Free The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn Page A

awful.
    She knew I’d come. I’m coming, I replied. No arguments. I’ll be no trouble, I’ll keep myself to myself, but just let me see you. I need to see you.
    And perhaps it’s true that this was as much for my sake as for hers, and perhaps that’s why she let me come. Everyone knows I’m no nurse. I’m hopeless with sickness, my own or anyone else’s – even my boys’, it hurts and shames me to say.
    At times during the days before I set off to see Kate, I was frantic with worry about her; but at other times, I managed to reassure myself that it was a bad time of year and hardly anyone was fully well. Plague was around – Elizabeth and Jane’s tutor, William, had died of it, Kate told me, during his trip home at Christmas – but there had been no cases anywhere near Sudeley and, anyway, whatever this indisposition of Kate’s was, it clearly wasn’t the plague. Come spring, I told myself in my good moments, she’ll pick up. In the bad moments, though, I wondered: a day or two of sickness could be put down to bad food; and a week, well, it happens, particularly at this time of year. A couple of weeks of being unwell, even: yes. But this? This sickness for weeks with no let-up?
    You see, when I was thirteen I’d had to stand by and watch Charles’s previous wife sicken and die. Mary Rose: my sort-of-stepmother, the woman who’d taken me on. My own mother was away so much when I was a child, and my father was hopeless, and one of the ways in which he was hopeless was with money. So, when he was dead and I was nine, I was sold. Let’s be frank: that’s what it is when a girl becomes a ward, she’s sold. A man pays to have a girl handed over to him with her inheritance, and he later gets the best possible deal when he marries her on to someone else. It was what Maud strove to avoid for Kate. Kate was independent until she was married, and the marriage was of her choice, or at least of her mother’s choice and her mother had Kate’s happiness at heart. I had no Maud championing me, no one had my happiness at heart and I became the Duke of Suffolk’s ward, but, with that, my luck turned. Because what a place to be, to grow up: in the home of the king’s adored brother-in-law, with his lovely wife Mary Rose and their children. My lonely years were over.
    Mary Rose’s illness seemed nothing much, at first. Tiredness. Summer stretched the days but she seemed unable to keep up, going to bed early, skipping a few social occasions that she’d have loved. She sounded breathless, too, full of sighs and exclamations where before she’d been lovably brisk, her habitual expression of impatience having been the pointed tapping of a fingernail. And her face began to look wrong to me: small, the features unused. That big, red laugh of a mouth and that clever gaze had gone slack, flat. Then came the sickness. Occasional, at first, but then relentless, monotonous. Soon, it was all she did: throw up. I was thirteen, I didn’t want to hear it. It shames me to say it but it’s the truth. Listen: I was thirteen. One day I noticed her face had changed again. There was no longer the flatness to it; on the contrary, she was all teeth, all jaw. And her hair, the amazing hair in which she’d taken so obvious a delight: that mane was now a clump, a kind of disfigurement.
    Within a month or so, Mary Rose had slid into a state whereby everything was too much for her. Instead of a strutting redhead whose call to us – ‘Girls!’ – was accompanied by an arched eyebrow, we had a shuffling, wincing woman, pathetically grateful to us in anticipation of any small comforts we might be able to provide for her. Which we couldn’t: we couldn’t please her; she couldn’t be pleased. It wasn’t really to do with us; we were barely there for her by then; she tended by that stage to look through us.
    Me, in particular. It shrinks fast, the world of a dying person: I understand that now; I’ve seen it happen now several times. But