The Sixth Wife

SUZANNAH DUNN

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

Epigraph

Here lyethe Quene Kateryn wife to Kyng Henry the VIII and

last the wife of Thomas Lord of Sudeley high Admirall of

England and onkle to kyng Edward the VI

dyed 5 September MCCCCCXLVIII

Inscription scratched onto Katherine Parr’s coffin

I can say nothing but as my Lady of Suffolk saith,

‘God is a marvellous man’.

Katherine Parr, in a letter to Thomas Seymour

This day died a man with much wit,

and very little judgement

Princess Elizabeth – later Queen Elizabeth I -on hearing of Thomas Seymour’s execution

CONTENTS

Epigraph

Chapter1

Chapter2

Chapter3

Chapter4

Chapter5

Chapter6

Chapter7

Chapter8

Chapter9

Chapter10

Chapter11

Chapter12

Chapter13

Chapter14

Chapter15

Chapter16

Chapter17

Chapter18

Chapter19

Chapter20

Chapter21

Chapter22

Chapter23

Chapter24

Chapter25

Chapter26

Chapter27

Chapter28

Chapter29

Chapter30

Chapter31

Chapter32

Chapter33

Chapter34

Chapter35

Chapter36

Chapter37

Chapter38

Chapter39

Chapter40

Chapter41

Chapter42

Chapter43

Epilogue

Acknowledgements

Copyright

About the Publisher

One

I won’t testify. They’ll get no help from me. Not that they need it, the trial being a formality. It’s over already for him. No need for this investigation, the intimidation and confessions. And anyway they should have left him to it, saved themselves the bother. He’d have ended up doing the job for them. He’d have got nowhere, in the end. Got away with nothing.

It seems they have little better to do, though, than rubbish the memory of a good woman who’s barely cold in the ground. That’s what’s happening: it’s making her look bad, what they’re digging up on her widower. Making her look as if she was beguiled and hapless.

Kate?

Listen: she’d dealt with it; it was all dealt with. She’d dealt with Thomas and the mess he’d made. She’d saved everybody’s skin.

One mistake: that was all Thomas was in her life. Could just as easily not have been a fatal one, that mistake; just the turn of events made it fatal.

I won’t testify, and if they come for anyone in my household, they’ll have me to reckon with.

Which they know.

Which is why they haven’t.

I’ll tell you something about Kate; I’ll tell you what it was about her. She always made everything all right. That’s what she did. That was Kate.

And now she’s gone. And now look.

I didn’t go to her funeral. I arranged it, the day she died, that long, long day of her death. Then, when the next day came around as suddenly as a drawn curtain, I didn’t go. I couldn’t watch her lowered into that vault.

You could say that I didn’t need to go; you could look at it that way. I’d made the arrangements, I already knew that funeral from first moment to last. I’d dressed the chapel, lain drapes over the altar rails and then supervised the men struggling with the black, embroidered hangings. I’d planned the procession, right down to the servants at the rear. Well, someone had to do it. I’d selected the four knights to walk hooded with the pallbearers, and the two torchbearers to walk with them. Then would come Jane, tiny ten-year-old Jane Grey, chief mourner, and I’d coached her maid how to carry her train, forewarned her of steps and loose slabs. The psalms and the sermon: Reverend Coverdale had gone through everything with me.

I’d dressed Kate for her burial, chosen the dress, a dress that I’d loved on her: holly red, running with gold stitching. Kate had colourless eyes like a dawn sky, but she had sunrise hair and I turned it loose for her burial as if she were a girl again.

While the funeral was taking place, I stayed with the baby. I couldn’t believe she was our compensation for Kate. Such an unequal exchange. She was like something skinned; she was nothing like my boys had been, born big and with frank, focused gazes. But, then, they were boys: from their first moments, the world was theirs for the taking. The baby was unsettled, so I walked with her. With everyone at the chapel, the house was deserted and I’d never been so alone. It might have been that everyone had died. Everyone in the world, even, so that I could have walked from the house and kept walking but never found anyone again. Just kept walking until I, too, died. From starvation or exhaustion or perhaps sheer loneliness – can you die from loneliness?

I was bone-tired when the baby finally gave in to sleep, so I sat down where I was, nowhere in particular, on a carpet-draped chest in a hallway, my back uncomfortable against the linenfold. Suddenly a nearby door was opening.Who on earth wouldn’t be at the funeral? But then I knew. There was indeed one person in the household who wouldn’t be there. The one person I didn’t want to see. I should have thought of that. Of him. And so there we were, facing each other. My heart was furious, each beat nipping hard. His beauty rankled; he’d always been everything that Kate wasn’t, and never more so than today. It was an affront, that bright beauty, on this darkest of days. I wanted to strike it from him.

A frown snatched at his eyes. I knew what he meant: didn’t I want to be in chapel?

I said, ‘Someone has to look after this baby.’

He looked back at me with no look at all; his incomprehension said, There are nurses for that.

I could have said, I don’t have to explain anything to you.

Or I could have said, The nurses are all there, they wanted so much to go, because everyone loved Kate. Everyone, that is, except you.

He said, ‘Cathy…’

I hugged that oblivious baby to me and turned, walked away.

If she’d never married Thomas, Kate would still be alive. She should have stayed a widow, that last time. The king’s death had been her third widowing, and had made her dowager queen. I’d been around while Henry was dying, in case she needed me, but it just so happened that I wasn’t with her when they finally came with the news. I’d gone into the gardens to take a few minutes to myself. When I returned to her room, unaware, she asked everyone to leave us. In her hands was one of the pairs of spectacles – silver rims,Venetian lenses – that she’d encouraged Henry to buy and which he’d tended to mislay all over his palaces. She watched everyone leave the room as if their leaving was of some interest to her. Always so polite, Kate. Not until the last of them had gone and only her dogs remained stretched in front of the fireplace did she look at me, and that was when she sighed and closed her eyes. The mildly interested expression went from her face – indeed, all expression went from her face – and she covered it with her hands and began to cry.

I’d never seen her cry. All our years of best-friendship and I’d never seen her cry. She’d never seen me cry, either, for that matter. Should she ever, though, I realised, she’d know exactly what to do. I couldn’t even guess, myself, what that would be, but she’d know. She’d rise to it. She’d comfort me, I imagined, without making me self-conscious. For now, though, folded forward there on that huge chair, she looked awkward. It was usually well hidden, that gawkiness of hers; she tended to turn it to her advantage, turn it into something else, walk tall with it. I crouched beside her – awkward, too – and rubbed her bony shoulder. She cried harder and I didn’t know if that was because I was doing something right or something wrong. Exasperation dizzied me. Tell me what to do, I wanted to say, and I’ll do it.

Just two years before I knelt there with my arm around Kate, my own husband had died. My husband of twelve years. I was widowed at twenty-six. Charles had been a little older than Henry – sixty – but in good shape and could have passed for forty. His death – a sudden illness one weekend – was a shock, whereas no one could claim that Henry’s death had come as a shock. It wasn’t shock that was causing Kate’s tears.

Four years, they’d been married. Kate had known him fairly well when he was gorgeous and big-hearted, but those days were long gone by the time she’d been persuaded to stand at the altar and think of England. During their marriage, he’d been a cantankerous, backwards-looking monstrosity. No sense in pretending otherwise. It couldn’t have been the loss of Henry that was causing Kate’s tears.

Queenship, though: the loss of her queenship. She’d loved the role. Not just the work that was required of her – the easy but tedious meeting and greeting – but the bringing of changes. As queen, she’d been able to champion certain people, albeit quietly, Kate-like. How suited she was to all that: the talk, the confidences. She’d always had people’s trust, but as queen she had the ear of anyone who mattered. Careful work, for which I’d never have had the patience. My view is: what a time this is to live – it’s the time to live – because the world is opening up to new ideas and the truth is here, now, for the taking, if you just look. And if people don’t take it, if they don’t look, don’t make the effort to learn, it’s because they’re lazy, self-interested, they’re cowards. But Kate’s view was that people are slow to change because they’re scared, or misguided, misinformed. And people trusted her. No one trusts me. That’s not what I’m for. Kate used to say to me, We all have different strengths, Cathy. I don’t know if she omitted to say what mine were, or if I just can’t now remember.

Queenship had been Kate’s big chance and now, suddenly, one January day, through no fault of her own, it was being taken away. Over, for her, before time. Just four years she’d had, and there was so much more to do. No wonder she was miserable. I’d never before seen her miserable. Frightened, yes. Impossible – foolish – to live through our times and not be frightened. Even I’d been frightened. And I’d seen her angry, too, beneath her considerable composure. But never miserable. Because that’s something that you feel for yourself, which wasn’t Kate, she didn’t do that. Or hadn’t done, before now.

A month later, something happened that made me see her dejection on the day of the king’s death as perhaps having had rather less than I’d imagined to do with her no longer being queen. At least some of those tears had been because she was in her mid-thirties, still childless, and once again unmarried. And who’d marry her now?

Two

A month or so into Kate’s widowhood I went to stay with her in the Chelsea countryside, at the old manor that Henry had left to her. I set off from home later than I’d envisaged because my friends the Cavendishes, en route to their Hertfordshire manor, stopped by for longer than they’d intended; and when they did eventually depart, we saw that one of their horses needed a shoe.

‘Go,’ Bess Cavendish dismissed me, ‘or you’ll be on the river in the dark.’

‘It’s February,’ I countered with a laugh. ‘Half the day’s dark; dark’s unavoidable.’

Then, back indoors at last, I had to see a local shoemaker whose home and workshop had burned down, because my steward wanted to discuss with me how much assistance we should give the family.

We didn’t launch the barge until the evening and, despite hard rowing by my men, arrived at Chelsea too late for dinner. I can’t say I minded. I sat cosily at the fireside in Kate’s room with my two accompanying ladies to eat excellent pigeon pie, and peaches that had been bottled in lavender-infused syrup. I’d brought Joanna and Nichola, my youngest ladies, knowing they’d fit in best at Kate’s. We all have girls in our household, of course, come to us to learn the ropes, but trust Kate to have only girls, every last one of her attendants a fledgling under her wing. There had been some changes, though, now that she was no longer at court. A couple of new faces. One was Marcella, who, Kate told me, was married to one of Thomas Seymour’s men; the other was the Lassells girl – Frances, ‘Frankie’ – an eager twelve-year-old.

It was an easy, gossipy evening, Marcella playing the virginals beautifully in the background. I wasn’t late going to bed, to the room that was mine whenever I was there. I hadn’t been there for long, though, when Kate turned up, nightdress-attired, barefoot, hair down, unattended by any of her girls. There was never any bustle to Kate, just this walk, loose, light, and tall. She sat on the edge of my bed and switched those big clear eyes of hers to my maidservant, Bella.

‘Bella,’ I said,‘that’s fine for now, thanks.’ She was unpacking for me. ‘Why don’t you take a little time to yourself Bella wrapped herself in her cloak and made herself scarce.

Kate scooped her hair behind one ear and said,‘I’ve something to tell you.’ She held my gaze steady with her own and told me: ‘I’ve married Thomas Seymour.’ With a brief laugh, she turned her eyes to the ceiling, or just upwards, somehow both nervous and bold, as if taking pleasure in admonishing herself.

Thomas Seymour? They were friends, he and Kate; had been for years. Odd little friendship, theirs: a friendship that I’d never understood. Well, never even considered really. I couldn’t remember ever having seen them in each other’s company. She’d mentioned him sometimes, over the years, in a manner that might in retrospect be said to be friendly, but Kate was friendly with everybody. Her close friends, though, were reformers and scholars, people who believed in and worked for a better life for everyone. From what I knew of Thomas Seymour, the only life he was keen to better – and he was very keen indeed, from what I’d heard – was his own. But there I was, thinking about her friendship, and hadn’t she just said ‘married’?

Married?‘That was impossible. She was married to the king. Well, no, widowed, but only by a month. She was the king’s widow, still. Not some other man’s wife. And certainly not – certainly not – Thomas Seymour’s.

She got up, moved to the window. ‘No one must know, though, obviously, for a while.’

She had said ‘married’. ‘Thomas Seymour?’

She laughed, delighted. ‘Yes, Thomas Seymour.’Then, less boisterous, ‘It’s been so odd, Cathy. Such an odd time. And I couldn’t tell anyone.’

You, she meant.

Me.

It was an apology, but I was glad I hadn’t known. And wished I still didn’t. Because this was madness. Married to Thomas Seymour? Kate? No one must know? Oh, don’t worry, Kate, I won’t be the one to tell them.

Thomas Seymour had been away – High Admiral – for at least a couple of years. I’d had the distinct impression that he was regarded by those in power as someone best kept busy. The polite word for him would be ‘colourful’: a colourful character. Not only in character, though. I’d only ever known him in passing, but I remembered exactly how he looked. Because he was a good-looking man. No point in denying that. He certainly didn’t; he dressed the part. Fiercely cheekboned: that was what I recalled, now, of him. Sulky-mouthed. Moved fast, talked fast. Well, he’d certainly done that in this case, hadn’t he. Moved fast; fast-talked Kate. Kate. I looked at her, really looked. Those big fish-eyes of hers. She had a gaze – unlike his – that rested on people. And on books: those eyes of hers spent a lot of time resting on books. Thomas Seymour had the reputation of being quick-witted, but that, I gathered, was the extent of it: quick. Too quick – seemed to be the consensus of opinion – for his own good. Here’s the truth: I can’t claim that it was hard to imagine why some women would go for Thomas Seymour. Not, though, a woman such as Kate.

That was only half the puzzle, though, because what on earth had attracted him to her? I’d have sworn that Kate would have been Thomas Seymour’s very last choice. The very last choice for a man such as him. But, then, I knew nothing of his choices in women, did I. There were no women, was how it seemed. Somehow he – forty, now – had managed to stay unmarried. And he was the kind of man of whom I’d have expected to hear rumours of women, but I never had. Except, that is, for the very recent one. The big one. Big enough and recent enough to make me very worried.

He’d had his eye on the Princess Elizabeth, only weeks ago, and had been warned off: this I’d had from a reliable source, namely his brother, to whom it had fallen to do the warning. He had to remind Thomas that it’s treason to make such an approach to someone in line to the throne. Certainly the princess was Thomas Seymour’s type. In line to the throne. Sitting on a fortune. The latter, she had in common with her stepmother: both princess and dowager queen had been amply provided for by Henry. Was it the money, for Thomas? And the status? He was, after all, in the unenviable position of not being on the Council supervising the new boy-king. Sixteen men, none of whom were him. Worse: sixteen men headed by his own brother. Marriage to the dowager queen would be a smart move in the face of such a snub. Suddenly, he’d be husband to the kingdom’s first lady. Was it, then, Kate’s money and status? Well, let’s face it: what else could it be? Kate was going into her mid-thirties, three marriages behind her, with no children, so there’d almost certainly be no heir in this for him. And as for her other assets: you wouldn’t look at her twice, if looking was what you were about. And good-looking men – like Thomas Seymour – do look, don’t they. It’s a luxury they have.

If Kate wasn’t for looking at, though, she was for listening to. And she spoke so well that it was easy to overlook that she did it at all. A few quiet words from her: that was how she worked. Oh, and a kind of twinkle in her bulbous eyes. That’s all it took, for people: that wide-eyed, steady gaze of hers, and nothing much said, or so it seemed. And then whatever needed to happen would happen as if it had been that person’s own idea all along. Clever, that. Made her a lot of friends. So, you could say it was the money, for Thomas – and I will say it – but there was more to it. Kate took people on. She made their lives. I should know, because I was one of them. Kate made everything all right, and I now know there was a lot that wasn’t all right with Thomas.

Three

The next day, she was all for telling me how it had happened. Except that, it seemed, she couldn’t. Which was, as far as she was concerned, somehow part of it: the magic of it. ‘It just did,’ she insisted, exhilarated, trailing frosted breath. We were riding with a few of the household children – the doctor’s and falconer’s sons and a couple of excitable pages – and some liveried attendants in the parkland beyond the manor. Kate was a very good rider, a daily rider, a natural in the saddle. I’m probably as at home now on horseback when I have to be, but for me it comes from years of hard practice. From having two horse-mad boys and wanting to join in with them.

It just did? Well, yes, and quickly.

‘Mind you,’ she was calling back to me over the pounding of hooves, ‘we’ve always been friends.’

No, not ‘always’. The Seymours are relative newcomers. Compared to our families, they are. If it hadn’t been for their sister, Jane, the two boys would have got no further than that creaking old manor house of theirs in the West Country. Poor plain Jane, dull as ditchwater, around for a mere couple of years in which she was required only to be everything that Anne Boleyn hadn’t been. In other words, nothing much. And to produce the son that Anne Boleyn hadn’t been able to. Which she did, just, before draining away into that childbirth bed. By that time, the brothers had got their feet under the top table. They were uncles to the future king, no less.

I didn’t know them in those days. I’ve never been one for court. Best to leave them to it has always been my view – confirmed for me by the Anne Boleyn years. If you value your freedom, you’re better off away from court. Too much bowing and scraping. Kate was like me in that respect, so I don’t know how – where – it ever developed, that friendship of hers with Thomas. His brother, the elder of the two, I did get to know. I’ve had various dealings with Ed Seymour, and we’ve become friends. I like Ed in spite of himself. He has fingers in a lot of pies. It’s not hidden, though, that feathering of his nest, and I like that, I respect it. Being on the make isn’t bad if it’s honest. It’s subterfuge that I don’t like. Ed’s nothing like his younger brother. He’s even the opposite in looks: pallid, thin-lipped. Hardly fun, but straightforward. And despite all that – fingers in pies, feathering of nests, no nonsense – he’s somehow also a man of vision, full of interesting ideas. Whereas I wouldn’t want to think about any visions Thomas might have.

‘He makes me laugh,’ Kate yelled of Thomas as she thundered away from me.

I didn’t come back at her with, Yes, but my dog makes me laugh and I haven’t married him, have I.

Nor, Yes, but I make you laugh.

People underestimated Kate in one respect: kind but serious, was a lot of people’s opinion of her. Maybe it was as simple as that, it occurred to me as I trailed in her wake: maybe Thomas Seymour truly appreciates her.

Yes, but why marry him, and so soon?

Well, that was quite simple, too, in the end, it seemed. He’d asked her, she told me later. Marry me, he’d said: that’s what she told me. Marry me, marry me, marry me: he’d said it a lot. So that it seemed less and less ridiculous, presumably. Why not? he said. I’ve been away for years and you’ve been – well, you haven’t had an easy time of it for years, for your whole life, in fact, so…and then that smile of his.

Enough. That smile. I didn’t know what she was talking about at the time, but now I can well imagine it.

We were back at the stables, dismounting amid rowdy dogs, when she said, ‘So, the boys are fine?’ She was all lit up from her ride. And not only from her ride: it was how she seemed to be now, which, despite my misgivings, was good to see.

‘Yes, fine, thanks.’A measly word, though – ‘fine’ – for my wonderful boys.

‘You should bring them again, sometime.’ Then, as she handed the reins to one of her grooms, ‘Thomas is so good with children.’

Well, we’d see about that, wouldn’t we. ‘Next time.’ A second groom staggered away with Kate’s saddle and gold-tassled, crest-embroidered saddlecloth. I handed over my own horse and began removing my gloves.

‘Elizabeth’s coming to live here,’ Kate added, ‘did I tell you?’

‘No. No, you didn’t.’Was my wariness audible?

She enthused, ‘She’s a good girl, you know, Cathy.’

Well, to be honest, I didn’t know. All I knew of Elizabeth was that she was thirteen, had the Tudor-rose colouring and was clever. That’s what Kate said: very, very clever. Kate had great hopes for her. Couldn’t bear to think of her shut away in some country house with any so-so tutor. Nor did she like her having to do all that kneeling at her brother’s feet on her rare invitations to court. Elizabeth was very much looked down upon by her sister Mary, too. Of Henry’s three children, Elizabeth was definitely the poor relation. Which was, of course, down to who her mother was. But Kate had been working on Mary. It disturbed me, Kate’s bond with Mary. I don’t like catholics at the best of times, but Mary’s fervour feels to me like something else altogether. Like grief, in fact. As wilful as grief. But Kate was friends with everyone and, anyway, she and Mary had been at school together. Now Kate was telling me, ‘I said to Mary, Elizabeth’s incredibly bright.’ Well, that was a good move, because Mary would hate to think of any clever girl going uneducated; I’ll say that for her. Kate was saying, ‘I said, she needs to study here with Jane.’

Little Jane Grey. ‘Jane’s all right, is she?’ Earlier, I’d unwittingly made the mistake of asking Jane if she’d be riding with us. Her expression had been one of incomprehension as she’d declined and shrunk away, presumably to lessons or prayers.

‘Oh, Jane’s Jane,’ Kate said, diplomatically, with one of her wide-eyed twinkles.

Jane Grey: that tiny, serious girl, top-heavy with brains. Jane must have been so pleased to be at Kate’s. I’d had nice parents, if rather absent, but Jane’s situation was the opposite: parents not nice, and far too present in her life.

Walking from the stables, I puzzled over Elizabeth’s impending move into Kate’s household. Because there was something I knew about Elizabeth, wasn’t there: something that Kate didn’t seem to know. That Thomas Seymour had, only months ago, been pursuing her. But, then, I reminded myself, he’d left her alone, hadn’t he. Kate was the one he’d married, and as quickly as possible. So perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it had always been Kate for him. After all, Elizabeth was way out of his reach and surely he couldn’t have ever seriously imagined otherwise. Council would never have stood by and let him marry her, and he’d have known that, wouldn’t he. He must have known that. Anyone would know it. Perhaps, then, sensibly, he’d been covering up his interest in the king’s widow. In that way, it made sense, his play for Elizabeth. It was the only way it made sense: Elizabeth as red herring.

Four

A week or so later, when I was back home, Thomas’s brother turned up at my Barbican house. ‘Cathy,’ he said, and gave me a cold kiss on the cheek, somehow both diligent and absent-minded. Offered a drink, he requested warm milk and I suppressed a smile: England’s most powerful man, sipping warm milk. Bella fetched our drinks and a bowl of roast almonds, and Ed and I spent a while exchanging the usual pleasantries and making enquiries after family and mutual friends. Not Kate or Thomas, though: my best friend, his brother. Notable absences. Looming absences.

Presumably there was something that he felt would be best said if and when we were alone. So, I suggested a stroll in the garden. I’d probably have suggested it anyway because Ed is rather dull – he’d take no offence at my saying so, it’s something he seems to cultivate – and half an hour in his company is improved by there being something else to look at. Even a wintry garden. He hunched himself back into his luxurious cape and down we went to the terracotta-tiled terrace, then further down into the garden. At the bottom of the steps he launched in with, ‘My brother’s a bloody fool.’

So much for no one knowing.

He explained that he’d learned the news from the little king, who’d learned it from Thomas himself.

‘No one’s supposed to know,’ I said.

Ed’s smile was a sneer. ‘Thomas doesn’t keep secrets about his own good fortune.’

I asked how little Eddie had taken the news.

‘Thinks it’s nice: his favourite uncle and his beloved stepmama.’ Then he dropped the sneer and worried, ‘It’s just…too soon,’ touching his forehead as if placating a pain. His velvet cap didn’t disguise that he was more grey than when I’d last seen him, which was only weeks ago. No longer greying, but grey. The same thick, sleek head of hair, though.

‘Yes, I know.’

He gave an apologetic shrug: of course I knew. But then a double-take: ‘Did you…?’ You didn’t know beforehand, did you?

‘No! No. I’d have told her…’Told her what exactly? Any number of things. I voiced my doubts, or, more accurately, my incomprehension: ‘It’s not just that it’s too soon, is it. It’s that it’s him.’

He stopped, almost smiled.‘But I thought you’d have been all for that.’

‘For what?’

‘Marrying “for love”.’ He handled the words with a show of reluctance but it was clear that he enjoyed saying it. Probably the biggest thrill he’d had in ages.

I’ve never made any secret of my opinion. And if anyone fails to understand quite why I object to arranged marriages, a good start would be to have a look at Ed’s wife. Nasty piece of work. Or, indeed, look at Ed himself: pallid and shadowed.

‘It helps,’ I said, sarcastically,‘if both parties feel the same.’ We walked on, alongside joyless, brittle lavender.

‘So, you don’t think my brother is in love with Kate?’

‘Do you?’

Wearily: ‘I suspect he’s up to his usual tricks.’

I brushed my fingertips against a rosemary bush – the dusting of flowers, tiny knots of brightest blue – and enjoyed the sting of its deep, dark scent in the air. ‘What was all that with Elizabeth?’

‘Exactly what it looked like, I should think: an attempt to marry a princess.’

‘Has there ever been any other interest in women?’

He admitted, ‘That’s what puzzles me. If it wasn’t too premeditated for my brother – who’s nothing if not impetuous – I’d suspect he’d been waiting for the princesses to grow up. We’re lucky that his faults don’t include being Catholic.’ Mary would never have him.

I said, ‘It’s Kate who’s the mystery here, though, isn’t it. Not Thomas. What is Kate doing, marrying Thomas?’ Sensible Kate. Probably the most sensible woman any of us have ever known. Strong-minded Kate, though: it did fit, in that respect. And Kate who keeps her own counsel, likewise.

Ed nodded. ‘It’s Kate I’m concerned for. You know that.’ He was fond of Kate; she was his kind of person. ‘It’s not that I’m objecting to their being married. In fact, there’s probably no one I’d rather have as my sister-in-law -’ He stopped, gave me a look that meant Besides you, of course, although he didn’t mean it – he thinks I’m trouble. I laughed, but actually something serious occurred to me. I was remembering how Kate had said cheerfully to me, ‘But I don’t have to explain this to you, do I. You of all people.’And how I’d thought, Yes, but I’m me, Kate, and you’re you. Possibly, just possibly, this was something I’d do: marry someone whom others saw as unsuitable, and marry him quickly because I considered myself in love. Even though I had never, in fact, done any such thing. Had never had to. But Kate? Had I led her astray? By giving her ideas? She’d been the one giving me ideas, all my life: that’s how I saw our friendship. It felt odd to me that it might be the other way around, for once.

As we walked past my sunless sundial, Ed broached something else: ‘If there’s an heir soon, there’d be a question as to whose,’ and he clarified, unnecessarily, ‘Thomas’s, or the late king’s.’

‘Ed, there hasn’t been an heir in all these years. She’s been married three times since she was fifteen. To men who’d already had children, so there was nothing wrong with them’

He checked: ‘So, she isn’t…?’

‘Is that why you came here? Not to talk this over – two friends putting their heads together, concerned for a mutual friend – but to try to press something out of me?’

His turn now to take offence. ‘No. No. Don’t bite my head off over this.’ He sighed. ‘It’s genuinely that I don’t know what to think. Don’t know what to make of this.’

‘Yes, well,’ I said, ‘that makes two of us.’

Five

I went a couple of weeks later, at Kate’s invitation, to dine with the newlyweds. This was to be it: Thomas’s formal introduction to me as Kate’s husband. No point in my putting it off; every point in getting it over with while making as little as possible of it. It had to be done. When my barge drew up, it was Elizabeth – unmistakable hair of Tudor gold – who greeted us. She just happened to be sitting on the riverbank steps. Holding a lute. Beneath her scarlet, ermine-edged cloak was a gown of deepest, plushest black; beneath that, a kirtle in cloth-of-gold. Oh, very picturesque. How had she managed to slip away alone, unattended? The gems on her hood’s border winked as she stood to give me a huge smile – ‘Hellooo!’ – but those Boleyn-black eyes searched my face. I was careful to show just as much enthusiasm as we chatted. You want to know why I distrust Elizabeth’s familiarity? Because it’s calculated. Those scanning eyes. Oh, I understand why - she’s spent her life on the outside, special to no one – but that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

Her standing back from all the bustle of mooring and unloading our barge gave the unfortunate impression that she owned the place. ‘Oh, well,’ she said eventually and offered up her lute, raised her faint eyebrows. ‘Already late for my lesson.’ Watching her go, I did soften a little. Because there was also something genuine there. Excitement. She was obviously pleased to be at Kate’s. Understandably. Quite something, it was, to be taken on by Kate.

It was something, though, to which her elder sister was objecting: this I discovered a little later, when Kate came with me to my room. Her old friend Princess Mary was refusing all contact with her, she confided dolefully. ‘Doesn’t like my having married Thomas so soon.’ So soon after her father’s death. She shrugged, helpless. It crossed my mind to say, I’m sorry to hear that; but then it crossed my mind that I wasn’t. I was pleased; it was a relief. That friendship of Kate and Mary’s was unfathomable to me. Mary is from the dark ages.

It was predictable that she’d have voiced an objection: she’s famous for her sense of protocol, as well as for her horribly complicated relationship with her father. Understandable, the latter: think of his adoration of her as his precocious little princess, then his savage rejection of her along with her mother before he welcomed her – minus dead mother – back into the fold. Poor Mary never knew whether she was coming or going, whether she loved him or loathed him. Her confusion persists and she’s touchy on the subject, to say the least. I don’t like her but even I’d say that, given how her father treated her, she should be dancing on his grave.

‘She’ll come round, I think,’ Kate said, cautiously. We could speak freely; my two ladies, Joanna and Nichola, were reacquainting themselves with Kate’s; Kate and I could barely hear each other over all the chatter. Bella had gone to the laundresses with my gown, which had snagged on something when we’d disembarked.

‘And Elizabeth herself has no problems with your having married Thomas?’

‘No, none. Although Mary suggested she should have. Wrote to her and said it’d be best if she didn’t live with me.’ Kate permitted herself a wry smile. ‘Well, you can imagine. Elizabeth knows her own mind. She answered to say she’d be staying.’ Now, a burst of enthusiasm: ‘Elizabeth loves it here, you know. And I love having her here, Cathy. She’s a real joy to have around. Such a clever, grown-up girl; it’s so good to see her flourishing.’

I felt she was going to say, She’s more like a daughter to me than any girl has ever been. Or perhaps, I see a lot of how I was in her. She said neither. But she could have said either. It struck me that I was envious; of which of them, I didn’t know.

I didn’t meet Thomas until we went into the hall for dinner. And then there he was: across the expanse of jewellike tiles with the cavernous fireplace ablaze behind him. Kate took my hand, led me towards him, presenting me to him and getting away with it before I’d quite noticed. He kissed the hand – my hand – and greeted me with just one word: ‘Cathy.’ My own name, yet somehow it made me shy.

When had I last seen him? Five years ago? He was forty now but looked no different from when I’d last glimpsed him. His years of being cut loose from England seemed to have done him no harm at all. On the contrary. In the candlelight, his face looked sculpted, his eyes adamantine and his hair like cloth-of-gold. Impeccably tailored, too, he was, with even the smallest pieces of fabric slashed to reveal, underneath, as linings, fabrics that were just as fine. A performance in itself, how he looked. Kate never stinted on clothing – her gown was cloth-of-silver – and to my surprise they made a good-looking pair that evening.

He was bowed over my hand when he said my name and never during that whole evening did he once look me in the eye. I’ll be frank: it’s not something I’m used to, not being looked at. Ours was an intimate gathering, too, or should have been: just Elizabeth and me at the top table with Kate and Thomas. Jane Grey had gone from evening prayers to bed, having one of her headaches, and all Kate’s ladies and my own two were assigned with Thomas’s men to a separate table which was set at an unusual angle from ours. As was the table for the senior members of the household such as Elizabeth’s governess, the men of the church and the girls’ tutor. Kate’s consort of viols was practically inaudible. Uproar, though, heralded the subtlety brought to our table at the end of the meal: knowing, congratulatory laughter for the sugar-sculpted, goldleaf-tabbied pair of cats – the bigger one presumably a tom – which were arching their backs, rubbing against each other.

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 shrugged. ‘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?’

‘Waking early?’ Before I could clarify, she said, ‘I don’t think Thomas has “habits”.’ And flicked her gaze skywards. ‘He just…does whatever he wishes. I lose track. I didn’t realise he was up early but…’

Kate’s response – if it could be dignified as such – was not as I’d expected, not as I’d hoped. Irritated, I persisted, ‘He was taking them to the river, as far as I could see.’

Chewing, she frowned. It was a question.

‘Said it was going to be a beautiful day.’ I put the cushion back. ‘Said to Mrs Ashley.’

She looked at the window. ‘Well,’ she began, dreamily, ‘it is.’ Her eyes caught the light, shone.

This was no good, she was letting herself get carried away and this could well turn out badly. She should be extra-careful, in charge of a princess; she should realise that. Especially this particular princess, but presumably she didn’t know what I knew about Elizabeth and Thomas.

‘Bet the girls’ll be tired,’ I said, because I was uncertain what else to say. ‘It was very early. Before five.’

‘Before five?’ That had her attention. She seemed to stop and think. ‘Well,’ she continued, ‘they should have a good, long nap after lunch. I’ll tell William,’ their tutor.

I almost laughed. The girls, miss a lesson?. And Kate herself rising late. What was going on? I tried to look merely mildly interested. ‘Does Thomas do this often?’

‘Wake the girls?’ She dabbed a damask napkin to her lips.

I shrugged. ‘Wake people.’

She stood, indicated to her maid that she’d finished. ‘Well, he’s always waking me,’ a quick smile, ‘but not to take me to the river.’

I was shocked, to be honest. Which in itself shocked me. Because I’m unshockable, aren’t I? Everyone knows that. Yet there I was, feeling flushed and – deeper – chilled. That’s shock, isn’t it? But why? What on earth had I been thinking? That they didn’t sleep together? Newlyweds? Happy newly-weds? In truth, I hadn’t been thinking about it at all. There was so much else about them that was a puzzle. Was it, then, Kate’s mention of it that shocked me? Her direct mention of it? No, because sex wasn’t a popular topic of conversation with her, but it certainly wasn’t unmentionable. And, anyway, it wasn’t direct, what she said. But nor was it coy. I didn’t quite know what it was. An aside, a quip; it had felt like a brush-off. I realise, now, what it was that shocked me. It wasn’t what she said, but how she said it. As an aside, while she stood up and turned away. Allowing me a glimpse, but only so much, as if it were nothing of significance.

It was something I thought about as I lay in bed that night. Kate, like me, had probably had only one lover. Three marriages, but probably only one lover.Ted, her first husband, had been too old; I remembered now that she’d told me, ‘There was none of that.’ I hadn’t known her really in those days, the brief time of Ted; not properly. ‘It wasn’t a bad life for a girl,’ was what she later told me about it; and indeed she was a girl – fifteen, sixteen – in those days, younger than her own stepchildren. Her next husband was John and he, too, was a lot older than she was, but he wasn’t too old. Come to think of it, when they married he was probably younger than Thomas is now. John and Kate were married for fifteen years. John had been her lover. And then Henry, the king: nothing much doing there. I’d wanted to know, of course; everyone had wanted to know, but she actually did tell me. He’d tried, was what she whispered; he’d tried, a couple of times, and then given up. She gave me a look, and I pulled a face, said, ‘Thank God,’ to which her response was nothing more than a wan smile. Because the less said, the better. Not that it was news in Henry’s case. Anne Boleyn had famously decried his stamina – it was one of the misdemeanours for which she died – and, frankly, the record had been poor since then, with his fifth queen, little Catherine Howard, too stupid to realise that it didn’t mean she could take her pleasures elsewhere.

Pleasures. Me, like Kate: just the one lover. My husband. I bet people assumed that Charles and I were lovers for all twelve years of our marriage. Because we were clearly in love; because Charles was what they call a full-blooded man, a ladies’ man, he was so evidently all man; and because – I know what they think – I’m what’s known as hot-headed, headstrong, which is taken to mean hot-blooded.Well, people know nothing, do they. I spent the first couple of years of our marriage having babies. And then there I was, sixteen, with two babies under two. Enough, as far as I was concerned: I’d done my duty and was anxious not to get pregnant again. Really anxious. And Charles was anxious not to hurt me. I hadn’t recovered from the second birth, no doubt because I hadn’t healed from the first. Charles – much married, good at women – understood. And what they don’t tell you – unless they’re Anne Boleyn – is that the all-jousting type of man doesn’t actually have much energy left for the bedroom. Not when he’s over thirty, certainly.

Charles must have considered that he was doing me a kindness by mostly leaving me alone and of course in a way he was. But months became years and then it had been so long – practically all my adult life – that I wouldn’t have known how to start if I’d had to. That was something I pondered that night: how had Kate known how to start, when it came to it? I had to conclude that Thomas – resolutely non-jousting Thomas – had taken the trouble to show her.

Nine

The day I set off back home from that first visit, Kate was up late and then at prayers, then talking with the girls’ tutor. Having sent word that I’d like to be fetched when she was free, I remained in my room and helped Bella pack up. Or tried to, but Bella’s too capable to need or probably even welcome my help. I had none of my own ladies for company; I’d come unattended, this trip – Joanna being due her first child, and Nichola having returned to her family home. I used the time to tackle some correspondence. When I finally got to Kate’s room, she was treating herself to a bath. Her ladies Marcella and Agnes seemed to have exhausted themselves preparing it, and were reclined on cushions by the fire, reading. I ducked through the canopies, brushing aside bunches of lavender, and there was Kate amid more lavender in a tub of deep oats-creamy water.

‘Bath time,’ I said, pointlessly – a mere envious purr – and she smiled in response, closed her eyes and smiled even wider. On a table beside the tub was a big brass bowl: she’d be washing her hair, then, too. In the steaming water, among the usual cinnamon and liquorice sticks and cumin seeds, were slices of lemon.

I queried: ‘Lemon?’

‘It’s good. Lightens your hair.’ Her eyes sprang open. ‘Not your hair,’ she retracted. ‘Lightens light hair.’

Yes: no good for me. Cloves and rosemary for me.

‘Do you really have to go?’ she asked.

I pulled up a stool, sat. ‘Houses don’t run themselves, do they.’ I’ve an excellent steward – a legacy of Charles, who appointed well and inspired loyalty – but there’s only so much he can do, or is willing to do. There’s only so much that it’s fair of me to expect him to take on. I do the household accounts. More than a hundred people look to me, ultimately, to keep them fed and clothed and educated. All those people needing to be encouraged, placated and sometimes, unfortunately, reprimanded: ladies and gentlemen, senior members of staff and the servants who work under them, and all their children. In kitchens and storehouses, chapel, gardens, laundry, the farm and stables. Permission to be given and funds found for orders: four or six hundred oranges this month, and four hundred or five hundred eggs? Each head of department will know his or her own requirements, but it’s me who has to bring them together. We need barrels of soap for the laundry, but we also need soap for the kitchens and for our bedrooms. Wax for candles, of course, for the chandlery; but also for the laundresses, so that they can seal the edges of some of our clothes. We need bolts of fabric for me and the boys, and for our ladies and their children, and ushers and pages and maidservants; but we also need kitchen aprons and chapel robes, tablecloths, saddlecloths, blankets, curtains. And boots, the children have to be kept in boots: that’s what always seems to catch me out, and – it seems to me – most often with my own children. How many times have we been ready to journey between London and Lincolnshire and I’ve glanced down to see holes in Harry’s or Charlie’s boots? And then we’ve had to delay for a new pair to be made. As lady of the household, I did all this when Charles was alive; I don’t understand why it’s been so much more tiring since he died. I said to Kate, ‘You should come and see me, stay with me.’

She settled back in the bath, seeming to consider it. But she wouldn’t. I knew it, somehow. Something had changed – everything had changed – and willowy, light-footed Kate was somehow more solid; she was unbudgeable. It was me who was going to have to do the running from now on. She surprised me by saying, ‘If only you could just stay here for ever, you and the boys. I wish we all lived here, don’t you?’

I shouldn’t have been surprised, though. It’s usual, isn’t it: that desire to share a new-found happiness. To feel blessed and thereby magnanimous, keen to spread your blessings around. I’d been like that when I’d just had the boys: I’d wanted everyone to have children; I’d wanted so badly for Kate to have children. It took me years to calm down on that score.

Then she confided, ‘It wasn’t sudden, Thomas and I. It’s not been sudden.’

I smiled at her: if you wish; whatever you say. No flash in the pan, was what she was understandably keen to imply. But even if it was sudden, I wondered, why assume that I wouldn’t understand? Me, of all people. Me, who knows all there is to know about sudden. Me, the girl who married Charles a mere three months after the death of his previous wife. Less sudden, yes, but still sudden, especially considering that the dead wife was the woman for whom he’d defied the king and risked the death penalty. Charles’s elopement with the king’s sister had been the love story of the century. And it really was; they did genuinely love each other. Then I came along, tripping along in the footsteps of everyone’s favourite, fairytale princess. That was difficult, that’s what difficult means. That was a scandal.

No, it’s not the suddenness of it, I wanted to say as I smiled down at her: it’s Thomas; why Thomas? But I couldn’t say that, could I. Not then. Too late. It was done and dusted: she’d married him. And if she got wind of my distrust of him, she’d decide I should spend more time with him. So that I’d grow to like him, to love him. That was Kate all over: a plan of re-education for me. Well, I couldn’t be bothered with that; that was to be avoided.

‘I mean,’ Kate said, ‘he asked me to marry him before,’ and clarified, ‘before I married Henry.’

Well. This was new. ‘But you were married to John.’ Before Henry had come John, and there’d been very little time in between them.

‘When John died.’

‘What, he just’ – I laughed – ‘came up to you and asked you?’ In passing? Because there couldn’t have been time for much else.

She laughed with me – ‘No!’ – before turning contemplative. ‘No, no. We talked about it a lot, at the time.’ She smiled.‘He’s a surprisingly devoted sort. I mean, you wouldn’t think it of him, would you, but he waited for me.’

Well, either that, or she was one of his options, the one to which he returned when he couldn’t get Elizabeth.

‘We talked and talked…And I couldn’t tell you, Cathy; it wouldn’t have been fair on you. Henry was around by then, making his intentions clear. You remember that. I couldn’t draw you into this mess. It was…frightening.’ She winced: ‘It was miserable. We could talk all we liked, Thomas and I, but there was no choice, really, was there. We all knew what Henry wanted, so in the end there was no choice.’

True: if Henry asked you to marry him, there was no saying no. However much he made it sound like a question – and he’d have been careful to do that; he had his pride – there was no saying no to a king, particularly when that king was Henry. All that we’d stood for, Kate and I, was nothing in the face of Henry because he wasn’t a man but a king. And I suppose I’d assumed it hadn’t mattered all that much because, yes, it’d be unpleasant and quite possibly dangerous for Kate, but if anyone – any woman – was up to it, she was. And, crucially, it wasn’t going to be for long. She’d only have to be patient for a few years at most, taking what she could from the situation. Obviously it wasn’t without its compensations, being queen. But I hadn’t known that there was more to it, for her; that there was an actual loss involved. Not only had she had to take something on, but she’d had to leave something – someone – behind. Now, belatedly in on the secret, my heart throbbed for her. ‘You should have told me,’ I protested. ‘Since when have I cared about “frightening”?’Thomas, forgotten; it didn’t matter that it was Thomas. This was about Kate. ‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. You should never have had to go through that alone.’

‘Oh -’ She waved a hand, dismissive, weary. ‘I wasn’t totally alone. Anne knew, of course. And because Anne knew, Will knew.’

Of course, of course: Anne, Will, her sister and brother. Family. A family which had then done very nicely from the royal marriage. As families always do. Don’t misunderstand me, I like Anne, Kate’s sister, very much;Will, too, but particularly Anne: we’re good friends. There’s no denying, though, that she and Will stood to do very well from Kate’s marriage to Henry. They were hardly impartial advisors.

‘I had to do it,’ Kate was saying, ‘and so I did do it, and I think I did it very well.’

No question of that. ‘You did.’ Her motto, I remembered: To be useful in all I do. Useful to her family in this case certainly.

I cut in: ‘Does she – Anne – know now?’ Of this marriage to Thomas.

Kate nodded, a by-the-by nod.

‘And Will.’ It wasn’t a question, I already knew the answer, and indeed she didn’t bother to confirm or deny it.

‘I wish you’d told me.’

‘I did,’ she tried.

That was disingenuous of her; I gave her a look.

She relented a little. ‘You’re busy, Kate; you’ve the boys.’

I didn’t relinquish that look.

‘I couldn’t have burdened you.’

‘Oh -’ Exasperation: words failed me.

‘And you…you tend to talk me round.’ She tried a smile.

‘Yes, and perhaps that’s why you should tell me what you’re up to.’

I wasn’t sure what had just been said; I wasn’t sure, all of a sudden, where we were with this. Except that we were on uncertain ground.

‘You scare people, you know, Cathy.’ She was careful to make it sound good-humoured.

I rolled my eyes: That’s nonsense, that’s ridiculous. ‘Everyone knows that’s just me.’ I speak my mind and I don’t give an inch. ‘The only people I frighten are the ones who deserve it,’ I said. ‘I don’t frighten you’

She smiled; her knowing smile, the mysterious, infuriating one that she favoured when declining to go on, when putting a stop to something. I found her towel, handed it to her. Listen: the truth is that no one ever scared Kate, even if it suited her on this occasion to think otherwise.

As best friends, Kate and I went back further than we could ever even know, to before we were born. Our mothers were very close friends. They came of age under the influence of the formidable queen Margaret Beaufort and the sparkling new Spanish one, and I’d often imagine their optimism as they came together over their books and in their debates and discussions, just as we, their daughters, were later doing. In our case, they were different books and ideas – our good catholic mothers would have turned in their graves if they knew – but they were books and ideas nonetheless. Excitement at the prospect that something of the world was understandable, if not open to change: that’s what we shared with our mothers. The discovery that there was a better life to be lived. For women. I have a feeling that our mothers would have often said to each other, Everything is different now; everything is possible.

For women, was what they would have meant, because Margaret Beaufort and Catherine of Aragon were women who were serious about women. One of them had seen her generation of women run the estates while the men fought the Wars of the Roses; the other had witnessed her mother reign superbly in her own right.

It’s what Kate and I were saying a generation later – Everything’s different now for women - and we considered ourselves onto something new. But, then, women had had a setback, we’d come through difficult times and so we were, in a way, having to start all over again. What I recalled of Kate’s mother Maud was an expression that implied she’d seen it all and was expecting worse, but I doubt she could have imagined just how bad the Anne Boleyn years would be. The locking away of one queen and then the execution of the next. No matter that Catherine was queen, the highest of all women in the land, or, moreover, that she was a good queen, then a fierce queen, fighting for her principles and the rights of her daughter. In the end, she was just a woman, meaning just a burden on a man, no longer pretty and not up to bearing a son. And then, in Anne Boleyn’s world, at Anne Boleyn’s court, there was room for only one woman, and no prizes for guessing whom. That was when most of us – women – slunk away into quiet lives, family lives. Then came Anne’s arrest, and suddenly the woman who was above all other women was – officially – fickle, malicious, bewitching. No doubt about it: Kate and I became women at a time when women were seen as trouble.

Maud belonged, despite that heavy-weather expression of hers, to more optimistic times. It was my mother, the optimist, who lived on to face what was, for her, the end of the world: the Reformation. My mother was a foreigner. She’d come here with the Spanish queen-to-be, Catherine of Aragon, as chief hand-holder. She was Maria de Salinas in those days. Mary Salts to you. Married, Anglicised, she turned into Mary Willoughby. Maria de Salinas, the funny, clever Spaniard, was before my time, but nor did I ever really know the Mary Willoughby who had one of the king’s ships named in her honour. Because that Mary was, by all accounts, carefree, a lover of life. Back in those days, the king had done more than name a ship after his favoured Spaniard: he found her a husband, a good one. And then she had me. And then everything went wrong: England went mad, in my mother’s view, and she followed Catherine into exile, to various tumbledown, far-flung castles. She could have seen it as her duty, even if the hand-holding days had officially long passed, but it was so much more than that, and I’m not sure I have a word for it.‘Friendship’ hardly does it justice: hardly explains leaving one’s family, one’s little girl, for ever, for a banished, tormented queen. Catherine died in my mother’s arms and now my mother is buried alongside her. It was what she wanted, Catherine’s tomb prised open for her when the time came. Two Spanish girls, Maria and Catalina, side by side in Peterborough.

Ten

It was summer when I next saw Kate. A couple of months had slipped by and suddenly it was June or July, I don’t remember which. Strawberry season. She would have been married for six months or so and she looked better than I’d ever seen her – luminous – but there was desperation in her hug when she greeted me.

‘What is it?’ I was worried. ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Oh, it’s nothing,’ the agitated tone making clear it was anything but. ‘Really nothing.’

Thomas: that was my first thought. Here we go, honeymoon over. He’s done something, shown his true colours. I tingled at the prospect of vindication. We were in the hall, surrounded by my boxes. The featherbed drivers were at work that morning, in the bedrooms, beating the mattresses, driving fresh air through all those feathers. So, I was temporarily displaced even before I’d properly arrived. One of my leather-covered wooden trunks doubled as a bench for us; we perched side by side. We were alone, Bella having been sent to pick flowers and herbs for my room.

‘It’s just…’ Kate closed her eyes, hard, then opened them and stared at me, indignant. ‘Anne Stanhope.’ Ed Seymour’s wife. ‘Has Ed said anything to you?’

‘Oh, he knows better than to mention her to me.’ Not Thomas, then. Not this time. Oh, well.

She despaired, ‘What is it with her?’

‘What isn’t it?’Loathsome woman. Snide.‘What’s she done now?’

‘She has my jewels, the queen’s jewels. Not only is she keeping them from me – that would be bad enough – but she’s actually going to wear them. She’s claiming she’s first lady of the realm.’

‘Anne Stanhope?’ I couldn’t help but laugh. ‘How’s that?’

‘Wife of the Lord Protector.’

‘Oh, really,’ was all I managed; it wasn’t worth discussing. Kate was first lady of the realm, with the two princesses behind her, and then, if we were going to get down to detail, me: the Duchesses of Suffolk and of Norfolk, traditionally next behind royalty. Anne Stanhope was nobody.

Kate bit her lip. ‘Well, he is first man of the realm, isn’t he.’

‘Well, he shouldn’t be. Much as I like Ed, and much as I think it’s no bad thing he’s in control, it’s not how Henry left it, is it.’ Henry – dying – had stipulated a council of sixteen men, all equal, to oversee little Eddie in these years before he’s old enough to rule alone. But they then agreed amongst themselves to promote Ed to Lord Protector. Not a bad choice, originally, those sixteen men. They’re forward- looking enough, I’ve no complaints in that respect. But Kate should have been on that list with them. Everyone knew it. Even Henry himself knew it. She had run the country so well in his absence, and she was central to his children’s lives. It was a surprise to Kate as well as to everyone else when Henry’s order was made known. Nothing more than dowager queen: but what, quite, was that? No one seemed to know; there hadn’t been one for generations. No doubt it was an unpleasant surprise for Thomas, who’d already proposed to her, who’d assumed he’d be getting a wife on the ruling council. I can guess, though, why Henry showered Kate with wealth in his will but no power. An extremely wealthy widow would be a prize. A dead Henry wouldn’t be able to stop her falling prey personally to unscrupulous interests, but he could ensure England wouldn’t fall with her.

‘I’m dowager queen,’ Kate was saying, ‘I’m the only queen England has, for now. I was due to visit court a week or so ago and I asked Ed to make the jewels available for when I got there.’

I understood what that was about; she didn’t need to spell it out. It would have been hard to go back to court as mere dowager queen: still the queen, but pensioned off. Especially hard, though, as one who was in disgrace for this hasty remarriage to a man-about-town. Those jewels would have helped; they would have reminded people who she was, who she’d been and who, officially, she still was. Reminded people what respect, officially, was due to her.

‘Back comes this nonsense about Anne. And I know it’s not him talking…’

‘No,’ I agreed. Ed famously doesn’t stand up to his wife.

‘…but my problem is that there’s nowhere else to go with this. He’s the ultimate authority, isn’t he.’

‘Yes and no. You could go to the king.’

She recoiled. ‘He’s just a child. I don’t want to involve him.’

‘He’s a very grown-up child,’ which was a polite way of putting it. Her view of Henry’s son was one that I’ve never been able to share; I find him stiff, rather repulsive.

‘But that’s it. He takes everything very seriously; he’ll take this so seriously. But because he is still a little boy, he’ll be trying so hard to please everyone – Thomas and me because he loves us, and Ed because he’s supposed to do as Ed says. He’ll tie himself in knots.’ She looked pained. She said, ‘I can’t bear to see him do that.’

Thomas would have no such scruples, was my bet. How much did Kate know of how Thomas behaved with the king? What I knew, I knew from Ed Seymour. I learned that Thomas was paying the boy to keep him on his side. Ed had complained to me that he was trying to limit the king’s spending, to instil some financial sense into him, ‘And then along comes “Uncle Thomas” behind my back, jangling his change and undermining me.’ I’d asked if it was a lot of money. Not really, Ed had admitted,‘It’s not much more than pocket money,’ but that wasn’t the point, he’d said, because any money looks a lot to a nine-year-old who’s being taught to budget. ‘And how does that make “Uncle Thomas” look to him?’

Like a saint, I’d answered.

He’d inclined his head. ‘Exactly.’

Ed had also told me that before Thomas had married Kate, he’d turned up to see his nephew and got him on his own for a while. The boy had later reported their conversation, guilelessly, to his Uncle Ed. Thomas had appeared to confide in him: I’m thinking of getting married; would you like me to get married? Your Uncle Thomas: settle down, get myself a nice wife. And then you can come and stay with us as often as you’d like. It would be nice, wouldn’t it? So, who would you like me to marry, who would you choose for me? Eddie had obliged, having several stabs at it: his sister, Mary, for example. Oh dear: not quite the answer Thomas had in mind. In the end, he’d had to prompt: How about your wondeful stepmother? Eddie enthused, Oh, yes! His two favourite grown-ups. All done, as far as Thomas was concerned: the king’s permission. That’s how he boasted of it later to his brother:‘I have the king’s permission.’

I asked Kate: ‘What does Thomas think of this business with the jewels?’

‘Oh, he’s furious.’ Pleased with his indignation on her behalf.

An indignation that probably had a lot to do with an opportunity to take his brother to task and, into the bargain, gain some jewellery. ‘What does he think you should do?’

‘Go to Eddie.’

I bet he does.

But she wouldn’t have it. ‘This – these rivalries – it’s all beyond Eddie, and the longer we can protect him from this kind of nonsense, the better. Honestly, you’d think we adults were the children. I hate what this – she – has turned me into. Scrabbling after some jewels. But they’re England’s jewels, for England’s queens. They’re in my safekeeping. I have a duty to keep them safe. If I let Anne Stanhope get hold of them, no one’ll ever see them again. And did I mention that Anne has been saying that when I turn up at court, she’ll have me carrying her train for her? And she’s serious, Cathy, she’s deadly serious.’

‘She’s mad,’ I soothed. ‘Very mad.’

‘She calls me “Latimer’s widow”, you know.’John Latimer’s widow, as she was before her queenship. Anne Stanhope was trying to make it seem as if Kate’s queenship had never happened. ‘She says Henry wasn’t in his right mind when he married me. She says that I’m her husband’s little brother’s wife, and that’s all I am.’

All you are. Lovely, willowy, wise Kate. Anne Stanhope was never, ever, a patch on her in any way whatsoever. To lighten the tone, I said, ‘You got the handsome brother, though.’

And it worked, she laughed. And I laughed, to see her. So, there we both were, grinning away together and, for a moment, nothing else mattered. Two girls amusing themselves: we could still do that, could still be that.

Then Kate said, ‘You know, I’m glad not to be at court. This Anne Stanhope business: I can go to court and tussle over her train, or I can just not go. That’s how it seems to me now. And it’s not as if I need to go, do I. Thomas and I don’t need to go. We’re happy here; really, really happy. I did my time there, and now my time’s my own.’

I liked that; I was proud of her. Not for being happy with Thomas Seymour, but for kicking up her heels and suiting herself.

‘When Sudeley’s ready’ – Thomas’s latest acquisition in Gloucestershire, being renovated – ‘we’ll probably move there more or less permanently.’

That I liked rather less. ‘Oh, Kate, that’s such a long way.’ A long way west.

‘Good.’ She laughed. ‘The further, the better.’ Then she realised what she’d said. ‘Oh, I don’t mean from you.’ She laid a hand on my arm. ‘I’m including you; you’re coming with me. Well, for as much time as you can.’

Kate had finished telling me her woes and was ready to start getting dressed, so I nipped to check on Charlie. Harry wasn’t with us; he was, by then, boarding at court, being schooled with the king. I wanted to see how my lonesome little Charlie was settling in. At twelve, he was becoming too old to be able to occupy himself with almost nothing – a stick and some long grass, a handful of stones and a stretch of water – but of course he was still years away from being resourceful, adaptable. My suspicion was that I’d find him hanging around, looking sorry for himself and getting in everyone’s way.

I was told, though, that he was already with Thomas: in the gardens somewhere, was all the page knew. Three of Kate’s greyhounds came with me, streaking ahead and then, from time to time, checking back. The gardens at Chelsea are stunning not merely because of the work that has gone into them – so many roses that the household distils its own rosewater – but also the imagination, and I don’t mean summer houses, fountains, pools, because there’s none of that showiness. It’s the detail that’s arresting, I thought, as I cut through an alleyway planted all over with thyme; it released its lovely, warm scent as I crushed it underfoot. It’s a careful, old-fashioned garden. Rather like Kate was, in fact. It occurred to me that although Anne Stanhope is vicious, it wouldn’t be hard for someone to be deeply envious of Kate. True, she’d never had the children she’d have loved to have, and she’d had to marry Henry in his final, dreadful years. On the other hand, she had no children to fear for, she’d never been alone, she’d never had money worries and now never would. She was living a charmed life at Chelsea. It struck me that perhaps it would be easy to be as good as Kate if one were living her life.

Charlie was standing in the strawberry patch with one of his friends – another of the pages – and Thomas, who was declaiming to a huddle of giggling, basket-bristling kitchen maids. Spotting me, Charlie beamed; it wrenched my heart, that good-natured smile. You’d never know, to look at them – even to spend a few days with them – that my boys are so unalike. Harry seems so considered but actually he’s everything, all things, and not least hot-headed: it’s all there in Harry if you only know where to look or wait long enough. I don’t mean that Charlie’s any less - perhaps, indeed, he’s more - but if you could cut him down the middle, he’d be the same all the way through: Charlie and more Charlie, like a perfect stone or a healthy tree trunk. Gem, oak, he stood there in that strawberry patch, my boy, turned into a sore thumb between that peacock of a man and girls with blushes like rose-infused cream. His body, I noticed, seemed to have grown too big for him – when had that happened? During the night? – so that he was all gangle. I reined in an urge to rush to him, grab him to me and hold on fast. Absently, he greeted the dogs.

‘I mean it,’Thomas was laughing at the girls. ‘Go. Go! Go and’ – he gestured, suggesting a search for words – ‘put your feet up.’

I had to shield my eyes to get a look at him.

‘We’ll bring you some,’ he was saying. ‘How’s that: your own plateful, picked for you by Charlie’s fair hands and my own; served to you.’

The notion was too much for them: hands fluttered to mouths, renewed giggling.

Thomas was going to pick strawberries? Dressed like that? I doubted I’d ever seen a deeper green – how could so much colour have been worked into that silk? – and gold thread ran like fire across it. Those leaves around his ankles could have been made from paper, by comparison. Why was Thomas going to pick strawberries? Pick better, could he, than those bob-kneed, flutter-handed, well-practised girls?

‘So, go.’ He swooped, snatched their baskets. ‘Go!’

And they did, delighted, their honey-coloured dresses twirling around their legs.

Now, me: my turn. ‘Cathy.’ He was at a disadvantage, though, turned in my direction, his eyes screwed up against the sun.

‘Thomas.’

He put the baskets down. ‘Men’s work, you know, strawberry-picking. No, don’t laugh.’ He did, openly, unafraid of showing those good teeth of his. ‘Back-breaking work. But the boys and I’ – mock-conspiratorial glance at the two boys – ‘are here to do our best.’ My son, on cue, grinned. At least he was still in the clothes he’d worn for travelling, not his best.

‘Good for the soul,’Thomas declared,‘strawberry-picking. Don’t you think? Couple of weeks a year: you need to act quick. I like that. Blink and you’d miss it, strawberry season. As if it’s a secret.’A lazier smile this time. ‘Reminds me, too, of being a boy: stealing them. I like that, too.’

I nodded at the plants at his feet. ‘Except they’re yours.’ I addressed Charlie: ‘I came to see where you were.’ Charlie gave me a self-conscious shrug, And here I am. ‘And there you are.’ I turned to go, leaving him be. Clearly, he didn’t want saving. Then again, I doubted he’d last long; I’d be seeing him indoors before half an hour was up.

Thomas said, ‘Not for much longer he isn’t,’ and told Charlie and his friend, ‘Cabbage leaves.’

The boys – unsurprisingly – looked blank.

I interceded: ‘Cabbage leaves?’

‘As many as you can get hold of – fistfuls; no mercy – before one of our gardener-girls chases you off Thomas indicated a far corner of the kitchen garden, then knelt to begin examining the plants. ‘You’ve never tasted strawberries,’ he said to neither of us in particular, ‘if you haven’t tasted strawberries that have been wrapped in cabbage leaves.’

Charlie dithered, unsure if this was a joke at his expense.

‘Wrap them in cabbage leaves as soon as they’re picked.’ Thomas glanced up at me. ‘Ever heard that?’

‘Never.’

‘French. It’s what the French do. Or so I was told. By a Frenchwoman of my acquaintance.’

I did nothing or perhaps I did something – folded my arms, raised an eyebrow – but said nothing, because he, again, was the one who spoke: ‘I’ve always wanted to try it.’

‘Well, then,’ I said to Charlie, who immediately loped off, friend following, delighted to be in on something.

Standing there, I realised how hot it was. There was no shade anywhere near. Sunlight slammed down. ‘You have cabbages here,’ I remarked. Not having the room in our kitchen garden, we have to have ours imported.

‘We have pretty much everything here.’ He didn’t look up, and he’d spoken faintly, his tone, it seemed to me, flat. So, I left him to it.

Incidentally, he was right about the strawberries. Or his Frenchwoman was.

Eleven

After those two or three strawberry-season days at Kate’s, I didn’t see Thomas again for the best part of a year. I saw as much of Kate as before, though, or perhaps even more. Thomas was often away at Sudeley, supervising the renovations, and Kate would write: come and stay; or, could she come to me? I was at my London house most of the time: near to my Harry. Whenever Kate and I met up that summer or autumn, she appeared unchanged, or certainly less changed than she’d been in those first months of her marriage. It seemed to me, if I considered it at all – and I don’t think I did, I suspect I took it for granted – that I had my old Kate back.

She had a project that autumn which kept us busy. Her brother – divorced – liked Lizzie Brookes: that was how Kate put it when she first told me. And Kate liked Lizzie. Well, we both did.

No, she clarified, I mean he really likes her. This was new: this intrigued, knowing-eyed, matchmaking Kate. It would be so nice, she decided, if he could be happy.

There was nothing new in her wanting to make someone happy, but until now it had always been about books. To make someone happy had been to find them the best tutor. But now, matchmaking.

She had a point. Her brother had had romantic unhappiness in a spectacular fashion. The marriage that his mother had so carefully set up for him had gone bad; or, more accurately, had probably never been any good. Years into it, he discovered that his wife, Annie, had been having an affair. Wait: does that word – affair – do it justice? Put it this way: there was someone Annie loved, and that someone wasn’t Will. Someone who’d got there first, or at least before the marriage ever really got started. Will had been busy, in those years of his marriage, being a Parr, being the Parr, the heir; as Useful In All He Did as his sister was. In his view, he was doing the right thing. The problem was that he was in all the right places, and home wasn’t one of them. Two small children later, Annie upped and left.

Suddenly nothing was as Will had believed. His loving wife wasn’t loving and wasn’t his. His children weren’t his: that was what he chose to believe. There’d be no Parr heir for whom all his hard work would pay off. And then there was the shame: never in short supply at court. Kate told me that Will shook, he babbled, his hands were freezing and his forehead burned. That was what she knew. What she didn’t know to start with was that he requested an audience with Henry to remind him of the official penalty for an adulterous aristocratic wife. To plead for it. When Henry broke the news to Kate, he said, ‘It is the penalty. Officially. That’s what it is.’ That was Henry all over: official when it suited him.

‘But…’ said Kate. Where should she start? But we’re civilised, we’ve moved on. But there was Henry raising those hands of his as if to say, My hands are tied.

Kate knew what to do, of course. She knew not to argue with Henry. I’d never have been able to do that, but that’s why it was she who was his wife. She could do one better, too: she could praise him and sound as if she meant it. You’re the most forward-thinking ruler that has ever been, and perhaps above all you’re a man of conscience. Oh, and there’s the small matter of you being a man who understands women – how many of those are there? – so you know how we can be, funny creatures that we are. Something like that. It would have stuck in my throat but she was good, was Kate, she kept focused. In this case, on saving a woman’s life.

Send her to me, was what she requested of Henry. For safekeeping. For now. Will’s sick, she told him, but he’ll get better…but not if he’s responsible for his wife’s death.

That’s how she turned it around.

Don’t – please – condemn him to that, she said. Send Annie to me.

Ah, yes, Kate and her strays: Henry would have liked that. He liked to have a compassionate wife. In his opinion, women should be compassionate. And he should, of course, have the best, the most compassionate woman.

So, it was Kate’s doing, and she seemed to have done it easily: the immediate saving of one life, the far-sighted saving of the children’s future so they didn’t have to grow up motherless and the saving of her brother’s sanity. I don’t know that I’d have been bothered about the latter. For a man who was pursuing the axe for the woman whom he’d married? Or indeed any woman, any person. But then I don’t have a brother. I was – am - an only child. Out on a limb, from the beginning. Which is how I like it. I’m fond of Charles’s earlier families – his daughters, their children – but glad not to be tied to them. Now that Charles is gone, my boys are the only family I have. Keeps it simple, I suppose, albeit fiercely so. Kate was like a sister to her many stepchildren. I was no more than a girl when my boys were born, but there has never been anything merely sisterly in what I feel towards them.

Kate pleaded well for her brother, and did it so that he didn’t have to know, so that he could get on with recovering. Eventually we did have with us once again a good-natured, if emotionally bruised, Will: calming down and slowly turning back into an eligible bachelor.

In the meantime, though, Kate had wanted me over at her house. She wanted help with her reluctant house guest. Entertainment for her, or at least distraction. Although Kate didn’t say as much, I knew her own ladies weren’t up to it, being an unworldly bunch. No outsiders could do it because although everyone knew where Annie was, she had to be seen to have disappeared. No one else could visit. I wasn’t included in that, never am; I do what I want. I didn’t, though, want to do this. I’d never known Annie; we’d moved in different circles. So, it was a succession of strange afternoons and evenings that I spent at Kate’s, sometimes playing cards or more often doing nothing at all. Annie clearly wasn’t in the mood for fun and games, or indeed for anything. Kate and I exhausted ourselves coming up with chatter while avoiding mentioning anyone’s name or anything that was happening to anyone, be it trouble or triumph, because we simply didn’t know what might be sensitive for Annie. She probably didn’t give a damn what we said. She’d sit well back in her chair, arms folded hard and high, making the barest of necessary responses. It was impossible for me to know what she was usually like, even how she’d usually look, this shadowed-eyed, unsmiling woman. What was obvious, though, was that she was furious: her sullenness was suppressed fury. Directed at everything and everyone, would be my guess. And whatever we did, and however we tried, Kate and I probably came into that, even if it was against Annie’s better judgement, and I’d like to think it was. I’d like to think she was grateful to Kate and understood that we were on her side, but I suspect she couldn’t help hating us. Well, we were ladies bountiful, weren’t we. That’s how it must have seemed to her. Everything was all right for us.

Whenever I think of her now, what I recall is the slow drumming of her heels against the legs of her chair, the very sound of desolation and defiance. I’ve been thinking of her a lot recently. You know what I think? I wonder whether perhaps her situation wasn’t all that bad, in the end.

She was long gone by the autumn. She’d done her time at Kate’s and had moved on to her new life – children in tow – with that lover of hers. And we were busy doing our best for Will. For Lizzie Brookes.We were at our best, perhaps, then, Kate and me. Girls together again. It was harmless fun. It was cosy. It was easy. Kate, being Useful; me, my views on love well known. Kate, convert. Me, old hand.

Old hand? I have to tell you: that’s not how I felt, as I watched Will and Lizzie fall for each other. It had been so different for Charles and me. There’d been no mystery, for us. We did fall in love, yes, but only when we were married. Risking nothing. Not that our marriage was any less for it. On the contrary. But watching Will and Lizzie, I found myself wishing that I’d gone through what they had to endure. I was so very sure, then, that autumn, that I would never know what it is to have one’s head turned and be held there, breath taken. Not to know quite what one was in for.

Twelve

It was a cosy, carefree autumn, that autumn; insular and frivolous, the autumn that was Kate’s last. We met up as usual for the feast day of our namesake: St Catherine, on the twenty-fifth of November. Because we were outspoken on the need to rid religion of folklore, we had to keep it secret, this annual exception that we made. Which suited us fine. It was ‘our day’, and our ‘feast’ was exactly as we alone wanted it: steaming bowls of furmenty, the wheat-thickened, cinnamon-scented milk, chewy with dates and raisins; and our rich cream dowcet crusted with burned sugar. We sat at the fireside with our bowls in our laps, gossiping.

November became December and suddenly – or so it seemed to me – Kate had gone to Sudeley for Christmas: gone home for Christmas, gone to her new home. Sudeley was at last ready and she seemed to leave London without a backward glance. But Christmas for those of us who remained at or close to court was fun, as usual. My boys were particularly impressed, loved being in the thick of things, acting as if none of this – the feasts, masques, music – had ever happened before and had been contrived especially for their benefit. Full of it, standing tall, they seemed to be growing in front of my eyes and I saw them, for the first time, as stars of the rising generation. True, they’d been Knights of the Garter for almost a year, since the coronation, when Harry had walked behind Eddie, carrying the orb, but I’d never taken it seriously. They’d been my little boys, nominally in attendance on a nominal boy-king. Playacting. Last Christmas, though, was a revelation: I saw them shaping up for their future as right-hand men to their monarch. Following in their father’s footsteps.

Just after Christmas, I caught a bad cold and delayed my journey back to Lincolnshire. Three days on the road would have been quite beyond me. Taking to my bed for a few days, I missed a lot of the usual London New Year celebrations although I did manage to make an appearance for the gift-giving. My boys had been easy, this year, wanting money. And, despite the expense, I was particularly pleased with the cloth-of-tinsel doublets that I’d had made for the senior members of the household. Bella seemed delighted with her red silk purse. And her present to me was a little bag, too, this one for holding lavender: Holland linen, which she’d embroidered gorgeously. To Kate, I’d sent a length of that new, bobbin-made lace; and she’d sent me a beautiful gold brooch of a bee.

Still unwell, I missed the only event that had promised to liven up the lull after Epiphany: Kate’s brother’s marriage to Lizzie Brookes. Kate, too, missed it, for the same reason: she was ill. I’d assumed that her illness was similar to mine; there was a lot of it about. She felt slowed up, she wrote to me, and was sometimes sick. Well, the sickness I didn’t have. She’d picked something up, she said, and couldn’t shake it off. Her next letter mentioned she was no better. It’s dreary, she complained: I’m bored and boring and poor Thomas must wonder what on earth he’s married.

Ah, yes, poor Thomas. A third letter came with him on one of his trips to London but he didn’t deliver it to me in person, sending it instead via one of his men. In it, among news of family and friends, were the words I’m still wretched, a bit of a wreck.

I didn’t like the sound of that.

I’m coming, I wrote back. I was fine by then. I need a good look at you, I told her. Writing those words, I was remembering how well she’d looked when I’d last seen her. This was cruel, whatever it was, keeping her laid so low when she was at last ready to live life to the full. In her letters she’d been deliberately offhand, but I suspected she was worried. How could she not be?

Don’t, came back the message. Don’t come, don’t worry. I’ll be fine, I’ll sleep this off. It’s a bad time of year for getting better, that’s all. And a look is definitely not a good idea. I warn you now, she declared: I look awful.

She knew I’d come. I’m coming, I replied. No arguments. I’ll be no trouble, I’ll keep myself to myself, but just let me see you. I need to see you.

And perhaps it’s true that this was as much for my sake as for hers, and perhaps that’s why she let me come. Everyone knows I’m no nurse. I’m hopeless with sickness, my own or anyone else’s – even my boys’, it hurts and shames me to say.

At times during the days before I set off to see Kate, I was frantic with worry about her; but at other times, I managed to reassure myself that it was a bad time of year and hardly anyone was fully well. Plague was around – Elizabeth and Jane’s tutor, William, had died of it, Kate told me, during his trip home at Christmas – but there had been no cases anywhere near Sudeley and, anyway, whatever this indisposition of Kate’s was, it clearly wasn’t the plague. Come spring, I told myself in my good moments, she’ll pick up. In the bad moments, though, I wondered: a day or two of sickness could be put down to bad food; and a week, well, it happens, particularly at this time of year. A couple of weeks of being unwell, even: yes. But this? This sickness for weeks with no let-up?

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