❝ Tell me losing everything is what saved you,
Tell me you finally tasted freedom.
Can you even imagine yourself in paradise?
Even the daughter of gods must know loneliness, must sometimes want nothing more than to be trapped in a hell of forevers...
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Antwerp, Burgundy
Maximilian swallows, but it does nothing to ease the rawness in his throat. He tries to steel his nerves and mentally scolds his cowardice; he has faced war, had his body covered in blood and he'd stood tall. Yet, this, this makes him weak.
He listens to her careful instructions, as they race around his head once more.
"There'll be one near the brothel," she had told him, "there always is."
Maximilian wonders how she came to know this.
The air is cold and bitter. He pulls his cloak tighter around himself and looks around to make sure he isn't being watched.
Antwerp isn't particularly small, but he knows word will travel if he is seen outside the Palace at such hours. As luck would have it, the alley is empty and cloaked in darkness and besides, anyone watching would most likely assume he is visiting the whorehouse two doors down.
"That's why it has to be you," Charlotte had explained. "A man spotted there will go unnoticed, I won't be."
He steadies himself and enters the shop; little more than a single room, rough wooden beams support the ceiling and dirty straw covers the floor. The air inside smells of burnt sage.
A short, wizened man looks up at him from the dying fire- he wears the green woollen cap of the apothecaries. Maximilian asks the man for his wife, just as she had instructed, and the man nods and leaves to fetch her.
Left alone with his thoughts, Maximilian feels bile rise in his throat. Charlotte had come to him earlier this evening, her mouth set in a grim line and her eyes unblinking. "I need you," she had said solemnly. "I'd do it myself if I could, but Marie is ill and the physician can't know. No one can know."
The apothecary's wife enters and interrupts his thoughts. She holds out her hand expectantly and Maximilian presses Charlotte's note into her palm. The woman reads it quickly and nods.
"Two silver coins" she says quietly, and Maximilian pays her.
In return, she mixes various herbs before wrapping them neatly into a small pouch and hands it to him. "She knows what to do?"
"I believe so."
The woman nods again, satisfied. "Tell her to chew willow bark for the pain."
─────•~❉᯽❉~•─────
England
Meg Tudor, only daughter of King Henry VII and his wife, Queen Lily of York, knelt on her knees at the feet of the statue of The Virgin Mary in the chapel at Eltham Palace.
Her older brother was very sick and she'd overheard the maids saying he might die.
Arthur couldn't die! He was her only playmate, her only friend. Harry was too little to be of any fun, he couldn't even sit up. Arthur simply couldn't die and leave her alone. So that was why she was kneeling in the chapel, whispering her prayers in English since she wasn't proficient in Latin.
