Brazen (32 page)

“Because you can’t rid yourself of me that easily. I plan to come back to haunt you.”

His dry laugh turns into a cough that he stifles deep within his chest, his face turned to the curtains. When I sit up, I can see the pain distorting his features.

“You’re not—”

“I am.” Fitz turns back to me. “I’m dying, Mary.”

The weight of my pain bends me over and I lay my forehead on his chest. He puts a hand on the back of my neck, smoothing aside the veil of my hood so he can touch the skin there. The other hand strokes my cheek, and I lift my face to look at him.

“You’re beautiful,” he says, and takes me back to the first day we sat in bed together, surrounded by the men and ladies of the court, who laughed at our fumbling embarrassment.

“You don’t think . . .” I can’t say it. I can’t even think it. I blink rapidly, but all the tears are gone, settling deep in my chest and swelling, like to drown me.

“What?” he asks quietly.

“Is it my fault?” The words come in a rush and then falter. “They didn’t want us to consummate the marriage because the king was afraid it would make you ill. I . . . I threw myself at you. I made you . . .”

Fitz starts to cough, the rhythm of it shaking the entire bed. I sit up in terror, move to call the doctor. To run. But he grabs my wrist, and when I turn back, I see he’s laughing.

With tears in his eyes.

“You didn’t
make
me do anything. Sex can’t kill anyone.” He looks down at our hands clasped together, at his own sunken chest. “Well. Maybe it could kill me now.” He pulls in a tired, ragged breath. “But . . . it’s ridiculous. Something proven wrong over and over again. This? This is just . . . bad luck.”

I trace the outline of his hand with my forefinger, and then the lines of his palm. I wish I could read there that he will live another forty years. But with the swelling of his joints, all the lines are shortened, and I’m not sure which is the life line, anyway. So I just trace them all.

Fitz closes his hand over mine.

“You believe me. Don’t you?”

I nod. But I’m not sure I do. It seems that everyone who broke the rules has had to pay for it somehow. Anne Boleyn tried to make herself heard. And was silenced for it. Margaret married a man she loved. And is in the Tower because of it. Madge broke every rule there was, trying to find love. And is all alone. And here I am, holding the hand of my dying husband. Trying to believe I didn’t kill him.

“Don’t tell my father.” Fitz pulls himself up a little, still holding my hand. “Don’t tell him anything.”

“Why?” But I know the answer.

“Because he
will
blame you. He already blames her.”

I pause.

“The queen?”

“Anne Boleyn. He thinks it’s slow-acting poison.” Fitz coughs another laugh. “My father can’t stand the idea that sometimes things just happen. He has to have a cause. An adversary. Something to fight and beat down. The French. The Empire. The pope. The church.” He pauses. “The Boleyns.”

He squeezes my hand once.

“Don’t let the next thing be you, Mary.”

I nod and he lets me go, his hands falling limply to the counterpane, his head resting back against the pillows. He looks spent. His eyes turn to the drapes at the window. As if he can see through them to London beyond.

“He will not visit me.”

“The king?”

“My father. Too afraid of contagion. Too afraid of death.”

I cannot tell Fitz that the king has left the City. That his father has abandoned him as he lies here, dying. So for a long time, neither of us says anything. We watch imaginary stars spin across the velvet drapes, waiting for the dawn.

“He’ll never know what I’m worth.”

“I do.” I want to shelter him. Protect him. Hide him from death and his father and everyone who expected so much from him, and left him to expect so little in return.

More than that, I want him to protect me.

Though I know he can’t.

As if he knows what I’m thinking, he says, “What hurts most is leaving you.” He adjusts his body, so we are touching each other, full-length—head to toe. “I will not haunt you as a ghost. But I will always be with you.” He lays his hand on my chest, just above my heart. “I will take on your sadness, Mary. When you feel it lift, you’ll know it’s me.”

My breath comes a tiny bit easier until I hear his stop. And start again.

I stay with him as his breathing settles, and each whistling, shallow breath is regular. I assume he’s asleep, and don’t move, for fear of waking him.

He must think I’m asleep, too, and that I won’t hear him speak.

“I’m not ready,” he whispers in the dark. “Please don’t let me die alone.”

But he does.

T
HE
WORD
DEATH
TASTES
LIKE
CLA
Y
. C
OLD
AND
BARREN
AN
D
VISCID
, it leaves a gritty patina on the tongue and teeth.

Father comes when the sky outside is still deep gray, and the only thing that differentiates him from the rest of my room is the movement of his shadow. I know why he is there. I don’t let him know that I’m awake.

I wait like a held breath, because until he says the words, I can believe it’s not true.

Even after he says them—after he leaves me alone in the half-light—I don’t remember exactly what he’s said.

Because words no longer matter.

M
UCH
LATE
R
,
AFTER
THE
SKY
HAS
BRIGHTENED
,
THOUGH
TH
E
sun remains hidden, Hal comes to my door, haggard and shaken. He doesn’t speak.

I can’t bear to hear it, anyway.

Together, we sit in my room, silent. He writes until his fingers are stained and the paper piles up like leaves in autumn. All I can do is lay my head on my desk and watch him as the tears refuse to fall, leveed by the magnitude of my grief.

That is where Father finds us when he returns.

“The king did not take the news well.”

The
king
didn’t even see Fitz before he died. The king didn’t send one word of love. The king may only be disappointed that he no longer has a son. I know nothing about the king’s grief or the depth of it. All I know is that my own cannot be fathomed.

I stare at my father, my words caught somewhere below my grief, deep behind my breastbone.

Father doesn’t seem to notice my silence. Or takes it as acceptance. He paces back and forth in the little room. I glance at Hal, whose head is still bent over his parchment.

“He has put me in charge of the funeral.” Father’s voice finally takes on a melancholy tone.

At least there’s that. I imagine all the court at Westminster Abbey—all the dukes and earls and even Thomas Cromwell—their heads bowed over the Duke of Richmond and Somerset as Archbishop Cranmer speaks praise and sympathy.

“He suggests you go into mourning at Kenninghall.”

The king suggests I go back to my childhood home. That I go back to childhood.

I finally find my voice. “After the funeral.”

Father clears his throat.

“It won’t be in London. I will arrange to have him buried quietly at Thetford. The king doesn’t want it to be obvious.”

I feel a creeping dread curl up my spine. Like Fitz’s shadow is behind me, holding very still. Waiting for whatever remains of his father’s absent love to manifest itself.

Father stops talking.

“Why?” I ask.

Father narrows his eyes at me. “I believe he wants it to be a secret.”

“What?” My voice is sharper than I intended. “Fitz’s death? Or his funeral?”

“Both.”

Hal stands, knocking his pen and several pieces of paper to the floor, his expression slack and as white as the parchment in front of him.

The king wants no reminders of his son. He wants to erase Fitz as thoroughly as he did Anne Boleyn.

“The king wouldn’t acknowledge him in life and now he wants his death obscured as well?” I hold on to the edge of my own table, knuckles showing white under my skin.

“You are getting dangerously shrill, girl.” Not
Daughter
. Certainly not
my dear
.

“
He
wants to keep it a secret.
He
doesn’t want commotion or pageantry for his son.
He
wants to pretend it never happened. That Fitz never happened.”

“Mary . . .” Hal’s tone is a warning. I look at him. His lips are gray and his eyes are rimmed with red, a smudge of ink beneath the left one.

I turn back to Father. “How will keeping it a secret help anything?”

“I believe he’s hoping to announce that Queen Jane will give him an heir.”

“I hope her womb is as impoverished as the king’s heart.”

The room is so still, even the dust motes stop dancing. Father doesn’t move. Doesn’t even breathe.

“That statement will not go any farther than this room.”

Father’s lips barely move; his words don’t stir the air.

“You are no longer under your husband’s control and are now my responsibility. You will not jeopardize my future by your injudicious words or actions. If I hear you say anything like that again, I will personally whip you.”

He’s never threatened me before. All his anger—all his violence—has always been directed toward my mother. I always thought it justifiable.

I look at Hal, but he is so submerged in the well of his own grief that he doesn’t see me.

Father steps so close to me that I can feel the anger radiating off him in waves. “I will tell you the same thing I told the king’s recalcitrant daughter. If you remain so in opposition to your monarch, I will beat your head against the wall until it is as soft as a baked apple. Don’t think to defy me, girl. You are mine, now, and I will do with you what I like.”

Hal turns away. Back to his writing. It seems to me that Father almost smiles.

My mind gropes for some kind of support. For the spirit Fitz promised would haunt me. But there is no rescue.

Father strides to the door and pauses without looking back. “Pack your things. It’s time you went home.”