EPILOGUE
Mary was never formally charged with any offense related to her Catholic sympathies or her rumored favor toward Mary, Queen of Scots.
Whatever suspicion attached to her during the tense years surrounding the Northern Rising, no accusation was ever filed against her.
In the eyes of the law, she died an ordinary widow, watched but untouched.
Author’s Note
Henry Percy is somewhat better documented, largely because of his connection to Anne Boleyn and his role in her trial. Anne Boleyn, of course, is one of the most thoroughly chronicled women in English history. I tried to follow the documented record for both of them as closely as I could.
Unfortunately, Mary herself left us almost nothing in her own words.
By most accounts, there is a single letter to Bess of Hardwick and little else.
All of Mary’s inner life in this novella comes from my imagination.
Every conversation, private thought, argument, and reflection is invented.
I have tried to root that invention in what we do know of the world Mary lived in and the events that shaped it.
But her voice, reasoning, and feelings come from me and not from the historical Mary Talbot because the record is so limited.
A few specific inventions to note: There is no evidence that Mary and Anne Boleyn ever met, or that Mary ever traveled to court to witness Anne become Marquess of Pembroke. Their encounter in this novella was built to imagine what it might have meant for these two women to stand in the same room.
Percy’s physical appearance is also invented. I could find no description of him in primary sources, so I gave him one for the sake of the story.
Alice, Mary’s nurse, is a composite figure with no documented historical counterpart. However, the practice of a bride bringing a trusted childhood servant into her married household was common.
Mary’s attachment to her private chapel as a source of comfort during her marriage is my own imagined origin for a devotion the record only confirms much later in her life.
I chose to write this book from Mary’s point of view precisely because so much information is available on Anne Boleyn and Henry Percy.
Mary is usually portrayed as an obstacle. She’s the wife who stood between Percy and Anne. She’s the inconvenient precontract that is a footnote in someone else’s romance. I wanted to imagine what that might have felt like.
Mary was defined at every turn by a marriage she never chose and a husband who already had a first love.
It could not have been an easy life to live.
And it was not always an easy one to imagine, either.
I hope I have done right by her, even knowing that the real woman behind this book will always remain somewhat unknowable to us.
Thanks so much for reading. I hope you enjoyed reading about Mary’s life.