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Catherine’s seeing ghosts. Two little girls, pressed pinafores and golden hair, running round every corner just ahead of her. She’s taken to carrying a bundle of sage, tucked tight beneath her dress. Walking past the kitchen makes her flinch now, sometimes, when the staff are prepping herbs.
When she dresses in the morning and gathers up the sage, she thinks of how Henry looked at things that just weren’t there. How, eventually, he ran mad with it.
//
Mary’s seeing ghosts. A little boy, wrapped in blankets. He could have golden curls when he grows up, everyone says, cooing down at Lola’s child, and Mary thinks, so could mine.
Lola’s baby already smiles at Francis whenever he’s held and Francis smiles back at him like he’s cradling the sun. Mary thinks the sun would be less painful to look at.
//
Catherine’s seeing ghosts.She finds Mary tucked inside a window alcove, her hands pressed hard over her mouth. Catherine remembers standing almost exactly there, years and years ago, the day Diane first brought baby Bash to court. She’d excused herself long after she should have done, but Henry had been so caught up in the way his baby boy wrapped his tiny hand around just one of Henry’s fingers that he hadn’t had a second glance to spare for Catherine, or how visibly she might have been struggling.
Of course, later Henry would look at Francis in just the same way - the only thing that could awe a king, it seemed, was the fragility of his newborn sons - but that was an unknown consolation at the time. Catherine had had no choice but to hide herself away from such an unprecedented show of Henry’s open devotion.
Now, Catherine touches Mary’s elbow as delicately as she can. Even still, Mary jumps, startled.
“Oh,” she says, unsteadily. “It’s you.”
“So it would seem,” Catherine says, and Mary turns back to the window. She doesn’t tell Catherine to go and Catherine doesn’t pull away.
“Does it get easier?” Mary asks, eventually. Her eyes are rimmed as red as her made-up mouth. Her skin has yet to wrinkle and Catherine looks at her and wants, more deeply than she could have expected, to lie.
“No,” she says, instead. Mary’s whole body gives a little, sagging back against the wall. Catherine puts an arm around her shoulders and, presumably surprising both of them, Mary leans into her.
Outside the window, the sun breaks through the morning’s cloud. Behind them, in court, the baby starts crying.