The Sixth Wife

by Suzannah Dunn

  Instead, outside Kate’s door, there was a silent, night-watched hallway and staircase, and then deep Gloucestershire darkness. We were getting away with something, was how I felt; and I knew she felt it too. After all that we’d been through in our lives, we’d made it, we’d made it here, where the birth would be Kate’s occasion; this baby, Kate’s, not England’s. We were on the dark edge of the world with nobody looking over us but the stars, and if we chose to tell no one about this birth, then no one, for a long time, would know.

  Another night, she confided to me, ‘I’m not scared,’ and then sounded scared when she added, ‘D’you think I should be?’

  There was only one answer to that, to be truthful: ‘Well, it wouldn’t help, would it.’ And although I knew very well that disaster could strike any birthing woman, I couldn’t imagine Kate running into trouble. Statuesque, capable Kate: surely a baby would slip from her with ease. And, anyway, just about every woman I’d ever known had survived. The exception was Thomas’s sister, Jane Seymour, but her fate seemed like a story, had an inevitability to it: the new, doomed queen sacrificed for the longed-for prince.

  Kate said, ‘We’ve a good history, we Parrs. My mother survived, so did my sister.’ She added,‘And I’m so lucky that I have Thomas: if anything goes wrong – for me, I mean – he’s there for our baby.’

  What a prospect, was my immediate reaction: he’ll lead him or her astray.

  ‘And I know he’ll be marvellous,’ Kate whispered.

  But she didn’t mention any possible role for me. Names, too: I wondered for whom this baby – if a girl – would be named. ‘Catherine’ was unlikely, though, being her own name and also being rather old-fashioned, a name of our mother’s generation. So clearly a saint’s name. The saint: the ‘bride of Christ’, no less. When Kate and I first knew each other, we shared our hatred of our name, sniggering together over that pathetic old prayer: A husband, St Catherine, A handsome one, St Catherine, A rich one, St Catherine, A nice one, St Catherine, And soon, St Catherine. St Catherine, patron saint of unmarried girls. Well, we were hardly that: me, married from girlhood; Kate, married already several times.

  I did wonder if she’d call a girl baby ‘Elizabeth’, but that, now, perhaps, was doubtful. No word, either, on who would be godmother. I hoped she’d know that I’d do my very best for her child. She knew I was good with boys. And girls? Well, a girl, I would champion; I’m all for girls. I said to her, as a kind of prompt, ‘I’ve been lucky, knowing’ – because we’d talked it over, many times – ‘that you’d step in for my boys, if anything happened to me.’

  But she just said, quite flatly, ‘Nothing’ll ever happen to you, Cathy. You’re invincible.’

  Thirty-seven

  Kate went into labour a week or so earlier than we’d expected, and the onset was gradual. The heaviness of which she’d been complaining for days – staggering around, almost – became, she said, a downwards draw. She began to pace, pausing every few minutes to clutch a bedpost and exhale slowly. For the first few pacings, the first few puffings, she was denying it could be labour – ‘It’s in my back’ – but Mary Odell managed to catch her and unlace her sufficiently to feel her belly. A slow smile from Mary, a flush to her cheeks. ‘Oh, yes,’ she enthused, ‘feel,’ and grasped one of Kate’s hands, flattened it beneath hers on the bump.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ echoed Kate.

  And so there they were, the two of them, begun on their adventure.

  Progress was slow, though. Labour kept coming and going, over a day, a night, another day and another night. For want of anything else to do, and cajoled by Mary, we attendants followed the old routine – the card-playing, the instrument-playing – albeit half-heartedly, distractedly. Mealtimes, none of us managed much, and Kate declined to join us although sometimes Mary could tempt her to a snack. During the nights, we dozed; Kate for the odd hour or two at a time. I got up on the bed with her and rubbed the small of her back, which was where, she said, the pain was. When her labouring began to pick up pace, she’d disappear down into her gown – she was still dressed, still insisted upon being dressed – crouching down and folding over, humming a single note, until the contraction passed. It was all so calm and under control, nothing like what I remembered of my own labours.

  And then, quite suddenly, her labour intensified. After all that time waiting for it, I somehow missed the actual crucial change. In the blink of an eye she was kneeling up, facing the headboard and gripping the top of it. She was out of her gown and into her nightdress. Mary Odell was wearing an apron. Kate looked wide-eyed and…well, studious. Not ‘serious’, there was no solemnity to it. Studious: ready, rapt.

  I, too, was taken up, now, in the excitement. Kate groaned through her contractions and I swear there was considerable satisfaction in those groans. Her round eyes shone, blank, inwardly focused, as she anticipated the next contraction and prepared herself to sail on the crest of it. I stood at the side of the bed and held her hand, which seemed to me a useless gesture; but she held on hard and groped after my hand when briefly – on some errand – it went missing. I was thinking, This is going well, this is going well. Daring to think it. Unable to stop myself, even if I’d wanted to.

  Once – only once – I glanced in the direction of the window and there, astonishingly, was the outside world, just as it had always been. The ripe, lazy sunshine of early autumn.

  Sooner than I’d expected – and perhaps I’d never expected it, perhaps I was expecting that we’d go on and on like this, that this was our life, now – Mary Odell announced, thrilled, ‘The head’s there.’ Presumably she’d done one of her almost magically discreet examinations. This news was good to hear, but it was Kate who mattered to me and I couldn’t think of anyone else. The baby, to me, was practically an irrelevancy.

  For Kate, though, the news did the trick, buoyed her up, and she began to smile as if winning at something. And now, although our handholding continued, the delivery of the baby became shared between her and Mary Odell, and I was glad of it, ready to step back. We women urged her onwards and after a couple of false finishes – ‘One more push, just one more,’ said more times than she’d have liked to hear – Mary was talking herself through easing the baby free: ‘Here we are, here…we…’ Suddenly Kate screamed, ‘Somebody help me, please,’ but no one did, there was nothing anyone could do and no time to do it because here was the baby, in a gush of blood.

  ‘It’s a girl,Thomas,’ Kate wailed in mock commiseration when he arrived to see them. She couldn’t care less that she hadn’t produced a son, so obviously relieved was she to have a healthy baby, so obviously delighted to be cradling her. Thomas, too: ‘Oh, well, a boy next time,’ he said as he approached them, but only because he was expected to; said it self-consciously and apologetically, to amuse, which he did. For once, he didn’t irritate me, and I even warmed to him. His brother, for all his good points, wouldn’t have been so pleased had his first-born been a daughter. Perhaps – a flash of optimism – this was how it would be for me, from now on. Perhaps, sometimes, if only sometimes, I could like Thomas as other women do. Perhaps I could accept him for what he is, and like what’s likeable.

  It was nice to be just another lady in a roomful of ladies, a relief not to have to meet Thomas’s eyes or avoid them. Unconventionally, he had been admitted to the room, at his own request and at Kate’s bidding, but naturally he’d had to come unattended. So, he was on his best behaviour, subdued and deferential, eyes only for his wife and child. And what a perfect picture they made, over there in the bed. And what a lot of work that had taken, of which – I was proud of us – he’d be unaware. Before we’d got busy, blood had been pooled and splashed around the bed. We’d taken away bedclothes and carpets, we’d wiped and scrubbed floorboards. Kate was sitting on a deep pile of cloths, which Mary was checking at intervals and changing.

  Having placed a kiss on Kate’s forehead, Thomas turned his attention to the baby, whose red face was closed in sleep. I could see
him move nervously as if to touch her nose, couldn’t see if in fact he did. Then he looked up from the baby into Kate’s eyes and she took it as a question.

  ‘“Mary”, I think,’ she replied.

  He nodded, then said it, savoured it: ‘Mary.’

  Well, well, well. I’d never have guessed: Mary, the ultimate catholic name for this, the ultimate protestant baby.

  Thomas said to the baby, as if announcing it to her: ‘Mary.’

  There were appreciative murmurs from the women around me, and Mary Odell laughed a little, bashful. Smiling, Kate reached for her, put a hand on her arm and said, ‘My elder stepdaughter’s name, too.’ Neatly done, freeing Mary from any embarrassment, any obligation to feel honoured. There was now no telling if the baby was named for our princess or for the midwife, or both. We could think as we liked. Both seemed likely to me. Kate, the diplomat, naming her baby for a woman whom she loved but who persisted in cold-shouldering her, and making for that woman – England’s head catholic – a grand gesture. And Kate, unconventional, giving credit to a servant of whom she was fond and who had helped her.

  Thirty-eight

  I don’t remember much about the following couple of days; I’d say they were unremarkable – nothing much happening, routine tasks – but it’s also true of course that they were remarkable, there being a new, tiny, noisy person among us. We women were busy checking on Kate and the baby: busy, busy, busy keeping them clean and comfortable, changing their clothes and linens, maintaining the fire and the room’s supplies of ale and milk, apples and bread. We’d try to settle the baby, and to reassure Kate whenever it all became too much for her: a fretful baby, aching breasts and stomach cramps, weakness, weariness, and other people’s expectations as to what news they were due or visits they could make. (Jane Grey came dolefully to the door several times every day for news, and one or other of us would talk to her – usually other, if I had anything to do with it.) We introduced the baby to her wet nurse – Alys, wife of one of the carters – and to her nursery, and often took the baby there to allow Kate some much needed rest. We, too, had breaks, going off at intervals; twice I returned to my room and slept for perhaps five or six hours, which was both blissful and disorienting. Kate’s bedroom, peculiar and exhausting though it now was, had become the centre of my world.

  And then everything began to go wrong. Kate was sleeping and I was fitfully doing some needlework, meaning that whilst doing nothing I was working a threaded needle down a pillowcase seam. Agnes was boring Marcella with her marital difficulties. Kate groaned. I looked over – it was daytime, the bed’s hangings were open – to see her face tightened in pain. She was very pale; I wondered whether the pallor was new, or whether she’d been like this before her sleep but I’d only now, belatedly, noticed. Mary Odell, to one side of me, tensed. I asked Kate if she was all right. ‘Just a…pain,’ she managed, blowing into her cheeks and raising her eyebrows to signify its intensity. Then, immediately, again a groan, and this time she tried to curl up, curl over, clamp herself shut. Mary and I were both up and over to her in the same instant. One of Mary’s hands went to Kate’s forehead, as always, and the other eased back the bedcovers as she murmured assurances: Now, let’s see… Reaching down to Kate’s belly, she asked, ‘Would a rub help?’

  Kate nodded meekly but then the pain came again. ‘This is bad, Mary,’ she gasped. ‘Oh, this is bad,’ and was suddenly overwhelmed, despairing, crying. Crying? I was taken aback, actually stepped back. Mary, though, continued, checking with those capable hands of hers – ‘Here? Here?’ – while keeping up the comforting murmurs, promises of ‘a nice poultice’, and ‘something settling to drink’. Kate resisted her, doubled over, eyelids screwed up. I noticed with habitual irritation a bloodstain on the back of her nightdress – it happened whatever we did, however well we padded her – but then noticed something else, a smell. Not the usual flat smell of her blood, which had wafted towards me from time to time in the past couple of days when I’d been attending to her, but something…well, something twisted, complex, dark.

  Mary Odell had noticed it, too, and she was concerned: this I realised later not from what she said, because carefully she said nothing, but from the different manner in which she took the bundles of linen away – indeed, she bundled them away – with the instruction that they were not for laundering but for burning. As if it were a dead baby, I couldn’t help but think with a shudder as I watched one load despatched. What with Kate’s pains, and the dreadful smell, I did begin to fear in my bafflement that the cause of all this could be another baby, a small, forgotten twin come away too late.

  Kate stayed doubled up, crying out and crying, for hours and hours and hours. I rubbed her back, which was all I could do and all I could reach although I knew I was nowhere near the pain. She didn’t want to hold my hand now; she wanted handfuls of bedlinen, which she seized and held fast. I rubbed and rubbed but she remained beyond my reach – there was just a hot, hunched back below my hands. Me, I became nothing but those hands of mine, then nothing but the circles they made. A constant wondering: when will this pass? Her Doctor Huick came, frowning at her from the end of the bed and asking questions that went unanswered by her and guessed at by us. Then he spoke with Mary Odell outside the door. When she returned, I dared to ask her what was wrong. I was still thinking, at the same time as not daring to think, that perhaps something was trapped, or perhaps something had come loose. ‘Bad humours,’ was all she said, confiding it solemnly. She didn’t need to say more; I understood: Kate had some badness inside. She said that Thomas would have to be informed. He wouldn’t – yet – be allowed into the room, of course. I didn’t know whether to envy him for that, or pity him for it. It was dreadful being in that room with her when she was so distressed, but it might be worse, mightn’t it, not to be. Kate hadn’t asked for him, I realised, but she hadn’t asked for anyone or anything. Unable, no doubt, to think through the pain. Me, too: only when Mary mentioned Thomas did I remember that there was also a baby, away in her nursery.

  Sometime later an apothecary – or perhaps his assistant – came to the door with two jugs of infusions and several pots of ointments which were greeted by Mary as if they were old friends. She seemed to know what to do with them, slathering the glimmering grease onto strips of linen. Kate’s pains seemed undiminished; she had taken to baying through them, her face no longer pale but livid. Surely this was the worst of it now. Eventually I was up on the bed with her – me, too, down to my shift – doubled over her, cradling her, although tentatively because she was burning. This was when she began to say my name, and for some reason, no reason, I’d say, I know, I know, although of course I didn’t; how could I? I’d never known anything like this. Mary Odell seemed aware of Kate’s fever: the ointments were made into cold compresses for Kate’s forehead, although they were almost impossible to administer, Kate twisting away from us; and no doubt one or both of the infusions – hard to help her to take – were to cool her down. I was burning and I didn’t have a fever. The room was stifling. I was sick of it, the room: that sickening room, stuffed with carpets, coverlets, cushions, and crammed with hangings. Outside was a garden, lavender heads fussing in the breeze. I was sick of the candle gloom, the shutter shadows, the fire growling in the grate. And the smell, that vile smell.

  I said to Mary, ‘She’s very, very hot.’ Stating the obvious, having to start somewhere.

  ‘She is,’ Mary agreed, gravely, as if it were to be accepted.

  Again, I had to go with the obvious: ‘We need to cool her down.’

  ‘We’re trying.’ Mary’s gaze took mine to the jugs, the grease-plastered dressings. She’d spoken patiently, as if indeed I were her patient and she was doing her best to deal with my distress.

  ‘But the fire,’ I despaired, looking over at it.

  Mary joined me: ‘The fire?’

  ‘It’s hot,’ I insisted.

  She looked blank; would have looked startled, probably, if she’d had the ene
rgy. I watched her struggle with something she took to be self-explanatory, hard to put into words. ‘But it’s purifying,’ she tried. ‘Burning away the bad in the air.’

  I do understand, but… My mother, I remembered, had been derisive of fires in English sickrooms. Regrettably, I had been derisive of her, thinking of her as Spanish, as peculiar, as, well, wrong. Sometimes during her final illness she’d asked me to open her window and I’d refused, but, then, we were in Southwark and the air was foul, full of contagion. This, here, though, was Sudeley: outside Kate’s room was the sweet air of Sudeley.What harm could it do? Think of lavender, the scent of it: the heat of it in the air and yet its coolness.

  A memory from childhood, one that was new to me: I was in bed, I’d been coughing and coughing, had had long nights of coughing. My mother told me that the doctor had arrived to see me and I was puzzled because he’d only just visited. This, though, turned out to be a different doctor; this one spoke incomprehensibly to my mother, and she to him. A Spanish doctor, it occurs to me now, and he could only have been Catherine of Aragon’s own, the Queen’s Physician. My mother opened the window – oh, the lovely sound of it opening, the wrenching of the catch, a shove and then its squeaky give – and it was as if my lungs themselves had been opened.

  So, me, who’d considered myself as English as a solid oak door, as English as a sopping hedgerow: the fleck of Spanish blood that had been sunk somewhere in me was welling up. I was going to get that window opened. I put it to Mary: ‘We should open the window.’