“Yes, all right,” he said impatiently with a flick of his wrist. “Why didn’t you, though? Why not marry Raul? I never saw you like you are now when you were with Father. Not once.”
She frowned and set her teacup down. “That isn’t true. Your father and I had a lovely marriage.”
Freddy shot her a look which made her face falter, a little flicker of resignation.
“We had an acceptable marriage,” she amended. “I do not resent him the way you might expect. Yes, he preferred Miriam to me, and I knew that, but it also provided a kind of peace in my life.Obviously, I did not know about his mistress or their little boy before I said yes. Obviously not.”
“Their little boy,” Freddy repeated, a little incredulous at the distance in her tone. “You mean Silas.”
“Of course I mean Silas,” she snapped, and then sighed. “Raul likely had lovers and mistresses too, you know. They are both men of a certain time and place and power.”
“I don’t think he does,” Freddy returned, setting his cup down next to his mother’s. “I really do not.”
“No,” she allowed with a softening of her lips, a release of her frown. “I suppose I don’t, either. Freddy, do you remember when I would take you to Sudley Castle when you were a lad? How we’d tour the halls and look at all the paintings and then go say our respects for the queen who is buried there?”
“Yes, of course,” he said with a bit of surprise. “What has that to do with anything?”
“I grew up visiting Sudley,” she told him. “My mother and father would stay for weeks every autumn, after returning from London. I hated it, then. I hated how cold it got and how lonely it was for a child. The only balm was how often I ended up in the crypt because no one was paying any attention to me. I’d sit with Queen Catherine Parr and I’d complain about my life to her, as though she’d have any sympathy for someone as charmed as I was.”
Freddy could only blink in response, imagining his mother as a little girl in ribbons and pinafores, hiding from her family in a marble crypt.
“I learned everything there was to know about her,” she continued. “She married four times, you know. Four times! King Henry was the third, and when she married him, she was madly in love with another man. She stayed in love with the other man, with Thomas Seymour, until the king died and she could finally be with him.”
“A happy ending,” Freddy said, though her tone did not sound very happy.
“You would think so, wouldn’t you?” Patricia said with a sad little smile. “Thomas was a lecher. He spent their entire marriage trying to seduce Princess Elizabeth, who was little more than a girl herself still at that age. He left Catherine to die in childbirth, leaving behind a baby that vanished to history so quickly that she likely did not live very long. Queen Catherine Parr married four times, Freddy, and still never managed to be loved.”
Freddy stared, the sickening bent of this story, the noxious truth of it having actually unfolded once upon a time, lingering between them.
“That is horrible,” he said.
She nodded. She sighed.
“I spent those years of my blossom into womanhood thinking about Queen Catherine Parr,” she told him. “And when I wasn’t at Sudley, I learned about the others. I learned about all the ways a king can harm his wives, how each individual one of them ended up misused, harmed, and dead.
“I think it broke a part of me, Freddy. I think it taught me that love was not possible. I was determined to fail my debut Season, to become a wallflower, and to be allowed to live out my life inspinsterhood without risk or harm. I swore to it, even, with my friends, and then was the only one who did not follow through.”
They fell silent for a moment, the hum of birdsong and early-morning insects buzzing through the fruit blossoms punctuating what she had said.
“I could not be invisible, you understand. My father is a lord. I was wealthy and pretty and highly sought, and I had known Frederick—my Frederick—as a child. My mother told me to stop being a silly little chit and to accept my good fortune, and I agreed to do so, until I met Raul.”
She shook her head, taking up her cup and fortifying herself. She sipped with her eyes closed like she was back there again, a debutante on a dance floor. “It was madness,” she said softly. “Beautiful madness.”
Freddy nodded. Freddy understood. He truly did.
It sounded as though his mother could have lived out his exact story. He did not know if she was already engaged to his father when Raul had appeared, or if a staircase had been involved, of course, but it sounded very familiar to him. Very familiar indeed.
“I almost ran away with him,” she confessed softly. “I almost did it. I don’t think it would have even been that bad for my reputation if I had. I might have lived out my life with him in Lisbon, amongst vineyards and sunlit days. The only thing to lose was everything I was. I would lose my parents, my friends, my standing. I would lose England.
“And at the time, all of that seemed so very important, so much more important than my heart. I still might have overcome it, if not for Sudley Castle.”
Freddy shook his head. “I don’t follow.”
She gave a weak little smile. “Your father proposed we marry there, because he knew I was so fond of it. He knew I was fond of it but not why. He said it one afternoon in my family’s parlor, and I felt the weight of a lifetime of doomed queens unfold in my chest like a revelation. Most of Henry’s wives married him because they loved him, Freddy, and it did not protect them from doom. Raul was my Thomas Seymour, wasn’t he? A romantic ideal that might still hurt me in the end. I told myself that Frederick would likely hurt me too, of course, but he’d do it where I felt safe, where I could have other things in the absence of love.”
Freddy couldn't respond right away. He didn’t trust himself to. He opened his mouth once and somehow felt his own voice crack before he’d even put it to use, so he closed it again and turned over what she was saying in his mind, over and over.
“I don’t regret it,” she said, watching him. “I could never regret anything that brought you into my world, Freddy. I hope you know that.”
