style="font-size:15px;"> ‘The Parrs do not want her.’
No one wants her.
My skittles had been a present from my father. They were carved into the shape of men, painted to look like sailors. I took one in my fist and neatly struck off the head of another with it. Or so I am told. In truth, I probably remember nothing of this, being too young, although it feels as though the memory is real.
‘Lord Seymour suggested her grace of Suffolk…’ Mistress Aiglonby sounded hesitant now and my aunt gave a brusque bark of laughter.
‘Why would he do that? I thought he liked her?’ Her voice changed. Malice rang clear as a bell. ‘Mayhap the rumours are true and she did refuse him and this is his revenge.’
‘Her grace was a close friend of the late Queen.’
‘Which does not mean she would wish to be saddled with her penniless child.’
Yet to the Duchess of Suffolk I was sent, like an unwelcome gift, trailing my retinue of nursemaids, rockers, laundresses and servants.
Lady Suffolk was renowned for her piety but this did not mean she possessed generosity of spirit as well.
‘The late Queen’s child is too expensive for me to keep,’ she told anyone who would listen, but no one was listening, not really, not even parliament, which eventually restored to me all that was left of my father’s property. This was practically nothing. So my expensive household was dismissed but for a few servants, and Lady Suffolk sent me to her castle at Grimsthorpe in Lincolnshire since I could live more cheaply in the country than in London.
I loved Grimsthorpe. The castle had been neglected since the visit of the old king Henry some ten years before and its rooms smelled of stale air and damp and secrets. There were locked doors and tumbledown walls, rambling gardens and endless woods under wide blue skies. Best of all, no one cared what I did so no one interfered. One of Liz’s brothers came to tutor me sometimes, and Liz herself tried to instil in me the skills and lessons appropriate to a lady, but I was a stubborn child and had no interest in learning. I think that the Duchess of Suffolk might have tried to betroth me young had I even the smallest dowry but as I had nothing but notoriety she knew no one would want to wed me.
How long my idyllic life at Grimsthorpe might have continued I do not know, for when I was eight years old the duchess and her fierce Protestantism fell foul of the Bishop of Winchester and she vowed to leave England for fear of persecution. There was no question that she would take me abroad with her. For a couple of years, I was shunted from pillar to post, from London to the country, from north to south, from court to church and back again. I was a nuisance. Queen Mary declared that I should be sent to one of my father’s manors. Liz Aiglonby staunchly maintained I was too young, that I was the Queen’s ward and her responsibility. Mary said dryly that as the Seymours had begat me so to the Seymours I should go.
My uncle Somerset had followed my father to the executioner’s block, so it was left to my cousin Edward, as head of the family, to provide for me. He and I were united in disgrace, the Seymours fallen further than they had ever risen.
It was then I first heard the whisper of that name:
Wolf Hall.
My first sight of the place was on a day of bright sunlight, but once we were within the forest of Savernake the sun vanished into darkness and the track seemed interminable and lonely. It felt as though we were arriving at the end of the world.
‘What sort of a name is Wolf Hall?’ Liz asked, as she placed my clothes in the big bound chest in the chamber I was to share with my cousin Alison. We had been welcomed warmly enough on arrival with bread, a little butter and some fruit although it was closer to dinner than breakfast time. Dame Margery, the housekeeper, had then shown us to my bedchamber and had vanished, although Cousin Alison had remained. She sat in the window where the pale light seemed to shimmer on her flaxen hair. I had never seen anything so pretty in my life.
Liz sounded suspicious, I thought, as though she expected a wolf to appear from behind a tree and gobble her whole. She disliked the country and thought its inhabitants unruly and unpredictable, whether human, feathered or furred. Nor did she like Wolf Hall itself. The rambling old manor was even more run down than Grimsthorpe had been and here I was less than no one and Liz, consequently, nothing at all for all her London connections and service to the court.
‘Wolf Hall is nothing to do with wolves,’ Alison said. She sounded faintly patronising. ‘It comes from the ancient Saxon name for the estate.’
‘Saxon!’ Liz said. Her family had come over with the Norman King William. Her sniff of disdain left no room for doubt that she considered the Saxons even more barbaric than the present inhabitants of Savernake Forest.
Alison smiled, tossing her golden plait over her shoulder. She looked very Saxon herself with her cream and roses complexion and her blue eyes. There was a look of the late Queen Jane about her, or so I was told. Except that Queen Jane was pious and demure and Alison was never that.
Alison and I were only distantly related, but at Wolf Hall, I had already discovered that we Seymours were all jumbled up together, called cousins regardless of our relationships, abandoned here because there was nowhere else for the sprawling offshoots of the family to go. There were half a dozen of us children and I never worked out how we were connected other than through rejection or loss. There were two babies in the nursery; whose they were I never discovered. Closest in age to me was a boy of seven, but from the lofty heights of ten years, I considered him negligible. Then there was Alison, two or three years older, and above her in the pecking order a sullen youth who boasted that he was soon to be sent away as squire in a knight’s household.
Liz had turned her back as she laid out my linen shifts in the trunk. These had been worked with fine white lace and I saw Alison’s gaze narrow on them and something cold and hard and inimical come into her pale eyes as she looked back at me. She could not have looked less like meek Queen Jane then.
‘Those are very beautiful linens indeed,’ she said.
‘The Lady Mary is dressed as befits the daughter of a queen,’ Liz said.
Alison’s cornflower gaze swept over me. ‘Only beneath her gown,’ she said.
Even though I was only ten years old I was adept at reading what went on in the minds of men—and women—for my fate had often depended upon it. I knew that Alison resented me; that for all my notoriety and poverty, she was jealous because I had fame even though it was not of my own seeking. I was also adept at smoothing over discord so I slid from my chair and went over to her.
‘Would you show me the forest?’ I asked.
She looked scornful. ‘It would take days for you to see the forest.’ Her sharp gaze pinned me down. ‘We are forbidden from venturing there. It is dangerous.’
‘Why?’
There was a sudden silence and I realised that she did not know. She had never asked.
‘It just is.’ Her head was bent. I could not see her expression. Her busy fingers were sorting through the skeins of thread in her workbox. She put aside the ones that drew my gaze—the red, the gold, the blue—and selected the brown and the black. ‘Besides we have no time for idleness here. We clean and cook and sew and tend the garden and dairy and a thousand other things beside.’
‘Are
