The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (8 page)

Six

T
HE
very evening after the mysterious strangers left the House of the Standing Cat, at the precise moment that Mistress Hull was standing in the buttery deciding how many candles she could expend upon the corpse she had laid out on the floor, the candles were burning low in the paneled dining hall of the royal palace at Richmond. There the musicians had already been sent away when the conversation at the supper party turned to the supernatural. Mother Guildford’s firm stare, which had squelched a newborn discussion of gallantry, softened, for edifying tales of spectral visitations were among her favorites. She smoothed the black silk skirts of her immense, many-petticoated gown and settled her imposing, heavily corseted figure in a more comfortable position on the cushions of her chair. Lackeys filled the heavy silver wine cups again, removing the platters of bones and emptied dishes of stale sauce from the white tablecloth. Mother Guildford’s little dog lay at her feet in the rushes, gnawing on a knucklebone.

The princess’s ladies turned to each other with wide eyes, and the Duke of Suffolk, a practiced ladies’ man, took advantage of the old duenna’s brief inattention to cast a burning glance in the direction of the princess. A heavy necklace of pearls and rubies set off her white neck and echoed the colors of her red brocade gown, slashed to reveal heavily gathered, embroidered white silk sleeves. Her heavy red-gold hair, caught in a circlet of gold links decorated with sapphires, flowed freely down her back, for she was still a maiden, and very young. Mary Tudor’s face turned pink when she caught Suffolk’s look, but her bright eyes flashed in return. Jane Popincourt, her French tutor and lady-in-waiting, began an astonishing tale of the sound of a spinning wheel, which came each night from a wall in a bedchamber she had once had.

“Oh, yes, I remember how very vexed you were that you had no sleep,” cried the princess.

“And it was I who ordered masons to tear down the wall. And what do you think they found?” Mistress Jane paused. Mother Guildford cast an expectant eye over the awed company. After a dramatic silence, Mistress Jane continued. “A sealed chamber, with a dusty, unused old spinning wheel, entirely covered with cobwebs. We asked the priest to search the records and found that a woman who spun for the queen had died in that room.”

“But pray tell,” broke in Suffolk, a bluff, heavyset man, “why should a spirit, freed of earthly cares, carry on work both bothersome and laborious?” Everything about Suffolk looked large and square: his dark brown, square-cut beard, his heavy mane of hair, cut flat below the ears, his neck, his shoulders. Somehow it all reminded most people of an ox—an ox in court clothes, his English-cut dark blue satin doublet and heavy brocade gown extravagantly slashed with crimson seeming to sit uncomfortably on his huge frame. But largeness and roisterous spirits had made him the young king’s best friend and partner in high jinks. “No,” he went on, “spirits return only when they have a message for the living—or, perchance, a need for vengeance.”

“One might ask whether there is a message in the spinning.” The young Duc de Longueville, recently captured at the battle of Guinegate, but as free as any gentleman of the court until his ransom should be paid, was impatient to turn the company to his own story. “I believe that when ghosts work, it is always for a purpose. For example, in this very city, someone I know…very well…heard of a most extraordinary ghostly manifestation—”

“Oh, tell us!” cried the princess, clapping her hands. Vanity and wine pushed him, at that moment, beyond the bounds of discretion.

“Well, it seems that there was a young painter in the City of London, very handsome, with unique talent in the taking of portraits. He was newly wed to a beautiful wife, to whom he was devoted, and who was expecting their first child—” Longueville was clad in the French fashion, bright and glittering, with his pale blue satin doublet cut well away from his neck to show his beautifully made linen. His flat velvet hat, in dark violet, ornamented with a gold medallion, set off his light brown, shoulder-length curls and narrow features. Half the ladies in the room were in love with him.

“Ah, then it’s a love story,” exclaimed the princess. Mother Guildford turned a fierce eye, enough to stop a lion in midleap, on de Longueville, but he never hesitated.

“Exactly so,” agreed de Longueville cheerfully. “But one with an extraordinary ending. This painter, being newly come to a mastership, had many debts. But through good fortune, a great lord came to him with a princely commission, to create a portrait in small, as a jewel, from a portrait in large.” The company leaned forward, and Suffolk set his elbows on the table. The Frenchman did know how to tell a good story.

“The following day, the great lord returned and met outside the door a holy man, going to offer succor to a new-made widow, whose husband had been murdered the night before in a street brawl. It was the artist who had been murdered, the very night that the commission had been given, and his widow, all unknowing, was waiting for him to return.”

“Oh, this is so very sad,” said Mistress Popincourt. She took an embroidered handkerchief from her wide velvet sleeve. “It is much too sad for a love story.” Mother Guildford secretly wiped the corner of her eye with a plump index finger.

“Imagine the nobleman’s distress when I—uh, he, found that the jewel could not possibly have been completed. Still, when he entered the artist’s studio, the lord found there a masterwork, more perfect than earthly hand could create.” The company drew in its breath as one. “‘From whence did this perfect jewel come?’ the lord asked. And the artist’s young wife, still uninformed of her great loss, said that her husband had appeared silently that morning and worked all day without meat or drink, vanishing silently when the work was complete. Little did the wife suspect what the lord knew instantly: that it was the spirit of her dead husband, devoted beyond the grave, that had returned to complete the commission and so provide for her and the infant.”

“Astonishing!” cried another gentleman.

“So touching. Oh, in spite of the wickedness of the world, there is still true married love.” Mother Guildford wiped away several large tears.

“In the City itself, you say?”

“I wonder who it could have been. Did you say you knew this fellow?”

“I have sworn secrecy for the sake of a lady’s honor,” said de Longueville, content with the sensation he had made.

“Tell me,” teased Jane Popincourt, “the great lord was you, wasn’t it?” De Longueville, sated, stretched his naked body back on the pillows of the great bed. Even though the heavy velvet curtains were pulled shut around them, Mistress Jane had discreetly pulled the linen sheet over her in place of a shift. De Longueville smiled impishly and pulled at the sheet.

“Show it to me again,” he said.

“Oh, not until you tell,” she cried with mock modesty.

“Why, then, I’ll tell: it was me,” said de Longueville, twitching at the sheet.

“But what woman was it?” asked Mistress Jane, suddenly alarmed and clutching at the sheet with both hands. “Oh, you ingrate! You have another lady!”

“In addition to you, who are everything?” he teased. “Never think it, my sweet little Jeanne.” Then, spying the look on her face, he went on more seriously. “It was a commission for another—person—which I carried out. The woman is a great lady, and you will forgive me if I am sworn to protect her reputation.” Suddenly, Mistress Jane did not trust his sensual smile, his insinuating voice. Did those dark eyes light up for her alone? She scrutinized his face, trying to read some secret meaning there. She had risked everything, seeing him like this. She had risked her reputation, and her place with the princess, if the word got out. But if he abandoned her, he might well gossip about her. Men, oh, who can trust them? she thought. When can a man ever resist boasting about a conquest? Look at him there, betraying someone else’s secret to make a sensation at a dinner party. No, if she didn’t want him talking, she would do best to keep him entangled, she thought. She smiled and pulled aside the sheet.

“Beautiful,” he said. “You are more lovely than Venus herself.” As he rolled on top of her for a second passage at love, she resolved to question his footman, find the widow, and discover whose picture had been painted by the ghost. Distracted by her worry, she found him decidedly less satisfactory than before. But de Longueville, who liked to see his mistresses insecure, rejoiced in her edginess and let passion take his mind from the web of secrets he had so artfully concealed from her. The very least of them was that he was dispatching a portrait in miniature of the king’s sister, Mary Tudor, to Louise of Savoy, mother of the heir to the throne of France, at the request of that most formidable and ambitious lady.

Thomas Wolsey, the King’s Almoner, member of the King’s Council, Bishop of Lincoln and master of military logistics for the recent war in France, was seated in his cabinet at Bridewell when Robert Ashton, one of the secretaries of his privy chamber, along with the priest who was the confessor of Jane Popincourt, were announced. Wolsey was then in the act of conferring with the master cook of his privy kitchen, a personage held in high esteem in a household where food was of the first importance. The master cook was no small person: he was clad in damask satin, with a gold chain about his neck, and he carried himself with the confidence of one who commands two master cooks of the hall kitchen, two clerks of the kitchen, four kitchen grooms, two yeomen of the pantry, a yeoman of the scullery, and a yeoman of the silver scullery, to say nothing of an army of lesser laborers of the kitchen, men, women, and children.

Wolsey’s shape illustrated his passion for cuisine, but beneath the effulgent flesh and appearance of health lay a weakness of digestion that must be catered to absolutely. It was the master cook of the privy kitchen’s job to keep the internal workings of his master as finely tuned as a well-oiled clock, for as the Wolsey-clock functioned, so prospered the realm. Wolsey had been the secret power that planned England’s future since the death of the shrewd, stingy old king who had fathered Henry the Eighth. Under Wolsey’s capable management had come all the business neglected by an amusement-loving young king. Whenever there were statutes to consider, treaties to ponder, papers to be inspected before signing, in short, whenever dull work enclosed in a cabinet threatened, the king was only too happy to have Wolsey stand beside his stirrup and say, “Don’t let this matter spoil your day’s hunting, Your Majesty. Take your princely pleasure where you will, while I, your humble servant, shoulder the dull duties of the council and dispatch your business entirely according to your will.”

So well had Wolsey done that prince’s will in the dull matters of business that dull money, dull manors, and dull bishoprics had fallen like ripe fruit into the King’s Almoner’s busy, if plump, hands. At this time two great projects occupied entire compartments in his multicompartmented and ever-calculating mind, beyond the project of tomorrow’s dinner, which occupied a section that might be called “miscellaneous, recurring.” The first project was the search for a manor located near the capital city, but free from its pestilential airs. Wolsey feared illness as only a man with complex and far-reaching plans can. And so he employed tasters, hired physicians, and procured water from faraway sources. The thought that so humble a thing as poisoned air might lay low his grandest schemes offended him; he preferred enemies of rank. He had secured the lease of a place on the river called Hampton Court where his physicians had assured him the air was salubrious; now a part of him was given over to planning a residence worthy of his splendor.

The second project, rather less personal but no less dear to him, involved the complete realignment of the powers of Europe, in England’s favor, of course. The centerpiece to this plan was the engineering of an alliance with England’s greatest enemy, France, which would offset the power of Spain and the Holy Roman Emperor. But the key to the plan was a woman, or, rather, a flirtatious, lighthearted, spoiled girl of seventeen, Mary Tudor, the king’s younger sister. Just as Wolsey had been worrying about how to approach his project, and almost as if God had willed it, the King of France’s wife had died. Through secret negotiations (how convenient de Longueville had been!) Wolsey had offered the King of France Henry’s newly widowed sister, Margaret, the Queen of Scotland. But the old king had rejected her. The Queen of Scotland, the king had heard, was old and stout, having already reached her twenty-fifth birthday.