Chapter Three: The Throne and the Grave
There are moments in life when time fractures—when one world ends and another begins, though both are carved from the same bones. The day I crossed the threshold of David's palace, veiled in widow's garments, carrying a child beneath my heart, I felt the fracture deep within me. I stepped into royalty, but nothing about me felt elevated. I felt buried. They dressed me in fine linens. They gave me servants, perfumes, gold. But wealth has a strange taste when eaten with guilt; it sits on the tongue like ash. Every polished surface reflected pieces of a woman I no longer recognized, and every corridor whispered Uriah's name, no matter how loudly David tried to drown it out with gifts, with tenderness, with explanations shaped to justify the unjustifiable. I was not naïve. I knew my presence in the palace was a balm—not for me, but for David's conscience and for the eyes of the city. A widow taken in by a compassionate king—it was an old tale people wanted to believe.
But the truth walked beside me like an invisible guard. The truth was a grave. The child was born in early spring, when the fig trees began to swell and the city smelled of dust and new leaves. Labor came upon me fast and fierce. Women surrounded me—palace midwives, well-trained and soft-spoken, yet strangers to my grief. I cried out for my mother. I cried out for Uriah, though the name tore my throat on its way out.
When the baby emerged, he was small. Too small. His cry was thin, like a reedbird caught in a net. The midwife's eyes flickered, and for a moment I saw pity, then fear, then resignation. David entered after the birth, breathless, hopeful, his face softened by wonder. He touched the child's tiny hand. But the child had no strength to grasp his finger.
In the days that followed, I watched helplessly as my son struggled for breath. His skin went from rosy to pale, from pale to waxen. His eyelids fluttered like dying moths. His limbs twitched without purpose. My milk dried from stress. My prayers dried from despair. David fasted. He lay on the ground. He pleaded with God. But devotion cannot rewrite the past, and fasting cannot untangle the knots of consequence woven by sin. On the seventh day, the breathing stopped.
The room grew suddenly quiet—terrifyingly quiet—as though the air itself had paused. A bird cried somewhere beyond the courtyard. A midwife's hand slipped from my shoulder. One of the servants turned her face to the wall. David rose from the floor as if waking from a long sleep. He washed. He ate. He prayed. But I—I broke.
Grief hollowed me. It chewed through the softest parts of me until only stone remained. I moved through the palace like a ghost wrapped in silk. Servants greeted me with respect, yet no one dared touch me. I had become something untouchable:
The king's sorrow.
The king's scandal.
The king's reminder.
David tried to comfort me, but every time he reached for my hand, I saw Uriah lying in dust, carrying the letter that sealed his fate. Every time I looked into David's eyes, I saw my husband's eyes—faithful, loyal, unsuspecting. And I recoiled. David was a man divided. I could see it even then. There were moments when guilt softened him, moments when pride hardened him, moments when tenderness flickered and promptly died under the weight of memory. He wanted to make things right. He wanted me to heal. But wanting and repairing are not the same. I spoke little in those months. Words felt dangerous—too heavy to lift, too sharp to release. Silence hardened around me like armor. I carried bitterness inside me like a stone pressed beneath my tongue.
Yet time is a patient sculptor. Even stones wear down.
It was many seasons later when I conceived again. I felt the stirring before I dared to acknowledge it—the flutter of possibility, the faint drumbeat of hope against the walls of my womb. This child felt different. Part of me feared that difference. Part of me cradled it like a fragile ember.
When Solomon was born, the world seemed to pause. His cry was strong; his skin glowed warm; his eyes opened wide, as though he had come knowing something the rest of us had forgotten. The midwives smiled this time—genuine smiles, not the polite masks worn for doomed children. I held him close. David entered, and when he saw the child, something softened in him that I had not seen in years. A gentleness returned—tentative, hesitant, like a man touching fire in winter.
"God has shown mercy," he said, and for the first time since I had entered the palace, his words did not sting.
The bitterness in me did not dissolve overnight. But Solomon's presence made the stone in my heart crack, just a little. Through the fracture, something like light seeped in. Time flowed around us, reshaping the palace, reshaping the nation, reshaping me. David aged—first slowly, then all at once. His hair grayed. His steps were shortened. His gaze grew contemplative, as though he carried ghosts of his own.
Solomon grew in wisdom and beauty. He absorbed knowledge as other children absorbed sunlight. Rabbis leaned forward when he spoke. Courtiers paused to listen. Even the proudest officials felt disarmed by his calm. Sometimes, I watched David watching Solomon. And in David's eyes, I finally saw something that healed a small corner of my soul—
not desire, not regret, but reverence. He knew that Solomon was not only his child. Solomon was a promise. A thread woven through grief, mercy, and mystery.
I do not know when people began calling me "Lady Bathsheba," or when my voice started to matter in decisions whispered behind palace curtains. It was not sudden. It was not something I sought. Influence grows, sometimes, the way vines grow—out of need, out of proximity, out of resilience.
I learned how to read the faces of advisors.
I learned how to discern truth from flattery.
I learned when to speak and when silence was sharper than speech.
I was no longer the trembling woman summoned from her courtyard. I was no longer the widow mourning her righteous husband. I was no longer the mother of a lost child. Yet I was all these things too. Life had not healed me; it had transformed me.
From victim to matriarch.
From object to instrument.
From sorrow to purpose.
When David's strength finally waned, the palace buzzed like a hornet's nest. Many sought the throne for themselves. Whispers multiplied—plots brewing like storms behind closed doors.
I stepped into the fray.
Not because I craved power.
Not because I wished to rewrite my own story.
But because I knew who Solomon was meant to be.
Nathan, the prophet knew too. His words reached me like wind through an open window: "You must act, Bathsheba." And I did.
I entered the king's chamber. I reminded David of the promise he had once made in the quiet of our shared grief—that Solomon would be king after him. The promise he made when the memory of our first child still lay warm on our hearts. David listened. And the promise was fulfilled.
Solomon ascended the throne. I stood at his right hand, not as a victim or a possession, but as a witness to the strange alchemy of God—how He turns ashes into foundations, how He weaves broken stories into lineage.
Now age has settled around my bones like a familiar shawl. My hair has silvered. My hands bear the maps of time. I move slowly, but my mind remains sharp—sharper than it ever was in youth.
When I stand beside Solomon's throne, people bow not merely because of him, but because of me—Bathsheba, the king's mother. The matriarch of a dynasty. The woman whose name is spoken with respect in the courts of nations. Yet in quiet moments, I walk alone to the balcony. From there, I see the roofs of the old city. The sun paints them gold. The wind carries the faint smell of water from distant courtyards. And I remember.
I remember a young woman kneeling beside a basin, bathing in the innocence of routine.
I remember a gaze from a rooftop that changed everything.
I remember a husband who deserved better than the world gave him.
I remember a child whose life flickered too briefly.
I remember another child—the one who grew to be the wisest king of Israel.
Memory is both wound and balm.
I look toward the rooftop where my story fractured. I do not pray for forgiveness; forgiveness belongs to God, and He gives as He wills. Instead, I whisper a prayer for remembrance.
"Let none forget the cost," I murmur into the wind.
"Let none forget the woman behind the crown."
"Let none forget the water, the roof, the grave, and the throne."
For history remembers kings.
But I—I remember the woman I once was.
And I am still her.