Thomas asked, ‘And how was our good man Francis?’ It was an innocuous enough enquiry, so Edward was obliged to answer; and because Francis hadn’t visited us since his own marriage the previous summer to Philippa Spice, I paused to hear what he said.
Fine, Edward told us, and he’d done well in the tiltyard against his new young brother-in-law, Nick Carew. Nick Carew was the best jouster at court, even I knew that, just as I knew, as did Edward, how Thomas would have loved to have seen that joust for himself. Only Edward, though, had received Francis’s invitations so far. They made an unlikely pair, Edward and Francis, similar in age but little else. Edward was no jouster, to say the least. Nevertheless, Francis seemed to have recognised Edward’s qualities and was busy furthering his interests, which, as a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber and Esquire of the Body, he was ideally placed to do.
I retreated onto the path, hoping that Thomas would follow my lead, but, jovially, he asked Edward, ‘Will the king be making a prince of the little Fitzroy?’
What Fitzroy? I stopped in my tracks. Royal bastards belonged to the olden days, didn’t they? That was my understanding, back then. Our king had married Spanish Catherine for love; that was the story I’d grown up with. The king’s first action, at eighteen, against the advice of his councillors had been to marry his elder brother’s widow, to rescue her from obscurity and poverty. Everyone knew it. Everyone said theirs was the ideal marriage. The king was larger than life, whereas the queen – five years his senior – was wise and serene, and they adored each other, were devoted to each other and made the perfect pair. That was the story. So why on earth, then, I puzzled, would there have been a mistress? I couldn’t leave, because I had to hear what Edward would say. Thomas’s claim was quite something; I couldn’t walk off as if it were nothing. Keeping my eyes lowered, I stayed listening. My guess was that Thomas was somehow mistaken and Edward would enlighten him.
Nothing, though, from Edward, and curiosity had me sneak a glance to see that he didn’t appreciate this ambush from Thomas nor, probably, the topic itself, and certainly not its airing in present company. Judging from his discomfort, though, there was something to what Thomas had said. But what, exactly? And how had Thomas known? But then, it struck me, perhaps everyone knew. Everyone except me. Katherine, too? I looked to her, to find her glancing back and forth between my brothers in obvious delight at the prospect of a spat. Surely she knew better than that.
Edward spoke, albeit barely. ‘No idea.’
No denial, then, of the existence of the king’s illegitimate son. Katherine transferred her wide-eyed gaze to me: Well, well, well. It was news to her, then, but welcome – a generous helping of tasty gossip – and she looked keen for more. Me, too, I admit, even though I was mindful of Edward’s reticence, and pitied him: the two of us hanging on his every word, and Thomas needling him. Thomas wouldn’t let up: once he had Edward on the defensive, he’d be merciless.
‘Yes,’ Thomas came back at him, ‘but what are people saying?’
He’d asked it lightly, a perfectly reasonable question, which made it difficult for Edward to object. Edward should have told him to shut up and go away but, tempted though he must’ve been, in the company of ladies he wouldn’t do that.
He took refuge, instead, in a stiff rebuttal – ‘I’ve heard nothing’ – which was a miscalculation because Thomas could act incredulous, head cocked – Really? – to cast doubt on Edward’s much-vaunted new connections.
Katherine hooted a laugh at Edward’s walking into that particular trap.
Edward revised, acidly, ‘Because there’s nothing to hear.’
Still under the woefully thin mantle of bonhomie, Thomas objected. ‘Oh, come on! Someone, surely, must be looking into the possibility of it.’
If Edward denied it, he’d look either ignorant or churlish, but if he joined Thomas in speculation, he’d be gossiping.
Thomas pushed on. ‘Because how old is the queen now?’
At this, Katherine flew playfully into the fray. ‘Thomas! A gentleman never asks a lady’s age.’
Thomas liked that, but Edward looked daggers at his wife – Don’t encourage him – and the savagery of his glare took me aback. Katherine was unrepentant, though, barely registering his disapproval, and I marvelled at how she brushed it off, stayed untouched by it. Bolstered, perhaps, by Thomas’s company.
Thomas persisted: ‘She must be – what? – late thirties?’
Edward said nothing, which served as confirmation. And the fact spoke for itself: there was a low and rapidly decreasing chance of a male heir. I tried to think: how old had my mother been when she’d had the last baby, little John, who hadn’t lived? She’d been forty, I remembered, when Antony was born. My mother, though, had had a long history of having children, of having sons, which the queen conspicuously lacked.
I doubt I’d ever considered the queen’s age until then; perhaps I’d been regarding her as somehow above and beyond having an age. I’m not sure, even, that I’d been aware of the anxiety about the lack of an heir, but in any case I’d have understood, back then, that whatever happened or didn’t happen, even for a king and queen, was God’s will. Certainly it didn’t seem right, to me, for Thomas to air the issue. Why, I wondered, didn’t Edward put him in his place? He was acting as if that were beneath him.
And inevitably, Thomas took it too far, leaning forward to spell it out to Edward: ‘So, the king himself acknowledges that little boy, but you don’t,’ his tone light, but tauntingly so.
Edward stood, abruptly: ‘I just don’t think it’s helpful.’ Tight-lipped, he reined himself in, refusing to give Thomas the satisfaction.
Quickly, Katherine rose beside him, as if remembering her place. By contrast, Thomas’s own rise from the bench was deliberately laboured. ‘All I’m saying,’ he sighed, as if disappointed to be alone in being man enough to face up to it, ‘is that I’m sure the princess will make a good marriage somewhere, but for us here in England . . . Well, something has to happen, doesn’t it?’
But Edward was already stalking towards the house, leaving his wife a step or two behind, as if it were she just as much as his brother whom he wanted to escape.
Katherine seemed happy enough to play up to Thomas when Edward was there, but she was a lot less sure of him when he wasn’t, which, unfortunately, in turn only further provoked Thomas. One afternoon, not long after that altercation in the arbour, Katherine and I and Elizabeth and Lil were sewing (or in Elizabeth’s case, purporting to sew) in the day room, when Thomas dashed in on us with a button to be stitched back on to his jacket.
Elizabeth wasn’t having it. ‘Ask Ma!’
But our mother was in the kitchen, and anyway the job would be done in no time, so I did it then and there, while my brother craned from the window, fretting at having left his new, difficult horse with Ralph at the stables. Just as I was tying off, Lil, who was patching her apron, pricked herself with her needle and exclaimed, cradling her hand, steadying herself after the shock.
Katherine said to her, ‘You’ll get kissed in that apron.’ Then, faced with our collective incomprehension, explained as if reciting from memory, ‘Prick your finger when you’re making a dress – or apron, I suppose – and you’ll get kissed in it.’ She looked pleased with herself as the bearer of good news.
Thomas swung round from the window. ‘Kissed?’ He glanced at Lil’s finger, head inclined, playing at giving it some consideration. ‘A prick . . . a bit of blood . . .’ And before we knew it, he’d lunged, snatched up her hand and drawn the bloodied fingertip into his mouth. Releasing it, he asked her, ‘Better, now?’
She was mortified, sitting rigid, the offending hand hidden in the clasp of the other, her always troubled complexion turning florid.
‘Oh, don’t worry about Lil,’ Thomas announced to the room as he whisked the jacket from me, ’she already gets kissed plenty, both in and out of dresses.’ And with a word of thanks thrown in my direction, he was gone.
Ev
en if I didn’t fully understand what I’d witnessed, I knew it was bad and in the stunned silence looked to Katherine for one of her dismissive retorts. But her head was bowed over her stitching and it was clear to me that although I didn’t understand why, all her usual confidence had deserted her.
Most of us, though, my sister-in-law simply bowled over, that first summer. Even old Father James. One glorious June afternoon, we came across him in the garden, crouched on an adjacent path, fixated on a poppy, and Katherine strode up behind him to peer down over his shoulder before exclaiming, ‘Father! You can drawl’ I worried she’d made too much of it – she sounded amazed that he should have any talent at all – but, fortunately, he didn’t take it that way, beaming as he rushed to downplay his skill, ‘Oh, no, really, it’s just a scribble . . .’
She closed in on him, crouching beside him and roping me in, too: ‘Janey-jay! Just look at this! Isn’t this lovely?’
The sketch was indeed lovely, but that came as no surprise – Father James had always sketched. Feeling awkward alongside the pair of them – Katherine ebullient and Father James demurring – I mumbled something about a sketch that he’d recently made of Elizabeth, how good it was.
He tried to be dismissive of that, too, but what I’d said had my sister-in-law draw back onto her heels. ‘Really?’ and I watched it occur to her: ‘Could you sketch me, d’you think, Father?’ The artlessness of the request was rather touching; I’d never have offered myself up to be sketched. But, then, of course, I wasn’t pretty as she was.
Events were moving fast for poor old Father James. ‘Oh, well . . .’ But I could see that he was already along for the ride, he’d already begun considering her as a possible subject; the idea had been sown and he couldn’t help himself. But only when she asked him, ‘Where shall I sit?’ did I realise that she intended the sketch to be done that very minute. The sketch of the poppy that she’d so admired but which had yet to be finished; that, it seemed, would have to be set aside.
Father James had to think quickly, casting around – ‘Um, well . . .’ – before indicating the arbour. ‘I suppose you could just—’
And she did; she swept to the bench. But what about Father James? Where would he go? It looked as if he’d have to kneel in front of her, so I said I’d fetch a stool.
When I returned, they were deep in conversation, Katherine asking all the right questions about where and how Father James had learned to draw, and which subjects he favoured. Flattered by attention of which he’d almost certainly never known the like, he was rallying his reedy old man’s voice to give fulsome answers. Placing the stool at his disposal, I drew back – the arbour would be Katherine’s alone for the duration – but then didn’t quite know where to put myself, and ended up having to hang around Father James as he worked, uncomfortably aware that I might be cramping him.
‘How’s it looking?’ Katherine would call to me from time to time, and I’d report back favourably, doing my pathetic best to sound knowledgeable of the process (‘The outline’s done now’).
But then, once, when Father James glanced down at the sketch, her gaze darted to mine and I saw something different in it: mischief. She was finding it funny, this situation. Until then, I’d assumed she was taking it seriously: too seriously, really. That glance, though, revealed her as amused to be posing there in that arbour with Father James at her feet; and of course she was, because it was indeed funny. When he looked back up at her, though, he found her as composed as ever, picture perfect.
As soon as his attention had returned to the drawing, she was lightning quick with her two front teeth on her lower lip and a twitch of her nose, but then, in the nick of time, expressionless again, as if it hadn’t happened. But it had, and, as her audience, suppressing a laugh, I was complicit. It’d been nothing much, that flash of a bunny face, but inside me welled a deliciously excruciating unease because I had a strong suspicion that she hadn’t finished, that this was only the start. And indeed, when he looked down again, she waggled her eyebrows at me. That was all it was, two ridiculous hitches of her eyebrows, but the point was that it was at Father James’s expense: his earnestness mocked, his innocence.
At the next opportunity, her eyelids drooped until her eyes were three-quarters closed and then the tip of her tongue protruded in what I recognised as an impression of a dozing cat. Of course it was very silly, but, still, it was too much: Stop it, I begged her under my breath, stop it, stop it, even as I was willing her on to worse.
‘Nearly done?’
It was unclear which of us she was asking, but there was no mistaking the implication that the sketch should be nearly done, which had Father James suddenly flustered. ‘Oh, well, er. . . .’
And that was when I felt bad for him. The sketch had seemed like a good idea at the time, but minutes later Katherine was bored. There was no malice in it, and she was properly eager to see what he’d achieved; she made much of her delight with it, assured him she’d treasure it, but still, she’d had enough. She had been playing with him, I saw, but suddenly she’d finished with him. I did see it, and I didn’t like it, but how I wish I’d better heeded it.
7
For all her apparent breeziness, Katherine was already in trouble. Not that any of us knew it. They both were. I suspect I did once see something of it, but back then, couldn’t make anything of it. From the long gallery, one afternoon, I’d glimpsed the pair of them in the garden, pacing side by side but slowly, barely moving. From the bowed heads I guessed something to be under discussion, if only tentatively. Then she halted, which halted him, and she reached for him, her hand on his shoulder as if to stop him, although he showed no intention of going. Beseeching, too, that hand; with the gentlest touch, she turned him to her. She was the one who was talking, but guardedly; none of her usual liveliness.
I knew I should look away but I, too, was held there, way up above them. What I was seeing, even if I didn’t know it at the time, was the distance between them. A distance, however small, and despite her attempt to bridge it. She squeezed his shoulder in a gesture of reassurance. He was refusing to look at her, he was resolutely downcast, but her gaze tucked itself beneath his, and then she gathered him to her: her hands – both – on the back of his head, his neck, to guide him to her. He surrendered, but reluctantly, didn’t reciprocate, didn’t reach for her, his arms remaining at his sides, but nevertheless his forehead came to rest on hers.
Late one midsummer night, it was to my shoulder that her hand came, to fetch me from sleep. My eyes opened to hers and there she was, my sister-in-law, beside the bed, watching me come awake and half-smiling as if I were late for something, as if by falling asleep I’d been a little remiss. She held no light, had no need of one: we were a mere sliver short of the flower moon, and its radiance was oddly definite and dense everywhere in the room. The shutters and bed-hangings were open to let drift the considerable heat that had built up during the day, but I lay stranded, sweating, in nightclothes and bedclothes. Something must be wrong, I knew, despite that smile of hers, because why else would she be waking me? Beneath the weight of my sisters’ sleep, I hardly dared breathe. ‘What?’ I mouthed, my throat silted with sleep, but she dismissed my concern with a shake of her head, whispering, ‘Come to the brook.’
What?
‘The brook.’
I had no idea what she meant. Had she left something there?
‘To the water,’ she urged, and then I got it – water – and suddenly nothing else in the world mattered but free-flowing fresh water, the slash of it through the dense heat onto my skin. Carefully, I slid up from the bedclothes, only to realise that there could be no lovely cold water because the day was done and the brook had retreated into the night. Two separate worlds, we were: we Seymours wrapped in our beds and dreams, and the brook, down among distant trees, wriggling belly up in the moonlight and the gleam of animal eyes. And anyway, ‘Where’s Edward?’ Because shouldn’t she be with him? Night time was when they were a pair again; wher
ever else he had had to be for the day, they were a pair in bed when darkness fell.
‘Asleep,’ and a trace of impatience in it: stuffy Edward, more fool him.
Again, I pictured their bed as a tomb; but this time Edward alone on it, marble, untroubled, trusting. Somehow, Katherine had got loose.
‘Come on,’ she urged. ‘It’s like daylight out there.’ Far too good to miss, and so then I was the laggard, stubbornly unmoved by its wonders. Her urgency did ignite a spark beneath my breast-bone, but I knew we couldn’t leave the house – this locked, dog-guarded house – to go traipsing away over pastureland. Anyone could be out there, poaching, trying their luck, arrow-happy. Nor should I leave the girls untended in here: as eldest, I was guardian of their safe sleep; they’d been entrusted to me. Dottie’s face, across the pillow from mine, set against the heat. Margie’s feet, between Dottie and me, eerily still, as if listening.
True, though, it was intolerably hot. And anyway, I was awake.
Was this, then, something that she used to do, I wondered, down in Dorset? Was it something that she knew how to do? – move undetected through a dark house, come by keys and then brave whatever was out there before getting herself back unmissed into bed? Could she do all that? Standing expectantly at my bedside, she certainly gave that impression, and I was captivated. Never once in my life that I could recall had I stepped out of line. If I did go with her, I reasoned, we wouldn’t be long, because it wasn’t far, just beyond the gardens. And anyway, as long as we were careful, who would know? And Elizabeth, snoring down at the other end of the bed, was only a year my junior: she should be almost as capable of looking after the girls as I was.
The May Bride Page 6