#truedevotions

        There is pandemonium all around, the moment that shelf of heavy, menacing clouds unleashes its wet wrath across Hampton Court. His red-cheeks pricked by each razor-sharp droplet of rain, a raffish grin loosens across the King’s visage as a collective shriek rises from the ladies of court, now furiously jostling their heavy-skirts toward the dryness of the stables. William is, like his cronies, belly-laughing – deep, infectious, rolling booms of laughter thundering from his chest as rainwater plunks into his goblet of wine until it overflows. Someone – Sir Thomas, he thinks – rips open his doublet, letting the downpour seep through his lily-white skin and through to his bones, with a valorous roar lodged in his throat and a blazing torch in hand.  It had been a bonny evening, which not even the heaven’s fury could spoil. 

Then, a sobering hand on his arm. 

Two glowering black opals for eyes, narrowed with displeasure, boring into his skull.  

Your Grace, you’ll catch your death out here, Lord Witlshire counsels – the stony arrangement of his face a far cry from the rapscallion of his youth – before jetting off in Anne’s direction, and dissolving into the wet, silvery haze.

The King meanders along the river back toward court – chucking what was left in his cup into the bottomless blackness of the Thames – in no certain hurry to reach dry lodgings.  Ahead, a svelte, dark-haired woman founders along the path back to the palace, stepping with the uncertainty of a lost doe.  Although Wills doubts she can hear him through the drizzle, he twists his mouth to say, watch your step – and just as he does so, the lady stumbles forward, her arms flailing outward to brace her fall.   The King sprints forward, rather unchivalrously hauling her back to her feet and pressing her frame into the broad, solid wall of his chest. 

For his part, the King was glad that the morning’s ‘festivities’ – if one could call them that – were well done. The gruesome spectacle upon Tower Green had, in truth, tried his patience; he’d spent the better part of the traitor’s speeches running through the hackneyed phrases and insipid platitudes they’d inevitably lay at his feet. Begging mercy, protesting humility before God and all the world, offering no shortage of honeyed promises to His Majesty in the blind and lusty hope that William would rise from his velvet-canopied throne and offer clemency – cunningly, wickedly delivered at the eleventh hour. They’d pray for intervention until the very moment the ax slashed at their necks, and the smell of blood-soaked straw, cradling the heads of those four traitors, lingered in the air of the palace. (His uncle George had suggested traveling up river for the season, lodging at Whitehall – but Whitehall was drab and dreary compared to Hampton, and with much less parkland to hunt.)

Adjusting the heirlooms that graced his fingers, Wills was also glad for a moment alone as he strolled down the vacant corridors of court; grateful to the sound of silence – as opposed to the footfalls of his councilors, of eager place-seekers, hounding his every step – that followed in his wake. He felt, in these heady late-summer months, rather like a chess piece: hawkishly watched by those gathered ‘round the table for a game, the eyes and ears of the world over glued to his person, hanging like the gardens of Babylon to each word. But, mercifully, his subjects were still filling their guts with lavish feasts, some of them – most of them – piling over the morning’s nausea and disgust. Wills' strides are swift, determined, speared in the direction of his private lodgings (the whereabouts of which, assembled in the reign of his father, were unknown to the rest of the court). Those watching from the vaulted bay windows overlooking the gardens would have glimpsed but a flurry of copper-hair and flash of rich cloth, that undaunted Boleyn set to his shadowed brow, his father’s confident swagger, passing by –– no more than a spectre of a true sovereign.

It wasn’t until he saw a figure looming in one such window –– encased, as it were, like a painting –– that the King took pause, and bent in a hasty greeting. ‘Lady Percy. Twice in one week.’

As Isobel came up from her curtsy, Wills flickered a brow at her. ‘Am I to believe this is a fortunate accident, or have we chosen to forget our rainy rendezvous?’ His lips formed into a thin line, black irises tracing each nuanced flicker in her visage. ‘You’ve said nothing to me since, so you can imagine my surprise.’

Another month had been survived, and wasn’t that cause for celebration? Donned in velvet and trimmed with golden thread, he had rode by his wife’s side, his dark eyes surveying the road for any sign of highwaymen or any such animal that may wander into their path. Still, the journey had been easily made, and so Thomas had guided his wife to their chambers which were not unlike the ones kept at Hampton, but which seemed riddled with the ghosts of her past life. Everywhere he turned were echoes of Henry Tudor and his father, everywhere he went he saw people he knew back when he had been but an ambassador and supporter of the ascension of the Boleyn family.

Chiseled by Poseidon were the white cliffs of Dover, those jagged edges falling steeply into the turbulent froth below, the surface of the sea glittering, crowded with a flotilla of royal Spanish vessels, gold sails thrashing in the wind. His mother – God’s blood, his entire realm – would slice him with the sharp blade of condemnation were they to see their King thus, craning his neck over the slippery, scalloped ridge of the cliffs, overlooking the turquoise coves below; churning more white than blue with Amphitrite’s wroth. There would be few at court who would not mourn William, he knew, were he to descend here to his death as Narcissus before him; though with his sister’s entourage knocking at his door, there would also be no poverty of support for any number of Catholic adversaries to succeed him – with the rifts his father created still bleeding acid rain across England. For in the end, the same crowd that applauded his coronation would just as likely applaud his execution.

At the sound of fur-lined skirts whipping in the wind, William untangled his mind from deep, brooding thought and turned his gaze to the figure stealthily gaining ground on him – adorned in pleasing shades of cream and silk, a river of onyx-hair floating behind her, rather like the perfumed sails that flapped and billowed bellow, bearing Helen of Troy's ambrosial scent. The smile wreathed across Isobel’s ruby-red lips made the seascape, however, appear pale in comparison – bled of its vivacity and intrigue – as though all the radiance and luster of England’s wintry sun had poured its resources in concentrating on her, making gold the soft angles of her cheeks, glimmering the whites of her doe eyes, the ridge of her collar-bone ignited by its gentle rays. ‘Why is it,’ the King called out to her, beckoning her with a voice that proved teasingly accusative, ‘that you are the only woman in England who manages to creep up on me?’