The Sixth Wife

by Suzannah Dunn

  For all the supposed intimacy of our table, Kate seemed like a stranger to me. Was it, perhaps, like when a girl sees her older sister with a friend? I wouldn’t know, sisterless as I am, but that’s how I imagine it. A whole new Kate was conjured up in front of my eyes. A Kate who was somehow more than Kate. Not the one I knew, and surely the one I knew was the real one. But this one was so convincing. Pretty much perfect, in fact. Looking back, I suppose I felt as if something was being kept from me and something was being shown to me. I felt betrayed and tolerated and favoured, all at once.

  And as for Thomas…Well, Thomas is always Thomas, I’ve learned. That, if nothing else, can be said for him. He was good company, that evening, telling stories and making us laugh, me, Kate and Elizabeth. If you know no better, that’s how he seems: fun. Daring, even, because he tended to tease Kate and this was something I’d never seen. Kate, I realised, had never been teasable. For all that she could do for people, all that she could be, she wasn’t teasable. Not due to lack of humour or humility – she had both, in spades – but because teasing’s for taking, and Kate was a giver. But this, now, from Thomas, she had to sit back and take. I watched her warm to it; watched her rise to it, as required, then submit to it.

  Kate wasn’t the only one to fall in with him. Elizabeth and I must share some blame, too. Thomas was a good judge of when he’d taken more than his fair share of time and attention – as storyteller, joker – and that was when, to keep us on an even keel, he’d switch our attention to Kate. That’s what he was doing when he teased her, turning us away from him so that we could return, minutes later, refreshed, ready for more. He was also calling up our affection for her and offering it to her on his terms, in his words alone: Our Kate, our girl, our queen. We were giving up our say in who she was, to us, Our Kate, our girl, our queen. We went along with him. I can see it in retrospect but at the time, as I say, he seemed good company, telling stories and making us laugh. Now I know that’s what Thomas does: he charms; he tells stories. To women.

  Six

  I don’t remember ever having met Kate; she was always just there. My earliest memories of her are probably when she was thirteen or fourteen, when I would have been five or six. She was the daughter of my mother’s best friend, but more than that, to me, at my age, knee-high and wide-eyed, she was one of a crowd of girls of whom everyone at court spoke with such approval and enthusiasm. Very clever girls, they said. Of course, it wasn’t a crowd, it was a mere handful of girls from a few favoured families. Tall girls, to me, although that might only have been true of Kate and her sister, who did grow up tall. If the Princess Mary was tall, back in those days, she stopped growing, because she’s no bigger these days than a twelve-year-old. Something else: they were all so light-haired. Well, compared to me, they were. That’s what I’d notice: flaxen, auburn and gold tucked into those dark hoods. Perhaps all this makes Kate sound striking. What was striking about Kate, though, if it’s not contradictory to say so, was her plainness. There should be a word for it – striking plainness – but in English I don’t think there is; if there is, I don’t know it. Kate probably would have known a word or expression for it, in one of the four languages she spoke. Fish’s eyes was what came to mind, and still does. It might not sound complimentary, but actually they had an arresting glitter to them, those pale, protuberant eyes of hers.

  For all her bookishness, gangliness and pallor, there was nothing off-putting or overawing about her for the five-year-old me. She was never anything but a comforting presence. I’d say that she always made a fuss of me, except that somehow she did it with no fuss at all.

  And then she was away, married, and I thought no more of her, I suppose, or not much more; and then I was away, too, and then married and having the boys. My boys were part of Kate and I later becoming friends. She adored them and they adored her.

  Now there was Thomas, and Kate seemed to be right about him being good with my boys. They came with me when I next visited Chelsea, for my first visit of a couple of days with the newlyweds, and on the first evening they were gone for hours with him. I don’t remember now what they’d gone to do, but eventually it was close to midnight and they hadn’t reappeared. Having had enough of Elizabeth’s strenuously sophisticated chatter and Kate’s indulgence of her, I made my excuses. The dogs were too sleepy to rise and I made it outside alone. The courtyard was balmy, horse-scented, under a blunted moon and a span of stars.The gardens were what made the old manor so special. Behind me, its roofs were sheathed in moonshine. Ahead, the rosebushes lay in wait, hunkered. Beyond them, at a stone’s throw, was the river, still and silent yet somehow very much a presence, a body of water at ease but vigilant.

  Kate had told me that this was how she and Thomas had managed their clandestine meetings: in darkness in her garden. He would ride across the fields from London and the night porteress would admit him. It made perfect sense now: I could imagine it, even though I’d never in my life done such a thing. Before long, I heard the boys’ voices accompanied by a more certain male voice. I crept up on them; but where I’d expected to find them, there was unbroken darkness. It took me a moment to fathom: they were on the ground. Flat on their backs on the flagstones. Stargazing. Thomas was telling my boys about the stars. He’d had years away but under these same stars. Unanchored, star-trailing years during which this immense, peep-holed blackness had had to be his home. I heard how intimately he knew it, every faintly star-brushed corner. How he revered it. Earthbound me, I know so little of the constellations. I stopped at a safe distance, undetected.

  It could have been an echo that I was hearing: my boys as little boys again, agog as Charles told them a bedtime story or told them about their day or the days they’d go on to have. Charles had already had families; we were third time around for him, but he never stinted with us. He had the time by then and the patience. I didn’t have much of him – twelve years – but I probably had the best. That’s what I have to remind myself.

  What I was thinking, as I stood there in the darkness, was how well my boys had done in their two fatherless years. They’d done Charles proud. Their worries, I knew, were for me, for my happiness, however much I wished it weren’t so. And standing there, listening, was the first time I wondered if I was being too hard on Thomas. Perhaps Thomas, like Charles, had simply chosen to marry the woman he loved and would never waver. That kind of thinking – a forgiving kind – is what happens when you stop in a sparkling darkness and listen to a man showing your babies the stars. I doubt now that I was undetected; I think he knew I was there.

  Seven

  There’s a myth about Kate: that she found happiness at last with Thomas. Until, of course, it all went wrong. It’s a nice idea but it’s a myth. ‘I’ve always been happy,’ she’d said to me, during that first visit of mine, and was laughing as she said it. She sounded surprised that I’d made the remark, the one that would gain currency over the following months: that it was nice to see her happy at last. I’d succumbed already to the myth. Or perhaps, even – who knows? – I was the first to say it. Myth-making. Not like me; I don’t go in for myths. I can’t think why I said it now, can’t imagine how I’d fallen under that spell, except that’s how it is with myths, isn’t it: they’re persuasive. Myths, spells, lies – all the same, powerful.

  This, then, is the truth about Kate, as I know it; this is as close as I can get. She had a happy enough childhood, growing up with a brother and sister, the three of them close. And if her mother wasn’t exactly merry…well, who would be, widowed in her early twenties with three small children? I barely remember Maud but she was, as far as I know, a woman of careful, calculated steps, dedicating the final decade of her life to her children’s education and inheritance. And who does that sound like? Except that Kate failed in the end to follow her mother’s example in one crucial respect. Maud chose to stay a widow.

  Maud stayed at court, lodged there with her children and began working long and hard to secure future marriages for her children
that would keep the Parr fortune safe. In the meantime, she made a job for herself organising the royal school, a benefit of this being that her own daughters could attend. That’s how Kate had come to have an education fit for Catherine of Aragon’s own daughter. Consider just how good that education had to be. Priceless were those lessons that Kate took alongside Princess Mary from the wonderful Señor Vives. Beebis was what I used to think his name was when I was young, before I realised how it was spelled. Señor Beebis and his glamorous Belgian wife. He was hawkish and sallow but handsome; she was big and blonde, with a habit of affectionately cuffing him. They’d both had heavy accents, but different ones. Juan Luis Vives wasn’t only a man of ideas: he had ideas. One of them – a big one – was that education didn’t come from memorising facts but from asking questions. The biggest, though, surely, was that education was for girls. Especially for girls. Because, he reasoned, a woman needed her wits about her. His school was soon world-famous: its pupils, by the age of twelve, debating with lecturers, lawyers and bishops. In those days, the Princess Mary – heiress of England, studious half-Tudor and half-Castilian waif – hadn’t yet turned into plain old Mary Tudor, narrow-minded Catholic.

  Just as I was ready to move on from nursemaids and governesses to the school, it closed. Anne Boleyn was coming to the fore, and Señor Vives had unwisely been persuaded to say a little something in Queen Catherine’s favour. The consequences were worse than he’d anticipated. His services were no longer required. Whatever I’ve learned, I had to learn from Kate: a hand-me-down education, with which she was unstintingly generous.Which wasn’t how she claimed to see it. Once she claimed that it was from me she’d learned what mattered in life. Incredulous, I’d challenged: Learned what? This was how she put it: to have the courage of her convictions. I couldn’t see it. She was courageous, she had convictions. Whereas me, I follow my instincts and I’m stubborn: it’s as simple as that.

  She’d tried to explain: ‘What’s your dog called?’

  ‘ Which dog?’ And, anyway, she knew what my dogs were called.

  ‘You know which dog. Gardiner.’ My lapdog, named after our principal catholic bishop who also – bad luck – happens to be my godfather. Our principal catholic bishop, preaching celibacy whilst installing a succession of mistresses in his palace. ‘You called him Gardiner,’ she said, ‘so you could make us laugh by calling him to heel.’

  ‘That’s just me being silly.’

  She gave me her wide-eyed look. ‘You’re never just being silly.’

  I was determined not to let her take it seriously. ‘It was nothing.’

  But she wasn’t having it. ‘Well, here’s something that isn’t nothing then. I was there, remember, that evening, at your house, with all those people, when Charles said every lady had to choose the gentleman they’d most like to take in to dinner, and what did you say?’

  Oh, she had me now; I couldn’t suppress a smile at the memory. What a good pair we’d made, Charles and I, if an unlikely one, me being half his size and half his age. (Lucky that I could never have been mistaken for any daughter of his: him, a genial, greying bear of an Englishman, and me a snub-nosed, sharp-tongued half-Spaniard.) The evening in question, I’d gone up to the repellent Stephen Gardiner and said, ‘I’ll do things a little differently; I’ll take the man I like least and that’s you.’

  I said to Kate, ‘It was a joke.’

  ‘He didn’t find it funny, though, did he? He laughed along with everyone else, but you could see he didn’t like it.’

  ‘Yes, which is why he’s the butt of jokes like that.’ Pompous ass. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’re nice, Kate, and I’m not, and that’s all it is.’ I didn’t like the way the conversation was going, her implication that she was somehow lacking. Something I loved about her was her quiet certainty. And why, in any case, should she want to make cheap jokes? That was for me to do.

  ‘You make your point, Cathy,’ was what she replied. ‘You make people think. You go out on a limb to do that. And I’ve never in my whole life taken even the smallest risk.’

  I wonder, now, what Señor Vives would make of what happened to her in the end. Advice to his girls was something he’d undertaken seriously. Yes, there were languages to learn and translations to do, there was astronomy and maths and music, but he was keen, too, for his girls to do well in general. In life. To be happy, no less. Kate told me that he’d advised them never to marry for love. For a man, it was of no consequence, he’d said: a man could marry for love. But not a girl. Because it would render her vulnerable.

  Of all the pieces of advice from him, Kate chose to ignore this one.

  Eight

  It was this, with Thomas: he was often onto something, but he never knew when to stop. That was Thomas’s problem. He was unstoppable. Take that night of the stars. Was he content with a few special moments that arose there in the dark garden? No, because next morning – barely morning, barely even dawn, a mere few hours later – he decided it was the turn of the girls.

  I was awake, just; must have been, because I was unaware of being woken. How early was it? Very. I’d heard the clock strike four, but couldn’t recall it striking five. Not dark, nor light.What I’d heard was a girl’s voice, outside, in the grounds. Not the voice of a resentful servant on some extra-early duty, perhaps in the bakehouse, half asleep and matter-of-fact. This was someone wide awake, excited, momentarily forgetting herself before being hushed. And from my window I spied them: Elizabeth – it had been her voice – with little Jane, being led through the garden by Thomas. Only nightgowns beneath their cloaks, the three of them, and the girls’ hair was down; I’d never before seen Jane with her hair down. Her walk was brisk but she was well behind the other two, her reluctance clear. Elizabeth’s hair was like a fox fur. Her lolloping sideways canter was keeping her abreast of Thomas while she chattered at him in a theatrical hush. She loves drama, I realised as I watched.Why do people say there’s none of her mother in her? Her father would have either woken the whole household to join him, or he’d have genuinely enjoyed the secrecy. But her mother would have done exactly as Elizabeth was now doing: making a show of stealing away. The old king had been a showman but Anne Boleyn had loved show, and there’s a difference: Henry had drawn people in, Anne had wanted them to see what they were missing.

  Unwittingly, I was Elizabeth’s audience. I’m all for high jinks, believe me, but this? A grown man prancing around in his nightgown in the early hours with two girls entrusted to his wife’s care? A man who had been suspected of having had too close an interest in one of the girls. A girl who wasn’t just a girl but a princess. Was that why Jane had been drawn into the escapade, as alibi, chaperone? They slipped from view and I attempted to follow them, leaving my room without waking Bella, but then I saw Elizabeth’s governess, Mrs Ashley, in her nightdress, at a window far down the hallway. ‘Mrs Ashley?’

  ‘Oh!’ She slapped a steadying hand over her heart. I apologised for unnerving her and asked what was happening.

  She glanced at the window as if she had to look again before she’d know, and answered slowly, flatly. ‘He says it’s going to be a beautiful morning.’Then she sounded anxious: ‘Do you think they’ll be all right?’

  It was her job to know that. Or in Elizabeth’s case, at least; Jane’s nursemaid would be held to account for Jane. I quelled my irritation. ‘Where’s he taking them?’ She shrugged, which frankly wasn’t good enough. I answered myself: ‘To the river.’ Because that’s where I’d go on a beautiful dawn.

  ‘He woke her before I could stop him.’ She chewed her lip, contrite.

  ‘He came into her room?

  She, too, now sounded surprised. ‘Yes. But he does. That’s what he does.’ The surprise seemed to be at my not having known. ‘In the mornings.’ She half laughed. ‘Just not usually so early.’ And then when I said nothing – flummoxed – she continued, ‘He likes to come in, get her up, play with her.’

  ‘Play with her?’

  She shru
gged. ‘Tickle her. Tease her. Chase her around the room.’ She must have realised how it sounded because she explained, ‘That’s how he is: friendly, very friendly, never on ceremony. Everyone’s favourite uncle.’ She gave a quick, worried smile as I turned away, gave up on her and returned to my room.

  I raised it with Kate later. She was having breakfast in her chamber. Who but children ever have breakfast? But there she was, with eggs. I declined to share. Since when had she been sitting around in her bedroom in the mornings, eating breakfast? She checked whether I’d slept well and I lied that I had. ‘Thomas, though,’ I added, ‘he was up early.’

  ‘Oh, he woke you,’ she concluded. ‘I’m sorry, Cathy.’

  He didn’t, I reassured her. I was awake, I said; half awake. ‘But he woke the girls.’

  ‘Girls?’ She was unfolding the linen in which her bread was wrapped.

  ‘Jane and Elizabeth.’ I declined her offer of some of the soft, white bread; picked up, instead, one of the mound of cushions from her bed, hugged it to me.This particular cushion I recognised; remembered her embroidering it, back in the days of Henry. Stunning embroidery. Was there anything Kate didn’t do, and didn’t do perfectly? I’m a poor needlewoman, don’t have the patience. ‘That’s a habit of his, is it?’