Chapter 5
The years after my wedding did not stay quiet for long, though I told myself for a while that they might.
A marriage built on absence has its own kind of calm.
And for a time, I mistook that calm for the whole of what I would have to endure.
I was wrong. In that house, quiet was never the same as safe.
We did not have children. Not in those early years or in any that followed.
I am not going to soften it by using language people often use for a woman’s failure to produce an heir.
I will only describe how I experienced it myself.
Other wives in my position might have found some comfort in a nursery.
If I’d had one, I might have had some love to call my own, even while my husband’s heart lived elsewhere.
I was denied even that. And the loneliness of that apparently showed on me more plainly than I realized at the time.
My father saw it before I ever said a word.
I remember him watching me across the supper table during one visit home.
His eyes moved over me the way they might assess a horse he suspected of favoring an injured leg.
“You’ve gone thin,” he said. It was not quite a question.
I told him it was nothing. I insisted that the northern air didn’t agree with me the way Sheffield’s did.
He let the matter drop, though I do not think he believed me even then.
***
In 1527, the old Earl of Northumberland finally died, and Percy inherited the earldom that had waited for him his entire life.
He got the title his father had guarded so jealously against every encroachment of the crown.
I became Countess of Northumberland. It was the very future my own father had once promised me by a fire when I was seven years old.
I remember the first day the household addressed me by my new title.
There was a careful formality in it. Servants who had known me as simply Lady Mary now called me Her Lady Countess.
I remember standing in the same cold hall at Wressle where I had once waited alone in the mornings for a husband who rarely came and hearing myself called countess for the first time. I felt nothing that resembled triumph.
The title changed nothing. Percy’s attention was still given generously to others, and given to me only in the careful, minimal doses that propriety demanded. Whatever passed between us in the dark, rare as it was, produced nothing that lived long enough to draw breath in this world.
There was one night, early in those grey years, when I broke the silence we had both kept so carefully between us.
He had come to my bed as he occasionally did, out of duty rather than desire.
And when it was over, he lay beside me the way he always did afterward.
He was present in body and absent in every other way that might have counted as a marriage.
I do not know what possessed me to speak into the dark that night rather than simply endure it as I always had.
Perhaps I had finally run out of patience for my own silence.
“I know I am not her,” I said. “I have always known it. You needn’t treat me as though I’ve forgotten.”
He went rigid beside me. “Do not,” he said, after a long moment, “speak her name in this house.”
“I did not speak her name.”
“You did not need to.” When his voice came again, it was quieter and wavering. “You will not speak of her again. Not to me, not to my household, and not under this roof for as long as you live in it.”
In that moment, I saw that I had mistaken his coldness for a wound he could not afford to let anyone touch, least of all me.
I did not know whether to pity him or hate him for it.
I have never fully settled the question, even now.
But I did not raise the subject again. Whatever I had hoped to gain by speaking it aloud, I did not receive it.
Instead, I learned exactly how far his silence would go to protect itself, and how little of that silence I would ever be permitted to touch again.
The silence held, more or less, for another year. Then, in the spring of 1528, what was left of it gave way entirely.
Through channels I have never fully untangled, word reached my father that Percy was accusing me of spying on him by passing word of his affairs to the Duke of Norfolk.
“Of all the men in England he might have named,” my father wrote, “he named Norfolk.”
I had no logical answer for him. I did not understand the accusation either.
But the name alone was dangerous. Norfolk was no ordinary lord to be caught passing tales to.
He was one of the great men of the realm, and uncle to Anne Boleyn herself.
His favor or displeasure could unmake a lesser family without the King ever needing to trouble himself over the details.
Knowing why the name mattered did not tell me why Percy had chosen it.
I have since wondered whether the accusation was less about me than about the crown itself.
Percy’s father had spent his whole life wary of the crown’s reach into the family’s affairs.
I suspected that some of that wariness had settled into the son as well.
But I could not fathom why he fixed on Norfolk’s name specifically.
I would come to understand Norfolk’s importance far better within a few years.
But by then, it would be my own letter reaching his hands, and not the one Percy imagined me writing.
Percy acted on his suspicion without any proof at all. He forbade my father’s servants from seeing or speaking with me. My own household became a place where even a letter from my own father had to arrive by whatever means could avoid his notice.
It was Alice who found a way around this.
She was the one piece of Sheffield my father had allowed me to keep.
And in that spring of accusations, she became something more than a childhood nurse.
Letters that could not come to me openly came to her instead, folded small and passed along by whichever servant owed her a kindness or a debt.
I never asked her how she managed it. And she never told me, which I came to understand was itself a kind of gift.
The less I knew, the less I could be made to answer for if Percy ever discovered the arrangement.
I sometimes wondered why Percy let Alice stay.
I think now it was only because he judged her beneath his notice.
She was a half-stooped old woman. In his eyes, she was too slow and feeble to be worth the trouble of banishing.
It did not occur to him that a woman he considered too insignificant was precisely the one person in that household with nothing left to lose by defying him.
***
Once Percy banned my father’s household, his alarm toward my husband intensified. I remember him summoning physicians on my behalf during one visit home. The physicians were supposedly sought for a minor complaint, but I later understood that the visit had been prompted by something closer to fear.
“Has he ever given you cause to distrust what’s put before you at table? Or to wonder whether he wishes you gone from this world rather than merely gone from his affections?” My father asked in a tone so careful I nearly missed the sincerity beneath it.
I understood well enough what he was asking, though I could not quite bring myself to say the word poison to him. Nothing ever came of that particular fear, but the fact that a father could ask his daughter such a question tells you what kind of marriage everyone understood mine to be.
Percy had never raised a hand to me. In all our years together, he had never spoken to me with anything approaching violence.
Yet there is a type of harm that requires no hand at all.
It is a slow erosion that leaves no mark a physician would find.
I did not know how to explain to my father that the absence itself had become its own kind of injury.
“He does not touch me,” I said finally, which was true, although I knew it would not fully answer the fear behind his question.
My father did not look reassured. “Then let Alice see to what you eat and drink, at least,” he said. “I would rather you thought me foolish for asking than have cause to one day wish you’d humored me.”
I told him I would, and I did.
I do not think he ever fully trusted the situation again after that conversation.
And I have wondered since whether his growing alarm, however late, was the closest thing to protection he ever managed to offer me.
He could not undo the contract. He could not command Percy’s affection or manufacture warmth where none existed.
But, after that, he watched with a wariness he had not shown before.
I think some part of him understood that he had bound his daughter to a man who might, given sufficient provocation, prove genuinely harmful rather than merely cold.
***
I returned to my father’s house again the following year with child. The one time I carried a child long enough to hope, I did so away from Wressle. I went to my father’s estate to put whatever distance I could between myself and my husband.
I will not linger long on what happened.
But I remember pain that came too early and lasted too long, and a child born too still and too silent to survive.
I remember the midwife’s face, already arranging itself into the expression she would need to tell me what I already knew.
I remember my mother’s hand on my forehead afterward, and I remember that it was the only warm thing in that entire room.
I did not see Percy in the weeks that followed.
Whether this absence was his choice or some unspoken agreement neither of us bothered to voice, I could not say.
I only know that I remained at my father’s estate considerably longer than the birth alone required.
When I finally reluctantly returned to my husband’s household, I returned to a marriage that had somehow grown colder in my absence.
My failure to carry a living child seemed to confirm some suspicion Percy had held about me from the very beginning.
There was no arguing with it any longer.
There was no waiting for some later year to prove the marriage had simply needed more time.
I was Countess of Northumberland. I ruled nothing that mattered.
I bore no living child. I shared a bed and a house with a man who had accused me of malice and spying.
No title I carried would ever earn me the one thing I had once foolishly hoped a marriage might provide.
I had finally received everything my father had ever promised. None of it made me anything other than exactly what I had always been.
A contract. A name on a parchment. And a countess in a marriage that had never once, in all its long, cold years, belonged to me.