The Confession of Katherine Howard. Suzannah Dunn

By dinner-time, it was gone and Dottie never again attempted anything similar.

      My instinct, from the very first day, had been to resist Katherine, coupled in time by a stinging realisation that I’d be going it alone. She must’ve sensed my truculence, but never during that difficult first year when we lived alongside each other did she try to win me over. Nor, though, did she make any move to exclude me. It simply became accepted that I’d go for my walk in the gardens before supper while she and Dottie gossiped in our room, and that I’d loll on my mattress while, last thing, in their nightshirts, she, Dottie and Maggie practised their dance steps. I sensed that Katherine was keeping her distance from me: glittering back at me over the space that had opened up between us. But I didn’t feel any freer. In fact, I couldn’t shake a suspicion that I remained my own person only because she was allowing it.

      Mary was faring less well. Katherine took everything in her stately stride with the exception of Mary. Mary was her stumbling block. I’d seen it on her very first evening and it had only worsened. I’d once overheard Skid sighing to her husband that Mary would try the patience of a saint but, before Katherine’s arrival, our own tolerance of Mary had been less to do with saintliness than with being at an utter loss. Whenever she’d blundered in on us, bursting with greetings and expecting fulsome reciprocation, forgetting an appalling scene that she’d created a mere hour before, we’d find ourselves offering the required response just because she was impossible to ignore. Not for Katherine, though, and she showed us how easy it was. She simply didn’t look at her. She’d continue doing whatever she was doing, or talking or listening to whomever had been talking to her, fixing her companion with a stare so that there was a clear obligation to continue. Pausing and turning to Mary would have been to drop Katherine: a choice between Mary and Katherine, which, for anyone, even me, was no choice at all because Mary would give you no thanks and would be likely to give you grief. So, Mary had to weather her rejection and sit disgruntled, fuming, learning her place.

      One evening at supper, that first spring of ours at the duchess’s, Katherine dipped a fingertip into the residue of sauce on her plate and began a sinuous sliding, rarely broken and then only with precision. She was writing. When finished, she looked momentarily pleased with it - head cocked, appreciative - before paying it no further mind. Quite a display in itself, her abandonment of it, as if this - writing in her sauce - was something she did all the time. And so there it was, the word, the name, staring up at us, staring us down: OTIS, and, framing it, the twin lobes of a heart.

      Otis: charcoal-burner and - taking advantage of being out there in the woods - beekeeper. Long eyelashes and cowslick hair, and missing his two front teeth, which - happily - didn’t make him any less ready to smile. Otis was nice enough. But too old - perhaps as old as twenty - and anyway he was a charcoal-burner. Charcoal-burning was a skilled job, and there was the added attraction of his honey, but he’d never have been parcelled out, previously, in our negotiations because he was a labourer, which was a step too far.