Mistress of Mourning

by Karen Harper

  “I was bitter toward everyone for years,” Nick went on, when I thought he would say no more. He sighed and slumped onto the bench with his back against the stone wall. “Bitter against my dear grandmother, with whom I lived in dire poverty after our ruination; against the Tudors, even when they took me in and gave me a chance to earn my way—my family’s way—back. Especially bitter against that devil Lovell. He deserted his men, and ’tis said—rumors on the wind, Varina—that he and his minions still work covertly in Europe and in England to overthrow the Tudors, that he remains a dyed-in-the-wool, pro–King Richard Yorkist. I am waiting for the day…”

  His voice trailed off, but it had been so menacing that I turned to stare at him again, my brush in the air. “I am waiting for the day,” he repeated, speaking through gritted teeth, hitting his fists upon spread knees, “when the king will hearken to my petitions and give me leave to hunt Lovell down like the damned dog he is!”

  Petitions? Was that what he’d been bending his blond head over for hours at a stretch? Such a thirst for revenge was outside the realm of my thoughts or understanding.

  “I owe revenge and restoration not only to those I lost but also to my grandmother,” he went on, his voice almost a whisper. “She yet lives in sad straits but for coin I send her. My family’s misplaced loyalty cost us our pride and property near Nottingham, and I mean to have both back—for myself and for her who reared me and has sacrificed so much. And who knows how many years she has left, and if I cannot…”

  We were both startled when a voice—the queen’s—said from the hallway, “I am waiting for that day too, and other retribution for certain heinous acts. Some say—you may have heard, Nicholas—that Francis Lovell could have been a party”—she put a hand on each side of the doorway as if to brace herself—“to the disappearance of my brothers, to help prop up his liege lord King Richard the Third.”

  Nick jumped to his feet, and I curtsied. “I did hear that about Lovell and his ilk, Your Majesty,” Nick said, rising from his bow. “But, of course, there have also been other names whispered in connection with that dire deed.”

  “Such as?” she demanded, stopping in midstride and rounding on him. He looked surprised at her vehemence.

  “It was said King Richard’s henchman, Sir James Tyrell, knew something of it,” Nick told her. “But he must have had his name cleared, since he was one of the few Yorkists pardoned and he now serves His Majesty. I know he’s been a loyal servant ever since, so I took it for rumor. I hear Tyrell’s still in France, guarding a fort in Calais for England.”

  “Yes, but I believe His Majesty has summoned him back for the royal wedding. Ah, we shall see—and I am pleased to see this beautiful carving.”

  The queen bent to peer closely at my work. I slanted Nick a glance and saw that he stood silent, his eyes narrowed, his lips pressed together as if to halt himself from saying more.

  Her Majesty glanced at the block of wax that I had been carving, and she said, her voice quiet, “We shall speak no more of these things today or in this joyous wedding season. Both of you, come with me. We shall visit the royal nursery, for my youngest, Mary, is at her lessons there, and Prince Henry, since his watchful grandmother is not here today, is with her.”

  “Prince Henry is blessed to have his grandmother near,” Nick said, but I saw he missed the royal frown sent his way for saying that, and I knew not why. I hastily removed my canvas work apron and, picking cooled wax from beneath my fingernails, fell in behind the queen. Nick followed, and I could only hope that Her Majesty had not overheard him claiming how bitter he was yet about his losses from his family’s stand against the Tudors.

  It seemed strange to walk the wide, adorned hallways and rooms of the palace proper, for Nick had always brought me in through the warrens of the servants’ realm. Two of the queen’s ladies trailed us, Sibil Wynn and Sarah Middleton. But the queen left everyone but me outside the guarded door as she led the way into a spacious, sunny room.

  Two ladies and a man, the latter evidently a tutor, leaped to their feet and genuflected to Her Majesty, as did a beautiful blond girl of about five years, no doubt the princess Mary, baby of the royal brood, and a tall, robust-looking redhead, who must be Prince Henry, around age ten. I curtsied to both children. While I stood back, during greetings and introductions—I as Mistress Varina Westcott, an artist—and hugs from the queen for her offspring, I observed both of the young, vibrant royal faces.

  Though I had seen Prince Arthur in procession through London’s streets, I had never beheld the second son, Henry, Duke of York. The two brothers seemed as different as night and day, the Prince of Wales, unfortunately, being the night. This boy emanated strength of body and character, whereas Arthur was so thin he seemed frail. The little princess was one of the prettiest children I had ever seen.

  “Mistress Westcott is an artist who works in wax,” the queen told them. “She carves angel faces in candles, and I believe I shall have her create ones with my well-favored and well-behaved children, so I wanted her to see you. I shall expect you to act like perfect angels hereafter,” she added with a little laugh that seemed to light the room even more.

  “On my candle,” Mary piped up with a wide grin that flaunted her loss of baby teeth, “I should like to be smiling, but not with the gaps in my mouth showing, if you please, mistress.”

  “And,” Henry said, his voice steady and sure, “I would like to be ahorse and—”

  “But you are a prince and not a horse,” his little sister interrupted.

  “No, poppet,” he said with a frown that silenced her, “sitting on a horse in my first set of armor. Mistress Westcott, make it a tall candle that will burn with a big flame—if you please,” he added with a glance at his mother’s face. But the order definitely was to me. “And, my lady mother,” he added, hands on his hips, “I think it unfair that Father and Arthur went hunting without me, even if Arthur is the bridegroom and will be king someday!”

  I kept quiet but observed each child intently, noses, chins—and personality and behavior. If I really were to carve candles of these two, Mary’s would be sweetly scented and Henry’s would be boldly burning at both ends.

  “Signora, bene, bene!” Roberto Firenze, the Italian painter, told me again, this time as I was finally allowed to move from the pose I had been holding for far too long in the upstairs solar of Christopher’s fine house.

  The artist was most adamant about catching me in the late-afternoon light. So far I was not only intrigued by his rendering of me from the tip of my head to my hips, but also enchanted. Although he did not ask that I kneel, I was doing so in the painted sketch he’d done so far. There I was upon a wreath of pretty posies with a garland in my hand—none of the beautiful blooms were actually present in this room—with my hair flowing free down my back and my face turned slightly to the right. It felt strange to pose without a widow’s cover over my hair, as if I were a maiden or a bride again. With his magical oil paints, in place of the green gown I actually wore he had created a tight-sleeved gown of cloth of gold lined with ermine, the fur of royalty. By his talented hand I was not only a virgin again but also a queen! And more than that, for he told me that many who saw the portrait would think of the blessed Madonna.

  Christopher, however, was beginning to remind me of Her Majesty, in that he darted in and out of the room to study the results. I was hoping to be left alone with the man he called Maestro, so I could question him about painting or coloring wax. Finally, here was my chance, for Christopher had made a grand exit to oversee the packing of crates of candles to be sent to three places the Spanish princess was expected to stay on her journey toward London when she landed. With much ado, Christopher had twice announced the places to me and Signor Firenze: Dogmersfield in Hampshire, a royal manor in Berkshire, and Lambeth Palace across the Thames from London.

  As I sipped a glass of claret with the wiry, short artist, I said, “I wonder if you could give me some advice on either painting wax or co
loring it with paints. I’ve been looking over my father’s notes for such. I have happy memories of watching him prepare herbal dyes and then writing down his concoctions for him, but it is hardly the season to be finding such things as the fresh leaves of alder, saffron, or betony that I would need.”

  “Ah, si, I have painted wax figures in my native Firenze. The ones we spoke of before that your father saw on his journey, all those life-size wax effigies wigged and painted standing close to ze altar at the church of Orsanmichele, chiesa della santissima, many of the great family of Cosimo de’ Medici. Almost all of ze figures are men, signora, ze important men who want to buy their way to heaven. The power of seeing that, dead men yet standing, I cannot tell you, but that is why your papa tell you that and you remember, si, because he so impressed by ze waxworks. Did you ever hear of Caesar’s stab wounds?”

  I stopped drinking the red claret. “Caesar’s stab wounds? In a painting, you mean?”

  “Painted on a waxen effigy, is true, is true! After he was assassinated in ze senate chamber in Roma, his friends hired a wax artiste like yourself—only a man, I wager—to make Caesar’s exact form with all twenty-three bleeding wounds painted crimson. Put on display in ze public square, ze effigy create a riot with ze people. The Romani revolted and burned ze chamber where he was slain! Oh, ze power of art, of paint and wax!”

  “Yes, I know,” I said, trying to wipe the image of bloody wounds from my mind’s eye.

  “Oh, but you ask about painting and tinting wax,” he plunged on, his dark mustache bobbing with his words when he became excited. “Signora Varina, how you use paints to dye wax is leach out some oil from paint on parchment or cloth overnight, then mix the remnants with hot wax.”

  I nodded. If the bit of vermilion, larch, and oil Christopher had given me today didn’t work, I would try to buy some paint from this man. And if that was a lost cause, if I could only trust that Roberto Firenze would not talk too much and tell the queen’s secret, I would suggest to her that he paint her effigies. That is, if my work suited her. If I could create four children I had never seen, if everything I was trying to balance in secret, including my growing interest in Nick Sutton—if, if, if!—did not just all blow up in my face.

  CHAPTER THE FIFTH

  “Thank the Lord, you are here,” John Barker said the moment I entered the shop where the two barber-surgeons were bent over, embalming a corpse. John was a skilled embalmer; he had tended to both Will’s and Edmund’s bodies. “’Tis bad business,” he went on, “a death just before all the royal wedding festivities. And I was expecting your sister with the wax cloth.”

  Thomas Merridew, a wealthy haberdasher, had died suddenly the day before the Spanish princess was to make her grand entry into London. I could hear muted sobs and wailing from the upper floor of the Merridew house. Even his shop, where they had laid him out on the counter for embalming, was draped in black cloth.

  “You might know,” John went on, “that his family and guild will have to postpone his burial until after the wedding three days hence. Death may abide for no man, but the king has decreed that funerals and grieving are not welcome now, and what this king decrees, he gets,” he said with a small shudder. His helper, another barber-surgeon whose name I could not recall, did not speak a word or look up from his task of dressing the body.

  Indeed, the city was shivering with excitement as well as a biting November wind. My sister, Maud, usually delivered the wax-impregnated shrouds to the Worshipful Company of Barber-surgeons, the guild that prepared corpses for the grave and of which John Barker was an influential member, but Maud was ailing with pain from her monthly menses. And, sad to say, ailing because once again she had not conceived a child.

  Today was Thursday, November the eleventh, and the royal wedding would be on the fourteenth. This was also the first day in weeks, but for the Sabbaths, that I had not spent hours at the palace, working on the effigies for the queen. I was grateful for the break, but truth be told, I missed Nick.

  “Will you help us wrap him, then?” Master Barker asked as I stepped closer.

  I was not squeamish around a dead body, for I had seen many in various stages of preparation for the grave, but I did not wish to spend much time at this task today. I was to meet Christopher and several other chandlers at St. Paul’s to help oversee the positioning of the two hundred and twenty tall tapers for Princess Catherine’s thanksgiving service. If we were to have sunshine then, the light would be suitable inside the vast stone cathedral, but if it were cloudy like today, we must have banks and boards of candles, let alone the ones on the altar.

  I carefully unrolled the three ells of Holland cloth that we had soaked in wax at the chandlery. It clung to the corpse, kept any fluids in, and, at least people liked to think, it kept the mold and cold of the grave out. It took real skill to imbue the wheat-hued flax with just enough wax at the right temperature, to stretch it straight until it dried, and then to store it so it would not crack.

  As they rolled and lifted the body, I wrapped and tucked the cloth around it, fitting it snugly, keeping the arms to the torso and the legs together, tending carefully to the corpse’s head. Some families wanted the faces kept unwrapped until the coffin was closed, but farewells were best said before embalming.

  I was grateful the barber-surgeons had done their work before I came today, for they were not only healers of the ailing through bleedings and cuttings. Unless it was plague times when many died, or even during the sweat disease such as had carried off my family, each body buried in the city must be eviscerated and the soft organs of the abdomen and chest removed. Sometimes the organs were buried with the body in an urn. In the case of important people, the organs might be interred elsewhere.

  The corpse was washed inside and out and often stuffed with herbs and spices, depending on the wealth of the family. Major blood vessels might be seared before the body was wrapped in layers of our waxed cloth, most oft called cerements, for the Latin word cera meant wax.

  Even today, by the saints, this task brought back too many bad memories, so I was grateful Maud had lately taken it on. With Will’s and Gil’s help, I had wrapped my parents’ and brother’s bodies; Gil and Maud had not let me help with Will’s. But Edmund’s little frame—I had wrapped Edmund and then held him in my arms until they pulled him away.…

  “The other bad thing is,” John Barker was saying—he ever looked for problems—“that Their Majesties plan to view the princess’s passing by with her entourage tomorrow from the window of the haberdasher William Geoffrey in Cheapside, and he’s the one who will head this man’s burial procession. Wrap him good now, because he’s going to have to wait for burial at least until the day after the wedding, and then mayhap in secret, since there are to be jousts and revels at Westminster for several days, and all that following the banquet at Baynard’s Castle. Physicians and barber-surgeons are to stand at the ready lest any knights are hurt at the tilt rail.”

  I said naught about those festivities, though Nick had told me much of them and had promised I might have a glimpse. I accepted my payment from John and Clement—yes, that’s right; that was his name—and took my leave. This house was not far from Walbrook, which was hard by St. Mary Abchurch, where my family was buried. I had visited their graves frequently after each funeral, then less often, the same with even Will’s and Edmund’s, because I could not bear the pain. But today I would go, then hie myself to St. Paul’s.

  My parish church was situated on a slight rise in the southwest section of Walbrook Ward. With its turfy graveyard curled around it on three sides, the old gray stone building abutted Abchurch Lane and Candlewick Street. My people were buried on the south side, for by tradition the north was the domain of the devil, the burial site for unbaptized infants, suicides, and criminals. Tall, thick yews hunched over the mossy stones, for those trees were evergreens, to remind us of eternal life, and their red berries to recall Christ’s blood shed for us. I passed through the stone wall, using the lych-gate
with its roof-covered seats where the bearers of coffins oft rested out of foul weather.

  The gate creaked, even as I closed it carefully. Though I had not been aware of him before, I saw a man I did not recognize coming close behind me. He nodded, entered also, and, with his hooded black cloak flapping in the fitful breeze and snagging on his sword, he walked around the church to the north side. No one else was in sight in the graveyard, though it was midmorn and others passed by, so I had no fear.

  I slowly approached the single, small headstone that marked the Westcott plot: WCOTT, it read, for many of the smaller stones had shortenings of the names. The one marking the Waxman graves where my parents and brother lay had praying hands and WXMN. In faith, I supposed it hardly mattered how earthly records read, for human bones might lie here, but their spirits had long since flown away.

  So why could I not let Edmund go from my thoughts? I agonized as I knelt by his grave. And why was Her Majesty yet haunted by her losses, especially those of her brothers who died long ago? Though if they were indeed murdered, of course, she could yet seek justice or revenge.

  Despite the past summer season, the grassy turf above my child’s coffin had not yet regrown. I had thought that carving the queen’s effigies of her children had helped me to pass beyond grieving, but kneeling there, I felt the crushing weight of loss again. How I wished I had Nick to listen to or talk to now—just to know that he was near and—

  “I beg your pardon, mistress, but you seem familiar with this area.”

  I sucked in a sharp breath, then steadied myself and rose quickly to my feet. It was he who had come in the gate behind me, and I had not heard a sound of his approach.