The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘Really,’ he countered, witheringly, ‘I think I’d know.’

  She moved back, silenced.

  Well, that, I really, truly didn’t believe we’d heard, and I might’ve checked with someone, just a glance, had I dared to meet the eye of anyone in that room.

  Edward snapped to. ‘So, you see?’ and he spread his hands, There you have it. ‘That’s why, when I find a sheaf of love poems and my wife cheerfully admits to me’ – he flourished a gesture in her direction, Here she is, you all heard her – ’that she did indeed fall in love with my father while I was fighting in France, and then nine months later we have Johnny . . . well, that’s why I can’t believe that “nothing happened”.’

  Katherine shrugged, sulkily, belligerently but at a loss. Well, I’m telling you, it’s the truth.

  My father had once again been standing back but now he roused himself, ‘Edward, no, no—’

  But Edward again cut him dead, spoke over him: ‘And so, the boys will stay with us – they’re Seymours, after all – but you, Katherine, will go to the nuns at Wilton; they’re expecting you the day after tomorrow.’

  Then he was away, past his father, to the door. Katherine, too, though, a step behind him, to catch it before it closed, to haul it wide open and then slam it behind them both.

  9

  No door had ever been slammed at Wolf Hall that I remembered, but that one slammed on those of us in the parlour with the brutality and finality of a trap door: You stay here. And so the four of us, my mother and father, Elizabeth and me, were flung back on each other, but everything in me rebelled against that particular fate and before I knew it I was across the room and yanking at the door; and then there I was, pitched up in the oriel among the anxious, eddying dogs.

  Katherine had followed Edward up the stairs and, somewhere above me, was railing at him, her words indistinct but the tone unmistakeably livid. What she had to say to him felt, oddly, like no particular concern of mine, merely disconcerting at most, like the scrabblings of mice at night in the eaves. I had something that I had to do: that was all I could think. I had to be doing something.

  Checking my way was clear, ordering the dogs to stay, I sped across Hall to the courtyard door, which, opening, spilled Mort around my feet and, as I stepped over him to exchange places, I understood why: the cold of the courtyard came as a physical blow. I might have screamed if my breath hadn’t already been snatched away. Nevertheless, I set myself against it, beginning a soft-soled slithering over ice-sheened cobbles. The darkness, too, bore down on me – there was no more than a scratch of new moon, unnerving in its clean execution – so that I had to feel my way with my feet from pool to pool of bracket-light so faint as to be from a bygone age.

  Soon, despite the clanging coldness in my nose, I was breathing a haze of horse scent incongruously reminiscent of a balmy summer’s evening: I was close to the stables. Keep going, nearly there. Emerging from the passageway between the inner and outer courtyards, I looked and listened hard but detected no one; I was too late, everyone gone fireside. While we’d been screaming and yelling in the house, they’d finished up their day’s work and gone, leaving the stables the province solely of their legitimate inhabitants. From somewhere came hollow-ringing hoof scuff like the clearing of a throat, from somewhere else a noseful of horse breath as unselfconscious as a baby’s sneeze, and everywhere was an almost palpable dense-eyed dreaminess. There they were, the horses, and many more of them than I needed but, lacking men to saddle them, they were no use to me.

  Then, though, in a far corner, darkness stirred as water would around a body: Mr Wallensis, judging from his bulk and his being last to leave.

  ‘Mr Wallensis?’ I spoke up to alert him, to allay any fear on his part as I appeared in the gloom like a wraith, although I doubted he’d know the voice as mine and, anyway, it didn’t seem to soften the blow for him of having been observed – however briefly and barely – when unaware. He froze. Me, too: I felt a pang for springing on him in the last moments of his long, cold working day.

  Just get on with it, Jane: ‘Mr Wallensis, we have to fetch Thomas.’ But instantly realising my mistake and rushing to reassure him, ‘No – no, no – no one’s . . .’ Ill, dying, died, and there was a heartbeat’s dizziness because even if I’d wanted to explain what was going on back at the house, how would I? How would anyone ever explain it? ‘But we need Thomas here, we need him tomorrow, as early as possible. Someone needs to go at first light and get him . . .’

  My words, like my shivers, were running everywhere, and even in that meagre light I saw Mr Wallensis frown and glance behind me for a source of authority, and I didn’t blame him – he didn’t do it to defy me, to thwart me. There I was, one of the girls from the house, turning up at the stables at an ungodly hour on a bitter night, underdressed, wind-stung, nose dripping, and babbling about needing my brother, and my errant brother at that.

  Mr Wallensis would be thinking that I’d squabbled with the family and wanted Thomas to side with me. He barely knew who I was. One of the girls from the house. What he certainly would know was that fetching Thomas from the Dormers was no business of mine; any such order would come from my father or Edward or, at a push, from my mother. But what he couldn’t possibly know, yet, was that it was beyond the three of them, at that time, to do very much at all.

  So, yes, I understood his reluctance but I couldn’t have it, couldn’t allow him to stand there, turned solid-faced from the cold, blocking me from the means of reaching Thomas. My tone, still ringing in my ears, had been solicitous, but there’d be no more of that. ‘Get Thomas here, please,’ I said, ‘as soon as possible tomorrow.’

  Still sceptical, nevertheless he moved himself to ask, ‘And Mister Harry?’

  If Thomas, then Harry, too: that was what he was thinking. Or, indeed, Harry, surely, over Thomas.

  ‘No. Leave Harry.’ Because not only was Harry a day further away and his wife about to give birth but, I knew, he’d be no help. Harry is an appeaser. Harry has always hated discord whereas Thomas thrives on it. Thomas was the one – the only one of us – who’d stand up to Edward to shout him down. Never cowed, he’d know his mind and he’d speak it. I was banking on his self-interest, too: with his ambitions, he, least of all of us, could afford a family scandal. Edward wouldn’t listen to what Thomas actually had to say – I wasn’t so naive as to think that – but the mere fact of opposition might just stall him long enough, I hoped, for him to come to his senses.

  I began making my way back to the house, but now that I’d done what I’d had to do, exhaustion came for me, making my heart bird-feeble at my ribs and my limbs nothing but shivers. Making me nothing: nothing and going nowhere, prey for the wind as it rushed across the miles. And on the other side of a roaring stretch of miles was Thomas at the Dormers’, standing tall, candleflame-gilded and smiling, rock-steady in a confidence in his own splendid future. He might have been made of an entirely different substance from me: something fine and plush, which would brush up as good as new. There he was, in the Dormers’ bright Hall, while the rest of us were in the depths of the forest, done for.

  Ahead of me in the darkness, our own old house seemed to be listing, breaking up, and sucking us down. I couldn’t make myself go back in there because I didn’t know what I’d find. Anything, absolutely anything, might be being said in there. No, I’d stay outside in the cold, lie down and let the wind pick my bones clean. Or Thomas would take me away: he’d return tomorrow and find me, then turn around and take me with him. Thomas would always have somewhere to go. Or I could even do it myself, and do it now: return to Mr Wallensis and insist he take me somewhere, anywhere. Where, though? To Harry? Harry would take me in. Barbara was nice enough, and there was a baby due. I could be useful if only Barbara would let me. That was one possibility.

  Or tomorrow I could simply start walking and leave it until later to worry about where. Plenty of people lived their lives on the road, I reminded myself. What mattered – all t
hat mattered – was that I didn’t ever go back in to Wolf Hall. I could never again look at anyone who’d been in that room. What had happened in there? Some awful misunderstanding, that was what, a dreadful, incomprehensible misunderstanding; something to do with dates, the details of which were beyond me but which Thomas, I was sure, would instantly grasp and dismiss. He’d be able to explain it to me; he could explain it away, because whatever his faults, no one was ever able to pull the wool over Thomas’s eyes. If he’d been there in the parlour, if only he’d bothered to be there, for once, then little of it, I imagined, would have been said. He would have shouted Edward down, even laughed at his absurd claims – and oh, what I would have given, for once, to hear that laugh. But instead what I’d heard was Edward, our shining light, our golden boy, making a sickening allegation, by way of the most excruciating admission of his own inadequacy, against his wife, his father, and his baby sons. He’d retract, of course, I was sure of it, and probably even before Thomas arrived, but so much damage had already been done.

  Damage: I knew even by then that what would never be explained away for me was Edward’s cruelty. I reeled across that courtyard with him burned on to the back of my eyes: him standing there and stating his case, delivering his verdict. He’d called us together – we’d gathered in good faith – before meting it out to us, sparing no one, not even my mother. Particularly not my mother. Then he’d passed sentence on his wife: made witnesses of us all while he’d handed down his sentence. What exactly had he meant, ’the nuns at Wilton’? For a period of penance? For how long? Could he really order his wife to a nunnery? I’d never even heard of anything similar, or not in our own lifetime. I wanted so badly to think of it as madness on Edward’s behalf, but I knew he’d not been mad. Was it just a threat? A sharp reminder to an allegedly adulterous wife of what she could have expected to suffer if she didn’t have the luxury of a forward-thinking husband? Because Edward was no man to concern himself with nunneries; I was surprised he’d even known where to find one.

  But I didn’t doubt that he had. He didn’t make empty gestures; he dealt in practicalities, and dealt brilliantly with them. I didn’t doubt he had actually been, as he’d claimed, to Katherine’s father and to the Mother Superior at Wilton. Which meant they’d know at least something of his allegation. And there could well be others, too. Self-reliant and well informed though Edward was, he couldn’t have gone that far without legal advice or spiritual guidance. So there would almost certainly be others who knew.

  Those were my preoccupations as I crossed back across that courtyard: practical concerns. I was nothing if not my brother’s sister. Rage, too, bubbling under – in that sense, too, I was my brother’s sister. Because all Katherine had done was turn it into an opportunity to say her own little piece, to indulge in some utter nonsense that had made matters immeasurably worse. I was refusing to think about what she’d said, adamant not to dignify it. For her to have imagined such a thing of my father! How little she knew him. How little she knew any of us, to think that she could stand there and say what she’d said and claim it as a kind of triumph. That was madness, and, in a way, I felt sorry for her, pitied her for her delusions. Edward was right in one respect, I felt: it would be better if Katherine were gone. It would have been even better, though, if she’d never come to Wolf Hall. My brother should never have married her. But he had, and there were the boys, and it was the boys who mattered, I reminded myself. We had to think of the boys.

  And my father: then I turned my ire on my father, because what had he been doing, pandering to his daughter-in-law? Yes, he’d only done as she’d suggested – write poems – but he’d carried her suggestion away with him and made time for it and tended it. Where had he made time for it? In his office? When we’d assumed he was working? We’d have been sitting in the parlour feeling sorry for him for having to work late, but he’d have been sitting there in his office thinking of Katherine. How long did it take him to write those four poems? Several evenings? Several whole evenings spent secretly on his daughter-in-law.

  ‘You’re Edward’s wife,’ that’s what she’d told me that he’d said to her. Well, if that was true, then a certain conversation had been had between the two of them, but not one, it seemed, that my father had then gone on to make known to anyone else. I understood why he’d kept it to himself – he liked to keep everyone happy – but still, what I would have given on that cold night to get hold of him and shake him.

  But that was nothing to what I would ’ve done to my sister-in-law if I could have; I despised and despaired of her. And yet there I was in that freezing courtyard, crying and telling myself that those tears were tears of fury, but they weren’t and I knew it. The thought of Katherine had got me by the throat and nearly had me howl because her heart beat brighter and sang at a higher pitch than anyone else’s, and if that heart could have been held in my hand then I’d have done it: I’d have taken it up and carried it to safety. I’d still have done that for her, after everything that had happened and everything I now knew. And so it was me I despised for my weakness, it was me of whom I despaired.

  And what, actually, had I done? Back there in the parlour, what had I done? I’d spoken up because Edward had been talking rubbish and I’d been in a position to counter it: that’s what I told myself. Then, when he’d then tried to discredit me, I’d had to defend myself. But standing there by the door, ready to go inside because there was nowhere else for me to go, I had to face that what I’d said in the parlour had suggested I’d known Katherine had considered herself in love with my father, and I’d been happy enough to go along with it.

  10

  In the morning, I woke more slowly than my sisters, rose reluctantly and was late to prayers. Edward was last of all of us and – having stayed at the back – first to leave. Katherine, by contrast, had positioned herself right at the front. My parents weren’t there, but sometimes for morning prayers they kept to the closet adjoining their bedroom, although on this occasion there was no light visible up there.

  After prayers, I arrived in Hall to find the children at the table with bread and preserves and ale, but the fire unlit and the air itself stiff with cold. Red-nosed, they hadn’t thought so far as to equip themselves with extra layers.

  ‘Why isn’t—?’ Exhausted, and exasperated beyond words, I could only gesture at the hollow fireplace.

  Margie spoke through a mouthful, ‘Moll’s run off her feet.’ Inexpressive, to emphasise that the words were Moll’s own.

  ‘Her trotters,’ said Antony.

  I hadn’t the energy to tick him off.

  ‘Lil’s gone with Mama,’ Dottie explained.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Elvetham.’ She said it unsuspectingly: indeed, excitedly. There was a baby expected and, as far as Dottie was concerned, her mother had had to leave a little earlier than anticipated. She didn’t seem to consider it odd that she’d gone with no word or note of goodbye.

  Thrown, I fell back on pretending the same enthusiasm. ‘Oh, really?’

  Elizabeth, I noticed, didn’t catch my eye: nothing unusual in that, but I wondered if she too had found our mother’s sudden departure to be ominous. Our mother had abandoned us, was my suspicion: she’d got up and gone, and, once she was there, with the baby due in a couple of weeks’ time, she wouldn’t come all the way back home again before the birth. She’d be away, now, for weeks on end. She’d packed while we’d slept. I dreaded to think what might have been said between her and our father. Or, perhaps worse, what hadn’t been said.

  Mr Wallensis had suffered a second surprise visitor to his stables within hours. I wondered what he was thinking. Had he told her that Thomas was returning? If so, what had she made of it? Not enough, it seemed, to detain her.

  ‘Did we get a messenger, though?’ Dottie’s question was for anyone and everyone. She was puzzled. ‘We didn’t, did we?’

  No one seemed quite to want to admit it, but the general murmur suggested that there’d been no sight or
sound of any messenger.

  ‘She’ll have just had a feeling,’ I lied. ‘Or maybe she decided that we’re likely to get snow.’ So she’d need to be travelling ahead. ‘Where’s Papa?’

  Elizabeth raised her head but still didn’t quite meet my eye; she said something but hardly moved her lips, so I failed to catch it.

  ‘What?’

  This did get me a direct look, but of contempt. ‘Gone after her,’ pronounced more distinctly but no louder: for me, not them, to hear. Elizabeth’s gaze sat uncomfortably in mine and my heart shifted beneath my ribs. We’d been abandoned: in the midst of this impossible situation, we’d been abandoned.

  ‘Perhaps she forgot something,’ chirped Dottie, who evidently had heard.

  ‘Yes, probably,’ I made myself say.

  Antony sang out, ‘So, now we’re like orphans!’

  ‘Stop it,’ I snapped, which shocked even myself.

  Startled, he rushed to explain himself, ‘We can do as we like,’ but the bravado was gone and he sounded unconvinced, even desolate, and I felt bad for him, even more so when Margie drove it home: ‘With Moll in charge?’

  I nodded at the Moll-neglected fireplace. ‘We need this lit. Go into the parlour for now. Take your—’ I indicated their trenchers and tankards.

  The banging and scraping of implement-laden children on the move was such a distraction that I didn’t notice my sister-in-law come in, but suddenly there she was and the sight of her filled me with dread. In her all too obvious desperation, she was far more than I could manage. She looked awful: at least as bad as when she had one of her headaches. Unlike when she had a headache, though, she was on her feet, and she had Johnny hoisted onto a hip. Her dejection suggested that nothing between her and Edward had been resolved, and I felt the dash of a hope that I hadn’t known I’d been holding.