Free The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn Page B

then, it was a shock. She had no spare energy forher thirteen-year-old ward; there was no room in her shrunken world for the tag-along, for the girl she’d once casually scooped up and taken under her wing.
    I hated her for it; of course I did. And I hated her for her sickness which seemed to me not only disgusting but wilful. I longed to shake her out of it, to shake her back to herself. She’d been everything to me, she was all I had. My own mother had been too busy kneeling in front of a deposed queen to bother with me, but into her place strode Mary Rose. For five years, she’d listened to me, bolstered me, instructed and challenged me. And then, just as she had me desperate to be like her, she dropped it all, the striding and hair-tossing, the big-mouthed laughing, the passion for life. She dumped it all, as if it were nothing. I felt tricked. I took it as cruel.
    Now I know better. If I could turn back time, I’d sit and read to her. I’d bring a single, lightly spiced, honey-baked fig. And if that didn’t work, I’d clear away her untouched tray before it could sicken her. I realise, now, that she was frightened. I understand, now, that she couldn’t possibly have been ready to go. My own mother died six years later and although her symptoms were much the same, she seemed less troubled, less pained. The difference, I suspect, was that she had what she needed: her child safely grown and happily married with healthy children of her own. Whereas no one could help Mary Rose because she knew that her son, too, would soon be dead. Her boy, her youngest. He was sliding down inside himself, becoming all shoulders; he was turning inside out, bony and blood-flushed. His eyes looked candlelit in broad daylight, and he was roped to a cough which allowed him no rest. How can it have been for Mary Rose to knowthat when the end came for him, she wouldn’t be there to hold a cool hand to his forehead? Whenever I think of it, I find myself biting on my knuckles, as if I’ve stubbed something. The mercilessness of it. Her sunny-natured boy; her deliciously sly-boots, glinting-toothed boy; her tongue-tied, trying-hard boy: everything he’d ever been would soon be nothing. She was still – even in her illness – taking him a night light every evening: her boy, afraid of the dark, who would soon be sealed up in the family vault.
    When she was dead, we took her to the abbey at St Edmondsbury. A long day’s ride, there and back, on a long, midsummer day. I rode second in the procession, behind Frances and in front of Eleanor, in order of our ages as if I were their equal as a true daughter of Mary Rose. That was Charles’s doing, and I was grateful to him.
    Charles’s choice for his own burial place was the church at our castle at Tattershall. But when the time came, Henry claimed him for St George’s Chapel at Windsor, buried him there at his own expense. Then had requiem masses said for him at St Paul’s and Westminster Abbey. Spectacular, then, in the end, Charles’s dying, or so it must have seemed to everyone but us. Actually, it had been quick and quiet. I still don’t know what I feel about all that pomp, about his being taken from us for his burial, but I hope it stays with the boys that their father was loved and valued by his king. And of course he was: loyal, fair and good-natured man that he was.

Thirteen
    My preparations for my trip to Kate included explaining the situation to the boys. I didn’t want to alarm them, but they had to understand that it was important for me to go and perhaps for me to stay a while. Charlie was to remain in London, I decided, close to Harry, with his tutor and, of course, enough staff to keep our Barbican house comfortable for him. I was mindful that none of us was at home at Grimsthorpe, and hadn’t been, by then, for some time. Our absence felt, to me, a little like desertion. Which was ridiculous, because Grimsthorpe would – I knew – be running fine, albeit in its