The Sixth Wife (25 page)

January again.There are two views of two-faced Janus himself, aren’t there. Poised Janus, looking both backwards and forwards, properly both reflective and optimistic. And then there’s two-faced Janus. Perhaps, though, it’s just that he doesn’t know where to look. There’s nothing much to see, is there, in the dark days of January.

I heard Ed Seymour arrive; or heard a small party of riders, didn’t know who, hadn’t been told to expect Ed and the view from my Barbican window was choked with household smoke and river fog. Ushered unaccompanied to my room, chill clinging to him, he made a stab at looking cheerful as he administered the usual kiss. Only when he stepped back to register surprise and reproach did I realise I’d endured it with my arms folded. Letting them fall, I indicated the fireside.

‘It’s dismal out there,’ he agreed, banging his gloved hands together to shock feeling back into them.

No request for milk, this time, but instead something stronger: malmsey. And dates, I added, sending Bella to the kitchen: a plate of dates stuffed with marzipan. My ladies, too, I sent from the room.

Following polite enquiries after my own health and that of my boys, stepdaughters, godchildren, senior household and chapel staff, Ed began on his baby niece as if he had at last arrived at the reason for his visit. I went along with it, but the fact was that since the baby came to me – when Thomas was arrested – Ed had steered clear of her. He’d said, at the time, that Thomas had claimed it as Kate’s wish: if something happened to her widower, the baby was to come to me. And who was to know the truth of it? No doubt Kate wouldn’t have wanted her to go to Ed and his awful wife, but they wouldn’t have wanted her anyway: child of a traitor, and a traitor so close to home. And where else could she have gone? Kate’s sister is ill and her brother is a mess, Council having decided that his divorce was illegal and given him the choice of going back to his first wife or to the block. His is no household for a child. So, she came to me.

I knew the real reason for Ed’s visit. I’d known he’d come sooner or later to ask me about Thomas, about the rumours that have led to Thomas’s arrest on suspicion of – among many other things – plotting marriage to an heir to the throne. Those rumours about his pursuit of Elizabeth don’t come from me. Indeed, their spread – the speed and extent of it – has horrified me. I can’t pretend that I wouldn’t prefer Thomas not to be around, but nor do I want his supposed approaches to Elizabeth to be investigated. What I want, I suppose, is for him never to have existed. For none of this ever to have happened.

And it so nearly didn’t: that’s how it seems to me. I think back to Kate as the newly widowed dowager queen in that lovely old manor at Chelsea and it feels no more than a matter of months ago. As if I haven’t seen her for a while but could get in my boat and go there now and there she’d be and none of it would have happened.

I’d known Ed would come, but nothing I can tell him will make a difference to Thomas’s fate. What matters to me is keeping my family out of it. Thomas is as good as gone, he’s a lost cause. Council has long been out to get him, and lately he’s been making it very easy for those men. Doing deals, first, with the pirates against whom he – High Admiral, still – is supposed to be protecting us: that’s one rumour. Then complaining to others as if to suggest that they join him in some unspecified move against Council: that’s another. Then there was the bungled attempt to kidnap the little king: no mere rumour that one, because he was found outside the king’s bedroom – chasing an interloper, he claimed – and panicked into misfiring his pistol, killing the boy’s dog. Since Kate’s death, much of what he has done has been inexplicable, rash, desperate. Suicidal. As if he has only his own life to destroy, as if he has no child to consider.

Having taken so much of Ed’s new-found concern for his niece, I cut him short. We should address the state of her finances, I said, before he left. Clear enough indication that I knew there was something else to be discussed and we should get on with it.

I’d succeeded in shutting him up; when he began again, he did so in a different tone. ‘So, here I am,’ he admitted, ‘investigating my own brother.’ Adding, ruefully, ‘It has to be done.’

‘It does?’

‘I’m told it does.’ Drily. Oh, how times have changed: Ed, under orders now.
And done well, too
, he didn’t say. Conveniently for Council, this can be made a test of Ed’s loyalty, but, inconveniently for Ed, it’s probably not one that he can pass, whatever he does and however well he does it. Because this is how it happens in our world: people smell blood. One Seymour down and just one more to go, then that’s the end of the Seymours and your own family is a step nearer the king. No matter that Ed’s a good man. These days, a good man has as many enemies as a bad man. Which Ed must know. The shadowing under his eyes suggested so. His dreadful wife will know it, too. I doubt she’s much comfort to him when he returns home after a day of this kind of work. She’s probably already packed.

‘What with everything else’ – gesturing at the door: his niece? – ‘we haven’t actually ever talked, have we, you and I, about what happened at Sudeley last summer.’ He looked down at his hands, flexed his frozen fingers. ‘I do appreciate that you might not want to. Might not want to have to think about it.’ With a sigh, he gave up on his fingers, looked up at me, frank and sad. ‘You might prefer to put it behind you, dreadful time that it was.’ He added, unnecessarily, ‘The loss of your dear friend.’

Not
our
. He could have said
our
. He was distancing himself. Even here, in front of me. And that would be the doing of his wife, is my guess. Done at the urging of his wife.
Distance yourself from the tragic dowager queen, the mess she made of her life in the end
. Done at the urging of his appalling wife, perhaps, but done nonetheless and in front of
me
. He should reconsider his loyalties. He leaned forwards, for me to confide in him. ‘What did you witness, Cathy?’

I wondered what he wanted me to say. Not so long ago, I would have been able to ask him, just ask, but that time has gone. Was he hoping to build the case against his brother, or undermine it? Or did he perhaps want the truth, if only just for himself? The truth of what his errant brother had or hadn’t been involved in. Because, after all, Thomas was his brother, his boyhood companion, even if – I imagined – they hadn’t in fact been great companions. Thomas was the man with whom Ed shared his own history, and now Thomas faced a pitiless, vengeful death. Wouldn’t Ed want to know what his brother was really about to die for?

He wasn’t asking, though, and anyway I couldn’t tell him; I had to stick to my story. ‘Nothing.’ I made sure to sound surprised.

He echoed me: ‘Nothing?’ Same tone: ‘You don’t think Thomas did what he’s accused of?’

‘That’s not what I said.’ He was playing into my hands. I stressed the crucial distinction, the one through which my boys and I could slip to freedom: ‘I said I
saw
nothing.’

He was genuinely incredulous. ‘You were at the very heart of that household, and you saw nothing?’

‘Ed’ -
my turn to lean forwards, for emphasis – ‘what I
saw – who
I saw,
all
I saw – was
Kate
. I had no interest in Elizabeth, in what she was up to.’ Never a truer word. ‘And as for Thomas…’ I shrugged to imply that it was much the same for Thomas, but then threw in, ‘What I saw was no more than the usual.’

He bit. ‘The usual?’

Gently does it
. ‘Oh, you know…’

He cocked his head:
Go on
.

‘Thomas being overfamiliar.’

‘With Elizabeth?’

‘Yes’ – who else? – ‘with Elizabeth.’ A flash of anger at Thomas. He certainly hadn’t helped himself. He should have been more cautious. But that was Thomas, wasn’t it. Thoughtless towards those around him, careless of the consequences for others. Why should I care about the consequences for him? I can’t afford to, not with my Harry at stake.

‘How, exactly?’

So I listed some instances: the early-morning river walk, making no mention of tag-along Jane Grey; the hair-plaiting session, omitting Mrs Ashley’s inept supervision; Elizabeth sitting in Thomas’s lap as if it was something that I, alone, had come across; and the chasing around the bedroom as if I’d witnessed it for myself.

He remained expressionless, then asked, ‘Was Kate concerned?’

‘She said not.’

‘She
said
not? You discussed it?’

Witheringly: ‘Of course we discussed it. We were best friends, weren’t we.’

He was chastened, uneasy, apologetic: ‘I mean, she raised the subject?’

‘She did.’

‘How? Why?’

‘Mrs Ashley had concerns.’

‘About?’

‘About what I’ve just told you,’ and that was all he was going to get from me. What I’d told him was fairly common knowledge, so I was on safe ground. To go any further would lay me open to doubts, to questions.

He frowned, puzzled. ‘But Kate did send Elizabeth away.
Why would she have done that, unless she was worried?’

I repeated the explanation that Kate had always offered. ‘A baby was about to be born in that household. Elizabeth had to go away so that she could get on with her studies, free from distraction.’

‘But she didn’t send Jane Grey away.’

‘Jane Grey is never distracted.’

He couldn’t help but half smile at that. He couldn’t dispute it. After a pause, he stopped the questions and instead told me something. ‘Thomas was trying to contact Elizabeth again, just before his arrest, you know.’

My blood ambushed my heart. ‘I didn’t, no.’

‘We can only presume that it was a renewed attempt to get her to marry him.’ Fingertips to his temple, as if calming a pain. ‘He never learns, does he. He’ll never stop.’

‘No,’ I agreed, although of course I knew differently. He’d have been trying to get to her to square their stories. Whereas me: he hadn’t tried to reach me, to negotiate or plead with me. He’d given up on me before he’d even started. Probably his only wise move ever. I asked Ed,‘What’s Elizabeth saying?’ He’d tell me, I knew. In his view, we were old friends, and although I might bristle at being questioned, we were on the same side. He’d share what he knew.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Absolutely nothing, and I don’t think she ever will.’ He shook his head in wonderment.‘She’s smart, that one.’

I’d been right to rely on her saving her own skin. In that, we’re alike; in that, we understand each other.

‘Some performance, she’s giving us,’ he said. ‘Icily polite, but outwitting us all.’

‘Maybe there’s genuinely nothing to tell.’ Made to sound
like musing, but in fact a probing to see how much he knows. ‘Maybe they really were just friends.’

‘No,
something
went on.’ He spoke as if this was a mystery for us to share.‘
Something
was going on, Cathy.’ The faintest of smiles appeared in his eyes. ‘Don’t forget, I’ve a lifetime’s experience of my brother, and I can tell you that whenever there’s any suggestion that he’s been involved in some wrongdoing, it’ll be true. And what’s more, it’ll be worse than you imagined.’

Determined to return the smile, I found myself unable to hold his gaze.

‘Mrs Ashley will be the one to tell us. She’s done her best at maintaining a silence – I have to say, she’s done admirably for Elizabeth – but she’ll be the one to crack.’

What does Mrs Ashley know? Nothing, has been my guess, my gamble, but – crucial, this – she
thinks
she
does
. That will have been Elizabeth’s doing, to keep her much loved but fusspot governess at bay.

‘You know she’s in the Tower?’

I nodded. I’d heard. Mrs Ashley, busy with her embroidery in one of the Tower’s riverside rooms. Nowhere near Elizabeth, thank God, for any belated confidences.

‘Well, now she’s in a dungeon.’

‘A
dungeon?
Mrs Ashley?’

He held up his hands:
Not my decision
.

Unfortunately, I could believe it: Ed, excluded now from decision-making. ‘That’s
repugnant
, Ed.’

His hands came together as if in prayer, then to his lips, then they opened and he dipped his face into them. Looking up with red-rubbed eyes, he continued, ‘As I say, I think it’ll get them what they want.’ Then, apparently as an afterthought, ‘I’m expected to talk to your boys.’

Was it an afterthought? Why mention a dungeon and, in the next breath, my sons?
Steady
, I warned myself.
You’re doing it again: you’re imagining it, the threat you heard
. ‘Why? They were never there.’

He corrected, patiently: ‘They were
sometimes
there.’

‘Almost never,’ I countered, but reined myself in, aware that I was protesting too hard. ‘It’ll be pointless, your talking to them. They’re
boys
, Ed, they’re just boys: they’re oblivious. We’ve talked about it, of course, the three of us.’A lie.‘We’ve talked about what’s happening to Thomas and why, and frankly they’re as puzzled as I am. Interviewing them will be a waste of your time and,’ I reminded him, a touch brutally, ‘time is something you don’t have.’

He allowed it with one sharp nod, then stood, giving me a tight little smile. ‘And with that…’

I said it for him: ‘A quick look in at the nursery.’ He seemed surprised to be directed there alone, but I explained that Mary is a fearful child. With good reason: losing one parent within days of her birth and now, four months later, the other. I explained that she doesn’t like a lot of people around her, and he huffed at what he judged to be absurd. ‘But you’re not “people”, you’re her…’

Yes, indeed
, ‘Her what? I’m nothing to her, Ed, I’m no one. She doesn’t know me. Her various members of staff – and God knows there are enough of them – ‘are family to her.’