The Sixth Wife

by Suzannah Dunn

  She gave me that irritatingly untroubled smile. ‘Thomas told her.’

  ‘Did he?’ When? He’d only known himself since the previous evening. Did he rush to her room with the news this morning?

  ‘He’s so excited,’ she continued, indulgently. ‘And now so is she. It’s touching. She’s acting as if this baby’s going to be her little brother or sister.’

  ‘Acting’ is the word, I thought. Elizabeth is forever acting.

  Kate lamented,‘She’s never had much of a family, has she. I mean, Mary…’ She didn’t finish, didn’t have to: it went without saying that Mary wouldn’t be an easy half-sister to have. I’d go further and say she’s probably the worst possible half-sister to have, with that gravely wounded air and highhanded manner. ‘And Eddie: well, Elizabeth and Eddie have always been so close, but nowadays that’s hard.’ Her face creased in concern. ‘Being king has – inevitably – made him such a serious little boy.’

  Such a repulsive little boy, in my opinion. The old king mightn’t have been a breeze, but at least his life had colour and passion. This little king, though: thin-lipped, sanctimonious.

  ‘And Elizabeth isn’t serious,’ Kate was saying. ‘She’s a hard worker – oh, a very hard worker – but she’s not serious.’ She looked searchingly at me. ‘There is a difference, isn’t there.’

  I said nothing. Why were we talking about Elizabeth?

  ‘She’s a fun-lover, is Elizabeth.’

  She strives for it, I thought. There’s something off-putting about that. Something I don’t trust.

  Kate sighed and folded her arms across her chest. ‘I do worry about her. She’s only just settled here and there’s been the loss of William’ – her tutor – ‘and now this big change coming…I don’t want her to feel -’

  Supplanted.

  Elizabeth would be fine, I told her. A platitude, yes, but also the truth. Elizabeth would make something of the situation. Make something good of it for herself. That’s what she does; that’s what she’s spent her life, so far, doing. Elizabeth is a survivor. She learns fast and works to keep people on her side. Has to. I understand it, having grown up with no real family of my own.

  ‘So,’ I kept it cheerful, ‘who else knows?’

  ‘Oh, if Elizabeth knows, Jane has to know: it’s only fair. So, she knows, and has given us her blessing…’

  ‘And Mrs Ashley seems to know.’ No one had been whispering in her presence.

  ‘Oh, Mrs Ashley.’ She shrugged, dismissive. Then that look of concern, and it burned me. ‘You shouldn’t worry, Cathy. This isn’t like you.’

  It used to be me and Kate, then it was me and Kate and Thomas, then me and Kate and Thomas and a baby, and now…there were so many of them. All of them acting as if they were family. What do these people know about family? As if family is fun, as if fun is all that’s needed. As if it were that easy. I was suddenly so tired of it, of them; so very tired, and I’d only been there a day.

  I said, ‘I miss the boys.’ I hadn’t meant to say it, it felt as if it wasn’t what I’d meant to say, but as I did so it became the hard, inescapable truth. You’re losing your grip. I was sitting there, poised, on the bed, but being silly about my boys; my boys, who – let’s face it – had gone nowhere. It was me who’d upped and gone.

  ‘You should have brought them,’ Kate admonished, gently, her eyes seeking mine, and I felt her hand on mine, the confidence in it, the perfectly, instinctively judged weight of it. How did she do it? Parcel out her concern, yet give her all. She asked me, ‘Why didn’t you?’

  Let her have the truth then: ‘I didn’t know what I’d find.’

  ‘Oh – ’ She winced, and there was the slightest recoil. ‘I’m so, so sorry to have had you so worried.’

  Wasn’t that just so Kate? I couldn’t help but smile. ‘Listen,’ I said, ‘imagine my relief; it was worth it for that. You could look at it that way.’

  And she laughed. ‘To find out that, in fact, I’m blooming.’

  Her queasiness had made her late for morning prayers, to which she was now going. I declined to join her – preferring to pray alone – and she didn’t press me. Leaving the room, I almost bumped into Thomas, who was returning, had not yet gone hawking.

  ‘Ah!’

  I stopped, folded my arms. ‘What?’

  He looked puzzled. ‘What?’

  Me, too, now: confused, confounded.

  He tried, ‘I was just…’ and indicated the door. On my way to see Kate.

  Well, obviously. I made a definite sidestep, pointedly getting out of his way, and he smiled his thanks uncomfortably but didn’t move off. We were at sixes and sevens. I took the opportunity, cut through all this nonsense: ‘You told Elizabeth.’ No preliminaries needed for Thomas, I sensed.

  He widened his eyes, questioning: Told her what?

  He knew full well what. ‘About the baby.’

  The same look: And? Yes?

  ‘A little premature, don’t you think?’ He exhaled, puffed it away. ‘Elizabeth’s a grown-up girl.’ I took him to mean she understood that there was a possibility of disappointment. He could also have meant she was discreet.

  Then he broke, a little: ‘I had to tell someone.’ ‘And that someone was Elizabeth?’ Making it plain what I thought of her. I’d never have dared to do so to Kate, but I wasn’t going to waste niceties on Thomas. ‘She’s family,’ he said.

  I was tired of this. ‘She’s not, though, is she.’ He made a show of considering this, head inclined. Allowing it. Then he dropped his head and threaded his hands together, contrite. I opened Kate’s door for him. Interview over.

  Seventeen

  For weeks, Kate had told me, she’d been too sick to read. Like seasickness, was how she described it: she’d been quite unable to look down. Persuading herself that she was feeling better, she was keen to catch up. That’s how she saw it: catching up. She was forever anxious she’d miss something. As I’d left her room, she’d indicated a pile of books. ‘Look at these! Hugh brought them.’ Hugh, my chaplain. ‘Did he tell you about any of them?’

  I glanced. ‘That one, yes,’ I said. ‘Sounds good. But that one…’ I wrinkled my nose. A recommendation from Hugh, but it hadn’t appealed to me.

  ‘I’m going to sit very still here for a while after prayers and read,’ she told me, quietly jubilant.

  ‘Good,’ I said, ‘because then you can tell me what they say.’

  A joke, but I was also serious. It was how we worked. Perhaps it was why we worked so well together. I’m not much of a reader, but I relish discussion, debate. Kate had an eye for details, but she’d hold fast to them, was afraid to peek beneath them or throw them up and see how they’d land. Whereas I love all that. So, it’s not that I don’t like ideas: give me some to work with, and I will. It’s the books themselves that are the problem. Perhaps because I was never favoured – as Kate was – with an education. Reading books was easy for her, came as second nature, whereas I had make-do schooling and am forever having to translate what I read into words with which I’m comfortable. Perhaps it’s more basic than that, though, too. The truth is, I’m no good at sitting still. This is how I see it: life is short and there’s work to be done.

  There was a fundamental difference in temperament between Kate and me. Think of Hugh, my chaplain: we shared Hugh Latimer as a great friend but I’m closer to him than Kate ever was, and I think I know why. There he was, an ardent Papist, dedicating his life to defending Catholicism, and then one morning he listened to a sermon and changed his mind. He heard what Thomas Bilney had to say, and it made perfect sense to him so he never looked back. Isn’t that how it should be? I understand that. I applaud that. Kate, though, would have politely asked Bilney for a list of references in support of his argument so that she could go away and study them.

  Having left Kate to her books, I headed off for a walk, avoiding the cultivated gardens in favour of the surrounding woods, the trees clotted with rooks’ nests. The advantage of be
ing a visitor: being unaccompanied, being unoccupied, able sometimes to slip away unnoticed. In the near distance, beyond some magnificent holly bushes, was a pond like a spillage of ink. And Thomas. Alone, too. As I saw him, he saw me. Saw, too, that I was about to try to shrink back unseen.

  Caught out, I halted, and we both half laughed, half acknowledged it. He was chill-roughened: red eyes and nose. I joined him – had to, now – and there we stood, side by side at the edge of the water, its dull jade surface snagged by fussy ducks. Tightening my cloak around me, I enquired what he was doing.

  ‘Same as you, probably.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Being alone.’ And then, hurriedly, ‘Oh, I didn’t mean -’ to be rude. Apologetic smile. ‘I just meant, getting out of the house.’

  ‘It’s a lovely house,’ I countered. A humourless smile from him: he wasn’t going to play along. Fair enough. ‘Lovely gardens, though, as well,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you.’

  The ducks, with their ratchedy chatter, sounded comically affronted.

  ‘You must be very pleased with the gardens,’ I added, for something more to say. He said nothing, probably not least because nothing needed to be said.‘I am,’ I said, and laughed, and cringed.

  ‘Good,’ he managed. ‘That’s good.’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ but as I crunched back over fallen leaves, he called – ‘Cathy!’ – and said, ‘You think I should be more cautious.’ Referring, I presumed, to his telling Elizabeth about Kate’s pregnancy. Before I could respond, he said, ‘I’m no good at it,’ and then, with a mere nod, was off, in the opposite direction.

  I should have called after him, No. Because: cautious? No. I don’t like anyone thinking of me as cautious, and particularly, I found, I didn’t like it of him. I should have said, It’s nothing to do with caution, Thomas – life’s too short for caution – but everything to do with knowing what you can get away with.

  Eighteen

  I decided that I’d leave in a couple of days’ time. Just as soon as we could get ourselves back on the road. I’d done my bit. Kate was fine; she’d be fine, left to Thomas. There was no more I could do. I’d be in the way. But then, that very night, something happened.

  Two of Kate’s ladies came for me, in the early hours; came bobbing with apology, pop-eyed in the darkness. One, I now knew to be Kate’s usher’s wife, Susan; the other was the useless Agnes. Behind them, lighting their way, was a man, a liveried servant, his torch billowing the stench of tallow. The ladies were a mess of cloaks and hastily tied hair. Ungowned and unjewelled, they looked as if they’d been used up by the previous day and as yet unreplenished. They were polite but kept to necessities; there were no niceties. ‘She’s in pain,’ was what I heard. I asked my own Bella to stay. Nevertheless, we comprised quite a troop, hurrying wordless along the hallways under the dead-eyed stares of Kate’s ancestors, our slippers whispering on the matting.

  What – who – I saw first, in Kate’s bedroom, was Thomas. Thomas was there. My first, sleep-slowed reaction was that he’d somehow broken into the room: this must be the moment between him doing so and someone coming to escort him from it. Because this was a place for women. Kate’s ladies, though, were mere shadowy, peripheral presences. On the bed sat Thomas, white and gold: white nightgown and golden hair. Holding Kate’s hand and stroking her hair, and talking, talking and talking. Some of it I could catch: He’s looking to us, so let’s stay calm, for his sake; he wants to stay put, so let’s make it easy for him; this is nothing but a bit of a clamour for attention from our little one. I wanted to listen, just stand there and listen; I, too, wanted the reassurance of his words.

  Kate was kneeling on her bed; kneeling down, folded up, as if to make as little of herself as possible. Perhaps to tighten herself, to hold fast. Her face was expressionless except for the faintest stain of a frown, and, if I hadn’t known what was happening, I could have mistaken her pallor for anger. She looked up at me and there was nothing in the look. I had the sense that although she’d known I was on my way, it wasn’t she who’d sent for me. That would have been Thomas, I realised, and he’d been right to do so even if there was nothing I could do.

  I probably just said, ‘Kate?’

  ‘I think the baby’s coming away,’ she said to me. She’d spoken so flatly it was as if she’d been made to repeat it.

  ‘Is it pain?’ I took some steps towards her; I couldn’t get closer because of Thomas. I stopped at a respectable distance. It made my heart clench to see her a prisoner of her pain.

  ‘Blood, mostly,’ she replied.

  Blood. No mistaking blood, it’s not like pain, it’s so clear a signifier and yet there’s no telling what it signifies. Both triumphant and sly, is blood.

  She seemed to have to rouse herself for these minimal responses. I doubted she’d be telling me if I hadn’t asked. I had to ask her how much blood.

  ‘A cupful,’ she guessed.

  Admirably, Thomas didn’t flinch.

  I refrained from comment. ‘And the pain?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘The pain,’ I tried again. Not some polite enquiry about how she was feeling: I did need to know. I felt all their eyes on me: hers, Thomas’s, the ladies’. Perhaps simply because I was the most recent arrival in the room, they were hoping I’d do something.There was no midwife, of course: a midwife hadn’t yet been engaged, it was too early in this pregnancy for that. And no doctor – hers, or my marvellous Doctor Keyns – would be any good for this. This, a doctor would say, if it’s happening, is natural.

  She shook her head again. ‘It’s more a heaviness.’

  ‘All the time?’

  She nodded.

  I hadn’t got it right. ‘So, it’s constant?’ I felt awful, having to push, to question. What I wanted to know was if the pain was cramps, but I didn’t want to use the word, didn’t want to say anything that could imply the possible loss of the baby although in fact she’d already raised it and indeed raised it first of all.

  ‘It’s just a feeling of heaviness,’ was all she would say, and seemed sullen.

  Dashed: that was the look of her. All expression dashed from her face. I’d never before seen her like this, and clearly she didn’t like to be seen like this. Kate, I realised suddenly, was one for a brave face. I glanced around and there was Thomas, his eyes wide with expectation of something from me.

  ‘It’s probably nothing,’ I said, uselessly. I wasn’t lying; it was a kind of truth. I’d known pain and bleeding to happen to pregnant women and be of no consequence. But, then, we all knew of such cases. What mattered was whether Kate was just another such case. Nevertheless, I said to Kate, ‘It happened to Brigid, and there was no problem. And Joanna. And Honor. You know that, don’t you.’ I’d felt I should say it.

  She nodded, but her heart wasn’t in it. I splayed my hands, a gesture of helplessness and perhaps of bowing out. There was nothing to be done, now, but make her comfortable and be reassuring, and Thomas had elected to do that.

  Kate managed, ‘You go back to bed, Cathy,’ raising her head to say it. ‘Get some sleep.’Then she said something to Susan about needing the closet.

  Thomas stood up. ‘I’ll take you back, Cathy.’

  As soon as we were outside the room, I started again, felt obliged to. ‘This’ – indicating Kate’s door – ‘really means nothing -’ It was distracting, disconcerting, that he was in his nightgown. It was unnecessary: had he really not had time to throw on some basic clothes? Would any other man of any other household appear like this in front of ladies?

  He shook his head. ‘I wish there was something I could do for her.’

  Yes, well, we’re all in that boat. Dutifully, I reassured him. ‘You’re doing it, Thomas. You’re doing fine.’

  Again, though, a shimmer of his hair in the candle glow. ‘I always feel like this with her. I do so much want to make everything all right for her. Perfect for her. I do so much want her to be h
appy.’

  ‘She is happy, Thomas.’ I was weary. ‘Not -’ now, of course. ‘Generally, though.’ I started walking, and he, with the candle, had to join me, hurried to join me, releasing into the stone-coldness the fresh-bake scent of his warm skin. The glare of his nightgown, I averted my eyes from. Think of him as being like my boys, I told myself, as being no more than a boy. Because that’s what he was like. He must be freezing, I realised, wearing just a nightgown, and I almost turned to check with him before stopping myself because he wasn’t a boy, he could look after himself.

  He said, ‘I’m not up to it, am I.’

  Now what? ‘Up to what?’

  ‘Being married.’ He spoke conversationally. ‘I really did think I could do it, but now I’m letting her down. I started too late. I don’t have a clue.’

  I didn’t look at him, kept going. ‘You seem to be doing fine.’ Then, lax with tiredness, I couldn’t resist: ‘Maybe you try too hard.’

  I sensed him look at me. ‘I do, don’t I.’ He sounded surprised. ‘Try too hard: yes, I do, don’t I.’

  I said nothing. I’d said enough.

  ‘Whereas you,’ he said, ‘it’d be natural to you. You were married practically your whole life.’

  ‘Yes, and I’m not now.’

  ‘Yes’ – that was stupid of me - ‘I’m sorry.’

  We walked the rest of the way in silence.

  Back in bed, my thoughts turned to Charles. He’d never have had a crisis of confidence about being married. Or not when I knew him, but of course not, because by then he was well-practised. I didn’t mind, in fact I’d liked it that he had a history. I was his third or fourth wife, depending on whether you counted the first marriage, and he didn’t. Yes, he’d made mistakes, he’d not have pretended otherwise. Not that he could have pretended otherwise in the case of his first marriage, the disgrace being public. But that was back when he was no more than a boy, a silly boy. He lived it down and more than made up for it, and people had forgiven and forgotten.