Mistress of Mourning

by Karen Harper

  But how I had yearned to be permitted to donate votives for the guild’s secret, prestigious religious fraternity that worshiped in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral, below the very site of the mass to follow the royal wedding. Everyone knew a bounty of blessing befell anyone who contributed to the Guild of the Holy Name of Jesus. Christopher had been holding it over my head that if I would but accept the betrothal ring that weighed down my scales right before my nose, I could, through him, donate alms and benevolences in support of the rites of that guild.

  “I’m afraid,” I said to him, “that I told Her Majesty a bit of a lie. In speaking to her about the wedding at St. Paul’s—and, of course, she knew our—your—guild is furnishing candles for that—I implied that I also made candles and gave alms for the Holy Name guild that met in the crypt there.”

  “Oh…ah, yes. I could care for that—you could be included. And why not suggest to her that the guild provide more candles for the prince and princess’s gifts? I hear they will go to live at Ludlow Castle in Wales, where he had been before as Prince of Wales. Rainy, dreary, I hear—much light needed. Tell her—or I could go with you to suggest it—we could contribute candles for their Welsh castle. And, yes, yes, I repeat, I will see to it that your chandlery can donate to the secret rites of the Holy Name.”

  “She has given me a room in which to work at the palace, but she is very busy and I see her seldom. I can promise, though, to speak to her on the guild’s behalf. I’m to come alone to the palace, though. And word about my carving there is not to go beyond the guild’s governors.”

  “God as my judge, I can see to that. But the wax for it. Do you have enough good wax for the extra candles? Can I be of help there?”

  “I do not know her source, but she has provided cera bianca for me. If it is not too much to ask, could you donate a bit of the vermilion you use to color sealing wax?”

  “Red candles? Perhaps a Spanish custom, eh? Of course. You’ll need a bit of Venice turpentine for the mix too. It’s my chandlery’s secret yellow-green resinous extract from larch trees. It’s precious, but then so is this task you have been given—and so are you to me.”

  He picked up the ruby ring, and the scales bounced back to their balanced position. For once, I felt a bit of power over him. I was not so in thrall to his wishes.

  “A partnership in all ways, my love?” he asked, extending the ring to me across the counter.

  “I cannot promise that now,” I said, no doubt a bit too hastily. Then, mayhap because all this had gone to my head, I added, “I hope the guild has decided on the distribution and pricing of the angel candles, since the queen owns and values one that brought me to her attention.”

  “Ah—oh, yes. But now that we can tell buyers that the queen quite favors that candle, I’m sure the guild’s governors have set the price too low, so I will let you know of that soon. At close range, is our queen as beautiful as she looks from afar?”

  “Beautiful and kind. A noble woman with deep loyalties beneath the crown and gowns and trappings of her power.”

  “I want you to wear this ring to the palace,” he insisted, when I had hoped he was going to put it back on his own hand. “Not a betrothal ring then, but a promise of partnership.”

  “I can promise only that I will try to make you and the guild proud. And if you send Signor Firenze to me at this time on the morrow, I will be pleased to either sit for him or set a time to do so.”

  “I’ve arranged for him to paint you at my house, before that fine new oriole window for which I paid a pretty penny—lots of late-afternoon sun. As for angel candles, your angelic face, and our new motto of ‘Truth Is Light’—how blessed I am to be a part of all this and in your life!”

  It did prick my conscience again that truth and light were not things I had clung to today. Rather the old motto, “Loyalty Binds Me,” fit better—and that had been the one suggested by our former king, who might have dispatched Her Majesty’s brothers.

  I cleared my throat. I decided I had argued and won enough today and would forgo complaining about how Christopher had cleverly maneuvered me to sit for the portrait at his house.

  “I know,” I told him, “that I am blessed to have this trust of the queen, as well as your support in my sitting for the guild’s new coat of arms.”

  “I swear you will be in my arms too, and soon,” he vowed as he took his leave, backing a few steps toward the door first, as if I were the queen herself. I reckoned he could not wait to rush to the other guild governors with his news.

  Somehow his play on words pleased me not half so much as did Nick Sutton’s. I knew I would have to confess my lies to the priest before I dared to place one candle on the altar of the Holy Name of Jesus, our savior from Satan’s wiles. Yet how sweet it was that the queen’s name had saved me, for now at least, from Christopher’s demands.

  CHAPTER THE FOURTH

  Queen Elizabeth of York

  At midmorn, my husband summoned me to his withdrawing chamber. I could but pray nothing was amiss with the wedding preparations or the elaborate plans for the triumphal entry of Arthur’s bride into London. And, by the Virgin’s veil, I hoped there were not more storms to keep the princess from our shores, for she had been forced once to return to Spain after setting out, and we had not yet been informed of her safe landing.

  I nodded and smiled to curtsying and bowing courtiers clustered in the presence chamber. My lord’s councilors were huddled here, so my stomach twisted tighter. Ever since the troubles in my father’s reign, when he was once even driven from England and had to fight his way back, I dreaded dangerous dynastic news.

  In the sixteen years my lord husband had sat upon the throne, two insurrections and much murmuring had proved there was yet opposition to the house of Tudor after years of Plantagenet rule. Some who had been defeated at Bosworth Field had not given up the fight, and we feared that after several years of silence from those who had escaped capture, something dreadful was brewing. We knew full well we still had enemies lurking at home and abroad who would go to great lengths to topple the Tudor throne.

  So my lord husband’s claim to the kingdom must be shored up by continued vigilance and, however tight the purse strings, by a grand show of public events such as this coming wedding. I’d been praying for hours on my knees that, especially with the open-air wedding and parades, naught would befall any of us.

  I’d also preferred, since our Arthur was but fifteen and his Spanish bride barely a year older, that the marriage or at least their living together be delayed. But that could not be. We needed the security of many heirs, and England needed every national foreign friendship we could forge.

  The yeomen guards swept open the double doors for me, and, leaving my ladies behind, I entered. To my delight, Henry had plucked Arthur from his strenuous regimen of studies. They sat together, both behind the large writing table. Arthur’s face, as ever, lit to see me, and he stood to bow and then came to me for a hug. Ah, how much he resembled my father, whom the people had so loved. I held him to me one moment too long. He would soon be a married man—indeed, he had already been wed by proxy.

  Arthur had been born before the proper time, just eight months after our marriage. I suppose the tongues of those who deemed Henry Tudor a usurping blackguard wagged on that, though it was the truth that our heir arrived early, not that we bedded before our vows. My firstborn had ever been a bit frail, and oft looked either too pale and solemn or too rosy-cheeked and feverish, like now, but I knew he was excited by his coming nuptials. I ever carried in my small pomander a copy of the sweet letter he had written to his future bride, because it always bucked me up. In a world where royal marriages had naught to do with love, I prayed that the two of them would find great affection for each other and not just duty and resignation.

  “Good day, my dear lord,” I greeted the king as he too came around the table. At age forty-four, he was nine years older than I. Lean, gaunt, and tall, he had to bend to kiss my cheek. His prominent
nose dominated his small mouth and narrow, gray eyes. He’d taken to wearing day caps, since his once-reddish hair was graying and thinning. Even in our most intimate moments, he had ever seemed guarded and watchful. But he hid an aggressive nature; he was prepared to keep his lofty place by pouncing on his prey and tearing it limb from limb if he must. Still, he had ever been good and kind to me. We were loyal and loving to each other for our children’s and the kingdom’s sake and not only for our own.

  “My dearest, we wanted you to know that when we hear the Infanta has safely arrived on our shores, we—Arthur and the council too—intend to greet her,” His Majesty informed me, and Arthur nodded.

  “But we have written Ferdinand and Isabella that we would receive her and her entourage here in our capital,” I reminded him.

  “And so we shall. But we both want a good look at her, to be certain she is all they say. We shall trust other kingdoms only to a point, eh, Arthur?”

  “Trust but verify,” the boy insisted, and I wondered whether he’d heard that from his brilliant tutors or at his father’s knee. No one said more for a moment, as Arthur coughed into his hand and then his handkerchief. He was ever prone to suffer from drafts.

  “But,” I said when Arthur had recovered, “it could dismay the princess to have all of you suddenly riding in, and I hear she goes veiled in public.” Actually, I did not want Arthur riding out in cold weather or to be out where he and the king could be attacked by some lurking enemy. “Will you snatch away her veil and examine her like a new horse or a book—even inside its cover?” I argued.

  “You’ll not gainsay us on this, my dear,” the king said. “Then we will return to London to await her arrival, but I must be certain this is the woman to bear our name and our grandchildren. We are taking a full contingent of courtiers and guards. I just thought you should know, that’s all.” He kissed me on the other cheek, as if that were my cue to leave.

  “I do long to see her, Mother,” Arthur put in. “And Father and I are going hunting this morn to make the lagging time hie itself apace.”

  I knew better than to protest that too. I nodded and hugged him again, even though the king had warned me not to coddle Arthur. Henry, our second son, liked my kisses and cuddling too; I know he did. Well, to have a mother as formidable as did my husband—she yet ruled the domestic roost here at the palace. I could see why my lord was not used to my being sweet and soft to my sons. My husband’s father had died before his birth, and he had been mostly reared by his beloved, stern uncle Jasper Tudor. So when his mother, then remarried to the powerful Lord Stanley, came back into his life to support his claim to the throne, he tried to make up for years of separation by giving her too much power over my own family. Or so it seemed to me. Though I never said so, I vowed my mother-in-law was a demanding, strident she-wolf even now.

  My son and husband bade me farewell again and went off in a flurry of talk about shooting roebucks. I could hear the men of the court clattering behind them across the oaken floors to mount their horses in the courtyard. Bought like a new horse or a book—my own words rang in my ears. I glanced down at my lord’s writing table and saw that a book of household expenses lay open there. He had again been toting up sums, records, numbers. How much my own father had loved books, but ones with stories and fables. The only fiction Henry Tudor favored was about Welsh kings of his own heritage, or of King Arthur, for whom he had named our heir.

  I sighed and gazed out the window, which was half covered with thick ivy now gone bloodred in its autumn hue. One of the happiest days of my young life was when my sire, the king, took me on his big horse to the new printing shop of William Caxton in the city. People cheered us all the way. Then there were no worries of assassins or revolts. At the shop, Caxton showed us how a book could be reproduced in many copies by a big stamping machine without one stroke of a man’s pen. My lord father bought two books that day, and I cradled them to me in the big saddle with his arm around me as we rode back to the palace, I so proud to be his child, his beloved firstborn, though I knew I was a female and would never rule. We could not wait to show our treasures to my mother, the beautiful Elizabeth Woodville, whom he had chosen for love and not for power.

  I shook my head to clear my thoughts and started back for my own apartments. Four of my ladies fell in behind me, chattering about the coming wedding. When we reached my privy apartments, I bade them stay at their embroidery frames in my withdrawing room, saying I wanted to read and pray alone. That was true and, as I closed them out of my bedchamber, I leaned against the door and took out Arthur’s letter, which he had written over two years ago to Princess Catherine. He had given me a copy of it, asking me to look it over for “proper wording to show my respect and love.”

  It was addressed to “my dearest spouse,” for he had written it after their proxy marriage, and once that was accomplished, only the physical consummation of their bodies was needed to complete the contract. He wrote at first that he fancied he embraced her, though she was then still living at the fabled Moorish palace called the Alhambra in Spain.

  My favorite part of the epistle read: I cannot tell you what an earnest desire I feel to see Your Highness, and how vexatious to me is this procrastination about your coming. Let it be hastened, that the love conceived between us and the wished-for joys may reap their proper fruit. Their proper fruit, I thought, from the young woman with the fertile pomegranate for her personal badge. Their proper fruit, like Henry and my own sons, like my two lost brothers had been to my parents.

  I stuffed the letter back in my silken pomander. I must wipe my tears and blow my nose, and then I would call upon the wax woman and my stalwart Nick in my hidden carving chamber. With the king away and my mother-in-law keeping a vigil today in the abbey with our daughter, her namesake, Margaret, praying for the coming safe arrival of the Spanish princess, it would be a good time to introduce Varina Westcott to my clever Henry and my little Mary.

  Mistress Varina Westcott

  “So, both Her Majesty and I have losses to mourn,” I told Nick as I brushed on melted wax to a make delicate raised eyebrow for the effigy of Princess Elizabeth, eyebrows I would have to either dye and fuse or have someone paint. Named for her mother and grandmother, the young child had emerged from beneath my knives and smoothing spoons—slender shoulders, neck, now her face.

  Despite the heaviness of this mazelike palace and the sadness that hung in this small stone chamber, the loss of my Edmund was somehow eased by my work, and I had shared that with Nick. Tears clumped my eyelashes together and blurred my vision as I had told him about my son’s death. Indeed, I would not have been here had not the queen lost children too. Misery loves company, the old saying went, but it was more than that. Despite the chasms in gender and rank, I had found a commonality of heart between Her Majesty and me.

  “Though I have no children, I too have lost loved ones to cruel fates,” Nick said suddenly, when I thought he might shift the subject. “My father and uncle died opposing this king at Bosworth Field, and my older brother died in the Battle of Stoke.”

  “The Battle of Stoke?” I repeated, feeling the fool that I could not place that event. So—this man had suffered too. He’d been watching me and talking more today. Mayhap it was my telling him of my deepest wound that had made him share the same.

  “Yes, Stoke,” he said. “Two years after this king took the crown at Bosworth Field, Stoke was fought in June of 1487 in Nottinghamshire near my ancestral home. Do you remember hearing of the uprising in favor of a young pretender, Lambert Simnel? Tudor enemies were trying to pass him off as Richard, one of the princes in the Tower, saying the two boys had not been killed but rather escaped.”

  I had walked several steps toward Nick in the small chamber. I could see his nostrils flare in repressed anger and the pulse beating at the side of his throat. I swayed slightly toward him before I caught myself and stepped back, but how I yearned to put my arms around him.

  “I warrant,” I said, my voice catch
ing, “that I was too young to remember that.”

  “Then let me tell you how it was,” he said, his voice crisp and cold. “At the Battle of Bosworth Field, where my father and uncle died fighting against this king’s forces, their commander, Francis, Lord Lovell, simply disappeared. The next year, Lovell led a poorly organized revolt which was put down, and again he escaped. The next year, Lovell led rebels against the royal forces at Stoke in a stronger effort, where my brother Stephen fought and died at his side, and still again Lovell disappeared. His body was never found, though I heard the king had men searching for it day and night among the wounded and fallen. Later, some said they saw Lovell fleeing the fighting by swimming the River Trent. Some said he escaped on horseback. Some said he vanished into thin air.”

  I gasped, and when Nick paused, frowning, I said, “Rumors. People always love rumors, the stranger, the better.”

  He seemed not to heed what I said, but plunged on. “Lovell became a damned legend—a heaven-rescued hero to some, a vengeful ghost to others. But where did he go? He hated the Tudors with a passion, so the fear is that he will try again, return again. Three times he’s evaded the king’s justice, and twice he left my family dead in his wake. But all that mattered to me after the Battle of Stoke was that my brother and hero, Stephen, was dead, and all the menfolk of my once proud family were gone—I alone survived.”

  I leaned forward and put my right hand over his clenched left fist. Lightning jolted up my arm as he opened that fist and clasped my hand. I almost winced at his strength. We seemed to hang suspended for a moment as his gaze, previously distant, as if he imagined the battle scenes, took me in. I vow I could feel his grip and devouring stare even when he let me go and I stepped back a bit from him.

  “I understand your grief and loss,” I said, my voice not my own. Our gazes stayed locked until, in the screaming silence between us, I forced myself back to my task. I had to continually dip my small horsehair brush into heated wax set in a dish over the copper kettle on the rack above the coals, because I could not trust my trembling hand to form the other waxen eyebrow. I could feel his eyes yet upon me, as hot as the coals.