"How's Sebastian?" Mary asks, passing Kenna a mug of hot tea as she walks past the sofa and begins to sink into the soft lilac cushions her mother had brought over from France two autumns ago. Kenna puts the phone down onto the matching coaster, a stark contrast between the soft lilac and the glossy brown wood.
"Good, Hercules is driving him up the wall with his new little car, keeps rolling over his feet and pinning him to the wall to get his treats." she chuckles, brushing a lock of brown hair. "Catherine's just finished the appointments for their yearly testing."
"Only smart to do that, I get it." Mary drinks her raspberry leaf tea, letting the hot liquid warm her hands through her pretty cream and mint coloured mug. It still feels weird to think about all the stuff she and the Valois had been through, with everything they had lost and had taken from each other. It's been years since she had seen them, years since that horrible day when she had lost he who she had loved so deeply.
She and Francis, the whirlwind romance lasting from thirteen to seventeen, when the poor boy had been struck down with his second round of diffuse astrocytoma. It had been such a shock that it had returned, since he had spent the years of five to nine fighting his horrid sickness. But the simple fact is that he had been acting erratically, dripping sweat from fever and blood from his nose and ears. He had collapsed one night, and had been diagnosed two days later.
Sebastian and Kenna had just gotten married after falling pregnant with little Amia. But that shine had been taken away the day after the wedding when Francis had fainted, and the couple had forgone any and all pomp and pageantry, batting down the hatches with Mary and all the Valois-Angouleme children and family members spreading across France and Italy.
They'd tried to make it work, she and Francis. They really, really did. But he would reject her love and order her leave when he would get sick, he would keep things from her and wouldn't hear of her getting tested as a possible match for bone marrow. And those mood swings, he was downright evil with them when he wanted to be, and Mary couldn't live in France with such cruelty, even if its projector was sick and in the hospital.
So, back to Edinburgh, Mary went. The doctors had tried to get Francis transferred to either the Royal Infirmaries of Edinburgh or London, seeing as he had been attending some of his university classes despite his French treatment. But the boy would not hear of it, he wanted to stay in France and transfer to Paris, so his parents didn't keep having to cross the channel every time he grew unwell.
Mary had been heartbroken then, but in the time that had passed, she did understand. The boy was sick, and sick boys want their parents, even if those parents were cereal cheats and liars and users. She did not have the same emotional reaction and response to Henry and Catherine, for how could she? They were not her parents, one parent was long dead, and the other one foot already in her grave.
Even now, two years on, her heart hurts when she remembers her mother. She was not a good mother, she was not a particularly kind mother, she didn't kiss Mary's wounds or give her ice cream when she was sad or pretend Santa Claus was real or gave her soup when sick. No, Marie was the ice queen of Edinburgh, a French transplant who did not want to be there without her dead husband keeping her tied to the land. So, she stayed, and her only daughter was risen by nannies and nursemaids, as well as her youngest stepson.
She had died, that day. Her icy heart gave out, and it was soon discovered that the woman had drunk herself into a stupor and asphyxiated herself in the bathtub. Six weeks after Mary had left France, she returned at the head of a procession and a marble coffin, burying her mother in the land of her blood, far away from the ground that held her husband, who both of them had loved and lost so many years ago.
Francis wasn't there, only Claude and Elisabeth were, when Mary sat with her French relatives and wished her mother bon voyage on her last trip, and wept for the woman who had loved and lost, and then never loved again. Catherine kissed her cheek and Henry gave her flowers, and Francis had barely woken when Mary came to visit him. So frail, pale and sickened.
YOU ARE READING
You Are My Light Part II
Historical Fiction-Reign Oneshots/Taking Requests- The world can be dark, Mary, and uncertain and cruel. The only thing that matters is that we face it together. No matter what happens, you are my light. Part 2! -Read TEML first!-
