If I could come to your room where the icicles hang from the chandeliers, would I be able to see the left hand of God taking for himself?

Downstairs there is movement—children have taken the knives from the kitchens and their sword fights draw blood from their foes. The same rose-red liquid that oozes from the cut you have made between your legs. Staring down from the ceiling, I espy your vigour but not your need. Your eyes are tightly closed but the anger behind them is a pleasure we will never share.

Outside the dogs are barking; the rabbits are running wild. There is a smell of shot in the air. Your father has cleaned his musket, but still he misses the mark. And, yet, the dogs are soon running amok taking more than he can carry. The sun is drying blood and leaving the fur matted—the bunnies are black-eyed and brilliant. The children ask mother for a stew but mother laughs. She tells them they will be eating more lead than meat. Won’t they eat the last of the mutton, instead?

Under the sun, I am looking up, my royal blue eyes blinded by your iridescence; my skin burning golden brown before you will set me free. And still, I hover in the pallor of your attic room where no love (but your own brother’s love) has gone before. Once the athletic young man, I am now bound for abdominous ruin.

Scarified by your alabaster breath, I long to be outside, in the lucid air, once more. My skin is now scarlet, cold, and raw. You have taken my heart and mortgaged my love for the freedom of your father’s land. It is nothing to me, to play banker to a failing fool, who has stayed so long on fallow land that he would willingly sell your body to me. And I, for the price of a son, would sue God to the heavens.

Above my nightly visions flies a raven—a black-feathered angel that you would certainly mistake as your only true friend. As the minutes of waiting and wanting tick away, I apprehend his wings flapping capriciously about my head. And, if I grow deaf, you will not care to hear of my impending news to take you as my wife; that last bairn, a stillborn memory.

All winter is a snowdrift and the snowdrift is the blanket upon our bed. When I take you in the moment between waking and nightly death, I feel your bones breaking beneath my beating wings. In the darkness of your silent tears, I hope for a man-child and fall asleep dreaming of falcons flying news to my ghostly father—another dead king. A prince is to be born. But no word is ever sent. Your firstborn a hole in my hopes, your second, a death to everything.

In the barren spring, I wake to feel you still breathing. I watch your chest rising like the baker’s best bread, only to see it fall again; all it has suckled is vanity. And when finally you wake; you sit up, you stand and leave our bed. Not once do our eyes meet, your mouth as silent as your womb.

The room is soon empty and I have myself to myself and can no longer sense the thoughts, I once held for you.

So, in the late morning, the decree is signed; my word is law. Ah, dear sister, go ask Lord Rochford? If you dare!

On the morrow after our first night apart, you will hear the sound of soldiers marching, the sound of women sighing and your stillborn boy crying like a papal bull.

But still, you will not hear the lightning whine of death for too long, my dear—dearest Anne. For in a few short hours you will have departed this mortal coil . . . that your green eyes have been, for far too long, spoiling.

And then, I will take up my quill and joyously I will write, Dearest Jane . . .