The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  We didn’t know it then but we’d soon learn that she’d declined to take her place on the throne that the king had had built for her in that hall, opposite his own. She’d refused to address the court. Instead, she’d crossed the room to her husband to ask him for justice. She’d knelt and he’d tried to raise her, but she’d shaken him off. She’d never done him wrong, she said. She’d always done right by him, and there was no need for this trial because he was the only one to know the truth of their wedding night and he knew it very well. There he stood, told, and when she requested permission to take her case to Rome, what could he do but grant it?

  Getting herself to her feet, she’d glanced around for Griffin – ‘Come, Griffin’ – and then, with the lightest touch to her helper’s cheek as if mindful of fever, said, ‘Let’s leave them to it.’ She’d walked away, leaving the court to weeks of witnesses wrangling over the state of long-ago royal bed linen – did they, didn’t they? – before Cardinal Campeggio called for an Italian-sized summer break, from which he returned only to refer the case to Rome. The king was stumped and the world well and truly righted.

  Or so everyone thought, but, incredibly, Anne Boleyn continued to make herself queen. A confidence trick: there she was, one day, as Lady Anne, well on her way with a bogus coat of arms and liveried servants, and every evening, it was she, now, who presided over the royal entertainments. The real queen kept to her rooms. Sometimes from a staircase window I’d see Anne Boleyn struggling across a courtyard in layers of cloth of gold and ermine, encrusted with jewellery so bulky that it could only have been king-gifted. For all the high-held head, she was scrawny in her too-long sleeves; she was getting on in years. She could dress herself up as queen as much as she liked and sit herself in the queen’s chair but she couldn’t be queen so long as the real one was still living in the queen’s apartment. Nevertheless, dissenters were disappearing from the king’s household, either going quietly – granted leave – or otherwise. When the queen’s favourite bishop narrowly survived a poisoning, his cook was boiled alive for the offence on the order of the king, but no one believed that poor man was to blame. We ladies began locking and bolting every last door at night.

  And still Edward left me there. He’d have made the calculation that to remove me would be to draw attention to my having been there so long. Safer to lose me, to leave me lost. After all, it wasn’t that I was so much to lose.

  4

  When the end finally came, it couldn’t have been more different from how anyone had imagined. By mid-morning, that July day at Windsor, the queen’s advisors were much in evidence in her rooms and, even by their standards, looking worried. Something was up; something new. The queen sat taller than usual to hear from them, braced; and we maids and ladies sat tight, waiting to be informed but careful to give the appearance to the contrary. Something of it percolated down, reached me as a whisper from a fellow maid: the king and his entire household had gone, moved on, disappeared, leaving no word for the queen.

  Well, I knew not to believe it. It would have been physically impossible for the king’s vast household, hundreds of men with all their various effects, to have sneaked from the very same building in which we’d been sitting sewing, and particularly on a day so fine that our windows were wide open. There they were, those windows, across the room from me, framing a sky of high-rolling cloud; if I were to move nearer, they’d offer up the queen’s private rose garden. That was all, though, admittedly: the garden was the view from our room in its entirety; no courtyards, gatehouses, landing stages or thoroughfares.

  But even if it were possible – at a push, a considerable push, with considerable preparation – the king would never have done it; he’d never have just left her. Would he? After everything? After all those hearings and petitions and enquiries? None of which, in his view, had achieved anything. Was this, then, how he’d do it?

  I stood up, and all eyes in the room came with me: me, standing in the presence of the sitting queen. Barely standing, though: shaking. The queen, concerned, halted her consultation with Lord Mountjoy to say my name, or what passed for my name whenever she, unable quite to sound a ‘J’ tried to say it. Unbearable though it was to be standing there under all that baffled scrutiny, it’d be worse not to know what was happening outside our room. I glanced around them in disbelief: sitting ducks, lame ducks, did they really not want to know the truth of what was being done to us?

  I fled the room – let them think I was sick – for the courtyard, and there at the foot of the staircase it stared back at me: doors oak-dark and windows brilliant with cloud-glaze. No sign or sound of life except the squabbling of house martins in a nest somewhere above me. More than mere absence, the desertion of that courtyard was something accomplished, and its accomplishment was being flourished for me: See?

  Done.

  Gone.

  The closed doors and windows were lips tightened and eyes widened in a parody of denial: barefaced, a denial that anyone had ever been here or would ever return. I crossed the courtyard to Hall, only to find the door locked; I hadn’t even known that a Hall door could be locked; Hall was for anyone and everyone, day and night, whenever the king or queen was in residence.

  So, this was how he’d done it: the king was gone, and the queen – this Hall-locking made clear – was no longer the queen. Chapel, too, was barred, I discovered. How thoroughgoing, then, this locking-up, how pitiless. The queen could worship in her own private closet, but what of the rest of us? As for our more basic, immediate needs, standing there in that fresh air, I didn’t have to investigate the kitchens to know that nothing that morning was being cooked. The queen’s private kitchen would have to cater for us, for all of us in her household, down to the stable lads, although it was hard to imagine how supplies would stretch and two cooks would cope.

  Which was it, I wondered, as I turned back to those walls of windows like shields: were we locked in, or out?

  At the gatehouse, I surprised a solitary porter and a dozy dog, which didn’t growl so much as clear its throat.

  ‘This is a lady,’ the porter reprimanded the dog; then, to me, no less sharply, ‘Where did you come from?’

  The queen’s rooms, I told him.

  ‘No,’ he shook his head, ’they’ve all gone. Early this morning. Just the cleaners left behind.’

  I hadn’t the heart to break it to him that only he and his dog stood between the queen of England and the big bad world.

  Having received a month’s notice, the queen began planning a move to a house in Hertfordshire from where she’d concern herself in particular with the plight of her disinherited daughter. She’d have to reduce her household and, at last, word arrived from Edward, as I knew it would, for me to pack up and be ready for him. There was no choice: there was nowhere else for me to go. I’d been away for seven years only to be back where I’d started. When Edward and Thomas came for me, Edward said that he was getting married to Anne Stanhope – one of Anne Boleyn’s ladies – and I’d live with them at Elvetham, which Harry and Barbara had vacated in favour of Wolf Hall. I said nothing but, when he rode ahead, I asked Thomas, ‘Anne Stanhope?’ Thomas whispered back, ‘Says jump, and he jumps.’ It amused him, faintly, fleetingly, to have said it, but then he looked away because he knew what I’d been asking, what I couldn’t bring myself ask, and either he couldn’t or wouldn’t answer.

  What happened to Katherine?

  Because Edward already had a wife, and a wife only stops being a wife if she becomes, instead, a bride of Christ, or if she dies.

  Thomas, what’s happened to Katherine?

  If I’d asked, I’d have had to hear the answer. My throat throbbed with the unvoiced question, and Thomas, awkward, spurred his horse onwards to join his brother.

  Edward was carver at the feast to celebrate the coronation of the new so-called queen and a month later was once again at a top table, but this time at his wedding. Then I lived with him and ‘Stan’ for two years: two years during which came th
eir first two babies to keep me busy. There I was, the spinster sister, and so it had ended for me, as I’d long suspected it would.

  5

  How, then, did it come to this? How, two years later, could it possibly have come to this? Me, turning queen: me, a May bride, a May queen. I know what people see, or think they see: a Seymour-sister, cleverly Edward-manoeuvred into place. Clever Edward, to realise what it was that he had, shut away at home. Because look at me: no ambition nor zeal, no attraction for other men nor any allegiances bar a muted, long-standing loyalty to the first, recently deceased queen, which now stands in my favour. No interest in any future beyond that of the king’s (and just look at these childbearing hips), nor any past of my own.

  For anyone remembering anything of the Seymour scandal – if they ever knew much, and are able, a decade later, to recall it – it was a long time ago and far away, and anyway it concerned the old man, whom no one ever sees, and a girl who seems no longer to exist. And in any case, what would the dull Seymour-sister have had to do with it? Just fifteen when the brother married and seventeen when the marriage ended. Everyone thinks I’d have known nothing of what happened and probably only ever knew that long-ago May bride from a distance.

  I might be dull but I’m discreet, too, and diligent and dependable – everything that the pretend-queen never was – which makes me perfect, makes me the sensible choice: it makes perfect sense to be making me queen. I can’t be bettered. I’d say Edward can’t believe his luck, but Edward doesn’t believe in luck.

  What he believes in is hard work, but this was no work of his, he had nothing to do with this. It’s something else he never saw coming. I don’t do this to oblige Edward; I do it to honour the old queen. It’s for her that I’ll usurp her usurper so utterly that no trace remains of that woman. If I didn’t do right in the past, if I didn’t know how to do right, I’m certainly going to do it now.

  And cannon-fire, two miles downriver on this glorious May morning, will get me started. One brutal blast and the queen is dead, long live the queen. Will she, herself, hear anything of the split of her own nape under the sword blade? Not that I pity her, but still: the cracking in two of the bony stem of her, the pouring of her blood to the ground. Perhaps I should have been brave enough to ask the king: ‘Couldn’t she just. . . ?’ Perhaps she could have just gone away. Because surely a nunnery would have done.

  I’m listening hard for that cannon-blast because I can’t have it springing on me when I’m half-stripped and splashing at the washbowl, or spooning preserve onto a piece of bread. Imagine failing to distinguish, quite, between the execution and the growl of a lady-in-waiting’s stomach. And I can’t ask, can I: can’t look around those in-waiting eyes and ask, ‘Was that. . . ?’

  I envy those nearer the Tower, inside the city walls: the explosion barging in on their haggling and their water-lugging, their lute-tuning and floor-brushing. It’ll have them glancing skywards even though they’ll know that’s not where the noise came from, but leave them in no doubt that the deed is done.

  I want to be alone when it gets to me; if anyone were here with me, I wouldn’t know where to look. I’m keeping to my bed in shutter-darkness. The ladies – my ladies – are across the stairwell in the day room and they think I’m dozing, but the truth is I’m wide awake and lain wide open to what’s coming: on top of the bedclothes to take the boom inside my bones and have my body buckle. What I’ve told the ladies is that I’m ill but not so ill as to need a physician. Just some sleep, I said, just for a little longer. Go away, all of you. They didn’t like it, of course, because, as queen-in-waiting, I should never be alone, even asleep. My snub-nosed sister-in-law came swishing into the room, tried to cajole me with a falsely cheerful ‘This is silly,’ but I raised myself on the pillows and said – the first time I’ve ever said it – ‘Do I have to order you?’

  Will I hear the cannons? Will that blast really flash two miles along the river to rattle all the little lead teeth of my window and kick its way through the shutters and bed-hangings? If I don’t hear them, I’ll have to be told; some man of the king’s will stalk into this house with the news like a cat with a kill.

  As soon as those cannons have sounded, I have a job to do: be queen as if the last one never existed. Give me a job to do and I’ll do it, and I’m nothing if not thorough. And in this case it’ll be my pleasure. Give me time and no one will so much as remember the name Anne Boleyn. Just give me enough time.

  Or I could make a run for it. This – now, here – is my chance to escape, the last ever time in my life that I’ll be alone. I should just do it, shouldn’t I: dash down the stairs to the river, the landing stage. Plain Jane, washerwoman-hefty, late twenties but with the tread of a woman twenty years heavier, so ordinary that no one would spare me a glance.

  But where would I go? To Katherine, is what I’ve found myself thinking. Well, there’s a thought. What would she make of this? She’d never have imagined it for me: this, last of all, and for me, last of all the girls in England, if she ever imagined anything for me, which she almost certainly didn’t. If I could go to Katherine, we could disappear together. She’s been so good at disappearing. She could show me how it’s done.

  I’ve been careful not often to think of her in the decade since she went, and I’ve had help with that, no Seymour ever again mentioning her in my hearing. Not only did she have to be gone but, like the pretend-queen kneeling now for the swordsman, she was never even to have been. When she left Wolf Hall, the Seymours turned their backs on her and they’ve kept up that turning, the relentless grind of which has made her nothing beneath it.

  6

  If mine was no happy ending when I was finally came away from Queen Catherine’s household, the king’s was much worse. At least there was that. The pretend-queen’s household was releasing my new sister-in-law from duties for two weeks of every four and from the beginning she was coming home full of the decline of that new royal so-called marriage. Then, last year, she came with news that almost rendered her speechless: so desperate was the king for a break that he’d be travelling wife-free for the summer and Wolf Hall was on his itinerary. Edward’s many years of hard work were to pay off; the Seymours were to be rehabilitated. We were, at last, officially beyond the scandal.

  To Wolf Hall, then, for me, after almost a decade’s absence, because we Seymours were to be reassembled in the king’s gaze as one big, happy family. During my two years in Edward’s household, I’d had news of the family – my parents’ health, Harry and Barbara’s five children, Elizabeth’s four, Dottie’s two – which I’d been glad to hear, but still I’d found every reason to remain at Elvetham and no one, I noted, had ever objected. Now, though, I was being expected to swallow bad blood and return to a Wolf Hall clean-swept of ghosts. Moreover, I’d have to get to my knees for a king who’d I’d witnessed, at length, ridding himself of his queen.

  Come the day of departure, I feigned fever, although it stuck in my throat to do Edward the favour, to hand him the excuse to keep me hidden, the dowdy spinster sister who was complicit in the misdemeanours of his first wife. I failed to reckon on Stan, though, who always gets what she wants and for this biggest of occasions she definitely wanted a united front. She sat pertly on the edge of my bed to pledge herself to my rescue: ‘I’ll get you there, missy, one way or another. I nursed my poor old mother to her dying day and there’s nothing I don’t know about levering a big prone lump into her finest clothes.’ And I didn’t doubt she’d do it: there she was, eyeing my bedcovers and thinking of hoists.

  If only to deny her the opportunity to demonstrate those well-honed hoist-wielding capabilities, I did get up – careful, though, to dress then in my oldest, plainest clothes, to look like the nursemaid that, in her household, I practically was. And that was how I came to arrive, a couple of days later, at Wolf Hall’s gatehouse, to be put to shame by servants spruce in royal livery. Those same servants were chaotic, though, in their unloading of a delivery of dozens of boxes of
oranges, which let me give Stan the slip, and I went to the garden to let my stomach settle and my head clear after those two long days on the road.

  The shade of the arbour was bee-drone drowsy and I must have closed my eyes because next I knew, I was being nosed by a dog, and behind the dog was someone dressed in velvet that was closer in kind to liquid or flame and linen so fine that I’d only ever seen the like in the queen’s lap, like a fall of spider-silk. Well, I knew better than to raise my eyes any further. To one side of that velvet and linen, though, was Edward, at whom of course it was permissible to look, and I saw it cross his mind to have a stab at denying me, disowning me, pretending I didn’t exist: Moving swiftly on, Your Highness . . .

  The king, though, was already exclaiming.

  ‘My sister Jane,’ Edward announced, hurriedly dutiful, ‘just arrived.’ By the looks of it.

  I was scrambling to my feet so that I could drop down, but the king tired of it before I’d properly begun and stopped me, catching me absently but deftly by the elbow. I kept my eyes down; his shoes were pearl-fastened, fur-lined.

  ‘Jane.’

  It was no more than a repetition but, because he’d spoken my name, I had to look up at him. And had I not been off guard and half-asleep, I’d have managed to hide my shock, but he saw me see him for what he was. Which was nothing, really. All gone, the self-belief that had once made him who he was. He could barely look me in the eye: he, the king, could barely look me, Jane Seymour, in the eye. What I saw was a man who’d made a monumental mistake and knew it, a mistake for which so many people had died, and all for the sake of a woman. What he saw, though, when he looked at me, was that there’s nothing I don’t know about men who’ve made mistakes over a woman. There’s nothing I don’t know about shame. There was nothing he needed to hide from me.