The Sixth Wife by Suzannah Dunn Page A

what I’d do. ‘Yes,’ I allowed. ‘I’d fight for them. As long as there were a way to do it.’
    ‘Have a drink.’
    I shook my head. ‘I’m exhausted.’
    His smile broadened. ‘All the more reason for a drink,’ but there was no insistence, he’d already given up on me. He’d be content to sit alone, I knew, as I stood to go. It was something he’d been doing often, lately, I imagined, with Kate having been so sick. Suddenly tiredness welled up from somewhere deeper than the last few days and I could do nothing but stay where I was. My room was so far away in this huge house; I didn’t even quite know where. Down shadowy, chilly corridors. If I ever managed to reach it, then there’d be the wearisome business of getting ready for bed. I was too tired even to acknowledge Bella; I wanted nothing but to stay where I was.
    So, I sat back down again, which Thomas took as acquiescence. He brightened, reached for the jug of wine and a glass. He could do the talking. I didn’t even have to listen; I could just drink.
    ‘You know’ – he handed me a ruby-filled glass of hippocras – ‘I’d just accepted that I wouldn’t be having children.’ He said it casually; it was me who felt exposed by the revelation. He’d told me what I’d wanted to know but hadn’t dared ask. He’d read my mind and hadn’t spared me.
    I was unsettled, and fended him off with a suitable platitude: ‘Well, you’ve been pleasantly surprised.’ Dutifully, we raised our glasses to his good fortune. As the hippocras twinkled in my mouth, I was thinking again, Why, then, did you marry her? Did he love Kate so very much that he’d been willing to forego the chance of an heir? I’d never come across a man from a wealthy family who hadn’t at least one eye on the future of the family fortune. No one gave up on an heir for love. No one. True, he was impulsive, but there are other – better – ways to be impulsive than to marry the love of your life. He could have married sensibly – with an heir in mind – and then found other ways to enjoy life, couldn’t he. Although not, of course, with Kate; she would never have been his mistress.
    Again, he seemed to read my mind. ‘All I wanted, in all my unmarried years, was to be happily married.’ Gone was the lazy, confident smile; in its place, a tentative one, and I saw that he was offering me the truth. Not so far-fetched, either. Boys need mothers, men need wives. ‘And I’ve known for years that Kate’s the only one I could be happily married to. She’s -’ He shrugged. ‘Well, you know what she is, all the things she is.’
    ‘She’s perfect.’
    ‘Yes,’ and we both laughed, as if it were a joke between us, her perfection. Or our being in the shadow of it: perhaps that was the joke. ‘I’ve been lucky,’ he said, and took a mouthful of wine. ‘Very, very lucky. And now I’m even luckier.’
    Because of the baby.
    But suddenly he looked all at sea. ‘Anyway,’ he changed the subject, ‘what do you think of Sudeley?’
    Safer ground: we talked about the house, the building work, his plans and the difficulties of hiring good craftsmen. Then we couldn’t avoid the subject of last year’s poor harvest, the prospect of food shortages. We moved from that to my journey, and to other journeys that we’d both made, which led us to places we knew, and people. Nothing much, in the end, and it was easy – indeed, surprisingly pleasurable – to sit talking with him about nothing much. When the courtyard clock struck two, I was reminded that I should try to get some sleep, and made a move to go. He stayed, glass in hand. During the walk to my room, I revisited our conversation, dipping into pockets of it so far unexplored: other places, people we hadn’t yet mentioned. Arriving, I signalled for a bleary Bella to settle back down on her mattress, and, still dressed, gave myself up to the big bed. As I melted into sleep, Thomas’s voice was still with me, on me, in