Mistress of Mourning (5 page)

“I…I understand,” was all I could manage. I had wanted to keen and tear my hair when my children died, just the way my mother had when she learned her two young sons were missing in the Tower. Yet now I, daughter, sister, and wife of a king, almost pulled this stranger into my arms to comfort her when I was desperate for that very thing. My lord was strong and stoic in his mourning, and so I pretended to be also. But I was truly tormented by the deaths of my two children. Even worse, I vowed by the holy Virgin, I was smitten to the depths of my soul by something else. I
feared the Lord High God was punishing me for the loss of two other royal children I mayhap could have saved, my beloved brothers, surely murdered, and by whom? I had secretly spent the last ten years trying to find out, and I would yet do anything I must to discover who had killed them.

Mistress Varina Westcott

As I gaped at the queen—she too fought back tears—I realized what she wanted from me. Surely I had been summoned not to carve just cherubs or angels in candles for her, but candles with the faces of her two deceased little children. Bless our queen, for she had lost two, not one, as I had. Perhaps in doing this service for her, I could find solace for my own loss. Indeed, Edmund was a common name, but it had taken me by surprise to realize that I’d had sons Arthur and Edmund too, named, of course, as was the practice, for members of the royal family. Feeling the fool for exploding in tears, I carefully examined the two oval, gold-framed miniature paintings she had handed me, neither longer than the span of my hand.

“Of course, you have not the profiles here,” the queen said as she bent her head close to them too. “But I could describe those, or perhaps a glimpse of my other children would help, for my Mary’s nose is much like Elizabeth’s, and Henry’s is similar to Edmund’s, the chin too.”

A floral scent wafted from the veil that hung from her gabled headdress beset with jewels winking in the spill of early-morning light. I could see the desperation, the wretchedness she sought to hide, in her pale blue eyes and the tiny
crow’s-feet that perched at their corners. She was a blond, roses-and-cream beauty, but this close I could see that her mouth, lush as a Cupid’s bow, was drawn together like tight purse strings. I believe she was in the midpoint of her fourth decade, but she looked worn and older. Could not the approaching nuptials of her firstborn son and the health of her three living children help to allay her grief?

“Yes,” I told her, “I believe I could carve such candles for you, with your help. Of course, I could not presume to take those portraits away with me to work at my sh—”

“No. No—I was hoping you could work here at least part of each day. We can arrange for you to be escorted to and from the palace, of course. Nicholas Sutton is entirely trustworthy, discreet, and loyal. I have a quiet work chamber for you nearby, even much fine, expensive beeswax laid aside. The thing is,” she said, her voice such a whisper now I almost had to read her lips, “what I wish to have—to reward you well for—is not candles but life-size effigies of the children. Not for their tombs in the abbey, but for myself alone. There is more, but I would show you. Not here, but in the room I have prepared for your work, if you will come to see.”

If
I would come? I thought, when this woman could merely command me. “I am at your service,” I said again.

To my surprise, Her Majesty led me not out the door through which I had entered her suite of rooms, but through one hidden by a large, woven arras, one with a scene of the Virgin cradling the crucified Christ beneath the cross. We traversed a short corridor glowing from a torch toward a small, open doorway beyond.

My pulse began to pound. The walls here were blocks of heavy, thick stone. Two torches burned low athwart a doorway at the end of the hall. I could see that within the well-lit chamber beyond, the ceiling was low, the walls close. She entered, but I hung back. At least the room, perhaps twelve feet by ten, had a second, small wooden door in one corner, and I yearned to flee through it. Stiff armed, I braced myself in the doorway. Sweat beads leaped out on my forehead. I could hear my heart hammering. I feared the entire palace would crash down around me, shutting me in forever.

“I—I am bothered by small, enclosed places,” I gasped out, hoping I did not sound like a coward, not to this queen who had spent years of her young life enclosed in sanctuary or held against her will during the civil war.

“Then we can keep this far door open, the one you stand in too,” she said, and grasped my hand as if she were an intimate friend, a sister. “You see,” she said, pointing with her free hand, “four blocks of fine wax for faces and hands, and I shall take care of the clothing, stuffed bodies, the hair—I shall cut my own hair for a perfect match.”

“F-four?” I stammered, honored but horrified by what she expected. Did she want two effigies of her lost children, or extra ones made lest she lose more? There was something terribly amiss here that I could not quite fathom.

“Two for my lost children—and two for my murdered royal brothers. I must have them all with me, sacred, safe at least this way, since I could not save their lives. I shall guide you on the likenesses of my poor lost brothers: Edward, who was our rightful king, and little Richard, Duke of York, who
should have reigned if aught befell his older brother. And all this must be a secret between us; swear it!”

Wide-eyed, with my back against the solid stone, I could only nod. Even should she bestow honor and fortune on me, by all the saints, what had I gotten myself into? A chill snaked up my spine, for she wanted much more than I could create with a simple candle. Was our dear queen—was I—devoted or demented?

B
undled in my robe with warm wool mules on my feet, I paced my bedroom that night. I could not believe my good fortune—or was it to be misfortune? Could I abide laboring long in that chamber like a tomb wherein would lie the waxen forms of four dead children?

And did I have the skills? What if my work did not please the queen? I had no doubt I could carve the faces, the hands too, but they must not remain the waxen hue of death. Elizabeth of York wanted sleeping figures on beds, not corpses on biers. I still had my father’s handwritten herbal of what roots could stain wax to lifelike shades. Although I had watched him tint wax, I had never tried so much as a colored candle, other than the black ones we sold daily for funerals. Or I could arrange for someone else to paint my wax to lifelike likeness. Perhaps the Italian artist
Signor
Firenze was a possibility I could broach with the queen. Then too, Christopher’s chandlery made the best wax for sealing letters, and
he added colored powders mixed with oil to molten mixtures to create reddish hues. It could be that just a touch of his vermilion would turn that fine
cera bianca
the queen had bought into a healthier flesh hue. And how was I to keep all this from my family and friends—and from Christopher? I must cobble up some sort of excuse, one even those closest to me would credit.

When I heard the midnight bells toll from St. Mary Abchurch and St. Swithin’s, I blew out my candle and made myself lie down in bed. I drew the bed curtains tight against drafts, pulled little Edmund’s ring-toss rope and ball to me, and stared up at the dark underside of the tester while all the queen had said plodded through my mind again…of the loss of her dear daughter and son.… I saw my Edmund’s face.… I must not carve my own child’s countenance for the queen.

And then her two young brothers, the so-called lost princes in the Tower. Their uncle Richard, Duke of Gloucester, brother to King Edward IV, had put them there supposedly for safekeeping after their royal father died. The true heir, King Edward V, was but twelve then. Soon Gloucester had himself named king as Richard III, claiming the boys to be illegitimate, since their father had supposedly signed a marriage precontract with another woman before he wed their mother.

The boys’ mother, the widowed queen, and their sister, the current queen, had fled to sanctuary at Westminster Abbey after Edward V had been taken to the Tower. Our present queen was the eldest child and a protective sister to
the rest of the brood, a spate of sisters and the other son who was still with them, Richard, Duke of York. But King Richard’s councilors and bishops had coerced the royal family to allow the younger prince to join his brother in the Tower as a companion.

Then disaster, the mystery of our age. Both boys simply disappeared. Rumors ran rampant, claiming their uncle Richard had them dispatched to clear his way to the throne. Yet enemies of Henry Tudor, the current king Henry VII—and there were still many, despite his God-given victory at Bosworth Field over King Richard—whispered that Henry Tudor had ordered the boys murdered, so that they did not stand in his way. He wed the boys’ sister to unite the warring factions of Lancaster and York, and that was that for the lost princes. But obviously it was not the end for Her Majesty. Or now, for me either.

Queen Elizabeth of York

After everyone in the palace had quieted—I could hear my ladies’ slow, even breathing from their trundle beds across the room—I arose and wrapped a cloak about my night rail. Like a barefoot penitent, I went in the darkness toward the small stone room I would henceforth think of as another bedchamber. As the arras whispered closed behind me, I shuddered to think what would happen if I were discovered missing and my ladies set up a hue and cry and called for the king. How I wished that such a panic and search had ensued when my brothers had disappeared from the Tower. But for
days no one had so much as said that they were missing. By that time, we knew they were gone for good—that is, gone by someone’s murderous hand.

I kept a single, huge candle burning in this chamber, with the wax blocks laid out on boards that I would later transform into three small beds and a cradle. I regretted that this was once a garderobe with a chute that dropped human refuse to the Thames before this new era of close stools replaced mere chamber pots. But, saying I would use it for a private chapel that no one else was to enter, I’d had the chute blocked and the walls scrubbed and a back entrance hewn through from the servants’ hall. That way the wax woman and her guard—I should use Nicholas Sutton, for he was eager to earn his way back into our good graces—should enter and depart. Poor Nicholas, for, like others, his people had cast their fortunes with the losing side in the war, and I knew he was ambitious to make amends and rebuild his family’s future.

I stroked one of the blocks of fine beeswax, smuggled in by some contact in the countryside Nicholas had found for me. Smooth as a child’s cheek, which, mayhap it would become. I prayed she was good, Varina Westcott. I knew her chandlery produced excellent wax-impregnated cloths for winding sheets and smooth, smokeless votive candles she could carve so cleverly that, gazing upon the one I was given, I could almost hear that angel sing.

In this private sanctuary my dear ones would rest where I could guard them…but again I saw my brother Richard on that last day. In danger of our lives with our father dead and the kingdom in chaos, we had sneaked into sanctuary in
the abbey with our jewelry in bedsheets. Everything had gone down, down from there. Only two sons among us seven daughters, precious sons who should have had the throne. The eldest boy, Prince Edward, proclaimed the new king, had been brought back from Ludlow Castle in Wales and put in the Tower by Uncle Richard—for his protection, it was said. Alack the day! Lies, all lies. We huddled in fear, all of us women—Mother, me, my sisters—around young Richard when they came for him, saying he should join his brother, be his playfellow.

“I cannot let my last son leave my care,” my mother had insisted, her once lovely face gaunt and white as she faced the bishop and the guards our uncle had sent. “Bess, what shall I do? Whatever shall I do?” she whispered to me, for as the eldest child at age seventeen, I was the best she had for counselor and comforter in our isolation after Father’s death. “We cannot allow Richard to go too.”

“But they are right to say Edward will be lonely there,” I had argued. “We must keep his spirits up, for he is the rightful king. How it will cheer them to be together!”

Richard had pleaded too. “Yes, Mother, if you please, I want to go. I beg you, do not be afraid.” He had blond curls and was blue eyed like all of us children, the inheritance from both of our handsome parents. At age ten, of course, his voice had not changed. I could hear it yet, sweet, almost a piping sound as he said, “I will help Edward, protect him, study and play with him, and when he is released to rule, I will be at his side.”

“Bess, I cannot bear it,” Mother said, as if he had not spoken.

“We have been given the bishop’s word, Uncle Richard’s word,” I told her. “Should not the boys be together to comfort each other, even as you and I do for each other here?”

That decided it for her, I vow. More fool I to trust my uncle, to trust a man, especially one ravenous for power, especially one who had made himself, even as my husband later did, the king.