The Sixth Wife Read Online Free PDF Page B

wasn’t having it. ‘Well, here’s something that isn’tnothing then. I was there, remember, that evening, at your house, with all those people, when Charles said every lady had to choose the gentleman they’d most like to take in to dinner, and what did you say?’
    Oh, she had me now; I couldn’t suppress a smile at the memory. What a good pair we’d made, Charles and I, if an unlikely one, me being half his size and half his age. (Lucky that I could never have been mistaken for any daughter of his: him, a genial, greying bear of an Englishman, and me a snub-nosed, sharp-tongued half-Spaniard.) The evening in question, I’d gone up to the repellent Stephen Gardiner and said, ‘I’ll do things a little differently; I’ll take the man I like least and that’s you.’
    I said to Kate, ‘It was a joke.’
    ‘He didn’t find it funny, though, did he? He laughed along with everyone else, but you could see he didn’t like it.’
    ‘Yes, which is why he’s the butt of jokes like that.’ Pompous ass . ‘Look,’ I said, ‘you’re nice, Kate, and I’m not, and that’s all it is.’ I didn’t like the way the conversation was going, her implication that she was somehow lacking. Something I loved about her was her quiet certainty. And why, in any case, should she want to make cheap jokes? That was for me to do.
    ‘You make your point, Cathy,’ was what she replied. ‘You make people think. You go out on a limb to do that. And I’ve never in my whole life taken even the smallest risk.’
    I wonder, now, what Señor Vives would make of what happened to her in the end. Advice to his girls was something he’d undertaken seriously. Yes, there were languages to learn and translations to do, there was astronomy and maths and music, but he was keen, too, for his girls to do well ingeneral. In life. To be happy, no less. Kate told me that he’d advised them never to marry for love. For a man, it was of no consequence, he’d said: a man could marry for love. But not a girl. Because it would render her vulnerable.
    Of all the pieces of advice from him, Kate chose to ignore this one.

Eight
    It was this, with Thomas: he was often onto something, but he never knew when to stop. That was Thomas’s problem. He was unstoppable. Take that night of the stars. Was he content with a few special moments that arose there in the dark garden? No, because next morning – barely morning, barely even dawn, a mere few hours later – he decided it was the turn of the girls.
    I was awake, just; must have been, because I was unaware of being woken. How early was it? Very. I’d heard the clock strike four, but couldn’t recall it striking five. Not dark, nor light.What I’d heard was a girl’s voice, outside, in the grounds. Not the voice of a resentful servant on some extra-early duty, perhaps in the bakehouse, half asleep and matter-of-fact. This was someone wide awake, excited, momentarily forgetting herself before being hushed. And from my window I spied them: Elizabeth – it had been her voice – with littleJane, being led through the garden by Thomas. Only nightgowns beneath their cloaks, the three of them, and the girls’ hair was down; I’d never before seen Jane with her hair down. Her walk was brisk but she was well behind the other two, her reluctance clear. Elizabeth’s hair was like a fox fur. Her lolloping sideways canter was keeping her abreast of Thomas while she chattered at him in a theatrical hush. She loves drama, I realised as I watched.Why do people say there’s none of her mother in her? Her father would have either woken the whole household to join him, or he’d have genuinely enjoyed the secrecy. But her mother would have done exactly as Elizabeth was now doing: making a show of stealing away. The old king had been a showman but Anne Boleyn had loved show, and there’s a difference: Henry had drawn people in, Anne had wanted them to see what they were missing.
    Unwittingly, I was Elizabeth’s