‘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
