The Sixth Wife

by Suzannah Dunn

  She had a point. Her brother had had romantic unhappiness in a spectacular fashion. The marriage that his mother had so carefully set up for him had gone bad; or, more accurately, had probably never been any good. Years into it, he discovered that his wife, Annie, had been having an affair. Wait: does that word – affair – do it justice? Put it this way: there was someone Annie loved, and that someone wasn’t Will. Someone who’d got there first, or at least before the marriage ever really got started. Will had been busy, in those years of his marriage, being a Parr, being the Parr, the heir; as Useful In All He Did as his sister was. In his view, he was doing the right thing. The problem was that he was in all the right places, and home wasn’t one of them. Two small children later, Annie upped and left.

  Suddenly nothing was as Will had believed. His loving wife wasn’t loving and wasn’t his. His children weren’t his: that was what he chose to believe. There’d be no Parr heir for whom all his hard work would pay off. And then there was the shame: never in short supply at court. Kate told me that Will shook, he babbled, his hands were freezing and his forehead burned. That was what she knew. What she didn’t know to start with was that he requested an audience with Henry to remind him of the official penalty for an adulterous aristocratic wife. To plead for it. When Henry broke the news to Kate, he said, ‘It is the penalty. Officially. That’s what it is.’ That was Henry all over: official when it suited him.

  ‘But…’ said Kate. Where should she start? But we’re civilised, we’ve moved on. But there was Henry raising those hands of his as if to say, My hands are tied.

  Kate knew what to do, of course. She knew not to argue with Henry. I’d never have been able to do that, but that’s why it was she who was his wife. She could do one better, too: she could praise him and sound as if she meant it. You’re the most forward-thinking ruler that has ever been, and perhaps above all you’re a man of conscience. Oh, and there’s the small matter of you being a man who understands women – how many of those are there? – so you know how we can be, funny creatures that we are. Something like that. It would have stuck in my throat but she was good, was Kate, she kept focused. In this case, on saving a woman’s life.

  Send her to me, was what she requested of Henry. For safekeeping. For now. Will’s sick, she told him, but he’ll get better…but not if he’s responsible for his wife’s death.

  That’s how she turned it around.

  Don’t – please – condemn him to that, she said. Send Annie to me.

  Ah, yes, Kate and her strays: Henry would have liked that. He liked to have a compassionate wife. In his opinion, women should be compassionate. And he should, of course, have the best, the most compassionate woman.

  So, it was Kate’s doing, and she seemed to have done it easily: the immediate saving of one life, the far-sighted saving of the children’s future so they didn’t have to grow up motherless and the saving of her brother’s sanity. I don’t know that I’d have been bothered about the latter. For a man who was pursuing the axe for the woman whom he’d married? Or indeed any woman, any person. But then I don’t have a brother. I was – am - an only child. Out on a limb, from the beginning. Which is how I like it. I’m fond of Charles’s earlier families – his daughters, their children – but glad not to be tied to them. Now that Charles is gone, my boys are the only family I have. Keeps it simple, I suppose, albeit fiercely so. Kate was like a sister to her many stepchildren. I was no more than a girl when my boys were born, but there has never been anything merely sisterly in what I feel towards them.

  Kate pleaded well for her brother, and did it so that he didn’t have to know, so that he could get on with recovering. Eventually we did have with us once again a good-natured, if emotionally bruised, Will: calming down and slowly turning back into an eligible bachelor.

  In the meantime, though, Kate had wanted me over at her house. She wanted help with her reluctant house guest. Entertainment for her, or at least distraction. Although Kate didn’t say as much, I knew her own ladies weren’t up to it, being an unworldly bunch. No outsiders could do it because although everyone knew where Annie was, she had to be seen to have disappeared. No one else could visit. I wasn’t included in that, never am; I do what I want. I didn’t, though, want to do this. I’d never known Annie; we’d moved in different circles. So, it was a succession of strange afternoons and evenings that I spent at Kate’s, sometimes playing cards or more often doing nothing at all. Annie clearly wasn’t in the mood for fun and games, or indeed for anything. Kate and I exhausted ourselves coming up with chatter while avoiding mentioning anyone’s name or anything that was happening to anyone, be it trouble or triumph, because we simply didn’t know what might be sensitive for Annie. She probably didn’t give a damn what we said. She’d sit well back in her chair, arms folded hard and high, making the barest of necessary responses. It was impossible for me to know what she was usually like, even how she’d usually look, this shadowed-eyed, unsmiling woman. What was obvious, though, was that she was furious: her sullenness was suppressed fury. Directed at everything and everyone, would be my guess. And whatever we did, and however we tried, Kate and I probably came into that, even if it was against Annie’s better judgement, and I’d like to think it was. I’d like to think she was grateful to Kate and understood that we were on her side, but I suspect she couldn’t help hating us. Well, we were ladies bountiful, weren’t we. That’s how it must have seemed to her. Everything was all right for us.

  Whenever I think of her now, what I recall is the slow drumming of her heels against the legs of her chair, the very sound of desolation and defiance. I’ve been thinking of her a lot recently. You know what I think? I wonder whether perhaps her situation wasn’t all that bad, in the end.

  She was long gone by the autumn. She’d done her time at Kate’s and had moved on to her new life – children in tow – with that lover of hers. And we were busy doing our best for Will. For Lizzie Brookes.We were at our best, perhaps, then, Kate and me. Girls together again. It was harmless fun. It was cosy. It was easy. Kate, being Useful; me, my views on love well known. Kate, convert. Me, old hand.

  Old hand? I have to tell you: that’s not how I felt, as I watched Will and Lizzie fall for each other. It had been so different for Charles and me. There’d been no mystery, for us. We did fall in love, yes, but only when we were married. Risking nothing. Not that our marriage was any less for it. On the contrary. But watching Will and Lizzie, I found myself wishing that I’d gone through what they had to endure. I was so very sure, then, that autumn, that I would never know what it is to have one’s head turned and be held there, breath taken. Not to know quite what one was in for.

  Twelve

  It was a cosy, carefree autumn, that autumn; insular and frivolous, the autumn that was Kate’s last. We met up as usual for the feast day of our namesake: St Catherine, on the twenty-fifth of November. Because we were outspoken on the need to rid religion of folklore, we had to keep it secret, this annual exception that we made. Which suited us fine. It was ‘our day’, and our ‘feast’ was exactly as we alone wanted it: steaming bowls of furmenty, the wheat-thickened, cinnamon-scented milk, chewy with dates and raisins; and our rich cream dowcet crusted with burned sugar. We sat at the fireside with our bowls in our laps, gossiping.

  November became December and suddenly – or so it seemed to me – Kate had gone to Sudeley for Christmas: gone home for Christmas, gone to her new home. Sudeley was at last ready and she seemed to leave London without a backward glance. But Christmas for those of us who remained at or close to court was fun, as usual. My boys were particularly impressed, loved being in the thick of things, acting as if none of this – the feasts, masques, music – had ever happened before and had been contrived especially for their benefit. Full of it, standing tall, they seemed to be growing in front of my eyes and I saw them, for the first time, as stars of the rising generation. True, they’d been Knights of the Garter for almost a year, since the coronation, when Harry had walked behind
Eddie, carrying the orb, but I’d never taken it seriously. They’d been my little boys, nominally in attendance on a nominal boy-king. Playacting. Last Christmas, though, was a revelation: I saw them shaping up for their future as right-hand men to their monarch. Following in their father’s footsteps.

  Just after Christmas, I caught a bad cold and delayed my journey back to Lincolnshire. Three days on the road would have been quite beyond me. Taking to my bed for a few days, I missed a lot of the usual London New Year celebrations although I did manage to make an appearance for the gift-giving. My boys had been easy, this year, wanting money. And, despite the expense, I was particularly pleased with the cloth-of-tinsel doublets that I’d had made for the senior members of the household. Bella seemed delighted with her red silk purse. And her present to me was a little bag, too, this one for holding lavender: Holland linen, which she’d embroidered gorgeously. To Kate, I’d sent a length of that new, bobbin-made lace; and she’d sent me a beautiful gold brooch of a bee.

  Still unwell, I missed the only event that had promised to liven up the lull after Epiphany: Kate’s brother’s marriage to Lizzie Brookes. Kate, too, missed it, for the same reason: she was ill. I’d assumed that her illness was similar to mine; there was a lot of it about. She felt slowed up, she wrote to me, and was sometimes sick. Well, the sickness I didn’t have. She’d picked something up, she said, and couldn’t shake it off. Her next letter mentioned she was no better. It’s dreary, she complained: I’m bored and boring and poor Thomas must wonder what on earth he’s married.

  Ah, yes, poor Thomas. A third letter came with him on one of his trips to London but he didn’t deliver it to me in person, sending it instead via one of his men. In it, among news of family and friends, were the words I’m still wretched, a bit of a wreck.

  I didn’t like the sound of that.

  I’m coming, I wrote back. I was fine by then. I need a good look at you, I told her. Writing those words, I was remembering how well she’d looked when I’d last seen her. This was cruel, whatever it was, keeping her laid so low when she was at last ready to live life to the full. In her letters she’d been deliberately offhand, but I suspected she was worried. How could she not be?

  Don’t, came back the message. Don’t come, don’t worry. I’ll be fine, I’ll sleep this off. It’s a bad time of year for getting better, that’s all. And a look is definitely not a good idea. I warn you now, she declared: I look awful.

  She knew I’d come. I’m coming, I replied. No arguments. I’ll be no trouble, I’ll keep myself to myself, but just let me see you. I need to see you.

  And perhaps it’s true that this was as much for my sake as for hers, and perhaps that’s why she let me come. Everyone knows I’m no nurse. I’m hopeless with sickness, my own or anyone else’s – even my boys’, it hurts and shames me to say.

  At times during the days before I set off to see Kate, I was frantic with worry about her; but at other times, I managed to reassure myself that it was a bad time of year and hardly anyone was fully well. Plague was around – Elizabeth and Jane’s tutor, William, had died of it, Kate told me, during his trip home at Christmas – but there had been no cases anywhere near Sudeley and, anyway, whatever this indisposition of Kate’s was, it clearly wasn’t the plague. Come spring, I told myself in my good moments, she’ll pick up. In the bad moments, though, I wondered: a day or two of sickness could be put down to bad food; and a week, well, it happens, particularly at this time of year. A couple of weeks of being unwell, even: yes. But this? This sickness for weeks with no let-up?

  You see, when I was thirteen I’d had to stand by and watch Charles’s previous wife sicken and die. Mary Rose: my sort-of-stepmother, the woman who’d taken me on. My own mother was away so much when I was a child, and my father was hopeless, and one of the ways in which he was hopeless was with money. So, when he was dead and I was nine, I was sold. Let’s be frank: that’s what it is when a girl becomes a ward, she’s sold. A man pays to have a girl handed over to him with her inheritance, and he later gets the best possible deal when he marries her on to someone else. It was what Maud strove to avoid for Kate. Kate was independent until she was married, and the marriage was of her choice, or at least of her mother’s choice and her mother had Kate’s happiness at heart. I had no Maud championing me, no one had my happiness at heart and I became the Duke of Suffolk’s ward, but, with that, my luck turned. Because what a place to be, to grow up: in the home of the king’s adored brother- in-law, with his lovely wife Mary Rose and their children. My lonely years were over.

  Mary Rose’s illness seemed nothing much, at first. Tiredness. Summer stretched the days but she seemed unable to keep up, going to bed early, skipping a few social occasions that she’d have loved. She sounded breathless, too, full of sighs and exclamations where before she’d been lovably brisk, her habitual expression of impatience having been the pointed tapping of a fingernail. And her face began to look wrong to me: small, the features unused. That big, red laugh of a mouth and that clever gaze had gone slack, flat. Then came the sickness. Occasional, at first, but then relentless, monotonous. Soon, it was all she did: throw up. I was thirteen, I didn’t want to hear it. It shames me to say it but it’s the truth. Listen: I was thirteen. One day I noticed her face had changed again. There was no longer the flatness to it; on the contrary, she was all teeth, all jaw. And her hair, the amazing hair in which she’d taken so obvious a delight: that mane was now a clump, a kind of disfigurement.

  Within a month or so, Mary Rose had slid into a state whereby everything was too much for her. Instead of a strutting redhead whose call to us – ‘Girls!’ – was accompanied by an arched eyebrow, we had a shuffling, wincing woman, pathetically grateful to us in anticipation of any small comforts we might be able to provide for her. Which we couldn’t: we couldn’t please her; she couldn’t be pleased. It wasn’t really to do with us; we were barely there for her by then; she tended by that stage to look through us.

  Me, in particular. It shrinks fast, the world of a dying person: I understand that now; I’ve seen it happen now several times. But then, it was a shock. She had no spare energy for her thirteen-year-old ward; there was no room in her shrunken world for the tag-along, for the girl she’d once casually scooped up and taken under her wing.

  I hated her for it; of course I did. And I hated her for her sickness which seemed to me not only disgusting but wilful. I longed to shake her out of it, to shake her back to herself. She’d been everything to me, she was all I had. My own mother had been too busy kneeling in front of a deposed queen to bother with me, but into her place strode Mary Rose. For five years, she’d listened to me, bolstered me, instructed and challenged me. And then, just as she had me desperate to be like her, she dropped it all, the striding and hair-tossing, the big-mouthed laughing, the passion for life. She dumped it all, as if it were nothing. I felt tricked. I took it as cruel.

  Now I know better. If I could turn back time, I’d sit and read to her. I’d bring a single, lightly spiced, honey-baked fig. And if that didn’t work, I’d clear away her untouched tray before it could sicken her. I realise, now, that she was frightened. I understand, now, that she couldn’t possibly have been ready to go. My own mother died six years later and although her symptoms were much the same, she seemed less troubled, less pained. The difference, I suspect, was that she had what she needed: her child safely grown and happily married with healthy children of her own. Whereas no one could help Mary Rose because she knew that her son, too, would soon be dead. Her boy, her youngest. He was sliding down inside himself, becoming all shoulders; he was turning inside out, bony and blood-flushed. His eyes looked candlelit in broad daylight, and he was roped to a cough which allowed him no rest. How can it have been for Mary Rose to know that when the end came for him, she wouldn’t be there to hold a cool hand to his forehead? Whenever I think of it, I find myself biting on my knuckles, as if I’ve stubbed something. The mercilessness of it. Her sunny-natured boy; her deliciously sly-boot
s, glinting-toothed boy; her tongue-tied, trying-hard boy: everything he’d ever been would soon be nothing. She was still – even in her illness – taking him a night light every evening: her boy, afraid of the dark, who would soon be sealed up in the family vault.

  When she was dead, we took her to the abbey at St Edmondsbury. A long day’s ride, there and back, on a long, midsummer day. I rode second in the procession, behind Frances and in front of Eleanor, in order of our ages as if I were their equal as a true daughter of Mary Rose. That was Charles’s doing, and I was grateful to him.

  Charles’s choice for his own burial place was the church at our castle at Tattershall. But when the time came, Henry claimed him for St George’s Chapel at Windsor, buried him there at his own expense. Then had requiem masses said for him at St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Spectacular, then, in the end, Charles’s dying, or so it must have seemed to everyone but us. Actually, it had been quick and quiet. I still don’t know what I feel about all that pomp, about his being taken from us for his burial, but I hope it stays with the boys that their father was loved and valued by his king. And of course he was: loyal, fair and good-natured man that he was.

  Thirteen

  My preparations for my trip to Kate included explaining the situation to the boys. I didn’t want to alarm them, but they had to understand that it was important for me to go and perhaps for me to stay a while. Charlie was to remain in London, I decided, close to Harry, with his tutor and, of course, enough staff to keep our Barbican house comfortable for him. I was mindful that none of us was at home at Grimsthorpe, and hadn’t been, by then, for some time. Our absence felt, to me, a little like desertion. Which was ridiculous, because Grimsthorpe would – I knew – be running fine, albeit in its half-hearted winter way. The boys and I are, in a sense, superfluous there. Grimsthorpe’s grounds might seem to be in hibernation, but that wouldn’t be true of the house and outhouses. Baking, brewing and slaughtering would continue, our staff to be kept warm and fed. There were tens of horses to be tended to, exercised, shod. Chapel bells would, daily, be ringing. A busy, noisy world of its own, through summer and winter, work days and days of rest. If I’m honest, what was making me uneasy was that since Charles had died and Harry had been living at court, Grimsthorpe has no longer felt quite like home.