Refrain & Departure
By Emily Gardner
A woman is singing.
The sound is at once far-off and maddeningly close; one moment it seems as though he could see the singer’s face if he had the strength to turn his head, and the next it is so distant he can barely hear it at all.
None are here with him. The physicians have scattered like spiders, not one of them wishing to be last in the room when the inevitable happens. The servants have gone too, to wash the linens and keep the mills of gossip running at the same time, no doubt. No loyalty anymore, he thinks sourly. They think that because he is on his deathbed they can forget the respect he is owed as King of England, the man who has kept them safe, body and soul, these past four decades.
Yes, he muses, adjusting himself as best he can, they have forgotten their respect. Perhaps they wish to forget him altogether. Ha! He has questioned many things in his life, but never this: He is not the sort of man to be forgotten.
Still, the emptiness of the room unnerves him. Even his wife—dear, faithful Catherine—has left his side. And someone is singing.
Singing! He grunts his displeasure at the sheer gall. Singing, when they should be weeping the death of their king!
Death.
The starkness of the thought sends a shudder through him. He would cross himself if he had the energy, Papism be damned. The air feels chillier than it did before, and that echoing voice doesn’t help matters. His patience withers.
“Cease your damned caterwauling!” he barks, but the last word is broken over a series of hacking coughs. His eyes water, breath coming short and sharp; for a moment he fears his end has come.
But it only lasts a moment. All at once his eyes and lungs are clear.
And she is there.
“Catherine,” he says, for want of anything else.
His Spanish wife inclines her head with all the dignity of royalty born and bred. She does not rise from the cushioned chair by his bedside. She does not curtsey. She does not even do him the courtesy of looking at him.
“You are unwell, Henry,” she says.
He hasn’t heard the sound of her voice in so long. It was his constant companion for more than twenty years, and somehow it still has the power to soothe him—that rich, calm voice carrying shades of her native Spain. Despite the strangeness of their meeting, he relaxes.
“A passing illness,” he says with feigned confidence. “Nothing more.”
She does look at him then, with eyes that are blue and careworn.
“There was a time when you did not lie to me.”
Unexpected guilt grips at his chest. He wants to look away but finds that he cannot.
“You look young,” he says at last. It is not an apology, but a small smile tugs reluctantly at Catherine’s mouth: it is not a lie. She looks the age she was when they were first wed, beautiful with shining red-gold hair and a soft round face.
She has not looked so young since before they lost their first child.
The memory knocks a smile from his face like rotten fruit from a branch. Catherine must guess at his thoughts, for her own smile dims.
“Our children are safe now,” she says quietly. “I have seen them in the arms of the Lord. They were spared from this world of suffering.”
There is a certainty in the words that she did not have back then, when all they could do was swallow their tears and try again and pray, over and over, that this time it would end differently. It brings a tightness to his throat, and a question he cannot resist.
“And my boy?”
Catherine’s eyes soften. “Our Henry is grown tall and strong. Like his father.”
He closes his eyes against the unmanly wetness in them. When he is himself again Catherine is looking away, her face distant.
“Why is our daughter not yet married?” she asks.
He is taken aback. It is not the question he expected.
“We have found no one suitable.”
“No one?” she repeats. “The daughter of a king, England’s most precious jewel, and you can find no one? At her age I was twice married, and a mother besides.”
He frowns. It seems impossible that Catherine’s stubbornness can still find new ways to vex him, and yet. “Do not harangue me over Mary. She is also a bastard, as you should well remember.”
Catherine shakes her head so violently he wonders if her jewels will be dislodged. “No. She is a princess. In the eyes of the Church—”
“Your church no longer speaks for England, madam!”
“In the eyes of God, then!” she snaps, turning on him with eyes like fire. “Mary is our child, Henry—yours and mine. You can never deny her that much.”
“I have never denied it,” he replies tersely. “I have acknowledged her as my natural child by an unlawful union.”
Catherine’s face goes white but she does not stop. She never did know when to submit, he remembers.
“You were not always so faithless,” she says. “And I praise God that Mary is more my daughter than yours. You cannot keep her from her birthright forever.”
“Catherine—”
Whatever he would have said dissolves beneath another wave of coughing. By the time he can breathe again, Catherine is gone.
.
He wakes with a start, gasping in ragged breaths in the dark. Half of the beeswax candles in the room have gone out. Damn it all, where are his servants?
“Not frightened of the dark in your later years, I hope?”
It takes his eyes a moment to focus on the second figure in the room, but that hardly matters: he would know that voice even in death. Long-dimmed embers in his chest suddenly burst into flame—and anger.
“Witch!” he roars. “Harlot! Leave these rooms at once!”
Anne laughs, arranging her skirts around her as she sits at the foot of the bed. “And what have I done to merit such a welcome?”
“You know full well,” he snarls. “You cuckolded me with half a dozen men!”
She sighs. “Come now, Henry. There is no one to pretend for here.”
“I pretend nothing. How dare you come here to harass me?”
She spreads her hands wide, one long sleeve trailing across his blanketed knee. Even that faint touch makes him recoil as she speaks.
“And why should I not come to this place? We were married here, after all.” She tilts her head ever so slightly, as if deep in thought. “Then again, you married that Seymour woman here too, didn’t you? For shame, Henry. My body wasn’t yet cold.”
“Our marriage was false,” he snaps. “Made on false pretenses and utterly broken by your treachery. Why should I observe a period of mourning for a lying whore?”
The amusement vanishes from Anne’s face.
“You were the only man to ever have me, husband,” she says coolly.
He scoffs. “And you made me pay dearly for it.”
“Do you wish to discuss which of us paid more for our marriage?” The black eyes flash. “You never saw the result of the swordsman’s work, did you? A pity—you did go to all that trouble. Would you like to see how fine it was? Well?”
In the flickering candlelight he can almost believe he sees a gash across her throat—so dark a red it’s nearly black.
“Enough,” he barks, and the vision is gone. His skin crawls nonetheless.
Anne sits back, composed once more.
“And how is our Elizabeth?” she asks. “How fares my poor child without her mother?”
“She has been looked after,” he says. Then, grudgingly, “She’s a bright thing. Clever with languages—too clever by half, I’d say. If she had been a boy…”
They are silent for a moment. When Anne speaks again her voice is somber.
“Our boys died in my womb,” she says. “It broke my heart that they were never able to breathe the air of this world. But know that I would not trade Elizabeth for one of them.”
Ignoring the stinging reminder of yet more children lost, he presses, “She is an intelligent girl, but she cannot rule. Nor can Mary. It would mean another war, and England—”
“Do you know,” Anne interrupts, “when I served Margaret of Austria, she kept a work by a Frenchwoman called The City of Ladies. I was only a girl at the time, but there was a passage in it that I always remembered.” She closes her eyes as if recalling the words to an old song. “‘The man or woman in whom resides greater virtue is the higher; neither the loftiness nor lowliness of a person lies in the body according to the sex, but in the perfection of conduct and virtues.’”
Her eyes hold a challenge. It’s as if they are married still, and he finds he has a rejoinder ready.
“Fine talk,” he says, “from a Frenchwoman’s theoretical book.”
“I changed your life with a theoretical book once,” Anne retorts with a tiny smile. He is forced to concede the point—he still recalls with perfect clarity the experience of reading Tyndale’s work and realizing that the answer to all of his prayers was within. Realizing that his resentment toward the corrupt Pope’s hoard of earthly power stemmed from Scripture itself. That God was on his side after all.
And then he ripped his kingdom in half, for his rightful sovereignty and for love of the woman beside him. And for what? She had failed him. She betrayed him.
“Elizabeth would make a fine queen,” Anne murmurs, to herself it seems, and his anger returns in full force.
“She will never be more than she is now—the bastard child of an adulterous mother!”
At once Anne is standing, her skirts whirling around her. The shuddering light makes her elusive; his eyes cannot seem to capture her shape. She speaks before he has the chance.
“I could tell you tales of what’s to come, Henry, were I as vicious as you claim.” Her eyes close again for a moment. “But I will not, for I did love you once.”
The words make him ache for a long-ago time. He forces the sensation away. “You are nothing more than a liar,” he bites out. “Soon to be forgotten.”
She almost appears to be vanishing before his eyes, so that he hears rather than sees her high, lilting laugh, her parting words:
“I am not the sort of woman to be forgotten.”
.
The room is growing darker, candlewicks burning to nothing. He has given up on waiting for the servants to return. Instead he listens for the footfalls of another ghost—his third wife Jane, perhaps. It would be good to see her again. Sweet Jane, so gentle and accommodating. If she had survived Edward’s birth, how things would have been different…
There is a strange note in the far-off singing, some intense new quality, and somehow he knows she is coming. He tries to lift his head and fails.
“Jane?” he calls, hating the eagerness he hears.
But the woman who appears at his bedside is not Jane, he can tell by the footsteps alone: they are too spirited, too loud. Jane always walked as if she were loath to stir the dust from the flagstones. His other wives breathe still, which can only leave…
Her name turns to dust and dread in his mouth as he faces Katherine Howard.
“Hello Harry,” she says.
Memory plays many tricks, but she is as pretty as he remembers—petite and fair-haired with eyes that sparkle like gems. She wears a jewel around her neck on a velvet ribbon. He can’t remember whether he gave it to her or not.
“Katherine,” he manages when he has gathered himself. His little wife clucks her tongue.
“If we are to be formal I should call you Your Majesty, or My Lord Husband! But those are such dreary titles. Why do you not call me Kitty, as you used to?”
“You presume much,” he says quietly, “given how we…parted ways.”
He half expects her to fly into a rage as Anne did, but that was never Katherine’s way. She laughs instead.
“Parted ways! A fine courtly way of saying you had my head cut off.”
She says it as if they’re having a normal conversation, or playing some flirtatious game. For a moment he is stunned into silence. Katherine ignores his shock and chatters on.
“You ought to be grateful I’ve come instead of Jane. She resents you, you know. Although after what you did to her even you cannot lay blame for that.”
The name snaps him back to his senses. “Jane? I never wronged her, by God’s blood!”
Katherine pauses. An expression of pity dances across her face.
“Forgive me, Harry. I didn’t mean your Jane, though you’re right—you didn’t wrong her, or at least she doesn’t feel that you did. Otherwise she would be here tonight. I think she preferred to watch over her son and leave it at that.”
His disappointment is bitter enough to taste, yet it mingles somewhat with relief; at least one of his dead wives bears him no ill will. “Then—”
“I spoke of Jane Boleyn, of course.” Katherine sighs, looking downcast. “My dear Lady Rochford. All she did to help me and I was unable to do anything for her in the end.”
Helped you to play the whore, you mean. He nearly says it, but he can imagine from recollections of their former arguments how that scene would play: Katherine would look at him with a child’s hurt, utterly open, and all at once he would remember that she was young enough to be one of his own children. The thought always made him feel old; he never had the heart to continue arguing after that.
Instead he speaks patiently, as he used to when she asked after some finer point about court life. “The Boleyn women are always treacherous in the end. Lady Rochford sent her own husband to the axe, and did the same to you by encouraging your…liaisons.” He has to grind the word out between his teeth to say it calmly.
Katherine, however, is outraged. “You malign her! Jane was as loyal to her husband as I was to you.”
Now he cannot stop a derisive laugh. “Loyal? That is comedy, madam.”
“I never betrayed you, not with any man!”
“Then you deny what they say about your final words?” Long-buried pain twists his voice into a snarl. “That you would rather have died as that bastard Culpeper’s wife than as my queen?”
She bristles. “I said no such thing.”
“But was it true?”
It comes out nearly as a roar. Yet, to Katherine’s credit, she does not flinch. Her expression is impossible to read.
“You know,” she says softly, “you were not the first man to handle me when I did not wish it. I used to think of it as my lot in life as a woman.” She smiles a little. “But I am dead now. I answer to no one. And no one—not even you, my Great Harry—can force me to do or say other than what I wish.”
She steps closer, bending down towards him and he wonders briefly if he should be afraid. But her face is gentle as she tilts it toward the candle at his bedside. The last candle in the great bedchamber that remains lit.
“May God have mercy on you,” she says, just before she blows it out and all becomes darkness.
.
Even as he returns to himself he is aware of the slimmest of threads tethering him to this life. Against his will he is frightened.
The room is chaotic, overfull after what has seemed like hours of solitude; there are people talking and weeping and praying but he realizes with dawning panic that he cannot see them. They are as blurred as paint running down a canvas. A woman’s cool hands clasp his own—is she wife, daughter, nurse? He does not know.
He cannot even hear her voice. He cannot hear anything, save for the singing that has returned louder and clearer than before.
That voice could belong to anyone. It could be Catherine murmuring Spanish lullabies to her growing belly, Anne singing from her French songbook, Jane softly humming to their son. It could belong to his new Catherine or to his sister of Cleves. It could even be Mary’s voice, deep and strong as a man’s, or Elizabeth’s sharp tones that are so like her mother’s.
The thought strikes as suddenly as a snakebite: will any of them mourn him when he is gone? Will they weep?
Or will they sing, like this voice that seems to come from everywhere and nowhere?
He is struck with imagined memories, Catherine wasting away in a cold manor house, Anne and Katherine climbing wooden steps to kneel in the straw. They had walked to their ends alone, and only now does he see the terrible irony of it, that he should be forced to do the same. For the first time in his life he wishes he could ask for forgiveness.
But the time for that has passed. The deeds of his life have been measured and noted and done. All that is left is to walk into the unknowable, that which renders all of his earthly power useless.
He shrugs his body off like a heavy stole and walks toward the doorway. The singing grows louder as he approaches. A strange, blinding light intensifies along with it, until he can no longer tell whether he stands in perfect light or perfect darkness.
He will know soon enough.
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