JANE SHORE
It was a bitter Sunday in January, 1484. A little dry snow fell from time to time, and, so surely as its chill dust whitened the stones about St. Paul’s Church, a wind, like an officious tipstaff, would come and drive it away right and left, sweeping the pavement for bare footsteps that were to follow.
It was all sad and grey and wintry. The over-gabled houses seemed to totter with cold; the signboards cried with it; only the church itself, half-shrouded in mist, loomed like some mighty mountain-crag, soaring into one solitary pinnacle, spectral, stupendous, in its midst. The Sabbath folk in the streets below, released from Mass, wrung their frosty fingers as they lingered in dull excitement, waiting for the show that was to follow. They gathered in a swarm about the great west door; but mostly they flocked towards the north side, where in an open place stood the cross of St. Paul’s, surmounting the leaden roof of a little timber pavilion. This bothy, or pulpit, was like a dovecot in shape, hexagonal, and with a window in each of its six sides. That facing west was furnished with a lectern for the preacher; and the whole building was reared on a triple platform of stone, hexagonal like the other, and forming steps to it.
Whether from the weather, or the day, or the occasion, the crowd was a curiously quiet one. The weight of the new King’s authority, no doubt, rested upon it heavily. A general air of numbness and stupefaction appeared to prevail. Events of late had come, matured, and yielded to others so rapidly. Edward’s death in April; the disappearance of the young princes, his sons, in June; the new coronation in July; Buckingham’s short abortive conspiracy and execution in October; finally, in this very first month of the new year, the passing of the Titulus Regius, or Act which bastardised the late King’s issue and confirmed the crown to his usurper—such was the astonishing tale. Nothing was evident for the moment but that this crooked fellow could see clearly and strike quickly; that he was bold, unscrupulous, and strong. He was not unpopular for that, or for certain manly attributes which the crowd admire. The difficulty was, as in all sudden coups d’état, to adapt oneself politicly to the fresh conditions, while awaiting security from retaliation by the old. The twisted King was not so firm in his seat as a Pope of Rome. There was a certain risk in subscribing even to his pleasantries, among which the present show might be counted.
No one had properly believed in the worser guilt of poor Mistress Shore, the late Prince’s naughty, good-hearted mistress. The indictment which charged her with complicity in the asserted attempt of Lord Hastings, her second protector, to destroy the present King’s life by witchcraft, had succeeded in proving nothing but her lovable qualities of mind and heart; whereby the Court was obliged to fall back upon her frailty, which was notorious and undeniable. It made no point, indeed, of the real tragedy of her sinning, which lay in her desertion of a young husband—a good, honest, uncorrupt fellow, a prosperous goldsmith of Lombard Street—whose happiness she had done her best to wreck, and whose name she had not had the grace to exchange for another. It was really only concerned, at bottom, with proving what an obnoxious libertine had been the fourth Edward, and how sweetly the crooked one shone by contrast. And so, to make all this clear, it washed, Pilate-like, its hands of the beautiful frailty, and handed her over to the Churchmen for chastisement. They were prompt to deliver it, and not altogether inhumanly. The concubine was sentenced to make public confession of her fault, in the prescriptive deshabille of sheet and candle, and thereafter depart in peace and mend her ways. The penalty, in fact, was in process at the moment.
There was not much gossip. The crowd, penned within the multitude of low buildings which surrounded the old Cathedral, showed more curiosity, even sympathy, than hostility towards the delinquent. Its constituents were much the same as when it had listened six months before to Dr. Shaw’s famous sermon at the Cross, and that truckling divine had first broached the question of the last two Edwards’ illegitimacy. It had acquiesced then, in the insensibility following exhaustion; it had not yet recovered from that condition. This present matter, or the sin which had procured it, was not of a nature wont to excite much comment or reproof; but the undoubted popularity of the usurper was confusing all issues. It supposed he had a reason for humiliating pretty Mrs. Shore, who had been as notable for her kindness as her beauty; and so it accepted his ruling as part of the perplexity of things, which some day must be going to lighten.
She came out in a minute, a half-dozen of acolytes preceding, a group of priests following her. As she appeared on the steps, a waft of wind took the hem of the white sheet, which was her sole drapery, and blew it aside from her knees. Her face, which had been deadly pale, flushed to an instant pink, which never thereafter deserted it. She clapped down her hand in a haste which extinguished the taper she held; whereat a cold voice halted the procession, and she must stand in her shame while the light was being rekindled. And as they came on again she hung her head and her lip trembled.
“Her stature,” says an eye-witness, “was meane [signifying short]; her haire of a dark yellow; her face round and full; her eye grey, delicate harmony between each part’s proportion, and each proportion’s colour; her body white and smooth ... she went in countenance and pase demure, so womanlie, that albeit she were out of all araie save her kirtle onlie, yet went she so faire and lovelie, namelie, while the woondering of the people cast a comelier rud in her cheeks (of which she before had most misse), that hir great shame was hir much praise among those that were more amorous of hir bodie than curious of hir soule. And manie good folks that hated hir living (and glad were to see sin corrected), yet pitied they more hir penance than rejoised therein, when they considered that the King procured it more of a corrupt intent, than anie virtuous affection.”
“Proper she was and fair; nothing in her body that you would have changed, but if you would, have wished her somewhat higher”—no romancer can better that description, and so it shall stand.
She came down the steps so shamed that she seemed insensible to the weather. It was snowing again, and the flakes kissed her pink feet as if in pity, and kissed her neck, and cried into her cold bosom. She tried to shake her long, loose hair before her face.
Round by the north side they turned; and so to the pulpit, where she knelt; and all the way the people were silent. And the Bishop mounted into the tribune, and, sheltered in his snuggery, delivered a long harangue on the iniquity of loose living. And at the end he demanded of her if she confessed and repented; whereat she answered, in a voice all little and shrunken: “I do own my fault, and ask pardon for it.” At which he raised his tone and bade her depart where she would, and mend her ways and live cleanly; only first he pronounced the King’s mandate, that no man should relieve or succour her on pain of death, which set many marvelling over the reason which could deliver with one hand and deprive with the other.
Now, Jane Shore rose like one dazed, and the lighted taper fell from her hand, and she looked hither and thither, as if seeking where she could escape in her misery and confusion. And all of a sudden the cold seemed to smite her, and she gathered the sheet about her tender limbs and gave a single cry like a lamb. And in its very utterance she had a desperate inspiration, which was to follow a tall man who all this time had stood close by among the crowd. Something—the shadow of a gesture, the look in his eyes, close under which his hand had gathered his cloak—had seemed to invite her, and when he moved, without appearing to pursue him she followed—on the road to clean living. But was she the first or the only woman helplessly abandoned to the paradoxes of life?
The crowd made way for her, and no man durst follow. Soon she was upon the outskirts of the throng, soon quit of it altogether. Some whispered ribaldries, some rude touches she had to endure, and that was all. She believed that the lure would not have let her lose sight of him; and sure enough there he was going on in front, a noble by token of his jewelled bonnet, with the long pendant gathered from it about his neck, and the rich scarlet hose which showed under his cloak. She thought well, desperate as she was, not to compromise him, and she followed at a distance. He went round by the deserted east end of the church, through the place that was called Old Change, and so, turning sharp down towards the river, made a sudden twist among the confusion of buildings there, and wheeled into a narrow way known as Sermon Lane, where he loitered just sufficiently to enable her to see him disappear into a certain house. Clutching her sheet about her, and watchful of suspicious eyes, she stole on, hesitated a moment, and hurried in his footsteps. She may have been observed or not; in any case she was a contagion whom all avoided. The door closed behind her as she entered and sank against the wall.
“Rise, madam,” he whispered. He was close beside her. His voice was quick and strange.
She burst into tears at once, passionate, heart-rending, exhausting. He let her weep herself out, while she crouched against the wall. Presently, the storm subsiding, she looked half up.
“Will you not give me your cloak?” she said. “I am cold.”
“For no other reason?” he asked.
She slunk down again.
“No,” she said. “That were a poor pretence, and meet for your mockery. I must barter a private place with you against raiment. Even a whore must go covered.”
He stooped and took her, unresisting, in his arms, though she held her face averted. He carried her impassive up the stairs of that dark, unknown house, and all the way there was passion in his hold and grief in his labouring sighs. She knew that they had entered a warm room, that he had shut the door, had placed her gently on a couch by the fire.
“Jane!” he said.
She uttered a quick, wild cry, and started erect, so that the sheet fell from her shoulders.
“Cover them, in mercy to me,” he said.
She stared at him a moment, then went into a sudden hysteric laugh. It stabbed him to the heart to hear her, for her voice had ever been merry and sweet.
“O!” she cried, “that a woman should be so used by her own husband!”
“Nay,” said he—“but that I might know you still not dead to shame.”
The ripple of her laugh stopped as it had begun.
“Why are you so richly dight, Harry?” she said.
“A lure,” he answered, “to lead thee hither. Who would win a King’s mistress must borrow peacock’s plumes.”
She shivered a little, looking down, then whispered hoarse:
“Well, I am well answered. Yet you look like a noble. O, Harry, speak like one!”
“God forbid it, Jane! I will speak like Harry Shore.”
“He loved me once.”
“Aye; he is risking death to prove it.”
She looked up quickly; but before she could speak the door opened, and a little boy peeped into the room. He was caught away in a moment by an unseen hand, and the door closed; but in that instant the woman had snatched her drapery about her nakedness, shamed as she had never been yet.
“A wretch!” she said, her face on fire.
“Saw’st thou his blue eyes and pretty curls?” said the goldsmith. “He is son to my master-setter, whose house this is. I had dreamed once of such a babe, mine own and thine.”
She rose and crept to him, looking in his face. It was a bronzed and honest one, though drawn with pain.
“Harry,” she whispered, “find me clothes and bid me begone—in memory of our once kisses, Harry.”
“They are here,” he said. “Everything is prepared for thee—the means to lead a blameless life henceforth. Summon the woman when I’m gone. I would not have them say I left my wife to starve.”
He put out his arms, passion in his eyes, but withdrew them resolutely.
“Nay,” he said; “in heaven—not yet.”
He fell back a little, and cried out suddenly:
“Your foot, Jane! Poor foot; it bleeds!”
He motioned her to the couch, knelt, lifted the wounded limb, and with his napkin staunched the trickling blood. He held it to his breast, and at last, with a long, yearning sigh, put his lips to it.
“This hath atoned,” he said—“so far I shame myself,” and he rose. “Little sinful wife,” he whispered, “he loved thee once; he loves thee ever; else could he leave thee thus? Now, let me never hear thy name again—for love’s sake do I ask it.”
She had buried her face in the cushions. And there she lay, long after he had gone, weeping out her soul.