The Sixth Wife (19 page)

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 then, 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
any
one?’

‘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.

‘No?’

‘No. Harry trusts me. He was coming to me first.’

I raged at him, albeit in a whisper, ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. This is
treason, Thomas
.’ He tutted. ‘It’s
treason,’
I insisted. Typical, typical Thomas, blind to danger.

‘They’re
children,’
he hissed back.

‘They’re
fourteen,’
I said. ‘Elizabeth could easily have a baby. Council will go to any length to make sure that doesn’t happen until they want it to happen. And Harry…’ Old enough, as far as Council is concerned, to be a threat. And to Council, they’re much more than children. She’s their precious second in line, and he’s heir to a family so close to the throne to need an occasional pruning back.

Thomas said, ‘Telling them “no” isn’t going to work,’ and –
how dare he? -
gave me a look to imply that I, more than most, should appreciate the lure of the forbidden. ‘And, anyway,’ he shrugged, ‘who knows? Elizabeth’s going to have to marry someone soon, isn’t she.’

Not my son, she isn’t
. She’s dangerous, we don’t want the complication of having her in the family even if Council were to permit it.
‘You
…’ I despaired, furious. His ceaseless ambition, for himself and anyone connected to him: his unrealistic,
stupid
ambitions. I came close, now, to the edge of the mattress, better to impress upon him: ‘This is about Harry, my boy, my son…’

‘And Elizabeth.’ His eyes, on mine, didn’t flinch.

‘I don’t care about Elizabeth.’

‘No,’ he said, quietly, ‘I know you don’t.’Then, ‘But, look, Cathy, who’s to know? We’re
here,’
he reminded me,‘at
Sudeley
. We’re all friends here. Days away from…’ He flapped a hand: anyone who matters, Council. Then his hand was on my wrist. ‘We’re
safe.’ A
slow smile: ‘Now, come here.’

‘No.’ I extracted myself, stood up. ‘I can’t. I need to think.’ It was more than that, though. I couldn’t bear to have anything to do with someone who could be reckless with my son’s life.

Thomas seemed to accept my leaving, and, indeed, made a move to accompany me. When I objected – this was a bad time, people would still be around and returning to their rooms – he countered that there was nothing that couldn’t be explained away about the two of us walking together. Moreover, he said, it was more credible that we’d bumped into each other and been talking together for a while than that I’d been walking alone around Sudeley for no reason at
close to midnight. And so he came with me to the staircase most convenient for my room. He knew better than to talk on the way, and certainly not on the subject of Harry and Elizabeth. We met no one, kept to the shadows and kept moving. Perhaps our success made him overconfident, or perhaps he was trying to appease my obvious fury, but at the door to my staircase he overstepped the mark and kissed me goodnight, although the kiss itself was nothing but a pointedly respectful and cautious touch of his lips to mine.