Chapter 4
We married not long after the worst of the Boleyn business had finally quieted. I was newly sixteen. I was old enough to understand what I was walking into, but young enough to still foolishly hope. In some small, stubborn corner of myself, I believed that hope might still be permitted.
It was not.
The wedding itself I remember mostly in pieces, the way I remember most of my life before Percy became something more than a name in a contract.
I remember the cold of the chapel and the discomfort of a gown stiffened with more fabric than the season warranted.
I remember my father’s satisfaction, worn openly on his face the way other men might wear pride in a good harvest. I remember Percy himself standing beside me - tall, dark-haired, and handsome.
He carried an expression I could not read then and cannot fully reconstruct now.
It was some combination of resignation and absence.
His body stood in the correct place while the rest of him stayed elsewhere.
I do not remember him truly looking at me.
Not once. I sometimes wonder if my memory has exaggerated that absence or made it into something crueler than it was.
But I do not think so. I would remember if he had looked at me, because I spent that entire day watching for it, the way a starving woman watches a door for bread.
Everyone at that wedding knew that I was Percy’s second choice. I do not mean this as self-pity, though I understand it may read that way. I mean it as simple fact.
However quietly the betrothal to Anne Boleyn had been dissolved, it had not stayed quiet. Servants gossiped. I was the bride who had won a husband no one believed he wanted.
I think of our wedding night still, on the rare occasions I allow myself to think of it at all.
I remember the room was cold, despite a fire someone had built too small to warrant the effort.
I remember undressing with the help of a maid who would not meet my eyes, as though my humiliation were contagious and she feared catching it.
I remember Percy entering some time later, already in his nightclothes.
I remember how he stood at the foot of the bed for a moment before coming any closer, like a man pausing at the edge of cold water, gathering the will to step in.
He spoke only once, and not quite to me. “It has to be done, I suppose,” he said, to the room as much as to me, as though saying it aloud might make the doing of it easier.
It did not take long. He was not callous about it.
He was only distant, moving through it the way a man moves through a duty he means to finish quickly rather than to enjoy.
I do not think he looked at my face the entire time.
And when it was over, he turned away at once.
I lay very still in the dark long after his breathing had settled, and I was aware that he had gone somewhere else and left only his body beside me.
He was a husband in name only, and nothing more.
I did not cry that night. I want that understood, because I think there is an expectation that a bride treated so coldly ought to weep into her pillow.
I did not. I had spent too many years learning that tears changed nothing about my father’s negotiations or Percy’s indifference.
And I was not about to waste them then, in a marriage bed that had already made its verdict plain.
***
My new husband’s household received me with the correct courtesies and no real warmth.
My father had permitted me to bring Alice north with me.
It was the one concession to comfort in the whole arrangement, and I clung to her presence those first weeks the way a drowning woman clings to whatever floats.
But I still moved into married life the way one moves into a house built for someone else.
Every room was slightly wrong in its proportions.
Every servant’s greeting was a bit too formal.
It was as if the entire establishment was still mourning a mistress who had never even arrived.
Both Wressle and Alnwick houses offered me the same cold welcome in different stonework.
I remember Wressle’s great hall most clearly, if only because I spent so many early mornings there, alone, before the household had fully woken.
The hall held onto the night’s chill long after sunrise, and I took to wrapping myself in a shawl too heavy for the season.
I sat near the cold hearth and watched the light change through narrow windows while I waited for a husband who rarely joined me.
I learned the sound of that house before I learned the sound of my own husband’s laugh.
I performed my role as countess-in-waiting with the same careful attention I had once given to my letters as a child.
I oversaw what small portions of the household my husband’s mother and the older servants permitted me to oversee.
I sat correctly at meals. I wore what was expected.
I spoke when spoken to, curtsied at appropriate moments to appropriate guests, and did all of this in the service of a marriage that existed only on parchment.
In those early weeks, I found that the chapel at Wressle was the one room in which I could escape that cold, silent house. I went at first only because the chapel filled an hour that would otherwise have sat empty.
But, over time, I stayed for reasons that went beyond simply having somewhere to put my hours. There was a steadiness to it that I found nowhere else. I embraced words said in the same order and candles lit at the same hour, regardless of Percy’s moods or whatever fresh coldness the day brought me.
Kneeling there, I was not a wife who had failed to secure her husband’s affection or a woman denied any real authority in her own home.
I was only one soul among all the others God attended to equally.
I was asking for the same mercy anyone might ask for.
And for that one hour a day, no one in that house could tell me I had no right to what I was asking.
***
Percy was not exactly cruel to me, not in those early months.
Cruelty would have been easier to bear. Cruelty at least acknowledges a person’s existence enough to wound them deliberately.
What I received instead was a careful, exhausting absence.
He spoke to me when circumstance required it.
I might hear his voice at meals, before guests, and in the presence of servants who might report an unusual silence to his father.
He did not speak to me otherwise. He did not ask after my health, my comfort, my thoughts, or anything else a husband might reasonably ask a wife.
He had seemingly trained himself to never quite see what stood directly in front of him.
I saw his charm directed at others, though.
Once, when some lords visited Wressle, I watched Percy transform into a man I did not recognize.
He laughed easily. He asked his guests pointed questions about matters that plainly meant nothing to him personally.
And he made the asking look effortless and generous.
He showered his guests with the kind of attention that makes someone feel like the most interesting person in the room.
I sat several seats down from my husband that night and understood that the coldness I lived inside was a door he simply chose to keep shut to me.
But it was opened easily enough for anyone he judged worth the trouble.
Understanding that was not a comfort. If anything, it was proof that whatever I lived without had never been unavailable to him.
He had just chosen to withhold it from me.
The months that followed settled into a rhythm that would define my marriage: correct in public and hollow in private.
My husband’s attention was given generously to his hawks, his acquaintances, and his father’s business.
It was given to me only in the careful, minimal doses that propriety demanded.
I learned to read the household’s opinion of me in small gestures.
I’d watch a servant’s hesitation before addressing me directly or an older woman’s careful neutrality whenever I asked after matters that I suspected had once been someone else’s concern.
Without anyone needing to say it aloud, I understood that I occupied a role rather than a marriage.
The woman everyone had expected to occupy it instead was never far from anyone’s mind, including, I had every reason to believe, my husband’s.
I did not know how long that cold would last, or that it would deepen rather than thaw as the years accumulated between us. I only knew that I had married a broken heart rather than a man, and that I would spend however many years God granted me learning to live inside the wreckage.
I was, after all, only ever the contract.
I had known that since I was a young girl, crouched in a hallway, listening to my mother weigh the word Percy like a coin.
I simply had not understood exactly how heavy that coin would prove to be, or how many cold years I would spend learning its true weight.