I hold my Maggie in my arms, rocking back and forth. I cannot let her go like this. She was just here. Maybe she isn’t dead. Maybe she will get better. I have heard strange tales in which people appeared dead only to have a resurgence of life moments later. Yes, this can happen for my Maggie. I must hold her a while, will my strength into her so when she wakes up she won’t be afraid.
I talk to her, I tell her she will get better, she is just sick. I apologise for scolding her about supper. I tell her she can eat whatever she wants whenever she wants if she’ll just come back to me. I tell her she must return so she can become a great lady and serve in the queen’s chambers someday. I tell her I am going to arrange a marriage for her with a strong, handsome knight.
I tell her she cannot leave because no one loves her like I do.
She does not move.
No matter, she just isn’t awake yet. She just isn’t awake yet, yes, that is it.
The princess enters collected and composed late that evening with two gentlemen servants.
“You must let her go now, my lord,” she tells me. “She must be interred soon.”
I shake my head. “I have heard of things … of miracles…. She might not be dead. She may be in that deep sleep some people go into and it takes them months or years to wake up…. What if we bury her and she is merely asleep?”
The princess’s eyes mist over with a pity I loathe. I avert my head. Why doesn’t anyone understand? Why do they all look at me this way?
“She isn’t coming back, Thomas,” she says.
It is the first time in our thirteen years of marriage she has ever called me by my first name.
She steps forward. “You must give her over now.”
“No!” I cry, clutching the child to my breast. “You cannot take her!” I kiss my daughter’s cool forehead, stroking her cheek. “I won’t let them take you from me, Maggie, not ever. I will be here when you wake up. I will always be here when you wake up.”
The princess nods to the servants. Some understanding passes between them and at once my arms are seized. The princess has taken Maggie in her arms and is carrying her away from me. I struggle against the men, crying for Maggie, cursing my wife.
I am too weak to break free, however. Perhaps some part of me knows I can no longer follow where she goes. I go limp, ceasing my struggling.
It is over. It is all over.
I press my face against Maggie’s pillow. It still smells of her, of lavender and roses and little girl.
I do not attend her interment.
My son Thomas isn’t the same after the echo of Maggie’s laughter can no longer be heard ringing throughout our house. He takes to his bed with severe headaches and requires possets to alleviate the pain. My wife attends him, sitting by his side, singing softly, stroking his brow and massaging his throbbing temples.
With me he discusses the other children; we talk about Heaven.
“You don’t feel any pain there, do you?” he asks me one day as I sit beside him while he clutches his head, tears streaming down his cheeks. “There is no pain in Heaven?”
“No pain,” I whisper, taking his hand. I swab his head with a cool cloth.
“And I will see my brothers and Maggie again?” he asks me, his eyes filled with hope.
I nod, swallowing the lump in my throat. “When it is your time, when God calls you to Him. But that will not be for many, many years.”
Thomas shakes his head. “No,” he tells me. “The angel who visited me last night said I will be coming home soon.”
I draw away from him in horror. “You are just sick with grief, Tommy,” I tell him. “We all are. Sometimes when we are agitated, we take on peculiar fancies. That is what has happened. One doesn’t really see angels or anything of that nature.”
“Mummy sees them,” says Thomas. “Only she calls them faeries.”
“Mummy sees nothing,” I say with a little more harshness than intended.
“What about the people in the Bible?” Thomas asks. “They saw angels all the time.”
I had never really read the Bible. I want to say I always intended to, but it isn’t true. I can’t bring myself to pick it up. I shrug. “Times were different then” is the best thing I can think of to say. “Do not worry, Thomas. We will get through this. You will feel better. We have no other choice.” I recall my grandfather’s words, words that seemed so cold but were the best he could come up with. “We are Howards.”
Perhaps it is better clinging to this abstract idea of a name and the greatness that can be associated with it than to the realness of people, people who are bound to leave in one way or another.
I rise, leaving his bedside. In the hall I encounter the princess, who has brought a basket of sweet-smelling herbs to the room along with some embroidery.
I seize her upper arm. Her eyes widen in surprise.
“What are you thinking, passing your fancies on to our son?” I seethe. “Aren’t we in trouble enough as it is without his having to believe in such drivel? There is nothing that can come of it. Shroud him with illusions and the world will be all the more cruel to him when reality sets in.”
“Reality has set in,” returns the princess. “And I can think of no better way to ease his pain and sorrow than with these ‘fancies’ of mine. What else have we to cling to but our faith in the unknown, our faith in something bigger and better waiting for us on the other side? If we have not that, we have nothing.”
I release her arm, half pushing her from me. “It is all nonsense. I’m sick and tired of it.”
Her face is a mingling of sweetness and pity. “Of course you are. But it isn’t that you’re tired of; it’s the death and the pain and the grief. You want something to blame, so you will blame anything to make sense of it all. I do not seek to make sense of it. There is no rational explanation that could ever justify what has happened. So let me keep my nonsense. I will lose my mind without it.”
“Perhaps, madam, your mind is long since gone,” I say before turning on my heel and quitting her presence.
Everything is so simple to her. I want to accept things as she does, but I cannot. I cannot throw myself into some fantasy world while reality stalks me with the relentlessness of a falcon.
I have never realised to this day how different the princess and I really are from each other.
The angel of Thomas’s vision claims him in August, four months after the death of his sister. His is a peaceful passing. He complained of a headache, something the princess and I had come to grow used to, and closed his eyes. That was it. He was gone.
Six servants hold me down to force a sleeping posset down my throat after I have screamed my throat bloody and raw for four hours straight. The princess takes her grief out of doors and sits swaying on a garden bench, singing to herself.
I am alone when I awake; my children are still gone. No amount of screaming against the fates or God or whatever force of divinity that decides these things will return them to me. I am silenced. I require no comfort. It is over, all over. My dynasty has collapsed.
As my heir and namesake, he is interred at the family chapel of Lambeth, and the occasion is celebrated with the property dignity.
Some of my siblings attend the funeral and we are approached by my sister Elizabeth and her husband, the ambitious and untalented Thomas Boleyn.
My sister wraps her arms about my