Page 136 of Dawnlands

“Did you forgive yourself?”

“At the end. At the end I became the man I hoped to be.”

“I love you, James,” she said simply. “I loved you truly.”

He smiled at her, that young smile: filled with joy and confidence, his eyes warm upon her face. “I loved you,” he told her. “Not enough then. But I learned. And now I can love you again.”

She knew better than to try to touch him; she sank down to her seat and smiled up at him until he grew ghostly and she could see him no more, then she gave a deep sigh and rested her head on the stone wall and fell fast asleep.

That was where they found her in the morning.

WHITEHALL PALACE, LONDON, SUMMER 1687

A letter from Matthew saying that his foster grandmother, Alinor, had died, and would be buried next to her parents in the St. Wilfrid’s churchyard, arrived at Whitehall Palace at the same time as bad news from Rome. Duchess Laura, the difficult, bad-tempered mother of the queen, had died, and Mary Beatrice, shocked with grief, losing her refuge from her unhappy marriage, ordered the whole court into the deepest black mourning. Livia thought it painfully ironic that she had to go into deepest black as if she were mourning Alinor: the one woman in her life that she had never been able to seduce, defraud, or even confuse.

Servants were to wear black gloves, black armbands, and black sashes. Ladies of the court were to wear no color for a month, and no beauty spots or rouge; the gentlemen and lords were to wear black or gray for Duchess Laura. The embroiderers and haberdashers ran out of black thread and black velvet, and Julia’s father loaned the guild of haberdashers a thousand pounds to buy French silk.

It was a sign of how unpopular Duchess Laura had made herself that some of the ladies and lords at court refused to go into full mourning, and the Dowager Queen complained that when her mother died, there had been only partial mourning for a short time, and thatshe would wear dark colors, but neither she nor her ladies would go into black.

Livia did not hesitate: the shape of her face, an exquisite oval, was enhanced by a high black neckline, the lines around her eyes and forehead were obscured by a little veil. Her dark eyes under her hat with dark feathers and black crystals sparkled ambivalently, as if filled with tears or perhaps promise. She drew the best of the black gowns from the royal wardrobe the moment she heard the news, and she wondered how she could keep them in her cupboard after the official time of mourning was over.

So she was already dressed as a widow when she received the news from Yorkshire that her husband, Sir James, had died in his sleep on Midsummer Eve. She read and reread the letter with increasing incredulity, then she took Matthew’s note telling her of Alinor’s death and reread that, looking at the date, seeing that they matched exactly. James and Alinor, lovers for all their lives, had both died on Midsummer Eve. She had no doubt that they had died together, at midnight. She told her maid she was not to be disturbed and she retired to her room and locked the door.

“She’s grieving for her husband,” the other ladies told the queen, who had taken to her enormous gilded bed in her luxurious new apartments to cry for her mother. The young queen forced herself up, threw a black robe around her black nightgown, and went through the shaded silent palace to her friend.

She listened at Livia’s door for heartbroken sobs, but instead heard the rapid stride of footsteps up and down, up and down the length of the room, echoing on the wooden floorboards, dulled by the expensive rugs. She tapped on the door.

“I gave orders I was not to be disturbed!” Livia snapped from inside the room.

“It’s me, the queen,” Mary Beatrice said, her voice choked with grief. “Please let me in, Livia.”

She heard Livia’s heels click across the floor and then the door was flung open and Livia, tragic in black, sunk into a curtsey. Mary Beatrice rushed into the room and lifted her up to hold her as tightly as a lover.

“I came as soon as I heard,” she said. “I got up at once. I knew you would be miserable.”

“Yes,” Livia said, still white with anger.

Mary Beatrice peeped into her friend’s scowling face. “We can grieve together,” she promised. “To think that I will never see her again… now, when I need her so much! When I have lost the love of my husband, to lose my mother as well!”

Livia wrenched her expression into mournful serenity. “It’s terribly sad,” she managed to say.

The two of them sank onto a sofa before the fireplace. Mary Beatrice sobbed into Livia’s shoulder and the older woman smoothed her hair. “We should pray for her,” she said after a little while. “We should go to your chapel.”

“Yes, yes,” Mary Beatrice said. “But the soul of your husband! He was not of our faith.”

“I’ll have Masses sung for him anyway,” Livia said vindictively. “He was so heretical… d’you know I believe he commanded the hour of his death, he timed it so that he—” She broke off in the face of Mary Beatrice’s tearstained bewilderment. “Nothing. Nothing. I am distracted with grief. He believed he would be reunited with his loved one in death,” she said.

“It must be true,” Mary Beatrice said. “I know I will see my mother again. I know I will speak to my mother again.”

Livia silently gritted her teeth at the thought of what she would say to James if they met in the afterlife. “And now I shall have to go to Yorkshire for his funeral. And the reading of the will.”

“Oh, don’t go!” Mary Beatrice said, holding her tighter. “I can’t bear to be alone.”

Livia tightened her grip. “And I can’t bear to leave you,” she assured the younger woman. “I won’t go till after tomorrow. I won’t leave you at once. But they can’t conduct the funeral without me, and I have to be there for the reading of the will.” She let her voice tremble with a real sense of loss. “The estate is entailed. It won’t even come tome. I will have nothing but a life interest in a pokey little dower house. But surely, he will have left me something more? Otherwise, I won’t be able to afford to attend court.”

“Oh no!” Mary Beatrice said at once. “No! No! I shall give you a post, I shall give you a salary. I shall give you access to the royal wardrobe all the time, not just for mourning. You must come back. If you have to go to Yorkshire, all that way, then you must come back.”

“I shall have to hire a carriage—”