As we walked the paths with our gazes necessarily downwards, I summoned up the courage to try to convey that I appreciated how hard a week she’d had but, mumbling something about being sure that Edward would be home soon, I instantly regretted it, because no one could be sure, which was precisely the problem. It wasn’t that, though, to which she took exception.
‘Oh, he’s be glad to be away.’ It was a knife blade of a response, stopping me dead as she stomped on ahead. Whirling around on the path, she lobbed back, ‘He won’t want to come home,’ and her eyes were hard, her throat sounding tight, closing like a fist.
There I stood, suspended, unable to make sense of it. She was upset, I told myself; this was coming from the strain of their separation. Instinct had me put down the bucket and start towards her, but she drew back into a fold of arms, a fierce hug of her own, and spoke fast to get it said before I could reach her, ‘He doesn’t love me, Jane, he says he does, but he doesn’t,’ and in it sounded clear warning that I shouldn’t contradict her. Swiping furiously at a few tears, she stared me down. My heart was bashing at my breastbone, but I’d have to contradict her, because what she’d said was rubbish, madness.
‘Katherine’ – unfortunately it came out like a whine – ‘he does.’
‘And how would you know?’
For a heartbeat or two, I fully expected her to take back the viciousness with which it’d been said, to apologise for it and explain it away: Oh, I’m sorry, Janey-jay, it’s just that I’m so . . . But no; just that burning stare.
‘Katherine’ – it felt ridiculous to be having to spell it out – ‘he had to go—’
‘Jane,’ she countered, as if I were stupid not to know it, ‘he was glad to go,’ and stalked off back to the house.
It was as much as I could do to stand my ground there beside that stinking bucket, spared only the further humiliation of running after her. She was upset, I reminded myself again and again, but, still, I was cut to the core by that tone of hers. And to blame Edward for having gone! When he’d had no choice and was in some French field somewhere. I was struggling to feel sympathetic; she was truly testing my patience.
When eventually I did brave going back indoors, I wasn’t alone again in her company for the rest of that day, so nothing more on the subject was said, which was just as well because by the following day it seemed to be well and truly behind us. So said her smiles and her verve. All her surliness had disappeared; she was a hive of activity that morning, getting Hall prepared, and had all of us enthused and organised, busy fetching table linen and bowls and jugs, even Elizabeth, whom she made efforts to win over by deference (‘Here, or here, d’you think, Elizabeth?’).
Later, when the musicians arrived – four of them – it was Katherine who welcomed them and saw to their refreshments, allowing my mother to stay longer in the kitchen with Bax. Then Harry’s Barbara appeared and Katherine was off to greet her, and the pair stayed in each other’s company for the rest of the afternoon. Side by side on a bench, surveying the various goings-on, they had an illuminated quality, those two who were Seymour-chosen. Both of them had their arms folded but Katherine’s were lower slung, more relaxed, because Wolf Hall was already her territory, she was already a Seymour.
The previous day had been a bad day, I decided, that was all. A spectacularly bad day, and she’d said her worst.
After dinner, there was a lot of dancing, even for me: I was in a celebratory mood and danced with anyone who asked me, people I didn’t even know. As for Katherine, she snatched Will Dormer’s cap and plonked it on top of her own hood, refusing to relinquish it until he’d pledged a whole series of dances to her.
‘Well, just look at Katherine,’ Thomas muttered, sceptically, ‘living a little.’
He was being unfair, I felt. She’d had a bad week, but, given the circumstances, wasn’t that understandable? Thomas didn’t know her as I knew her, I felt; he didn’t know the best of her. She lived a lot, I wanted to tell him, but just not brashly, as he did. But I said nothing, because he was unreachable, deep in a sulk, his own plans to live a little having been quashed by my mother. In a rare wielding of authority over him, my mother had forbidden him to do as he usually did at the end of Harvest Festival: play football with the local lads, kicking and throwing the ball from village to village, the arrival at each inn being the scoring of a goal. She said that people living along the route found it an endurance; some had been pushed and shoved in previous years, and vegetable patches had been trampled.
‘That is not true!’ Thomas had protested, appealing, ‘Pa?’
My father, though, had backed my mother, albeit with a resigned shrug of his eyebrows.
Thomas was incredulous: ‘But you always let me!’
‘But this year is different,’ pronounced my mother, and then we’d all understood, or kind of understood: Edward wasn’t here to salvage our good name, should it need salvaging; his being gone left us vulnerable.
At the end of the evening, my father did the farewells from the courtyard, and Harry rode off to escort Barbara home. Elizabeth made herself scarce while my mother ushered the children upstairs to bed. Lil and Moll immersed themselves in the scullery, and Katherine and I cleared tables in Hall, Thomas following us around to dismantle the trestles. When I’d yawned one time too many, Katherine told me to go to bed. ‘Really,’ she said, kindly, ‘Just go. You’re exhausted.’ And with a glance at Thomas, she reassured me, ‘We ‘re fine here. You’re not needed.’
Which was when it struck me: all day long she’d been trying to prove exactly that. You ‘re not needed. Each and every cosy-up on the bench towards Barbara had put distance between us. Not that she hadn’t made sure to welcome me whenever I’d ventured over – quite the contrary, she’d made a show of it, with a verbal flourish – ‘Janey-jay!’ – to accompany the physical one, the hand on my arm to settle me beside her – but only now did I understand why, all along, it’d had me feeling so uneasy. It was as if a show had had to be made, as if I were someone to whom she felt she should be polite. As if I were just anyone. With every solicitation of Elizabeth’s opinion, and every coy wave in Will Dormer’s direction, Katherine had been putting me in my place, as she saw it, hoping to show that I was no more to her than anyone else.
And there at the foot of the stairs, I realised why. The previous day in the garden she had, in her opinion, revealed too much of herself. But had I asked her to? Had I asked her to stand there yelling at me that my brother didn’t love her? Not that I’d minded, I reminded myself, because anything my sister-in-law wanted to tell me, I was of course more than ready to hear. Because we were like sisters. Better than sisters. Climbing the stairs, I had to fight the urge to go back down there into Hall and say so, but I knew that if I did, she’d deny me. She’d laugh me off, probably with a rallying glance at Thomas: What on earth’s the matter with her?
Getting into bed, I recalled how Antony, when he was small, used to cover his eyes when he wanted to make himself or someone else invisible. That was what Katherine had been doing all day long, only I didn’t know which of us was supposed to disappear, nor why.
Katherine being difficult didn’t diminish my feeling responsible for her; if anything, it only intensified it. Disappointed in her as I was when I bedded down that night, I was at least as impatient with myself because, I felt, I should know how to make the situation more bearable for her: me, her better-than-sister. Me, the ever-practical one. Me, alone, surely, of all of us in the household. Mere hours later came help, though, and from a most unlikely source.
In the morning, Katherine and I were in the scullery tackling the dishes that still needed washing (Marcus had a burn on his hand which had to be kept dry, Lil and Moll were embarking on the laundering of the tablecloths) when from the courtyard outside came Antony’s bell-like voice. ‘Daddy,’ he enquired, pleasantly, as they clomped together across the cobbles, ‘will Edward be killing people yet?’
My hope was that Katherine had somehow missed
it, difficult though that would’ve been to do. Myself, I was careful to give no indication of having heard, despite being all ears. I was desperate to hear that Edward would see nothing of any battles, and desperate for that to be the truth. Trapped in my throat was a warning cry for my father: Be careful what you say because we’re here, just the other side of the wall.
‘Well, you know . . .’ My father pitched high, as if musing and appreciative of Antony for bringing it to his attention when, in fact, I knew, he was playing for time, thinking how best to answer. ‘If I remember correctly,’ he began, ‘it isn’t often really like that.’
Beside me, Katherine was listening, easing up on the tray she was scrubbing, a handful of river sand sloughing from her cloth into the scummy water. I swear I felt her heartbeats along with my own and if throwing myself in front of her could have shielded her from whatever she was going to hear, I would have done it.
My father said, ‘There really isn’t very much of that, if my own experience is anything to go by.’
Scrubbing at the pot in my tub, I willed his each and every word to be the right one: no mention – please – of wounds, of terror. ‘If Edward’s experience is anything like mine—’
‘Wait—’ from Antony, possibly a bootlace come undone.
No – my heart contracting – keep going, go away.
‘—there’s an awful lot of riding around and’ – my father half-laughed – ‘an awful lot of moaning about food, by which I mean the lack of it. And, well, you know,’ as if Antony did indeed know and they were merely sharing reminiscences, ‘we were travelling with the entire Royal Chapel choir and six hundred archers, so there was a lot of parading.’ He checked: ‘Done?’
Go, please go, while Antony was still happy with talk of archers and choristers.
Antony’s small sound of assent was followed by the striking of soles against cobbles; they were on their way again.
‘And then, when we’d taken Thérouanne and were supposed to be resting up at Lille, we had a joust, but indoors, would you believe, in some grand house, the horses wearing felt shoes so as not to damage the black marble floor . . .’
And then they were too far across the courtyard for us to hear more, Antony spirited away on an anecdote.
Clutching the rim of my tub, I let my blood subside. Had my father known we were on the other side of the wall? He’d behaved as if he had, and I was full of gratitude. Not that Katherine would’ve known; I couldn’t have her see that there’d ever been the slightest doubt in my mind that my father would have answered as he did. No question, for me, that Edward could ever be doing anything other than parading around to the accompaniment of the Royal Chapel choir. In my relief, I did even allow myself a momentary vision of Edward pristine on a soft-shoed steed. Katherine was similarly determined, it seemed, to give nothing away of her own relief, in that we didn’t even exchange a glance.
Later that day, though, when she and I were setting tables in Hall and my father came through on his way to change for dinner, she dropped a handful of knives back onto her tray and sped into his path.
‘Mr Seymour.’ Startled, he nevertheless looked amused. Katherine, on the contrary, stood tall, shoulders squared, and spoke fast, seemingly wary of asking too much of him. ‘I overheard you and Antony earlier. Is it true, what you said?’
Never before, to my knowledge, had Katherine directly addressed my father. No one much did. She’d evidently been at the ready, though, all morning. And polite though the question was, it was undeniably a challenge. My father looked keen to oblige her – that shine to his eyes – but baffled.
‘You said,’ she reminded him, ’that it’s a lot of parading about.’
‘Oh!’ – contrite to have forgotten – ‘but, well, yes, of course that’s true,’ and then perhaps a little surprised that she’d doubted him.
She backed down, ‘Yes, sorry,’ and then the pair of them were strolling the length of Hall side by side.
Careful to appear absorbed in my table-laying, my attention trailed them both.
‘I should worry less,’ Katherine said, anguished, ’shouldn’t I.’
My father shot her a quizzical glance. ‘Should you?’
How intriguing, to hear her talking so easily and openly to him; easier, perhaps, than I ever did. He didn’t seem to find it strange, but, then, that was my father: taking people as he found them, holding them in his dark-shining eyes.
‘I mean,’ Katherine said, ’that I’m making a fuss.’
A fuss? My heart leapt, because was that what it was? The slamming around the kitchen, the frowning every evening over that embroidery, the insistence that Edward was glad to be away from her: was that all it was? Because ‘a fuss’, I could handle.
‘I doubt Mrs Seymour made a fuss when you went . . .’ But she waved the words away, reluctant either for his sake or her own to voice them. To battle.
Odd, too, for me to hear her compare herself and Edward to my parents. I tended to think of her as just a girl, like me, but here came a reminder that she was also Mrs Seymour Junior. Perhaps, if I half-closed my eyes and peered to one side of her, I felt, I’d be able to summon both versions at once.
My father dipped his head to hide a smile. ‘Well, I don’t know if she did or she didn’t,’ and he bounced it to me. ‘Jane?’
I was picking up a hand-washing bowl and the water lunged for the rim; I’d been discovered eavesdropping. But how could I not have overheard? There were only the three of us in the room. I didn’t know the answer, though; I’d been a toddler when he’d fought in France. Putting the bowl down, all I could do was shrug.
They were at the door and my father was about to go up to his room, but he stopped and turned to Katherine, serious, or as serious as he ever was. ‘I think it’s probably harder for you,’ he said.
She was hanging on his every word. As I was too, I suppose.
‘You’re at the beginning of your married life. Margery would probably tell you she was too busy with the children when I was away, to be able to worry much about me.’
‘The children.’ That’d been me; I’d been one of them, keeping my mother’s attention from her husband. To hear his gentle acceptance of it, I didn’t quite know how I felt. Nor, actually, to hear him talk of children to his daughter-in-law, who didn’t yet have her own – was that wise? But then, my father never said a wrong word to anyone; he might not say much, but he always knew exactly what to say.
Katherine took it, but sighed, heavily, doubtful. ‘You’re very kind.’
He dismissed that. ‘You’re less sure of yourselves at the beginning, that’s all,’ and then he was gone, into the oriel and onto the stairs.
‘Less sure of yourselves’: something of which he, himself, had sounded impressively sure; he’d made it sound entirely natural that my sister-in-law would doubt my brother’s love for her. And he’d know, I told myself, with his quarter-of-a-century’s experience of marriage, surely he’d know. And better still, she’d believed him. Oh, my dear, sweet father. I looked down to hide a smile, pleased and relieved that perhaps I wasn’t alone after all.
4
A pity there was no such rapport between mother- and daughter-in-law. Nothing was wrong between them, but nothing was quite right either, and what happened during the following week, although no one’s fault, didn’t help matters.
Hard on the heels of Harvest Festival came Michaelmas, another goose for the chop and more baking for us to do, but at this very busy time Katherine took to her bed for several days with a headache. Shut-eyed and stirring only to throw up into a bowl, she once uttered a weary, resigned explanation of a kind: ‘I get this sometimes.’ Not before then, she hadn’t. This was new for us; this was something about her that we hadn’t known.
My mother ushered me along on her frequent visits to Katherine’s room, where I had to watch her bustling around the bed, frowning with concern as she dabbed her daughter-in-law’s temples with rosewater. The rasping of her voluminous gown in t
he deep hush and the trumpeting of floorboards at her every step had me squirm; I’d be willing her to leave, and I bet Katherine felt the same. When eventually my wish was granted, I’d stay behind to wash the bowl, refresh the damp cloth draped over Katherine’s forehead, and hold up a cup of ale from which she’d take the odd sip. Occasionally, she’d open her eyes and look glassily in my direction.
Once, leaving the room, my mother indicated for me to follow her and, out on the staircase, whispered: ‘Jane is there anything I should know?’ I was slow to catch on but the realisation, when it came, threw me: she was asking me if Katherine was pregnant. And it hadn’t even crossed my mind. If Katherine was indeed pregnant, she’d been keeping it not just from my mother, but from me. Would she keep it from me? We spent – had spent – a lot of time talking but, admittedly, never about anything much. And a pregnancy would be really something. Apparently my mother felt it was something Katherine would confide in me, but I was less sure of that and I didn’t appreciate my mother’s scrutiny.
Standing in that irritatingly understanding gaze of my mother’s, I could tell what she was thinking: that Katherine had some hold over me, but now here came my mother to the rescue. And how I resented it. She knew nothing, I felt, of Katherine and me. I myself barely did any more, so my mother certainly didn’t. Her sympathetic gaze was saying that if I owned up, if I remembered to whom I owed allegiance, forgiveness would be mine. Well, frankly, she could keep it. She smelled of cloves and suddenly, overwhelmingly, I needed to be rid of her, and it wouldn’t have taken much to push her down the stairs.
Turning hastily back to the door, I shrugged her off, ‘I don’t think so,’ refusing even to give any indication that I’d grasped what it was that she’d been asking.
Katherine emerged from her sickbed peculiarly resolved to make a subtlety for Michaelmas eve. When she announced the intention at the dinner table, a certain briskness to her manner implied that we Seymours had been neglectful in having no such plans of our own and thus it fell to her, belatedly, to pick up the slack. This was odd, because if we were indeed remiss in our failure to make sugar sculptures, then we’d been so for the four months during which she’d been living with us and she’d never previously found fit to mention it.
The May Bride Page 11