Chapter 9
I lived under my father’s roof again for nearly two and a half years by the time everything finally resolved itself. I want to be honest about what those years actually felt like, rather than let the word separation carry more dignity than it deserves.
I was not a wife in any sense that mattered beyond the legal fiction that bound my name to Percy’s. And I was not yet a widow. I existed in the space between those two words, and I have come to believe that no space in the English language is colder than the one made for a woman who is neither.
My father quickly grew openly impatient with the arrangement.
He had not fully trusted Percy since the early years when he suspected abuse, or worse.
And my residence under his own roof seemed to confirm every fear he had once quietly carried.
He raised the matter with me directly one evening, in the same study where he had once told me that I would make a fine countess.
“This cannot continue indefinitely,” he said. “You are neither married in any practical sense nor free of the marriage by law. Something must resolve, Mary, one way or another, before matters resolve themselves without your say in it.”
I did not disagree with him. By then, I had spent years nursing something that had long since stopped being grief and had hardened into something closer to hatred.
I did not hate Percy for failing to love me.
I had made peace with that failure years before.
I hated him for the deliberate ruthlessness of having lied under sacred oath to keep me trapped beside him, and then abandoning me to my father’s house regardless.
It was as though the marriage’s only remaining purpose was to deny me any version of a life, together or apart.
But he found one more purpose that same year.
My father brought me another piece of news, which he delivered with the carefulness he reserved for things he suspected would hurt me.
“I have heard that Percy has settled his will,” he told me.
“He means to leave the whole of his estate to the King. He has no children of his own to inherit it, and no more generosity toward you than the law already forces on him.”
“What does the law force on him?” I asked.
“Your jointure that was settled at your marriage. That much he cannot simply write away, whatever else he does with the rest. But there is a condition attached to what remains. The grant is to pass eventually to his brother Thomas’s son, should the boy outlive him.
” My father’s mouth tightened. “Your portion was set thin enough at the start, but I wanted you to hear it from me rather than have it reach you as gossip.”
I did not weep over that news, any more than I wept over most things by then. But I understood that Percy had spent sixteen years finding new ways to make certain I would leave the marriage with as little as the law allowed him to give me.
***
That autumn, the north rose up in the largest rebellion the King had ever faced.
They called it a pilgrimage, and they meant that word seriously.
It was a holy march to force the King back from the religious changes he’d set in motion.
It rose up around the very inheritance Percy had spent his whole life guarding, in the same northern country where his family’s name had meant something for generations.
My father brought me the news himself, his face carrying obvious alarm.
“There is rebellion in Yorkshire,” he told me.
“They call it a pilgrimage, if you can credit such a name for armed men marching on the King’s own officers.
It has spread already. Percy’s own brothers are said to be among its leaders. ”
To my shame, I felt a strange, cold curiosity rather than any real fear on Percy’s behalf. “And Percy himself?”
“Too ill to ride from what I hear. Hasn’t left his bed properly since the trial last spring, by all accounts.”
I sat with that longer than the news itself required.
“Too ill to ride.” The same illness, again - the one I had already come to wonder about, back when it first carried him from that courtroom.
Whatever it truly was, it had once again arrived at the exact moment a lesser excuse would have cost a man his head.
I did not yet understand how completely that same illness would come to define the last months of his life. It would spare him one fate only to deliver him to another. But I am getting ahead of myself again.
Word reached me the following spring that the rebellion had not ended cleanly and that Percy’s brother Thomas had been taken up in a second uprising.
My father delivered this news with more grimness. “Thomas Percy has been captured,” he said. “Tried for treason, and condemned. He is to be executed at Tyburn.”
And he was. Thomas Percy died on the second of June that year.
The younger Percy brother, Ingram, was taken as well.
He sat imprisoned in the Tower still awaiting whatever the Crown meant to do with him.
Whether he would face a trial of his own, or simply be left there indefinitely while better-connected men decided his fate, no one at my father’s house could say with any confidence.
I had met Percy’s brothers only a handful of times in all my years married into that family.
I saw them at his father’s funeral, and once or twice more at gatherings none of us could avoid.
I never knew them well enough to call either of them anything but strangers who happened to share my husband’s blood.
I confess I felt little beyond the same alarm I imagine most of England felt.
Even so, I understood what Thomas’s death meant for the will my father had already described to me months before.
Percy had originally left his estate to the King on the condition that it would eventually pass to Thomas’s own son.
Once Thomas was attainted and executed, that condition became meaningless.
There was no heir left in that line worth protecting.
Percy made the grant to the Crown unconditional that same month. Most of his inheritance would pass cleanly away from his own blood, and there would be very little provision left for anyone, nephew or wife.
When my father told me this, I realized how completely Percy had isolated himself. One brother was dead, and one was still sitting in the Tower with no verdict in sight. He had a wife he refused to acknowledge, and an inheritance he had decided belonged to no one who actually carried his blood.
I did not expect that isolation to bring him to my door. But it did. That same month, Percy came to my father’s house. It was the first time I had seen my husband in over two years.
He looked older than his years. He was thinner, and his skin carried an odd cast I did not like looking at directly. I received him in a small chamber my father had given over for the purpose. I did not offer him the courtesy of sitting first.
“You’ve come about the will,” I said.
“I’ve come to settle matters sensibly,” he said, “before matters settle themselves in a manner neither of us would prefer.”
“Say what you mean, Henry. You’ve never troubled yourself with sensibility before now.”
He exhaled, and for a moment something like exhaustion moved through him that I almost mistook for honesty.
“I have left everything to the King. Unconditionally now. Thomas’s attainder saw to that.
A traitor’s blood carries nothing forward.
Not even to his own son. But a wife’s claim against an estate is not so easily dismissed, even by a king’s solicitors.
I would prefer this concluded without difficulty. ”
“You would prefer,” I said, “that I raise no voice at all while you finish giving away everything your own blood might have had.”
“I am asking you,” he said, “to let this go quietly. It costs you nothing you were ever going to have regardless.”
Something simmered in me, hearing that. Sixteen years of marriage reduced to nothing I was ever going to have regardless. He made my own life sound like something I’d merely imagined, with a grievance too small to merit real negotiation.
“You were too ill to ride with them,” I said. “Too ill to stand trial for treason beside your own brother. I have wondered whether that illness was ever quite what everyone assumed it was. And now here you stand, upright enough to travel here and settle your affairs.”
His expression shifted into something I had never seen there before.
It was not quite anger and not quite shame.
It was closer to a man recognizing an accusation he had already leveled at himself, in whatever private hours his illness had left him.
“I did not choose to fall ill at that trial,” he said. “Whatever you wish to believe.”
“I wish to believe very little of anything you’ve ever told me,” I said. “You lied under oath to keep this marriage standing. You kept me bound to you when neither of us wanted it, and now you ask me to make it easy for you to give your family’s inheritance away without any noise from me.”
“I am dying, Mary,” he said. For the first time in all our years together, his voice actually broke slightly on my name. “I would like what remains settled before I go. Is that so difficult to understand?”
“You are asking me to give you something,” I said, “I find I am in no hurry to give it to you simply because you finally need it.”
He looked at me for a long moment, and I watched something harden back into place behind his eyes.
Whatever brief crack I had glimpsed, it sealed shut as quickly as it had opened.
“Then we have nothing further to discuss,” he said.
And he left without another word, exactly as he had left every room we had ever shared in all our years together.
I did not sign anything. I did not raise any formal challenge either, though I told myself for weeks afterward that I might.
I had less than a month, as it turned out, to sit with that unfinished argument. I did not know, watching him leave my father’s house that day, that I would never see him again.
***
My father came to me himself in early July, and I remember the weight of his footsteps in the corridor before he ever reached my door.
He found me in the small parlor where I did most of my sewing those days, and he did not sit.
“Mary,” he said. “He is dead.”
I set down the needle very carefully, as though the ordinary act of setting it down might buy me another moment before I had to absorb what he’d just told me. “When?”
“The night of the twenty-ninth. Not a month after his brother’s execution. They say he was swollen and yellowed in a way the physicians could not agree on how to treat.”
I sat quietly before I asked anything further.
And I found, to my considerable surprise, that I did not know what I felt.
More than once, I had imagined precisely this moment.
And I had always imagined it arriving with something like relief.
What arrived instead was something far stranger: a silence inside me that matched every other silence he had ever left me sitting in.
He had died at not yet forty. And the only conversation between us in over two years had ended with him leaving a room without a farewell and me refusing him the one thing he had ever actually needed from me.
My father watched me for a long moment, and whatever he saw in my face seemed to soften something in his own.
“It is finished,” he said, more gently than I had heard him speak in years.
“Whatever you intended to do about the will, you may do now without fear of his objection. I am sorry, Mary, for whatever that is worth to you now, that it ended this way.”
I did not weep, hearing him say it. I only sat with the strange, hollow finality of it. I was a widow now, in fact if not yet fully in name. The paperwork of estates and inheritances takes its own slow time regardless of what the heart has already settled.
What I inherited from him was little more than the law required and not a portion more. It was nothing that resembled the countess’s fortune my father had once promised me as a child. The King took all of it, exactly as Percy had intended.
Whatever I would eventually have of my own came from the Crown rather than from my husband.
I received a modest grant of former abbey lands.
It was not much. But at least it was mine.
It was the first thing I had without any man’s name attached.
For the first time in my entire life, I had no contract binding me to anyone at all.
I did not yet know what to do with that freedom. I had waited for it in one form or another since I was five years old. I would spend the better part of the next three decades learning what to make of it.