The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  I didn’t know how to respond, didn’t even know if I should respond. I wanted to, though: she was confiding in me and I was keen to honour that, as well as to prompt more. Her gaze was at the window, on the chalky sky – she was expecting nothing from me – and I was grateful for that because I didn’t yet know what it was that she was telling me. Of what, exactly, had she dreamt? So, I stayed listening and duly it came: ‘Being married to a such a gorgeous man.’

  Did I want to hear that? Because that, surely, was for him alone, Oh, you gorgeous man, you. Even ‘man’ unnerved me, although of course I knew very well that Edward was no longer a boy – indeed he was a married man. – but as a boy was how I’d always known him. And anyway, no one in our family ever passed comment on anyone else’s physical attributes. It had always been impressed on us that what mattered was what was on the inside. True, there was the story of my mother having been beautiful and my father handsome, but it was exactly that: a story, family lore, for fun. It was something of which we couldn’t know the truth and wouldn’t wish to. The truth of it – or otherwise – was irrelevant. But to proclaim Edward as gorgeous . . . well, he was, but, again, wasn’t it somehow indecent to say so?

  ‘And he’s so good with people, isn’t he,’ she said, awed and humbled, looking at me now, although this wasn’t a real question. She was looking for affirmation and I had no qualms in giving it. Edward had time for everyone, from Marcus, our kitchen boy, to our neighbour, Mr Dorell, who was forever poaching in the forest, and Lady Wroughton, whom not even our mother could stand. Good, even, with itinerant wool-winders and wandering minstrels. Edward was hardworking on everyone’s behalf, scrupulously fair and respectful, and everyone knew it. Thomas might make fun of him, but that was because he knew that, in truth, his eldest brother couldn’t be faulted.

  ‘People really like him, don’t they?’

  Actually, I wasn’t sure that ‘like’ was quite the right word. People trusted him, that was what I would have said. It was Thomas they’d be more likely to choose to have a drink with, to play cards with; Thomas would give them a better time if a good time was what they were after.

  ‘He’s so kind.’

  Again, I didn’t know that it was kindness as such; I didn’t know if it was as simple as that.

  I said, ‘He thinks things could be fairer.’

  She half-laughed at that: ‘Everything could always be fairer, couldn’t it,’ as if it were pointless to wish for it, and I felt a twinge of unease that perhaps she didn’t understand him as well or take him as seriously as she should. But then again, what did I know? Perhaps that didn’t matter; perhaps, even, in the early days of a marriage, that was how it should be. Perhaps it was quite touching, or one day would be, to look back and see how little, at the beginning of their life together, she’d understood him.

  ‘Anyway, that was always my dream,’ she concluded, sleepily pleased with herself, ’to marry a wonderful man.’

  Even back when I’d assumed that a husband would eventually come my way, how had I envisaged such a man? As being like Edward, albeit a lesser version to befit me. Not that I’d ever come across anyone who’d even approximated him and that was the disadvantage, I knew, of having a brother such as him; such boys were few and far between.

  ‘To make a home,’ Katherine was saying, ‘and have a family with a wonderful man – isn’t that every girl’s dream?’

  She looked for me to agree, but while marrying a wonderful man was better than not marrying a wonderful man or marrying a man who wasn’t wonderful, I wasn’t sure that it was what I’d have called a dream. Could it be said to be a dream? I experienced a flutter of panic because, yes, marrying and having a family was what was supposed to happen, even if I’d come to doubt that it’d happen for me; it was what would happen, I felt, for anyone who had just enough luck; it was what life was, or should be . . . But dreams: weren’t they something else?

  Being queen, for instance, wasn’t that something every girl dreamed of?

  So, I said it, tentatively, testing it out on her: ‘I used to dream of being queen.’

  Katherine laughed a little at that, enjoying the absurdity of it – ‘Well, that job’s taken’ – and I was flustered to have been taken at my word, even in jest, because of course I didn’t dream of replacing our actual queen, so I clarified, ‘Just a queen,’ which was no clarification at all, really. Which other queen could I possibly be?

  ‘Queen . . . ‘ She was repeating it, doubtful, and then she warned me, ‘You wouldn’t be sitting here, like this, if you were a queen.’

  Wouldn’t I?

  ‘Well, you’d be—’ She had to stop and think about it. ‘You’d be on show somewhere, wouldn’t you. Attending some . . . entertainment,’ the word said derisively: in her opinion, nothing of the kind. ‘You’d have to be on your best behaviour, all the time. Surrounded by your ladies. Courtiers, ambassadors,’ and suddenly it was indeed an awful prospect, that the pair of us couldn’t be alone in her room, taking our time together over the ending of a summer’s day. Because, quite simply, there could be nothing better, I realised: the slow-spun light, the laciness of what was left of it, the febrile birdsong spread on the air, and the sweetness of the milkshed. Outside, I knew, would be the first star of the evening, bold in the blue. If I were to go to the window, I’d come up against its bright-eyed watchfulness. And then the first breath of stars on the surface of the sky. Inside, with the simmering down of the day, the mustiness of old wood – floorboards and panelling – was coming to the fore, a muted but resonant note. The bed-hangings had held on to the day’s warmth but were beginning to release it, as would a night-scented flower. Our waiting for it was bringing it all about, I felt, the evening was playing to us. I wouldn’t have given it up for the world.

  I felt I should try to explain: ‘I think I just wanted not to have to do the cleaning,’ although that, too, was only a small part of it. I could have gone on to say that I would have loved a bed to myself, a whole bed to myself, free of Elizabeth’s bulk, Dottie’s laboured breathing and Margie’s feet. I could have said that I dreamed of sitting down to melting, juice-rich venison on every meat-eating day and sturgeon on every fasting day; of spooning caramelised orange slices from a syrup of spiced wine, and pocketing sugared almonds inside my cheek. An end to long winters of stockfish and mutton, and powdery baked apples. And I wondered about the sensation against my skin of a cloth woven from gold that had been made thin enough to thread. And stockings made of silk instead of wool. And how it would be to sit back in chairs, instead of having to balance on stools and benches or slump against floor-cushions. Sailing through London, too – not only going to London, but being swept through it in a silk-draped, velvet-plush barge, serenaded by musicians. Imagine that.

  And there was more, but back then it was beyond me to explain and I knew it: I knew to say nothing because I wouldn’t have been able to make myself understood; I didn’t quite even understand it myself. When I dreamed of being a queen, what I’d dream of was being merciful. Full of mercy: brimful and bountiful with that best and most precious of qualities. As a queen, I knew, I’d be merciful not because I was a good person but simply because I was queen: there I would be, above and beyond everyone else, singular, and my very business would be mercy. The king might dabble, he might take an interest and sometimes try his hand, but he’d be occupied with affairs of state. As queen, mercy would be mine to give: mine by right, whether or not I wanted it; invested in me, to be bestowed. My subjects would come to me in their desperation and I wouldn’t have to know or understand them: nothing so complicated. I’d pass no judgement, but simply change everything for them: dissolve the past and conjure up a different future.

  Katherine had linked her hands behind her head and was reciting a litany of our household duties:’. . . cleaning and cooking and sewing, gardening, larder-stocking and egg-collecting, pickling and bottling, malt-sprouting and brewing, butter-churning . . .’ but although she did so with a put-upon air,
we both knew that she didn’t really mind the tasks. She was efficient around the house, and had thus earned the right to a gripe. I didn’t much mind the work, either, because what else would I have been doing with my time? Katherine said, ‘If you want to avoid all that, Janey-jay-jay, you just need to marry a very, very rich man. He doesn’t have to be a king.’

  I made myself smile to show that I was taking her advice in the spirit that it was intended.

  ‘Problem solved, then,’ I said. ‘I’ll make sure to marry a very, very rich man.’

  A satisfied little smile from her. ‘Make sure you do.’

  From then onwards, we retreated together to her room whenever Edward was away. ‘Coming?’ she’d ask me after evening prayers when our time was our own, and she’d ask it merrily and unselfconsciously, as if there were no question that I’d be joining her. And oh how right she was. Gladly I set myself adrift from my family. As for her, I don’t think it occurred to her that she was expected to sit downstairs; she was simply doing what she wanted to do, creature of whim that she was, and didn’t consider that she might be missed. Not arrogance or disregard on her part, I don’t think; if anything, the contrary: in her view, she simply wasn’t that important. The Seymours had always sat together in the parlour of an evening, was how she’d have regarded it, and they were sitting there still, so what could be the problem?

  As for me, my family didn’t exist when we were in her room; we two alone existed, we sisters of a kind, of a special kind, a perfect kind. I could say that I fell under her spell, but, really, honestly, Katherine didn’t have the wit to cast spells. It was all of my own doing, my giving myself over to her, and there was nothing complicated to it, just the joy of lolling around talking about nothing: the day’s events, such as they’d been; the household’s various characters, of whom we knew little. ‘Did you see the look that Lil gave Bax when . . . ?’ ‘Marcus has an odd way, doesn’t he, of . . .’ ‘D’you think Father James has ever been in love?’

  She’d pass me her jar of comfits, and even now I associate those evenings with the beguiling resistance of a sugar coating and the shock of its fracture, however much anticipated, before the wince-inducing crunch into the seed, the flooding of my mouth with flavour. Where did they come from? I did ask, but all I got was the shrug, ‘Oh—’ As if the acquisition of comfits was simply something else that – like so much else – just happened to her. She encouraged me to indulge in them, although once, early on, peering down into the much-diminished contents, I did object, ‘But—’ But then they’ll be gone.

  ‘Oh—’ and my quibble was dismissed with an airy wave, was of no concern and, sure enough, the supply was regularly replenished, the source remaining a mystery to me but not one to tax me greatly, because what mattered, ultimately, was that they were there in that jar, and they always were.

  And Katherine was, in general, a girl who had things, little things, all the more eye-catching for being ephemeral. She had lace ribbon: her plaits were tied with it beneath her hood, whereas we Seymours used strips of old fabric. I’d never seen lace before I picked up those ribbons of hers, I didn’t know what it was: snow-white, intricately petalled, much of my fingertips remaining visible through it. Made of very little, barely holding itself together, yet clearly tough. Bone lace, she called it, made on bone bobbins, ‘I didn’t make it,’ she laughed when I looked up at her in wonder.

  Who did, then?

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ as if that were quite beside the point. ‘Comes from Italy or the Low Countries or somewhere.’

  She had a handheld mirror, an oval of shiny steel like a fragment of armour set into a wooden frame. Until then, I’d never seen a mirror, nor knew anyone who had one. Myself, I didn’t hanker for one, having no wish to capture my own face, but I was impressed by Katherine’s having one. Her comb, too: nothing like the grimaces that were ours, bared and ready to savage our hair, hers was exquisite, its handle carved with sinuous stems and leaves to match the mirror’s frame. It wasn’t as if she was vain, though, I never saw her give the slightest regard to how she looked. But then, she didn’t need to.

  Little luxuries, they were – those pieces of lace, the mirror and comb nestled in their own red velvet pouch, a pot of rose-scented beeswax hand cream – but somehow all the more captivating for that. The same was true of the freshly picked flowers in that room; just a few, but always there in a small clay jug that was her own, which she must have thought to bring with her for that very purpose. I didn’t envy her the actual objects; what I envied her was being able to allow herself such luxuries.

  Recently I’ve accrued clothes and jewellery that I couldn’t even have imagined in my days back at Wolf Hall, but I’m glad to be merely their safe-keeper, their custodian; they haven’t been given to Jane Seymour, these fabulous gifts from the king and others seeking favour, but to England’s queen-in-waiting. Back at Wolf Hall, I never even had anywhere to keep anything. Katherine’s room, then, was something to envy – she didn’t have to share with Elizabeth, Dottie and Margie – although perhaps not so much for the physical space as the time alone that it gave us. Before she came to Wolf Hall, I’d never had time of my own. My daydreaming I’d done as I’d worked. My evenings I’d given over to family duties, minding the children and listening politely to a laboured recital of Dottie’s or to Thomas’s musical musings, to Father James’s readings or the conversation of our guests. Why would I have made time for myself? I’d had no one with whom to share it.

  Well, all that changed once Katherine arrived. Up in her room during those evenings, it was my freedom from Elizabeth that was particularly heady for me. I wonder, now, what Elizabeth made of Katherine’s favouring of me, because my sister never made any secret of considering me deadly dull. She could have wheedled for a share of the friendship, but why would she have bothered? Katherine was of no use to her; Elizabeth had ascertained that Katherine held no sway in the household. And Katherine? Why no interest, from her, in Elizabeth? Of we two sisters, so close in age, Elizabeth was the one never at a loss for something pithy to say. But then, Katherine loved an easy life – I can see it now – and I was the one who was no trouble, I was easy company. At the time, I would have hated to think it of myself, but it stood me in good stead when the king came looking for the quietest of company and I was so much better practised than any other lady.

  Back then, the future was a long way off, an impossibly long way off, and in Katherine’s room on those long summer evenings, we’d reflect on our day and speculate no further than an upcoming feast. There was no more mention of marriage for me, nor – it occurs to me now – of babies for her: no talk such as the adults downstairs would have probably imagined us to be having, and probably wanted us to have. And absolutely no one, least of all me, would have guessed that my dream would be the one eventually to come true.

  6

  Edward had had a month’s grace after the wedding but then his proper return to work took him away ever more often, and for longer, commonly several days at a time. My father was stiffer in the saddle, so tended to stay local, busy enough with his sheriff’s duties, his role as a JP and as warden of Savernake Forest, whereas Edward rode beyond Wiltshire into Dorset and Somerset and even occasionally as far as Bristol. From then on, his homecomings were less predictable and his new wife could no longer be listening for him as she once had at the end of each day: listening for him speaking to Mr Wallensis, our stable master, or Ralph, our stable lad, or – indoors – to my father, reporting back to him, or if it had been one of those days when they’d worked together, mulling it over with him.

  When Edward had come home every evening, what had often been audible first of his return was not his own voice at all but someone else’s, yet somehow it was clear to us that it was he who was being addressed, perhaps from the attentiveness in the tone, the sound of someone on his or her toes. An Edward-distinctive shutting of a door was also easily discernible: nothing careless in it, no trace of a slam but nevertheless resolutely d
one. Detecting him, Katherine would lift her head, the better to catch the clues, and then, satisfied that it was indeed him, she’d resume her task, confident that he’d be coming for her. But when he was gone for days and no one knew which evening he’d get home, he’d be suddenly upon us: a door opening and his voice pitched in greeting. And then Katherine was on less sure ground. Rising, she’d almost trip over herself, and that slight loss of composure of hers would in turn wrong-foot him so that, stepping backwards, he’d gather himself with a hasty clasp of his hands, which then left the pair of them standing facing each other, somehow at a loss. They were still so new to each other and, in my innocence, I found it touching, even comical, to see their shyness of each other. I was secretly proud, too, that she was more comfortable in my company than his.

  Thomas, too, spotted the newly-weds’ lack of ease with each other, and he couldn’t resist exploiting it; he’d grab any opportunity to get one over Edward, and Edward’s self-consciousness in the presence of his wife made him easy prey. One evening Katherine and I had gone into the garden after chapel and were sitting in the arbour when Edward came to find us. He’d been away at court, at Francis Bryan’s invitation, for the first time since the wedding. I was about to leave him and Katherine to become reacquainted but suddenly Thomas was there, too. He’d got wind of Edward’s return and tracked him down.

  ‘You’re back,’ Thomas announced cheerily, as he always did: it was as much greeting as he ever gave his elder brother.

  ‘I am,’ Edward confirmed, dryly, careful not to open a conversation, hoping to send him on his way, and I felt sharply for my eldest brother: Thomas’s looming there in the opening in the yew hedge was wearying even for me, and I hadn’t been on the road for a couple of days. Edward would have had a splash-down and brush-up before he’d come looking for us, but he had an insect bite on one eyelid and his cheekbones were risen like bruises. Thomas shouldered past me and made himself at home on the bench, thighs spread and elbows on knees, chin in his hands. Katherine caught my eye, looking faintly amused: All legs, I recalled her saying.