The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  We should have heard any approach from a distance but a mere scattering of footsteps immediately on the other side of the door alerted us to its opening and then there was Thomas, close-candlelit and deeper flushed from an evening of wine and his sprint up the stairs. My brother was in search of distraction and, all else having failed, we girls would do. Well, that did it, I decided: I was off to bed. In he sauntered, breathing hard, turning the light chaotic around him, delighted at his find – ‘ Thought I saw shadows up here!’ – and overly optimistic, as ever, of a welcome. ‘What are you two up to?’

  What were we up to? Nothing, really. And indeed Katherine said nothing, retreating into a fold of arms so that it was left to me to answer, ‘Just dancing, a bit.’

  I resented having to hear how silly it sounded. He seemed happy enough, though. ‘Don’t let me stop you,’ and he put down his candle, about to hunker beside it, so keen to prolong the evening that he’d pay the price of polite interest in girls’ dancing.

  But Katherine and I stood there, the spell for us having been broken, which he must have realised because he was only halfway down before he reversed the descent, rising and beckoning for my hand. In order to get it over and done with, I allowed him to take me into a few dance steps.

  ‘Head up, Jane,’ he warned, which, despite everything, made me smile, because it was a family joke, my graceless focusing on the floor, and then he turned, as that particular dance required, for the next partner.

  Katherine hadn’t been following us; she was surprised by his reaching for her, but she wasn’t wrong-footed. If he was a good dancer, she was even better. No reminders needed for her to keep her head high, and Thomas, at the end of her arm, looked superfluous. Perhaps he knew it, because he broke off to ask, ‘D’you know this one?’ and embarked on a different, tricky sequence of steps, which he’d probably learned at the Dormers’.

  Neither Katherine nor I responded.

  Thomas prompted, ‘Jane?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘It’s not difficult,’ he countered, as if I’d claimed otherwise. ‘Want me to teach you?’

  I said I was off to bed.

  ‘Oh, come on!’ I was, apparently, a spoilsport.

  Well, so be it. ‘Thomas, really, it’s late,’ and I retrieved the candle from the floor.

  ‘Katherine, then?’ he wheedled, ‘Shall I show you?’

  I opened the door, the light spilling ahead of me down the stairwell, while behind me Katherine sighed crossly. ‘Oh, if you must.’

  I halted, already a step down, because I was stealing away with her flame, which hadn’t been my intention; I’d assumed she’d be following me. When I glanced around, she waved me off with the same impatience with which she’d just conceded to him.

  ‘I’ll take his,’ she said.

  And so I left them to it.

  3

  When Edward arrived home, it seemed that everything might well be fine; he seemed well, if even thinner in the face, which made his eyes look bigger and, for the first week or so, those eyes, free of their usual preoccupations, trailed we Seymours. And however much he hoped to hide his exhaustion, it was obvious in that benign, dazed expression with which he regarded us. Katherine stuck by his side so close as to take on something of it. She shored him up but there was none of that absurd wifely posturing in which she’d indulged when he was away; she seemed calmly accepting of her duty. And she was indeed built for diligence, I saw to my surprise; that long neck which had so often held her head high in jubilant defiance could bend just a little and then there she was, meek and mindful, and the steadiness of her gaze, which used to deliver long looks, was just as readily employed to serious effect.

  In his first days back, Edward took time to reacquaint himself with life at Wolf Hall, happy enough to sit with his mother in the day room or to endure ridiculous exchanges with Antony. Everyone wanted his company. Well, everyone except Thomas, who took himself off to the Dormers’, which was a relief to us all. Edward spent his time walking the dogs in the deadened gardens, and hanging around the stables, and once I came across him in the kitchen, chatting earnestly with Bax, who was treating him to samples as if he were a little boy. Katherine was there, too, ostensibly busy with her own task but, stealthy with her knife, she was listening to their every word. I tried to catch her eye, to exchange a smile: there I was in the doorway, stopped notably still, but she didn’t look over at me, too protective of her husband even to risk the fondest mockery.

  As he regained his weight and vigour during the following weeks, it seemed to me that his wife was losing hers. That taxing time of year, with the dietary restrictions of Advent compounded by the hardships of winter, meant that none of us was blooming, we all looked weary and wan, but Katherine was taking it worse than any of us. She went down with one of her headaches for three or four days, after which my mother secured a dietary dispensation in order to build her back up, and then a blind eye was turned so that the dispensation stayed in place until Christmas. She didn’t take much advantage of it, though, claiming a poor appetite and every mealtime pushing the superior, much-envied food around her plate.

  Then came Christmas at last, but on St Stephen’s she succumbed to a second bout. My mother’s view was that it was a bad time of year for those who were prone to headaches: stuck inside all day, every day in the fire-smoke, and then the fasting of Advent followed by the overindulgence of Christmas.

  On New Year’s Day, I walked in on my sister-in-law in the dry larder and saw, despite her frantic attempt to hide it, that she was crying. She’d turned fast but too late and she knew it.

  ‘Yes?’ She feigned scrutiny of a high shelf. ‘What?’

  I knew better than to take the hostility at face value. Excruciating though it was to have to stand there in the doorway with her desperate for me to go, I had to give her a chance to change her mind, to decide that she did, after all, need to confide in me. Only when the moment had well and truly passed with no sign of her relenting did I say what I’d come for – cinnamon – and then she handed me the jar without turning around. I was to leave her be and, it seemed, pretend to have seen nothing untoward, which surely made fools of us both.

  Katherine stopped being my friend when Edward came home from France: that’s the truth of it. Her first summer at Wolf Hall became just a summer, a May bride’s first, frivolous summer before she properly settled down to the serious business of being the wife of the Seymour heir. So my father had been right, I thought, with his gentle, knowing smile: the rest of Katherine’s life did start then. And from that time onwards, the two of us were simply sisters-in-law.

  But was it that simple? Because why take it that bit further and try to revise the past, too? That was what she was doing: pretending it’d always been thus, ever since she’d first stepped over our threshold. Pretending she’d never been anything other than the perfect wife. It was obvious from the way she avoided my company and declined to meet my eye as if I didn’t exist, the girl with whom she’d walked and danced in the dark, and the wifely Katherine was the only Katherine there’d ever been.

  And something else. One night not long after the turn of the year, I’d left my bed because Dottie had a tickly cough; she was able to half-sleep through it but I had no such luck, and it was on my way to the kitchen for a spoonful of honey for her that I glimpsed Katherine. From the foot of my staircase, across a moon-silvered expanse of flagstones, I saw my sister-in-law at the oriel’s unshuttered window. She was slotted onto the window seat, hugging her knees and facing into the night. She hadn’t heard me, it seemed, but if I took a single step further, then she would. There was no sleepiness to her, illuminated as she was by the wolf moon. She was thinking hard, I sensed, thinking something through, the work of it as exacting as a physical labour. What was it that was keeping her so wide awake? In the hours of daylight, she hovered around Edward, yet in the dead of night, when she should have been dreaming beside him, there she was, at that window, animal-br
ight.

  Having to resign myself to suffering Dottie’s cough, I drew stealthily back up the stairs, but from that night onwards, I could never quite trust to Katherine being asleep. Lying in bed on the other side of the wall from her, I’d find myself half-listening for her tread, even for her breathing, even perhaps her thinking; I’d lie there wondering if she, too, was awake, and why.

  That spring came, at last, almost a year after their wedding, the big news: Katherine was pregnant. It was Edward who actually announced it, in the parlour after supper one evening, but Katherine had looked to him to do it: he rose at her urging, unvoiced though it was. I’d glimpsed her sidelong glance at him, as pointed as a nudge in his ribs: Go on, that look had said, do it. He didn’t, not immediately, batting it back with a scowl of his own so that she re-delivered it: I said, Go on. As if they were children owning up to something. Then he rose, self-conscious, clearing his throat to command our attention, and said he had some news, failing to specify good or bad. He pitched it over our heads: ‘Katherine is expecting a baby.’

  The squeals of delight seemed to startle him so that he, too, might have been hearing it for the first time. Perhaps that was when he allowed himself to believe it, and then he looked to his wife. She returned the look, but apprehensively. My mother spoke up, over all the congratulations, to ask when she was due. Second half of September, Katherine replied, not quite meeting her eye.

  My heart was over-full beneath my breastbone. Sitting there in a room aglow with joyful faces, I beamed back at my brother and sister-in-law while trying to force that strenuous smile down inside me in order to feel it, because all I felt so far was that with a baby, Katherine would sail away from me into motherhood and leave me stranded in my Wolf Hall life. I hadn’t expected to feel like that, I’d assumed I was beyond all that; she was no company for me by then, she was nothing to me bar a sister-in-law (just one summer – my mistake, I’d never had a sister-in-law before). But I’d been protecting myself, I realised to my disappointment and my shame. I knew I should have been across the parlour, as was Elizabeth – Elizabeth! – to give Katherine a hug; I should have been generous enough to be able to do that. The children were bouncing, literally bouncing, and Harry was laughing, and my parents almost crying. Thomas would be the odd one out, but I couldn’t look at him for fear of seeing my ambivalence reflected there. I so badly didn’t want to be like Thomas.

  Oddly, Edward and Katherine appeared no more comfortable than I was. If the news had been of a business deal, Edward would’ve been graciously accepting the congratulations, but he looked flummoxed. As for Katherine, her gaze roved among us as if she’d been unsure of a good reception and still couldn’t trust to it, and I wondered how she could ever have doubted it.

  ‘Lent!’ My mother turned, alarmed, wide-eyed, a hand pressed to her lips. We’d already endured three weeks of dietary restrictions, which Katherine – in her delicate condition – could have been excused, had she only spoken up. My mother crossed the room and crouched down to look, pained, into her daughter-in-law’s face. ‘Katherine, really, you should’ve said.’

  It was Edward who spoke. ‘But we didn’t know, did we.’

  He sounded irked. My mother ignored him and continued her appeal to Katherine. ‘You’d have had an inkling and you should have said. I mean, I can understand’ – a furtive glance around the room, you might not yet have felt confident to tell everyone – ‘but you could have just had a little word.’ With me.

  ‘Honestly,’ Katherine said, refusing to respond in kind, ’thank you, but I was fine.’

  ‘But the baby—’ My mother caught herself, unsure if she should’ve owned up so readily to her concern being not for Katherine, but for the baby.

  Thus rebuked, Katherine did from then onwards make sure to eat more, but in all other respects she sought no concessions nor welcomed any. She worked as hard as ever around the house, actively taking on tasks and rebuffing offers of assistance. ‘I’m not ill,’ I heard her protest once to Dottie and Margie who, following my mother’s example, were trying to deprive her of a broom. The small silence that followed was, I knew, the sound of the girls mulling this over; and presumably it satisfied them because they relented without further ado, and to my knowledge never again tried anything similar.

  The one time I did see my sister-in-law accept help was, surprisingly, from Thomas. We were waddling across the inner courtyard, laden with laundry baskets, when he strode past us but then appeared to remember himself and turned back.

  ‘Here.’ He gestured grimly at Katherine’s basket. ‘Let me.’

  She held it to her and I could almost hear her usual rebuff – I’m fine, thanks – before she said it. But then she didn’t say it, changed her mind and heaved it into his arms. ‘Thanks.’ It was all she said and there was less than no gratitude in it. She didn’t smile or even look at him, and nor did he at her.

  My mother, though, persisted, forever snatching baskets from Katherine’s hands and rushing to plump cushions behind her even as she was in the act of reclining on them. Quite unable to stop herself, she longed to make a fuss of her or, more accurately, of the baby she was carrying, and tried to hide her dismay at Katherine’s pointedly robust self-reliance by affecting an indulgence of it: ‘Oh, you young ladies these days . . .’

  Edward, though, was made to answer for his wife’s attitude. One morning I was searching for Antony – he needed a hair-wash – and came across him at the stables with Edward, up on Edward’s hunter. Standing by for my little brother to slide from the saddle into his big brother’s arms, I spotted my mother advancing on us, looking concerned. ‘Edward?’

  I claimed Antony with a hand on his shoulder, the better to steer him indoors, while Ralph began leading Gawain back into his stable.

  ‘Edward?’ My mother pitched her enquiry past us and over the clatter of hooves on cobbles. ‘Is Katherine all right?’

  I faltered – had something happened? Antony slipped free of me, loping ahead. Katherine had seemed fine when I’d last seen her, mere moments before, combing Margie’s hair for lice.

  ‘It’s just that—’ Reaching him, she could lower her voice, into a sigh, ‘Well, you know, it’s that she just doesn’t seem very happy to be pregnant.’

  Oh, that, then, was all it was, Katherine’s ongoing all-too-obvious impatience with the plumped cushions.

  ‘Is it because she’s worried, d’you think? Because of course I can understand that, but she should rest assured that there’s no one better than Mrs Gilhooley.’

  Mrs Gilhooley, the midwife.

  ‘Yes,’ said Edward, notably uncomfortable at being waylaid on the subject and perhaps especially near the stables, that most masculine of territories. ‘I’ll tell her.’

  Antony stopped short. ‘Oh!’

  ‘Antony.’ I’d had enough – fetching him had taken long enough already – and, besides, I didn’t want to seem to be eavesdropping, which was exactly what I was doing.

  ‘My stick!’ he wailed, to which I folded my arms emphatically: Quickly, then.

  He scampered back across the courtyard and I made a show of watching him, of being in the courtyard on legitimate business.

  ‘And,’ my mother asked Edward, ’there’s nothing else wrong?’

  But Edward had never had a pregnant wife before: how could he know how happy his wife should he, or at least seem to be? I sensed him pondering the extent of his wife’s failing in this respect, and the extent to which he could be held at fault for it.

  ‘She’s fine,’ he said, making it sound like the last word on the matter.

  That was a mistake; Edward was losing his touch. My mother hadn’t picked her way across the cobbles to be dismissed so easily; she wasn’t going to say, ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ or ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ and then just turn on her heel.

  ‘Come on,’ I called to Antony, even though he was doing just that and at a fair lick.

  My mother said nothing, so Edward had to say something m
ore. ‘You’re right,’ he said, ’she probably is worried.’

  My mother allowed it with a sage nod, but didn’t shift. It didn’t suffice.

  Antony reached me with an extravagant skip.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Come on.’ At last we could get going. ‘Hair-wash. Now.’

  ‘Can I do it myself?’

  ‘If you do it properly,’ which he never did.

  Behind us, I heard Edward claiming, ‘Katherine really isn’t one for show, that’s all.’ But that was worse: the implication that my mother had failed to grasp something so fundamental about her own daughter-in-law. And, anyway, that use of the word ’show’, as if all she was after was mere show.

  So, on the whole, it wasn’t going too well. Not only had my mother been brushed off by her difficult daughter-in-law, but also by her beloved eldest son. And as time went on, it didn’t get any better. Quite often I’d glimpse Edward snapping-to and changing direction on a staircase or in a passageway to avoid my mother, and never before from him had I seen the likes of such disloyalty.

  Nevertheless, my mother didn’t let up. She refused to be denied any opportunity to celebrate her daughter-in-law’s condition, however stony the reception, to which end she’d rope in any of us who happened to be around; even the dogs would do. Katherine would walk into a room and her mother-in-law would enthuse to everyone and no one in particular, ‘Well, goodness, I think Katherine’s showing already, don’t you?’ No response required, which was just as well in the case of the dogs but suited the children, too. They’d look up, unfocused, from whatever they were doing, momentarily disoriented, as if having half-heard something from afar and of no concern to them, like a hunting horn.