The Sixth Wife

by Suzannah Dunn

  Having taken so much of Ed’s new-found concern for his niece, I cut him short. We should address the state of her finances, I said, before he left. Clear enough indication that I knew there was something else to be discussed and we should get on with it.

  I’d succeeded in shutting him up; when he began again, he did so in a different tone. ‘So, here I am,’ he admitted, ‘investigating my own brother.’ Adding, ruefully, ‘It has to be done.’

  ‘It does?’

  ‘I’m told it does.’ Drily. Oh, how times have changed: Ed, under orders now. And done well, too, he didn’t say. Conveniently for Council, this can be made a test of Ed’s loyalty, but, inconveniently for Ed, it’s probably not one that he can pass, whatever he does and however well he does it. Because this is how it happens in our world: people smell blood. One Seymour down and just one more to go, then that’s the end of the Seymours and your own family is a step nearer the king. No matter that Ed’s a good man. These days, a good man has as many enemies as a bad man. Which Ed must know. The shadowing under his eyes suggested so. His dreadful wife will know it, too. I doubt she’s much comfort to him when he returns home after a day of this kind of work. She’s probably already packed.

  ‘What with everything else’ – gesturing at the door: his niece? – ‘we haven’t actually ever talked, have we, you and I, about what happened at Sudeley last summer.’ He looked down at his hands, flexed his frozen fingers. ‘I do appreciate that you might not want to. Might not want to have to think about it.’ With a sigh, he gave up on his fingers, looked up at me, frank and sad. ‘You might prefer to put it behind you, dreadful time that it was.’ He added, unnecessarily, ‘The loss of your dear friend.’

  Not our. He could have said our. He was distancing himself. Even here, in front of me. And that would be the doing of his wife, is my guess. Done at the urging of his wife. Distance yourself from the tragic dowager queen, the mess she made of her life in the end. Done at the urging of his appalling wife, perhaps, but done nonetheless and in front of me. He should reconsider his loyalties. He leaned forwards, for me to confide in him. ‘What did you witness, Cathy?’

  I wondered what he wanted me to say. Not so long ago, I would have been able to ask him, just ask, but that time has gone. Was he hoping to build the case against his brother, or undermine it? Or did he perhaps want the truth, if only just for himself? The truth of what his errant brother had or hadn’t been involved in. Because, after all, Thomas was his brother, his boyhood companion, even if – I imagined – they hadn’t in fact been great companions. Thomas was the man with whom Ed shared his own history, and now Thomas faced a pitiless, vengeful death. Wouldn’t Ed want to know what his brother was really about to die for?

  He wasn’t asking, though, and anyway I couldn’t tell him; I had to stick to my story. ‘Nothing.’ I made sure to sound surprised.

  He echoed me: ‘Nothing?’ Same tone: ‘You don’t think Thomas did what he’s accused of?’

  ‘That’s not what I said.’ He was playing into my hands. I stressed the crucial distinction, the one through which my boys and I could slip to freedom: ‘I said I saw nothing.’

  He was genuinely incredulous. ‘You were at the very heart of that household, and you saw nothing?’

  ‘Ed’ - my turn to lean forwards, for emphasis – ‘what I saw – who I saw, all I saw – was Kate. I had no interest in Elizabeth, in what she was up to.’ Never a truer word. ‘And as for Thomas…’ I shrugged to imply that it was much the same for Thomas, but then threw in, ‘What I saw was no more than the usual.’

  He bit. ‘The usual?’

  Gently does it. ‘Oh, you know…’

  He cocked his head: Go on.

  ‘Thomas being overfamiliar.’

  ‘With Elizabeth?’

  ‘Yes’ – who else? – ‘with Elizabeth.’ A flash of anger at Thomas. He certainly hadn’t helped himself. He should have been more cautious. But that was Thomas, wasn’t it. Thoughtless towards those around him, careless of the consequences for others. Why should I care about the consequences for him? I can’t afford to, not with my Harry at stake.

  ‘How, exactly?’

  So I listed some instances: the early-morning river walk, making no mention of tag-along Jane Grey; the hair-plaiting session, omitting Mrs Ashley’s inept supervision; Elizabeth sitting in Thomas’s lap as if it was something that I, alone, had come across; and the chasing around the bedroom as if I’d witnessed it for myself.

  He remained expressionless, then asked, ‘Was Kate concerned?’

  ‘She said not.’

  ‘She said not? You discussed it?’

  Witheringly: ‘Of course we discussed it. We were best friends, weren’t we.’

  He was chastened, uneasy, apologetic: ‘I mean, she raised the subject?’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘How? Why?’

  ‘Mrs Ashley had concerns.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘About what I’ve just told you,’ and that was all he was going to get from me. What I’d told him was fairly common knowledge, so I was on safe ground. To go any further would lay me open to doubts, to questions.

  He frowned, puzzled. ‘But Kate did send Elizabeth away. Why would she have done that, unless she was worried?’

  I repeated the explanation that Kate had always offered. ‘A baby was about to be born in that household. Elizabeth had to go away so that she could get on with her studies, free from distraction.’

  ‘But she didn’t send Jane Grey away.’

  ‘Jane Grey is never distracted.’

  He couldn’t help but half smile at that. He couldn’t dispute it. After a pause, he stopped the questions and instead told me something. ‘Thomas was trying to contact Elizabeth again, just before his arrest, you know.’

  My blood ambushed my heart. ‘I didn’t, no.’

  ‘We can only presume that it was a renewed attempt to get her to marry him.’ Fingertips to his temple, as if calming a pain. ‘He never learns, does he. He’ll never stop.’

  ‘No,’ I agreed, although of course I knew differently. He’d have been trying to get to her to square their stories. Whereas me: he hadn’t tried to reach me, to negotiate or plead with me. He’d given up on me before he’d even started. Probably his only wise move ever. I asked Ed,‘What’s Elizabeth saying?’ He’d tell me, I knew. In his view, we were old friends, and although I might bristle at being questioned, we were on the same side. He’d share what he knew.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Absolutely nothing, and I don’t think she ever will.’ He shook his head in wonderment.‘She’s smart, that one.’

  I’d been right to rely on her saving her own skin. In that, we’re alike; in that, we understand each other.

  ‘Some performance, she’s giving us,’ he said. ‘Icily polite, but outwitting us all.’

  ‘Maybe there’s genuinely nothing to tell.’ Made to sound like musing, but in fact a probing to see how much he knows. ‘Maybe they really were just friends.’

  ‘No, something went on.’ He spoke as if this was a mystery for us to share.‘ Something was going on, Cathy.’ The faintest of smiles appeared in his eyes. ‘Don’t forget, I’ve a lifetime’s experience of my brother, and I can tell you that whenever there’s any suggestion that he’s been involved in some wrongdoing, it’ll be true. And what’s more, it’ll be worse than you imagined.’

  Determined to return the smile, I found myself unable to hold his gaze.

  ‘Mrs Ashley will be the one to tell us. She’s done her best at maintaining a silence – I have to say, she’s done admirably for Elizabeth – but she’ll be the one to crack.’

  What does Mrs Ashley know? Nothing, has been my guess, my gamble, but – crucial, this – she thinks she does. That will have been Elizabeth’s doing, to keep her much loved but fusspot governess at bay.

  ‘You know she’s in the Tower?’

  I nodded. I’d heard. Mrs Ashley, busy with her embroidery in one of the Tower’s river
side rooms. Nowhere near Elizabeth, thank God, for any belated confidences.

  ‘Well, now she’s in a dungeon.’

  ‘A dungeon? Mrs Ashley?’

  He held up his hands: Not my decision.

  Unfortunately, I could believe it: Ed, excluded now from decision-making. ‘That’s repugnant, Ed.’

  His hands came together as if in prayer, then to his lips, then they opened and he dipped his face into them. Looking up with red-rubbed eyes, he continued, ‘As I say, I think it’ll get them what they want.’ Then, apparently as an afterthought, ‘I’m expected to talk to your boys.’

  Was it an afterthought? Why mention a dungeon and, in the next breath, my sons? Steady, I warned myself. You’re doing it again: you’re imagining it, the threat you heard. ‘Why? They were never there.’

  He corrected, patiently: ‘They were sometimes there.’

  ‘Almost never,’ I countered, but reined myself in, aware that I was protesting too hard. ‘It’ll be pointless, your talking to them. They’re boys, Ed, they’re just boys: they’re oblivious. We’ve talked about it, of course, the three of us.’A lie.‘We’ve talked about what’s happening to Thomas and why, and frankly they’re as puzzled as I am. Interviewing them will be a waste of your time and,’ I reminded him, a touch brutally, ‘time is something you don’t have.’

  He allowed it with one sharp nod, then stood, giving me a tight little smile. ‘And with that…’

  I said it for him: ‘A quick look in at the nursery.’ He seemed surprised to be directed there alone, but I explained that Mary is a fearful child. With good reason: losing one parent within days of her birth and now, four months later, the other. I explained that she doesn’t like a lot of people around her, and he huffed at what he judged to be absurd. ‘But you’re not “people”, you’re her…’

  Yes, indeed, ‘Her what? I’m nothing to her, Ed, I’m no one. She doesn’t know me. Her various members of staff – and God knows there are enough of them – ‘are family to her.’

  And so now he’s over there, across the courtyard in the wing of my house that the baby and her nursery staff have practically taken over, and he’ll be keen to do what’s expected of him. Playing up to the ladies, in his awkward way, and cajoling the little girl. Hoping to prove himself – not least in his own eyes – to be the good uncle, the family man. And in a few minutes he’ll be back over here, exhilarated by his efforts, exclaiming how she looks like one or the other of her parents. I can’t see it, myself. She might have no connection to either, for all that I can see.

  Perhaps that’s how her questions will start. It’s something she’ll want to know one day, isn’t it? Do I look like my mother, do I look like my father? By then, there’ll probably be something I can say: You have your mother’s smile; or, You have your father’s eyes. She’ll want to know about her parents and it’ll be left to me to tell her. Kate: well, that’s easy; there’s plenty I can say about Kate, all of which will have her daughter feeling special and proud. Thomas, though? He felt that we understood something about each other, didn’t he. He felt that we recognised something in each other. But Thomas, I’ll tell her, I barely knew, and there’s some truth in it.

  Epilogue

  Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk was indeed Katherine Parr’s closest friend, but her relationship with Katherine’s husband as depicted in this novel is of my own imagining. In every other aspect, I have aimed for historical accuracy.

  At the time of Thomas Seymour’s trial, there were rumours that Elizabeth Tudor had been pregnant and had had a miscarriage or stillbirth or a baby. She’d been ill and unable or unwilling to leave the Dennys’ Hertfordshire home during the summer of 1548. A local midwife, it was said, had claimed to have been taken to a secret location to deliver a baby of a young noblewoman who was in disguise. Such rumours persist to this day, the most recent claim (in 2006, exciting the attention of the British press) being that William Shakespeare was the child of Thomas Seymour and Elizabeth Tudor.

  Thomas Seymour was indicted on thirty-three counts of treason and beheaded in 1549, on the day his daughter was seven months old. (His brother, Edward Seymour, suffered the same fate in 1552, on trumped-up charges.) He had been described by one of his contemporaries, Sir John Hayward, as ‘Fierce in courage, courtly in fashion, in personage stately and in voice magnificent…but somewhat empty in matter.’ Hugh Latimer (Catherine of Suffolk’s chaplain, and Katharine Parr’s close friend) attended his execution and said that he died ‘very dangerously, irksomely, horribly’. There is no mention of his daughter, Mary, beyond infancy; she is believed to have died as a small child, although a popular myth held that she had survived into adulthood, married Sir Edward Bushell and had descendants. Historians consider it extremely unlikely, though, that the daughter of a dowager queen could disappear from public record.

  In 1551, when they were students at Cambridge, Catherine of Suffolk’s two sons died suddenly on the same day from ‘sweating sickness’, an almost always fatal flu-like illness, specific to the Tudor period, which killed within hours of the first symptoms. Catherine reached the bedside of only one of them – the younger, Charles – in time.

  In 1553, Catherine married one of her own staff, her gentleman usher, Richard Bertie, and theirs was a long and happy marriage, despite having to escape into exile in the Low Countries during Mary Tudor’s reign. Catherine had two more children, Susan and Peregrine, both of whom survived into adulthood. Peregrine grew up to be a happily married father of six and a valued member of Queen Elizabeth’s court, but he had a troubled and controversial early adulthood (not least when he backed away from a marriage with one of Bess Cavendish’s daughters in favour of the tempestuous Lady Mary Vere) and his relationship with his mother was fraught. They were estranged at the time of her death in 1580. She is buried (with Richard Bertie, who died eighteen months later) in the fourteenth-century church at Spilsbury in Lincolnshire. Her biographer, Evelyn Read, describes her as ‘singularly modern in the midst of the sixteenth century, modern in her quiet assumption that in addition to home-making and caring for her children a woman could and should make a contribution to the spiritual well-being of her people, in her courage and outspokeness, and, above all, modern in her refusal to accept beliefs and customs simply because they had always been accepted.’ (See Catherine, Duchess of Suffolk, Jonathan Cape, 1962.)

  Sudeley Castle was beseiged and wrecked during the Civil War, and remained ruined for two hundred years before new owners began restoration. The mediaeval buildings of the inner court, including the banqueting hall, have been left evocatively as ruins. During the Second World War, Sudeley Castle was used as a prisoner-of-war camp and shelter for part of the Tate’s collection of paintings. Nowadays, it is open to the public (Katherine Parr’s apartment only by special arrangement), and on display there – looking as good as new – is princess Elizabeth’s christening gown and cradle-canopy (discovered at Sudeley Castle, with other of Katherine Parr’s belongings).The Tudor formal garden was uncovered in front of the banqueting hall during the 1860s, and the grounds have been extensively restored.

  For the ruined chapel, John Ruskin recommended ‘no restoration; a pile of mossy stones a fitter monument for Queen Katherine Parr than the most gorgeous church that wealth could erect’. In 1782, a man discovered her lead coffin among the ruins, and opened it to find her undecayed; he took a sample of the red cloth of her dress and a lock of her auburn hair. Over the next ten years, the coffin was unearthed and opened on three occasions by curious locals, before being reburied upside down by drunken labourers. Public dissatisfaction with the situation led to a successful search for it in 1817, and a skeleton and a mass of ivy roots was discovered inside. It was placed into a vault in the restored church of St Mary’s (Ruskin’s advice had been ignored), and in 1861 a new and magnificent altar-tomb was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott and carved by S. Birnie Philip, who were also responsible for the Albert Memorial.

  Katherine Parr’s biographer, Anth
ony Martienssen, credits her with having rescued Elizabeth Tudor from obscurity and educating and encouraging her to develop into the politically astute young woman she became. He claims, ‘It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that without Katherine Parr, Queen Elizabeth would not have been the Queen she was nor her reign the epic it became.’ (Queen Katherine Parr, Secker & Warburg Ltd, 1973).

  Historians have noted that despite all they shared (their protestantism, their loving memories of Katherine Parr), relations between Queen Elizabeth and Catherine of Suffolk were only ever cordial at best.

  Acknowledgements

  Many thanks to my agent, Antony Topping, without whom this novel would never have got off the ground in any sense; Venetia Butterfield for taking the novel on, and Clare Smith for then taking it over and making me feel so welcome as one of her writers; Annabel Wright and Essie Cousins, my editors at HarperCollins, for a job beautifully done; and Jo Adams and Carol Painter for so often lending me their cottage, which has made such a difference to my life.

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © Suzannah Dunn 2007

  Suzannah Dunn asserts the moral right to

  be identified as the author of this work

  A catalogue record for this book

  is available from the British Library

  ISBN 13: 978-0-00-723242-0

  ISBN 10: 0-00-723 242-X

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