THE QUEEN’S NURSE
Frivolous she may have been, shallow and light-hearted as a brook, but not heartless. Her nurse—she who, in modern parlance, had “taken her from the month” and had fed and bred her in the house of her father, Sir John Seymour, of Wiltshire, knight—would always defend her tooth and nail from that charge. And when at last, having followed her nursling’s dancing career through the Courts of the old gloomy Louvre and the more splendid Whitehall, she came to see her supplant in the royal caprice the unhappy Queen whose maid-of-honour she had been, she would allow in her presence no breath of detraction to slur the good fame of her darling, but would constantly aver that she had fought against the inevitable with all the desperation of which her buoyant nature was capable. Jane could never say nay to the least plausible beggar in the world, she would declare; and what was her chance when that suppliant was King Harry himself? She loved life, to be sure, the sweet butterfly—who would not with such a disposition? And when the alternative was to be broken on a wheel! How many, though deeper ones, would have chosen that in her place, she would like to know? And here was she about to justify her monarch’s choice by presenting him with a male heir—the heir for whom he had been growling and raging these twenty years past. She had no doubt it would be a male, since her bird always gave every one what he asked. And she had come to nurse her nursling through her first troublous days in this the new great palace of Hampton that the red Cardinal had built.
So she believed up to the last, and at that last the King, the least plausible beggar, sat all alone one wild October evening in the great oriel window of the great hall at the Court. It blew and rained boisterously without, and the wet, red leaves were dashed against the glass, where they ran down like gouts of blood. Their hue was reflected in the royal eyes, which stared out upon the desolate prospect between wrath and anxiety. Henry’s conscience was gnawing at his heart, in truth, and despot-like he resented the pain.
The tapers burned under that vaulted gloom like glow-worms in a dark avenue; the residue of a discarded feast lay tumbled about the tables. Apart from the golden dishes, the piles of fruit, the crusted goblets and great flagons of wine, he sat in his tremendous isolation, and fought the fight between desire and humanity. It was never, alas! but a brief struggle with him. He rose in a moment, a heavy, butcher-like figure of a man, a huge common hulk made formidable by padded doublet and “blistered” sleeves all roped and starred with gems, and, his lips puffing, the scant ginger hair bristling on his swollen neck and jowls, thundered an order into space. Instant to it an obsequious page leaped into the Presence.
“Sir Anthony Denny—summon him.”
The page vanished; the King strode up and down. At the fourth turn he paused to see a figure bow before him. This figure, for contrast, was robed all in black, with a tight coif on its head, and, hanging from its shoulders, a long, sleeveless gown edged with brown fur. It was the figure, livid and drawn-faced, of the chief barber-surgeon attending on her Majesty the Queen’s confinement.
“Sir Anthony,” said the King, “make note of our decision. Meseemeth in this realm of ours that wives be plenty, but heirs most sorely lack. Poor Jane must suffer for the succession. If one must perish——” He paused.
“It is even so, your Majesty,” murmured the physician.
The King stamped his foot, and turned away.
“I must have my heir,” he said. “God’s blood, I must and will!”
But that night, as he was crossing a corridor to his cabinet, an old woman broke upon him with tears and lamentations.
“They are killing my bird!”
“Peace, fool!” said the King, harsh and lowering. “I must have mine heir, though all birds fell dumb from this moment.”
She clung to him, but he shook her off roughly, and went on his way. She followed, importunate and beyond fear.
“Spare my nursling! She is one and only; thou canst not renew her; but many shall be her gifts of love to thee.”
He turned like a goaded bull, and the woman was dragged away.
That night the little Prince was born; and thereafter the wreck from which he had been delivered settled down, and on the twelfth day it sank into the fathomless deeps.
The King was sorry for a while; but he had his heir to reward him for the sacrifice he had made. Mary Tudor, a girl of twenty, and already as sour as crabs, was the little dead queen’s chief mourner. The trumpets brayed her obsequies, the laureate sang them in execrable verse, the baby—a pinched atom—screamed them. Only the old nurse sat dumb and dry-eyed, taking no notice of anything.
She would have nothing to do with the Prince, craved or claimed no part in his rearing. But presently she took her spinning-wheel to the little dark room by the chapel which had been allotted her; and there she would sit all day drawing flax from the distaff.
One noon, the door being open, the King in passing saw her thus occupied, and went in. She neither moved nor acknowledged his presence, but went on with her spinning. His eyes began to redden in the way all knew.
“What spinnest thou?” he demanded.
“Flax,” she answered, grim and quiet, without stopping in her work.
“For what?” he roared.
“Thy shroud,” she said, “and that of all thy house.”
Those with him thought the roof would have fallen. He raised his own blazing eyes to it, as if in momentary doubt of his omnipotence. But when he spoke at last it was noted with amazement that his words were temperate.
“That shall we see, old dotard,” he said. “Dispart her wheel and her.”
She stood up, with a smile on her thin lips, as they snatched her wheel away.
“Dispose them,” said the King, “where neither may avail the other. And, for her, take her incontinent in her sorcery, and put her where she may weave a shroud of darkness for evermore.”
He spoke, and passed out; and, as he had ordered, so was it done. The spinning-wheel was cast into a cupboard under the great staircase, and the nurse disappeared from human ken. Nothing more was heard of her for ten long years.
At the end of that time the King’s majesty lay ill. His huge bombard of a body was swollen with gout and dropsy; a mere rust of hair remained to his gross head; his hearing was capricious, and his eyes rheumy with half-blindness. He had grown slovenly in his dress; his every breath bullied the sweet air for ease and comfort; and, to cap all, his temper had grown with his deformities till hardly a man durst meet his eye.
Lying at Whitehall, he had a dream one night which troubled him. He sent for Sir Anthony Denny, always now in close attendance, and, heaving himself on his elbow, glared at the physician through a mist of anguish.
“Give me,” he said, “to mend this whirring in my brain.”
Sir Anthony, quaking in his list slippers, prescribed and administered a febrifuge. It availed little. Day and night the buzzing noise went on until it grew to madness. One morning the King groaned in torture: “It droneth, droneth for ever like a wheel!” and of a sudden sat up as if stricken.
“The old beldame’s!” he whispered. “What of it?”
It was some time before the alarmed leech could gather the import of his question, and then he hurried to have inquiries made. A special courier was despatched boot and spur to Hampton Court. But in these full years the very memory of the incident had vanished, and none knew where the wheel had been deposited. Only it seemed that others there had been haunted of late by a mysterious sound, so that none dared venture by the great staircase whence it appeared to proceed. And that was the message returned, in fear and trembling, to the tyrant.
He raged: “I will have no mysteries in my house. Pluck the stairway down.”
A despot’s will is law. In preparing to obey it the masons came upon the wheel. The King, being informed of the discovery, roared like a wounded tiger.
“Burn the thing to ashes!” he thundered, and, on the very word, turned white and mumbled. “Nay,” he said, in a fallen voice, “put it where the arts of Satan may not prevail with it; hide it away in my royal chapel, and the fiend shall be baffled. And look you that none comes near me in the night again to choke me in my shroud.”
His mind was impaired; it was evident that he was approaching his end; yet through all his desperation and mental anguish the inflexible will, which had surmounted all other wills of half the world, remained true, as history knows, to its dogged traditions. Almost his last breath was given to confirm the death sentence passed on a great subject. If one bitterer pang than another rent his released spirit, it must have been that which showed him his final vengeance unaccomplished.
And, in the meanwhile, none dared approach him with the truth of his nearing dissolution. He had killed men in the past for prophesying his mortality. He had held death so cheaply, had carried it so lightly in the hollow of his hand, that he could not believe it capable of striking at his omnipotence.
But there came a time when the truth could be no longer withheld from him, and Sir Anthony Denny was the one deputed to break it. He approached his task with a very natural apprehension, the more so as his Majesty had that morning shown some increased signs of confidence in his own recovery. He greeted the physician’s return with a distorted smile.
“I shall live to plague mine enemies yet,” he said, “so I can pluck this cursed hornet from my brain. Look you, man, I see a cause. It is my mind accusing me of an over-harshness in the past. Poor Jane her nurse, that old demented fool! Well, she loved her; the debt is paid; let her go free, I say.”
The physician stood aghast. He had been half expecting this thunderbolt ever since the King’s sick fancy had raised the dust of a long-forgotten sentence.
“Your Majesty,” he whispered, “your Majesty! The beldame died in prison this very day se’nnight.”
“This day!” The King struggled into a sitting posture. His face was like nothing human. “This day se’nnight!” He battled for breath. “It was when the sound began. God’s mercy! the wheel!”
“Alas, your Majesty!” half whimpered the leech; “there be those who say they cannot hear themselves pray for its whirring. The chapel is deserted.”
The King fell back, and raised his hands feebly, as if drawing something over his face. For an instant it appeared to the agitated physician as if a shroud of white had actually hidden it; but, on nearer approach, he saw that it was the frost of death that had fallen.
Long years after, a tradition which had for ages associated a muffled, incomprehensible droning with the occurrence of any death in the palace received, “in the white winter of its age,” a curious justification. Some workmen, in breaking through a wall of the old chapel, came upon an ancient spinning-wheel hidden away behind the panelling.