incantations - even Mary, sometimes, welcoming the opportunity to make a noise - as if trying to summon futures for ourselves.
Despite the talk of whom our parents would choose for us, we didn’t shy away from speculating which boys in the household or neighbourhood we’d marry if by some chance we had the choice. Harmless, this talk, and liberating: a choice unburdened by the various considerations which, we knew, our parents had to take into account. Liberating, but never frivolous: we relished the choice that in fact we would never have, and chose carefully. Careful, as well, to avoid any conflict between one another. By negotiation, we parcelled out the better of the boys in the household and the neighbourhood: the trio of pages, and the sons of the higher-status members and retainers of the duchess’s household such as her secretary and doctor. Not so much a choice, then, perhaps, as an allocation. Mine, that first autumn and winter, was the doctor’s second son, fourteen-year-old Rufus: a watchful lad, by all accounts a clever boy. We kept our boys to ourselves and even they themselves - especially them — knew nothing of our interest in them.
We didn’t idolise them. Our attitude to them was one of tolerance - as if they were merely, in some way, necessary. We took an interest in them, but there was no passion. What was important to us was the act of choosing. Looking back, I’m struck that our attitude to them was rather superior. In my daydreams, Rufus would be struck down, it didn’t matter how, it mattered only that he was in desperate need and that I, grave and efficient, worked wonders. I found, in my daydreams, that I had a talent for it.
Bright-button-eyed Dottie had been right, that very first night: It’s great, you wait and see. The only problem was that, in so enjoying myself, I couldn’t shake a suspicion that I was betraying my mother: my mother, by whose very best efforts I was there at the duchess’s. It wasn’t only the talk of boys of which she would’ve disapproved, or the lack of schooling. Worse than that: she’d drummed into me that I’d have to be on my best behaviour at the duchess’s, but to my surprise, I realised that it was at home that I’d been on my best behaviour. Both of us - my mother and me - had been forever on our best behaviour, whereas life in the duchess’s household wasn’t the ceremonial business that she’d believed it would be. At the duchess’s, I was free of all that: I was free and every day was one long sigh of relief freighted with the shame of my disloyalty. However happy I was, I lived day by day with a catch in my breath, a lump in my throat, a hitch to my heartbeat: the sense that I was getting away with something and the day would come when I’d have to answer for it.
Katherine Howard arrived at the duchess’s six months after I did, on the eve of Lady’s Day. That first evening, she said very little; just regarded us all with that gaze of hers, that half-smile, answering our questions which, from shyness, were limited to practical considerations. Only Mary was more personal - ‘Are your parents alive?’ - but was answered at first less readily and then rarely, Katherine giving an impression of being unable to hear while she unpacked her chest and her bags. When we woke in the morning, Katherine’s mattress lay square on to the wall in our higgledy-piggledy room and, shutting the door behind us, glancing back, I saw that it was our five that looked out of place.
Her first morning, she showed a similar effortless efficiency in the day room, copying letters as if it were nothing and gazing into space while waiting for the others to catch up. Mrs Scully was full of praise for her - ‘Very good, Katherine!’ - which rather dismayed me because it was only copying, after all, and she showed no signs of actually being able to write. When Mrs Scully left the room at the end of the lesson, Katherine remarked expressionlessly and to no one in particular, ‘What do you think she was thinking when she put that dress on this morning? “Oh, this blue’ll look good”?’
It’d been phrased as a question, but I knew full well that no actual response was required. Or none that wasn’t in accord. The new girl’s opinion was that the colour of Mrs Scully’s dress was wrong and Mrs Scully should not only have known it but also cared.
Infuriatingly, ever-eager Dottie rushed in with an excuse: ‘Not much else fits her -’ as if Mrs Scully had lots of dresses from which to choose - ‘because she’s expecting again.’
‘Yes.’ Katherine bit a nail, then examined it. ‘I can see she’s been busy.’
Busy?
At that, Alice almost caught my eye but seemed to think better of it. I didn’t like it that this new girl - or anyone, but especially this blank-faced, glittery-eyed new girl - should be passing comment on Mrs Scully. What was wrong with blue, anyway? True, it was more often the colour of servants’ livery, and, true, it was more often worn by men than by women, but so what? What did it matter? The duchess’s wasn’t a fashionable household, and Mrs Scully was a busy countrywoman distracted by children.
More to the point, who was this girl to judge? From what I’d seen of her own clothes, they were plain and well used, handed down, even if she wore them as if they were something special, with cuffs turned back, buttons unfastened. In fact, she was plain herself, not that you’d know it from the way she walked around with that glittering half-smile. She walked tall despite her lack of stature. Purposefully, too, her pace measured. Like an adult. None of our scampering or dawdling. She was thin-lipped and big-nosed; her eyes were small and grey, her hair not Tudorgold but bronze. She wasn’t a patch on any of us, I didn’t think, with perhaps - if I was honest - the exception of double-chinned Alice. This colourless little new girl was nothing special but she acted as if she were. Polly would’ve put her in her place but she’d gone, having left us at Christmas to be married.
Later that morning, on our way into Hall for dinner, the new girl’s eyes trailed the imposing figure of Mr Wolfe, the caterer, and - again - to no one in particular, matter-of-fact, she remarked, ‘That one looks a lot like one of my sister’s ex-lovers.’ This time, no one responded. Little Maggie bit her lip. That one was a disturbingly casual way to refer to Mr Wolfe, who held considerable respect in the household. And lover? Not a word we used, probably not a word we’d ever heard. Ex-, too, which made clear that there’d been others. And, anyway, even to think of our respectable - indeed, married - Mr Wolfe in that way…
When we were leaving Hall, though, and passed Jay-jay, one of the page boys, just as he spat copiously on to the cobblestones, Katherine muttered, ‘You’re nice,’ for us to hear but for him to fail to catch, and it was this snipe of hers - pointless but pointed - that had us smiling among ourselves. The page boys were a wily trio and we’d never have admitted it but we were in awe of them, so it was good, for once, to feel superior.
Sewing, that afternoon, Katherine had barely clapped eyes on Mrs Scully’s stepdaughter before coming up with ‘Oddbod’, and nothing could’ve been more apt. Skin and bone, with birthmark-red hair and venous-blue eyes, Trudie was a girl of sudden revelations: a moth from the palm of her hand, a milk-tooth dredged from her pocket, a shrew’s skeleton shrouded in her handkerchief. ‘Oddbod,’ decreed Katherine, her tone neutral, just as it was safe to do so, just as Trudie flitted away over the threshold ahead of her stepmother, and in that instant, it was done: Trudie became - affectionately, and only among us - Oddbod. As for Mrs Scully herself: later that afternoon, having asked us to fetch cheeses for the Lady’s Day supper and rushing into the dairy to supervise us, she slipped but managed to correct it before it had properly happened, perhaps even before she’d consciously registered it. Respectfully averting my gaze, I came up against Katherine’s, which showed no such compunction. That evening, Katherine relayed a message to me with, ‘“Skid” Scully’s asking for you,’ and by bedtime, Mrs Scully was, to all of us, without discussion, as if she had never been anything else, simply ‘Skid’.
Despite myself, I began listening for Katherine’s asides, anticipating them. We all did. Desultory though they were, they drew us in, they drew us to her in our efforts to catch them. I don’t think it had ever occurred to us to pass judgement on anyone, but in the new girl’s eyes everyone was fair game. I saw how adults
