The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  When Katherine drew me aside at the door and whispered, ‘Which one’s which?’ I paused to consider how to pitch the answer. My mother would’ve gone for a tactful, respectful, ‘Moll’s the more experienced,’ something Moll never let us forget, which Elizabeth would’ve translated as ‘old’ although actually Moll was nowhere near as old as my mother (older than Lil, though, who was, by comparison, a girl, the pair of them being opposites in every way). I’d once heard Thomas describe Moll as ‘girthly’, and for the briefest moment I was tempted before opting for something less offensive but as indisputable: ‘Moll’s the one doing all the talking.’

  Katherine herself didn’t talk much while she worked, humming tunelessly instead, which should have been irritating but, surprisingly, was cheering. Whenever she did speak up, it was to express what seemed to be genuine pleasure in the various aspects and simple contents of our room: the view from the window, the embroidered coverlet on our bed, the little walnut stool in the corner, even the pungency of the flea-repelling wormwood scattered under our bed. She herself was a breath of fresh air: that was how I felt about her that first morning. Her company made light work of the drudgery, and, really, how better to endear herself to me? Me, of all of the Seymours. I’d had no sense before then of having been biding my time at Wolf Hall, but that morning, whenever I glimpsed her across my room, I’d think, What took you so long?

  When we’d worked our way through the house – sweeping and shaking carpets and curtains, wiping and polishing, collecting and replacing candle-stubs – we ended up in the long gallery, along which she skipped with arms outstretched as if to brush her fingertips along the panelling at either side in celebration of the length and breadth of it. Exhilarating though it was to watch her take off across those floorboards, I knew even by then that she didn’t have to skip into a room to light it up. She went into any room looking for the pleasures it could offer her, simple though they might well be, which for me was an eye-opener, because I’d only ever gone into rooms looking for what needed to be done. It didn’t occur to me then that such joie de vivre might bring its own dangers.

  When the house was in order, Elizabeth took Margie to help her set the places for dinner and got rid of Dottie by sending her to pick posies for the tables (that old trick), so Katherine and I returned to the laundry pile for a proper sifting because, if the weather were to hold, Lil and Moll might progress to bleaching and we should give them enough to keep them busy. And that was when we had our first proper conversation, just the two of us. Setting to the task, I mentioned that the girls’ laundry was my job while my mother did my father’s and the boys’, but then worried I’d said too much because perhaps Katherine would want to be the one, now, responsible for Edward’s; after all, he was no longer one of the boys, but her husband. How to backtrack, though, I worried, without drawing attention to the prospect of his under-clothes in her hands, her intimate scrutiny of them for blemishes and unravellings? Luckily for me, she didn’t seem to have heard; she was still considering the girls’ laundry.

  ‘I had it easy,’ she said, frowning at the pile, ‘with there only being the two of us, my sister and me.’

  It was unimaginable to me, so small a family.

  ‘I’m the younger,’ she told me, although of course I already knew it, but there was a twinkle to the way she said it, as if to suggest that, in being the younger, she’d been getting away with something. ‘The naughty one.’

  That I doubted; she was merely having fun: Edward would never have married someone who was ‘naughty’.

  ‘Nancy was always such a goody-goody,’ and this accusation of hers was voiced just as pleasantly. At that, though, I was a little uneasy, because I could be said to be a ‘goody-goody’ in our household. Had I been said to be a goody-goody? Had Edward said it to her? He probably hadn’t actually said ‘goody-goody’, because surely the same could be said of him.

  ‘Except she never really was,’ Katherine cheerfully contradicted herself, ‘because no one ever really is, are they? What she was good at was never getting caught.’ And this was said admiringly before she glanced at the door and lowered her voice to admit, ‘It was always me who was still – you know – making the face when my father turned around. There was Nancy, all butter-wouldn’t-melt . . . and then there was me . . .’

  She said it as if I’d sympathise, as if I’d spent my own childhood making faces behind my own father’s back, whereas I didn’t recall ever having done such a thing and probably wouldn’t even have known what face to make. Not that he’d have minded, probably, if I had, and that was if he’d even noticed, which he almost certainly wouldn’t have. But then again, who knew what I’d have been like if I’d had a sister like her? If she’d have been at Wolf Hall to egg me on, I felt, perhaps I would indeed have done it. She’d had her sister to encourage her, even if that sister did then leave her in the lurch; whereas Elizabeth had never lowered herself so much as to catch my eye.

  ‘I was never quick enough,’ she lamented merrily, ‘or I just didn’t think or something – oh, I don’t know, I don’t know – but whenever my father turned around, it was always just me who was making that face.’

  And her laugh came as her smile had done the day before, escaping from her, running away with her, and this time it snatched up my own and took it with it as I imagined her at eight years old, gawky and spindly, haplessly overstepping the mark, her own silliness having gone on for a moment too long, leaving her cruelly uncovered and having to hope for mercy. At eight, I recalled, Edward had had to step up to be the eldest son, when John – a year older – had died. So, Edward would have been serious-minded even at eight, or especially at eight. But then we Seymours in general were a stoic lot. My new sister-in-law, though, seemed utterly unlike that, and my heart opened to her.

  ‘Nancy’s clever,’ Katherine was saying, approvingly but ruefully, the implication being that in this, they differed. Again, I was sure she was merely making fun of herself. ‘She can read and write really well, whereas me: oh, it makes no sense to me, I’m useless – it just dances around in front of my eyes.’ Eyes which she now flicked skywards in exasperation. ‘I “don’t concentrate”.’ The precise annunciation made clear she was quoting. ‘But She shrugged jauntily: Who cares?

  Then, as an afterthought, ‘Did you have a tutor?’

  ‘Father James.’ I resisted adding ‘for all the good it did me’. I’d liked to have said that words danced in front of my eyes, but, sadly, nothing so lively; they lay on the page and I crawled my way through them. Edward had gone to university at Oxford but the rest of us had learned whatever we’d managed to learn from Father James.

  Katherine sighed, which I took to mean that although Father James’s tuition might not have been much, nor much fun, it was more than she’d had. Well, perhaps if not bookish, I decided, then my brother would have chosen for a wife someone who was naturally astute. Thinking back, what amazes me is that I assumed Edward would be as sensible as in other spheres of his life when it came to matters of the heart.

  3

  Strange, too, that I didn’t recognise Edward’s ambitiousness for what it was. Then again, how could I have? I’d never come across ambition, not really. My father took his duties very seriously, but that’s not the same. And Thomas? Well, back then, Thomas was a fledgling; but, anyway, the nature of his aspirations – for material gain, personal advantage – has always been quite distinct from Edward’s. As is everyone’s at court, it seems to me, with the possible exception of Cromwell’s. Cromwell and Edward: perhaps, then, Edward’s is a new kind of ambition, and perhaps I couldn’t have recognised it back at Wolf Hall, even if I’d known to look. Come to think of it, perhaps he didn’t, at that stage, even quite recognise it himself. In retrospect, it’s clear that his new wife didn’t.

  What I did know was that he was hardworking and exceptionally able, and by the time I was fifteen I’d picked up enough from eavesdropping to know he was keen to improve the lives of our tenants and all
the men and women on whom my father had to pass judgement in his capacity as a Justice of the Peace. Edward has always been able to see clearly where there are changes that can be made; he has an instinct for what can and can’t be done. And if anything can be done, he’s almost certainly the one to do it, the one with the capabilities and the resolve. That’s Edward’s particular gift, I think: not only to know what can and can’t be done, but to know exactly what he’s capable and incapable of. It’s that practical bent that makes him lethal.

  Perhaps we aren’t so dissimilar after all.

  If I was oblivious to how ambitious he was, I did realise that he was quite unlike everyone else at home. He wasn’t often around during my childhood, what with his years in Oxford and then his assisting my father in the running of family business; and then, around the time that he married, he began to be away at court, with the help of our distant cousin Francis Bryan, when-ever occasion could be found. All of which meant that whenever he came back to us, he was invigoratingly different from every-one else. None of my father’s dithering, Harry’s loping and mooching, Thomas’s swagger; none of my father’s vagueness, Harry’s undisguised lack of interest, Thomas’s verbal sparring. And because being home was a novelty for him, he was able to be interested in us, to give measured responses even to Antony’s various madnesses and Elizabeth’s endless gripes.

  Back when I was fifteen and he was twenty-one, I’d have simply said that my eldest brother was wonderful: it was as simple as that, for me. Not that I’d have said it to his face, but, then, I didn’t say much at all to him, didn’t dare, was hopelessly shy of him. Good job, too, because he’d have failed to appreciate it, partly on principle – hero-worship being unhealthy – but also because he would, I think, have been genuinely perplexed. Judging from the habitual worried frown and the diligence with which he undertook his various duties, I suspect he considered himself barely to measure up as the eldest Seymour son.

  I didn’t care what he’d read in books at Oxford, nor was I properly conscious, then, of how unusual were his ideas about the lives of ordinary people. Books and new ideas, no: it was his worldliness that impressed me, his having been places and seen things. Not that he bragged, as Thomas did: Thomas only had to go to horrid old Salisbury for the day for us to suffer months of hearing how amazing it was.

  Not from Edward himself but from my mother did I know that at thirteen he’d waded from a run-aground ship to the French shore behind our king’s bedraggled eighteen-year-old sister. Edward was one of three pages at her marriage to the old French king and he saw her laughing as she held her soaked gown up around her knees because she guessed (correctly) that the marriage – the king – wouldn’t last long and she’d soon be free.

  Then, a year before he himself had married, he’d accompanied my father to join the hundreds of knights and nobles welcoming the Spanish Emperor to England. He had stayed at inns in Canterbury, Sittingbourne and Greenwich before riding into London behind the silk- and ermine-clad Archbishop Wolsey and his hundreds of servants liveried in crimson velvet. There in London he had watched pageants, and at Greenwich, jousts. All this he’d done. When he arrived back home, we crowded around him in the parlour and he opened his hand to reveal, in his palm, something pebble-sized and dun-coloured.

  ‘What’s that?’ asked Elizabeth, curl-nosed.

  ‘An acorn,’ he’d said, unperturbed by the less than rapturous reception. ‘Or, rather, it isn’t: it’s a piece of wood that’s been turned to make an acorn, and there were two-and-a-half thousand of them. Two-and-a-half thousand, that’s what Mr Gibson said, and for just five minutes on stage.’

  Did he think that good or bad? I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Who’s Mr Gibson?’ Margie, keen as ever to establish the facts.

  The gentleman, Edward said, who was in charge of all the court entertainments. So, Edward knew such a man; he’d actually conversed with him. But he told us so little of life at court, whether because he didn’t want to turn our heads or because he was unimpressed, I still don’t know. Perhaps both. He didn’t tell us about the woodland scene to which that acorn had belonged: the wood-turned and fabric-sewn hawthorns, oaks, maples, hazels and ferns; the papier-mâché beasts and birds; the centrepiece, a castle holding a silk-flower-garlanded, crowd-pleasing maiden. It was my father who described all that for us, just as he described the joust, of which that scene was merely one of many interludes. It was from my father that we learned of the king and queen’s gold-canopied stand and the king’s newly minted silver armour, and the hundreds of horses, grooms and footmen, players and heralds dressed in white velvet and gold damask. I can see, now, how odd it must’ve been for Edward, back in those days, having seen all that he’d seen, to have to come home to us: we Seymours with our clothes darned and handed down, our food plain and predictable, our horses tired and our opinions – if we had them, and if we expressed them – poorly informed.

  Yet he was still a country boy at heart, because he’d gone ahead and married a local girl. He could have waited to marry until he fell for a girl at court, which was probably what my parents expected and what Francis Bryan, his mentor, had hoped. At twenty-one, Edward had yet to make his way. Well, he’d be making his way with a wife already at his side, I thought at the time, and how could Katherine fail to be an asset? On that first day of hers at Wolf Hall, sitting across that laundry pile from her, I pondered how it might have happened between the two of them.

  Our families went way back but were separated by two days’ ride. Katherine had visited us once, I’d been told, when she was nine; I’d been three and had no memory of it. Ten years later, our father and Edward had made the journey to her Horton home on business, and then Edward had found reason to go again, alone, and again and again. I imagined Katherine’s goody-goody sister had been too busy at virginals practice to entertain him, so Katherine had been the one to sit with him, in the company of her father, enquiring about his journey and, perhaps, the family to whom he’d be returning. She might have told him something of life on the Horton estate, which he’d have drunk down because he was an interested listener, his serious-mindedness never taking him away from the world but deeper into it.

  Then perhaps, one late afternoon, the pair of them ventured into the garden, stopping only at the edge in the haze of dusk and beyond the earshot of anyone at a window. Precisely calibrated; what they could get away with. Just a little too far from the house and a little too late in the day. Nothing spoken of it, but nevertheless the pair of them complicit. That might have been all it was, but it would have been enough; it might have been the start. That’s what I dreamt up for them, when I was fifteen, and I suspect I wasn’t far wrong; I suspect there was never anything very complicated about it.

  And why should there have been? That’s what we Seymours would have thought, at the time. Why not follow one’s heart in matters of the heart? It all looked set to be perfect. How ideal his bride seemed, that first evening, as she settled to her embroidery in the parlour, stitching steadily and absorbed by the rhythm of it. I was stitching, too, whereas my mother was one for cards at the end of the day, turning determined and devious, pitting herself against Elizabeth, who was, of course, more than a match for her. Dottie and Margie were playing shovelboard, which, although they played noisily, was preferable to Dottie’s plodding practice on the virginals. Antony was learning chess under Thomas’s tutelage, so that evening, like many others during that spring and summer, was punctuated by exclamations of dismay at moves good or bad or puzzling. Harry was over at Barbara’s. Edward was looking through paperwork, briefly, with my father, whose long eyelids were creeping longer, and then played his lute, head cocked as if listening for an element not easily discernible. Father James muscled in among the dogs at the fireside, ostensibly reading but actually dozing.

  It was an evening like any other for us, that first evening of Katherine ’s, except that we younger Seymours, who still embroidered solely in black, had rarely seen the likes of the vivid si
lks in our sister-in-law’s folded wallet. I glimpsed a creamy quince, a dusky raspberry, a blaring cornflower blue, and the zingy sweet green of wild garlic.

  Margie raised it: ‘Where d’you get those?’

  ‘London.’

  ‘London?’ Dottie was round-eyed. ‘You went to London?’

  ‘My father’s steward did.’

  Margie frowned, sceptical. ‘And he knows how to buy silks?’

  Katherine widened her eyes, amused. ‘I had him well trained.’

  Our own steward would never have gone off into shops to buy us any silks – not that any of us had ever dared ask.

  Margie put it to no one in particular, ‘Which is your favourite colour?’ and suddenly we were all up for the challenge of choosing but frozen in the face of it, afraid to commit. Well, all of us except Elizabeth. ‘The green,’ she said, unbothered, as if it should get up and thank her for having chosen it.

  My mother nodded at the slip in Katherine’s lap. ‘That’s a lovely piece of work, Katherine.’ The colours shone in the fire-glow, in shapes that formed buds and petals, fruits and vines.

  She shrugged off the compliment. ‘It’s for an altar cloth.’

  Piled on top of her sewing box were more slips: a pair of stocky, golden little bodies, one with a fuller head of hair than the other, and a cheerfully red-baubled tree.

  She said, ‘You’re welcome to have it for chapel here, or perhaps it could go to St Mary’s.’ Our local church in Great Bedwyn.

  ‘Oh—’ my mother was concerned, anxious to do the right thing. It would be improper to expropriate it, was what she would’ve been thinking, wrong to assume that it would come to us rather than the church at Horton just because its maker had. ‘I’m sure we can send it down to Horton when it’s done.’