Prisoner of the Queen (Tales From the Tudor Court) (49 page)

Arabel and Beau jumped up onto the bed with a flick of my fingers and cuddled beside me, their warmth seeping into my bones
, which never seemed to feel anything other than the cold these days.

“My babies,” I whispered—because my voice was not strong enough to speak—
partly to my pets as endearments and partly to the sweet cherub who’d been ripped from my arms and the one who was still with me, who had grown these years without his family together.

Rain splattered and pinged against the shutters, and gusts of wind blew in from some narrow
, unseen crack. Perhaps by the time the tenacious drops slipped their way through the eaves to drip upon my face, I would no longer be in this place, my soul having escaped my body. As if the Lord heard me, my chest tightened painfully, and I felt for a moment as though my whole throat was closing up, cutting off my air. I coughed, deep, heaving coughs that shook my whole body, made me ache in spots I had not known existed. The sound emitted from my hacking coughs was wholly unnatural and splintered fear throughout my spine.

I closed my eyes, let the coughing
take hold until my belly and ribs ached and red and yellow sputum dribbled from my lips.

Fro
m somewhere I heard a door open, the wood cracking against the wall. Feet rushed forward, heels clicking on the wooden planked floors, but my world floated around me, and I could not make out much more than a hovering face and probing hands.

Someone wiped at my face, around my lips, upon my brow with a cool cloth.
A cup was brought to my cracked lips for me to drink. I tried desperately, because an overwhelming need for drink took hold. I gulped at the cool liquid, but none of it made it past my mouth, instead gushing from behind the wall of my teeth and lips to form warm, spittle-filled paths down my chin.

“How could she insist my lady be brought here today?” an anguished
Mrs. Helen said.

There was silence to her query.

A rustling of skirts. “I demand you send a messenger to Her Majesty! You must request a physician. My lady will not—” Mrs. Helen’s voice caught, and she did not finish what she was going to say.

But she need not have finished, for I knew what words she clamped behind frozen lips. I would die
.

Not a one was willing to say thus to me, but I
knew. I could feel it in my bones, in each aching muscle, in my chest that hurt, my lungs that refused to breathe. And I felt relief.

“Oh, the babies…
Poor little Thomas and Eddie!” Mrs. Helen wailed. “His lordship! And they only wished to be happy… The poor girl has lost so much. She sought only her own happiness. And that woman—”

“Do not blaspheme, madam. We can all only do as Her Majesty commands, and if
’tis God’s will to take this child from our presence, then so be it.”

Mrs. Helen
gasped, and I imagined her running at the man full force, pummeling his chest, but my consciousness was beginning to wane.

“I will send for a physician. And a priest.”

I murmured my thanks for the latter. “My time has come. Even now I am going with God as fast as I can.” I was not sure if either of them heard me, for I did not hear myself, and I barely felt my lips move. Nevertheless, I had thought it, wished for them to know that while all else had abandoned me, I was grateful for their presence.

And for sleep…

“I cannot bear it!” The distressed cry from
Mrs. Helen woke me with a startle.

The crease of my elbow stung, and I tried to move, to pull it away from the source of the pain, but I could not. Was I completely paralyzed? I had felt the numbing tingles in my lips before. My toes
were too weak to wiggle, and I was powerless to move any part of myself.

A
whimper escaped my lips. And I heard it! I wanted to tell them to stop. To no longer attempt to save my life for I was through with it. Ready to die. I had
learned to die.

Mrs. Helen
heard it, too. “She is awake!”

I heard the swish of her skirts as she approached my side, felt the air move against my cheek, and then her old
, callused hand upon my brow.

“Careful of the blood bowl, madam,” a stiff male voice commanded.

Blood bowl?

“I shan
’t be in your way,” Mrs. Helen replied tartly.

The man grunted.

“They had cause to bleed you, my love,” she whispered.

That must
have been the cause of my stinging arm. I tried to nod, but instead felt my head roll to the side.

I blink
ed open my eyes, the light harsh. Everything was a bleary mass of white. I blinked some more, but my eyes refused to cooperate. I looked around, panicked, but could get no certain visualization on anything in particular. Shadows with the light… Flashes of movement…

I let out a moan when I had truly wanted to ask what was happening. Pain. Blindness. This was my new world?
No, he could not yet have taken me.
Why, Lord in Heaven? My sweet Jesu, I beseech you. Take me away to paradise!

“Hush, darling girl,
‘twill be all right,” Mrs. Helen soothed.

But it would not. Where were my babies? My Ned?

Precisely when I started to think the only thing I would ever experience again was the sting of my arm as the physician sliced my flesh and bled the life from me, I felt something else. Something warm, wet, then cool against my cheek.

Tears.

Warm, weathered fingers wiped at my cheeks.

“Can you not be done with this foolishness? You are traumatizing my lady
, Dr. Symondes,” Mrs. Helen pleaded.

“
’Tis how we heal a body, madam. She must be bled. Her humors realigned.” There was no emotion in his voice, almost as if he’d tired of the argument and now had only an automatic response.

I had not realized my
eyes had closed again until the snap in Mrs. Helen’s voice woke me. “I recall another great lady, a royal of this realm, who was bled in her bed when ill. The physicians bled the very essence of her soul from her body. Would you do such a thing to my mistress? A princess of the blood?”

My vision cleared slightly, and while things were still a blur, I was able to make out faces
, able to make out the blanch of the physician’s pallor at Mrs. Helen’s words.

“Surely, madam, you are not referring to who I think you might be referring?”

His words were tongue-tied… And I blinked to try to understand what it was they meant. What great lady?

“That I am, sir, that I am. The king did not take
kindly to his physician bleeding her, and I suspect our current monarch will be just as angry with you.”

“I never—
” he blustered.

“That is just the issue then
, is it not, sir? You never—you never thought to do anything other than bleed her. Do you even know what is wrong with her? You never thought to even ask me what was the matter, just took out your knife and sliced away at her precious arm. She is weak enough as it is, having eaten barely a thing in months, and now ill, and you would let the only thing keeping her with us flow from her body.”

“Madam! This is an outrage! I am a trained doctor
, schooled by the very best in all matters of modern medicine. You are little more than a housemaid, and you dare to tell me how to treat a patient?”

“When that patient is a princess of the blood and you are killing her
, then yes!” Mrs. Helen’s hands came up to rest on her bountiful hips.

What little breath I had came quick at this exchange. He was killing me. She was trying to save me.

But I saw what she could not, what she refused. I perceived in that one moment of watching that Mrs. Helen was scared, that she was searching for someone to blame for what had happened to me. There was no one to blame. There could be no one to blame. Had the doctor not come to bleed me, I would still have been lying here, ill beyond measure, not long for this world.

I smi
led, or at least I hoped I did. Through sheer force of will, I beckoned Mrs. Helen to me with tingling fingers.

“Oh, my lady,” she gushed, rushing over and dropping
to her knees beside me. “It has been days since you last awakened.”

She gripped my hand in hers as the doctor rushed to press a wad of padding to the incision on the same arm
’s elbow. She kissed my fingertips and whispered, “I am afraid.”

I licked my lips and tried to speak, but all that came out was a raspy whimper. I closed my eyes. Swallowed. Took a deep breath. Reopened my eyes and tried again. “Do not be afraid, dear friend.” My voice came raspy and gravelly.

The physician reached for a cup and held it to my lips. I drank a few drops, but choked and sputtered. I had things to say, and if my cough should ensue, I would not be able to get my words across. He put the cup back on the table and mumbled indiscernible words before quitting the room.

“You have been good to me.”

Tears spilled down Mrs. Helen’s face, and she shook her head. “I should have stopped you! I should have never let this happen.”

I smiled sadly, knowing the struggle this poor, loyal woman had gone through. She
’d been with me my whole life. Nursed me as a babe, and now here she knelt beside my deathbed. My whole life I’d been searching for someone who loved me for me. And while I had found that in a man, in my dear sweet Ned, who would always be more of a Beau to me than the latter, I had overlooked the one person who’d stood by me through the entirety of my life. Here she was. The last person I would see.

I squeezed her hand. “You have been like a mother to me, but
know there is—” A cough interrupted my thoughts for several minutes, and once again the cup was put to my lips. “You could not have done anything. He is my love, my life. My soul. I could not have lived without him.” I recalled then the words he’d inscribed on the ring he gave me nearly a decade before. “
Whose force to break, but greedy Death, no evil possesseth power
.” By the end of my words, my voice no longer held strength, and so
power
came out on a breath.

“You always were a stubborn child,”
Mrs. Helen chided with a smile. “I remember watching you frolic in the gardens, picking posies and weaving little crowns. Your sister Jane scoffed—even at the tender age of six—at your antics, and when Mary came along, she was so shy and timid she would only stare after you. Everyone claimed you were the beauty, Jane the brains. But I knew there was more to you than lustrous hair, fair skin, and delicate bones. You have heart. You have strength beyond measure, and you are true to yourself. You dared not let anyone tell you the rules of your life. Albeit you had to follow the demands of your parents and sovereign, but you always did so in your own way.”

I chuckled softly, but it came out sounding like
only a raspy grunt.

“And now here you are, you stubborn chit, and still my sweetest little lady, lying upon your death bed and telling me you would lay here still if you had it to do all over again.”

Tears gathered in my eyes, and once again I felt their hot journey carving a path of sorrow on my cheeks. But not sorrow for the life I had lived. As Mrs. Helen had said, I would have done it all over again. No, my sorrow was that I would not get to finish this life. That I would not see my boys ride their first mounts, parry in their first sword match, nor have them in my arms again. And Ned! My sweet husband… That I should never lay eyes on his beautiful face again. Never feel his soft lips on mine. Never feel his arms slide around me and bring me to the heights of passion as he whispered of his love in my ear. And, most of all, that I should not see any of their faces and have the chance to tell them myself that I loved them—tell them that this was good-bye in this life, that I would see them once more in heaven.

“Go within my chest… There is a small box.”

Mrs. Helen went to the chest and rummaged through. I saw from the corner of my eye that Sir Owen had entered my room.

“Take out my ring,
Mrs. Helen, and give it to Sir Owen.” I felt faint and weak, as though any moment I would be called to sleep once more but not to wake.