The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘No,’ I insisted of her, because for once, just for once, she was going to behave properly, with consideration for other people, and I turned to the chest, ‘We ‘re putting everything back where it belongs.’ But suddenly, decisively, she rose, and somehow, in a step or two, she’d swept me with her to the window and there we stood, side by side, which was when she told me.

  13

  Think back two years, she said, to St Katherine’s eve, the eve of Edward’s return from France. When everyone else went to bed, she said, we went up to the long gallery: did I remember?

  I did.

  And along came Thomas, offering to teach us a new dance.

  Yes, I remembered: I’d opted for bed, but she’d taken him up on it and I’d left the two of them there in the light of a single taper.

  She’d felt she wouldn’t be able to sleep, she said, so she decided she might as well put the time to good use. Better than lying alone for hours in the dark. Thomas then did as he’d promised, demonstrating the steps for her and directing her attempts to copy them, despite the evening’s wine taking its toll on him: ‘No, uh-uh’ – he’d raise a hand to call her to a halt – ‘you’ve got to go to the . . . the . . .’

  ‘Left?’ Sleepless though she was, she was nevertheless weary. ‘To the left, here, Thomas? Is that it?’

  ‘Left! – yep, that’s the one. But perhaps not quite so . . . so . . .’

  ‘So what, Thomas?’

  He could only laugh at his helplessness in the face of her exasperation: ‘Just . . .’

  ‘Just what, Thomas? Lighter? Faster? What?’

  All he could do, in the end, was show her – like this – and so there he was, taking those steps again with the considerable, enviable ease which came from evenings of practice in the Dormer household.

  She scrutinised those steps and their sequence, holding the recollection firmly in mind when she moved to reproduce them but somehow they eluded her, tripped her up: she found that she couldn’t do that dance, or only imperfectly, approximately. She couldn’t even see where the problem was, couldn’t quite account for the shortfall between intention and execution. She’d recognised those moves of Thomas’s exactly for what they were, she was sure of it, she’d understood them and known what it was that she had to do but then, when she came to make them, they didn’t quite happen. And worse, Thomas was witness to it: sneery seventeen-year-old Thomas, of all people. But suddenly, just as inexplicably, it was there, that dance, it was right there at her feet – the steps, their sequence – and she could repeat it time and time again until the mystery was how she’d ever got it wrong. Now she couldn’t have got it wrong if she’d tried.

  Thomas watched, standing back enough to sit down, eventually, on a stool, and then, when he was satisfied, rising to join her. There they were, the two of them, perhaps not so much partnering each other as dancing the two parts of the same dance at the same time.

  By then, I’d been gone quite a while and it seemed to Katherine that it was done, the dance learned, practised, committed to memory, and she should no longer be putting off going to bed. So, with perfunctory thanks to Thomas, she swiped the taper from the chest on which it’d been placed, but moved too quickly and the flame veered in its wake, throwing off smoke as it drowned.

  They both groaned, defeated, because how could they possibly find their way from the long gallery and down the stairs in darkness so dense that it seemed hard even to breathe? There was nothing for it but for them to edge their way along, the flat of a hand offered up to the tapestry-lined wall, while their eyes adapted. Thomas offered to lead the way.

  ‘Whatever you do,’ Katherine whispered ahead to him, ‘don’t yank down any of Margery’s tapestries.’

  The prospect struck them both as hilarious. The disloyalty was delicious. In daylight, those treasured tapestries presided over the gallery, but now, abandoned to the night, they hung there at their mercy, practically inviting desecration. If something did go wrong, no one would know who’d done it.

  Thomas breathed a regretful, ‘Oh God,’ and whispered back at her, ‘I’m pissed and I’m going to be horrible tomorrow.’

  Tomorrow, when Edward the hero would return and all Seymours should be on best behaviour. That, too, struck her as funny: Edward wasn’t even home yet but already his homecoming was a disaster. She put Thomas straight: ‘It’s all right for you, he’s not expecting anything of you.’

  She’d intended it lightly, but the misery of it hit her square in the chest and Thomas was taken aback by the depth of her sigh: stopping in his tracks and turning to her, although of course he’d see nothing. Unaware that he’d halted, she bumped into him, her free hand up to his chest to recoup her balance and re-establish some space. She felt bad for him, too, all of a sudden: Edward was a hard act to follow. She knew only too well how it was to be forever falling short. In that sense, she and Thomas were allies.

  And although Thomas’s hadn’t been the chest against which she’d been longing to rest in all that time when Edward had been away, there it was, right in front of her, and so, fleetingly, she laid her head on it, to take what she needed. No one would know, not even Thomas, really, drunk as he was. Gingerly, he placed a hand on her back – a brotherly gesture – and, held there like that, she faced her dread of Edward’s return: didn’t fight it, didn’t have to pretend. There’d been so much pretence for her of late, that it was giddying to be able to give up on it, however momentarily.

  Thomas’s breath was warm on the top of her head and there was his chin, too, the jut of it, a resistance that was somehow pleasurable. She hadn’t reckoned on how difficult it would be to pull back from the warmth of him. She’d not been held by a man for a long time and perhaps never unambivalently. Thomas had no qualms, she could tell, but she sensed he’d been taken unawares and it was surprisingly satisfying to have rendered him at a bit of a loss.

  She drew away from him and duly he dropped his hand. But there had been that unexpected connection between the two of them, to which she wanted to give her blessing before it disappeared, so she craned to bestow on him the lightest of kisses, not unlike those with which in later years she’d grace her sons’ heads before leaving them to sleep. He reeled a little but not enough to take his lips from hers: he was a seventeen-year-old boy after all, and a drunken one at that. She detected a mindfulness to his lack of response: he was being careful, she realised, he was having to be careful. And hadn’t that been her dream? To be kissed by someone who couldn’t stop himself. Not Thomas, of course, but her lips stayed on his, nevertheless, to keep there the potential of such a kiss. Thomas, too, she felt: his lips were on hers even though, had it been physically possible, he’d have been looking pointedly in a different direction.

  Then she made to move away but didn’t, quite. Which made it a brush of her lips across his. Which made it a kind of kiss. Still, no one would know, probably not even the pair of them themselves because the chances were, come the morning, they’d have no memory of it. And anyway, this was only Thomas, he was just a boy and this was nothing, this was what he did with servant girls. How different, though, from Edward’s cold mouth, how different from the way Edward kissed her, and it was definitely kissing that was happening, now, and actually it’d been happening anyway – the lips on lips, the brushing of lips over lips – so why pretend otherwise? No more pretence, not tonight. Because this was her chance – her one chance and her last – to press her mouth hard and open to someone else’s and she was discovering that, for her, it couldn’t be too hard. Nor for Thomas, it seemed, she didn’t have to worry about Thomas; he was giving as good as he was getting.

  There was that ache, too, underneath her – that deep-down, insistent ache of which Edward, merely by his presence, had made her feel ashamed – and Thomas shouldn’t have known it was there, yet he seemed to be playing with it with every touch of his tongue on hers. He was also turning her around, reaching behind her with one hand for the wall, checking for an absence of tapestry so th
at he could press her back and pin her there, the better to kiss her. Those tapestries! Despite the kissing, she smiled and then so did he. She sank back but then his weight knocked the breath from her and her shoulder blades crashed into the panelling and she surfaced from her reverie, which was when it all should have stopped.

  But instead she whispered to him, ‘Let’s go to my room.’ It was a practical solution to the problem of that linen fold digging into her backbone, and that was all it was; that was as far as she was thinking. She just needed a little more of him, just a little more time with him. There was no plan. Nothing would happen. What could happen? He was her husband’s little brother; she was his big brother’s wife. He was drunk and her mother had warned her that her husband would be no use if he were drunk, and indeed, at Lammas, when Edward had had too much wine, hadn’t those been Thomas’s own words? ‘He’ll be no use to you.’ Well, now it was Thomas himself who’d be no use; she could kiss him all night long if she liked and she’d be perfectly safe.

  Thomas said nothing. He must have wondered if he’d heard her right but didn’t dare question his luck. He was seventeen and drunk. He allowed her to guide him. She gloved his hand with hers and groped with the other for the door, her stealth in opening it striking the two of them as comical, as did the oblivion of everyone beyond the staircase: a household of Edward-types earnestly asleep and the two of them on the stairs in league against them.

  How different life would’ve been, it occurred to her, if she’d married Thomas. There’d have been a lot of this, she’d bet: sneaking off together, giggly, to bed. A lot of bed, a lot of early retiring and late rising, and perhaps even moments mid-morning as the chapel bell was calling her to Mass, the thought of which, alongside the impossibility of it, whipped her heart from its beat.

  Descending that staircase with Thomas on her heels, she marvelled: she’d be having this living, breathing boy to herself on her bed for a while, and he wanted it at least as much as she did, and what a revelation that was. And whoever would’ve guessed? The two of them, who’d always been so badly at odds.

  When they reached her room, he drew his fingers through her hair so that she too felt the life in it. Edward had never touched her hair; she’d always combed it through before bed then tidied it away again into a single plait. Thomas breathed against her neck as if relieved of a burden, and her own inhalation of his warm, secret saltiness slid beneath her breastbone to knock her, almost, off her feet. He drew back from her and nudged her around to face away from him so that he could unlace her gown, and of course, of course, because the gown was bulky and she couldn’t lay comfortably in it on the bed. He worked slowly, no doubt because he was less than sober, but it was clear that he knew what he was doing, that he was practised at it, which came as no surprise to her; the surprise was the thrill it gave her. She noted the barely perceptible tightening of each lace as he made enough slack to free it; and soon all the fabric was being lifted away from her, across the room, with a sound like overhead wing-rustle. He draped it over a chest, and there, looking lovely, it might never have had anything to do with her: she looked at it and it seemed to look back at her, and it was as if she and it denied all knowledge of each other.

  She stood in the softness of her kirtle but Thomas was loosening that, too, tackling its side-lacing so that she had to raise her arm for him. She’d never before been undressed by a man. She didn’t even undress herself so much as change clothes, donning one garment before emerging from the other so that briefly she’d be wearing both and never none: it was how she’d been taught and it was how she changed into her nightdress whenever she came to bed for Edward. But here was Thomas with his fingers threaded into her lacing. And if he could do it, then why shouldn’t she? She twisted to get to work on him, popping buttons through buttonholes, and when she slid his jacket from his shoulders, he took it from her and dropped it on top of her gown. He was down to his doublet and hose, but she – when he’d removed her kirtle – was in smock and stockings. Well, if her, then him, too, she decided: his doublet should come off, although it’d take some doing, thoroughly laced as it was to the hose. She worked her way around his waist, unpicking every one of those ties until the doublet could be shed and he was left in shirt and hose that was held up by nothing now but his hips.

  Time at last for the bed: she went to open the hangings but his hand came to her arm to halt her and, when she turned to answer that touch with a glance, he drew her smock up and over her, the linen buffeting her head and white-blinding her. Now she was naked except for her stockings and she’d never been naked that she remembered in front of anyone, not even herself. Unnatural, was how it felt, which perhaps he understood because quickly he cloaked her with himself, and she clung to him, Don’t go, don’t move. Over his shoulder, she spied her smock on the floor: it hadn’t made it as far as the chest.

  He parted the hangings behind her and then the pair of them were on the bed, but instantly he drew back again, this time to take off her stockings. She could only watch with a kind of incomprehension as they came rolling away from her, first one and then the other: relinquishing her, those much-darned woollens, to leave her across the bed in the lantern-light as she’d never before seen herself.

  She refused to be alone in this, so, when he tried to settle back down, she tugged at his shirt, prompting him to strip himself of it, and then she eased his hose down until he obliged her by wriggling and kicking himself free so that he, too, was naked. She’d never even imagined two bare bodies together, she, diligent embroiderer of peach-hued Adam and Eve. Nor could she have anticipated the heat of his skin on hers and how he seemed to be melted over her so that nothing of her stayed untouched. She was aware he was hard but she knew she was safe because he was drunk and even if he hadn’t been, he would never dare, because in a few hours his brother would be coming through that door downstairs. And indeed he didn’t dare, but just kissed her: long, luxuriated-in kisses to her mouth, and others, lighter, elsewhere. She, too: her own lips relished the rolling of bones inside his skin and the confidence of muscle.

  But by now her ache had become not quite bearable and she longed to know – she’d been longing to know ever since she’d married – how it would feel to have a man inside her and to have him stay there, not slip away as Edward did. Edward retreated from her, every time, sighing and bitterly disappointed, leaving her adrift. Would that happen with Thomas? Thomas, who’d unvested her of every last stitch, then dressed her up in kisses? She doubted it.

  She shifted him so that he was beneath her. No one would know; neither of them would tell a soul because both their lives would depend on it. Not that he’d even remember, probably, in the morning. She pressed down onto him.

  ‘Katherine.’ It was the first thing he’d said since the long gallery: her name sounded in warning, as if he’d suddenly woken to what was happening.

  She stopped his mouth with the flat of her hand, but he turned his head to escape it and urged her – ‘Katherine’ – to her senses.

  Her answer was to press harder, but this time with her hips: a flex that eased him inside her. To that, he didn’t respond, didn’t even breathe, not at first; but then, when at last he did, the breath came as a kind of laugh, a mix of incredulity and admiration in it and something like resignation, but perhaps closer to despair. And he countered that pressure of hers – if warily at first – with his own. What he didn’t do was shrink from her. It was startling how perfect a fit they were, the two of them, and in sheer gratitude she kissed him; and then she divined that perfect fit with the next push down onto him, and then another, and with each one it was a little more pleasurable, if that were even possible. And no one had ever told her it would feel this good but then, perhaps no one knew, perhaps only they knew, only the two of them. It was impossible that it could be still more pleasurable, yet it was, time and time again; it was, confounding her over and over again, and she had to find just how pleasurable it could possibly be, and that, in the end, was all that ma
ttered.

  HEYDAY

  1

  As soon as Katherine had gone to Wilton, Edward took me to the queen to lead the quietest and most respectable of lives, and if I’d been able to feel anything for him, I might have felt sorry, because, so very clever as he was, he could never have foreseen what was about to happen. At any other time in the history of England, his plan would have worked a treat – my life would have been among the quietest, the most respectable – but, as bad luck would have it, I walked right back into the middle of the tricky business of a man setting aside his wife. And this time, not just any man, nor just any wife.

  Walked? Crept: I crept into court, a decade ago, to disappear in the ranks of those many maids of honour. What should have been a cause for celebration – the first Seymour girl in the household of a queen – was, under the circumstances, a kind of exile. And if my own family wouldn’t have me, then no other family would. I was at court because I had nowhere else to go; I was in the service of the queen as a last resort. The best I could hope for was rehabilitation: salvaging some respectability for myself and my family, perhaps, if I kept my head down.

  We thirty maids of honour and almost as many ladies-in-waiting were in the service of a queen who, it seemed to me, appeared to be attending us. There she was, Queen Catherine, in her gorgeously canopied chair, presiding benignly, as if mindful to do her very best by us. It looked to me that if for some reason we all left her, she’d happily pack up and go to her little daughter in Ludlow. She was anything but the imposing figure of my imaginings, that Spanish daughter of king-crusader and warrior-queen, that victor of Flodden. Short and stout, she wore her finery dutifully, her huge, jewel-heavy crucifix staring us down, lunging whenever she reached to the floor for her sewing basket.