The Virgin's War (Tudor Legacy #3)(92)

Those she saved for her husband, in the short spaces when her mother insisted she leave Pippa’s bedside to eat or rest.

Her mother, Lucette noted, did neither.

Matthew was also a constant presence, and Madalena a godsend for her calm manner. She would whisper sometimes to Pippa in a soft and sibilant Spanish. And the Scottish surgeon from Stephen’s company was a steady and practiced man who spoke bracingly to Pippa when she was awake.

The problem was, Pippa had already been seriously weakened by a prolonged illness that they were only now told was consumption. The surgeon could only shrug when asked how it might affect her healing. But his face was grave. Less than forty-eight hours after being brought to Pontefract, the first dangerous signs of infection were already pronounced.

What frightened Lucette most of all was Pippa’s serenity. She tried once to task her sister with the need to fight, but Pippa simply smiled. “I will not go, Lucie, until I have finished.”

She would not be drawn further.

They had sent riders to alert Kit, but he arrived faster than they could have hoped. He barely paused to speak to anyone, so it was left to Anabel to explain. She looked wraith-thin from long riding at a punishing pace, and her eyes followed Kit with a queer mix of fear and love as he left for Pippa’s bedside.

“He knew,” Anabel told Lucette and Stephen. “He woke from a dead sleep—it must have been when Pippa was…when Navarro stabbed her. We were on the road in less than twenty minutes. I don’t think he’s slept, even when we were forced to stop to snatch food and change horses. I have never seen him so…inward. As though only his body were moving while his soul was already here with her.”

Lucette said roughly, so as not to cry, “Come change, Anabel, and at least wash your face. It will help.”

“May I see her?”

“Of course.”

Anabel shivered, and Lucette saw beneath the regal princess to the little girl who had come to Wynfield Mote so long ago for friendship. And had found a family.

Gently, Lucette noted, “You are afraid. Why?”

The answer was simple, and devastating. “Because Kit is afraid.”

—

Pippa died as the hush of night gave way to the earliest call of the morning birds. With Matthew supporting her on one side and Kit on the other, God allowed her to slip away peacefully. She was conscious until nearly the end, her breath slight and shallow enough that it took Kit a minute or two to understand when it ceased. Then his mother put her arm around his shoulders. Despite her tears, Minuette spoke clearly. “Come away, Kit. She is gone.”

He allowed himself to be passed from hand to hand until Stephen took his arm and led him unseeing through the castle. Dimly, he was aware of his brother talking, but could make no sense of the words. Then there was a quiet, darkened room and a soft bed and someone tugging off his boots, and then only darkness.

An hour later—or two—or possibly a lifetime—Kit woke choking on his own breath. He’d heard that sometimes when people woke after a death it would take a moment for the memory of loss to return, but it was not so for him. How could it be? Even in sleep, part of him had been achingly aware of what was missing. It was as though half his world had blinked itself out of existence.

He felt the unshed tears thick in his throat but could not cry. After sitting with his face buried in his hands for some time, Kit got up in a sudden burst of frantic energy. There was water in a bowl, and he stripped off jerkin and shirt and washed himself as best he could, splashing water through his hair and letting it run down his face in place of crying. Stephen had put him in his own room, and Kit found a clean shirt in a pack at the end of the bed.

Outside the room, he hesitated. He didn’t really want to talk to anyone but Anabel, but he didn’t know where she had been put. Except that…he did. Kit stood still, hardly daring to move for fear of losing it, but where there had once been the silk and diamond tie that bound him to Pippa, there was a slender silver thread pulling at him from someone nearby.

When he let his feet follow his instincts and knocked on the door they took him to, it was Anabel who answered.

She took one look at his face and made an inarticulate sound of distress. She pulled him into the room and closed the door, then guided him to a low couch upholstered in velvet. Sitting as close to him as she could get, Anabel laid her head on his shoulder.

He closed his eyes. “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “What do I do now? I’ve always had her, from before we were even born. She…”

Kit swallowed against a low sob, then another, and tears found their way from behind his clenched eyelids. “I can’t breathe, Anabel,” he gasped. “I don’t even know how to breathe without Pippa.”

He slid from the bench and laid his head in her lap. As he wept, Anabel ran her hands lightly over his hair and his shoulders. And Kit knew that she was the only thing anchoring him to this world.





23 June 1586


Pontefract Castle


It is over. Tonight we laid my little girl to temporary rest in All Saints’ Church. There is no time to take her home, no time for an appropriate funeral. But what would that even be? What service—in any religion—could possibly ease our grief? As Dominic wrapped me close while I wept, I had a vivid memory of a similar night thirty years ago. The white garden at Hatfield, sitting beneath an arbor, sorrowing for the loss of what would have been our first child.