More Glass Than Wall

She built six houses to be alone in.

She was never alone in any of them.

Derbyshire, 1544. Bess Hardwick is seventeen, widowed eleven months, sitting up alone with the body of the boy they married her to. At two in the morning she understands, without a sound and without a sign of any kind, that there is somebody standing on the far side of that bed. She does not scream. She does not run. And she never tells one living soul for the next sixty-four years, because a woman who says such a thing aloud in 1544 has put her own neck into a rope and knows it.

She spends the rest of her life getting rich. Four husbands, eight children, a fortune built out of lawsuits and lead and coal, and house after house after house, each one newer and brighter than the last, until she raises the most famous windows in England on a bare ridge in Derbyshire and the county gives her a rhyme for it. Every stone of it is a defence, and not one living person knows what it is a defence against.

Then the axe falls at Fotheringhay in 1587, and the one soul in England with the most owing to her does not come, and every room Bess owns goes quiet in the same week. She has twenty-one years left, a granddaughter she cannot save, and a tomb she has already climbed down into and stood inside of, and no notion at all of what has been taken out of her houses, or of what it means that something is finished with her.

Nothing was ever owed. That was the worst of it.