The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  We did at least know what subtleties were: the Dormers always had one at their feasts. They had a mould for the casting of boiled sugar into a generic figure which would then be equipped to suit the particular occasion (so, a wheel, perhaps made from stalks, for St Katherine). There was no such mould at Wolf Hall, though, which my mother had to tell Katherine, who then looked as if this were only to be expected and said she could sculpt instead in a mixture of sugar and ground almonds. That was all very well, but had she checked our supplies? We weren’t due any more deliveries before Michaelmas. Not only would her subtlety-making deplete our supplies, but we were already stretched for time, particularly because she’d been ill. And Michaelmas was as demanding for as us Harvest Festival because, despite Edward’s best efforts over some years, the villagers couldn’t be dissuaded from the tradition of turning up with gifts; there might no longer be the procession that there’d been during my father’s boyhood, but still people came to the gatehouse with flocks of ewes and barrels of fruit, and the very least we could do in return was provide a feast. For that, we needed roasts and pies, and plenty of them. Not a fancy sugar sculpture.

  The children had no such qualms; they were delighted by the prospect, and intrigued: what would it be? What could it be, when she had just two days to work on it? Two days, moreover, of frantic pie-making.

  Katherine maintained the intrigue. Whenever she found a moment in the kitchen to work on it, she stood with her back to us, and whenever she left, she took it away with her, wrapped in a cloth.

  Then Michaelmas eve was upon us and in all the activity we forgot about the subtlety until, at dinner, Katherine slipped from the table to reappear, moments later, with something in her hands. Plonking it down in front of us – ‘Here’ – she stood back with a little laugh, dismissive of it.

  Antony piped up, ‘It’s a candle!’ and indeed, it was: a candle made of marzipan. ‘Not a sword!’

  We all froze, anxious as to how Katherine might take this, but, actually, she slid me a look just as she used to do – lips pressed down on a laugh but eyes flaring with it – which my heart lifted a little to see.

  ‘It is a candle,’ she teased him. ‘It isn’t a sword.’

  ‘But’ – strenuous indignation – ‘St Michael has a sword!’

  ‘Lots of people have swords,’ she humoured him, ‘but the Archangel fought the darkness, which is what’s important about him.’

  ‘It is,’ Father James agreed, gladly.

  ‘Yes, he fought the Devil!’ Antony countered, a little happier now. ‘He slashed his giant sword around, didn’t he, and led God’s army!’

  ‘He judges souls,’ said Thomas.

  ‘He judges souls,’ Katherine repeated, as if it were an item on a shopping list.

  ‘Heals the sick,’ added Father James with an appreciative nod in my mother’s direction. She had the good grace to lower her eyes but my sister-in-law’s gaze caught mine and I could see the mischief in it: St Margery Seymour.

  ‘He was a good all-rounder,’ said Thomas, and my mother beamed at him, blissfully unaware of the sarcasm. Good all-rounders were, in Thomas’s view, deserving of scorn. Edward was a good all-rounder.

  My father leaned dramatically towards Antony, wide-eyed to feign alarm. ‘The Archangel has no face, did you know that? Or you hope he has no face; he only shows his face to those who are about to die.’

  Antony was thrilled. ‘Is that true?’

  ‘As true as any of it,’ muttered Thomas.

  I cut in fast, instinctively, perhaps to cover for my brother, perhaps to protect my parents, perhaps both: ‘It really does look like a candle.’ It was artfully slumped, and a moderately successful attempt had been made to portray a beading of liquefied wax down its length.

  ‘It does,’ echoed Elizabeth, her own note of surprise rendering the observation less complimentary.

  ‘It does,’ said my father, with much more enthusiasm.

  ‘Is this gold leaf?’ My mother was peering at the flame with which the candle was crowned.

  ‘Yes,’ said Katherine, ‘I had a bit.’

  So, somewhere in her room there’d been gold leaf, just as there was lace and a jar of confits.

  ‘And do we eat it?’ My mother asked it over-brightly so that if Katherine took offence, she could laugh it off. No joke to my mother, though, really, I knew: there was a lot of costly food in that candle.

  For Antony, there was no question – ‘Yeeesss!’ – its short-comings as a weapon more than compensated for by it being made of sugar and almonds.

  Dottie, though, was scandalised. ‘No! It’s lovely! We should keep it.’

  Smiling, Katherine shrugged, abdicating responsibility for the decision. All that fuss, but now, apparently, it didn’t matter. Perhaps all that had mattered to her was the making of it.

  My mother appeared unable quite to trust to that, though. She’d been the one to ask the question and when Katherine declined to answer, we all returned our attention to her, but she was prevaricating. She was afraid of upsetting Katherine, I saw, and my heart was in my mouth to see it: my mother, who never tiptoed around anyone but blundered through life thinking only of arrangements and obligations. There she was, fearfully mindful of Katherine. Not just me, then, I saw: not just me who of late had been cowed by Katherine. Not just me who was weary of having to tread so carefully around her.

  ‘Anyway,’ Dottie was keeping up her campaign, ‘I don’t think you could eat the gold.’

  Father James said, cheerfully, ‘I’m not sure that with my teeth I could eat any of it.’

  Katherine cocked her head to consider her creation. ‘I think you can eat the gold.’

  ‘Isn’t it very hard?’ Margie didn’t sound daunted but, on the contrary, ready to do battle. She only hadn’t spoken before because she’d been subjecting it to a thorough examination.

  ‘It might be,’ Katherine hedged, ‘a little.’

  ‘A little very hard,’ disparaged Thomas, elbows on the table and head in his hands, which would have been to risk a rebuke from my mother, had she been looking.

  ‘You know,’ my father sat back in his chair. ‘I think it’s up to you, Katherine; it has to be up to you,’ and he looked pleased with himself, as well he might because he rarely spoke up at home, let alone decisively. He wasn’t in the least wary of his daughter-in-law, I saw – but then, why would he be? He’d never had to endure her crashing around the kitchen. To him, she was just a girl who needed a little kindness; with her barely suppressed smile and those honeyed eyes, she was just a girl who’d been having a tough time. But he only knew the half of it.

  He took the uncharacteristically definite step of bestowing the decision on her, and she liked it, graciously accepted it: rising to it and, moreover, taking pleasure in it. Tentatively, she suggested to him, ‘Eat it?’

  Amused that she still couldn’t quite make the decision, he folded his arms to show that he wouldn’t be drawn – As I said, up to you – and, at that, she accepted defeat, tipping back her head in a soundless laugh before announcing her decision: ‘Eat it.’

  Antony whooped.

  Dottie wailed: ‘Allot it?’

  Katherine swiped it from the table and wrenched off the flame. ‘All except this,’ she said, handing it to Dottie with a flourish, ‘which you, Dotsy-pops, get to keep.’ And so there she was, turned back – just like that – into everyone’s favourite Seymour, and I almost believed it.

  5

  With October that year came winter, the gust-troubled month sinking whatever remained of summer, and even autumn, so that the memory of sunshine was as unlikely as a dream. Each morning I woke braced for the startling chill beyond my bed before spending the day recoiling from open doorways and mincing around courtyard puddles. At Mass, Father James was frequently drowned out by rain on the roof.

  As long as Edward had survived the sea crossing, he’d be ashore and properly embarked on the campaign. Crawling from my bedclothes, I’d make myself think of
him; how, perhaps, he’d had no shelter for the night. Dropping clean linen down over my shoulders and inhaling its comforting sour tang, I’d wonder if he’d depleted his own supply. Every evening, when we gathered close to the hearth, I’d hope he was near enough to a fireside. Bewitched by the interlacing of flames, I’d imagine they had news of him to unfold to me, that it was there if only I looked hard enough, whereas, of course, all they were doing was making pitilessly quick work of whatever wood we could spare.

  The first Sunday in October was the Church Ale, to raise funds for St Mary’s at Great Bedwyn, the first part of which was always hosted at Wolf Hall, and that year the weather decidedly put a dampener on it. It had to be held indoors, in Hall; no room for bowls or skittles and, even if anyone had felt like dancing, there wouldn’t have been enough space between the various stalls. Foot-tapping was as far as it could go that year. The villagers arrived soaked from the walk or cart ride, some of their wares and handicrafts having suffered, too. The best we could do for them was greet them with hot, spiced, damson-syrup-swirled punch.

  Ourselves, we weren’t at our best; we all had colds and Katherine’s was definitely the worst; she was muffled and reluctant all day, cringing at the frequent slams of the door. My mother would have been hoping, I knew, that Katherine’s altar cloth would be finished, so that something could be made, that day, of its gifting to the church, but there’d been no sight of it since Edward had been called to France; it’d been displaced first by the preparations for his departure and then by the ongoing elaborate embroidering of the nightshirt. So all we Seymours had to show for ourselves at that Church Ale was our usual little stall of pincushions and herb bags.

  Katherine stayed behind the table on duty with me for much of the afternoon, occasionally summoning the energy for a desultory wander among the other stalls and some obligatory purchasing (a little basket, some braided ribbon), and once venturing over to the lucky-dip stall, of which Margie was in charge, with my father’s nominal assistance. I didn’t doubt that Margie was running a tight ship, if a lucky dip can be such a thing. She and my father stood markedly to attention as Katherine approached, in cahoots, bolstering each other with elbow digs, Here she comes: the two most composed Seymours turned quite dizzy by the prospect of Katherine’s patronage. They were acting honoured to have her custom, but underneath all that acting there was, I felt, some truth to it, and I was on tenterhooks that Katherine could find it in herself – cold-addled though she was – to respond in kind.

  ‘Delve! Delve!’ Margie was sprung to intervene if necessary, adamant that the dipping be properly done, refusing to settle for a less than fully committed rummage. My father stood by, faintly abashed, and he and Katherine exchanged an amused glance. Katherine did as Margie ordered but when her hand closed over an object, I noticed, it was at my father she smiled, liberated of all the sullenness with which she’d been standing beside me at our stall.

  That cold October was bringing legions of mice into the house, and at last Mort came slinking from his summer torpor. We humans had few good reasons to be outside, yet, oddly, that was where Katherine more often was. Having finished whatever task was in hand, she’d stretch, sigh, say to me, ‘I have to get out of this place, get some air.’ She always made sure to ask if I’d join her but I rarely did because even if I’d felt up to braving the chill, I didn’t have her freedom to come and go. Fetching and carrying for my mother, I’d glimpse my sister-in-law in the gardens, well wrapped in her cloak and usually in the company of my father and his dogs. Coming back indoors, she’d be all aglow: challenged by the cold – nose red-tipped, eyes tear-blurred, lips chapped – but unvanquished by it.

  What, I began to wonder, did she and my father find to talk about out there? What was it that Katherine found so invigorating about his gentle company in the gardens? Eventually, I decided to see for myself, to go along with her when she next suggested.

  It was a morning of rain recently having cleared and we were no further from the house than the flower garden when along came my father with the dogs. Or, more accurately, the dogs came along with my father, and the canine gang acknowledged us only in passing, led by their noses, but my father stopped.

  Glancing after them, Katherine voiced a concern: ‘Chopper’s limping.’

  ‘Well,’ my father sighed, ‘he’s getting on, now, isn’t he. His hips trouble him from time to time.’

  It was good to have my father there with us in the garden and to hear his warm voice among the wind-racked, hissing lilacs, even if only discussing the dogs.

  Sensing that he was the subject of discussion, Chopper circled back, self-conscious, for my father to reach down, with his own habitual stiff-jointed wince, and fuss him.

  ‘He’s done well, though. Haven’t you, Chops? You’ve done very well.’ Straightening up to send Chopper on his way, he said, ‘And to think he used to go belting off and we’d not see him for days.’

  That piqued Katherine’s interest. ‘Did he?’

  ‘Oh, he did,’ and my father sounded proud of him. ‘He’d scarper, and we’d have to spend the day looking for him, wouldn’t we, Jane.’

  ‘Would we?’ The memory that was vivid for him was lost to me.

  ‘Ah, well, I suppose you’d have been small, back then.’ His own recollection didn’t stretch to my age, even approximately, at that stage. Sometimes, inevitably, I was just one of his children. ‘No, we couldn’t trust to him coming back of his own accord. Too many plans.’ He said it admiringly. ‘Plans that didn’t include boring old Wolf Hall,’ but his own glance at the house was appreciative.

  He never stayed away from home unless it was absolutely necessary. Despite the distances he travelled for work, if there was the faintest possibility that he could come home for the night, he’d do it. ‘I like my own bed,’ he’d say, teasing us with a pause before adding, ‘oh, and my own family.’ Having ridden home, he’d sit at the fireside listening to us, his eyes closed, half-smiling, as other people listen to music. Easy to forget of him, after what later happened. He’d never lived anywhere but Wolf Hall and, it struck me, standing there in the garden, there’d come a day not so far in the future when it would be said that he’d lived his whole life there. He must have suspected by then that Edward and Thomas, ostensibly so much their father’s sons, were full of plans that didn’t include Wolf Hall; I wonder if he ever guessed that unSeymour-like, sandy-haired Harry would be the one to make it his home.

  ‘Well, Chopper, my old lad,’ he called mock-ruefully down the path, ‘it comes to us all: the time when what’s best about going away is getting back.’

  ‘When I was a little girl,’ Katherine said, ‘I had a fear that I’d sleepwalk and then not be able to find my way home.’

  I wondered, idly, if that was what our nocturnal flit to the brook had been for her, some kind of sleepwalk.

  She added, ‘I’ve never been one to want to go far from home.’

  She’d had to do it, though, that two-day ride from her girlhood home to Wolf Hall. I sensed it strike my father as it struck me, but deferred to him to be the one to tackle it, which he did. ‘Katherine,’ he cleared his throat, ‘would you perhaps like to visit your family while . . .’

  While Edward’s gone.

  Her eyes found his. ‘I think it’s better that I’m here.’

  Better how, I wondered: to show solidarity? Or better to receive news of him, if and when it came?

  ‘Thank you, though,’ she said, gravely, ‘for asking.’

  And then I was ashamed not to have thought, before then, to do so.

  After a respectful pause, my father concluded, ‘So, anyway, I didn’t know: you’re a sleepwalker.’

  She laughed. ‘No!’ Then, ‘Or not that I know of. If I am, I always find my way back.’ And a flourish of her hands: Because – see? – here I am, not lost.

  All three of us smiled at that, and my father took his leave, rounding up the dogs.

  Katherine and I took a different path. Raising he
r face to what was left of the sun, she drew down a fortifying breath.

  ‘Did you?’ I probed. ‘Did you really worry about that?’ Sleepwalking away, getting lost. Such a fear was so unlike the preoccupations of my own younger self, in as far as I could remember. I’d tended to worry about practicalities: whether I’d done the tasks that I was supposed to have done, and done them properly; and if not, whether I’d be uncovered and held to account.

  ‘I did used to think about it,’ she said, which, I realised a moment too late to object, wasn’t quite the story with which she’d delighted my father.

  6

  October dragged, that year, but at least it would be bringing the fair. Twice a year, Lady Day in the spring and St Luke’s in the autumn, the fair would come to Great Bedwyn and we’d leave home after an early meal to spend the rest of the day there. The two-mile cart ride to the village was never less than tortuously slow, our fellow fair-goers crowding onto the lanes from manors and farms, and their children scampering alarmingly close to our wheels, made wild by the thrill of a coin in the hand. The crowds were drawn into Great Bedwyn as if on a lighted wick by the tang of roasting meats, but I’ d be thinking of the Burbage baker’s stall: spiced, fruited buns deep-seamed with cinnamon-rich sugar. First of all, though, as soon as we arrived, our little ones would have to be treated to comfits, their jaws hard at work and eyes low-lidded until they were sated and off elsewhere, leaving me encumbered with a handful of sweet-scented paper cones like strange lilies and the burden of having to remember, as accurately as they themselves would, whose was whose.

  As for the men of our household, they always headed initially (and in some cases solely) for the ale tent, which even by lunchtime smelled of a day gone on too long. Just passing it was enough to make me feel faintly sick and sleepy. I could never understand the attraction: they had ale at home, so why waste precious fair time in there? At each and every fair, my mother warned Harry and Thomas to go easy on the ale, using a variety of euphemisms (‘Don’t overstretch yourselves,’ ‘Don’t forget yourselves’) and with varied levels of success. Never Edward, though, of course; Edward never needed warning.