He thought about her often. Time being so much on his hands to the point where he felt the urge to nudge it forward like an awkward child who shies back from a room of strangers. Though he hadn’t fallen so far that he lacked willing couriers, he solicited them only to send final missives to his sons. Notes which could cause no great harm if fallen into unfriendly hands for not even his enemies could begrudge a father his last words.

His tower cell looked over the deserted yard and out to the Thames where he tried vainly to drown her image. She’d married finally they told him. She was safe, he heard.

It was nearly two years since he last touched her. Soft and smelling of roses fresh from the markets of Calais. She’d found him, hiding in the dank corridors near chapel, crouched low, hands folded, thumbs indenting a time-worn brow.

“Time is past for prayers,” she said.

He didn’t look up but opened his eyes to the fullness of a sky blue skirt so close he had but to release his clasp and gather her to him like the air.

Once was a time he’d have slipped beneath the folds and run rough common hands up to delve royal treasures well-known. Instead, he reached out a tentative finger, briefly catching the pleated fabric between index and thumb before pulling back to monkish misery. She was beyond his knowing and they both realized it.

“It’s all I can do,” he replied.

He expected her to chide him over his failure of conscious, his weak-kneed capitulation, but she did not. Her grasp of the complicated was as grounded in survival as his own.

“She sends this,” and she dropped an English bible at his feet. It fell flat and hollow, the sound echoing down the drafty hall. “She faults herself only she says.”

“Kindness out of character for her, methinks.”

“Kindess is all the vengeance left to her.”

He looked up. Her pale moon shaped face pinched in places and tear swollen in others in comic effect that nearly cracked his own matching facade.

“I’d heard she’d turned over that leaf,” he said. “Perhaps she is not so shriven as she gives out?”

“Do not jest with me, Master,” her reply worn and thin. The last days have been long and though near over, she is spent like a farthing in the hands of beggar.

“I’ve missed our little assignations,” he countered in a dipolmatic tone that marked him courtier but with eyes that belied the disinterested tone.

“You’ve heard? You’re angry?”

“No,” he said. “How could I ever be made angry be the practical choice. Practicality is the foundation of my life. It is nearly my motto and I daresay will serve me as a fine epitaph.”

“Do you ever want, Tom*?”

He gathered a handful of her gown as she stepped nearer, her fingers playing tentatively through his salted locks.

“Modestly,” he admitted.

“Or wish?” tone more hopeful.

“Not at all,” regretting the cold water as soon as it tripped the tongue.

“Why breath?” she asked.

“Why indeed Mistress Mary,” he said. “Should you puzzle it out, share your revelation with me.”

“And more,” she agreed, slipping away from his grasp until only her shadow caressed his own with the whimsy of a ghost.

A stained wood block tore his gaze back from the water to the courtyard below. A beggar would find himself poorly mounted astride my wishes, he thought. Cold seeped into his forearms and up through his resting chin, chilling his memories as he noted the gathering crowd.

Grey, as though it knew her melancholy, the sky clung to its tears. It wept but a little for her sister as she recalled, stingy when it might downpour and damp the moment called for more.

She stood alone on the parapet. Hooded cloak concealing only so much of her identity as to not arouse suspicion. The times balanced precariously on princely whim and temper. In the yard, she noted the ugly mood and the grimly satisfied visages of the lords in attendance. Little did they know they disservice they did themselves this bleak morning.

He stumbled a bit as he made his way to the scaffold. She wondered that he wasn’t bound for humiliation’s sake. She hoped he would make a noble end without tears but knew that he would not. He left much behind and he was not such a man that his many regrets wouldn’t rise up to choke him at his end. He bent not a whit for his enemies, scowling and impatient for his end.

“I die a good true Catholic and his majesty’s most humble servant who I beg all to pray for so he should continue long and in health,” he spoke to the small crowd as if he were at Parliament, catching unwilling eyes and noting attendance though he did not glance up to see her.

Stepping to the block he knelt before it as if it were the altar and bowed his head to pray before gripping it either side with a soldier’s steeled nerve.

“I pray you all to learn from me,” he said. “Want modestly, but wish upon stars. Had I done this, a happier man I would have undoubtedly been.”

The blade landed to high to be true, the crack of skull followed shortly by a soft gurgle as the axe was lifted for a second stroke. She turned as his fingers clutched convulsively before going slack.

*I’ve been reading Hilary Mantel’s delightful Wolf Hall. I am a Tudor junkie and am well read on the time period, but Cromwell is more often than not a footnote or a very minor character. He is usually portrayed as a self-serving villain, but as the Tudors had a habit of rewriting history to suit their purposes, it’s hard to get an accurate picture of who he was and what might be true and what was merely invention by his enemies after the fact. Mantel’s novel is startling in its compassionate view of him and the hint of a romance between Cromwell and Mary Boleyn (Queen Anne’s older sister and mother of at least one of Henry the VIII’s bastards) caught my fancy though it would have been a very unlikely thing to have happened.

This is so not done. The roughest of drafts and I really envision it as short story that tells about their affair in flashback.