‘Oh no, she’s horrid.’
Startled, my father and I both laughed, which in turn startled her and she, too, laughed. ‘Well, / think she is,’ she half-apologised, or perhaps it was a refusal to apologise. ‘Well, she is,’ and her insistence had us laughing anew. Ahead, the dogs pranced around in their own way of laughing although at what, like children, they didn’t know and didn’t care.
‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I made my mind up to steal him from her.’
‘Did you?’ She had me, now. This, I felt, had the makings of a good story.
‘But you didn’t have to,’ said my father. It wasn’t a question and she didn’t answer, just smiled with some satisfaction.
I wanted the story, though, enough to step in front of her and walk backwards, leading her on. ‘How did you realise?’ When had she realised that she didn’t have to steal him, that he was already all hers?
‘Oh—’ she gazed distantly, less interested. ‘It was one day when I said something like, “Nancy’s in the garden,” and he said, “Nancy?” Simple as that. I don’t think he even knew who she was.’
No story, then, after all, but still we were laughing, all three of us, in celebration of her victory, her easy victory, so easy that it was in fact no victory at all because there’d been no battle.
‘Well,’ my father concluded, eventually, buoyantly, ‘Edward never makes a wrong choice, does he, Jane?’
But Katherine thought that he had, or believed that he thought that he had. I glanced nervously at her but she said nothing, halting and reaching into the lavender bush to draw the fingertips of one hand the length of that brittle flower head: we were back where we’d started, I realised, we’d done our circuit of the garden.
She asked my father, ‘You really don’t write poetry any more? Nothing at all?’
‘Good Lord, no.’ Cheerfully dismissive, he turned to whistle for the dogs.
She drew down the scent from her fingertips as if it were something she’d hitherto been denied. ‘Never tempted?’
‘Young man’s game.’ He was gesturing for Bear to come to him, reaching to fuss her, making his peace with her.
‘You’re not old! You’re half the age of my father.’
My father laughed at the exaggeration, which then had her insisting, playfully and ridiculously, ‘You are!’ before settling for, ‘Well, you certainly seem to be.’ With a passing pat of her own to Bear’s head, she finished, ‘You should try, you know, John. You should try writing a few poems. You might surprise yourself.’
WOLF MOON
1
The longed-for news of Edward’s imminent return came on an afternoon that was, at first, like any other November afternoon. Most of us were sewing with my mother in the day room, my job being to perform long-overdue surgery on Antony’s beloved night-time companion, the bedraggled Bibi. Katherine had taken the blacksmith up to the long gallery to see to a faulty hinge on the virginals’ lid. Outside, the rain was one long sigh; inside, the fire was testy, spitting and smoking, my mother frowning at it from time to time as if to put it in its place, and Margie coughing. The only other sound was the rasp of thread drawn through fabric.
But just after three o’clock came a welter of boot steps on the stairs and the door banged open, giddying the wall-hangings, to deliver Thomas still in motion, already withdrawing but calling to us, ‘Messenger!’ He knew we’d know from his tone that the news was good, and from the lack of explanation that the news was of Edward.
‘Dover!’
He slammed the door shut behind him in his haste to spread the word. A collective gasp rose around me as the hangings settled down like hands behind which passed a frantic whisper. Edward was ashore in England and all but home. My breath slipped its knot and unspooled.
‘Thomas!’ My mother was on her feet, hurrying to the door, ostensibly to object to so abrupt a departure but really because she couldn’t take the news sitting down. She called after him again from the doorway, but he was long gone. Turning back to us, she voiced my own thought: ‘Katherine.’
‘I’ll go.’
Not that I needed to say it: everyone knew I’d be the one to go. Off I ran, down the stairs and across the house, heading for the stairs up to the long gallery, brimful of the news, my breath bouncing against my ribs and my garters slipping down over my knees. Bax was loping along the screens passage but I hurtled past without sparing him a word. My steps hammered into that seemingly endless staircase leading to the long gallery, but I could see myself already at the top and hurling open that door. My sister-in-law had been held captive for a couple of months in a state of ignorance as to the whereabouts and welfare of her husband but, at last, I could release her with a single word: ‘Dover.’ I probably wouldn’t even have to say it – she’d probably know as soon as she saw me, and, turning to me, she’d look exactly as she had in the beginning, when she’d first stepped over our threshold. We could start all over again, the stresses and strains of the previous two months behind us as if they’d never been. I hadn’t acknowledged to myself, until belting up those stairs, how desperately I wanted that. Edward would be home and Katherine would be my friend again and all would be fine.
But at the top of the stairs the door opened to nothing, to no one; the long gallery empty, the virginals’ lid demurely down and the hinge flush with it.
Where was she?
Back down the staircase in a rush of maddeningly little steps, my blood at a rolling boil; back along the screens passage, this time lobbing a fragment of apology at Bax. No sign of Katherine in Hall, either, or chapel or the parlour, nor the kitchen and larders, nor was there any response when I yelled for her outside the jakes. She could be anywhere, I despaired; this big old house was made of nooks and crannies. Why on earth hadn’t she come straight back to the day room? Someone else, most likely Thomas, would have got to her first; she’d hear the news from someone else. Someone else, probably Thomas, would be the recipient of her profound gratitude while I lumbered around red-faced in wrinkled stockings.
As a last resort, I hauled myself up the stairs to her room, where, to my surprise, my knock elicited a faintly audible answer. I had barely enough strength left to push on the door. Inside, she was luminous beside the unshuttered window; and luminous, too, in one hand, was a letter which, presumably, she’d been reading in the diminishing daylight. A letter? As far as I was aware, she couldn’t read well enough to be able to make much sense of a letter. Nonetheless, whatever was in her hand had absorbed her so that her focus on me was delayed, and I took that moment to try to catch my breath, scooping it back into my burning lungs from where much of it was ejected in a spasm of coughing.
She didn’t remark on my disarray, didn’t even seem to notice it, instead proffering what was in her hand – ‘Look’ – which I suppose I then did, my gaze going in that direction even if I took nothing in.
‘Poems.’ She was full of wonder. ‘From your father. He’s done it, he’s had a go, and don’t you think that’s marvellous?’
My coughing was dragging me under; I tried to straighten up. I was half-laughing, too, by now, because if she thought it marvellous that my father had penned a poem or two, just wait until she heard what I was going to say.
‘I can’t read much of it, though.’ She came to my side, pausing to ask, ‘Are you all right?’ but not long enough for me to reply, and, flourishing the missive, she asked me, ‘See that word, there? What’s that?’
It was as if one or other of us were dreaming and hard to wake; it was easiest just to answer, ‘Autumn,’ before, ‘Ka—’
‘And that one, there?’
‘Michaelmas – Katherine, Katherine . . . ‘And then, thank God, I did have her attention, or at least her eyes on mine. ‘A messenger,’ I managed, just.
All the life fled from her face and I realised my mistake.
‘No!’ Not bad news – anything but – and my coughing blasted into laughter. ‘No! Edward’s back.’
Such a sharp intake of breath that
I might’ve slapped her.
No, not here, not yet. ‘Ashore.’
Still, though, she didn’t look reassured. ‘Really?’
One hand, holding the poems, went to her heart and the other onto my wrist where the strength of her grip had my breathing falter. The grip was already dissolving into shakes, though, and I realised she was incapable of standing, and even as she was holding me down, I was going to have to hold her up. But in a trice she’d groped for the bed and got herself to it, let the edge of it take her weight. She asked again – ‘Really?’ – but just as blankly, as wide-eyed as before.
The news would have come as a shock, I realised – of course it would have, and how stupid of me to have imagined otherwise, to have burst into the room so very full of myself. Sitting down, half-sitting, warily, beside her, I noticed she was crying; saw it rather than heard it, because she was tight-lipped. The tears seemed wrenched from her eyes, making them a sore red. Sitting there shoulder to shoulder with her, I murmured some reassurances – ‘Don’t worry, he’ll be back soon, he’ll be fine’ – as my own breathing settled, but she didn’t look at me, her steadily leaking eyes fixed floorwards. I’d imagined we’d be there for a while as she regained her composure and gathered her nerve, but suddenly she stood, so abruptly that the rebounding mattress almost unseated me.
‘Yes,’ she said, clipped, if nasal, in dismissal of my reassurances. I had a dizzying sense of the two of us being somehow at cross purposes. She was done with the shaking and crying, but I wasn’t so sure they were done with her. I anticipated some explaining away of the manner in which she’d received the news – just the shock – but no, not a bit of it. Instead, she crossed the room and, with her back to me, began tidying herself up, culminating in a harsh blowing of her nose before she was ahead of me through the door.
Downstairs, a tentatively celebratory gathering was under way in Hall, family and servants milling expectantly. Lil came in with a big bowl in each hand – almonds, dates – and Moll whipped the high table with a tablecloth. Antony made a beeline for Lil, intercepting her and hovering on tiptoe to see what was in the bowls, but every other face turned to us as we came through the doorway. My father had an arm across my mother’s shoulders and Dottie was cantering around them, proposing various ambitious entertainments for Edward’s homecoming.
It was Margie who took it upon herself to approach us, with a valedictory tipping of her nose into the air, to break the news: ‘Edward’s been knighted.’
‘Really?’ And so there I was, just as Katherine had been, minutes ago, up in her room – Really? Really? – but nothing like her because my grin was so wide that it almost hurt. Beside me, Katherine mustered an appropriate response but sounded dazed, which was how Thomas looked, too, over at the far end of Hall, not simply, I knew, because he was exhausted by his heroic dash around the house and courtyards but because, despite himself, he’d be finding it hard to hear of this important success of Edward’s. Well, tough, was all I could think, Time to grow up, sunshine.
Few people were quite bold enough to be looking one another square in the eye before Edward was definitely back on the safe side of the gatehouse, but my father was the exception. His eyes came for Katherine’s and, standing there at her side, I too felt their draw, which was how I came to glimpse the smile he gave her: fleeting but somehow also long, and both joyful and gentle. ‘See?’ that smile seemed to say, as if he were holding her to something. ‘See? He’s coming home.’
I did see it, I definitely did, but back then I made nothing of it, and, really, why would I have? That smile of my father’s, which said to his daughter-in-law, ‘This is over now, and the rest of your life can begin.’
2
The final week of Edward’s absence was the worst, in a way, because we were holding our breath and in the last few days it proved harder and harder to hold. In honour of their big brother’s return, the children devised a pageant, which became disastrously overambitious and alarmingly paced, depicting a crazed ensemble of saints and growing daily more elaborate until even Mort and the dogs had parts. Every rehearsal degenerated into strife: Antony overzealous with his sword, which invited Margie’s disapproval, which only inflamed him further; and Dottie was in the middle of the feuding pair, marshalling the dogs, panicking and pitching in to try to keep the peace. Myself, I had a lot less patience with them than I should have had.
Then, in the early hours of one morning that week, I woke to hear Katherine crying. Our rooms, on separate staircases, shared a wall. Only once before in my life had I ever heard such crying and on that occasion it had been through a closed door: my mother, when the baby John died. To call it despairing would be to dignify it. It was simply the kind of crying that just has to be done: it would go on and on and on until it was done. It would go on until it was done with her. Even if I got up and went to that room, there’d be no consoling her. So I lay awake in the dark while, on the other side of that wall, my sister-in-law gradually exhausted herself back into sleep. And then I lay awake a while longer, wondering. We were all going mad, it seemed to me, but in Katherine’s case, not with joy. What on earth, I wondered, could have her, mere days from her husband’s homecoming, so utterly desolate?
Edward had been likely to make it home on St Katherine’s eve, but, in the end, he didn’t. Mid-afternoon came the news that he was still about thirty miles away, which suddenly didn’t seem to matter. With him back on home territory – my father even knew which inn he’d be stopping at – we felt able to relax enough to allow ourselves some cautious optimism. He’d be with us in his own sweet time and meanwhile we could enjoy the evening for ourselves. To everyone’s relief, the children postponed their pageant. Our St Katherine’s feast would go ahead, though, my mother decided. If it couldn’t now mark Edward’s return, it could instead be a celebration of our final night of waiting.
Katherine came later than any of us into Hall that evening and when at last she did appear, she took us all aback, her head bare and hair loose: the bride she’d never been, because she’d worn it coiled under a caul of gold thread and pearls for her wedding when she could have worn it down. She’d forgotten, was my first thought, she’d been distracted by her other elaborate preparations and had forgotten to fix her hair, cover her head. Encircling her waist were pearls that should have been looped around her neck and at her throat was a choker made from silk ribbon and a stunning brooch but, despite these efforts, my sister-in-law was only half-dressed.
Her first step into the room, though, showed me how wrong I was. That long-swinging hair was no mistake; she held her head high, the better to let it fall. A ripple of unease passed down the table but didn’t touch me. As I saw it, she was leaving the past few miserable months behind, and in style.
We had musicians hired for that evening, and the food was particularly good: meat melting from the bone, an extraordinarily dense cherry sauce, and bread that was almost creamy. The fire burned with confidence for hours and its steady touch had the muscles of my back opening like flowers. When the dishes were being taken away and the handing around of the spiced wine had begun, Katherine called softly down the table: ‘Antony? A dance?’
More accustomed to being told to sit still, my little brother leapt at the chance, my mother fretting in his wake over a kink in his collar. He and Katherine crossed to the small space bounded by the other tables and began a stately dance. For all that they made an incongruous pair, it was a proper undertaking, perfectly serious. I could see her murmuring prompts to him, ‘Two steps, now, to the left. That’s right.’
Margie stood up to make her proposal – ‘Harry?’ – and so they joined in.
Then Elizabeth sighed to Thomas, ‘Come on, I need to practise,’ and although he was going to decline – his hand tightening around his cup, ready to raise it, to object that he was too busy drinking – my mother caught and held his eye, Do as your sister asks. So, with a sigh even more fulsome than Elizabeth’s, he capitulated.
‘And look like
you’re enjoying it,’ Elizabeth ordered, ‘or you’ll put me off,’ to which he raised his hands in a show of surrender. Only Dottie and I were left at the table with our parents. My mother was concerned for Dottie but the response was a stern frown and a gesturing at a busy mouth: her priority was the cheese, which had just been brought to the table; she could never resist cheese. Placated, my mother leaned back in her chair and gave herself over to spectating.
My father stood, bowed to me – dear man – and extended a hand in invitation: ‘Jane?’
Eventually, late, at my mother’s request, the children were ushered off to bed by Lil and Moll, the rest of us drifting back to the table, where Harry entertained us with card tricks. Elizabeth retired after a while – she had her monthly, I knew – but everyone else remained at the table when all the precious beeswax had pooled and firelight alone painted the room in its colours. No one could quite give up on the evening. Perhaps, oddly, none of us could quite give up on the time when Edward had been away, of which, despite its difficulties, we had proved ourselves to be survivors. When we did all finally leave Hall, we had to salvage wicks for the purpose and, heading for our adjacent staircases, Katherine and I took a single one, which she carried. Neither of us spoke on our way across the house; we were both tired and anyway she’d not said much all evening, At the foot of my staircase, I was about to grope my way up as she held the candle aloft for me, but she said, ‘Let’s go up to the long gallery.’
She said it with no obvious enthusiasm, and I was baffled. ‘What for?’
She shrugged. ‘I love it up there.’
Well, she did, I knew, and – warm and well fed – 1 was feeling relatively well disposed towards her and didn’t wish to deny her, on that night of all nights. More to the point, I didn’t quite have the wherewithal to object; it’d be easiest to go along with it. Anyway, she was already turning away with our light.
The long gallery seemed to have been expecting us: when the door opened, there it was, composed, looking coolly and levelly back at us. The length of it drew us onwards but, much of it beyond the reach of our flame, also kept us in our place. A few steps in, Katherine paused and turned to me with a little laugh of delight, then, having placed the candle carefully on the floor, spread her arms just as she had on her very first day. Back then, she’d skipped into the morning sunshine but now she stood in the candle-glow and turned, slowly, relishing the space not by dashing into it but by wrapping it around herself. One of her extended hands reached for me, drew me to her, and then we were dancing or at least going through a few steps. No music, of course, but that didn’t seem to matter. Dancing was the obvious use for so much space. Free of music, we were, not at its bidding, not having to fall in it with it but dancing instead as we chose, our shadow-selves looming and lumbering around us, undimmed by the dark.
The May Bride Page 15
