Chapter 2
My mother was the one who first began to describe Henry Percy for me, one fragment at a time, though she didn’t always realize it.
By the time I was ten, I had learned to listen without appearing to listen. It was a skill every daughter in a house like mine cultivated the way sons cultivated swordplay.
One gray afternoon, my mother sat with her sister-in-law. The two of them were bent over needlework while I sat nearby pretending absorption in a psalter I had long since memorized.
They spoke of the Percys the way women of their rank spoke of everything that mattered. They circled the subject before committing to it.
“He was born in Nottingham, of all places,” my mother said. “Though the family holds nearly all of the north between them. And he is fifteen now.”
“So young,” my aunt said. “Younger than I’d thought.”
“Old enough. His father is quarrelsome enough for the both of them.” My mother paused. “You know the earl. Fought the crown over every scrap of authority in the north. And guards it like a man who expects the king to steal it from him personally.”
I did not know the earl. I only knew that the word quarrelsome told me more than any formal account could have. I tucked it away the way I tucked away everything in those years, like a small stone dropped into a pocket that was slowly filling with stones.
***
It was my father’s steward, a man named Fletcher, who added the next piece.
He traveled between Sheffield and London more often than anyone else in the household.
One night, he had come to report on some accounts, and he stayed for supper.
Almost as an aside, he mentioned that young Percy had been sent to Wolsey’s household as a page.
“Wolsey,” my father repeated, and something in his voice sharpened with interest. “The cardinal takes the sons of half the north into his service these days. I’d wager he’s building himself a following dressed up as an education.”
“The boy’s done well by it from what I hear,” Fletcher said. “Sharpened his Latin, polished his manners, and learned how to carry himself at court. Knighted at only nineteen. That’s young for it.”
I sat very still, working to hold the pieces together in my mind.
A boy born far from his family’s own country, son of a quarrelsome earl, and knighted before he had lived twenty years.
I began picturing him without quite meaning to.
Children do this. They take the little they are given and construct entire people from it.
They fill gaps with hope, because hope requires much less evidence than truth.
I decided he must be clever, since my father once said that Wolsey, the king’s own chief minister, did not waste his patronage on fools.
I decided he must be brave, because knighthood surely required some proof of it, though no one ever told me what he had done to earn his.
I decided, most foolishly of all, that a boy raised so far from his quarrelsome father might have grown gentle in the absence of that temper.
He might have learned some warmth in Wolsey’s household that Northumberland’s had never offered him.
My nurse Alice, who had served my mother since before I was born and who possessed the gift of knowing everything and admitting to nothing, was the one who finally gave me something like a face to match the name.
“I saw him once,” she told me, when I was perhaps twelve and had finally worked up the courage to ask her directly.
“At court, when I traveled south with your mother. He was a tall, fair boy. And he carried himself well, though I’ll say he seemed to carry something else too. Something heavier than his years.”
“Heavier how?”
Alice considered this, testing whether the truth was worth the trouble of speaking. “I couldn’t say. Some boys are born solemn. Others learn it. I only know he didn’t smile the way boys his age usually do. When he smiled, it looked like it cost him something.”
I did not understand, at twelve, what might cost a boy his smile.
I imagined, in the absence of better information, that it was the weight of his inheritance or the burden of a father who fought the crown and a family that commanded half the north.
I imagined Henry Percy as a boy shaped by duty the way I had been shaped by it.
I thought that perhaps he was someone who understood what it meant to belong to a family before belonging to oneself.
I took the information that everyone gave me and built a boy who did not exist. I built him kind because I needed him kind. I built him solemn to match my own solemnity. I imagined some quiet sympathy between us before we had ever exchanged a single word.
Looking back now from the distance of a woman who eventually learned exactly how wrong she had been, I find this version of him almost unbearably tender.
In my twelve-year-old imagination, he was a boy waiting patiently at the other end of a long betrothal, as curious about me as I was about him.
He was gathering his own fragments of information and constructing his own hopeful version of his intended bride.
I have often wondered whether my imagination was even remotely accurate.
I now realize that if he thought of me at all in those years, his imagination likely extended half as far as mine did.
After all, he had Wolsey’s household to occupy him and whatever else a young man finds to keep himself busy with at court.
I would not learn for years exactly what was keeping Henry Percy busy.
And when my father spoke of him at all, he only knew the version of Percy that mattered to him: a promising young man rising steadily in the world.
My father continued to speak of the match with the satisfaction of a man watching an investment mature. “Northumberland’s boy has done well for himself,” he said once, over supper, to no one in particular. “Wolsey favors him. There’s talk he might rise further yet, given the cardinal’s regard.”
“Will he inherit soon?” my mother asked.
“Not soon. The old earl’s health is poor, but poor health has a way of lingering when a man is stubborn enough.” My father speared a piece of meat with more force than the comment required. “Still, when the boy inherits, our Mary will be a countess. That’s worth the wait.”
I sat across the table listening to my own future discussed in the same tone my father used for his hunting dogs and his harvest yields.
For the first time, I felt something like resentment stir beneath my careful obedience.
Not because the marriage itself frightened me.
I had no experience yet to fear it properly.
It was the casualness that unsettled me.
It was the ease with which my whole life could be reduced to a phrase like “worth the wait.”
I did not yet know how literally that wait would test me, or how little the boy at the other end of it had ever waited for anything but the one thing he’d eventually lose.
I built Henry Percy carefully in those years. I built him out of solemn smiles and northern pride and a boy’s quiet burden of duty. I built him the way a child builds a fort from furniture that happens to be in the room.
I could not have known that the real house he was building in those same years had another woman standing at its door. That knowledge would come later. And it would tear down everything I had constructed so carefully.
But as a child, I only knew my future husband’s name, his birth year, his knighthood, and a smile Alice said had cost him something. I did not know yet what that something was.
I would spend the rest of my girlhood finding out, one overheard fragment at a time. And by the time I understood the full story of what Henry Percy had already lost before I ever met him, it would be far too late for either of us to do anything but marry into the wreckage of it.