The Concubine (7 page)

The lute twanged its final flourish; there was the sound of light footsteps, and then the slam of a door.

Henry said, “Did I not know otherwise, I’d have said that was your daughter, Tom,” and waited for Sir Thomas to laugh, reveal the trick and congratulate him upon his perspicacity. But Thomas Boleyn’s face showed nothing except surprise.

“My daughter? But as your Grace knows, she’s in bed with a cold, and hoarse as a crow.”

Henry looked at Lady Boleyn who blushed and said too quickly, too eagerly,

“It was a pageboy, your Grace. Very young, very shy. I had great difficulty in persuading him to sing at all.” The firmness with which she brought out the last words merely emphasized the flutteriness of the others.

For a second Henry hesitated. He was King. He had only to say that he’d like a closer look at this pageboy who sang so well. That’d teach them to play tricks on him! On the other hand it was rather an engaging trick, and it was hers, he’d warrant. She had a gay and lively look. Much as he longed to see her he wouldn’t spoil her little masquerade. So he said,

“I heard your daughter sing and play, once, at Greenwich; the boy’s voice and his handling of the lute reminded me. Perhaps she schooled him. And whoever he is, he went off unpaid, after singing so sweetly. Give him this, with my thanks.”

With one of the great royally generous gestures in which he so delighted he pulled from his little finger a ruby ring, the red stone the size of a thumbnail and all set around with diamonds. Lady Bo eyed it with apprehension; no woman could possibly look at it and not wish to wear it; so Anne would wear it and Tom would know that she had connived, behind his back!

“Your Grace, it is much too fine a gift. I will see to it that the boy is rewarded—adequately.”

Sir Thomas looked at the ring with green jealousy and fury. Typical! Throw to some scruffy little pageboy a ring worth a small fortune, grudge to a faithful servant the title he longed for, the title to which he had a right. All through this visit he had waited for the King to refer to the promise he had made at Saint Albans.

Henry said, a little too gently, “Lady Boleyn, I asked you to give this trinket to the singer.”

The girl would understand, he thought; just as he had understood the burden of her songs. The saucy ballad had informed him that she was no prude. The love song and the passion she had put into it had said—Look how I can love. The professional entertainers’ song at the end had been part of the joke, and the subtle changes in it had been meant for his ear alone. “Joy in store,” she had wished him. And he would have joy, for he was in love again. Wonderful, marvelous. She’d receive the ring and know that he understood; and he’d come back, and when he did…

He began immediately to prepare for that next visit, overwhelming his host and hostess with thanks and praise. Seldom, if ever, he said, had he received such hospitality; and nowhere in the world was there such ham as at Hever.

Lady Bo gave her husband a look which said—There you are! That was a ham that I cured myself before you became concerned about the state of my hands! And it said, in true Norfolk fashion—All these elaborate messed-about dishes, made to look like something other than what they are, and the King, the King himself singled out my ham!

But the ring weighed heavy in her hand. Before she slept she must make a clean breast of it to Tom. Never mind her promise to Anne. Husbands and wives should have no secrets from one another. In law they were regarded as one person; in the rubric they were called “one flesh,” and so they were, twice a week at least, when Tom was home, in the big tester bed.

So, in the bed, she told Tom everything, and he said, “Maybe it was as well. She isn’t pretty, but she is lively and taking and we don’t want Mary’s tale over again. I’m sick and tired of the notion that I rose to favor, not of my own merit, but on my daughter’s supine body. Untrue. Unfair. I was of sufficient importance to be one of those chosen to carry the canopy at the christening of the Princess Mary, years before our Mary caught the King’s eye. And I am still hoping for my rightful titles. I don’t want my enemies to say that I bought
that
with a virgin sacrifice.”

“The things you say!” said Lady Bo, so greatly relieved by the way he had taken her confession that she felt she could afford to be a little admonitory. Even now, even in the big bed…

C
HRISTMAS THAT YEAR HAD BEEN
spent at Blickling, to Lady Bo’s extreme delight. Ever since Anne had described the state of the house there, her housewifely fingers had itched to get busy. Also she liked the idea of spending the merriest festival of the year in her own countryside, where the voices, even of the gentry, had a homely, familiar sound.

It had promised to be, as Christmas should be, a family affair, for George was to be in Norfolk, too. His Grace had half-promised him the manor of Grimston, and he was anxious to look it over. Lady Bo, in those busy days between their own arrival and Christmas Eve when George was expected, had acted upon a piece of information which Sir Thomas had once let fall in a fit of anger, and prepared two bedchambers, one for George and one for Jane, his wife. They were unhappily married and no longer shared a bed. Lady Bo quite liked her stepdaughter-in-law, who always took pains to be civil to her, and who was so much more serious a person than George. George was frivolous and had a way of making mock of so many things and so many people that Lady Bo never felt quite at ease with him. However, Anne had cheered up considerably at the prospect of having George for company and Christmas was, in any case, a lighthearted season.

It had given everybody a surprise, almost a shock, when George arrived bringing with him, not Jane, but his sister Mary.

A daughter of the family had come home to spend Christmas and no one was pleased to see her.

Lady Bo always suffered a conflict of emotion when in Mary’s company; she found it impossible not to be censorious; and equally impossible not to feel straitlaced, countrified, old-fashioned and unkind for being censorious. There were the facts; Mary had established for herself a reputation for easy virtue even when she was in France; then she had been the King’s mistress; but the past was the past, and she was now respectably married, and she had, for all her elegance, such a sweet, almost simple way with her. Sometimes Lady Bo wondered whether Tom was not right in saying that Mary was half-witted. You couldn’t really look at her and believe that her wicked behavior had been deliberate. Lady Bo had always imagined that bad women, kept women, women who became men’s mistresses were hard-eyed, cynical, brash.

Sir Thomas regarded his elder daughter with disfavor for a number of reasons. It angered him, as it would have angered any able and ambitious man, to know that in the eyes of the world a good deal of his success was due to a pretty daughter’s frailty. It simply was not true, as he often said, with oaths. Hadn’t he, he would demand, been one of those chosen to carry the canopy over the Princess Mary when she was christened; wasn’t that a sign of high favor, and back in 1516 before the King ever looked at Mary? That he had bought his way by being complaisant was just another of the damnable lies put about by his enemies. At the same time it angered him to think that Mary had made so little of the vast opportunities she had been offered. For a little while—not long, but long enough—she had held the King’s heart in her hand; and what had she got out of it? Nothing. Not a house, not an acre of land, not a penny of money. All that shame and gossip and nothing to show for it. Lesser men’s mistresses went flaunting away with damned great manors, with monopolies in wool or wine, with pensions. Mary, after all the scandal, had got a husband, a plain Mr. Carey who was one of the gentlemen of the King’s bedchamber, and would never be anything more. It was the
waste
that most irked Sir Thomas’s thrifty mind. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, with a pink and white skin unflawed by the pox, and a voluptuous figure, what couldn’t she have made of herself? No spirit, that was her trouble.

Anne’s feelings toward her sister were more complicated than Lady Bo’s, more vehement than Sir Thomas’s. In the far distant past she had adored Mary, looking up to her as elder, more worldly-wise, more elegant and more beautiful; as far as possible, in her very early days she had modeled herself upon Mary, regretting equally that she lacked her looks, and that she could never match her placid good nature. And then, just when she herself had reached the most vulnerable, fastidious, idealistic and intolerant age of thirteen, she had learned the truth about Mary. And the truth was that not only had she just become the King’s mistress, but she had, while in France, gained a bad reputation, memories of which this most recent scandal revived. Mary who always looked so fresh, so clean, so pure, Mary whom she had loved.

Mary, who during her own time in France had suffered from her father’s extreme parsimony and never had any money for clothes, and now remembered, in her new prosperity, her little sister, sent across to Paris a parcel of clothing, all of rich material, hardly worn, and still smelling deliciously of the scented sachets which Mary always hung or laid amongst her clothes. The young Anne had at the sight and scent of them suffered a feeling of such revulsion that she was nauseated. A few hours of work—and she was clever with her needle—would have made them fit her more slender figure, and there was a long hooded cloak, lined with fur, and some stockings and gloves which needed no alteration at all; but she had given everything away. And although she was as handy with a pen as with a needle she had written no letter of thanks. And when, not long after, the news had seeped through that Mary had married William Carey, she had not written to wish her well. And Mary had understood.

Back in London, during all her time in Catherine’s service Anne had dreaded coming face-to-face with her sister; it had never happened; and to Anne Mary had remained just a fallen idol and a horrid warning, a warning which had always sounded whenever Harry Percy had been a little too ardent.

Always that small, poisonous thought—Just because my sister Mary…At the same time being in love brought a new understanding and softened the fierce intolerance of the just-nubile. Having suffered the onset of temptation herself Anne began to see that Mary, with no example of a sister’s fall to warn her, had found it easy to succumb. Even that measure of understanding did not, however, make her wish to see Mary again; as adorer and adored they had come to an end, and any other relationship would be sad.

Yet, brought face-to-face with Mary, against the background of the old, loved home, it was impossible to believe that she had been anything but silly and too easily persuaded; in appearance, in manner, she had scarcely changed at all; she still looked pretty, fresh and pure; she was still gentle and softly spoken; she still had no defense against the taunts which Sir Thomas launched twenty times a day in some form or another.

He professed himself surprised that she should come visiting without her husband.

“George I can understand, his domestic ties gall him, but yours, my dear, was a love match, or so I was given to understand.”

He commented upon her obviously well-worn gowns. Anne had noticed them, too.

“It is curious,” he said, addressing nobody in particular, “how rapidly married women become dowdy. A hanging-up of weapons on the wall, I suppose.”

His obsession with titles obtruded itself; he would have thought, he said, that the King would have knighted William by this time. And he mentioned innumerable instances of women, less favored than Mary, who had married well, gaining either status or wealth.

Mary bore it all, answering when she could, otherwise remaining silent; she explained that George had suggested her making the visit because William was to be on duty all through the Christmas season; she admitted that she had had few new clothes since her marriage, “but I didn’t look for them; I knew that William was not rich.” Over the matter of William’s knighthood she merely looked unhappy.

Sir Thomas’s open antagonism had the effect of welding his children into the close, self-supporting group that they had been in their childhood, after the death of their mother. George, forced on two occasions to go to Mary’s defense, said two things that made matters much worse. A knighthood, he said, no longer meant so very much—there was Thomas Wyatt, their cousin, a prime favorite with the King and still plain Mr.; and there was Harry Norris who had been knighted and was still called Mr. as often as not. Sir Thomas, though discontented with his own title, valued it and did not welcome such remarks. George’s second attempt to help Mary was even more unfortunate; he hit his father’s most sensitive spot by saying, “After all, but for her, we shouldn’t be where we are…” Sir Thomas repudiated that suggestion hotly, and mentioned all the favors he had been shown, all the missions with which he had been entrusted, “before Mary had sense enough to blow her own nose.” He reminded George that he had carried the Princess Mary’s canopy, and asked him to remember to whom he was speaking. George then became prey to a conflict of feelings; he was fond of Mary, he was sorry for her, he wanted to be loyal, but there was expediency to be considered. He and his father were closely associated in several enterprises, were likely any day to be sent together on some business of the King’s; a quarrel would be most inadvisable. So the next time Sir Thomas eased his spleen by baiting Mary there was no one to support her except Anne. The subject was, once more, Mary’s ill-advised and unprofitable marriage, her lack of status, her shabby dress.

“But, Father, if she loved William she couldn’t have married anyone else. And if you mind so much how she looks, buy her a new gown and I’ll wear what I have for years and years, until…”

Almost gleefully, Sir Thomas swung round to attack his youngest daughter.

“You’ll do that in any case, my young madam. I thought you were settled. You could have been at Court, costing me nothing, but you must go and get yourself entangled with a man already betrothed. And let me not hear any more bleatings about love. You’ve only to look at her, to see where that leads. Or look at yourself for that matter. I must say my daughters do me fine credit; one with a bad name married to a pauper, the other thrown back on my hands, like a sheep with the foot-rot.”

He was wreaking upon them his anger with circumstances. Nothing had come of all that the King had so blithely promised in October; the girl’s marriage to Piers Butler had never been mentioned again, the titles were still in dispute. When he thought how happily he had ridden back to Hever, carrying with him those promises, that delicious hint of intrigue against Butler, he felt quite sick with disappointment.

Mary wilted under the combination of bad name and pauper in a single sentence, but Anne stood her ground and said in a meditative way,

“I don’t see why you should so decry love, Father. I don’t know about our mother, but you love Lady Bo and you married her.”

She had hit her father in his second most vulnerable spot. Sensible, cool-headed, calculating man who had pulled himself out of the mere middle class by his first marriage, what had happened to him one late summer afternoon in Norfolk? A lapse, a total contradiction of all that had so far governed his actions. And it had brought him happiness, he’d never for a moment regretted it. But it was not to be mentioned in the same breath as easy, bedbound goings on of his elder daughter, or the silly vaporing ideas of his younger—which might, at some crucial moment in the future, prove awkward.

He said furiously,

“Keep her name out of this, if you please. It’s a different thing altogether. I pleased myself. When you’re my age and have made as much out of as little, and with no help or encouragement from your family, you’ll be entitled to do the same. Go away, both of you!”

Halfway up the stairs Anne said,

“Come to my room. There’ll be a good fire there. Emma sees to that.”

The invitation was a sign of total acceptance. Anne’s feeling of revulsion toward her sister had vanished within an hour; Sir Thomas’s behavior had resurrected the old loyalties; but the years of silence, the unacknowledged gift, the good wishes withheld had made a barrier between their new relationship and the former close intimacy. That barrier had now fallen, and as they entered Anne’s warm room, she said,

“It hurts me to hear him taunt you so. Why don’t you answer him back? You’re not dependent on him any more.”

“It’d only worsen matters,” Mary said, holding her hands to the fire. “And you mustn’t quarrel with him on my account—though it was sweet of you to take up for me, just now. I had no notion that he would still be so…spiteful. In fact,” she gave a little rueful laugh, “I actually came with the intention of asking him to lend me ten pounds.”

“Ten pounds! That is a great deal of money.”

“I know.”

“He never would.”

“I know. I asked George first, but you know George; he’s in worse case than I am, though not so shabby. He said that to give me ten pounds in cash he’d either have to sell something, or borrow. But he was kind and said that if he gets Grimston he’d give me what I wanted immediately, but that would be too late; William will have found out before then.”

“Found what out?”

“That I’ve been playing cards with money he gave me for other purposes. You see, it wasn’t enough. William is not a pauper, as Father says, nor is he miserly.” She raised her beautiful eyes and gave Anne a disarming smile, “I’m a bad manager and no matter how often I add up reckonings I never get the same answer twice. But now and then I am lucky with cards, so I hoped…But it was just the other way.”

She spread her hands helplessly and Anne had a strong feeling that the people with whom she had played cards had cheated, or inveigled her into playing some game with whose rules she was not familiar. Mary’s looks and manner, everything about her, Anne thought shrewdly, evoked in all ordinary people either the desire to protect or the intention to exploit.