It was warm by the fireside, the countess’ fingertips slick as she flipped the pages of a religious volume that rested neatly upon her lap, splayed open like a cadaver.  One of the Dowager’s irreconcilable tempers had given Cecily leave to her own apartments early that evening, those lush, spacious rooms that granted her both quiet and solitude.  It would not be long before the Wyatt brood, their bellies rounded by feasting and drinking, plowed into their chambers, their fleet slapping against the floors, their laughter rattling the windows.  Yet for a few hours, it had simply been Cecily, and the mound of linens needing mending heaped at her side, growing taller by the day.  

At the sound of keys chiming, the countess turns her coin-white face to the darkened figure that slips through the doorframe.  Tall, dark-haired, light-eyed.  Appearing a little portly, perhaps in preparation of the impending autumn.  Thomas.  Cecily resumes, just as briskly as she had been diverted, to her reading, not sparing a glance to him as she remarks: ‘it surprises me to see you, Thomas.  The Dowager is in one of her moods, so I thought no one better but you or the king to relieve her of it.’