The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  Katherine was right: the water was there, down among the trees, a mere string of steps away; there it was, God-given, being water, busy doing its absolute best to be cold, and so it could only be right to use it, wrong to waste it. Anyway, I sensed that she’d be going, regardless, and I knew I shouldn’t let her go alone.

  The warm floorboards received my bare soles and so I was on my way.

  ‘I knew you’d be awake,’ she whispered appreciatively, tip-toeing ahead of me to the door, although we both knew that she’d woken me. That was to be the story, though, that we told each other: that we were equals in this endeavour. She had a way of doing that, I’d learn in time, of magicking up complicity; she had a knack for it. She pulled open the door, a scent billowing from her; the scent of her but more so, unfettered by daytime dress.

  ‘You’re in your nightdress,’ I said, meaning that perhaps we should be getting dressed.

  ‘It’s night,’ was her simple answer as she started her descent of the stairs, and I heard her smile in it. Not that our state of undress would matter, because, I felt, we probably wouldn’t venture far. Any minute now, I feared, someone would hear us – the dogs, if no one else – and then the escapade would be out of our hands and we’d be back safely in our beds in no time. We could say that we’d merely been on our way to get some air, to stand in a doorway or at one of the bigger windows downstairs. There need be no mention of any trip to the brook.

  Ahead of me, she was already at the foot of the stairs and an eddy of shadows told me that she was placating the dogs, offering them her hand. I heard her soothing whispers, even if I couldn’t distinguish the actual words, amid the surprisingly delicate tapping of the dogs’ nails on the flagstones. Reaching her, though, I found that it was only George and he was unalarmed because – of course, of course – he’d recognised our footfalls. He was merely intrigued, being nosy: he’d come to investigate and to discover if he might be of any help.

  I took over settling him while Katherine went to find the keys then sifted through the bunch, trying a few before coming across the correct one, its grinding in the lock having me cringing in anticipation of someone waking, and realising how badly I wanted us to get away with the escapade. When the door opened, there was the outside world looking steadily back at us. The night was mostly sky, poised in all its finery and hung with the overly large moon. I was drawn behind Katherine onto the path, the graininess of the brick under my soles bringing me up sharp. The night seemed to lay itself down before us and suddenly it was absurd that anyone could ever contemplate keeping to the house. Before then, I’d been shut up indoors and simply hadn’t known. She had, though: Katherine had known, and, thank God, she’d shown me.

  The dark air had a physical presence: we had to press ourselves through it. The fragrance was earthy with the smell of foliage but somehow also the opposite, there being a sweetness to it like something on the turn. A creature darted away into a bush, furtive: a rip, then a whispering of leaves in its wake. We were trespassers in this night-time world. As I strode after Katherine, my nightdress clamoured around my knees and shins. Shadows were everywhere, sleek, their clarity unnerving. Her own shadow ahead of me slid below her like a fish just beneath the water’s surface, quicksilver but blunt-nosed, disturbingly insensate. Above it, though, her steps were jaunty, tossing anklebones as if they were handfuls of pebbles. I was awed by her purposefulness – she was so very full of life – and had the sudden, dizzying notion that she might be carrying a baby; the start of a baby like a pearl inside her. It seemed to me, then, that nothing had happened at Wolf Hall for as long as I could remember, but now, marvellously, anything could happen.

  I had to concentrate to keep up with her, and we were at the water before I knew it: there was the brook, a skein amid the trees, rippling as if drawing its fingertips along its own surface. She didn’t break her stride but hastened, those merry footsteps tumbling over one another. Grabbing a fistful of nightgown, she extended her other arm in search of her balance, coaxing it into play as she waded into the water, onto the little stones on its bed. I winced to think of their grudging shift beneath the soles of her feet. She halted abruptly, as if snared, and looked back at me, exhilaration spilling from her. ‘Come on!’ and it soared like birdcall.

  She tottered backwards, making something of surrendering to the depths even though the water would only cover her ankles, and gasping at the cold, which was like a trick played on her again and again, the delight of it failing to diminish. For me, dipping my toes, the chilliness came both as a shock and no surprise at all, as if I’d been let in on a secret that I found I had known all along. Emboldened and beguiled, I held my breath as the brook gloved both my feet. The sensation was delicious: why did we ever spend any time anywhere else? I’d never be able to thank her enough for waking me and bringing me with her.

  Laughing, she hauled her nightdress up around her knees; shins revealed, she had a raw look to her, skinned, and I looked away to spare her. Bending double, she stirred the stream with her free hand, arcs sweeping her from side to side so that she might’ve been in search of something that playfully eluded her. Then she released her handful of nightdress; it floated around and away from her. I swallowed my warning cry because she didn’t need alerting, she’d clearly done it on purpose: she was wallowing in it, seemed to be relishing the drag of its dead weight. Both her hands were down in the water now, and she exclaimed at the cold, thrilled to be tormented, before dropping to her heels, then forward onto her knees so that she was properly in the stream, her nightdress sodden to the hips. She looked up wide-eyed to me for congratulations, but actually I could think only of her walk, drenched, back to the house and her arrival dripping on the threshold. Where was she going to hang that nightdress to dry so that it didn’t give us away?

  ‘Come on in!’ She looked both aghast and amused that I hadn’t joined her.

  Kicking up a couple of splashes to show that I could pursue pleasures of my own, albeit small ones, I broached it: ‘You’re soaked, now,’ hating that I sounded peevish.

  ‘I’ll dry off,’ she countered over the clattering of water from her cupped, raised hands.

  She wouldn’t, though. Not unless she took off that nightdress. Should I go back to the house to fetch her a dry one? Back to the house, then back here again: two stretches of darkness to be braved alone. ‘Edward’ll know where you’ve been.’ What should have been simple, a mere paddle, had gone too far. We had a drenched nightdress on our hands and a dry one to dig from the depths of one of the chests in her – his – room. No longer would she be able simply to slip back into the house and into bed beside him, but either she hadn’t grasped that or she didn’t care. I didn’t want to be a killjoy; I’d been such a dutiful, timid sort before Katherine had come to Wolf Hall but I’d hoped I’d left that conventional girl behind. Suddenly weary, I turned from my sister-in-law, waded a few steps away. Perhaps I should just leave her to it, see how she liked that. Only the one dark stretch, for me, back to the house. That, at a push, I could probably face.

  ‘Edward won’t know!’ She was laughing not only at the very idea but at me, too, for entertaining it, for fussing. ‘And anyway, so what if he does?’

  Her bravado drew me back around, curious, because did she really not know of Edward’s deep distrust of impulsive behaviour? And sneaking from the house to the brook in the small hours was surely that. And he’d blame me for it, I feared, as much as he’d blame her, because as a Seymour I should have known better.

  There she was, though, kneeling, comfortable and unconcerned, patting the water’s surface, unmistakably pleased with herself. Perhaps I was wrong, then, perhaps Edward made an exception for her. Because what did I know? Perhaps the exception was what she was, for him, and he loved her for it; perhaps it was even what he loved her for. Perhaps when she turned up, later, at the bedside, shivery and overexcited, he’d murmur, ‘Oh, you, what on earth have you been up to? Come on, get in and let me warm you up.’

&n
bsp; ‘Can you swim?’

  Her change of tone threw me, and, anyway, ‘In this?’ The slightest flex of my foot broke the surface.

  Her laugh was devoid of edge now, warm and appreciative instead. ‘Well, anywhere.’

  This was silly, though, because where else had I ever been? ‘No.’ Where – how – would I ever have learned? ‘Can you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Suspicious, that pause before her answer. ‘How did you learn?’ She didn’t have brothers, who could’ve taught her.

  She was sweeping her hands in arcs again, so the shrug was done with her mouth. ‘Dunno. Just did.’

  That I definitely didn’t believe. If she’d learned to swim, she’d recall the circumstances.

  ‘I could teach you if you like.’ Her offer seemed genuine – shyly voiced, her gaze steady and guileless – so then I didn’t know what to believe.

  ‘In this?’ The brook was the only water for miles around.

  She smiled as if her offer had been a joke between us, which perhaps it had. ‘Everyone should learn. I mean, you don’t want to drown, do you?’

  I gave her a look, which she dismissed with a roll of her eyes.

  ‘Wherever you end up going,’ she said, and there was a hitch to my heartbeat as I absorbed the ring of the words. Was she humouring me? She didn’t give that impression. Did she really think I’d have a life away from Wolf Hall? Could I perhaps confide to her my fear that I’d never marry? Possibly I could – possibly I could manage to get it voiced in this faraway darkness. But what if she laughed it off? That’d be even worse than keeping it to myself: to have it laughed at, to be left with it. The moment was fast passing. Could I do it? Could I say it? In a couple more heartbeats, the opportunity would have vanished.

  So I did it, made myself do it: leapt in, but careful to make nothing much of it. ‘Oh, I doubt I’ll be going anywhere,’ as if so long reconciled to my future failure as to be bored by the prospect of it. The suggestion, too, that my impending spinsterhood might be regarded as a quirk; harmless, even amusing.

  ‘You’ll get married,’ she said, rising, done with the water, letting it fall as she emerged. ‘Everyone does.’ At the time, I was so relieved to hear it that I didn’t register what I should have, and it’s only all these years later, free from the anxieties and preoccupations of my fifteen-year-old self, that I detect the defeat in her words.

  8

  What should have been the first clear sign of trouble between my brother and sister-in-law, I was only too ready to put down to the physically arduous circumstances of a particular evening, and I doubt I was alone in that. It happened on the first of August.

  July had sweltered until the heat itself seemed weary, going through the motions so that the long days had something to them of a child’s wide-eyed stare of exhaustion, incapable even of giving up, and then, come our Lammas celebration, the mid-evening air was hotter outdoors than in Hall. Stepping through the doorway, what I took in of the trestle tables in the gardens wasn’t the banquet on offer but the tablecloths, the heaviness of all that linen. Myself, I was as lightly dressed as possible but, despite a ribbon-made caul rather than a hood or a cotton coif, my hair was damp with perspiration. Even my eyelids were sticky with it.

  On those long tables were bowls and platters of fruits which should’ve been refreshing but were defeated: strawberries going slimy in rosewater syrup, raspberries bleeding into custard pastries. We girls had spent a week picking and preparing those fruits, but then Bax’s burning, salty meat had been the success of the afternoon. The air had been slathered with the rich aroma of roasting, and all through the day the lining of my mouth had puckered at the prospect of it. We’d all eaten our fill in Hall before stepping outside to the banquet of sore-looking strawberries and raspberries. Standing there on the terrace, I was parched, but the sickly floral scent given off by the jugs of honey-mead was distinctly unappetising. There was some wine – our mother having done her trick of adding damson syrup to eke out and pep up the dregs of our annual Christmas delivery – but I headed for the jugs that contained ale, much of which had had to be bought in when we’d realised that however hard we worked, we’d never be able to brew enough to quench everybody’s thirst.

  The children, our own Seymour children and those of our guests, had run on ahead and had kept running to end up just beyond the gardens, where they melded into the shadows. Over there, the flurries of activity were punctuated by periods of notable stillness: a code tapped onto the dusk, but one that I couldn’t decipher. Wondering if I should go and check on them, thinking Margie and Antony should soon be getting ready for bed, I remained on the terrace, beyond caring, staring blindly in their general direction with a suspicion that they were getting one over on me. Even the old dogs, usually so keen to poke their noses in, had failed to make it over there. I envied them their drastic sprawling in the relative cool of the grass, but pitied them their laboured breathing, the spasms of their ribcages.

  Katherine and I stood in the thrum of dragonflies, watching the evening go by. Despite the valiant efforts of the trio of musicians to earn their fee, it was far too hot for dancing. Gamely, though, they kept grinding on, two of them sawing at the strings of their viols and the third subjecting those of his harp to spiteful-looking plucks. As for us, after all our hard work, Lammas was at last here, the evening under way so that it took on a life of its own and had us bowing to it, casting us aside, making mere bystanders of us. Well, so be it. It seemed to me that we’d been waiting for this evening for quite a while, perhaps for longer than we’d known, and it was a relief that it was finally here.

  The Dormers were our principal guests. Beside us, my mother and Mrs Dormer were in full flow on their usual favoured topics: the shortcomings of particular servants (‘. . . had to make it very clear . . .’); achievements of various sons (‘. . . really very pleased . . .’); their own ill health (‘. . . stiff, first thing . . .’) and that of relatives and acquaintances (‘. . . tremendous swelling . . .’). Katherine and I were nominally in attendance but not expected to contribute and, anyway, I doubt we could have got a word in edgeways. Our own happily desultory exchange was the undertow to theirs; we spoke of nothing much, this and that. She showed me a blister, I remember, kicked up a heel, eased down the back of her shoe and there it was, a nasty little nub, tight-lipped white.

  Across the terrace, my father and Edward stood with Mr Dormer, and, although I couldn’t hear, I knew what would be under discussion: incidences of poaching and disputes over land-ownership; the trustworthiness or otherwise of various labourers, artisans and suppliers; the impending appointment of a Justice of the Peace for Somerset. Edward looked inattentive, which was unusual for him. Katherine noticed it too. ‘Just how bored,’ she laughed, ’does Edward look?’

  ‘Well, it’s business, isn’t it.’ I sympathised; Edward never allowed himself to go off duty. ‘What he’s doing, over there, is keeping on good terms with the neighbours.’

  She said nothing to that, whispering instead, ‘You and me, we should be down at the brook,’ as if this were something we did at the drop of a hat, when actually we’d only done it the once. We both laughed guiltily, or at least self-consciously, and I guessed she, too, was thinking of everyone else stuck at the house on their best behaviour in arduous circumstances while we frolicked at the brook, half-undressed under the alders, giving ourselves to the immediate, physical pleasures of the water.

  Then she surprised me with, ‘Not bad, is he, the Dormer boy.’

  Will Dormer? He and Thomas were in the garden, sprawled across the bench in the arbour, and the deepening dusk made it hard to distinguish between them. Similar build, similar sprawl. Friends of old, they hadn’t seen each other for a while, and this was their chance to get reacquainted. When the Dormers had turned up in the courtyard, I’d been struck how Will had changed since he’d last visited us a year ago; his face, in particular, was no longer boyish but bone-heavy, especially his jaw. It was as if he were wear
ing a crudely made mask of his own face. Perplexed, I’d been narrowing my eyes, all afternoon, to try to see through it. ‘Not bad’? Well, I really didn’t know how to respond to that; didn’t even quite know how to go about thinking about it. Didn’t know if I should. He was Thomas’s friend: that was what he was. That was all he was. He was Thomas’s friend: he was just . . . there. Except, of course, when he hadn’t been.

  Katherine was asking, ‘Any plans for him?’

  I dredged up what I could recall: ‘He’s at Oxford, for now, but—’

  She laughed: ‘No!’ I’d misunderstood. With exaggerated patience, she elucidated: ‘For you and him.’

  What? I whirled to her. What? But that was ridiculous! Completely ridiculous. Was she mocking me? ‘No!’

  Will Dormer never so much as looked at me and, actually, even if he did, I realised, I’d resent it. Because I didn’t like him. The realisation came as a physical jolt; I really didn’t like Will Dormer. What was shocking was that I’d not considered myself to have any feelings whatsoever for him – didn’t care enough – yet here was a feeling, loud and clear, if damning.

  But was there something wrong with me? Everyone else seemed to like him. And now so did Katherine. Everyone seemed to regard him as genial, affable: Will Dormer, good bloke. Indeed, that was how he was careful to present himself, and it was exactly that, I realised, that I mistrusted, the way he’d come ambling over as if he were shucking off welcoming claps to the back, as if embarrassed by the abundance of goodwill that surrounded him. I’m just a bloke, just a good bloke. But his eyes were dead: couldn’t Katherine see that? Look at the eyes.

  Whereas Thomas, well, Thomas might be full of himself, but there was life in his eyes. He burned with it. And although he could be exasperating and obstructive, and thoughtless and reckless, although he could be all those things, just occasionally he’d desist from making life difficult for everyone and then it was clear, even if he wished to pretend otherwise, that he had a heart. It was definitely true of Thomas back then, no longer the case, perhaps, a couple of years later, after what happened, but back then, I’m certain it was the truth.