The Sixth Wife. Suzannah Dunn

a brother. I was – am - an only child. Out on a limb, from the beginning. Which is how I like it. I’m fond of Charles’s earlier families – his daughters, their children – but glad not to be tied to them. Now that Charles is gone, my boys are the only family I have. Keeps it simple, I suppose, albeit fiercely so. Kate was like a sister to her many stepchildren. I was no more than a girl when my boys were born, but there has never been anything merely sisterly in what I feel towards them.

      Kate pleaded well for her brother, and did it so that he didn’t have to know, so that he could get on with recovering. Eventually we did have with us once again a good-natured, if emotionally bruised, Will: calming down and slowly turning back into an eligible bachelor.

      In the meantime, though, Kate had wanted me over at her house. She wanted help with her reluctant house guest. Entertainment for her, or at least distraction. Although Kate didn’t say as much, I knew her own ladies weren’t up to it, being an unworldly bunch. No outsiders could do it because although everyone knew where Annie was, she had to be seen to have disappeared. No one else could visit. I wasn’t included in that, never am; I do what I want. I didn’t, though, want to do this. I’d never known Annie; we’d moved in different circles. So, it was a succession of strange afternoons and evenings that I spent at Kate’s, sometimes playing cards or more often doing nothing at all. Annie clearly wasn’t in the mood for fun and games, or indeed for anything. Kate and I exhausted ourselves coming up with chatter while avoiding mentioning anyone’s name or anything that was happening to anyone, be it trouble or triumph, because we simply didn’t know what might be sensitive for Annie. She probably didn’t give a damn what we said. She’d sit well back in her chair, arms folded hard and high, making the barest of necessary responses. It was impossible for me to know what she was usually like, even how she’d usually look, this shadowed-eyed, unsmiling woman. What was obvious, though, was that she was furious: her sullenness was suppressed fury. Directed at everything and everyone, would be my guess. And whatever we did, and however we tried, Kate and I probably came into that, even if it was against Annie’s better judgement, and I’d like to think it was. I’d like to think she was grateful to Kate and understood that we were on her side, but I suspect she couldn’t help hating us. Well, we were ladies bountiful, weren’t we. That’s how it must have seemed to her. Everything was all right for us.

      Whenever I think of her now, what I recall is the slow drumming of her heels against the legs of her chair, the very sound of desolation and defiance. I’ve been thinking of her a lot recently. You know what I think? I wonder whether perhaps her situation wasn’t all that bad, in the end.

      She was long gone by the autumn. She’d done her time at Kate’s and had moved on to her new life – children in tow – with that lover of hers. And we were busy doing our best for Will. For Lizzie Brookes.We were at our best, perhaps, then, Kate and me. Girls together again. It was harmless fun. It was cosy. It was easy. Kate, being Useful; me, my views on love well known. Kate, convert. Me, old hand.

      Old hand? I have to tell you: that’s not how I felt, as I watched Will and Lizzie fall for each other. It had been so different for Charles and me. There’d been no mystery, for us. We did fall in love, yes, but only when we were married. Risking nothing. Not that our marriage was any less for it. On the contrary. But watching Will and Lizzie, I found myself wishing that I’d gone through what they had to endure. I was so very sure, then, that autumn, that I would never know what it is to have one’s head turned and be held there, breath taken. Not to know quite what one was in for.