The Concubine (29 page)

The music during and after supper pleased him, too. Mark Smeaton was certainly a most gifted fellow, and the choir boys whom he had selected to sing, had sung several of Henry’s own songs, some of which he had written as a young man, in love with Catherine, some from a later period when he was in love with Anne. Hearing them now, when both the loves that had inspired them were dead as burned-out candles, caused him no regrets, no remorse, no grief over the mutability of all things human. Listening he thought that they were good songs, and it was a pity that of late he had had so little time to give to such pleasant ploys. He must make a song for Jane, something very subtle…mentioning Spring, because that was the year’s youth and she was young, mentioning perhaps apple-blossom, because her skin was so like it, pink and white. When he thought of subtlety he remembered how while he loved Catherine, he had ridden in the lists as “Sir Loyal Heart”; and then, when he transferred his affections he had changed his motto to “Declare I Dare Not.” And again he felt nothing, except the pride in his subtlety. He was in love again, and his old loves were of no more importance than last year’s roses to a fresh-flowering bush.

He was pleased to see Anne happy and gay, because presently he must take her to bed and go through the flavorless business of trying to beget an heir for England. After this talk with Norfolk he had set himself a limit; the end of this year, 1535. A man had only one life. If she wasn’t pregnant by Christmas he would know that God had given a sign that this marriage was wrong, too…

He thought how marvelous it would be if she could be pregnant by the end of August. That was the beginning of the grease season, which took its name from the fat which the deer carried after the full feeding of summer. It lasted until October, and that was the time of his country visits. If only, he thought, Anne could be pregnant and queasy and bound to stay in London while he rode out…Wolf Hall in Wiltshire, the home of the Seymours, could be one of his stopping places. Jane could be there…Once again anticipation, the drug upon which, waiting for Anne, he had lived so long that he had become an addict, and of which, since late summer three years ago, he had been deprived, tingled along his veins.

He looked sidelong at Anne. He no longer thought her beautiful. That, like the indefinable joy that she had seemed to promise, had been a delusion, part of the unaccountable spell that had wasted so much of his life and cost so dearly; but she was comely and she was a woman, and tonight he felt potent. Tonight, God willing, he would get a son…

And at last they were alone.

She had taken all the advice offered by Margaret and Emma. Margaret’s so incongruously sophisticated, Emma’s so downright and bucolic. Emma’s final word had been, “Your Grace above all things needs a son and nobody has ever thought of another way to get one.”

Margaret had said, “If Anthony’s eye ever wandered, I’d try to catch it back. I’d darken my lids and redden my lips and…”

“End by feeling like a painted harlot whom nobody cared to hire! It’s useless, Margaret. If a man loves you, he loves you, and you could go barefoot, in a dirty shift, and still be beautiful to him. When it’s over, it’s over. Whatever I do won’t make me, to Henry, look as comely as Jane Seymour.”

Margaret said sagely, “He’s vain. All men are, but he is vainer than most. I always thought that one reason why he never forced Catherine to renounce her claims—and he could, you know, he could have starved her into submission had he been so minded—was because deep in his heart he was flattered by her determination not to let him go. If you put up a fight…”

“There’s some truth in what you say,” Anne said, and sat down before her glass.

And all the advice, she realized, had been good, sound, based on centuries of female experience; for here he was; and the sight of him, standing there, so big and smug and confident, a husband about to exercise his conjugal rights, fired something inside her, unexpected, unplanned, insane.

“Keep away from me,” she said, “I’m not your hireling. If you feel amorous go find the little bitch who sat on your knee this morning and give England another bastard!”

He said, in a rather helpless way, “So you saw.”

“I saw. So now everybody knows. You seem to find maids-of honor irresistible! Or is this another quirk of your conscience?”

Stung by that taunt he found it easy to make the remark which he had planned, but he said it more unkindly, saying “your betters” instead of “Catherine.”

“Put up with it,” she threw back at him. “I have no intention of putting up with the kind of thing that happened this morning. I shall leave Court! Catherine is my better, in patience, if nothing else. But I shan’t follow her example and hang on until I’m ordered away from Court. You can find some excuse to get rid of me, as you got rid of Catherine, and marry your pudding-faced charmer.”

Nothing could have suited him better; but the Duke of Norfolk had quietly closed both doors that offered a possibility of escape. And it wouldn’t do to let Anne go, a deeply wronged and very angry woman, anxious to blacken Jane’s name at every opportunity. That would make him look so light-minded and frivolous—which God knew he was not—wasn’t he here at this moment with the express intention of doing his duty and trying to get a son? Moreover Anne’s going would leave him in the exact position which he had occupied so uncomfortably for so many years, poised between a wife he couldn’t use and a sweetheart he couldn’t marry. And ill-minded people would say that the place was littered with his castoff wives.

He changed his tone and said reasonably,

“You’re making much out of very little. Men have impulses of which women know nothing. She’s a plump, soft, cuddlesome little thing, like a kitten, and like a kitten I cuddled her. No harm was intended, or done. Come to bed.”

“If you stumbled on me, hugging one of your gentlemen, would you say no harm was done and wish to bed with me a few hours later?”

Suddenly he was swept by a perverse emotion. She was saying “no” again, and that set the old will-o’-the-wisp dancing.

“Let’s not quarrel or argue,” he said. “She’s a kitten and I stroked her. But you are my wife, my angry, railing fishwife, and I will take you to bed and stop your mouth with kisses.”

She stood still and silent, looking at him in the way which he had once found so fascinating, and now for a moment did again, her look of seeing something invisible to anyone else. She was thinking that, despite losing her temper and acting in opposition to all advice, she was being offered another chance. With a son in her arms she could laugh at Jane Seymour and a hundred like her. And as Emma had said, there was no other way…

She had never known exactly when Elizabeth had been conceived, but tonight was different. This child would be born in April; and would be the boy for whom England had waited so long. She was thinking this when Henry, still a little breathless, said, in a sudden excess of goodwill,

“You may send the girl home for all I care.”

It demanded an effort to think backwards, to think—I was sent home, and he followed; better that she should be here, under my eye.

She said, “No. I think the time may come when I shall need
all
the services of
all
my ladies.”

“I
T IS NOT A MISCARRIAGE
,”
Emma Arnett said.

“Give it another name, then!”

“You missed a month. Women do; even those who have never been near a man.”

The need to scream, scream, scream, came upon her. She only just mastered it by turning furiously upon Emma.

“How should you know? I tell you I felt it. I knew. I was sure. Why else am I here and not on progress? I was with child, I tell you; a child who should have been born in April. Now I have miscarried. It’s like a blight; girls and miscarriages! And I was so pleased. So was he when I told him. Fool that I was to speak so soon. I know what he’ll say! Another cursed marriage. The first one cursed because the Pope let him make it, and this one cursed because the Pope forbade. That’d be comic, if it wasn’t so…”

Something that seemed to have no part of her decided that it was comic and she sat down on the bed and rocked to and fro in a gale of hysterical laughter.

Emma, acting from some motive not yet clear to herself, laid her hard square hands on Anne’s shoulders, and said urgently,

“Stop. Your Grace, stop it! Do you want them to hear? Lady Rochfort coming to see what’s amiss?”

Anne seemed past caring; she laughed on. Emma shook her, not gently, and then, moving one hand, placed the palm of it squarely over Anne’s mouth. As she did so she said, through the sound of the now-muffled laughter,

“I’m sorry, Your Grace, but you forced me to it. Listen, I beg you, I beg you. Let this be between you and me, till we have had time to think.”

Anne made some gulping sounds and then was quiet; cautiously Emma removed her hand. The hysterical bout had passed. Anne said quite calmly,

“And what will thinking do? Put it back?”

“It might save the situation,” Emma said, her Saxon eyes as cold and hard as flint. “I was loath to own that it was a miscarriage, knowing how the very word would set you off. But suppose it was?…”

“I tell you I know that it was.”

“Then it proves one thing.” Emma’s attention seemed to detach itself. She looked thoughtfully about the luxurious bedchamber.

“What does it prove?”

Emma said, with seeming irrelevance, “I’ve come a long way from the farm…But close to the soil, there’s a kind of wisdom. On a farm, if a cow slips her calf
once
, which is to blame, her or the bull? Nobody can tell. Try her with another bull, him with another cow and then the fault is fixed and the bad breeder goes straight to the shambles and is beef.” She paused for a second, gazing into Anne’s eyes. “I’m thinking this proves that His Grace is a bad breeder.”

“He fathered the Duke of Richmond.”

“Did he? His mother
said
so. But what company had she kept?”

“Emma!”

“It would bear thinking on.”

As she spoke Emma had a curious feeling that it was for this moment that she had been born. She was doing, or was out to do something that nobody else in all the world could do.

She thought of the fear which haunted all Protestants—that something should happen to the King before the reforms were properly established, and that all the backward-looking Papists, all the people who were neither one thing nor the other would rally to the cause of the Lady Mary who was old enough to take control, sit a horse, wear the Crown. The baby Elizabeth would stand no chance against Mary; but a boy would; from the moment he was born he would be unchallenged.

Emma, from reading the New Testament, had progressed to reading the Old which was crammed with proofs that if the
heart
were right, acts mattered little. Look at Jacob, cheating his old blind father, cheating his brother, and his father-in-law, and yet
chosen
, beloved of God, and the founder of all the tribes of Israel. There must also be taken into consideration Christ’s attitude toward adultery; He’d dealt very gently with the loose-living woman at the wells of Samaria, and had protected the other woman who was about to be stoned…

Not without an inner amazement, Emma Arnett, that decent woman, realized that if Anne, to bear a prince who would save the country from Mary, must commit adultery, she was willing to be an accomplice, even an instigator.

“It should be thought about,” she said, “and nothing said yet. This news would dishearten your friends, and delight your enemies. And His Grace would take it very hard.”

Her lips were framing the simple-seeming, obvious remarks, while her eyes, looking into Anne’s, made their own communication. We know how it could be managed…

The room seemed to grow smaller, closing itself in around the secret; the scented air seemed to vibrate with words which must not be spoken, need never be spoken.

Then, suddenly, Anne’s innate secretiveness took fright. This was too close! It wasn’t that she did not trust Emma who had always been loyal and closemouthed, and who had dealt admirably with the situation which had existed in the months between her yielding to Henry and her marriage. But then the worst danger had been scandal, in which Henry had been himself involved. This was different. If, as a last desperate resource, she took this perilous road, she would walk it alone.

Still eye to eye with Emma she said,

“That advice is sound. I’m grateful for it. And for your restraining me when I was distraught. I’m too anxious. I think too much of Catherine. A slight show and I go screaming about a miscarriage because it is a thing I dread, and always in the forefront of my mind. Now I’m no longer sure. Somehow, despite everything, I don’t feel that I have shed my load.”

Emma’s gaze remained steady, but behind it she, in turn, retreated. Oh, she thought, so that is the way it is to be. You don’t trust me. Very well, go ahead, do it in your own fashion. I shall stand by and pretend to be deceived with all the rest. The end is what matters, not the means.

Yet she was more hurt by Anne’s lack of trust than she would admit, even to herself. It was a poor reward for all she had done, and especially hard, coming as it did just when she had saved the situation.

She looked at the door and thought, But for me they’d have all come crowding in when they heard the laughter; they’d have asked what was the matter and she, just then, would have blurted it all out. And then suddenly to be put in my place like that!

Still, she had averted certain disaster, she had made success possible, she had served the Cause. And for what other reason was she here?