The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn Read Free Book Online

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.’ Shesmiled.‘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