Lil? Her unbandaged hand cupped his bottom, the fingers splayed for grip. Thomas was held hard to her but pressing harder still, rhythmically, as if his whole body were coaxing something up through hers. I stood there unable to believe what I was seeing. Actually, I didn’t know what I was seeing.
Hadn’t Thomas said something, that embarrassing time in the day room, about Lil being kissed in and out of her dress? Well, at least here she was in her dress, horribly rucked up though it was to expose spindly, shiny-stockinged legs. At least there was that. How did Thomas even know what to do, whatever it was that he was doing to her that had her clutching at him like that? Thomas: good for nothing except slouching around Wolf Hall and getting on everyone’s nerves. Or so I’d thought. Thomas, a mere year older than me and as least as far away as me from marriage. Or so I’d thought. Not that he’d be marrying Lil, of course, and a sudden awful suspicion stole over me: was he forcing himself on her? Had he lured her there to take advantage of her? But to judge from that tight circling of the flat of her hand on his backside, she didn’t look in the least taken advantage of – she looked born to it. And that, too, I would never have imagined: Lil?
Perhaps, I thought, that was the point of the painting on the wall at St Mary’s: to show that you go about your daily business assuming you know what’s going on when everywhere under your nose, should you look, there’s this. I was stunned; I had no idea what it was that I was thinking or feeling, no idea even what I should be thinking, should be feeling. It was all new to me, all of it, every last bit – people among trees, the slow-kissing and the rucking-up of clothing by people who’d never be getting married to one another – but most startling to me of all was that I’d been such an innocent. Oh, I’d known I was hardly worldly wise, but until then I’d had no sense of the extent of my naivety, and the revelation brought me to an astounded stop.
Only momentarily, though, I told myself, because any time now I’d be turning away, recovering myself and moving off, leaving them all to it. That was the intention, but there I still was, gawping, as if I, too, were somehow bodily held, and even odder was the sensation that it was me who was being watched.
Katherine would come to my rescue, though, of that I was certain. She was a married lady and awful though it was that she had to see such behaviour from a Seymour, it’d be nothing, really, to her. She’d be able to make a good laugh of it and have us strolling away from the scene as if it were nothing, all in a day’s fair-going. And then, halfway back across the common, beyond the hearing of the kissers, she’d look at me and raise her eyebrows and wrinkle her nose – Thomas! Lil! – and we’d be shrieking delightedly and derisively, getting the better of them.
When I did eventually look at her, her eyes fled mine. ‘You know,’ she said, clipped, as if I were the one at fault, ’that brother of yours really should watch himself,’ but with her shame-hot cheeks and furtively averted eyes, it could have been she who’d been uncovered.
8
Not until the skirmish on All Souls a couple of weeks later did I discover the depth of the contempt that Katherine had developed for Thomas. All Souls was a serious undertaking at Wolf Hall: the one day of the year when, according to Father James, my two dead brothers came close enough to home to hear our prayers for them. My first-born brother, of whom I had no memory, and the last-born, whom I’d never seen alive. Every All Souls eve, our mother made the house wondrous and welcoming for her two lost boys: banks of beeswax candles in every room, and Hall ringing with the deft work of a hired trio of harpists. We Seymour children had grown up understanding that that there should be none of the silliness that, we’d been intrigued to glean from Moll, tended to happen in other households: a candle unexpectedly extinguished and, to shrieks of excitement, a hand lain on an unsuspecting arm.
That year, on All Souls, our new family member was, unfortunately, far from at her best: sharp-shouldered all morning, her eyes downcast and an incisor punishing her lower lip. It didn’t bode well, but All Souls had to go without a hitch, so, nervously, I waylaid her in the oriel after dinner to ask what was wrong. She didn’t hold back, her response a huge sigh and frank stare.
‘Jane,’ she levelled with me, ‘is Edward coming here tonight?’
In her question was a note of challenge, as if I should be admitting to something. What, though? I had absolutely no idea what she was asking me. Edward, home? Had I missed something? Could I possibly have missed something? Panic skittered under my ribs. What on earth could it be that I’d somehow missed? Standing there willing her to say more, to offer some kind of explanation, I suffered a stare from her that was both reluctant and insistent: a refusal to let me off the hook.
But what hook?
‘I don’t know,’ I had to say eventually, and, feeling profoundly stupid, I had to ask, ‘Is he?’
‘Well,’ her stare-strained eyes reddened, ‘If he’s dead, then yes, he is, isn’t he.’
And I got it, even as I sincerely wished I hadn’t: a soul; Edward as a soul, already gone from the world and drifting around in purgatory.
But she couldn’t say that! She couldn’t even think it. I understood that she feared the worst, of course she did, but so did I and everyone else at Wolf Hall and none of us would dare think of him as dead because wherever he was and whatever was happening to him, he’d be trying his utmost to stay alive, and for her to think of him as one of the dead was the ultimate betrayal. It was a giving-up on him; it was, practically, as bad as wishing him dead. I had one immediate concern: my mother mustn’t hear any of this, shouldn’t even get wind of it; it’d be more than she could bear, more than she should have to bear.
I heard myself saying, ‘Stop it, Katherine.’
But she pressed on. ‘And I won’t know, will I.’ She was aghast, tremulous, transported by the drama of it. ‘He could be here . . .’ She even glanced fearfully around the oriel, ‘Watching me . . .’ And suddenly her face was running – eyes, nose – and she swiped absently, approximately at it with her sleeve, which was shocking enough but not nearly so much as her thinking of her own husband pursuing her like a spectre.
Just then the Hall door opened, jolting her into self-awareness, and she turned abruptly to hide her face. It was Elizabeth who sauntered into the oriel: saving souls was one of the few tasks my sister considered worthy of her efforts, and she was making quite a show of carrying to chapel a big box of beeswax candles. The door hadn’t properly closed behind her before it swung open again and in came Thomas, instantly several paces past her and up onto the stairs from where, glancing back down at that reverentially borne box, he teased, ‘Sure you’ve enough there, Elizabeth?’ She ignored him, but he called after her as she disappeared into the parlour, ‘A lot of souls vying for God’s attention tonight! Light the way, Elizabeth!’ and then, raising his voice as if he himself were a soul pleading to God, ‘Oh, down here, down here, please, please! Me, me!’
He shouldn’t have said it, disrespectful of the dead as it was, but there was no malice in it and, anyway, Elizabeth’s insufferable self-importance invited a needling. Thomas was only being Thomas, and even Elizabeth herself knew to make nothing of it.
Not Katherine, though, she flew after him, roaring up the stairs, ‘Thomas!’ So that the oriel’s window-glass actually rattled. ‘God listens to everyone.’
It was an absurd overreaction and Thomas did well not to be taken aback, managing instead to make light of it – ‘Does he, now?’ – which at least gave her the chance to adopt disdain, save face, walk away.
But she took it as further provocation: ‘He’s God!’
I knew I should do something – go and lay a reassuring hand on her shoulder, try to bring her to her senses – but in her self-righteous fury there across the oriel from me, she was unreachable. I had no sense of what she might do next, might say.
Too late, anyway, because, ‘Who are you, Thomas Seymour,’ and startling, it was, the disgust with which she yelled his name, ’to know anything of God?’ Wit
h that, she whirled away, stamped back into Hall, leaving Thomas to take a step or two down the stairs in her wake, belatedly conciliatory. He appeared a little shaken but composed enough to give me that knowing look of his: See?
But I didn’t – it was sheer madness to me – or I didn’t think I did at the time. But actually, I had seen something: that Katherine was, to me, quite unknowable.
My father was the only Seymour she seemed to regard as being on her side, and thus he only ever saw the best of her. One dismal early-November afternoon she persuaded me to accompany her from the smoke-bitter day room for a breath of fresh air, and there in the herb garden was my father, engrossed in a lavender bush. He didn’t look up as we approached, didn’t offer us any proper greeting but remarked instead, in wonder and pity, ‘It’s still in flower.’ Dutifully, we appreciated the solitary flower head, but actually I could only think of hurrying on: just once around the garden, Katherine had assured me. In the leaden, sodden air, even this briefest of pauses was proving hard for my feet. I was in mere soft-soled shoes; she hadn’t given me time to go for my boots. Contracting my toes, claw-like, I shuffled on the path. My fingers, too, were beginning to sting, my hands red raw from all the salting we’d been doing, so I slotted them into my armpits.
Katherine, though, straightened from her inspection of the lavender to stand tall, drawing her cloak around herself and relishing a deep breath as she took in the garden, which was such a sorry sight: lanky, brittle stems blotchy with seed heads. Below ground, bulbs were sleeping and roots feeling their wet way down.
Her eyes gleamed. ‘I do love this time of year.’ Despite everything, her wistfulness suggested, despite the decay. She was unable to resist its peculiar charms, was the implication, glad to give into it.
I said nothing. Well, she hadn’t been addressing me, anyway; to judge from the way she’d drawn herself up to say it, and the lofty, distant focus she’d adopted, she’d been declaring to an audience of which I was, at most, only half. Did she really love this time of year? Could anyone? Not the animals, that was for sure, because with Martinmas began the annual slaughter: everything to be hacked up, lathered in salt and stuffed into barrels to last us the winter. For the rest of the month, bellowing and squealing would be coming from the outbuildings, and the courtyards would stink of blood. The slaughtering unsettled the children: Dottie was febrile, which turned Margie stern, and Antony would at some stage get himself daubed with blood on his cheeks and forehead as a badge of dubious honour.
Katherine had never before mentioned any love of late autumn and I’d have said that summer was her season.
‘There’s no pretence, is there, in November,’ she said, approvingly. ‘It’s not putting on a show.’
Unlike her: she did seem to be putting on a show, although not for me. My father was receptive and I had a sense that this kind of conversation, if that was what it could be called, was commonplace here in the gardens between the pair of them. Quite clearly, she felt my father was the only one of us who understood her. Quite possibly, it occurred to me, she was right.
‘It is what it is.’ Katherine flapped a hand at the desolate beds.
What it was, this time of year, was a wreck, which was a shame, seeing as how hard we’d worked on it. She shrugged: ‘It is what it is’ – fair enough – ‘and no getting away from it. You have to face it. And I like that.’
I flexed my toes as hard as I could inside my shoes and rocked back and forth from my heels to the balls of my feet, not simply for warmth but to try to set us in motion. Once around the garden, she’d said, but she and my father continued to stand there breathing in the damp-reeking air as if it were doing them a favour. And now she gazed admiringly at the house. ‘Mind you, I love being indoors, too, this time of year. Love settling down.’ She hitched up her shoulders and dropped them hard, as if giving herself a consolatory hug.
I had to suppress a sigh. If she loved being indoors, then why were we out here? And for someone who loved being indoors, she’d been spending an awful lot of time lately in the desolate gardens. Edward would need to be home soon, I realised, before it became much colder, and the absence of him from all this chatter of the charms of autumn came to me like a breath on the back of my neck.
By this time, the dogs had become concerned by our lack of progress; George approached us, respectful but impatient, his eyes searching ours.
‘Bear’s in disgrace,’ my father confided, his voice low to spare her the shame.
We both gasped. ‘Bear?’
‘Bear.’
She did indeed seem to be skulking ahead of us on the path, keeping her distance.
‘Got herself into the dry larder.’
A laugh escaped Katherine, her fingertips too late to her lips. ‘Dogs! Why don’t they hide what they’ve done?’ She was incredulous. ‘They’re clever enough to do it – coming up with the plan, biding their time – but then don’t think to cover their tracks! And there they are, when you come along, standing there with their spoils all scattered around them, just cringing . . .’ It genuinely appealed to her, this canine lack of guile, which in turn made me smile. ‘Oh, poor Bear,’ she breathed, heartfelt and fond.
‘Yes, well, anyway,’ my father said with his own smile, ‘we’re not talking to each other.’
Katherine raised one eyebrow, ‘I’ll say nothing more of it,’ and turned her attention instead to the solitary flower that my father had found. ‘You used to write poems for Mrs Seymour, didn’t you, comparing her to flowers.’
My heart contracted, because it was me who’d told her. Not that it was a secret. Anything but: it was family lore and there was no reason that I shouldn’t have told her, and every reason that I should’ve, now that she was a Seymour. But still, I felt implicated.
My father feigned surprise, ‘Who told you that?’ and looked pointedly from her to me and back again. Despite the note of protest in it, I could hear that he was proud, and rightly so. A family legend: his ardent wooing of his wife.
‘Oh . . .’ And Katherine was having fun now, emphatically avoiding looking at me.
There I was, in the middle of the pair of them, the subject of their indulgent attention. Well, there were worse places to be. I batted it back: ‘She’s family,’ was what I offered my father in my defence.
Katherine seemed to find that funny, and gave a sceptical tilt of her head to elicit what he might say to it.
His own defence was offered with a flourish like a bow: ‘I was young. Very. It was bad poetry. Very.’
‘But she married you.’
‘She forgave me, then married me.’
Untrue, of course; he was simply having fun. There’d been nothing for my mother to forgive. She’d loved him for it.
‘Well,’ Katherine offered her own verdict, airily, ‘I think it was lovely of you.’
‘No, really, you didn’t see the poetry.’
I could tell he was pleased, though, which in turn pleased me. He was self-conscious, yes, put on the spot like this, but enjoying the opportunity to reflect fondly on the gauche, hopeful boy he’d once been. His conspiratorial glance came to me like a wink, as if the poetry-writing escapade was something we’d been in on together, although of course it’d happened long before I’d existed. Still, he was right, I suppose, in that I was family in a way that Katherine wasn’t.
‘Well, I’m quite sure it was lovely,’ she said, ‘but anyway it’s not the poetry itself, is it, it’s that you made the effort,’ and her tone was cheery, but I had the faintest unnerving sense, even as I told myself not to be silly, that this was an implied criticism of Edward. No letter had yet come from him, as we were all too aware, although it was hard to imagine how, under the circumstances, one would reach us.
We were walking, at last, but too slowly. My father said, ‘I only did it because my friend did it. Mr Skelton – you remember, Jane?’
I did, or at least I knew the name from various family stories: my father’s friend, John Skelton.
/> He said, ‘I was terribly impressed by his poetry-writing. Problem was,’ an exasperated breath of a laugh, ‘he was good at it.’
Katherine said, ‘Edward never wrote me poetry,’ and so then there it was, as I’d feared, good-natured enough, yes, but still, she’d said it.
‘You married him, though,’ said my father.
She liked that. Drawing us in, she indicated that she had something to tell us. ‘D’you know, I used to think he’d come for my sister. He’d leave my father’s office – I’d find him around the house – and I’d assume he was looking for my sister.’
That I’d never heard before and, despite myself, I was suitably intrigued.
‘I assumed that he just happened to bump into me on his way to find Nancy, and was having to be polite to me.’ She laughed at the absurdity of that feigned politeness. ‘There he was, all serious and clever . . .’ She didn’t say ‘gorgeous’, as once, to me, she had, ‘. . . and Nancy’s all serious and clever . . .’
A shortening of breath from my father, about to interrupt, pose a question or raise an objection, but she headed him off with the explanation, ‘She never gets things wrong, never shows herself up.’
Whereas she did, she meant. And it was true, she did, and I remembered how it was what had drawn me to her. Well intentioned though she was, she was forever tripping herself up, couldn’t help herself. She was at the mercy of herself and knew it, always ready to throw up her hands to it. Or that’s how I saw it. In time, I’d learn that what had looked like openness was a mere lack of guile.
She said, ‘They seemed to me to be the perfect match.’
‘So,’ my father said, ‘he should’ve married Nancy?’
The May Bride Page 14
