‘You have conversations about me?’
He tucked his hands behind his head, and smiled. ‘Yes, we have conversations about you. You think I should refuse? When she starts talking about you, I should say, “Oh, sorry, Kate, I really can’t discuss Cathy”? That would look good.’ Then, ‘You two have conversations about me.’
‘Less often than you think.’ Less often than you’d like. I glanced around for my shift. ‘Anyway, Kate doesn’t know everything about me.’
‘Clearly not,’ he said, and I hated him for it, which he must have sensed because he shut up. I put on my shift and stockings. Then he started again: ‘So, were you?’
‘Was I what?’
Belatedly, he sat up and began to cast around for his clothes. ‘Supposed to marry the son.’
‘Does it matter?’ I stepped into my petticoat.
‘You tell me.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’ I was amazed that he didn’t know, but then, of course, my little scandal was before the Seymours’ time, was done and dusted before they came on the scene. I was well and truly respectable by the time they arrived. ‘I was supposed to be marrying him but he died.’
‘How long before?’
‘Before what?’And a prompt,‘Thomas…’ repin me, please.
He rose, stepped beside me, got to it. ‘Before you married Charles.’
I was going to have to go through it all. ‘He died after.’
‘How did that happen?’
His interest sounded genuine, but puzzled me. ‘Why are you pursuing this?’
His turn to be foxed. ‘I don’t know really. Just trying to find the heart of you, I suppose.’
That’s not your domain. ‘Why are you so interested in whether I have a heart?’
‘Not if. I never said if did I.’
If I gave him what he wanted, I suspected, he’d let me be.‘I was engaged to Charles’s son,’ and I stressed, ‘by others.’
‘Yes, well, by Charles, I imagine,’ said Thomas.
‘Yes, by Charles,’ I allowed.
‘And then Charles changed his mind, and married you himself.’ He’d finished repinning me and now I had to turn to the tricky business of my hair, of tidying it, of making the most of a bad job, mirror-less and maid-less. Thank goodness for hoods. He’d resumed dressing himself. ‘And you’ – he spoke downwards, absorbed in those eyelets – ‘you, who’d been this boy’s stepsister and his soon-to-be wife: there you were, suddenly his stepmother.’
‘Stranger things have happened,Thomas, as you well know.’ He wasn’t deflected. ‘What was he like, this boy?’ What was he like? ‘Oh, Thomas, it was a long, long time ago.’ A glance from him suggested that he wasn’t keen to settle for that. He’d have to, though. It was the truth. ‘Nice,’ I said: what more could I say? He was a nice boy. He was just a boy. I tried to explain, ‘I didn’t really notice what he “was like”; he was just always there.’ Or not, come to think of it. He was always off somewhere, doing whatever he did: climbing trees, swimming, making pets of voles. Sandy-haired, straw-haired, endearingly unkempt regardless of what anyone tried to do for him. We got on well, considering he was a year younger than me and a year makes a difference at that age. He’d show me his pets, for which he couldn’t do enough, and make a fuss of my dog. Often I was invited along with him: we rode together most afternoons. He treated me as an equal, which his sisters, friendly though they were to me, never quite did. He’d have made a good husband, is my guess, and been a worthy successor to Charles: generous, kind, no airs and graces. Strange to think that if he’d survived – Mary Rose’s boy, the baby of her family – my own sons would never have existed. Not simply strange, but unthinkable.
My little husband-to-be was Charles’s second Harry. My own, just a year later, was – is – Charles’s third, and the survivor. Third time lucky. The heir and then the successor. When second Harry was no longer around, that’s when I noticed him. Noticed him missing. Missed him. Charles had sent for me to come to his study and when I’d settled in the huge chair there, he said, slowly,‘I wonder, Cathy, whether we – you and I – shouldn’t get married.’ He looked concerned.
I said, ‘But who will marry Harry?’ My innocence now makes me wince. I feel for Charles, too, in retrospect, having to face the unworldly little girl that was me.
He took a moment to answer. ‘You know, Cathy, he’s very, very ill.’
I’d known he was ill; everyone knew; he hadn’t been well for a while. Not riding much. Good days and bad days. Bad nights, sometimes, with Mary Rose comforting him when she was strong enough to make her way to his room. But very, very ill: that was something else; that was what Mary Rose had been, and look what had just happened to her. Harry? Tree-climbing, bareback-riding Harry? Twelve-year-old Harry? Charles’s expression was telling me, Yes, Harry.
Charles wouldn’t have wanted to hurt his son but he was a pragmatist. A gentle, wise pragmatist but a pragmatist all the same. So, we married. Harry went off to court, on one of his good days, presumably one of his last, and never came home again. I never saw him again. Never went riding with him again.
Harry had been just like me, we’d been two of a kind, kicking around the estate, almost the same age and with the same future, but suddenly – he’d been made no one. Me, too, in a way: I’d been taken from who I was. Fourteen and pregnant, I was no longer the girl I had been, no longer the girl I should have stayed until I’d been ready to let her go. To think, now: Harry was around the age of my own boys when it all happened to him. He lost his mother and then, within months, his sisters were married off according to plan but the plan for his own future was cancelled and his wife-to-be became his stepmother. He would have felt so ill, too; worse and worse every day, and with no mother to comfort him. And me? Standing there in front of Thomas, I remembered how – newly married, then pregnant – I’d been mad with loneliness and no one, no one had known. That was what had done it: my being so desperate but not even Charles knowing it; not even Kate, until later, until too late.That was what changed me. That was what made me what I am.
Thirty-three
Thomas had told me that he wouldn’t be around the following afternoon. A local friend would be visiting and they’d be playing tennis. Last thing, he suggested: come to our secret room at night, before bedtime. Impossible, I argued, and in retrospect I should have argued harder. You’ll find a way, he told me: you did, before. He’d wait, he told me, until I managed it; he’d wait, however long it took.
That evening I was on my way back to my own room, ostensibly turning in for the night, annoyingly joined by Agnes and Marcella, when Harry stepped out from behind a staircase. This was dizzying, because, as far as I’d known, he was still in the hall with his friends and his brother. Somehow he’d managed to follow me and then get ahead. He stood his ground, serious-faced, his gaze flicking warily to the two ladies. He asked, ‘Can we talk?’ Even this, from him, sounded like a challenge, albeit reined in. I indicated to the ladies that they should go ahead. Still that look from Harry, though: a refusal to yield. Whatever he wanted to say, he wanted greater privacy for it than allowed by a hallway. So, where to? ‘The library,’ I decided. It would be warm enough despite the lack of a fire, but of course we’d need lights.’ We’ll need the candles lit,’ I called to the departing Marcella, who said she’d send someone.
Harry and I walked together and waited in awkward silence at the door to the dark library. My assumption was that he was in trouble. A dispute with a friend, perhaps, or he’d offended someone or broken something here. Once the man with the taper had been and we were settled in the library, Harry said, ‘I need your advice,’ before revising, ‘I need your help,’ his chin tilted in defiance. I kept my expression clear and spread my hands: It’s yours to take. My heart was heavy, though, because I held no great hope that this uneasy concord of ours wouldn’t collapse in the blink of an eye.
‘I don’t know how to start.’ He gave an exasperated, humourless laugh, but the
n, suddenly: ‘I’m in love with Elizabeth.’ My heart dropped like a shot bird. In love with: grown-up words from my boy, hanging on him like fancy dress, incongruous and pitiful and endearing at the same time. And Elizabeth. Elizabeth! As if she’d give him a second glance. Damn Elizabeth.
‘As is Elizabeth with me,’ he added, and everything changed, lurched, my reaction going in two directions at once: This – with Elizabeth – is actually already happening; and, She’s second in line to the throne, so this can’t happen, can’t be happening, can’t have happened. I got a hold on my nerve and held on hard while asking, ‘She said so?’ and trying to look pleased. I needed information from him.
‘Yes.’ He, too, looked pleased, enormously so. He looked very handsome, grinning away, and I glimpsed him through her eyes. Fear was washing through me, but I steadied myself to ask, ‘When did this happen?’
‘Oh’ – as if chronology and facts were charming irrelevancies – ‘I suppose it’s always been happening for me ever since we first met. First sight,’ he claimed, proudly; then, ‘No, not sight, to be honest, although of course she is -’ and he halted, bashful.
Beautiful.
Was she? Was it beauty that she had, or something more complex? More dangerous.
‘I suppose it happened the first time I heard her speak, although I don’t remember what she said, doesn’t matter what she said.’ He leaned forward, and urged, ‘It’s just that she thinks like I do.’ As if that were a miracle. As if no one else ever had or ever will do. I felt so very tired. He was glowing, and there I was in that glow, reflecting it, having to reflect it, feeling it burn on my face. There we sat, smiling at each other.
‘And Elizabeth?’ I probed. ‘You’ve talked together about how you both feel?’
‘And written,’ he enthused, to my utter dread. ‘We’ve been writing, all along.’
There are letters, there is evidence. I wanted to scream at him, We all know it’s treason to make such an approach to anyone in line, and we all know the sentence for treason. I should have guessed, though, shouldn’t I, that he’d be capable of this. He’s forever been running before he could walk. Think of him as a baby, his readiness for a world which wasn’t yet interested in him and required him to bide his time. Remember his offended stare, his disbelief, his rage.
‘So,’ my son was continuing, cheerfully, ‘where do we go from here? What happens now?’
Nowhere. Nothing. I’d have to get him out of danger. I’d have to make this…unhappen somehow. Make it not have happened. Make it something else. ‘Well,’ I was buying time, ‘you’re both very young.’ Not that Council would care. Old enough, in their eyes, to do damage. Old enough to be made an example of. Old enough to kneel at a block. Oh, the faint downiness of his nape when he was a toddler: a surprise, a little secret, little joke, that golden mist with its own grain. His perfect, God-made nape, the softest part of him and also the strongest. And now someone – some nobody – would quite possibly require him to bare that nape and slam down onto it a butchering blade. As if my son were nothing. To make him nothing and to make nothing of all that has gone into him: my ever-vigilant love; the love that he has drunk from me; his to take, gladly given and relentlessly taken.
‘We’re the age you were when you married,’ he came back quickly, keenly; keen to claim this affinity.
‘Not by choice,’ I had to remind him.
He wasn’t to be deflected. ‘It worked for you, though, didn’t it.’
I didn’t know, any more; I really didn’t know.
‘And,’ Harry continued, ‘how would it be any different if I was older? I’m lucky it’s happened early. You always said I’d know when I met the right person.’
Did I?
‘You always said I should follow my heart.’
‘Yes.’ I said that?
He was getting wind of my resistance. ‘That’s what you brought us up to believe,’ he reminded me.
I felt that I was watching myself, and I watched with sadness and despair to see where this was going. Our first chance for a truce for so long was probably about to be our last because I’d have to try to save him and he didn’t want to be saved and would rage against me for it.
Memories, suddenly. Harry, aged three, toddling past chapel, from which was coming the sound of choir practice, the scorching voices of the boys at the top and everywhere below them voices striking bell-like on each note, and so many of those notes, massed and mad-turning. And Harry looking up at me, trying to express himself with his few words: ‘It’s not a man speaking in there, it’s a man crying. It’s sad, that music. It’s scary-sad.’ And at around the same age, Harry playing with a toy cart, flattening himself to the floor the better to appreciate the revolutions of its chunky wheels. I’d seen then that he was impressively long, no longer a baby, as I’d assumed, but a boy, and a boy, to judge from his expression, with serious concerns. Six, seven: a boy whose climbing of trees was both as certain and as carefree as the singing of a song. Nine or so: a boy whose steadying hand on the muzzle of a skittish horse had exactly the right balance of authority and reassurance, a hand that worked its own small wonder. And last summer, a young man who plunged in after a slipped child, a servant’s child, hauled her from the river and pounded the fluid from her lungs, forcing his own air down her in long, luxurious breaths while everyone else, including me, was still only just letting go of an initial sharp intake. Oh, believe you me, no one, but no one, was going to make nothing of this boy, turn this boy into nothing.
I said to Harry, ‘It’s just that it’s complicated, you know, this situation with Elizabeth.’
‘That’s why I’m here.’ For him, we were conspirators now, heads together, rather than him opening up to me and me failing him.
‘It’s Council’s decision,’ I was thinking aloud, ‘who Elizabeth marries. Her being second in line.’
‘I know.’ He was impatient.
I confronted him with hard fact: ‘It’s treason, Harry, to’ – how to put this? – ‘have anything romantic to do with her.’
This, though, he dismissed. ‘I’m the Duke of Suffolk. There’s no one in England higher in rank. I’m the son of her father’s oldest friend. And I’m his son’s right-hand man. So, as long as no one’s looking abroad for a husband for her…’ He gave me a questioning look, as if he expected me to know. Which I didn’t. Having been rather preoccupied of late. He continued, ‘You have friends on the Council, they’re all your friends. The Lord Protector himself, he’s one of your best friends.’
Thomas’s brother. It seemed ages ago, when I’d had the ear of Ed. Another world, one that I’d left for an involvement with his brother. That world beckoned now; made its presence felt, loud and clear; was real again. Harry will go on to be brilliant: an excellent husband and father, and a far-sighted, humane influence on the king. He has to do so much, and will do it gloriously. He is truly God’s gift. No one is going to go against God to put a stop to him. I asked him, ‘Who knows about this?’
‘No one.’
‘No one?’ Think. ‘Mrs Ashley?’
He half laughed, dismissive,‘ Oh, no.’
I recalled Mrs Ashley’s thinking on the matter of Elizabeth’s conduct: Thomas, overfamiliar. Thomas, red herring, in fact, it now seemed.
Harry urged, ‘You can do this for me, I know you can.’
I stood up. ‘Oh, I’m sure I can help you,’ I said, ‘but first, I have to ask: do you have Elizabeth’s letters to you, here at Sudeley?’ He said he did. ‘I need all the letters,’ I said, ‘yours to her and hers to you,’ and raised a hand to silence the inevitable objection. I didn’t want to read them: that was the last thing I wanted to do. ‘Council will need to be shown that this comes from her as much as from you,’ I lied, as I began extinguishing our candles. And now for the truth: ‘I really, really need to have that evidence, Harry.’
I could go to Thomas now: I was alone. I wasn’t going to stay there, though. Not now; not after this. I needed to think. But
I had to tell him that I wasn’t coming, rather than simply fail to turn up. I couldn’t risk him coming looking for me. He’d already be there, in our little room, was my guess. Not long after I’d gone, he’d have made his own excuses for leaving the hall, probably hinting at joining staff in the kitchens for card games. He had little need to lay false trails, to go to his room and pretend to go to bed; he was less answerable to his own attendants than I was to Kate’s. I departed from Harry in the direction of my room, before switching route. Outside, the full moon lit my way, and then, sure enough, there was the suggestion of candlelight in our little window.
Inside, Thomas was sitting on the mattress. ‘What is it?’ he asked, smile vanishing, as soon as I entered the room.
Having just come from Harry, I was full of it. Back pressed to the door, I gave him the gist of what Harry had confided. I had no concerns about Thomas keeping this secret: he was already sworn to secrecy, with me, albeit on a different matter. He looked unsurprised, though. ‘You knew?’
He seemed to have to consider how to answer. ‘Well, he had sort of half broached the subject with me.’
‘When?’ Fury flared inside me. ‘You didn’t say!’
‘To you?’ He laughed it off.‘You bet I didn’t.’Then, offering his hand, ‘Come here.’
‘No!’ Instinct backed me harder into the door.
‘It was just the other day,’ he added, as if that made it better. As if, perhaps, given more time, he might have reconsidered and told me, tipped me off that my son was risking his life.
What I had to know was, ‘Have you said anything to anyone?’ and again, before he’d even had a chance to reply, ‘Thomas? Think: to anyone?’
‘No!’ He acted affronted: ‘Why would I betray Harry’s trust? And, anyway, I didn’t know; he’d half broached it, I said.’
‘Do you think anyone knows?’
‘No.’ Confident.
The Sixth Wife Page 18