Mistress of Mourning (40 page)

But blessedly, that—and Lovell—was all in our past now. Losses and tragedies too, I prayed.

“I always felt affection for your son,” Nick told me when we were alone in the solar of my home, “but what he went through because of Lovell—I feel even closer to him now. And to his mother.”

“I suppose the king will want to question both of us again.”

“I think he wants everything buried and forgotten. Jamie received word the court has moved to Windsor, and only I am sent for. Best you stay here at home with Arthur and your family and wait for my return. And then I intend to ask you to be my wife, and pray you will give me a hearty yes.”

“Oh, Nick!” I cried, throwing myself at him so hard he almost toppled backward. “But can you manage it? I used to fret that marriage would mean you can’t be advanced the way you want at court.”

“Better you worry whether wedding me will slow
your
rise to favor with Their Majesties,” he said with a smile. “But, all that aside, what I want is you. I am certain the king and queen will permit and sanction our union, so consider this a proposal of wedlock.”

“Wedlock—a sad word for such a blessed state, my Nick.”

“I hate to bring this up after all we’ve been through, but does the solar door lock from the inside?”

“Yes,” I told him. “Both the hall door and the backstairs door, and I don’t think anyone will break them down.”

We each shot the bolt on one door and met in the middle, all kisses and caresses. He threw four plump pillows on the floor from the chairs and we lay there, entwined and entranced.

Everything evil, everything frightening fled that night in our mutual trust and love. Arthur slept on; Maud and Gil left us alone, though the remnants of the night were much too short. Nick’s strong body hovered over mine like a protective roof against the terrors of the past. Not only had I come home, but my dear love, Nick Sutton, had too.

The king made Nick a knight—Sir Nick, I teasingly called him. ’Twas not unheard-of, a gentleman or knight wedding a merchant’s widow or daughter, to make her a gentlewoman. It truly mattered not to me whether I had been named a scullery maid, for I had Nick and Arthur safe. Then too, Gil received a gilt invitation to join the Worshipful Guild of Wax Chandlers, and Maud finally was with child. The only thing that hurt my happiness was that I was not summoned to make a waxen effigy of Prince Arthur. Later, I learned why.

Nick and I made another journey out of London, taking Arthur with us. We carried a deed and charter from the king—and a fat purse Their Majesties had given to both of us—so that Nick’s ancestral home could be returned to his family. We met his elderly but spry and sharp grandmother and saw that she was reinstated in the home she had missed so much. I liked her instantly, even though, when she looked at me a certain way and the light slanted on us in her refurbished solar, I swear she reminded me of old Fey.

Once we returned to city life, Nick was away when the court was at Windsor or Greenwich, but home each night when they were at Westminster, so I was quite content. Then, just when my being summoned to the queen almost three years ago began to seem like a distant dream, Nick brought a royal summons for me, just after the queen had been delivered of a sickly girl child in February of 1503.

“Is she fearful the child will die and wants another effigy?” I asked Nick as he escorted me—not by the familiar back entrance—toward the queen’s suite of rooms in Westminster Palace. Like dear Maud, I was showing a pregnancy, four months on, I reckoned, but I pulled my cloak closer around my slightly swelling form. If Her Majesty was going to lose another child, it wouldn’t do to flaunt my happy state.

I was surprised to find the king sitting by her bed and no one else about. He motioned us over and rose. We curtsied and bowed. “Mistress Sutton,” he said, and nodded a greeting—a surprisingly humble gesture. “And Nick. Come with me,” he added to Nick, “for the queen would speak with Varina alone, about something that has my full approval.”

Either I was going to finally begin Prince Arthur’s effigy, I thought, or—God forbid—carve a new one for their sick infant. And yet, when the queen’s eyes opened and I noted how ashen pale she looked, I held my breath.

“Varina, no one is to know yet…but you are good at…keeping secrets.”

I could barely make out her words, her voice was so faint.

“I am ill,” she went on. “Childbed fever. I feel…I am told I may not recover.”

“But you are strong in your heart and mind and soul, Your Maj—” I protested, until she gave a slight shake of her head and gestured me to bend down to her. With one hand lightly on her bed—her sheet was soaked with sweat—I did as she asked.

“In a way, I gave you Nicholas,” she whispered, gasping for breath. “And you gave me some peace. Now…the king has agreed…that you shall carve my effigy for my funeral. Come each day…so it will be ready soon. And make me—at last—look content.”

I opened my mouth to protest, then closed it again. I nodded, kept nodding until I realized it and stopped.

“And do the one of my Arthur after. The king…he’s seen them. He knows…and now accepts. He will pay you.”

“I will do it, Your Grace, but as a labor of love.”

A wan hint of a smile lifted the corners of her mouth. “Ah, yes—love. Our lots in life so different—but we are so alike,” she said, then seemed to slip away, to sleep instantly.

The moment I straightened, the king came back to her side. “I knew that would tire her, but anything she asks—anything that I could do for her—almost, I would. Nick, I’ll give others your duties for now and ask you to bring your wife to her old haunt to carve the new wax image. Make her beautiful, Varina.”

“As she is and ever will be, Your Majesty,” I choked out as he walked us to the door.

“And carve it quickly,” he said. “I must summon back her physicians and her ladies now.”

I left, stunned, but determined that I would make my dear friend look as lovely as she had been the day she told me she was with child again. I subtly stroked my own belly as Nick led me out.

Queen Elizabeth of York

As Henry hovered and the royal physicians tended me, I soared and slid, in and out, up and down. Prince Henry came in, and I gave him my blessing. His cool lips lingered on my hot cheek before he left, Henry now our only hope to be king.
Be a good and loving king
, I longed to tell him, but I was not strong enough to form the words. My dear, sweet daughters came and went, weeping. My mother-in-law, who would now really rule the royal roost, muttered something about how I had been a good wife for her son.

And then, as I closed my heavy eyes and drifted again, swimming in sweat, burning with fever, the Archbishop of Canterbury—what was his name?—gave me the final rites. Then I saw them all again, those I had so long sought. Was I in paradise already?

My mother was crying but said she forgave me. My brothers, so thin and pale, but hanging over my bed with wings, like angels. Who had hurt them? I still was not sure and did not want to know anymore. I just wanted to be with them all. My father, King Edward, strong and blond, was lifting me now, lifting me up to ride before him on his horse through London’s streets. Yes, we were going to buy a book, and I was so proud to be his daughter, a princess. And then—and then the man named Henry Tudor, who had
been our enemy, took me to his bed, and then there was a crown.…

A man I did not know held my hand, sobbing. I smelled incense, or mayhap it was sweet herbs or roses, white and red roses. A bright light was burning in my brain, a lovely angel candle. I began to rush toward it and then I flew.

Mistress Varina Westcott

Her Majesty Elizabeth of York died on her thirty-seventh birthday, and all of London mourned. Her newborn girl, Katherine, outlived her by but a few days. The king, Nick said, was inconsolable.

I was summoned to Westminster Palace on February 12, to oversee the embalming of Her Majesty’s body—another final wish of the queen. Royal physicians did the work, but I, in tears, wrapped her gently in Westcott Chandlery waxen cloth. I stood with her ladies as her physicians carried her body from her bed. After they changed the linens, they placed the flexible body with the wax face and hands I had labored over upon the bed until it would be placed atop the black satin–draped coffin, then be regally seated next to her tomb in Westminster Abbey.

Once I saw the effigy was placed in the bed, its robes of velvet and cloth of gold arranged, its ornate hood fitted properly over the long blond wig—the king had found a painter to color the cheeks, lips, and eyes—I walked down the narrow corridor to bid farewell to the effigies I’d carved. It seemed but yesterday that I had first been summoned
here. Nick would be meeting me soon, but I took a moment, touched each face as I had seen Elizabeth the Good do in her love for these, her lost children. Then I turned and, since I was not to use the back entrance to this room anymore, I went back toward the queen’s now deserted bedchamber.

Lost in memories, I jolted to a halt at the sound of sobbing. Someone must have come in to mourn at the image of the queen, so I must go out quietly.

But I stood frozen in the door of her bedchamber. The king himself lay prostrate on the bed next to the queen’s effigy, his face buried against its neck, his arm over the waist. It took me a moment to catch the meaning of his broken words, and when I did, I shuffled carefully back down the narrow corridor I had just trod.

“Forgive me, forgive me, my dearest, but I could not tell you—could not, and you so loyal. I was terrified you would know, would turn on me. It was…it was”—he gasped for air, near hysteria as I came to a halt in the shadows of the hall—“just something that happened.”

What was he speaking of? I feared I knew.

“I caused it, but it wasn’t my fault!” he wailed. “I—I said aloud one day in the hearing of some loyal men that my path to the throne would be clearer, faster if the princes were to disappear from the Tower. I didn’t mean what happened. It was…it was like when King Henry the Second said to some knights, ‘Who will rid me of that turbulent priest?’ and they went and murdered Archbishop Becket! I had your brothers’ murderers dispatched on trumped-up charges, so only I knew—all these years, I knew!”

I nearly fell to my knees. The king was confessing that he—even if indirectly—had caused the murders of the queen’s young brothers! But he’d publicly claimed it was her cruel uncle, Richard of York, who wanted those impediments removed and commanded their killing. Tyrell had been blamed, and Lovell must have learned or guessed the truth somehow and meant to tell the queen so she would hate her husband and turn on him.

I could hear Henry VII, king of all England, sobbing, his mutterings incoherent. I tiptoed all the way back into the tiny closed-in room in which I’d carved the children’s effigies. At least Nick’s presence had helped calm my claustrophobia then. Nick had always helped. Would I tell him what I had overheard, or would that ruin his loyalty to the king? And would His Majesty’s broken confession to a cold wax effigy of his dead queen ease his grief and guilt?

When I stepped out into the hall a good while later, all was silent, and I prayed it was now safe for me to pass through to the withdrawing chamber to meet Nick. Yes, the effigy lay alone on the bed. I fancied for one moment that I should make it frown and let the king wonder about its change of expression. But I was only, as ever, being wayward, the woman who ran her own chandlery shop and, thank the Lord, had turned down marriage to one of the most influential waxmongers in London. The woman who dared to share much with the queen, who dared to ride astride in men’s garb to Wales and to Minster Lovell Hall and—

I gasped as a man, still in shadow, emerged from behind
the draperies. The king still here? Or had Nick come in and didn’t want to be seen by others?

No—it was Prince Henry, so tall for his age. I bobbed him a curtsy. How long had he been secreted there?

As if he heard my thought, he asked, “Mistress Sutton, how long have you been here?”

“I was closeted in the far chamber, saying farewell to my work,” I told him.

“Your best work is there,” he said, pointing at the bed with his mother’s effigy, “for the best of women. I shall never forget her.”

“Nor I, Your Grace.”

He came closer. “I might have need of your services for a full array of special candles at my investiture as Prince of Wales,” he said, surprising me by his change of topic. “The king was putting it off for a while, but I think it will be soon now. Very soon, I’m sure.”

I stared at him as my mind raced. Had he overheard his father’s confession? And would he use it to— No, surely sons, even royal ones, were not like that. Not this queen’s son…but then, he was his father’s boy too.

I curtsied again, and he gestured that I could leave.

A mere week after the queen was buried with all pomp—when her effigy was moved along the streets, it trembled as if it were alive—Prince Henry Tudor became Prince of Wales, heir to the Tudor throne.

I decided then that although I had once named my dear son Arthur after a prince of Wales, this child of Nick’s I
carried, should it be a son, would never be named Henry. Carved candles for King Henry VIII’s investiture, candles for his marriage to Catherine of Aragon, candles for his coronation but six years later—yes, our chandlery provided them all at the young, handsome king’s request. But knowing Lord Lovell had made me realize that some men—cobbler, king, or in between—were not to be trusted. And so, over the long years of the rule of King Henry VIII, I cherished even more my beloved Nick.