Suzannah Dunn - The Sixth Wife

An Imprint of HarperCollins Publishers

Harper Perennial

An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Harper Perennial in 2007

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

All rights reserved under international and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780007229727

Ebook edition © September 2008 ISBN: 9780007280124

Version: 2019-10-22

Here lyethe Quene Kateryn wife to Kyng Henry the VIII and

last the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley high Admirall of

England and onkle to kyng Edward the VI

dyed 5 September MCCCCCXLVIII

Inscription scratched onto Katherine Parr’s coffin

I can say nothing but as my Lady of Suffolk saith,

‘God is a marvellous man’.

Katherine Parr, in a letter to Thomas Seymour

This day died a man with much wit,

and very little judgement

Princess Elizabeth – later Queen Elizabeth I -on hearing of Thomas Seymour’s execution

Copyright

Epigraph

Chapter1

Chapter2

Chapter3

Chapter4

Chapter5

Chapter6

Chapter7

Chapter8

Chapter9

Chapter10

Chapter11

Chapter12

Chapter13

Chapter14

Chapter15

Chapter16

Chapter17

Chapter18

Chapter19

Chapter20

Chapter21

Chapter22

Chapter23

Chapter24

Chapter25

Chapter26

Chapter27

Chapter28

Chapter29

Chapter30

Chapter31

Chapter32

Chapter33

Chapter34

Chapter35

Chapter36

Chapter37

Chapter38

Chapter39

Chapter40

Chapter41

Chapter42

Chapter43

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

I won’t testify. They’ll get no help from me. Not that they need it, the trial being a formality. It’s over already for him. No need for this investigation, the intimidation and confessions. And anyway they should have left him to it, saved themselves the bother. He’d have ended up doing the job for them. He’d have got nowhere, in the end. Got away with nothing.

It seems they have little better to do, though, than rubbish the memory of a good woman who’s barely cold in the ground. That’s what’s happening: it’s making her look bad, what they’re digging up on her widower. Making her look as if she was beguiled and hapless.

Kate?

Listen: she’d dealt with it; it was all dealt with. She’d dealt with Thomas and the mess he’d made. She’d saved everybody’s skin.

One mistake: that was all Thomas was in her life. Could just as easily not have been a fatal one, that mistake; just the turn of events made it fatal.

I won’t testify, and if they come for anyone in my household, they’ll have me to reckon with.

Which they know.

Which is why they haven’t.

I’ll tell you something about Kate; I’ll tell you what it was about her. She always made everything all right. That’s what she did. That was Kate.

And now she’s gone. And now look.

I didn’t go to her funeral. I arranged it, the day she died, that long, long day of her death. Then, when the next day came around as suddenly as a drawn curtain, I didn’t go. I couldn’t watch her lowered into that vault.

You could say that I didn’t need to go; you could look at it that way. I’d made the arrangements, I already knew that funeral from first moment to last. I’d dressed the chapel, lain drapes over the altar rails and then supervised the men struggling with the black, embroidered hangings. I’d planned the procession, right down to the servants at the rear. Well, someone had to do it. I’d selected the four knights to walk hooded with the pallbearers, and the two torchbearers to walk with them. Then would come Jane, tiny ten-year-old Jane Grey, chief mourner, and I’d coached her maid how to carry her train, forewarned her of steps and loose slabs. The psalms and the sermon: Reverend Coverdale had gone through everything with me.

I’d dressed Kate for her burial, chosen the dress, a dress that I’d loved on her: holly red, running with gold stitching. Kate had colourless eyes like a dawn sky, but she had sunrise hair and I turned it loose for her burial as if she were a girl again.

While the funeral was taking place, I stayed with the baby. I couldn’t believe she was our compensation for Kate. Such an unequal exchange. She was like something skinned; she was nothing like my boys had been, born big and with frank, focused gazes. But, then, they were boys: from their first moments, the world was theirs for the taking. The baby was unsettled, so I walked with her. With everyone at the chapel, the house was deserted and I’d never been so alone. It might have been that everyone had died. Everyone in the world, even, so that I could have walked from the house and kept walking but never found anyone again. Just kept walking until I, too, died. From starvation or exhaustion or perhaps sheer loneliness – can you die from loneliness?

I was bone-tired when the baby finally gave in to sleep, so I sat down where I was, nowhere in particular, on a carpet-draped chest in a hallway, my back uncomfortable against the linenfold. Suddenly a nearby door was opening.Who on earth wouldn’t be at the funeral? But then I knew. There was indeed one person in the household who wouldn’t be there. The one person I didn’t want to see. I should have thought of that. Of him. And so there we were, facing each other. My heart was furious, each beat nipping hard. His beauty rankled; he’d always been everything that Kate wasn’t, and never more so than today. It was an affront, that bright beauty, on this darkest of days. I wanted to strike it from him.

A frown snatched at his eyes. I knew what he meant: didn’t I want to be in chapel?

I said, ‘Someone has to look after this baby.’

He looked back at me with no look at all; his incomprehension said, There are nurses for that .

I could have said, I don’t have to explain anything to you .

Or I could have said, The nurses are all there, they wanted so much to go, because everyone loved Kate. Everyone, that is, except you .

He said, ‘Cathy…’

I hugged that oblivious baby to me and turned, walked away.