The Concubine (20 page)

Walsh glanced at the Earl who gave a small, almost imperceptible nod of the head, and shuddering turned toward the fire.

“Then tomorrow, my lord Cardinal,” Walsh said, “we will set out for Pomfret, leaving my Lord of Northumberland here to see that all is left in order.”

“I shall be ready,” Wolsey said. “His lordship was about to shed his wet gear; you also, Master Walsh, should change or you will be stiff tomorrow. Cavendish will see to you.” He crossed the room and opened a door. “My stoolroom,” he said. “There is no exit. You may safely leave me here. I should like to be alone.”

Anne Boleyn rode with both of them. With Harry Percy, young and sweet, the ghost of a lost love, for lack of whom life had become so dry and desolate that even an act of revenge, so coincidental that surely in the whole history of the world it had no equal, was tasteless. With Wolsey, a cruel and malignant persecutor who at Grafton had snatched away his one chance to rehabilitate himself in Henry’s esteem, and not content with that, had so worked and talked against him that this had happened.

The mule jogged steadily along toward Pomfret, Pontefract Castle, which was an ill-omened place. Many political prisoners and one King, Richard II, had died there in mysterious circumstances. Wolsey did not expect to die there; he was bound for London and the Tower and the block. He could not know that this flux, far from being a passing indisposition, was a symptom of a grave disease which was to kill him, mercifully, in a few days’ time. But he did, as he rode, look back over the past, remembering how from humble beginnings he had risen to greatness and talked to Kings and their representatives as an equal. Henry’s favor had raised him, his disfavor had cast him down. The Bible said, “Put not thy trust in princes,” and that was a sound saying; for princes, like Samson, went and put their heads in the laps of strange women and were shorn of their strength. He thought, rationally, and without emotion—I should have done better to have served God with even half the zeal with which I served Henry;
he
would not, in my age, have left me naked to my enemies. The chief of whom is, and always has been, the Lady.

Harry Percy, riding North, riding faster, knew that nothing had changed. The Cardinal was doomed, but it made no difference. Nothing could restore the magic of those hours in the rose-scented garden. He had, he thought—mistakenly as it happened, for him, too, death was busy—years and years of life to get through. All those springs, with the trees in bud, lucently green, and flowers breaking and cuckoos calling and doves crying. One word only. Anne. Anne. Anne.

T
HE WORN QUILL WAS WRITING
too thickly; impatiently Catherine flung it aside and selected a fresh one. How many quills, she wondered, had she worn down on letters which, for all the result they brought, might as well have remained unwritten?

Changing the quill had interrupted her flow of thought and she reread the last sentence she had written. “Your Holiness should mark that my complaint is not against the King. I trust so much in my lord the King’s natural virtues and goodness that if I could only have him with me for two months, as he used to be, I alone would be powerful enough to make him forget the past…”

That, she thought, was absolutely true; she was completely certain that Henry had undergone no fundamental change; he was the victim of an ambitious, unscrupulous woman.

Now, how to continue? She brushed her mouth with its firmly closed lips with the feather of the quill. She wished to write vehemently, urging Clement to decide soon, and in her favor. The delay was inexplicable. It was two years since Campeggio had decided that the case must go to Rome, and no progress had been made at all.

Not for the first time Catherine faced the question—
Why
was Clement afraid to declare for her? He was afraid of angering Henry and driving him to Lutheranism. That must be the reason. There could be no other. And the truth was that by delaying Clement merely increased the danger. Wolsey was dead now. Catherine had never liked him, she had detested his pro-French, anti-Empire policy, but he was a sound, orthodox churchman. The men who had taken his place with the King were different altogether. Thomas Cromwell, once Wolsey’s secretary, was the new favorite, a dangerous, worldly man; and there was the seemingly harmless little Cranmer, too, earmarked as the future Archbishop of Canterbury. They were both prepared to do Henry’s bidding without protest or question; if the delay went on too long, or if the verdict displeased Henry, Cromwell and Cranmer would assist in separating the English Church from the Papacy.

His Holiness should be warned. She dipped the quill and then hesitated. The Spanish Ambassador knew all these things and was in constant touch with Clement and with Charles; he would have reported the state of things in England. There was nothing for Catherine to
tell
Clement—he probably even knew how at Christmas Anne had assumed the Queen’s peculiar function and touched the silver rings which, being touched by the Queen, were supposed to have the power of relieving night cramp!

There was nothing to do but to appeal again, more humbly, more earnestly…

Griffiths opened the door and said, quickly, a little breathlessly,

“Your Grace, there is come a great deputation from the King. They ask immediate audience.”

“It is late,” Catherine said. “It must be urgent.” Her heart leaped. News from Rome. And only one verdict was possible. Many disappointments had taught her caution, however, and she asked, “Who are they?”

“I recognized the Dukes of Norfolk and Suffolk; the Earl of Northumberland, the Earl of Wiltshire…”

“Bring them in,” she said. If Thomas Boleyn, Earl of Wiltshire, was one of the number, they did not bring any news she wished to hear.

She moved around the table, so that it was behind her as she faced the door. Her face had aged and her figure thickened since her appearance at the Court of Blackfriars, and tonight she was not dressed for show; but she had retained her dignity and even the ink-stained fingers of the hand she extended to each man in turn did not detract from the queenliness of the gesture. In addition to those Griffiths had named there were many of less importance, as well as Dr. Gardiner, Dr. Sampson and the Bishop of Winchester. It must be a matter of supreme importance. Mary!

She addressed herself to the Duke of Norfolk who had taken up a position that marked him as spokesman.

“My daughter, the Princess Mary…you bring me…” Even her resolution could not enable her to finish the sentence. Mary had never been robust, and now, just at an age when a girl most needed her mother…

“Madam, your daughter the Lady Mary is in excellent health. The matter which we have come to lay before you does not concern her.”

“I thank your Grace.”

“It concerns the matrimonial dispute, lately advoked to the Roman Court,” Norfolk said.

Dear God, Catherine prayed quickly, lend me strength! For with that woman’s father present they could only be about to tell her that her marriage was annulled, that the struggle and the shame had been borne in vain.

“His Holiness has decided that the case should be tried in a neutral court. He therefore suggests a French court, in Cambrai. His Majesty is agreeable to this and wishes the court to be set up with all possible dispatch. We have been sent to obtain your promise to acknowledge the jurisdiction of such a court and to attend it, either in person or by proxy.”

The words came into her head, so suddenly and completely that she almost said them aloud—No French court could be neutral to me, a Spaniard! But that was a mere comment and she forced it back.

“My lords, I expect no favor of the Pope who has indeed helped me little and injured me much; but it was to the Pope that my lord the King first made his appeal to have our marriage looked at; and it is
only
from the Pope, Christ’s Vicar on this earth, that I will accept a verdict.”

She had been writing by the light of two candles, but others had been brought in and now the room was bright. The light wavered and the planes of the men’s faces shifted, but their eyes stayed steady and it was at their eyes that she looked. Hostile some of them, indifferent some, but there were those that regarded her with respect, and a few with kindness. It was true, she thought; if you make no false claims but stand steadily upon your indubitable rights, keep your temper, refuse to give way to hysteria or self-pity, the honest man of goodwill will be on your side.

This was Henry’s own picked deputation and she had given them the wrong answer, yet at least half of them approved.

The blood of her mother, Isabella, the warrior Queen of Castile, made itself felt for a moment. She thought—I could rouse this country against him; the common people love me and abhor Anne Boleyn. If I took up arms, not for myself, for Mary, I could overturn this new, shallow-rooted Tudor dynasty…

But to do that she would have to hate Henry and that was impossible. His image was fixed, immutable in her heart; the big strong handsome boy who had lifted her from her anomalous position of widow of the Prince of Wales and made her Queen of England, and had loved her and teased her, and made her laugh, so that the six years between them had seemed as nothing…No, she could never take action against Henry; only against his determination to put her away.

“And that, Madam, is what you wish to tell His Grace?”

“That is my decision.”

Thomas Boleyn said,

“You place the King in an intolerable position, Madam. Throughout the whole procedure he has been amenable to the wishes of the Pope. The Pope now proposes a neutral court, but if you refuse to acknowledge such a court what answer can His Majesty return?”

Catherine looked at him and thought—You are
her
father. One night, all unwitting, you lay with your wife and nine months later this monster was born, to be the ruin of us all. And now you tell me that Henry’s position is intolerable!

She said, “I love and have loved my lord the King as much as any woman can love a man. But I would never have been his wife against the voice of my conscience. I came to him a virgin; I am his true wife. Any evidence to the contrary is based on forgery and lies. He appealed to Rome and it is there that I wish the case to be tried.”

They went away. It was another tiny triumph. There’d be no trial in Cambrai, with some cynical French Cardinal sitting in judgment. Neutral? When everybody knew that the French hated Spain and all things Spanish.

She sat down at the table and put her head in her hands and gave a sigh that was almost a groan. How long, oh Lord, how long?

The case would stay in Rome and sooner or later Julius’s ruling would be upheld and she would be declared Henry’s lawful wife. And what would that profit her? If Henry didn’t hate her already, he would then. And who wanted to be tied, until death, to a husband who hated her?

Oh, how willingly, she thought, would I have gone to a nunnery and set him free and said, “Go play with your new toy, but think kindly of me.” But for two things. My duty to the Church, in whose eyes we were legally wedded; and my duty to Mary, born in wedlock and indisputable heir to England’s throne.

She looked at her unfinished letter to Clement and had her first, sickening feeling of suspicion of his intentions.
He
had suggested the court at Cambrai, and he must have known what that meant. He was weak, vacillating, unfit for…No, no, that was not the way to think, that kind of thought led straight to Lutheranism. Clement was Pope, by the will of God who was omniscient and omnipotent, and if Clement were weak and vacillating it was because God knew that the world, at this moment,
needed
such a Pope. One who would bend, but not break. That was it. A stronger, more brittle man would long ago have given way before Henry’s determination. Clement had suggested Cambrai, trusting her to refuse the idea…

None the less, she did not feel like completing her letter to him. She pushed it away. She remembered the moment when she had feared that something had happened to Mary. She must write to her, one of those bracing, heartening letters which since their separation had been their sole link. She took a fresh sheet, dipped the quill, and wrote, “Daughter…”

T
HE LIME WALK, LEADING FROM
the house to the river, was one of the things which Wolsey had made and which Henry had allowed to remain unaltered. The lime trees were so trained and so cut that each tree linked arms with its neighbor, and overhead the branches made a roof impervious to all but the heaviest rainstorm. Between the boles of the limes lavender bushes had been planted, and on this August morning they were blue with flowers and all abuzz with bees. At the end of the walk, shaded by trees and near to the river, was a seat, cool on a hot day, and sheltered on a cold one. Henry and Anne had been making for it when he was recalled to give audience to a messenger.

One day, she supposed, some real news must arrive; but not today. She had hoped so much and been disappointed so often that words like message, messenger, dispatch, important news no longer moved her. Waiting now for Henry to rejoin her she thought that waiting had composed the greater part of her life. On her tomb they could cut the words “She waited” and they would say all.

When Henry came into sight again, however, she knew that something had happened at last. The set, somewhat peevish expression on his face had lightened, and he moved swiftly for so heavy a man on such a hot morning.

“I have news,” he said. “I’ll give you three guesses.”

“The Queen has agreed to come to terms.”

His faced darkened as it always did at any mention of Catherine, and particularly when Anne referred to her by title.

“The Pope has agreed to set a date and a place.”

He looked ferocious.

It was probably some small, homely thing.

“Your brindled hound has whelped.”

“Wrong again. Warham’s dead.”

She saw no reason there either for jubilation or death’s other attendant, grief. The Archbishop of Canterbury was past eighty, and of no particular consequence. Of late he had been out of favor with Henry because he clung to old-fashioned ideas, disliked the idea of the threatened breach with Rome, and kept advising patience.

Henry sat down and reached for Anne’s hand.

“I welcome his death,” he said. “It has saved me from having a serious quarrel with an old man in high office. Now Cranmer can be Archbishop of Canterbury and our way will be clear at last.”

This morning she found his optimism irritating. With every shift of the scene on the Continent, with every new delegation despatched, he had said much the same thing. Not long now, sweetheart. Now things will move.

“In Cranmer,” Henry went on complacently, “I shall have a Primate prepared to acknowledge me as Head of the Church, and to declare that I am a bachelor,
and have been all along.
”

She said, “Yes, Cranmer is very…pliable.” She spoke in an abstracted tone, and did not look at Henry, but away, over the loop of shining river to the fields where the harvest was in progress, the harvesters burned as brown as the sheaves they handled. She was suffering from one of her intermittent attacks of feeling insecure.

It was a long time now since Henry had first told her that he considered himself a bachelor. He had taken his stand on that, and gone ahead, like a bull, his head down, shoving aside this obstacle, and that. Suppose now…suppose Cranmer, the moment he was in office, said, “Yes, your Grace, you are a bachelor and have been all along,” and Henry lifted his head, even for an instant, and looked around. What would he see? Not the girl with whom he had fallen in love, but a woman, worn thin and sharp by years of waiting and wariness and self-control and chastity in circumstances where chastity was difficult and almost misplaced. She thought of a dog, chained to a tree, with a bone just out of reach; he’d lunge and struggle, thinking that bone the most desirable thing in the world, and never look beyond it. But suppose the chain snapped suddenly and he found himself free in a world scattered with bones, many more succulent than the one he had wanted so much?…

She looked back over their long association and realized that during its course she had given Henry everything except the ultimate favor. She’d been gay, and teasing, eager to entertain; she’d been serious, willing to listen and to try to master a knowledge of affairs—especially after the fall of Wolsey whose place, in a measure, she had tried to fill. They’d been together so long and so constantly that but for the fact that they did not share a bed, they might have been married for years. They knew one another almost too well.

And what was to stop him, the moment he was free, from finding someone young and fresh, whose moods and ways of thought were not as well known to him as his own?

With cruel honesty she admitted that throwing her over would be a most popular move. The ordinary common people had never accepted or approved of her. When she passed through the streets, or along the river in her barge, they came in their thousands to stare—and she knew why. They were everlastingly curious to know
what
there was about her that had caught and held the King’s attention; men studied her face and figure, women her clothes. But they stared in silence, or broke it only to declare that they didn’t want Nan Bullen for their Queen. And since Catherine had been virtually banished from London, antipathy had hardened…

For a moment she felt small, and lost and alone. In the pride of youth, flattered by the King’s attention, she had thought that since she must make do with second best that second best might as well be apparently the greatest prize of all; but everything had conspired against her. She was twenty-five and her name was irretrievably sullied. They called her whore, and concubine, and paramour. If Henry threw her aside now the future would be bleak indeed…

Well, she had used every nail but one to hold Henry to her—and now she must use the last. It was ironic to think that an old man, who if he had lived would probably have gone to the Tower, had, by dying, forced her to take a step which all Henry’s persuasions had failed to make her take…

“You’re very quiet,” Henry said. “This is not the time for your head to ache, is it?”

You see, she said to herself, he knows even the timing of your links with the moon’s changes.

“Oh no. I was watching the harvesters and thinking…There’s something sad about August. It is the turn of the year.”

“I welcome the autumn,” Henry said. “I like the grease season, when we hunt the fat deer, the misty mornings and evenings, and all the bustle and the moving from place to place.”

Men weren’t as conscious of passing time as women were. They didn’t think, another summer gone! They didn’t peer into a glass, reckoning the damage each year did.

She said, “Where do you intend to make your progress this year?”

And he began to tell her where, and why, whom and what he hoped to see; and that gave her time for thought.

She’d take the last, most desperate risk of all. At once. She might be lucky and become pregnant…and Henry certainly wouldn’t wish to risk having another son born out of wedlock. Yes, before Cranmer was ready to set Henry free, she must, if possible, be ready to offer Henry the one thing he wanted most in the world.

But the suggestion of altering their relationship must seem to come from him. And he must be provoked into making it.

“Would it be unseemly in view of the Archbishop’s death to proceed with the entertainment that I had planned for this evening?”

“I didn’t know you had anything planned,” Henry said, all delight and expectation.

“It should have been a surprise.”

“Never mind Warham. He had outlived his time; and had he lived on…”

But why speak of such things on such a bright morning? Death had saved Warham as it had saved Wolsey.

God’s Blood! Why think of Wolsey
now
? He never thought of Wolsey. Not that any qualms of conscience were involved; his treatment of Wolsey had actually marked a change in his life. He was
right
, always and indisputably right; anyone who opposed him was wrong. The Pope, the Emperor, Catherine, Bishop Fisher, his daughter Mary…and More, he wasn’t sure about More yet. But if they were against Henry Tudor then they were wrong and had only themselves to blame for what happened.

“What is this entertainment, sweetheart?”

“Oh, that is still a secret. And I should go now and busy myself with it. I was waiting to see what the day would do. Emma, my woman, who claims to be weatherwise, predicts thunder; and yet, it being so warm, I thought to have the mumming out-of-doors. It seems settled enough, don’t you think?”

“I am, I think, as good a weather prophet as any old woman who spends her time huddled in bedchambers; and I say it will be a fine warm evening. You go to your plans, I to my work; and I shall look forward all day to what you have to offer for my entertainment.”

But it will surprise you, none the less, she thought.

An entertainment, and not just
any
entertainment, one with a purpose, to be made ready within a few hours. She sped into the house and sent pages running. Her brother George, Norris, Weston, Brereton, Wyatt, and Smeaton, all to come at once to the chamber overlooking the Knot Garden. She ordered wine, dishes of ripe plums and pears, cold meats, cakes.

When the six men had arrived and the doors were closed, she said,

“You will have heard the news. Canterbury is dead.”

“So perish all your enemies, my dear sister,” George Boleyn said.

“He was old,” she said tolerantly. She had not rated Warham very highly, even as an enemy, and her thought now was to use his death as an excuse. “He was out of favor, too. Nevertheless, to hear of a death is never pleasant, so I pretended to the King that I had an entertainment planned for this evening. That seemed to cheer him. The question now is, what can we possibly make ready in the time?”

She seated herself in the window, spreading her tawny skirts about her; topazes glowed in her ears and at her throat. Alert and intent she looked her very best, and the men crowded round, eager to please, anxious to make suggestions; all except her brother who stood a little to one side and gnawed his knuckle. Up to something, he thought, and more than likely mischief!

The relationship between them was a rare one. In their distant childhood days they had played together, he as the boy and the senior always the leader and instigator. Then they had parted, and when she had appeared at the English Court they had met almost as strangers. But they had quickly found that they were so much in sympathy that they could communicate in half-finished sentences, in the lift of an eyebrow, the flick of a finger. Once he had said to her, “If I didn’t know otherwise, I should swear we were twins.” And once his wife had snapped at him, in the middle of his recounting some tale about Anne, “If she weren’t your sister I should suspect you of being in love with her. You talk of nothing else.” Jane, like many other women, was very jealous of Anne, always demanding to be informed what in the world the King could see in her, and angry when given the answer, “Only a man can understand that.”

He now said, “We could do
The Man Leader
. It is largely in mime and what words there are matter very little.” It was a clowning comedy, a caricature of the world, in which bears were the ruling race and one bear made a living by leading around a performing man.

“That wouldn’t be suitable,” Anne said.

“It’s cheerful.”

Norris said, “Who wants to wear a bearskin in this weather?” and George saw her throw him a grateful glance.

“That is what I meant when I said it wouldn’t be suitable. Think again. Here I sit, surrounded by the wittiest men in the wittiest Court in Europe, two poets and one musician; and all I ask is something easily prepared and suited to a hot summer evening.”

“To be performed out-of-doors, by the river?” Weston asked. And he drew a grateful glance.

They were ready enough with suggestions, but nothing pleased her.

Finally George Boleyn said, “Anne, saying “no” is becoming a habit with you.” They all laughed except Smeaton who thought the remark in poor taste. “But if you go on refusing every suggestion we shall end with no entertainment at all. Or be left with”—he saw her look at him expectantly—“
Leda and the Swan
,” he said.

Smeaton said quickly, “Oh no! My lady disliked that piece and refused to have it performed. Did you not, my lady? more than a year ago.”

“After George and I had sweated over it, too,” Thomas Wyatt said, lightly. “It broke our hearts! One of the best things we ever devised and you called it gross and lascivious and altogether unsuitable. George and I cried ourselves to sleep night after night; didn’t we, George?”

George made a sound of assent, his eyes still upon Anne.

“I wonder…” she said. “Did I judge too hastily? It was designed for out-of-doors, and made good use of the river…It would be better than something hastily devised and ill-finished…perhaps.”

“I remember all
Leda
’s touching words,” Weston said eagerly. He was a very beautiful young man, most deceptively slim, almost frailly built, very fair of complexion and with eyelashes that all women envied. He was usually cast for the leading female role. “It is for George to decide,” he added, “the Swan’s outfit is almost as hot as the bearskins.”