The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘It’s just that . . .’ I cleared my throat. ‘Well, she’s such a country girl, isn’t she?’ Which was one way to put it.

  He said nothing, which I took to be affirmation; he was only too aware of the gulf between them.

  Suddenly I felt so very tired and wanted Katherine to come back through that door and fix whatever was wrong between them, or try to; it shouldn’t be left to me.

  He changed the subject: ‘Are you sure you have time to do this today?’ his dark eyes on mine were concerned.

  I assured him that I did.

  ‘Well, I appreciate it,’ he said, ‘I really do.’

  In turn, I appreciated him saying so. Had we been different people, I might have laid a hand on his arm.

  He sighed hugely in a kind of summing-up. ‘You know, Francis and I should probably be talking to the Dormers about you.’

  I didn’t follow.

  ‘Good family, but Will’s a third son. Won’t be easy to marry off.’

  ‘No,’ I said. I wasn’t agreeing, I didn’t mean that Will wouldn’t be easy to marry off; I meant, Stop. My stomach had dropped to my shoes.

  Edward regarded me kindly. ‘There’s no shame in having a good word put in for you.’

  How would you know? ‘Not Will,’ I managed.

  But he laughed softly. ‘Will’s all right.’

  All right? As, if all right was all right. And, anyway, actually, he wasn’t; he wasn’t even all right.

  ‘Jane—’

  I cut him off. ‘I’d rather stay here.’

  ‘Here?’ He was incredulous.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, with much more certainty than I felt.

  Did he really hold life at Wolf Hall in so little regard? Your family is here, I wanted to remind him. Your children.

  He didn’t appreciate what he had, I felt. And his wife: she could have the best of both worlds, trips to court and a life at home, but still she acted hard done by. Well, try being married off to someone loathsome. I gathered up Edward’s garments. I wouldn’t hear a word more; I was going back to bed, I’d do his repairs there.

  At the door, I let loose a parting shot: ‘Katherine might just find herself a bit out of place at court.’ He assumed it’d be plain sailing, but I wasn’t so sure; he was forgetting that his wife wasn’t wholly conventional.

  He rolled his eyes, but mine was a serious point and I pressed ahead with it. ‘I mean,’ I cast around for an example, ’she can’t even read, really, can she?’

  This he dismissed with a weary sigh.

  ‘She can’t, Edward.’ Did he really not know? Did he really not know what kind of girl he’d married? But, then, how would he? He was almost never home. He hardly knew her. ‘Our father once wrote her some poems,’ I told him, ‘and she had to ask me to read them to her.’

  He just scoffed. ‘Our father? Poems?’ Which further annoyed me because this was beside the point.

  ‘He did, when you were in France. She couldn’t even read words like “autumn”.’

  He looked amused, and shrugged. This was a fight that he was refusing to have. He asked, ‘Can you do those this morning?’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, before I shut the door on him.

  It sparked something for him, though, my mention of those poems, although I didn’t know it at the time; it was only later, from Katherine, that I’d learn what happened.

  At first, Edward was intrigued by what I’d said, because his father? Writing Katherine poems? His father and Katherine had nothing to do with each other. Our father had nothing much to do with any of us, really, except Edward himself, and even then the conversations were pretty much limited to work. And Katherine had never mentioned any poems. And, Edward wondered, why wouldn’t she have? He might have considered asking her, but feared she’d jump down his throat; he was too tired for that.

  At night, too weary to sleep without her beside him – again, she was with the boys – he pondered those poems and decided to have a look for them, just a little look. If they had ever existed, he doubted Katherine would have burned them. Who, given poems, would go so far as to burn them? So he got up and opened her oak chest; he didn’t know what she kept in there but he knew it was where she kept whatever she had.

  There were some clothes that he recalled having liked her wearing, in which he hadn’t seen her for a while, and her wedding dress, which he hardly dared touch, and, deeper down, cloths, bleached and rolled, that he suspected she used monthly. At the very bottom, he found a small bundle, linen-wrapped and ribbon-tied. He untied it, unwrapped it, and there was no mistaking his father’s handwriting. Four poems, instantly recognisable as standard courtly fare, comparing the subject to flowers. As far as Edward knew, his wife was no fan of poetry. She laughed at courtly conventions. Didn’t she? Yet those poems had an air of being treasured, he felt, despite or perhaps because of being kept at the bottom of that chest. He wished she’d mentioned them. It seemed odd that she hadn’t. He pondered how little he knew of the life she led at Wolf Hall while he was away.

  He couldn’t re-tie that ribbon exactly as she had; tying ribbon was no skill of his. If she ever came looking for that little bundle, he knew, she wouldn’t be fooled.

  He probably didn’t intend to raise the subject with his wife, but the next night, when she was back in the bed with him, he found himself saying, ‘You never told me that my father wrote you poems,’ hearing how he sounded pleasantly surprised, chummy, chatty.

  But she would have none of it. ‘What?’ She was probably already half asleep.

  ‘Jane said. Said my father wrote you some poems when I was in France.’

  She murmured, ‘I told him to.’

  Of all the responses he might’ve expected, that wasn’t one of them. ‘You told him to?’

  ‘Yes.’ And? But then she did explain, or kind of: ‘He’s good at it, but he never does it any more, which seems a shame.’

  There was no answer to that. A moment later, he asked, ‘And were they any good?’

  She sighed, pointedly: she was desperate to get to sleep. ‘How would I know? What do I know about poetry?’

  And that was that.

  Except that he added, ‘It’s just that you never said.’

  To which she mumbled, ‘You were away, remember?’

  Some minutes later: ‘Those poems—’

  ‘What, Edward, what?’ She’d been on the brink of sleep.

  He made himself ask it. ‘Did you keep them?’

  ‘No!’ Irritated by the suggestion. ‘Why would I?’

  Perhaps she’d forgotten that she’d kept them: that was what Edward decided to think. It was feasible. It’d be easily done, buried away as they were, even if, at the time, she’d wrapped them with such care. It was a long time ago that she’d wrapped them up: two years. That was what Edward told himself. But he had an inkling of what he’d find if he looked for them again and when he did so, the following day, he was right: they were gone.

  Two days, he gave her, two whole days in which to say it: Oh, those poems? Remember? Those poems of your father’s? Well, guess what – turns out I did still have them.

  And after those two days, he raised it with her: ‘Those poems of my father’s . . .’

  ‘Will you stop going on about them.’ They were both in bed again; she turned her back on him.

  He was taken aback by her vehemence, and, anyway, ‘I am not “going on about them”.’

  Nothing from her.

  ‘Katherine, really, honestly, I’m not “going on” . . . It’s just that, well, I suppose I’m wondering if it was . . . quite right for my father to be writing you poems. That’s all.’

  No response.

  ‘I mean,’ he didn’t like to have to say it, ‘courtly poems written to his daughter-in-law . . . how does that look?’

  She turned on him. ‘Who’s looking?’

  A fair question, but a mistake because the answer – loud and clear in the silence – was that he was. He retreated to, ‘I just don’t k
now if he should be writing you poems.’

  ‘He isn’t,’ she retorted, which only made matters worse: the implication that it’d been a discrete period of time, the time when Edward had been away.

  Edward sighed pointedly. ‘Well, all right, but perhaps just don’t encourage him.’

  And then – why on earth did she do it? – she glared at him and said, ‘He didn’t need any encouragement.’

  He would have counselled himself against reading too much into what she’d said in haste and when goaded, but it stayed with him, and the following night, in bed, under cover of darkness, he dared to ask her, because he felt he should: ‘He didn’t. . . bother you, did he, my father? That time when I was in France.’

  He wouldn’t quite have been able to imagine it – his father bothering her – but what did he know, really, he would have asked himself, of what went on at Wolf Hall when he was away?

  She threw it back at him, hotly, ‘Edward, your father is a lovely, lovely man.’

  He lay there contemplating it, then said to the ceiling, ‘I’m sorry that I’ve never written you poems,’ but despite it being said in all sincerity, there was inevitably a tetchiness to it.

  Katherine sat up – snapped up – to object, ‘I don’t want poems, Edward.’

  He said, gently, as a reminder, ‘I’m working very hard you know, Katherine.’

  She said nothing, because she did know. She hadn’t needed telling. Everyone knew; no one could fail to know how hard he worked. It was his answer to everything.

  Then he made it worse by adding what she knew he’d add: ‘And I’m doing it for you.’

  She was glad he’d said it, though, because now she could shout it down. ‘No, you are not.’

  He tried to insist, ‘It’s for us.’

  ‘No, it is not!’

  She really was shouting, and I remember hearing it through the wall: I heard shouting. No one ever shouted at Edward.

  I hadn’t discerned the actual words but later I’d learn that she’d shouted, ‘I don’t care about any of that! Don’t you understand? I don’t want any of that! You, bowing and scraping to make your way at court. What I want is . . .’

  Words failed her.

  ‘Poems,’ he countered scornfully. He, too, was up; he couldn’t take this lying down.

  She fumed, ‘What I want, Edward,’ and she didn’t want to have to say it, but there was no avoiding it, ‘is to be loved,’ spitting out the word to deride it between the two of them as an outlandish expectation.

  He said nothing, just lay back down in the bed. He could have said – should have said – ‘You are,’ but he didn’t.

  6

  The first I knew of any of it, bar there having been some shouting, was when I was taking advantage of a rare dry February afternoon to get a few rugs beaten. It was the one task for which I never had any trouble garnering assistance from the junior members of the household, so long as I restricted myself to holding one end while they argued over whose turn it was to be left holding the other and whose to be free to indulge in the flogging. Chopper was bothering us, agitated, barking at each thwack, whether in excitement or alarm, I didn’t know. Perhaps both.

  So there I was, coughing on the dust, reverberating with the blows, refereeing the children and shouting at Chopper to pipe down, when Katherine came across the courtyard to me and, in the midst of the mayhem, turned her back to the little ones to ensure us some privacy. Quietly, below the whooping and beating and barking, she asked me, ‘Why did you tell Edward that your father wrote me some poems?’

  For a beat, my heart seized, because for her to know that I’d told him, he must have told her, and because the two of them clearly weren’t on good terms, I doubted he’d done so in celebration of her muse-like quality. My guess was that he’d somehow used it against her, although I couldn’t see how.

  There’d been no complaint in her question, though, no accusation; it was just a question. She was here for an answer. But what was the answer? I couldn’t exactly remember why I’d said it, but, to my sudden shame, I did recall the spirit in which I’d delivered it, and it hadn’t been generous. What I recollected of the encounter was how cross I’d been with Edward for having the temerity to try to marry me off when he himself, in my view, had married the wrong girl. Cross at him, too, for having made that marital mistake; cross, perhaps, even with Katherine for being the wrong girl. I’d been tired was what came to mind and, yet again, as it felt to me, trapped in the middle of some altercation of theirs.

  I didn’t answer, but deflected: ‘Shouldn’t I have?’

  She gave a weary flex of her eyebrows. ‘Well, he doesn’t seem terribly pleased.’

  I checked, ‘Edward?’ because she could’ve meant my father. My father, surely, was the one with face to lose; my father, revisiting his gauche boyhood self.

  She nodded: Edward.

  I was genuinely puzzled. ‘But what’s it got to do with him?’ Why would Edward be bothered?

  Turning to go, she agreed with a widening of her eyes and a shrug: Search me.

  A day later, my mother asked me to nip up to Katherine and Edward’s room to fetch Katherine’s little box of silks; she had an idea of a shade of green she’d like to use on some sleeves, but nothing in her own box came close and Katherine had invited her to look in hers. But Katherine had forgotten to bring the box downstairs, and then, apparently, while Johnny and Ned were napping, she was busy in the long gallery, undertaking what my mother suddenly seemed to regard as the most crucial of tasks, the supervision of the girls’ virginals practice. So it was me who had to drop everything and go in search of those silks. As it happened, all I had to drop that morning was one of those little hammers with which, all Lent long, we pummelled strips of stockfish in an attempt to make it faintly palatable. However much of that disgusting dried fish we pulped, there was always dismayingly more in the barrel, so, despite resenting being at my mother’s beck and call, I was happy enough to down tools.

  I was still a few steps short of their door when I heard Edward: not on his way to the barber in Burbage, as my mother had told me, but in the room and sounding relatively cheerful. ‘Next time,’ he was saying, ‘I’ll be bringing Francis’s tailor back with me, to make you something really special, because we’re off to Greenwich for Lady Day.’

  The final few words were flourished to bestow what was presumably intended as a fabulous surprise on his wife. Which it was for me, too: Greenwich Palace, and for Lady Day, not simply one of the biggest feasts of the year but, when it fell during Lent, dietary restrictions would be abandoned for that one day. And at Greenwich, I imagined, that would be done in some considerable style.

  Katherine’s response was, ‘Mr Marychurch at Marlborough is fine for me, Edward, thank you,’ but with a striking lack of gratitude. ‘He knows exactly how to cut for me, and I’m not going to take my business away from him just because you’ve decided I should look like a stuffed partridge.’

  I cringed, physically, my backbone bumped onto the stone wall, to hear this from her. It had been a peace offering, he’d been making a gift to her (and what a gift! A court-worthy new dress and the Lady Day feast in a palace) but she’d hurled it back at him. Had she really needed to be nasty? Couldn’t she have put on a brave face and pretended to be pleased, or at least to be considering it? But then, she was spoiling for a fight – ‘stuffed partridge’ – and Edward, I knew, would be wise to leave it, step away, walk out of the room. If he did, though, he’d come across me stuck on the stairs.

  ‘I’m going nowhere for Lady Day,’ Katherine continued. ‘I’m not leaving Ned; he won’t even be three months, and that’s too young.’

  Incredibly, and admirably, Edward persisted, with increased good cheer: ‘But Ned’ll be fine! He’s a big, healthy boy, he’s fine with Mrs Pluckrose’ – his wet-nurse – ‘and, anyway, my mother’s here.’

  Katherine wouldn’t budge. ‘You go.’

  It was me who needed to be going, I told myself,
I should be off this staircase and away; I couldn’t risk one of them huffing out of that room to find me here. How, though? How to get back down the steps without giving myself away? True, I’d managed to get up – oblivious, too, all a-scamper. . . but, still, I didn’t fancy my chances. Just go, I urged myself, Just do it: six, eight steps and I’d be safe. But I stood there, unable to trust to my luck.

  ‘Katherine,’ Edward’s voice was lowered, pleading, ‘It’s taken me a lot of work to get us a room—’

  ‘Well, go and stay in it, then.’

  ‘– and until now,’ his voice even softer, a stab at intimacy, ’there’s always been the . . .’ He seemed to have to consider how to word it, ‘. . . the boys.’ The pregnancies was probably what he’d avoided saying, although I didn’t know why he’d wanted to avoid it. His wife had been pregnant for much of the previous year and a half, and travel for her would’ve been ill-advised. ‘And now, I think, it might do us some good to get away together.’

  ‘What would do us some good, Edward, is to live away somewhere.’

  I was rigid on those stairs, my back to the wall, barely daring to breathe. I’d had no idea this was a bone of contention, but it’d had the ring of being well rehearsed. I’d assumed that Katherine was settled at Wolf Hall, now that the boys were born; happy, even.

  ‘Yes.’ Admirable patience from Edward, if rather strained. ‘And you know that I’m working on that.’

  Was he? How? Harry and Barbara had moved into Elvetham now they were married; there was no other Seymour house. He’d have to buy one, or build one.

  ‘No, Edward, you’re working on a bigger room for yourself at court.’ And then she wailed, ‘Barbara and Harry have their own home!’

  He echoed it, ‘But you didn’t want to live at Elvetham!’

  So they’d discussed it then. Well, Katherine had been right to decide against it; Elvetham was bleak and I pitied Barbara.

  ‘Katherine, I just don’t understand you! Anyone else would jump at the chance to go to court for Lady Day.’