Chapter 6
I had not spoken her name since the night we argued. Nor had Percy. But silence in a house does not mean silence in the world beyond it. Word still reached me that the king’s interest in Anne Boleyn had not faded the way my mother once promised that such things did.
What had once been rumor had hardened into an open fact.
The king’s affection for Anne Boleyn was no longer a whispered guess passed along by aunts and cousins, but something the whole court seemed to know.
I learned that Anne had risen from a lady-in-waiting easily replaced to a woman given her own household, her own income, and her own quiet authority that no mere king’s mistress before her had ever been granted.
Knowing that, I watched Percy more closely than he ever knew.
He did not speak her name, but I learned to read the news of her by what it did to him instead.
A certain silence at supper meant a letter had come from London.
A restlessness that sent him out riding in weather no sensible man would choose meant he’d heard more reports of her.
I never asked him what he felt, watching another man raise the woman he’d once meant to marry higher than either of their stations. I did not need to ask. I watched, and I lived inside it.
By that time, I’d been telling myself for years that my endurance in our marriage was a kind of victory. I was wrong about this, though it took me a decade to understand how wrong. Endurance without hope is not victory. It is simply delay. And I was running out of patience for delay.
Months passed, and Anne’s increased power proved to be only a stepping stone to something far larger.
By 1532, it was no longer a mistress the court whispered about, but a future wife.
The king meant to marry Anne, and he meant to have a male heir by her.
But to do that, he would first need to rid himself of Queen Catherine, the wife he already had.
So he tried to annul his marriage to Catherine by arguing that it had been forbidden from the start.
He cited the biblical prohibition against marrying a brother’s widow.
It was a different argument than my precontract to Percy.
But it rested on the same principle: that a marriage could be undone, however many years it had stood, if the right flaw could be found.
If a king’s marriage could be undone on such grounds, then surely a countess’s could be too.
I did not act on the thought immediately. I only carried it with me, the way I carried every small hope in that marriage.
In the end, it was Percy himself who handed me my opportunity. And he handed it to me in anger, without the smallest thought for what it might cause.
We quarreled over some matter I no longer remember clearly.
It may have been some fresh cruelty of his or some fresh grievance of mine.
What I remember, what I will remember until I die, is that somewhere in the middle of that quarrel, his temper outran his caution.
And he said something that stopped me cold.
“You’ve always known I never chose this,” he seethed.
“I wish to God every day that the precontract had held instead of being torn apart by Wolsey and my father both. There was one, Mary. Real vows, spoken and meant. Not some boy’s foolish daydream, whatever you’ve been told.
It should have bound me to Anne instead of you.
And none of this,” he gestured at the room and at me, “should have happened.”
I did not answer him at once. Even through my own fury, some small, disbelieving part of me realized that he had just broken the rule that had banished her name from the house.
He had built that silence himself and had guarded it fiercely.
And yet he was tearing it open with his own hands rather than mine.
I do not think he even noticed he’d done it. He stormed from the room the way he always did when his temper outpaced his judgment. And I stood there alone, understanding that I had just heard the single sentence that might finally set me free.
I wrote to my father within the week. I did not embellish what Percy had said.
I did not need to. I set down the quarrel as close to his exact words as memory allowed.
I asked my father to carry the matter to the King himself, since a claim of this weight required more than a countess’s letter to move it.
My father’s reply came swiftly, and I could feel his caution through the careful formality of his handwriting.
“I have taken this to the Duke of Norfolk,” he wrote.
“He will not welcome it, given that his niece stands to be affected by the answer. But he cannot ignore a sworn account of a husband’s own admission.
The matter is out of my hands now, Mary, and largely out of yours as well.
We must wait and see which way the King’s own interests bend. ”
I learned later that Norfolk had carried word of my father’s letter to Anne Boleyn herself, and Anne had chosen not to quietly bury it. Whether that was out of some sense of justice, or simply because she judged it too dangerous a thing to hide from the King, I have never known.
I wondered what she felt, hearing my name attached to Percy’s again after so many years.
I’m not sure if she felt anything at all, or whether I existed for her only as a minor inconvenience to be cleared away before her own marriage could proceed unclouded.
I suspect the latter. I do not think she had any more power to bury the matter quietly than I had to successfully raise it.
But I could not get the wondering out of my mind, so I went to court with my father that September. He had business enough with Norfolk by then to justify my presence at his side, though I confess I wanted to see Anne Boleyn far more than I wanted to see any of the men actually deciding my case.
I was able to see her. The occasion was her elevation to the Marquess of Pembroke.
It was a title granted in her own right, which I understood was nearly unheard of.
The crowd of nobility pressed close around the hall.
The King watched from his chair with an expression I did not study properly because my own attention was fixed entirely on the woman kneeling to receive what no woman before her had ever been given.
She was smaller than I had imagined, and darker. There was nothing in her face I could point to afterward and call remarkable. There was no single feature that explained a decade of my own ruin. And yet the room moved around her the way water moves around a stone too heavy to carry along with it.
She saw me. Something in her face briefly changed into recognition, and I understood in that instant that she knew exactly who I was.
I expected, foolishly, that she might look away.
She did not. She held my gaze the entire length of that ceremony’s pause.
She was clearly a woman entirely unafraid of being looked at by anyone in that room, least of all by me.
There was no hostility in her gaze that I could see, but there was no warmth either.
It was simply complete confidence. It was the look of a woman who had already decided how this story would end and felt no need to flinch from anyone still writing a different version of it.
I was the one who looked away. I told myself that I had simply grown tired of staring, and that there was no shame in a woman glancing elsewhere at a crowded ceremony. I did not believe it.
I never saw her again. And I do not know if she ever thought of that encounter. But I have thought of it more times than I can count. I’ve repeatedly turned it over because of how completely she won that silence, just like she seemed to be winning everything else that year.
Percy was summoned before the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and also before the Duke of Norfolk himself.
I was not present for this questioning, and I have only ever known its outcome through my father.
Percy denied the precontract. He swore, upon the sacrament itself, that no precontract had ever existed between himself and Anne Boleyn.
He claimed that his words to me had been nothing more than a careless man saying whatever might wound me fastest in an argument he had no other way to win.
“He has perjured himself,” my father wrote, “or he lied to you in that quarrel to wound you. Either way, the man is beneath contempt. But contempt will not free you, Mary. His sworn oath now stands as the official record. And your account of a private quarrel is only your word against his sacred one.”
Parliament dismissed the petition that autumn. The marriage stood. It was upheld by the very oath that directly contradicted what I had heard with my own ears, in my own home, from his own mouth.
After I heard of the dismissal, I found Percy in the hallway outside his study, and I did not soften my approach.
“You said it to me yourself,” I said. “In this house. I did not invent a single word of what I wrote to my father. You know what you said, and you know what you swore before Norfolk was a lie.”
He would not quite meet my eyes. “I say a great many things when my temper gets the better of me. That does not make them true, whatever use you tried to make of them afterward.”
“It was true when you said it,” I said. “I heard it plainly enough. You only decided it was a lie once you understood what it might cost you to let it stand.”
He did not answer that directly, which told me everything his sworn denial had not. “The truth has never done either of us any good, Mary. I learned that a long time ago. I would think you’d have learned it too.”
I had no answer for him. I only knew that I had taken the one careless, angry truth he had ever handed me and tried to make a life out of it. He had simply unmade it with a lie.
The marriage stood. I remained his wife and his countess. I continued to be bound to a man who had shown me exactly how easily he could hand me hope in one breath and take it back with the next.