Читать книгу The Sixth Wife - Suzannah Dunn, Suzannah Dunn - Страница 7

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.