The Sixth Wife

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘And they’re so well suited. Same age’ – born within weeks of each other – ‘and same ideas.’Well, yes, very keen on revolution, those two, convinced of it, famous for their conviction: a pair of serious little faces, books in their hands and heads bowed to Luther. But that was friendship. Being able to offer abroad the queenship of England gave Eddie a bargaining power too great to pass over in favour of choosing a like-minded spouse. However regrettable it was – and it was – that little boy’s life wasn’t his own. As king, a lifetime of conjugal fireside chats would almost certainly be an un-affordable luxury for him. Kate wasn’t being practical. ‘What’s depressing,’ she said, ‘is that we still need to resort to the old ways.’ The buying of a wardship. ‘It doesn’t feel right.’

  What wasn’t right was Thomas’s self-interest. I didn’t want to think about it.

  Suddenly Kate smiled, grabbed my hand and pressed it to her stomacher. Raised her eyebrows: You feel him? A weird flexing. ‘Always so restless,’ she said, wryly. ‘Like his father.’ I took my hand away, and she resumed: ‘It’s depressing to see Jane bought, handed over. To see her knowing that. Any girl, but particularly one as proud and self-contained as Jane. And of course I know she’ll be safe; she couldn’t be safer, with Thomas and me, and it’s immeasurably better than her being with Frances and Henry. I know that, and, more importantly, she knows that. But it’s the principle, isn’t it. Thomas can’t understand why anyone would allow a principle to get in the way, as he sees it. I don’t know what he thinks principles are for.’ She sighed. ‘But, then, an awful lot of people would say “told you so”.’

  Not knowing what to say, I said,‘He just wasn’t the obvious choice for you, that’s all.’

  ‘But you understand, don’t you,’ she said, immediately, and there was no plea in it; it was statement pure and simple. ‘You understand what it is about him.’

  I floated through the moment, determined to feel nothing, to clean myself out of feeling and then start from scratch. As if I barely knew him.

  Before I could respond, though, she said, ‘Everyone else is so deferential, so false,’ and then laughed, ‘I mean, except you, of course.’

  I made sure to echo the laugh.

  ‘Thomas is true, isn’t he. True to himself. He gets into scrapes, yes, which doesn’t make him the easiest of husbands, but I’ve never had cause to doubt his devotion to me, and how many wives can say that?’

  Nothing from me. Not even a heartbeat.

  ‘Everyone’s so cautious, but Thomas is…Well, he’s silly, sometimes, I know, but he’s alive in a way that nobody else is, he’s…’

  Reckless. I looked away, down at the floor, wanting to cry without quite knowing for whom.

  She said, ‘Anyway, I did choose him, I did marry him, and’ – she patted her belly – ‘it worked, didn’t it.’

  And then we did laugh, both of us, relieved; I managed it, managed to catch her up and laugh along with her.

  She turned serious again, though. ‘I know he didn’t tell me because he knew I wouldn’t like it.The problem is, he’s good at that; he’s always doing it.’

  ‘He is?’ My smile, again, felt fixed.

  ‘You know, Cathy, however it might look to the contrary, he’s not an easy man to live with. All that fun with everyone in his household, yes. But with everyone else…’ she whispered, ‘it’s the opposite, he’s at war. At war. I’m only now uncovering the extent of it. Tenants…’ Her tone suggested she was embarking on a list, but she abandoned it. ‘He’s even in trouble at home now.’

  My heart flipped. I said nothing. Wait.

  Barely audibly, she confided, ‘Mrs Ashley thinks he’s over-familiar with Elizabeth.’ She flicked her eyes skywards. ‘That was what she said: “Overfamiliar”. I said to her, “But he’s overfamiliar with everyone, isn’t he, really; that’s what he is. That’s Thomas.”’

  Keep looking into her eyes: receptive, loyal. And wait for details.

  ‘I mean, she has a point in that Elizabeth isn’t everyone, she’s royal and Thomas could get into a lot of trouble for barging into her bedroom and playing these tickling games -’

  ‘Tickling games?’

  ‘Oh, you know; you know how they are. Like father and daughter, it seems to me, and I love to see it.’ Mildly affronted, she added, ‘And Mrs Ashley and I have always agreed that we don’t want Elizabeth growing up as if she’s in a nunnery.’

  I asked,‘What are these “tickling games”?’ I wondered how I looked – what was she seeing on my face? – not least because I had no idea how I felt. Thomas teasing Elizabeth was nothing, I knew very well; but still I didn’t like it, even if I didn’t quite know why. And, anyway, it was dangerous, and what was dangerous for him was dangerous for his family, for Kate and the baby.

  ‘Tickling.’ Kate shrugged. ‘Reaching under the bedclothes and…’ But she stopped.

  ‘Tickling,’ I had to say it for her. And then I almost laughed: Thomas, really, honestly, you do push it, don’t you. Oh, this was easy: I didn’t need to have any feelings whatsoever about this; this was a purely practical consideration. ‘Kate,’ I stressed, ‘he probably does need to be more careful, doesn’t he?’ Surely there was no denying it.

  She did, though; she did deny it, in a way. Folding her arms, frowning, looking at the floor, she said, ‘Well, I’m not going to mention it to him, because it would make it worse. If he’s told he can’t do something, he does it all the more.’

  Breathe, Cathy.

  She looked at me. ‘He means no harm,’ she said, making clear that she was finished, that the subject was closed.

  Twenty-eight

  For almost a week, I avoided Thomas: avoided being alone with him, even for a moment; avoided even catching his eye. Decided, is how it seemed to me, those first few days at Sudeley in June, without me – or indeed him – having had to decide it. Somehow, it had finished and I accepted the end, was thankful, glad, relieved. What had happened with Thomas had been a madness; it was as if I’d been ill. This, now, was another new life, my second within months: no simple going back, I knew, to where I’d once been. No, this would need living through; I would need to find a way through. Going to chapel, praying hard and listening harder to Miles Coverdale’s sermons, I told myself that I could do better than before, could learn from this.

  There would never be anything I could do to make it up to Kate: I was under no illusions about that. The best I could do for her would be to forget that it ever happened: the closest I could come to making it never have happened.

  I ached, but that was to be expected, wasn’t it? A real, physical ache. I paid it no heed. Stopped up my yearning. The ache, I knew, was for Thomas’s unflinching focus on me, as palpable as his touch upon my skin.

  It wasn’t hard to avoid him, because he in turn gave me a wide berth. So wide that he was away on business for two days at a neighbouring landowner’s, before spending a day at home in conference with his treasurer. On that occasion he was free by suppertime but nevertheless declined to join us – ‘I think I’ll say no, ladies, if you don’t mind; it’s been a long day.’ I’d heard him when he’d arrived back from his trip saying to Kate that life would be easier if they had the royal jewellery back from his brother and sister-in-law. She’d replied, ‘But you wouldn’t be selling it, would you.’ He’d changed the subject. I couldn’t tell if she’d been puzzled by what he’d said or had understood full well what he’d let slip, and was reminding him that it wasn’t his to sell.

  Yet it also was hard, somehow, to keep my distance from Thomas; it must have been, because I was exhausted. Perhaps it was the resolve that it took. No help was the lack of distractions at Sudeley I’d come with very few of my own household and – as usual, because of the distance – none of my ladies. A visit from Kate’s brother and his new wife Lizzie had been anticipated, but, due to some political crisis of what seemed to me a spectacularly uninteresting nature, he’d had to stay at court. John Pankhurst – Kate’s chap
lain, my ex-chaplain – was laid up in bed with his habitual fever and sickness. Susan, the usher’s wife, was visiting her ailing mother. The rest of Kate’s ladies were a dead loss. The girls’ new tutor, Roger, was usually good for conversation, but he was preoccupied with some financial crisis of his brother’s and always in his room writing letters. Twittery Mrs Ashley was best avoided in my view. As for my boys, and Elizabeth and Jane, I didn’t really know where they were; all I knew was that they weren’t around. The only visitor to Sudeley that week was the bonesetter, for Charlie’s little friend, Anthony, who’d fallen from a tree and broken an ankle.

  Kate’s advanced pregnancy meant that she didn’t do much, but it shouldn’t have meant that she was any poorer company for me. That was down to the midwife, who was already in residence. Her name was Mary Odell, and she was a very nice woman. That was the problem: I don’t tend to get on with very nice people. I wish I did, but I don’t; it just doesn’t happen; perhaps it’s that I can’t quite take them seriously. Whereas Kate, of course, does. So there Kate was, in her element, often keeping company with the cheerful Mary Odell and assuming – not unreasonably – that I was happy to do likewise.

  Mary was probably in her forties, a tall, brisk blonde, papery-skinned, chapped-knuckled. My own first midwife, the meaty-armed Mrs Arkwright, had scowled through my pregnancy, barely ever giving me a second glance. It had all been about the heir, to her. Her job, as she saw it, was safe delivery of the heir. Actually, that was her job, and she was unsurpassed at it. Charles had appointed her on her reputation. ‘But she was the very best around,’ he’d claimed, dismayed and contrite, when I said a year later that I didn’t want her for my second pregnancy. Actually, I didn’t say it, I cried it, and he was mortified: why on earth hadn’t I said at the time? I had to tell him: how would I have known? What had I known about midwives and how they could be, how they were supposed to be? I’d been fourteen, fifteen, at the time, motherless, sisterless. I hadn’t known that Mrs Arkwright could have been said to be limited in her view that there was no point to me other than to reproduce. I hadn’t known until Kate had come along to tell me.

  Kate. When Harry was six weeks old, I’d arrived reluctantly for a stay at court. I don’t remember the circumstances, just my reluctance and how court was suddenly incomprehensible to me, from the hours everyone kept to the conversations they considered called for. I was seized by questions which no one else even recognised as questions, usually answering only with a knowing and unhelpful ‘Ha!’, giving the impression that having a baby was a business simultaneously odd and predictable and thus unworthy of consideration. Harry was having none of this, bawling at them, all of them, roaring his impatience. He didn’t belong to the world of court or to any world that wasn’t his own, his Harry-world. And where he was, I was, too, dragged along in his wake. I was a foot soldier and the sole one because this business of having a baby seemed too confounding to entrust to anyone not intimately involved. Harry’s nurses, my ladies and even my husband retreated from me, puzzled and a little piqued. Harry and I were left alone in our suite, or so it felt, to muddle through the days and nights.

  Then came Kate’s tentative knock at the door, a diffident ‘Hello, you,’ to me, then a gutsy ‘Helloooo, you,’ to Harry. At last, I saw him think. For me: well, I was rather more thrown. I hadn’t seen Kate since I was a girl. At a loss, I indicated the side of my bed. Immediately – but delicately – she sat. I don’t remember what we went on to talk about, only that she conversed with me as if I were an adult when everyone else was treating me as a child, whilst somehow also allowing me to be a child when the general expectation had been for me to be an adult. Whatever she did, however she did it, she got it right, and from the off. As she did with Harry, too. Harry, whom everyone else had regarded - exclaimed about, discussed – if they’d bothered with him at all, so that he had glared and tried to fight his corner, exhausting and frustrating himself with useless thrusts of his arms and legs. Kate talked to him and he waved at her, reached for her, his rosebud mouth open in imitation and invitation.

  Kate continued to come by whenever, as far as I could tell, she didn’t have to do anything else in particular. She never asked me how I was, in the way that other people did, the way that made me cry. She let me be. But she also didn’t, getting me up and out, eventually, and without any of the chiding that others had considered necessary. Together, we took Harry to see trees, horses, and, one evening, the moon. When I finally did appear in hall, it was beside Kate and I walked tall, with Harry.

  When I knew I was pregnant again, Kate came to Grimsthorpe to help me choose my midwife, which is how I ended up with the incomparable old Betty Bright, regrettably now long since dead.

  And now, thirteen years later, I remembered all this as if it were yesterday and I wanted to be for Kate as she had been for me. But I knew it couldn’t happen. I’d known it from the start of her pregnancy, not simply from meeting the capable Mary Odell. True, Kate might run into difficulties, of course she might, and help of a practical nature, I was ready to give. But I would never be able to do for her as she’d done for me. There was no call for it.

  I began to make a habit of taking walks, long walks, alone, way beyond the gardens. The air was blood-warm, the sky squint-inducingly luminous despite the cover of pleated cloud. Massive trees glowered on the horizon as if they were thunderclouds, and underfoot the grasses of the pathways were extravagantly noisy. Barley was being grown: up close, feathery plaits; stretching into the distance, expanses of pale gold stippled with the faintest green. Once, I spotted a small, delicately striped snail on a hedgerow leaf and found myself actually speaking aloud to it: Do you like this - the sun on our backs – as much as I do? Even though I knew, really, that it couldn’t; it would be swooning in its shell, longing for shade. It ought to, though, is perhaps what I meant. Because how unthinkable that anyone – anything – didn’t love this: the freedom out here. But most of the time, there was nothing in me at all. Nothing to me. I was opened up to the vast sky, looking around and around.

  During Thomas’s first supper back with us, he’d no sooner sat down than he announced, ‘We have a decision to make.’ He sounded pleased; looked it, too, glancing around us, clearly enjoying our attention and being about to throw us something of a test. I couldn’t have cared less. ‘What are we going to do,’ he asked,‘about St John the Baptist’s day? Celebrate it or not?’

  Kate followed suit: snapped to attention and looked bright-eyed at the youngsters around the table. Wearily I watched them Being A Family.

  The feast day of St John the Baptist, Midsummer Day. Coming up, I suddenly realised, in a few days’ time. Midsummer: three months since the start of the new calendar year. Since the start of .. .Three months already, or only three months? I didn’t know; I felt too tired to know the answer. Could have been either.

  ‘Celebrate it.’ Elizabeth was unhesitating, unequivocal. ‘All depends on whether you see it as St John’s or Midsummer.’ Everyone knew this; she was merely stating the obvious to get the discussion going. St John the Baptist’s was a feast day, a catholic celebration. Not, then, something for this household. Midsummer, though, was exactly the kind of celebration this household would relish: open house; an all-night party.

  ‘Well, which do we see it as?’ Kate’s question sounded genuine; she was sincerely interested.

  ‘Midsummer, of course,’ breezed Elizabeth, ‘because then we can celebrate it.’

  Thomas laughed.

  My Harry cleared his throat. ‘The Lord Protector’ – he glanced at Thomas, perhaps nervous at mentioning Thomas’s brother – ‘is allowing it in London.’

  ‘So I’d heard,’Thomas remarked.

  Charlie piped up, ‘That’s because everyone was so upset at Corpus Christi being banned.’ My London-based boys, with their London-based concerns. I couldn’t help but smile.

  ‘Well, that was Corpus Christi,’ said Elizabeth. ‘That had to go; you don’t get more catholic than Cor
pus Christi, do you. This, though, is different.’

  Kate ventured,‘And perhaps people can only take so much change at one time.’ Then she made the mistake of trying to include little Jane Grey: ‘What do you think, Jane?’

  Jane said, ‘People should take however much change they have to take.’

  My boys turned to the food on their plates. No such luxury for the adults, who had to respond.

  Thomas frowned, making a show of thinking, and Kate, likewise, inclined her head.

  Elizabeth, though, rounded on her. ‘There’s no harm in it. If we say it’s non-religious for us, then it is non-religious for us. And, I mean, it is for me, I can assure you. And I’m sure that’s the same for everyone here.’ She added in conclusion, ‘I want to celebrate Midsummer.’

  Jane was scandalised. ‘You act as if it doesn’t matter. It does matter.’ I was amazed: until this, I’d never heard her speak this way. She switched to Kate, helpless. ‘What about leading by example? Isn’t that always what you say we should do?’

  Kate was obviously – visibly – torn between her girls.

  Thomas cut in with, ‘What do you think, Cathy?’ It was the first time he’d addressed me openly and in an instant he’d directed everyone’s eyes to me. I recoiled, resentful, and anyway quite unable to work up enthusiasm for the discussion. Whereas usually – before - I’d have been preoccupied by the very same issues. I went for, ‘Whatever Ed has decided on is good enough for me.’And meant it. Ed Seymour could do the thinking on this one. It was what he was paid to do, and he was paid to do it because he was good at it.

  Elizabeth chipped in, sarcastically,‘You, of the strong opinions.’