The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn Read Free Book Online Page B

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. Oneof my leather-covered wooden trunks