The Concubine (33 page)

He was big and strong but he had never been able to bear pain, either his own or other people’s. And this was more than pain, it was agony.

“Think again; think well,” Cromwell said. “You seem to be a stubborn man, but we have other means, should this fail. And all your endurance is wasted. There will be a confession, signed by you, before we have done. And if you confess, fully and freely, you may escape, as being young and not in a position to resist advances. Can you hear me?”

“I can hear,” Smeaton groaned out.

“Then confess.”

“It never happened.”

The pressure increased, became intolerable. He screamed. And then the peak of pain was passed and he began to spin down into darkness. Cromwell’s voice followed him, just a senseless noise now, and even that dying away. He was dying, for her.

Then pain again and consciousness rushing back and Cromwell’s voice speaking words again.

“There is no escape for you, Smeaton. Except by confession. Would the rack loosen your tongue? I tell you again, there will be a confession, signed by you. If you die it will make no difference.”

He could not save her. He might die of torment, after hours and hours of torment, suffering every pain that the inhumanity of man had devised, and at the end it would make no difference. There would be a confession, with his signature, forged.

He said, sobbing, “What do you want me to say?”

“I want the truth. Are you ready?”

“I’ll say what you want.”

“Then you are not ready.”

The cord tightened again; this time judged to a nicety, so that the pain stayed at the screaming peak and his brain tilted.

“I’ll say it. I’ll say anything.”

“That’s better,” Cromwell said, and he must have made the sign for the cord to be loosened. “Now begin.”

Once he had started it came easily enough, because it was really all part of his dream and therefore had a truth of its own. For almost four years, ever since she had submitted to Henry, he had dreamed of possessing her. He was able to bring out a dozen small corroborative details, the gleanings of watchfulness and of a vivid imagination. She had a mole on her neck, always hidden by a necklace or a collar; her breasts were so small that the hand could cup them; at the moment of climax she…

On and on it went until even Cromwell, who had lain on his sickbed and devised this approach to the final solution of the problem, was slightly shaken. Was it possible that fumbling round in the dark he had hit on a hidden truth? The most he had expected had been the admission, extracted under torture, “Yes, I bedded with her.” He’d got that, and more. Much more. This did not sound like a grudging admission of guilt, but the real direct from the heart, almost boastful reliving of a love affair, it was all there, even his envy of Norris, Brereton and Weston, and George Boleyn who had been, he said, favored more than he had been.

Finally he had told all, everything that he had wished were true, everything that he had almost convinced himself was true, because otherwise how could he have lived, loving her as he did and seeing her every day?

“And that is all?”

“Is it not…enough?”

“The paper, Edward.”

Cromwell ran his eye over it almost perfunctorily. This was not the first interrogation which this particular secretary had reported; he knew exactly what to omit.

“Now, if you will sign.”

Smeaton signed. Cromwell regarded the signature with satisfaction. If anyone said “rack,” which was what everyone thought of as a means of persuasion, this signature would be a refutal.

“Keep him here,” Cromwell said. Give him anything he wants to eat or drink and wash off the blood. As soon as it is dark enough take him to the Tower. Sir William Kingston has been warned of his coming.”

H
ENRY LOOKED AT CROMWELL AND
said, “If only Norris had not been involved! He’s slept in my chamber, been closer than a son. It cuts me to the heart that he, whom I trusted…”

“Smeaton’s statement was taken down just as he made it, Your Grace.”

And why, in God’s name, shouldn’t the King suffer? Smeaton had suffered this morning, and would suffer more. The others would suffer. And Cromwell in the last three months had suffered more mental distress than most people bore in a lifetime.

First of all he had had the task of breaking to the King the news that one way to free him had been thought out, a way that would free him swiftly and completely, since in a Queen adultery was treason and punishable by death. Henry had instantly dug in his heels and demanded, “Am I to clap the horns on my own head?”

Cromwell had pointed out that it was the only alternative to legal action on the plea of consanguinity which would revive the old scandal of Mary Boleyn, or on the plea of precontract. which would rouse echoes of the case against Catherine. No, Henry said, he had abandoned both those ideas last summer, after his talk with the Duke of Norfolk. He’d have no consanguinity, no precontract, and no cuckolding.

Cromwell, ambitious, self-seeking, and cynical, could, if pushed too far, turn like a cornered rat. He had done so then.

“Your Grace, all that you leave open to me is to have her poisoned, or pushed downstairs.”

Henry had quite seriously considered that suggestion, and then, rather regretfully, said, “Difficult to achieve and open to suspicion. God’s Head! Is that the best you can do? I tell you I want some means of ridding her that will leave me with the goodwill of my people.”

“Her adultery, could we prove it, would do that.”

“And bring their mockery, too.”

“Not necessarily. The ordinary man whose wife betrays him is mocked because he has been a blind fool. He’s been home to supper every evening, he’s slept in the same bed with her. He must be a blind and unobservant ass. But Kings have matters to attend to that demand the removal of their minds and eyes from domestic matters. I am positive, Your Grace, that if you proceed with this, there will not be a man in the country who will not sympathize with you, nor a woman who will not think that the Queen has taken advantage of her opportunities.”

Arguments like that had gone on and on, and Henry, wasting time, had fretted against its wasting. And the sore on his leg had grown worse, and his temper with it. He had demanded the impossible, and finding it unobtainable had thrown hard names, a cushion, a stick, and the three-legged stool at his advisers. At one point Cromwell’s health had broken down under the strain and he had taken to his bed.

Then, suddenly, Henry had veered around and agreed to proceed against Smeaton. So if, now, he had a little more than he had bargained for, and was cut to the heart, Cromwell was glad.

“I rode with Norris in from Greenwich this afternoon,” Henry said in a self-pitying voice. “I begged, I pleaded with him to confess. I’d have forgiven him if he would but have confessed. I know her ways. And there’s enough here to condemn her without mentioning his name. You could have blotted it over. But he was stubborn as wood. He had a guilty look though, and I’ve been thinking. He was long ago betrothed to a Mistress Shelton; he’s made no move to get himself married. Now we know why!” He narrowed his eyes and looked hard at his chief minister. “Give me an honest answer. You knew of all this. You suggested a charge of adultery because you knew you were on safe ground. And if you knew, so did others. In God’s Name, why didn’t you tell me?”

Cromwell felt a tremor in his bones. His flesh stayed solid and steady, but his marrow quivered. Whatever you did, he thought bitterly, was wrong; pitfalls you never dreamed of opened suddenly under your feet. He knew a moment of envy for his blacksmith father. If a horse were properly shod it put its hoof down and walked away, the owner was satisfied and paid you, and that was that. In the world which he had chosen to inhabit no job was ever really done and finished with.

“I do most earnestly assure Your Grace that until this morning I
knew
nothing. What Smeaton revealed in his confession was as great a surprise to me as it is to you. We fixed upon him as a
likely
man. Close to the Queen, and the subject of two casual, quite unrelated remarks which might have meant nothing. He was therefore interrogated…”

“Did you rack him?”

“Your Grace, I questioned him in my own house where I keep no implements of torture. And the signature, does that look like the hand of a racked man?”

Almost unwillingly, Henry said, “No. Not that I care about him. He should be torn in pieces! But Norris…”

“Naturally I am grieved that anyone for whom you had an affection is implicated. At the same time I feel it my duty to advise you to let things take their course. In a way this is all to the good. The very magnitude of your wrong will divert attention from its nature. This shows her as such a monster of iniquity that no man could possibly have been on guard against her. From our point of view things have worked out well.”

“A little too well,” Henry said and gave Cromwell a searching look which he met with one of calm and candor. Then, as though seeking some flaw, Henry read the confession again and found, not a flaw but a hateful unpalatable truth. This damned tinkling musician had
enjoyed
her, just as he himself had dreamed of doing and never had. And the others, doubtless, had had equal joy.

“I sent Norris to the Tower. Where is this wretch?”

“On his way there.”

“Good. And the others?”

“Arrested or being arrested.”

And then, deep inside the bulky body with its ulcerating leg, inside the mind hardshelled with egoism and corrupted by power, the young Henry Tudor, gay and just and high-hearted, stirred once, perhaps for the last time.

“I never wanted this,” he said. “What happens to her I do not care, for whatever Norfolk may say I know she did bewitch me; she’s wasted the best years of my life. But I meant to pardon the man when he had served his purpose. I meant to pardon him…”

S
HE TOOK POSSESSION OF HER
senses again by a process that was not unlike waking from a light, troubled sleep; but she had not been asleep; she knew that because she was standing upright with her hands clasped before her. She was in her right mind, could see and hear, felt no pain; yet something was wrong, and there was a gap…

Slowly she looked about and recognized the room. It was the one she had occupied during her stay in the Tower immediately before her Coronation. Except that now there were no flowers nothing had changed; even her chair was there, still under the canopy. This side of the gap the Queen’s Chamber in the Tower. And on the other? She remembered perfectly; her uncle Norfolk’s voice saying, “We have orders to arrest you on a charge of treason; and are taking you to the Tower.”

Dinner. Yes, they’d been at dinner. Not a lively meal. On the previous afternoon, at the jousting, the King had suddenly risen, wearing a look of dark displeasure and gone away without a word: and he had left a feeling of uneasiness behind him. She had lived in a state of apprehension ever since January and all her women had shared her nervous mood. Henry would, she was sure, get rid of her somehow, and anything unusual could make her feel that the moment had struck; and it was unusual for him to leave in the middle of a joust. So she was prepared for something, had long been so prepared. But treason!

When Norfolk said the word she had begun to laugh, the senseless, painful laughter that would come upon her at the most unlikely moments and which she was powerless to control. Her women looked frightened and even her uncle and those with him had drawn away a little. Then Emma had come running with the poppy syrup, a massive dose, and had forced her to drink it, saying, “Your Grace must be calm and bear up.” Soon she had stopped laughing and had said to her uncle. “If that be His Majesty’s pleasure, I am ready to go.” After that she could remember nothing; not even how she had made the journey.

Still, here she was; and not in a dungeon as one would expect. And not alone. There were two women at the far end of the room. She blinked her drug-laden eyes, and then narrowed them, staring and trying to make the women look like Margaret and Emma—the two people most likely to have insisted upon accompanying her; but they weren’t the right shape.

She said, “Who are you?”

One woman said, “You know very well who I am; What trick are you up to now? I’m your aunt, Elizabeth Boleyn. And I must say that when I married your uncle and took that name little did I dream that the day would come when I should have such cause to be ashamed of it.”

“I’m Mrs. Cosyns,” the other woman said.

“Why are you ashamed?”

“Ashamed to be related to you, even by marriage,” her aunt said, with a look of utter loathing. “You heard the charges.”

“Treason, they said. But that isn’t true. How could I commit treason?”

“I don’t know what you hope to gain by pretending to be a half-wit. The two women who came with you said you’d heard the charges.”

“Are two of my women here? I’d like to have them with me. You are both excused.”

“What you like isn’t law any more; you’ll have what’s ordered. Mrs. Cosyns and I are to attend you.”

“And it is not,” Mrs. Cosyns said, “a job I fancy. I can tell you that.”

“I shall remember your manner towards me, Mrs. Cosyns, when this farce is ended.”

“Farce,” Elizabeth Boleyn snorted. “Tragedy more like. Tragedy for the decent members of the family.”

“You know very well that I have not committed treason. It is an excuse. The King is tired of me and wants to be rid of me. I was willing to go. I would have said so had he given me the chance. There was no need to fabricate a charge against me…”

“Fabricate!” Her aunt’s voice was almost a scream. “How you can stand there and say such things, when you know…”

“I know I never did a traitorous thing, spoke a traitorous word. Apart from that I know nothing. When they came to arrest me I had a hysterical fit and Emma gave me a dose. I may have stood there and appeared to be listening to the charges. I may even have replied, but I remember nothing at all. I’d be obliged to you if you would tell me exactly what I am said to have done.”

She moved to the chair under the canopy and sat down, folding her hands in her lap.

“I’m not going to soil my mouth with an account of such evil doings,” Lady Boleyn said.

“
I’ll
tell you,” Mrs. Cosyns said, and came forward. She had no particular cause, no personal reason for hating Anne; she was human in shape, had, presumably, been once an innocent-hearted child, but life in some way had warped her, made her coarse-minded, spiteful, unkind. She said, with real relish,

“You’re charged with adultery; with five men, your own brother one of them.”

“Oh no! Nobody could be so wicked!” She meant that even Henry in his hatred couldn’t have stooped to invent such a charge.

“
You
could!” Mrs. Cosyns said. “Your pet, Mark Smeaton, made a confession. And he involved all the others.”

She said in a thin, faint voice, “What others?”

“Sir Harry Norris; Sir Francis Weston; William Brereton; and your brother.”

“They’ll deny it.”

“Naturally. But they can’t get away from what the Chief Secretary has written down, just as Smeaton said it. And signed.”

“Mark went to Cromwell’s house yesterday. He was invited for dinner. He did not come home. He was taken, and with no rank to protect him, tortured. On the rack a man will say anything.”

The conversation had now reached a point at which Elizabeth Boleyn felt she could take her share.

“The Duke says otherwise. The confession was signed in a hand no racked man could have written.”

“Then it was spite,” Anne said. “He affected a great devotion to me, and I offended him once. This is his revenge.”

She had a passing vision of an impotent, offended girl planning vengeance on a great Cardinal; and it matched exactly with an impotent, offended musician planning vengeance on a Queen.

The two women had been instructed to spy and pry, to listen and report anything, anything at all that might be useful. So Lady Boleyn threw in a brisk question,

“And why, pray, should so petted a lapdog as Smeaton turn and bite his mistress?”

“He was jealous,” Anne said, “and just a little mad. And I know why he named those he did. On ordinary days, when they came to my apartment, they kissed my hand; at Christmas, or New Year, or on a birthday, they kissed my cheek. My brother always kissed my cheek and embraced me. One evening…Mark came in and played the virginals for me. He played very well and when he had done I put my hand on his shoulder and thanked him. He turned and took my hand and twisted it and kissed my palm. I withdrew it sharply and said, “You may not do that.” Then he said, “Mere friends may kiss you, but I who am your slave, may not.” And he began to cry; he cried very easily. I said to him, “Mark you are not my slave, you are my musician, and I cannot allow you such liberties as are allowed to gentlemen of His Grace’s household.” And that hurt him, I could see and was sorry. He was very conscious of his humble birth.” She thought how she had been, too, and taken such pains to spare him whenever possible. And this was how he had repaid her. If it was indeed his doing.

She jumped up. “I must refute this charge. But how? If I cut my body open, I could not prove it clean.” She put her hands to the top of her bodice and for a moment the two women watching thought that she meant to rip it down and expose the body about which there had been so much fuss—and would be so much more. But she dropped her hands and said again,

“George and the others will deny this preposterous charge.”

They must; out of honesty as well as self-interest.

There wasn’t a man living who could truthfully say that he had sinned with the Queen. She’d taken such meticulous pains during those weeks when she had been set on getting herself with child again. She’d been one of the masked, anonymous dancers; one evening a character from Pope Julius’s game; another evening one of three dozen milkmaids; on the third one of forty-three versions of herself. She had hardly spoken, and when she did she had not used her own voice, or the French accent which came so easily to her; she’d sounded rustic, just a girl up from Norfolk or Suffolk, invited to a masked ball at Court and completely dizzied, ready to go the whole way. She had made absolutely sure that no man could look at her next day and think…

“Lies won’t save them. Nor you either,” Mrs. Cosyns said. “You’d do better to make a full confession and get ready to die in a state of grace.”

“To die?”

“Traitors do,” the woman’s voice was relentless. She had a purpose; if Anne could be driven to confess it would greatly ease the whole procedure.

She tried to stave off panic by reckoning her resources. Her most powerful relative, her uncle Norfolk, was plainly against her; but surely her father…And that thought brought Lady Bo to mind.

“My poor mother,” she said. “She will die of sorrow!”

“Your mother has been dead these four and twenty years,” Lady Boleyn snapped. “If you mean that Norfolk clod, your stepmother, such people don’t die of sorrow. Your blood kin are more likely to die of shame.”

“Most of them,” Anne said, with a flash of her old spirit, “have too much sense! The charge is false and nobody not poisoned with hatred would believe it for a minute.” But the King believed it. He hated her now as much as he had once loved her. And he had the power of life or death.

“All those poor young men,” she said.

“Poor indeed; seduced by your wiles, and doomed to die for their foolishness.”

Anne stumbled to her chair and sat down again, and thought about death. It came to everyone. With your first breath you began to die and every breath thereafter brought you nearer to the last. But in order to live at all people pushed that thought away, or otherwise life would be just a hopeless waiting. Death happened to other people, and would one day happen to you, but you didn’t face that truth; even at the end, the last desperate remedies, the last rattling breaths were all attempts to evade the truth, to stave death off.

Henry would act fast; he was hot for Jane and he’d want his next marriage to be legal beyond all question.

In a short time, a few days perhaps, she would be dead. She looked at her hands, felt the terrified fluttering beat of the heart in her breast and imagined the stillness, the chill, the irrevocability of death. “And after death, the judgment.”

She sat for a long time, looking back over her life as it would appear when she stood before God to give an account of it. At the end she was comforted. God knew everything, the sorry little shifts, the self-seeking, the many faults, the sins: but He would know, too, and could be trusted to understand, that everything would have been different, she herself would have been different, if only they had left her alone and allowed her to marry Harry Percy.