Chapter 49: He Was Breathing
Henry stopped. "What...What is it?"
Lionel looked as if he would rather be dragged behind one of the horses than speak. "Your Highness..."
"Lionel," Henry snapped, "for the love of God, speak."
Lionel bowed his head lower. "His Grace Thomas Fitzroy took his last breath, Sire," Lionel said.
"What?" Henry looked from Lionel to Stephen, as if one of them might have the decency to correct what had just been said. "What?"
Stephen made a sound low in his throat in grief. His face had gone pale and his hands tightened at his sides.
Henry stared at him, then back at Lionel. "What are you saying? I saw him before I left the palace. He was fine. He was breathing. He was..." His mouth struggled around the last words. "My son."
Movement returned to him all at once. He snatched the reins from Lionel’s hand and swung onto the horse with reckless speed.
"Your Highness!" Lionel called. "Your gloves!"
Henry did not even look back. Gloves. God help them all. His son was dead and Lionel was shouting about gloves. He drove his heels into the horse’s sides, and the animal surged forward before Lionel could mount his own. Hooves struck the street hard, iron against stone, scattering the morning hush into panic.
Behind him, Lionel turned sharply to Stephen.
"Get the girl back and return to the palace," Lionel ordered, already reaching for his saddle. "And for God’s sake, be discreet."
Stephen nodded once, grief still caught in his face, then moved. Lionel mounted and rode after the king.
Henry did not stop. The ride to Whitehall Palace became a blur of wet streets, startled faces, and the violent rhythm of hooves. London woke around him in fragments: smoke rising from chimneys, shutters opening, apprentices hauling water, merchants setting out wares. The world should have stopped. Bells should have cracked. The river should have turned black. Instead, men yawned, dogs barked, carts groaned, and somewhere someone laughed.
Henry hated them all for it. By the time the gates of Whitehall came into view, his breath was ragged and his horse flecked with sweat. The palace loomed pale and sprawling in the early light, all galleries, courtyards, and guarded doors—his home, his prison, his kingdom’s jeweled cage.
He dismounted like a man crazed. A groom rushed forward, but Henry shoved past him and stormed into the palace.
Inside, the atmosphere was wrong. Servants stood clustered in corners, faces lowered. Guards stiffened as he passed. Ladies whispered behind their sleeves, then fell silent.
The corridors seemed longer than they had ever been, the floors and walls stretching endlessly ahead of him. Every step brought him closer to what he did not want to see.
Before he reached Lady Bella’s wing, he heard a scream. Gut-wrenching. Broken. Inhuman with grief.
Henry’s steps faltered. The guards bowed as Henry entered. He barely saw them. Bella’s chamber was in chaos. Bella was crying inconsolably, folded almost in half by grief, held upright by two maids who looked close to collapsing with her. Her hair had fallen loose from its pins. Her face was swollen, wet, unrecognisable with pain.
"No," she kept sobbing. "No, no, please, no..."
No one answered her. No one could. Near the wall, his mother stood perfectly still. Theodora stood, her face composed, her hands folded before her.
He hated her for being upright when he felt himself falling apart. His heartbeat slowed into a dangerous rhythm, each beat separated by a silence that felt far too long. His gaze drifted past Bella, past the maids, past the physician lingering uselessly by the far table, to the inner chamber.
That was where his son was supposed to be. Alive. Sleeping perhaps, restless perhaps, fussy and warm and demanding attention like all children did when they were still small enough to believe the world existed solely to serve them.
Henry moved toward the inner chamber. His steps slowed with each pace. The room inside was quieter. Cruelly quieter. A candle burned near the crib, the small flame trembling. Henry reached the crib. He looked down.
Thomas lay there, impossibly still. Asleep, Henry decided. That was the word. Asleep. Because there was no way—no way—that his son was dead. No way that the small chest he had seen rise and fall before he left the palace had simply stopped. No way that the child who had once wrapped tiny fingers around his thumb was now beyond his reach.
No. If Thomas was dead, then God was punishing him. That thought came with such force that Henry nearly staggered.
This was payment. This was judgement. A son taken for every sin Henry had buried beneath the crown. Every crime committed in silence.
His mother entered the inner chamber and stood beside him. "Your Highness," she called.
Henry couldn’t find his voice.
"Your Highness," Theodora said quietly, "you should go now. The people must not see the king in his darkest hour."
Henry remained by the crib, his hands resting on the carved wooden rail. He stared down at Thomas. He looked untouched. Peaceful.
Death should have looked like a monster. It should have come with claws, with blood, with some visible wound he could point to and say, there. There was the enemy. There was the thing to destroy.
But Thomas only looked asleep.
"How?" Henry finally asked.
"No one knows," she said. "It might be natural causes."
Henry turned his head slowly. "Natural causes..."
The words sounded obscene in his mouth. Bella’s sobs reached them from the outer chamber, cracked and ruined, rising and falling.
"Natural?" Henry repeated. "I reject that." He straightened. "I want to know who came in and out of this room from the moment my son was last breathing," he said. "Every single person. Nurse, maid, guard, physician, priest, kitchen boy, damned candle-lighter—I want names. I want times. I want to know what happened!"
"Henry—"
"God dammit, Mother!" His voice broke through the chamber like thunder. "He is my son."
Theodora’s face tightened. "The Lord Chancellor will begin his investigation once he arrives," she said. "You have to go into mourning, Your Highness."
(Brought to you by Mar King 1/2)