The Concubine (3 page)

Lady Lucia, Emma remembered, had said much the same thing. Probably no one knew the reason, nor ever would. The Cardinal’s methods were too subtle to be understood by anyone but himself.

“He’s very sly,” Emma said. “If ever he fell out of favor he could earn a living at fairs, with three thimbles and a pea. Drink your wine while it’s warm, mistress.”

“Put the jug on the hearth,” Anne said, “and fetch yourself a cup. You’ve had a long, cold ride, too.”

During her spectacular career—upon which, although she did not know it, she had already started—she was to have virulent enemies, some devoted friends; arguments about her behavior, her motives, her personality were to go on and on down the years, but those who actually served her in a menial capacity never wavered in their good opinion of her, never had anything but kind things to say. “She was always considerate and just.” “To me she was a good mistress.” “She was easy to work for.”

Fetching the second cup Emma said to herself—That was thoughtful, with all she has on her mind, too. And she remembered how often, in her own hard life, a furious resentment had been all that had kept her going. She understood, and therefore sympathized with Anne’s anger, far more than she would have done with any softer emotion.

When she had poured wine into her cup she lifted it a little and said formally, “Good health, mistress; and better fortune.”

“I wish you health and happiness,” Anne responded. The wind whined and threw rain against the windows, but the fire was hot, the candles bright, and the erstwhile dreary room was cosy, a safe, warm refuge.

They had missed dinner in the effort to reach Blickling before twilight and upon empty stomachs the mulled wine, spiced with cloves and cinnamon and ginger, and sweetened with honey, was a potent brew. Under its influence each woman lowered guard a little and when a sudden thought struck her, Anne spoke aloud.

“Do you know, I believe, I truly believe that the Cardinal knew that my father had gone from here. That was another trick. My father has no great fondness for me, he is not a man given to fondness, but he is ambitious and my being cast off in this manner will displease him. Had he been here he would have heard my story and carried it to the King—he has his ear, at times, when the Cardinal is not whispering into it. He’d have asked for some proof of this former betrothal. And the Cardinal needed time. So I was sent here, because my father is at Hever. Oh, I was a fool to have left so meekly. I did everything wrong. Even the Queen…if I’d thought…if I’d had my wits about me, I shouldn’t have asked leave to retire, I should have flung myself at her feet and asked her to plead for me.”

“With the King?”

“Who else?”

“It would have been to no purpose,” Emma said, flatly. “Whatever influence Her Grace ever had upon the King is outworn. That marriage, mistress, is fourteen years old and has not given His Grace what he wanted, a sturdy son. You may ease your mind there, nothing that you could have said to the Queen could have bettered your case. And to have pleaded, fruitlessly, that, later on, would have burned you to remember.”

Anne looked at Emma and saw, for the first time, the woman within the servant.

“Yes,” she said. “It would.” And her mind took a sideways skip and she thought—At least I have done nothing to be ashamed of. So few minutes before she had been regretting that on those warm, rose-scented evenings she had withstood the demand of Harry’s urgent lips and hands, and of her own newly wakened, clamorous senses. Now she was glad. It was humiliating enough to be cast off as she had been; to have been abandoned
after
…Yes, that too would have burned her to remember.

The rest of what Emma had said slid through her mind almost unremarked. She had seen the King often enough; huge and handsome, in every way just a little more than life-size; the most powerful monarch in the world, the best knight in a tourney, the most skillful handler of the lute, the best—or almost the best—maker of songs. There was no visible sign of the Queen having lost influence over him, but possibly Emma knew best about that. She herself had been too much engrossed in her own love affair to give much heed to other people.

She thought—Fourteen years; if Harry and I had been allowed to marry, would our marriage have been outworn in fourteen years? It seemed impossible to imagine, as impossible as imagining snow and ice on the hottest summer day. No. Ours would have lasted, because it was a love match. The King and Queen had been thrust together by an arranged marriage, just as Harry and Mary Talbot were being thrust together.

And so, here she was, thinking the same thoughts, over and over, driving herself mad. It was as though her mind had been locked in a little stone cell, without door or window, and with nothing to do except go round and round.

She lifted the cup and drank, forgetting for once to be careful of something the concealing of which had become almost second nature; and suddenly she was aware that Emma was regarding it. Instead of whisking it away out of sight as she always did on those rare occasions when she had exposed it, she spread it out against the firelight; her slender, long-fingered left hand with its hateful deformity. Growing out from the little finger, near the nail, was another tiny fingertip.

“Yes,” she said, “you see aright. And you should cross yourself, Emma. People do, if they glimpse it. They call it a witch mark.”

“I’m not superstitious,” Emma said. As soon as the words were spoken she wished them back, or wished that they hadn’t sounded so abrupt and final. She had cultivated that way of speech; the fewest words, the least revealing, but she shouldn’t just at this moment have clipped a subject off so short. While the girl talked she wasn’t brooding; and she should have kept her talking until supper came; then maybe she would have eaten with some appetite.

With an obvious air of beginning again, she said, “It’s always seemed to me that if those who’re called witches could do a half of what they’re said to do, they could do more for themselves. But they’re always poor and ugly and old, and if their neighbors turn against them, they let themselves be taken and ducked, or swum, or pricked, as helpless as sheep.”

“You speak as though you had known a number.”

“There’s one in every village, and I had country jobs until about eleven years ago. In the country, until a cow dies or somebody has a bad accident, people take the whole business as natural. In fact country children play at being witches the same way they play at being married and keeping house.”

“Do they? I was a country child, too. I lived here, most of the time, after my mother died; but I hardly ever played games. I had a governess, a Frenchwoman, named Simonette, and with her it was lessons, lessons all the time. She was a very serious woman. I’ve been grateful to her, since. In France it made things easier for me, and once, when the other English maids of honor were sent home, I was allowed to stay because, speaking both tongues, I was useful.”

Was that good or bad? If I’d come home sooner I might not have met Harry at all; or I might have met him sooner and perhaps the Cardinal might not have noticed…All her past life, back to the lessons with Simonette, seemed like a path leading straight to this stony cell out of which she could not break, where her thoughts went round and round. She made another effort.

“Did you ever play at being a witch, Emma?”

“Well, I never had much time for play, either. My father had a little farm then and my mother was always busy and wanted all the help she could get. And even when there was time…” Emma heard herself making this confidential statement with some surprise, for it was something that she had always kept to herself, for you never knew who might listen and play a trick that they might think funny but which would be too loathsome to contemplate…“I never could abide frogs or toads,” she said. “So I never could play properly. But I have gone so far as to give our yard dog a secret name, “Owd Scrat” I used to call him, when we were alone; and I’ve well-wished people with a bit of cherry blossom, and I’ve pricked more than one name on a laurel leaf with a thorn. And nobody a bit the better or worse and the dog no more heedful of me, in fact less than he was of my father who called him “Nip” and lammed into him if he didn’t do what he was bid.”

Round and round inside the small stony cell; this time, if I were a witch, or even playing at being one, I know what I’d wish, good and ill. God’s life, if I could just have power for five minutes…

You see, she said, addressing herself, there is no escape; your thoughts always come back to the same point, as a mariner’s compass always comes back to the North. I can’t even sit and talk about my serving woman’s childhood games without relating them to me and my situation.

She made another attempt to break through.

“You say you’ve pricked names on laurel leaves, Emma. How? Could you write when you were young?”

“Not then. I’ve learned since. Maybe,” the slow, dry self-derogatory humor of her breed brought a smile to Emma’s craggy face. “Maybe that’s why nobody was ever the worse for our pranks. We just named the leaf and pricked along the veins, and then kept it next our skin till it was cooked, as we called it. When it was cooked all the prick-holes were brown. Then we buried it and said, “Within nine days, as this leaf rots, so will you,” and we said the name of the person we meant. Once, I remember, we did it to try to get our own back on a man who’d closed a footpath and made us trudge all the way round, another two miles, to get to church.”

“And what happened to him?”

“He was knighted,” Emma said, and the smile showed again. “And if that wouldn’t cure you of being superstitious, what would. Young children at one end, old women in second childhood at the other; and that, mistress, to my mind, is all it is.”

But the truth was that Emma Arnett’s lack of superstition, like her tendency to silence, her sense of responsibility, and the unspoken disapproval of which Lady Lucia Bryant had been aware, stemmed from causes far removed from childish games. Emma’s first job in London had been as nursemaid to a family named Hunne. Richard Hunne was a prosperous merchant tailor who, because of his dealings with the Netherlands, where new ideas were rife, was what a hundred years earlier would have been called a Lollard. He was anticlerical; he read the New Testament. He was “a new man” of a very different kind from Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Boleyn and hundreds of others, who were new where their own importance was concerned, and everywhere else strongly conservative. Amongst his other advanced ideas, Richard Hunne held that in an ideal society everyone should be capable of reading the Bible; and finding, in his new nurse-girl, a woman of some intelligence, who admitted to a desire to read and write, he had taken pains to teach her. Before Emma’s studies were very far advanced, the child whose birth had been her occasion for joining the household had died, and over his funeral his father had decided to make what he called “a test case.” The officiating priest had claimed the coffin cover, a good one, worth four shillings, and Richard Hunne, to whom the value of the cover meant less than nothing, had refused to give it up. It was, he said, just one more example of how priests acted as extortioners; in this case the cover didn’t matter, but what of a poor family, where a dead child might be wrapped in the best, perhaps the only, blanket, or a cloak?

There’d been a lot of fuss and argument, some of which ordinary people like Emma could understand, some of which was far beyond their comprehension. The priest had sued Master Hunne and then Master Hunne had turned about and claimed that the priest, in suing him, had been acting for a foreign power—to wit, the Pope of Rome. The word “praemunire” had been tossed about. But Richard Hunne had been taken off to jail, and there found hanged. It was said that he had committed suicide because he feared trial for heresy. That, no one believed; he had gone out of his way to
invite
trial; and the most sinister feature of the case was that the jailer had run away as soon as he knew that there was to be an inquest. A great many people, and especially, of course, his family, believed that Richard Hunne had been murdered, was a martyr.

Emma Arnett, busy with her upward climb, had entered the Bryant household, and was, within a year, to achieve her ambition of being personal maid to a great lady. But she had never forgotten Master Hunne, or his teachings, not just the mastering of the reading and writing, but his general attitude toward things. When she said, “I’m not superstitious,” she meant a great deal more than that she could regard a deformed little finger without horror; she meant that she did not believe that at Walsingham one could see the milk of the Virgin Mary, still liquid after more than fifteen hundred years, or that at Canterbury St. Thomas’s bones still had shreds of bleeding flesh attached to them, or that you could go to the tomb of St. Edmund at St. Edmundsbury and in return for a sizable gift be cured of the lame leg or crooked back which had hitherto crippled you. Master Hunne had denounced all this as nonsense; and she, without knowing it, had already been in a state of mind open to conversion. There were in England many thousands like her, sound, hard, practical people who felt that something had gone wrong; who could, however obscurely, sense the gulf between Jesus of Nazareth who had owned nothing, whose only mount had been an unbroken donkey, and His self-styled heirs and servants; Thomas Wolsey for example, who rode like a prince, who, though professedly celibate, had a son and a daughter, at whose table every day nine hundred idle or sycophantic persons ate their fill.

Anne said, “Nonsense it may be, but everyone isn’t sensible, and they look askance at me if they see my finger. That is why my gowns are made with trailing sleeves, which several ladies, I have noted, are beginning to copy.”