The May Bride

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘Yes, but—’

  But what?

  ‘It’d ruin him,’ she repeated, ‘and you know it.’

  I did know it, I supposed; I wished I didn’t, but I did.

  ‘He’s family, so you’ll close ranks.’ Blood Seymours. ‘And he’ll stay, but Edward’ll make sure nothing ever happens for him, he’ll make dead sure of that, you know he will, and it’ll become all too obvious, and what with me gone . . .’ Everyone will guess, and it’ll ruin him. ‘If I tell the truth, then that’ll be the only difference, that’ll be all we gain.’

  The last word was said lightly, to disparage it. She returned to the winter-blank window. ‘He was a boy, Jane.’

  Thomas, a year older than me and so alarmingly well versed in the ways of the world.

  ‘Pretty much still is,’ she said. ‘A boy. It wasn’t his fault.’

  Hers, then: her fault, and she’d be the one to pay for it. This wasn’t quite right, I suspected, but I couldn’t see my way through it.

  She turned back to me and feigned reasonableness: ‘I can’t stop you, of course. If you feel you should go ahead and explain.’

  It was Thomas, Edward. Listen, everyone, it was actually Thomas.

  What, then, though? Were we really to leave the truth half-told and muddled with supposition? Were we all permitted to know what didn’t happen – Edward didn’t father her son, nor did my father – but not what did? Was she really, honestly suggesting that that was how we leave it?

  She was, and, incredible though it is to me now, we did.

  3

  Queen Catherine faced the truth of her own situation with sadness but no alarm nor rancour, and I was very taken with her refusal to allow the king’s lie. Here, I felt, was someone to stick by: if I were to throw my lot in with the queen, I’d be safe. And to be safe, back then, after what had just happened at Wolf Hall, was what mattered.

  Weeks went by, became months, and still the queen showed no sign of being unduly troubled. The situation would pass, was probably what she was thinking: the king was in the grip of something, but have faith and show patience and it would pass. Which seemed to me, back then, as good a plan as any. And anyway, right was on her side. Her first marriage, to the brother, had been no marriage – nothing happened – and the king knew it. Everyone knew it.

  In the meantime, though, Anne Boleyn was allocated her own rooms. In a palace where the rest of us slept three or four to a bed, the king granted that woman a riverside apartment on the floor below and staffed it fit for a queen. Still, it meant that we didn’t have to see her any more; at least there was that. Nor did we see any more of quite a few of the queen’s ladies, who no longer continued up on to our top flight of stairs. Their voices did, though: we’d be sitting sewing to the incantation of the queen’s songbirds and up through the floorboards would come peals and gales of laughter. Once, from the stairs, I glimpsed Thomas and Francis leaving that apartment looking very pleased with themselves.

  Edward didn’t like her: he told me so as we stood together one day outside the queen’s rooms and, below, Anne Boleyn’s door was shut too freely, bouncing our gazes into one another’s.

  ‘I don’t like her any more than you do,’ he muttered, ‘but I think I know which way the wind’s blowing.’ He’d come to the queen’s apartment requesting to see me – a first – and I’d stepped from under the avid eyes of maids of honour who were unsure if he was a catch: so good-looking and doing so very well for himself, but there was the matter of the repudiated wife and disinherited baby sons. He warned me, ‘You don’t want to get left up here.’

  I hadn’t asked for his opinion on which way the wind was blowing, and being left with the queen was exactly what I did want. So I said nothing, but that was hardly unusual for me where he was concerned. In any case, he hadn’t come to discuss the queen’s situation, but to bring me bad news from home, which was, in nearly a year, my only news from home. Margie and Antony had died, he said. The previous day. All I could think at first, standing there, was that he was being cruel; cruel, as I knew he could be. Because how would he even know? Although when, eventually, I did look at him, he seemed weary enough to have ridden all the way there and back.

  ‘It was the Sweat,’ he said. Antony first, he told me, and then, later that same day, Margie. I asked him, ‘Are you sure?’ just in case he’d back down: Oh, well, actually, Jane, now that you mention it. . .

  ‘Everyone else seems well,’ he allowed, and then, unnecessarily, but perhaps glad to be able to account for them, he elucidated. ‘Our parents, Liz and Dottie, the little ones.’

  The little ones: the boys, Katherine’s boys. Something else to know then, and it struck me like a pebble in a wave: there they were at Wolf Hall, and not with Katherine. She’d left vowing that she’d have them follow her. At the time, her departure had been a relief to me, exhausted and confused as I was, but the boys, those little boys. I’d wanted to believe they’d be joining her.

  Was she alive? No word of her in almost a year. And news, now, only, of the Sweat. In a nunnery, the Sweat would shift over a row of beds during a single day, like a shaft of sunlight.

  I checked with Edward, ‘Is there anything else?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Thank you,’ I remembered to say, as I turned back to the queen’s door, ‘for telling me.’

  I’d not seen Margie and Antony for almost a year by then, but together they’d made a tune at the back of my mind which had always been playing; if I hadn’t been able to make it out note by note, I’d been confident that when the time came, I’d pick it straight back up again. And I’d kept memories of them on me like charms: the golden down that bridged Antony’s eyebrows; the garish splash of a vein across his right collarbone; his hair’s sleep-scent, and that scent’s day-long devil-may-care persistence. Margie’s definite parting of her lips before she spoke, sounding a missed beat with which she’d draw our attention; and the dropped stitch in her left eyebrow; the surprising inelegance of her crooked second toes. Did Katherine do that with her own boys, to keep them with her? Gather them to her, bit by bit? I imagined she did. But now Edward had told me that never again in this life would I see Margie and Antony: never see Antony hurl himself through a doorway, taking on trust an unequivocal welcome; never see Margie poking at embers as if they were personally failing her. I knew it, for certain. Katherine, though, she might not even know if her boys were alive or dead.

  All those years, at Wolf Hall, of careful, careful, careful. Fires to keep away from, carts to keep from under, wells to keep out of, and then along came the Sweat one summer afternoon. My mother would have had a long day of it and in the evening she’d have had to wash down her little girl and boy and lay them out. I remembered drying Antony, once, after his bath; he’d been submitting grudgingly, affecting a slightly sulky rebound from each rub of the cloth when, looking down on my head – which he didn’t often get to do – he asked with genuine interest, ‘Who will look after me when I’m old?’

  I’d been quick to answer, ‘Your children,’ but I’d had to stare at the floor to compose myself, because it was too much to think of him left to those future children, who would probably only ever know him as wearied and beset. This was Antony, I’d felt: this, here, was Antony, boy-brilliant, and all the other, later Antonys would be the ghosts.

  Antony would be nineteen now, and a better brother to me, I don’t doubt, than Edward and Thomas. And Margie? I like to think there’d have been no Queen Anne, that so-called queen, if Margie had been around. If Margie, rather than me, had come to court, she’d have put that woman straight and seen her off. It’s something I remind myself to do: look at the people here through Margie’s eyes. She’d have no time for them. And it’s when I’m free of all of them – crossing a courtyard, perhaps, alone at the end of the day – that, sometimes, I sense a little of Antony, like a wink of the air itself.

  After Edward told me about Margie and Antony, I went back into the queen’s apartment to sta
y because there was no going back: Wolf Hall as I’d left it was no longer there. Where I belonged, from then on, as I saw it, was with the queen. I’d be safe with her; there was nowhere safer. And, hedging his bets, Edward left me be. So, there I stayed, and Masses were said and meals served, and I didn’t look up but threaded silk into silk, stitch by stitch, inch by inch, day by day for another year.

  In all that time when we maids and ladies lived up there in that apartment like nuns, our only visitor was the king, who came as often as he ever had and was as affectionate to the queen as he’d ever been. Keen to be seen to do right, I suppose. Keen to keep in her favour in the hope, perhaps, that she’d give in, give him what he wanted, step aside. The queen received him on every occasion like the old friend that he was, but never missed a chance to state how – as he well knew, she said, and as God was her witness – she’d known no husband but him. Those were the only times in more than a year when I felt something like a smile, because it was good to witness him so discomforted. That mighty man was no match for her.

  And if, below, that door was flung to and fro in its frame at all hours, it was just noise and, like everything, one day would stop.

  To think it easier for a king than a common man to set aside his wife is to forget that a king’s wife is a queen. The queen was entitled to have her case heard by the Pope in Rome. First, though, at the king’s request, a representative of the Pope was despatched to London, although he took his time coming.

  ‘Rock and a hard place,’ sympathised Thomas, whose first proper job had been to accompany Francis to deliver the king’s petition to Rome. We were passing each other on the stairs and having to make conversation. ‘Devil and the deep blue sea.’

  ‘Better to travel than to arrive,’ Francis Bryan laughed, the eye-patch crinkling. ‘Life on the road: soft beds and hard harlots.’

  If the Pope’s man took enough time, Thomas had implied, the situation might resolve itself one way or the other before he arrived. But if everyone else understood the Italian cardinal’s reluctance, the queen never seemed to suspect it; she was full of concern for his various travails. When eventually he did reach London, he took straight to bed with a protracted bout of gout.

  Once he’d arrived, though, we queen’s ladies, too, were to head for London. The case was to be heard in Blackfriars Priory, and both king and queen would lodge separately for the duration in adjacent Bridewell Palace. I was to leave the Greenwich rooms that had for two years been my home, to become a city-dweller. And it was no weather for city-dwelling. The Italian cardinal had brought the heat with him: it’d stuck to him and he’d dragged it into England, where he crawled into bed and it, too, lay down and began to stink. Opening windows only let it in, although open them we did, of course, in desperation. It was heavy work to move the queen’s household: clothes and jewels to be packed, linen and hangings and cushions and carpets, plate and utensils, mirrors and candles, the queen’s own altar, trestles and beds, clocks, harps and lutes and virginals, the songbirds and the monkey, parchment and ink, soap, grain and wine and cheese, preserves and honey, spices and remedies. It needed to be done because although that old palace in London on the bank of the sludge called the Fleet was ready to receive us, it was entirely empty.

  But empty of Anne Boleyn, too: at least there was that. She was to make herself scarce because the Pope’s man was in England and there could be no hint of impropriety. He’d come to examine the validity or otherwise of the royal marriage; there was to be no mention of any mistress. Not that he’d be fooled, because no one in Christendom could fail to know of that woman. But, anyway, she was to go back home to Hever, and one day the absence of door-slams made itself felt in the queen’s rooms like the sudden cessation of a pain.

  In the days before our departure, heat lay like filth on the floors and walls and windows of our Greenwich rooms. When men came to dismantle furniture and heave boxes, the smell of their sweat was so dense and persistent as to make a physical presence of its own, like a malevolent spirit. For we maids and ladies, there was stacking and rolling and folding to do; we whose laps were usually blanketed with needlework were up, instead, and busy. The flush to the queen’s cheeks came not just from exertion, though, but from the thrill of her time finally having come. She was to be heard, soon, at last, and what was the truth but that which should be spoken loud and clear?

  And so eventually there we were, one morning, stepping aboard the barge, each maid or lady pressing the barge a little lower in the water. The air glittered with midges and the sun shone through the red silk canopy to give us all a bloodied look. Almost three years before, my brother had sent me to the queen to sit and sew and say my prayers, but now I was on my way into battle, and gladly.

  At Bridewell, there was no possibility of open windows. The Fleet, which should’ve been running into the Thames, had died in the heat and lay putrid alongside the palace. Reassembling the household was done in airless rooms; we did most of it at night, like thieves in reverse. During the daytime, the closed windows failed against London’s bells, a church on every corner, so that my bones rang with them, and those windows were useless, too, against the noise of the crowds, which I took to be another feature of city life until one of the ladies said, ‘Isn’t it heartening?’ and I realised the clamour was for the queen. I dared a peek and there they were, down in the lanes: hundreds or perhaps thousands of Londoners waving up at us, cheering us on.

  And then I thought of my sister-in-law. I couldn’t help but recall her up in her room on that last day; of the two of us together at her window, the house cavernous and cold behind us and everywhere beyond us the bleak Savernake Forest. It was unbelievable that it should ever have happened. It shouldn’t have happened. I should never have stood by and let it happen, I should never have let Edward send her away. But I hadn’t known what to do, hadn’t known what else to do, hadn’t even known what to think. It’d seemed easiest, at the time, for her to go. And she, herself, had been convinced that she should go, and so were Edward and Thomas, and against the three of them – older and worldly – who, back in those days, was I?

  In the case of the queen, though, I knew, it’d be different; thank God it’d be different. Couldn’t be more different. London watching – holding a vigil, no less, outside our windows – and no shred of doubt, in this case, as to who was in the right. The queen took to honouring the crowd with her presence, braving open windows and leaning from them as if the air outside were rose-scented, until she received a letter from the king: ‘Stop the smiling,’ it said, ‘you’re an incitement to riot.’

  Which is treason, it didn’t have to say, and you know the penalty for that.

  Close to a month went by before the Italian cardinal was back on his feet but then, one morning, there he was at our Bridewell door, alongside our own English cardinal, requesting an audience. I doubt it was his idea, he hung back. But, then, none of it was his idea: he’d still have been in bed, if it were up to him, he’d still have been in Rome. The queen never refused a visitor, even when that visitor was Cardinal Wolsey, the king’s right-hand man, so she welcomed them both but made a particular fuss of the Italian.

  ‘You must take us as you find us, I’m afraid,’ she said, not afraid in the least. We’d been sewing and she had a skein of thread looped over her shoulders. Business as usual, said her smile, I’m sure you understand.

  Cardinal Wolsey himself was built of threads stitched tight in elaborate embroidery, and he was draped in furs and gold chains and medallions; all he lacked was a crown. He was clearly uncomfortable, the hum of sweat all too apparent beneath the incense of which he reeked. He began in Latin.

  ‘In English, please,’ smiled the queen. If you have something to say, we’d all like to hear it. The Italian cardinal didn’t quite hide his smirk. Our cardinal gave us a nervous glance – incitement to riot – before continuing: if he and his esteemed colleague might be permitted to offer a suggestion, he said, as to how the whole vexatious matter might be resolv
ed, then perhaps the queen, godly as she was renowned through all Christendom to be, would welcome the opportunity to take up the veil?

  A nunnery: they wanted to make a nun of her.

  Had they been speaking to Edward?

  She smiled her lovely, gentle smile. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’d love that,’ and a roomful of ladies whirled to attention, bewildered. ‘But,’ she blew a sigh, ‘God made me the king’s wife,’ and drew the length of thread from around her neck. ‘Now, thank you, your Eminences, for your concern, but will that be all? Because if you’ll excuse me’ – she flourished the thread – ‘I have wifely work to do.’

  Oh, I never doubted her; how could I ever have doubted her? There was wrong in the world but she was the one to right it. And two days later came her chance, came the summons and she left for Blackfriars on the arm of gawky Griffin Richards, her Receiver General, allowing none of us to follow because she wanted us waiting on her return.

  We all made a dash for the window that gave the best view of the bridge, and there they were, the pair of them edging into that haze of stomach-churning stench: a voluminously crimson-clad queen and a lad fast outgrowing his livery, a sleeve riding high as he waved his free arm at the cloud of flies. They took it at his pace; no doubt he considered it hers, but he was the one picking his way across that bridge with exaggerated care and she, patiently and respectfully, walked even slower than usual for him.

  They were inside Blackfriars for no time at all, but word travelled faster and London was already proclaiming her victorious when they came back into view on the far side of that bridge. It was she who was waving now, and not at the flies. The jubilation of the crowd had us press forward at the window and I forgot myself and opened it; no one stopped me, no one said a word or, if they did, I wasn’t listening and they didn’t really mind.