The Sixth Wife (15 page)

Kate would be very pregnant, I knew, by the time of my next visit. That was how I thought of her, once I was back home: becoming very pregnant. Definitely pregnant, at around six, seven months: the bump a visible presence but not so ridiculous as to look unreal. Perfectly pregnant. That was from the outside looking on, but for Kate, too, surely, it would be the best phase, after the sickness and tiredness but before the incapacity. I was intrigued by the prospect of being able to gauge the physical change in her, to
see
her
different
. Here at last was something by which even she couldn’t remain untouched. And for her, of course, the physical changes would be more profound than anything I’d see. Someone would be keeping constant company with her: someone who’d wake perhaps moments later than her – slow to stir, a tiny sleepyhead – but then be hard to settle at bedtime and need a murmured talking-to, a steadying hand.
A small, invisible person animated during conversations and comically excited by the first mouthful of every meal. More than a decade on, I still miss that intimacy. Perhaps I always will.

So there I was, looking forward to seeing Kate again, to spending time with her. I can’t explain it, other than to say that I was two people, one snug inside the other. I was doing a balancing act, by necessity. This was my life now: this is what I did. It could be done.

Thomas and I had the briefest contact between my March and June visits to Sudeley: just one polite meeting, at my London house. Kate and I, though, were busy writing to each other as ever: a letter always on the go, a letter always on its week-long journey with a carrier. The difference now being that whenever I received one from her, I dreaded opening it, dreaded discovering that she knew. What would such a letter from her contain? I simply couldn’t guess how she’d be, and that in itself was terrifying enough. Would she be cold, brief, requesting no further contact? Or a whirl of fury, recriminations and, perhaps even – who knows? – long-held resentments. The latter was unlikely, I felt, but, then, what did I know? I’d never known a pregnant Kate, had I, married to a man whom she’d very much wanted to marry. Oh, a disappointed Kate, yes, making clear her disappointment: her, I’d come across. I’d heard that rather patronising tone of hers. I’d heard it occasionally, directed at other people, but I didn’t delude myself that I’d be getting away with a mere upbraiding.

Quill in hand, I still burned to confide in her, anticipating her advice and, yes, her admonishments. Longing for them, in fact. I wanted her to be my best friend, in other words.
I wondered how I’d explain myself, but never got further than,
Kate, just…just let me do this, let me have him for those minutes every day when you don’t want him
. And, put like that, was it so unreasonable?
I want, I want
…I’d think hard but always only come up with,
I want the scent of him on my own skin
.

Whenever a letter came from her, I’d skim to see that it wasn’t
that
letter, then take a breath and skim again for mention of Thomas. If she didn’t mention him, or barely did so, I was uneasy. Were they drifting apart, or even arguing? Did she know, or nearly know? I was fearful of the undercurrents between them, of which I was sharply aware I knew nothing. If she did mention him, I’d expect to have some reaction, a jolt or flush, but in fact I never felt anything. Felt hollow. I’d be expecting, too, to feel some resentment of their daily life together; but then, whenever it was mentioned, it seemed unimportant. If I was interested at all, I wanted
his
account and felt impatient with her, with her words for getting in the way. Perhaps she no longer seemed a reliable witness because, to put it bluntly, she didn’t even know something as basic as what her husband was up to.

Her letters contained household news, pregnancy news, and family news, which, a number of times, included mention of Thomas’s disputes with his brother and his brother’s wife over the leasing and sale of Seymour-family properties. The unresolved business of the queen’s jewels still rankled. On a happier note, there would be something about a book she’d read, or a debate of which she’d heard or in which she was involved. There was always mention of the weather, and usually something – supposedly profound or funny – that Elizabeth had said. And about this time, there was trouble
with one of her dogs, Damson: his misdemeanours figured, too, in most of those letters.

And there was nothing, nothing, nothing from Thomas. And no clue as to what that might mean. Or not mean. I couldn’t write to him, and he knew it – or would have known it, had he thought about it, and I couldn’t be sure that he had. I never did wonder what we might have written in those unwritten letters.

When we’d parted, he’d asked with some urgency, ‘Will you come again soon?’

‘Well,’ I’d said,‘Kate does need me.’ I didn’t know why I’d said it, and, as perhaps I’d intended, he bridled.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘there’s that.’

We were standing at the foot of our little stone staircase.

‘Are you coming to London?’ I asked.

‘I expect so.’Then,‘London’s risky, Cathy. It’s not…
here
.’

Here
, which was also Kate’s home. It would have been nice to be together somewhere else. There was Grimsthorpe,
my
non-London home, but we both knew he could never manufacture a reason to be there.

In the end, he arrived unannounced at my London house one evening in early May, ostensibly to be sociable as the husband of my best friend and to bring me news of her. It had been a long day – dogged rain and a collapsed roof in the stables, a skirmish between two footmen in which a knife was brandished, then news of the serious illness of Joanna’s baby back at Grimsthorpe. We exchanged polite conversation for a half-hour or so. If we seemed ill at ease with each other, then that was only what our attendants would have expected, because we didn’t really like each other, did we? Everyone knew that. And I began to wonder if they were
right. I sat there, fire-flushed in my least flattering gown, my heart a wet sponge. He looked no better; in fact, he looked ridiculous, overdressed. I felt that I should be able to conjure the Thomas I’d known, but that vain imposter remained there across the room from me. What had happened in March seemed impossible, inexplicable. Had I been somehow hoodwinked? If so, by whom? Had it been him at fault or me? Had I imagined everything?

It was with dismay and relief that eventually I accompanied him down into the courtyard to see him off. There was nothing untoward in his taking my hand as he stood beside his horse; what was shocking was how hard he held it, which, of course, only he and I knew. There, with everyone around us, he gripped my hand and forced me to look up into his eyes, which, I realised, I’d so far avoided. And there, in those eyes, was that utter lack of compromise. What he said – all he said – was, ‘When are you coming to Sudeley?’ He’d lowered his voice just slightly; he could still have been heard by anyone if they’d chosen to listen and, of course, they’d have heard nothing but an innocent question.

I managed, ‘Soon.’

He tightened his grip, both affirmation and threat. ‘Soon,’ he repeated, releasing me and swinging up onto his horse, sparking the commotion of hooves on cobbles. I was burning again, the wick relit.

When we arrived at Sudeley in June, Kate came to the drawbridge to greet us. Even up close, her pregnancy barely showed beneath her stomacher, an extra panel of black satin. What was obviously bigger, though, and beyond the very best tailoring, was her newly broad face. In it the little nose and mouth looked smaller still and those eyes nothing much. Odd to see such a transformation. She was with Elizabeth and Jane. Jane was still no bigger than a six-year-old, but dressed as usual in adult black. Unsmiling, she seemed lost in thought. With Jane, I was beginning to understand, thinking took precedence over social niceties. Elizabeth, by contrast, was avid, and she glittered. In the late sunlight, her eyes were honey-coloured and her skin glowed like the flesh of a freshly bitten-into red apple.

I said something like, ‘You all look so well!’

And Elizabeth enthused, ‘Yes, doesn’t she look fabulous?’
stepping backwards and then from side to side, arms open, as if showing off Kate but coincidentally making quite a display of herself.

Kate looked anything but fabulous when she came to find me minutes later in my room, where a bath was being prepared for me. With a touch to my arm, she said, ‘Come for a walk.’ She led me down the stairs and into her own garden at a brisk pace, her ladies lagging; she was clearly after some privacy for us. I was watching for Thomas, whom I’d not yet seen and of whom there’d been no mention; I didn’t know whether or not I wanted us to come across him.

Stopping eventually at a bench – ‘Here’ – Kate acknowledged her breathlessness with splayed fingertips on her breastbone and a raised eyebrow. My turn to touch her arm, in concern. She smiled, shook her head.The bench was down a narrow path all of its own, and deep in an alcove; Marcella and Agnes remained at a distance, talking.We sat, and I waited. Once I’d have welcomed any confidence from her, but now I was wary.

She launched in with, ‘Thomas is buying Jane’s wardship.’ Her hands were linked on her stomacher. I looked up again at her flat, pallid face. She appeared to be asking something of me. But I was struggling to understand. Thomas would have known how we – how
she
, his own wife – regarded the trade in wardships. Much of Kate’s life had been and still was dedicated to circumventing it, first for herself and latterly for her various loved ones. And me,
me:
well, I’d
been
a ward, and if I’d been fine, that was only because I’d been lucky. And Thomas
knew
all that. Had he gone mad in my absence? I could only manage, ‘What does he say?’ Meaning,
How on earth does he explain himself?

As if merely quoting, she replied,‘He says it’s for the best.’

I gave no response because the answer made no sense to me, but she shrugged as if I’d said something.

So I said, ‘I’ll talk to him,’ because that, at a guess, was what she was expecting from me: me, who never shied from confrontation. And suddenly I was desperate to do so. He’d let me down, coming up with such a scheme; he was letting
me
down.

But Kate blew away my offer with a sigh. ‘Cathy,’ she said, but then said nothing more. I was aware of my held breath. ‘It’s not
that,’
she tried, then tried again, ‘It’s not
just
that.’ There was nothing to read in her clear, round eyes. ‘He’d made two down payments before I discovered what he was up to.’ She looked down at her hands, the eyes gone under colourless lashes. ‘That’s what bothers me: the secrecy. It’s that,’ she said again, but quieter, quite lost.

I had an excuse to go and find Thomas, and I adopted it wholeheartedly, powered by fury at him. I didn’t care that I still hadn’t had my bath and was unrefreshed after the day’s hard ride. I found him in the hall with his master glazier, looking up at and discussing one of the immense windows. I’ve never known anyone keener on heraldic glass than Thomas. At Sudeley, any window big enough was set with elaborate rosettes of emerald, ruby and cat’s-eye yellow, even if illuminating nothing but some corner of an obscure staircase. Quite whom they honoured was in most cases a mystery to me. It took me a while to realise that it wasn’t me at fault, that they were in fact unreadable: a mishmash of motifs borrowed from faintly related families. Initially, that had seemed typical of Thomas, to me: pitiful, if not despicable, and I’d wondered how Kate could turn a blind eye to it.
And then I’d seen it differently, seen Thomas as loving the finer things in life and being playful, being irreverent, barefacedly making the most of his situation. Now, I didn’t know, I just didn’t know. There he was: less striking than I’d remembered but more…real. His hair was a shade darker than I’d remembered and a tad too long. His face had picked up touches of the sun. I wondered how bad I looked after my day of riding.

I’d halted pointedly at the door. Noticing me, he brought his discussion to an end, and, as soon as we were alone, strode towards me, smiling, arms outstretched: very Thomas. My blood eddied but I told myself to stand firm. He’d lost a tooth, I saw, a small bottom tooth; my heart snagged on its absence, the pain and trouble of it about which I’d known nothing. Grasping my own hands behind my back, I said what I’d come to say: ‘You’re buying Jane.’

He stopped mid-stride and his exaggerated sigh spoke of weariness at having to explain himself. I hated the implication, my bracketing with Kate:
Oh, you women!
He said, ‘Frances and Henry are awful.’ Her parents. ‘You
know
that, Cathy. You’d rather they decided her fate?’

‘Buying
her,’ I reiterated, carefully. ‘Can’t you just…be like Kate? Be…kind?’ Be a mentor. Do your best.

‘Well’ – the slow smile – ‘that’s all very nice…’ Meaning: unrealistic, ultimately useless.

I switched to, ‘What does
Jane
think?’

He inclined his head and tried, ‘Do we have to discuss this
now?

I pressed on: ‘Yes.’

He spoke calmly: ‘Jane thinks she could make an excellent Protestant queen, just as Kate was.’

‘She’s
ten
.’

‘She won’t always be ten. She’s a very grown-up ten.’

I shook my head. ‘This is about
your
future. You tried to marry a princess but were warned off, so you married an ex-queen, and now you’ll go one better and
make
a queen, so you can be almost
a father
to a queen.’

He shrugged, feigned indifference. ‘If that also happens to be true, are you going to deny it’s a good idea?’

So, there it was. Take it or leave it,
This is who I am
.

I took it, had to. ‘It’s an unworkable idea: that’s what it is, Thomas. Kate was last in line for an old king whom no one else, abroad, would ever marry. It’s different for his son. Eddie won’t need to settle for an English queen.’

‘It
is
different,’ he allowed,‘but not impossible. I’ll just have to make sure it happens.’

I was scathing. ‘And you think you can do that.’

He declined to rise to it. ‘I think I can do that.’ Then he tried again: ‘Cathy, do we -’

‘Yes,’ I insisted, because I so badly wanted to insist on something.
‘Yes.’

And suddenly he was asking me, ‘What did you think of Charles’s motives when he married you?’

That floored me, but I didn’t let him see. ‘I understood them.’

‘And they were…?’

I wasn’t having this. ‘You know what they were.’

He nodded. ‘The usual: land and heirs.’

I argued, ‘He was a very nice man.’

‘I’m sure he was.’

‘No, I
mean
he was a
very
nice man.’

‘Cathy
, I’m sure he
was
.’

‘Life goes on,’ I blazed on in Charles’s defence, ‘and it’s hard, at court.’

He spread his arms to indicate a truce, to make clear that – see? – we were on the same side.

A heartbeat’s pause and I reined myself in. ‘People were quick to suspect…’What? I didn’t need too strong a word, because people had been, on the whole, forgiving of Charles. ‘…Insincerity.’ No comparison to the general feeling about Thomas, which was much more damning. ‘But just because he married me so quickly didn’t mean he’d loved Mary Rose any less.’

‘No.’

‘Nor me,’ I added quickly. ‘Nor me any less, in time.’

‘No.’

‘It was just…’
Different
. And there I was, landed on familiar ground, on our ground, Thomas’s and mine. There was no sense of homecoming, though. I changed the subject: ‘You didn’t tell Kate. You didn’t tell her that you were buying Jane’s wardship.’

‘Well’ – he seemed to be speaking over my head – ‘I don’t tell her everything, do I? I don’t tell her anything that she won’t like.’

That was a slap in the face.
Me
, he meant:
I
was what Kate wouldn’t like. I shrugged – giving up on him – before I turned on my heel, and he let me go. Banging through the door, I almost bumped into Harry and Charlie, who were rushing in, breathing hard. ‘What are you doing?’ I barked at them, venting my fury before I could catch myself. They were still caked in mud, practically creaking with it, and they had no excuse for having not yet been near their baths.

Harry reared back, affronted, to glare at me. ‘Finding
Thomas.’ As if it was what they always did first at Sudeley Perhaps it was.

I stepped aside, nothing to say.

Charlie hesitated – ‘Mama?’ – and I touched his arm as I strode away.

I felt hollow. Went into the formal garden and just stood there; had to just stand somewhere and the formal garden was as good a place as any. I hated myself and Thomas, and, if Kate knew what we’d done, she’d hate both of us, and there was nothing that could be done to make it better. What had happened could never be undone. I stood there for a while and then, because there was nothing else for it, picked myself up and went back to Kate.

‘He says it’s for the best,’ was what I said as I approached her, and, embarrassed at my failure to have made a difference, laughed in a fashion.

She didn’t. ‘Oh, everything always is, with Thomas, isn’t it.’ She was making bedlinen with little Frankie Lassells and Agnes. I couldn’t fathom exactly what she meant and didn’t want to; I wanted to be off the subject, fast. But no: her eyes sparkled in a deliberate effort to make light. ‘Did he say, “Trust me”?’

My heart lurched. I tried to look amused.

She laid the linen in her lap, winced with annoyance. ‘My fingers are swollen.’

‘Not long now,’ I managed.

‘This business of “for the best”,’ she said, getting to her feet, making it across to the fireplace, indicating for me to accompany her. ‘He says the times demand it, the circumstances. And maybe he’s right.’ Absently, she tapped the stonework. ‘Well, he
is
right. We
do
need an English queen.
We need a protestant queen and there’s hardly an abundance of those abroad, is there? And in any case that’s always so complicated, isn’t it: going abroad. This…revolution of ours is so precarious, so precious: safest of all would be a homegrown queen.’

An English-educated –
Kate
-educated – queen: I saw that the future could be so very civilised. Protestant though Thomas was, however, the prospect of a good, protestant queen for England wasn’t his motivation. He wanted Jane married to Eddie because then not only would he be uncle to the king but the new queen would be from his household, which would mean a lot of influence, a lot of favour. Or so he’d be hoping. Surely Kate could see that?

‘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…’