Dingwall, May 1536
He finds Nora in the nursery. She’s standing by the window, Mary Katherine in her arms. There is a poker of tension running through her spine, and, though she turns at Alexander’s footstep, she doesn’t seem to see him, not even as he takes his new daughter from her arms and hands the child to the wet nurse, kissing the tiny forehead absently as he does so.
“She’s blonde. Like her mother.”
The words are broken, tremulous, and Alexander doesn’t try to respond, only nods. He knows Nora doesn’t really expect an answer. He places his hands on Nora’s upper arms, anchoring her in place as he whispers the expected, dreaded words.
“She’s gone. Nora, I’m really sorry, but she’s gone.”
A sharp intake of breath is the only response he gets. He is about to repeat himself, fearing Nora hasn’t heard him properly, when she looks up at him, wild-eyed.
“Tell me you were with her. Please tell me you were with her!”
“I was with her,” he confirms gently, rubbing circles on Nora’s biceps with his thumbs, “I was with her. We named Mary Katherine together. She died in my arms. She wasn’t on her own, I promise.”
A smidgen of Nora’s tension eases at that, but she says no more.
Alexander wants to let her be, to let her work through this terrible, aching tragedy in her own time, but he can’t restrain himself. He has to know.
“She said she’d asked you to take her place as my Duchess. To be Bobby and Maggie and Mary Katherine’s mother. I’m sorry to bring it up right now, but I have to know. Is it…?”
“Years ago,” Nora interrupts him hollowly, “She sat across from me in the nursery in Holyrood, the day after we met Louise for the first time, and asked me. I couldn’t say no. Not - Not to our darling Mary. I loved her. She was my sister. I…”
Nora’s voice breaks, and Alexander acts on instinct. He steps forward and pulls Nora into his chest.
There are gasps from the maids around them, but he ignores them. Propriety be damned! Mary is
dead! This is hardly the time to worry about protocol.
“I know,” he hushes, pushing his fingers under Nora’s hood so that he can wind them into her blonde curls, anchoring them both, “I know how close you were. I loved her too. I loved her too.”
His words are what finally break through Nora’s defences. Her arms fly round his waist and she clings to him, desperate keening sobs juddering through her.
Alexander has no words to offer her. No comfort. After all, he’s just as shaken by their loss as she is.
All he can do – what he does – is hold her and cry with her.
Thornbury, May 1536
“Forgive me, Your Highness, but there is grave news from Edinburgh. Her Highness the Duchess of Ross is dead. She died last week, birthing a daughter the Duke has named Mary Katherine in both your honour and hers.”
The words strike Katherine like arrows. Her first instinct is to deny them, to cry that they cannot be true. Mary can’t be dead. By the Virgin, her darling girl is only twenty, and she’s hardly been sick a day in her life. She can’t be dead!
But when she looks over the kneeling messenger’s head to the woman standing behind him, she knows it is no lie. Maria de Salinas, Dowager Baroness Willoughby, wouldn’t leave her duties at Hundson without due warning, not unless there was a dire emergency at hand.
“Maria…” She whispers the name like a talisman, hardly knowing whether it is her daughter or her oldest friend she is calling to.
The other woman curtsies, her greying hair falling forward into her face as she dips her head.
“Catalina. I am so, so sorry.”
It is the sound of her native Castilian that finally dispels Katherine of her last, lingering doubts as to the veracity of the news. She almost buckles under the horror of it. Only her Trastamara pride keeps her upright.
Her first thought is that she must go to Scotland. Mary is only twenty. She’s too young to be buried in foreign soil, without even one of her parents present.
But when she opens her mouth to order her household to prepare, the words won’t come. She can’t bring herself to say the words.
She falls to her knees with a strangled gasp, hand clutching her chest.
“Catalina!”
Maria is there in an instant, supporting her, waving the messenger and the rest of Katherine’s twittering ladies away, so that the two of them can kneel, quite alone, in the middle of the solar.
They say that, in times of great peril, one’s life flashes before one’s eyes.
For Katherine, in these bitterly dark moments, it is Mary who flashes before her eyes.
Mary, all of four days old, kicking and gurgling merrily as the then Lady Surrey places her in Katherine’s arms after her baptism into the light of Christ.
Mary, wide-eyed and solemn at six, listening carefully as Katherine explains that she and Henry are no longer married, but rather brother and sister, and that Mary and her companions will have to learn to honour Lady Mary Talbot as Henry’s wife and Queen.
Mary, twelve years old and giddy with excitement because her father has deemed her old enough to attend her first Twelfth Night revel and promised that she may open the dancing with him.
Mary, radiant in rose-pink alexander and cloth-of-silver as she says her wedding vows, her smile bright enough to light up all of England, her beautiful poise filling Katherine with pride.
Minutes may pass, or it may be hours. Katherine has no idea. All she knows is that, eventually, she slumps sideways against Maria and sinks into the blessed peace of oblivion.
