Suzannah Dunn - The Sixth Wife

Charles must have considered that he was doing me a kindness by mostly leaving me alone and of course in a way he was. But months became years and then it had been so long – practically all my adult life – that I wouldn’t have known how to start if I’d had to. That was something I pondered that night: how had Kate known how to start , when it came to it? I had to conclude that Thomas – resolutely non-jousting Thomas – had taken the trouble to show her.

The day I set off back home from that first visit, Kate was up late and then at prayers, then talking with the girls’ tutor. Having sent word that I’d like to be fetched when she was free, I remained in my room and helped Bella pack up. Or tried to, but Bella’s too capable to need or probably even welcome my help. I had none of my own ladies for company; I’d come unattended, this trip – Joanna being due her first child, and Nichola having returned to her family home. I used the time to tackle some correspondence. When I finally got to Kate’s room, she was treating herself to a bath. Her ladies Marcella and Agnes seemed to have exhausted themselves preparing it, and were reclined on cushions by the fire, reading. I ducked through the canopies, brushing aside bunches of lavender, and there was Kate amid more lavender in a tub of deep oats-creamy water.

‘Bath time,’ I said, pointlessly – a mere envious purr – and she smiled in response, closed her eyes and smiled even wider. On a table beside the tub was a big brass bowl: she’d be washing her hair, then, too. In the steaming water, among the usual cinnamon and liquorice sticks and cumin seeds, were slices of lemon.

I queried: ‘Lemon?’

‘It’s good. Lightens your hair.’ Her eyes sprang open. ‘Not your hair,’ she retracted. ‘Lightens light hair.’

Yes: no good for me. Cloves and rosemary for me.

‘Do you really have to go?’ she asked.

I pulled up a stool, sat. ‘Houses don’t run themselves, do they.’ I’ve an excellent steward – a legacy of Charles, who appointed well and inspired loyalty – but there’s only so much he can do, or is willing to do. There’s only so much that it’s fair of me to expect him to take on. I do the household accounts. More than a hundred people look to me, ultimately, to keep them fed and clothed and educated. All those people needing to be encouraged, placated and sometimes, unfortunately, reprimanded: ladies and gentlemen, senior members of staff and the servants who work under them, and all their children. In kitchens and storehouses, chapel, gardens, laundry, the farm and stables. Permission to be given and funds found for orders: four or six hundred oranges this month, and four hundred or five hundred eggs? Each head of department will know his or her own requirements, but it’s me who has to bring them together. We need barrels of soap for the laundry, but we also need soap for the kitchens and for our bedrooms. Wax for candles, of course, for the chandlery; but also for the laundresses, so that they can seal the edges of some of our clothes. We need bolts of fabric for me and the boys, and for our ladies and their children, and ushers and pages and maidservants; but we also need kitchen aprons and chapel robes, tablecloths, saddlecloths, blankets, curtains. And boots, the children have to be kept in boots: that’s what always seems to catch me out, and – it seems to me – most often with my own children. How many times have we been ready to journey between London and Lincolnshire and I’ve glanced down to see holes in Harry’s or Charlie’s boots? And then we’ve had to delay for a new pair to be made. As lady of the household, I did all this when Charles was alive; I don’t understand why it’s been so much more tiring since he died. I said to Kate, ‘You should come and see me, stay with me.’

She settled back in the bath, seeming to consider it. But she wouldn’t. I knew it, somehow. Something had changed – everything had changed – and willowy, light-footed Kate was somehow more solid; she was unbudgeable. It was me who was going to have to do the running from now on. She surprised me by saying, ‘If only you could just stay here for ever, you and the boys. I wish we all lived here, don’t you?’

I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. It’s usual, isn’t it: that desire to share a new-found happiness. To feel blessed and thereby magnanimous, keen to spread your blessings around. I’d been like that when I’d just had the boys: I’d wanted everyone to have children; I’d wanted so badly for Kate to have children. It took me years to calm down on that score.

Then she confided, ‘It wasn’t sudden, Thomas and I. It’s not been sudden.’

I smiled at her: if you wish; whatever you say . No flash in the pan, was what she was understandably keen to imply. But even if it was sudden, I wondered, why assume that I wouldn’t understand? Me, of all people. Me, who knows all there is to know about sudden. Me, the girl who married Charles a mere three months after the death of his previous wife. Less sudden, yes, but still sudden, especially considering that the dead wife was the woman for whom he’d defied the king and risked the death penalty. Charles’s elopement with the king’s sister had been the love story of the century. And it really was; they did genuinely love each other. Then I came along, tripping along in the footsteps of everyone’s favourite, fairytale princess. That was difficult, that’s what difficult means. That was a scandal.

No, it’s not the suddenness of it, I wanted to say as I smiled down at her: it’s Thomas; why Thomas? But I couldn’t say that, could I. Not then. Too late. It was done and dusted: she’d married him. And if she got wind of my distrust of him, she’d decide I should spend more time with him. So that I’d grow to like him, to love him. That was Kate all over: a plan of re-education for me. Well, I couldn’t be bothered with that; that was to be avoided.

‘I mean,’ Kate said, ‘he asked me to marry him before,’ and clarified, ‘before I married Henry.’

Well. This was new. ‘But you were married to John.’ Before Henry had come John, and there’d been very little time in between them.

‘When John died.’

‘What, he just’ – I laughed – ‘came up to you and asked you?’ In passing? Because there couldn’t have been time for much else.

She laughed with me – ‘No!’ – before turning contemplative. ‘No, no. We talked about it a lot, at the time.’ She smiled.‘He’s a surprisingly devoted sort. I mean, you wouldn’t think it of him, would you, but he waited for me.’

Well, either that, or she was one of his options, the one to which he returned when he couldn’t get Elizabeth.

‘We talked and talked…And I couldn’t tell you, Cathy; it wouldn’t have been fair on you. Henry was around by then, making his intentions clear. You remember that. I couldn’t draw you into this mess. It was…frightening.’ She winced: ‘It was miserable . We could talk all we liked, Thomas and I, but there was no choice, really, was there. We all knew what Henry wanted, so in the end there was no choice.’

True: if Henry asked you to marry him, there was no saying no. However much he made it sound like a question – and he’d have been careful to do that; he had his pride – there was no saying no to a king, particularly when that king was Henry. All that we’d stood for, Kate and I, was nothing in the face of Henry because he wasn’t a man but a king. And I suppose I’d assumed it hadn’t mattered all that much because, yes, it’d be unpleasant and quite possibly dangerous for Kate, but if anyone – any woman – was up to it, she was. And, crucially, it wasn’t going to be for long. She’d only have to be patient for a few years at most, taking what she could from the situation. Obviously it wasn’t without its compensations, being queen. But I hadn’t known that there was more to it, for her; that there was an actual loss involved. Not only had she had to take something on, but she’d had to leave something – someone – behind. Now, belatedly in on the secret, my heart throbbed for her. ‘You should have told me,’ I protested. ‘Since when have I cared about “frightening”?’Thomas, forgotten; it didn’t matter that it was Thomas. This was about Kate. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. You should never have had to go through that alone.’