The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  Thomas had been first to the door, returning in no time to kneel on the floor, avid, like a boy with a puzzle, and unfurl it. Even before it was fully displayed, my mother noticed it had suffered a little from moth, her exclamation pitched between disapproval and disgust. Crouching down, her touch to the moth-pocked portion was as much soothing as exploratory. We all stayed back, respectfully suspended, waiting for her to pronounce remedy. Well, all of us except Thomas, who muttered an oath that had my mother slide him a reproving glance, Watch your language. When she was satisfied that she’d properly assessed the extent of the damage, she levered herself up with a heavy, steadying hand on her son’s shoulder, and it was to Katherine whom she turned: ‘A job for you, I think, Katherine, and your lovely silks.’

  So, for the next four evenings, Katherine knelt at our feet with a girlish slope of her shoulders and one hand mole-like beneath the banner to raise the moth-eaten area as if coaxing it up for her ministrations. It was a strange view that I had of her on those evenings – the hollow at the base of her skull, over which lay the finest and most golden threads of her hair – but that wasn’t what was disconcerting. Nor was it her readiness to set herself apart from us, refusing offers of help to lift the banner and place it across laps, insisting instead that it was easier to work down there on the floor when obviously it wasn’t, but the subjugation in that pose and her wilfulness in adopting it.

  2

  All too soon came the eve of Edward’s departure. For the five days since his summons I’d no more than glimpsed him, sometimes very early, in the outer courtyard, saddling up, and a couple of times very late, hauling himself up the stairs to his room; and once coming out of the still room with my mother, looking grave and baffled.

  He didn’t come home for his final evening, sending word that he was staying over at the Wroughtons’. He’d been caught up in last-minute business was the message, and he judged it prudent to accept their hospitality for the night. He’d leave there at dawn, we were told, and, all being well, would be with us an hour later, although we knew he’d have to move off quickly again to make up for lost time. It was a Friday, a day of fasting, so nothing elaborate had been planned for his send-off, but we Seymours weren’t strict observers and my mother had been thinking creatively around the restrictions. When the news of his absence came, she did well to hide her disappointment but Dottie, who’d been so carried away with a sense of occasion as to have prepared floral displays for the table (daisies, grasses and rosehips), piped her protest at the unfortunate messenger: ‘How could he do this? He has to say goodbye!’

  My mother turned flustered. ‘Dorothy! You heard the man! Your brother will be home, but tomorrow.’

  Dottie, though, would have none of it – ‘That is too late!’ – and then Antony was competing with a wail of his own – ‘I need to show him the shield I made!’ – while Margie, never to be outdone, offered a disdainful ‘You really do think he’d have made the effort . . .’

  Elizabeth’s contribution of a bosom-exerting sigh was the one that my mother seized upon to rebuke. ‘Elizabeth, please try to show a little more understanding . . .’

  Distracted by the clamour, I didn’t immediately think to look to Katherine to convey my sympathy. She was being denied a last night to have her husband to herself. When I did glance over, I saw that although she met no one’s eye, she looked entirely accepting, which I took to be admirably dignified. Thomas, though, did meet my eye, and his was a knowing look, but which I returned on a steely one of my own. If Edward said he was too busy to come home, I felt, then that was the truth of the matter, that was all there was to it and we didn’t need Thomas’s insinuation, whatever it was.

  Katherine retired alone very early to her room that evening – no invitation for me to join her – and in the morning was ahead of everyone into chapel for prayers. Immaculately dressed, too, from pearl coif to lace cuffs and kid gloves; she could’ve been up for hours. Perhaps she had. Certainly she looked tired, whey-faced. She kept herself to herself; but then in chapel she never did. No one else appeared so contemplative: all of us distracted, instead, by listening for Edward’s return.

  After prayers, we all got on with our usual household tasks, but half-heartedly. Antony didn’t help matters by haring back and forth between we girls in our room and his brothers down at the stables. He had to be spoken to, and more than once. The girls weren’t overexcited, quite the contrary, but were no easier to manage: Margie, morose; Dottie, high-handed; Elizabeth, just plain nasty. Nothing much except squabbling was getting done. Even Katherine was neglectful with the broom and dusters although, dressed beautifully as she was, who could blame her?

  Eventually, just before eight, word came that Edward had arrived in the outer courtyard but would come no further, was changing horses and heading off. We all dashed there from the house and if, when we emerged from the passageway, Edward’s gaze searched the crowd specifically for his wife, I didn’t notice. As for her, she didn’t go to him, but hung back with the rest of us.

  We’d pitched up in a rush only to find ourselves at a loss as to what to expect from him; there we all stood, stopped, assembled, self-conscious, as if awaiting inspection. Like his wife, he looked exhausted, although differently, darkly; a notch at the corner of each eye that could’ve been pressed there by a thumb. My breath was jammed against my heart to see him, just twenty-one, so very serious there beside his horse. Despite his effort to look glad to see us, we were, amid all those men eager for his attention, clearly a complication; this wasn’t the time or place for emotional goodbyes. Understandably, he was anxious to be off, to make the most of the first day’s ride.

  It wasn’t until my father took it upon himself to usher Katherine forward that I thought of her, as did everyone else, there being a flurry as we Seymours drew back, mindful and contrite. Suddenly she was singled out and there was nothing for it but for her to go ahead and conduct her wifely farewell in public. Edward was dazzled, his shadowed eyes widening at her approach and emptying of his preoccupations; she filled his gaze – completely filled it, brimful. Her own head, though, was bowed. We watched the barest touch of her fingertips to the front of his jacket, perhaps no actual touch but – I couldn’t quite see – just a gesture in that direction. For all its hesitancy, though, it had a weight behind it and held the sense of a reckoning.

  He smiled ruefully as he said something, then laid a hand on her shoulder before lowering his lips, reverently, to her cheek. It was done so slowly as to be enacted upon her; she had to stand stock still to receive it. Me, too, to witness it. I couldn’t get enough of it; such tenderness, as I saw it. Anyone less in thrall to my brother and his wife might’ve recognised that embrace, such as it was, not to be what a young husband going away indefinitely into mortal danger, should have been giving in parting from his bride.

  With Edward’s riding away through the gatehouse began the weeks and months of waiting for news of him, the longing for it but dread of it, the fear fired off by any courtyard commotion or unexpected dog bark or footfall. Each and every morning of those months, I woke to an unease that I couldn’t fathom before it closed over me and claimed me: Edward had gone to war. Anything could happen, could’ve already happened, could now be happening, and he might never come back. Until then, I’d lived an uneventful life; this was my first experience of uncertainty of any magnitude. During my waking hours, the foreboding lurked as a pressure behind my eyes: easy enough to ignore as long as I was busy, but otherwise all too present. There was no mediating it, I knew; it would only be alleviated by his safe return.

  But if it was bad for me, then how much worse was it for his new young wife? Yet she made no claim for special treatment, and we gave her none. There was no comfort to be had in the drastic circumstances of Edward’s absence, so we didn’t patronise her with the pretence of any, although I do now wonder at the wisdom of that. I tried to imagine how much worse his being away at war must be for her than for me, but however hard I tried, I didn’t
quite have the measure of it, because back then there was something that I failed to appreciate. With the passing of each month since the wedding – three and a half, by that time – there was, for my parents, an increasing likelihood that she’d announce her pregnancy.

  Of course I knew it was a possibility, of course I did, but on the other hand, for me to have thought of my new sister-in-law, my new friend, as a mother was, somehow, back then, for me, a step too far. If any such news were to be broken, Edward couldn’t be first to hear it, so, unbeknown to me, my mother was holding herself in a state of readiness for that particular honour. Katherine would’ve been only too well aware of it; she’d have known she was under my mother’s daily scrutiny, however good-willed. And how she must’ve resented it. She had to endure the suffocating weight of an expectation which she and she alone, after Edward left, knew that she had no hope of satisfying.

  Life went on, and busily, although that didn’t make Edward’s absence any easier on us. As soon as he’d gone, we needed to prepare for Harvest Festival, a Wolf Hall-hosted feast for every last neighbour and villager for miles around. When Edward left, it was less than a week away and, to make matters worse, Bax then succumbed to a fever, rallying only in time to roast the goose and lamb which, in his absence, Harry and Thomas had probably rather inexpertly slaughtered. Bax’s sickness left Katherine and me to make the dozens of tarts, savoury and sweet: egg and cheese and Good King Henry; pear, plum, apple and bramble. Those were long days and I found I had to work hard in the kitchen to keep up with her. Her efficiency that week was alarming: there was a ferocity to her scrubbing of surfaces and slamming down of trays.

  I understood that she was unhappy and bewildered to have been thrown back on us, coming to Wolf Hall to be Edward’s wife but in a matter of months being abandoned to we Seymours, but I’m not sure that understanding it in principle made it any easier to suffer in practice. Up close, bearing the brunt of it all day long for day after day, I’d worry that whatever I said or did inadvertently only served to infuriate her. For hours on end, she didn’t look at me, and said little, and never with a smile. I was at her mercy, I felt, and was frantic to appease.

  But then, occasionally, just as I was becoming accustomed to it, she’d shrug off her foul mood, literally, physically shrug it off, stopping there in the kitchen to draw down deep and rejuvenating breaths, and then there she was again, as she’d always been. She’d chatter away, or hum endearingly tunelessly, or offer answers to Antony’s absurd questions and, misguidedly but touchingly, try to charm Margie. There she was, sparkle-eyed and impish-smiling, but the reappearances were all too brief and I learned not to trust to them, however much I wished I could.

  Edward had never much been around the house, so his absence wasn’t extraordinary even if the circumstances of it were, and although I was afraid for him and longed to have him safely back, I don’t think I actually missed him. During that long, kitchen-bound week of slamming and sighing, it was Katherine I missed: the mischievous, capricious, irrepressible Katherine who, to my mind, had that summer become my friend. I pitied her the situation in which she found herself but, being fifteen, I probably pitied myself rather more.

  Most of my family were having much more of Katherine’s company, though, than usual: at the end of those busy days of preparation for Harvest Festival, she was sitting in the parlour for notably longer. She took no early nights, didn’t excuse herself before anyone else did. Nothing so carefree. And if her protracted sitting there made me uneasy, even more unsettling was what she was doing with the time.

  On the second evening of Edward’s absence, she’d brought along a piece of linen marked with an elaborate pattern for embroidering and, when Dottie asked what it was, she said it was going to be a nightshirt for Edward. She didn’t even look at Dottie when she said it, as if an answer were barely needed. Of course it was a nightshirt for Edward, was the implication of that resolutely down-turned gaze, because what else would she, a good wife, be doing with her evenings? The truth was that she’d never before sat sewing anything for Edward. To make matters worse, her brusqueness with Dottie had my mother stepping in – ‘Oh, how lovely, Katherine’ – only to have her approval left hanging, unacknowledged.

  Every evening Katherine worked determinedly on that embroidery as if she had something to prove. Wifely was what she was, but, it seemed to me, belligerently so. Never before in three months of marriage had she struck such a pose; before then she’d probably have scorned it. Those uncomfortable evenings of banner-repair had been bad enough with Katherine down on the floor, head bowed, making a spectacle of herself, but this was worse because, I was quite sure, it held an element of provocation: she was daring us to expose the sham of it. I watched in vain for glimpses of her – the real her – beneath that mantle of wife-liness, but she never faltered and the evenings of smirking at Father James’s snores seemed a lifetime ago.

  Only Thomas dared to show his scepticism at her newfound respectability, for which she was furious with him. In passing, he’d exaggeratedly peek over her shoulder and say of the embroidery, ‘Oh, very pretty,’ or, ‘Isn’t Edward in for a treat?’ or, ‘Edward’s going to love that!’ Edward, in a field somewhere, at war: no one could’ve failed to detect the sarcasm nor appreciate how close it was to the bone, but to speak up and condemn it would have been to emphasise it. Ignoring it was safer. So my mother’s frown of disapproval was the closest Thomas came to being reprimanded. As for Katherine, she didn’t rise to it. In fact, she did the opposite: lowering herself over that embroidery, protective, and, as Thomas issued his ungenerous snipes, huffing sighs in which the venom was all too audible.

  Her telling Dottie that the sewing was for Edward was the only time, to my knowledge, that she mentioned my absent brother in company during that difficult first week. Whenever we prayed for him, she did so alongside us, of course she did, but never contributed to any speculation as to his whereabouts nor joined in with the frequent expressions of concern for his comfort and safety. And it wasn’t merely that she said nothing on those occasions; she made sure to meet no one’s eye, and the wilfulness to her lack of participation was such that she might have had her hands clamped over her ears.

  It was distressing, that first week of Edward’s absence, to see her struggling, when a mere fortnight beforehand she’d been tripping around Wolf Hall with the lightest of steps and a leading smile. Wary and withdrawn, she was holding herself at a distance from everyone, adrift when surely she most needed us. And where did that leave me? Me, who’d been only too glad, until then, to throw my lot in with her. Well, like it or not, I was still a Seymour so, if anyone stood a chance of breaching the gap between my sister-in-law and everyone else at Wolf Hall, then it was me. But she didn’t look to me, not once, and I was cowed by all that slamming and sighing; I was scared of saying something wrong and making everything worse. So my reticence joined hers and the silence between us became twice as deep.

  But I hated to be failing her. Four or five difficult days after Edward had ridden away, we were together in the kitchen, making pastry, neither of us having spoken much except to complain about the inevitable difficulties of the task, when suddenly she ventured, ‘D’you think he’s all right?’

  Well, if I were to know who ‘he’ was, then Edward would have had to be uppermost in my thoughts, and, actually, he was. The question being a test, though, because that was how it felt, put me on my guard, which might explain why I couldn’t bring myself to answer. I should have just said, ‘I don’t know and I hope so,’ which was what I was thinking and, although not much of a response, was probably all she expected. Then we could have wondered together at his welfare, which was, I suspect, all she wanted. We could have had a conversation about him, however tentative, however circumspect. But I wasn’t quick enough and – it pains me to this day to remember – she was left looking into my pale eyes and seeing she’d get no help there. Before I knew it, she’d looked back down at her pastry, sparing us both, and the mom
ent was gone, and irretrievable.

  Anxious to do better, I held myself at the ready for another opportunity, which came the following morning, when we were back in the kitchen filling those pastry cases. Outside, a gust of wind caught an unattended bucket, dashing it across the cobbles. Startled, we exchanged a glance then a grimace in condemnation of the weather and whoever had been so careless as to leave an empty bucket to clatter around. Then, resuming the task in hand, nestling a spoonful of spiced apple into a pastry case, Katherine whispered to me, ‘D’you think he’s warm enough?’ Her whispering gave it a sense of daring; not confrontational, but conspiratorial. She was inviting me to share her concern and this time I was quick: ‘Don’t know; hope so.’ She said nothing back, but I had the clear sense that it had sufficed. His absence had been acknowledged between us, which, it seemed, was the most at the time that she could manage.

  3

  If I thought the tension was easing, though, what then happened between us on the eve of Harvest Festival showed me otherwise. My mother sent me into the garden, that evening, on one of the worst but most necessary of tasks: the clearing up of any dogs’ mess. With so many guests coming, the job had to be thoroughly done, which meant, of course, that it was down to me. My mother handed me the bucket, but Katherine picked up the trowel. My sister-in-law would rather shovel dogs’ mess, it seemed, than be left in her own company.