“Yes, lady,” Nancy nodded as though she truly understood. “I be in the common hall with my sister Megan if you should need me. I dare say you could catch a linkboy to fetch me.” She opened the door to the dark hall and a noticeable draft swept past her. “If there be any linkboys in such distant reaches of this cold palace,” Mary heard her murmur as she closed the door.
She warmed her hands for a moment near the charcoal embers, then brushed her hair, listening to the crackle of the brush through her long gold tresses. She could feel the chill now. It was creeping into her. Maybe when Anne left to return to Hever those rooms would be available. She laughed aloud at the foolish thought. “Those rooms are in the queen’s wing, silly,” she said, and her own voice in the now-silent room startled her.
At least when they progressed to Whitehall or Richmond or wherever, Will, as Esquire, would be certain to get her a room with at least a fireplace. “This room is as cold and sullen as the look His Grace gave me tonight with his fake ‘welcome back, dear Mary’ speech,” she accused the cold chamber.
When she slid her feet into the icy sheets she wished desperately for a warming pan to dump the charcoal embers into and run between the smooth linens. She lay there curled up stiffly for a moment and got up to don her robe again. It was then she heard the quick knock on her door. Her heart leapt at the sharp sound in the silence of her thoughts.
“Who is there?”
“It is Staff, Mary. I would talk with you.”
She pulled the robe tight around her hips, but her feet would not move.
“Mary.” He pushed the door slowly open and his shoulder and head appeared far higher up the door than where she stared. She had forgotten to shoot the door bolt. She had forgotten he was so tall.
He did not wait for words from her, but took a huge step in and closed the door quietly behind him. “I had to see you, Mary. I am sorry I startled you.”
“At least you still remember my name,” she heard herself say shakily.
A swift grin lit his features. “I remember a good deal more, Mary Bullen.”
She turned away so he would not see the fear on her face, the longing, the bitter anger. “My name, as you well know, William Stafford, is not Bullen nor has it been for a long time. I believe my husband, Lord Carey, is a dear friend of yours.” She looked down at the tiny mirror she had left on the drop leaf table.
“I did it all for you, Mary—for us, holding his position like that.”
“How considerate and noble.” Her voice caught as though she were on the edge of tears. She spun to face him and was terrified to see he had come much closer. “How considerate, just like all the visits you paid us at Plashy the last five months we were there.” She stared at the tiny throbbing pulse at the base of his bronze throat. How was he always so brown in the winter months? He had changed clothes too, and how did he ever find this forsaken room?
“When I saw Will’s bitter suspicions for our feelings,” he went on, “I knew it was foolish to cause you pain when I was there and much worse pain after I left. I knew he would take it out on you, and it was the only way I could protect you, even a little bit. I missed you, too.”
“I did not say I missed you.”
“You did not have to, sweetheart.” He took another step forward and, like a coward, she pressed back against the rough plaster wall next to the window. “I was so happy when I knew His Grace would allow you to come back. And when I saw you with Will tonight, I thought, what for? For the delicious torture of seeing you daily and not being able to touch you, to make love to you?”
“Please, Staff, you have to go.”
“I will. Later. Then I thought, I have to forget you and marry as the king wants....”
“The king wants you to? Whom?”
“One of the Dorset lasses he wants to come to court. I have only seen her once. But then, I realized I cannot forget you because I have desired you ever since I set eyes on you in the dusty old Bastille in Paris and knew that the blonde beauty with the smothered fire in her eyes was for me. And I have loved you almost as long as that, Mary.” He leaned close to her, not touching her tense body but placing his hands carefully on the wall on either side of her tousled head.
She closed her eyes treasuring his words, his soothing voice she had thought she would never hear again and had desired so desperately in the long hours away. She felt tears squeeze through her lashes. He was so close she could smell sweet wine on his breath.