The Concubine (14 page)

“Who is sick?” Dr. Butts asked.

“My man. Looks like he’s dying.”

“I am a doctor,” Dr. Butts said. “You can let me in, and my servant.”

She gave a wordless cry and vanished from the window. Within a few seconds the bars of the door squealed and it opened. The woman, who had been firm and controlled when she spoke of the law, was now incoherent and babbling, with her thanking God and calling down blessings on Dr. Butts and her declaration that it was a miracle which had brought him to her door.

“I can’t work miracles,” Dr. Butts said; he then added, with a touch of professional pomposity, “I can advise. I shall give you precisely the same advice as I should give the attendants of his Grace the King should he, which God forfend, take the sickness. Are you alone here?”

“Why, no. My husband’s sister is in the kitchen and her boy is in the yard.”

“Then ask the other woman to make ready what I want.” He told her briefly what he wanted and said that the boy should draw water for the horses. Then he climbed the stairs and found, as he had expected, the sick man lying almost naked on a bed soaked with his own sweat.

“Wrap him close, in your best woolen blanket,” he said.

“And him so hot already!” the woman said in astonished protest.

“Do as I say. And give him plenty to drink, water, milk, ale, anything.”

“But, good sir, it’ll all run out again as sweat. This is the Sweating Sickness!”

“Are you instructing me?” Dr. Butts asked coldly. Then, more kindly he said, “Wrap him warm and let him drink to replace the liquid he is losing, and he may live. Disobey my instructions and he has no chance at all.”

He then went downstairs, and in the manner which he had learned as a young man, put the sick man out of his mind and applied himself heartily to his wine, his bread and bacon. Then, the meal almost finished, he remembered that he carried a letter. The King’s letters to his sweetheart in the past had been a matter of some speculation. Some people said that for a year or more, until she reappeared at Court, he had written to her every day. That was clearly an exaggeration. Nobody had ever seen one of the letters, not even the lady’s father Sir Thomas Boleyn, beg his pardon, Lord Wiltshire; and that at least indicated that Mistress Anne was discreet and no show off. Some people said that she simply dared not show them, because they were couched in terms that contradicted her own statement, and the King’s, that they were not lovers in the accepted sense.

So much mystery, so much gossip, and here was William Butts, by nature and profession a searcher-out of truth, with one of these letters in his possession. Unsealed, too, being written in such haste; merely folded and the ends tucked in.

He looked around quickly. The sick man’s wife was upstairs, his sister had gone back to cry in the kitchen, Jack had taken his bread and bacon and ale out into the yard and was talking to the boy of the house in the watery sunshine.

Without any great feeling of guilt, since the human mind is capable of entertaining only one predominant emotion and his at the moment was curiosity, Dr. Butts unfolded the letter.

Sentences leaped up at him.

“The most displeasing news that could occur came to me suddenly at night.” “I would willingly bear half of what you suffer to cure you.” (Not the whole, part of Dr. Butt’s mind observed; well, at least Henry was honest!) “My physician in whom I have most confidence is absent…from want of him I send you my second, and hope that he…”

Dr. Butts read no further.

He was always warning people about the dangers of rage which could send a red mist swimming before the eyes, set the heart battering, swell one’s brain, lead, uncontrolled, to death; but now his own rage was ungoverned.

“My second.” In God’s name then, who was his first? Wotton? Cromer? Yes, Cromer the Scot, the bumptious oaf; just because he’d done part of his training in Paris. It was nothing short of disgraceful, it was disloyal. Everybody knew that Scots and Frenchmen always joined together against Englishmen. Every time England went to war with France, the Scots came over the border, raiding and burning. The Battle of Flodden Field was only now sixteen years past. It was abominable to think that a Scot…

It was no comfort to Dr. Butts to have his money refused, to be told that at any time whenever he passed the
St. Peter and the Keys
he was welcome to the best the house could provide.

He rode in rage toward Greenwich and was almost there before he could think, wryly, of the old proverb that said that eavesdroppers never heard any good spoken of themselves. Likewise people who opened other people’s letters deserved to take a knock on the nose. But all the way his horse’s hooves seemed to beat out the hateful rhythm, my second best, my second best, my second best.

D
R. BUTT
’
S CAREFUL BALANCING OF
his professional integrity against the welfare of England had all been wasted. Mistress Anne Boleyn had passed the crisis when he arrived. She was alive, she was conscious, she had been handled wisely. She was covered with a warm, light blanket and on a table near the bed stood a tall jug of water and a Venetian glass goblet. And one of those middle-aged, hard-faced, short-spoken women who, in Dr. Butts’s experience, made the best nurses of all, was in attendance.

The lady looked, naturally, very ill still, and he addressed her in the soothing voice the situation demanded.

“His Grace sent me, my lady, as soon as he had word of your sickness.”

Anne moved her head a little, and the fraction of the pillow thus exposed showed dark and damp with sweat.

“Emma!” The single word held accusation.

The woman said, “Yes. Yes, I did. It was only right he should know. You’re mending now, thanks be to God, but suppose…With everything so disordered I took it on myself.”

Anne said in a small thin voice, the words separated by indrawn breaths,

“I was afraid that he might feel that he should come. And he has such horror of any sickness.”

“His Grace recognizes his importance to the state,” Dr. Butts said, almost rebukingly. Then he remembered that he was addressing a patient and changed his manner. “His Grace will be delighted to hear that you are recovering.”

A great many people in England and in other places would be sorry, he thought; and wondered again at the mystery of things; strong lusty men struck down and dead in a few hours, a creature as frail seeming as this surviving. Though of course it was early yet to tell; there was always the chest…

He said, “If your woman supported you, could you bear to be raised a trifle? Half a minute, no longer.”

So Emma held her while he laid his ear to her chest, and then to her back, alert for the little crackle, like a piece of paper being crumpled, which would betray the most dreaded complication of all, one which often killed people who had survived the sweating and the coma. There was no sign of it.

Emma said, “If you could hold her for another half minute, sir, I could slip in a fresh pillow; this one’s drenched.”

So, for half a minute Dr. Butts held between his hands the body which had caused such an upset.

He’d seen her often enough, but never close to, and never without the ornate clothing, the jewels, the headdress which lent bulk and importance. He was amazed to see how small she was. He allowed for the dramatic wastage of this disease and judged by the bones; they were like a kitten’s, or a bird’s; and her neck! He’d only once seen a neck so slender, and that was on a ten-year-old who was dying of the lung rot, and was not so long by two inches. Dr. Butts, whose personal taste ran to plump, buxom females, wondered anew what a great hearty man like the King could possibly see in this woman. And if his true aim in all this tomfoolery was to get himself a good strong boy he could hardly have picked a less likely breeder.

Emma slipped in the fresh pillow, and almost gratefully Dr. Butts released his hold and moved toward the foot of the bed.

“You will recover, my lady,” he said. “The worst is over. I shall prescribe certain strengthening and heartening medicines; and you must keep warm, and quiet, and eat and drink well. I shall stay for a day or two, just to keep an eye on you.”

“Will you let His Grace know that there is no cause for anxiety?”

“Indeed I shall. He bade me let him have news three times each day.”

Then he remembered the letter.

He was tempted, really tempted to take it away and dispose of it. “My second best.” Cruel, undeserved humiliation. Where was the need to have said such a thing? Why not, “I send you my physician,” or “one of my physicians,” or “Dr. Butts”?

Horribly mortified, he produced the letter and said, curtly,

“He sent you this.”

And he thought—William Butts, if you hadn’t pried this bad moment would have been spared you. And a worse moment might be on its way; suppose she asked him to read it to her! In what voice, with what manner did one announce one’s own second-rate status?

He laid the letter within reach of her hand and would have made for the door, but the weak voice halted him.

“Wait, please. There may be something which should be answered, and if so, you could send word with your other message. Emma, lift me again.”

He turned to the window and tried to think sensible thoughts. It is
something
to be second physician to a great King. Better that than to be first physician to the Duke of Norfolk. But he failed to convince himself. The truth had been spoken centuries ago by some Roman whose name Dr. Butts had forgotten. Standing in some small provincial Italian town, the man had said that he would sooner be first man there than second man in Rome. And he had spoken for all men, at all times, everywhere.

He heard the sound of paper being handled; he heard Anne’s voice say, “Lay me down.” Now he must turn. His face felt stiff and there was a stinging sensation at the back of his eyes.

She said, “Dr. Butts.”

He turned.

“Thank you for waiting. There is a message. Tell the King that I am recovering, that I hope his health continues good, and say that I thank him heartily for sparing me his best physician at such a time.”

His best! But the letter clearly said “my second,” and she couldn’t know, unless she was the witch that people said she was, that he had read the letter and been so hurt. She couldn’t know…

He looked at her and noticed her eyes for the first time. Beautiful, wonderful eyes, looking at him with apparent candor, but behind the candor there was depth upon depth of mystery, and secrecy and understanding, and something else, a distant-seeing look, as though she saw more, knew more…

He pulled himself together and said in a harsh voice,

“My lady, either the King miswrote or you misread. Dr. Cromer holds pride of place. I have the honor to be His Grace’s second physician.”

She smiled and he realized that she had a beautiful mouth as well.

“Who can judge of that? Does it go by seniority? No matter. To me you are first, and will be, always.”

His natural vanity—the thing which must be fed from without or it will turn and devour the inner man—seized on the word “seniority.” That explained all. Those other words, “in whom I have most confidence,” might never have been written; he wanted to forget them, and he did, promptly. Of course, everything in and around the Court had to be governed by some form of protocol or another. Seniority! And he’d never even thought of it. He’d worked himself into a stupid rage over nothing, nothing at all. He could have brought on an apoplectic fit!

He forgot that she was the cause of all the turmoil; that all the way from Tittenhanger he had hoped to find her past aid. He forgot everything except that she, lying flat and exhausted, had hit upon the magic, restorative word. Seniority. When he came to make the medicines that would fortify her, he would see that they were well-flavored and palatable.

And he no longer wondered what it was that the King saw in Mistress Anne Boleyn, because he saw it himself. All the way down the stairs he tried to put a name to it. And failed.

H
ENRY WAS COMING TO SUPPER
with Anne in her fine new house. Having an establishment of her own gave her immense pleasure, not lessened by the knowledge that the house itself had been one of the Cardinal’s possessions. He had offered it, Henry said, and in that offer there was a hint that at last her position was being recognized, and that even Wolsey found it expedient to please her.

The joy of entertaining in her own house was still new, and this evening was, in a way, a celebration. Cardinal Campeggio had at last arrived in England, and now things would move. Disabled by his gout and exhausted from the journey he had taken to bed immediately upon arrival, but today he was to have had his first audience of the King who was now so confident of success that he was talking of being married within a year.

Henry arrived in a glum mood, one of those which he had himself, speaking in the garden at Hever, described as black. Such moods were more frightening and more difficult to deal with than his more frequent roaring rages, which, like bonfires, quickly burned themselves out.

She was relieved to feel, from the warmth of his kiss and the force of his embrace, that she was in no way the cause of his gloom, and set herself to cheer him, but without her usual success.

At last she said, “Something is troubling you. What is it?”

“One of my headaches.” But that, she knew, was not the full explanation. He was subject to severe headaches, from time to time, but ordinarily when thus afflicted, he was rather pitiable, childishly suing for sympathy and for comfort, pleased to have his head rubbed and stroked, and to be offered a sniff of her hartshorn or to have a cold wet handkerchief held over his eyes.

He ate hardly any of the special supper she had ordered, throwing so much to Urian that finally even that greedy dog was sated and flopped down in a corner with his stomach bulging like a whelping bitch’s.

“What is the news?” she asked, at one point.

“No news. There’s a joke though. I’ll share it with you later.”

She dared warrant that the joke would be a sour one.

It was.

They were alone, by the fire, and she was just about to break the heavy silence that had settled, when he said,

“I gave audience to Campeggio this afternoon. Do you know what he did, the moment he had kissed hands and gone through the formalities? He said—and he spoke as though he were offering me the sun, the moon, and all the stars to play with—that Clement was prepared to make good whatever was lacking in Julius’s dispensation, so that I could go back to Catherine, with an untroubled conscience.”

And he’d taken the offer; that was why he was so surly. He was dreading the task of breaking to her the news that he could now never keep his promise, or make good his troth. She was, after all, to be flung aside, like Mary.

“After all this delay,” Henry said, still in that dull, heavy voice, “when at last I thought Clement was moving on my behalf, he sends me this indubitable proof of what he thinks of my case. And the man who has come all this way to act as an impartial judge reveals his bias the first time he opens his mouth. A fine, fair trial that promises, doesn’t it?”

So there was still to be a trial! He had not accepted the offer.

“What did you say?” she asked. Her voice had gone small and thin.

“I said that even tailors knew that a botched job couldn’t be mended by a bit more botching. I said I should await the verdict of the Court.”

Relief from fright made her speak vehemently,

“You should have sent him home. Straight back to Rome. As you say, it promises a fine fair trial when one of the judges is the Pope’s man, and brings such an offer! It might as well never begin!”

Henry winced and put his hand to his head.

“It’s not quite as bad as that,” he protested. “It’ll be an English Court, composed of English clerics. And Wolsey has equal power with Campeggio. This may just have been Clement’s last attempt to evade…He can now assure himself, and the Emperor, that he has tried everything.”

“Oh no!” she said. “Oh no! He’ll have another trick up his sleeve, and after that another and another. While we sit here and grow old!”

The last words rang out with a passionate intensity. She had developed such a preoccupation with the passing of time, with the waste of time, that she dreaded each change in the name of the month, thinking, there’s June gone, thinking, yet another November. And New Year’s Day was always so sorry a festival that she could take no pleasure in her presents. Another year!

The last two years, outwardly so glittering and gay, so enviable, had been years of strain, a walking of a tightrope whose end receded as one approached it. Always just a little longer to wait. Hope, disappointment, hope, delay. It had been such a great day when the Pope had agreed to send Campeggio to judge the case in England; and then Campeggio had made the journey more slowly than ever a man had made that journey in the whole history of time. Now this!

And Catherine was still at Court; still proud and stubborn; still calling herself Queen, and being treated as such by everyone save Henry.

And there were the London crowds, watchful, jeering, uncivil.

There was the sharp division of all those about the Court; two parties, hers and Catherine’s, and one would have to be very blind or very stupid not to see that of the two Catherine’s was the more devoted, the more steadfastly loyal. Catherine’s party was rooted in solid rock, tradition, personal affection, her own upon the shifting sand of Henry’s favor and political expediency.

And always there was Henry himself. Up to a point he had tried to keep his promise about not demanding anything; but as time dragged on she could see that he often regretted it. Day after day she had faced the almost impossible task of making herself attractive enough to hold him, but not attractive enough to inflame his passion. This called for constant vigilance and self-control on her part, and those did not make for beauty. Often she wondered whether others saw the change in her that she saw when she faced her glass.

Henry heard in her voice a new note, a shrillness that displeased him. It made him say, perversely,

“Oh no! That was Clement’s last shifty little trick. It didn’t work, he won’t try any more.”

“He will. He must. What Campeggio offered you today shows what the Pope wants, what they all want—your reconciliation with the Queen.”

“She is
not
my Queen. She is the Princess Dowager.”

“What does it matter how you name her? Let’s face the truth for once. In the eyes of the world yours was a good marriage and only the Pope can annul it. He hasn’t any intention of doing so. He daren’t. The Emperor would box his ears or stand him in the corner. If you wait for the Pope to free you, you’ll wait forever.”

“What else can I do?”

“Send Campeggio packing. This is an English matter and you are King of England. The English bishops are anxious to please you. They’d give you the verdict you wish for. If indeed that is your wish. Sometimes I wonder.”

“And what in God’s name do you mean by that?”

“You say you are free, you also say that the one person who can set you free is the one person who will never do it. You must know by now that you cannot have me and the Pope, yet at every turn you choose him.” The relief of speaking frankly at last was as intoxicating as wine. “Why not accept the Pope’s last generous offer. Catherine has waited for this; go back to her. I shan’t hold you to anything you promised me. All I ask is to be left in peace and have done with this everlasting waiting and promises that are as empty as blown eggshells.”

Railing at him as though he were at fault. And she knew he had a headache. She hadn’t sympathized with him, or tried any remedy. She was a screeching virago!

He stood up and flung at her the most hurtful words he could muster,

“In all our time together, Catherine never spoke to me like that,” he said, and went away.

Anne did not recall her ladies but went through into her bedchamber where Emma Arnett was placing freshly-laundered linen in the press, with little scented sachets between the layers.

Anne ignored her, went to the bed and flung herself face down, took a handful of the quilted cover in each hand and wrenched it and ground her face into the pillow, trying to hold back the screaming.

Emma, who had seen her face, thought, not without irony, that the moment had come at last; the moment when the bedroom door closed and restraint gave way. But at least
this
lady did not demand a shoulder to cry on.

In any case, Emma was fortified now; she was still devoid of pity, and any words of sympathy that she might use would still be dictated by expediency rather than feeling, but it was no longer an expediency concerned solely with her own situation; there would be purpose behind whatever she said. She had been warmly welcomed by the reforming group that centered around the shop in Milk Street, and its members had provided her with verbal ammunition to be used when occasion offered. This might be one such occasion; you never knew.

She went softly to the bedside and asked, “My lady, are you in any pain?”

“No. I’m frantic.”

And that was all. This was a thing which Emma’s advisers could never understand—the Lady’s ability to keep things to herself.

“Don’t bother,” Anne said into the pillow, “to put away that linen. We’re leaving London tomorrow.”

“For long, my lady?” That was a permissible question.

“Forever!”

Emma was dismayed. What of the Cause? Queen Catherine had the support of the Pope, therefore it followed that Anne, whether she chose or not, must be the rallying point of the anti-Papal party. Emma’s friends, and hundreds more, hoped that Anne would maintain her hold on the King and that the situation would develop in one of two ways. Either the Pope would give Henry an annulment and thus bring the whole Papacy into further disrepute; or that Henry would tire of waiting and act upon some words he had once said in a rage, “In England I am the only ruler.” Either way would open the door to the Reformation. And for either thing to happen Anne was essential.

Emma made no protest, asked no question. She merely said, deeply cunning,

“The Cardinal
will
be pleased.”

Anne heaved herself over and sat up, propped on her elbows, her eyes enormous in her white face.

“You would say that!”

“Is it not true, my lady?”

“Of course it is true! And not the Cardinal alone. I could count on my fingers the people who will
not
be pleased.”

“No. There you are wrong, asking your pardon. Very wrong. You have friends, hundreds of them, whose faces you never see, whose names you do not know. Hundreds of them who”—her natural caution warned her not to say too much—“who hate the Cardinal. If you leave London and leave him triumphant there’ll be many a sore heart tomorrow.”

“Then they must bear them. My heart is sore, too. I have no wish to please the Cardinal, but nor do I wish to play in this mummery any more. The longer it goes on the sillier I shall look in the end. They mean to keep him tied to the Queen, lured on by false hopes until he is too old to care. He can’t see it, or won’t, and tonight, when I pointed out the truth…” Even now she hesitated for a second, but what did it matter any more? She broke through her habitual reserve and told Emma what had happened. “So what is there left to do but to retire with what small dignity is left to me?”

A bad decision, Emma thought. After an ordinary lovers’ tiff it might not be a bad policy to withdraw for a while; but the King’s parting words held a bitterness, a threat. If the lady left now he might remember her only as a nagging scold, he might take the easy way and go back to Catherine.

She said, “Why don’t you sleep on it, my lady? Things often look different in the morning.”

“Sleep! I feel as though I shall never sleep again.”

Emma thought for a moment and then said, diffidently, “One of my friends has a friend who is an apothecary and last spring, when I had that arm that ached so and kept me awake, he made me up some syrup. He swore there was nothing nasty in it.” Emma’s loathing of reptiles extended to snails and earthworms which often found their way into medicines. “He said it was made of poppies, not like ours that grow in the corn, but poppies from somewhere far away. It is pleasant to taste and it does bring sleep. I’ve proved that. Would you try a dose?”

“Anything so as not to lie awake all night, thinking.”

Emma went to her own low bed and pulled from under it the wooden chest, iron cornered and banded, which was one of her most cherished possessions. She had left home for her first post with all that she owned packed in a rush basket and she had saved for years in order to buy a chest with a lock, a serving woman’s only stake in privacy; it represented her home. When she locked it, it was like locking the door of her house.

There was the wooden bottle, and when she shook it the liquid gurgled. She poured a careful dose into a cup and handing it to Anne said, “May you sleep well, my lady.”

It tasted of honey and then of something bitter.

Anne handed back the cup and said, “Poor Emma! In addition to all else you have to be my confessor and my physician.”