by Karen Harper
Though Kat wasn't expecting her, one of the queen's cobblers, actually a slipper-maker, came running too. Foolish lass, she held a long needle in one hand and could have accidently jabbed herself or any of them. Finally, the two who embroidered or stitched on jewels and pendants, as well as the haughty old dame who was the royal lace-maker appeared, with her new ruff girl in tow, so it looked as if Kat would get them all in one fell swoop.
“I've been ailing of late,” Kat began, “but I'm back now and my being indisposed is no excuse for your laxness.”
“No, milady,” echoed in various voices down the line.
“I consulted my book, and I want you to fetch a gown the queen hasn't worn for some time but wants to see now,” she went on, setting in place her plan to make them search for that which was not there. “A tawny, branched velvet skirt, matching single sleeves, and boned bodice. The skirts have flowers appliquéd on, made of matched topaz, and—”
“Oh, I know the one,” Melly, who was the brightest of the bunch, piped up. Kat hoped she would not be implicated, because the girl could sew on a gem in any pattern and have nary a thread show. “I spent all night putting those golden daisies on that gown, and went near blind as a bat. I know where it's kept too, back with the golden or canary ones what have sprinkles of jewels.”
She darted out of line before Penny, the oldest of the staff, could grab her back. “Here now, you're not to fetch and carry gowns!” Penny cried and ran after her. “I'll get it. I shifted the befurred gowns and the embroidered smocks on the other side of the bodices. Here now, you just come back!”
But they both returned empty-handed with their caterwauling ended, and that gave Kat the excuse to go down the line and grill each one of them. She kept Lady Anne waiting an extra hour before they headed back to the palace, because it took that long before the new lace and ruff girl, Lucinda, finally broke down in tears.
She admitted she'd let a fine foreign gentleman who spoke real fancy lease those pieces for a fortnight just to show his friends, and he'd never brought them back. At that distraught display, Kat pulled the guard off the door and ordered him to take the sobbing girl straightaway to the queen at Whitehall.
THE QUEEN SHIVERED AS SHE ALIGHTED FROM THE royal barge at the Thames water gate and climbed the steps toward the old Palace of Westminster. As her companions fell in behind, a late afternoon mist closed off the city and river like a vast gray curtain.
Elizabeth Tudor's destination was Westminster Abbey, the place of her joyous coronation. But it was also the solemn site of a Tudor cemetery, where her paternal grandparents, one of her stepmothers, her brother, and her sister were entombed. She shuddered and went on, anxious to have this quest over and angry with herself that she had lost her temper at Kat before she had set out.
“I've found a link,” Kat had crowed when she'd returned from Blackfriars, “to who stole the effigy's gown, and I'm having the wench brought in direct for questioning!”
Delighted, the queen had delayed coming here while they waited for the lace girl Lucinda to be delivered by the wardrobe guard. When no one arrived, the queen had sent her own men to fetch them. It was they who learned that Lucinda and the guard were more than fast friends. Further inquiries revealed that both servants had disappeared into the teeming city with the queen's questions for them unasked and unanswered. Who was the man who supposedly leased the gown? Or if his name was unknown, what was his appearance? Now standing in the mist-swept gray shadows of Westminster, Elizabeth was not even certain what her questions here must be.
She had brought four of her ladies and a covey of guards. But, telling her women she wished to be alone to pray, she sent them into the palace nearby to wait for her and went on foot toward the Abbey with but two guards. It annoyed her that Jenks and Ned had not returned from Knightrider Street yet or she would have brought them, but perhaps they at least had turned something up.
She did not enter through the main west door to chance meeting the deans and canons of the college who had replaced the abbots and monks. The protectors of this place would be put out she had not announced her visit so they could make a fuss for it, and they would ask a thousand questions of their own.
She pulled her sable-lined hood and cape closer and walked around to go in through the north door. Fortunately, it was not locked, or she would have had to send one of her men to open it from inside while she waited. The metal hinges, however, protested their entry with a shrill, scraping sound.
It was even more dim and chill inside with the day's wan light washing in through high stained-glass windows. Silence hung heavy under the lofty ceiling's soaring vaults, vast arches, and stone carvings. The Abbey's musty breath seemed to seep into her bones from floor stones, chapels, and carved effigies of long-dead kings and queens.
Seeing several of the abbey staff clustered before the high altar, Elizabeth skirted behind it, her footsteps whispering, her two guards hurrying to keep up. Here, where distant, disembodied voices echoed, she strode by the recessed chapel of John the Baptist. Pulling her cloak closer, she remembered how he had been beheaded, with his head then brought in upon a platter. She pictured again the head of her effigy, wondering if the maker of it wanted her real one on a platter too.
Weak-kneed, she heaved a huge sigh. Gripping her hands as if in prayer, she paused at the coronation chair, set behind the high altar when not in use. She vowed she must do all she could to keep herself and her kingdom safe.
She quickly passed the vault under which her sister's body lay, but slowed her steps at the chapel deepest in the nave. Here stood the grated, gilt resting place that the founder of the Tudor dynasty, King Henry VII, had built for himself and his queen, Elizabeth of York. A single, flickering lantern illumined its sheen and etched its shadows deeper. Behind the altar, above the ornately enclosed tombs, her paternal grandparents' gilded forms, guarded by cherubs, lay side by side, staring up toward heaven. But these glorious, golden effigies were not the ones she sought today.
Passing other chapels, she crossed the south transept and passed through to the cloisters, the old grounds of the monks who had once tended this sacred place. Elizabeth nearly jumped out of her skin when her guard spoke, even though he whispered.
“Do you not wish this lantern lit now, Your Grace?” the taller guard, Clifford, asked, producing it and a flint box from under his cloak.
“Yes, all right. This cloister is always dim, even during midday.”
She waited, looking nervously about, as they lit one glass-paned lantern and, when she nodded, the other. If this took too long she was going to be late for the Privy Plot Council meeting she had called.
“It seems darker than it really is in here,” Clifford observed as if sensing she needed encouragement.
It was an astute comment, but she did not answer. Indeed, where she was going was called the Dark Cloister, for it lay beyond this arched, more open section where the monks used to take their air in bad weather. She only hoped the effigies she sought to examine—life-like ones of some earlier monarchs that had been paraded in their funeral processions—were still kept downstairs in the Undercroft, which had served as the monks' common room. Once she viewed them, she would decide whether to privily summon their caretaker or maker to Whitehall for questioning.
Her guards each holding a lantern, they walked a ways down the Dark Cloister until they reached a narrow stairway down that loomed like an open mouth. “Wait here,” she told her men, taking one lantern. “Come if I call, but call me only if you are challenged for your presence here.”
One hand holding up her hems, the other lifting the lantern high, she went slowly, carefully down the stairs. She had only been here once years ago with her three Grey cousins, Jane, Katherine, and little Mary, on a lark during the days of her father's fifth queen, Catherine Howard. It was long before Lady Jane found herself a figurehead in a revolt against Elizabeth's sister, Mary Tudor, long before Jane was beheaded in the Tower of London where her younger sister Katherine wa
s now imprisoned for her treasonous deceit against her current queen. Ah, those were happy days when they were young and sneaked down here to see the effigies and jested about them as if they were great dolls they could toy with. And yes, Elizabeth realized, Katherine Grey knew all about these royal effigies, and she—along with Margaret Lennox, their cousin—were women Cecil had suggested could be behind all this.
Elizabeth shook her head so hard her pearl earrings rattled. The girls had been caught and scolded that day, then thoroughly lectured by the Duke of Norfolk about how the effigies were carved here, painted, garbed, and made ready to be displayed on funeral hearses or tombs.
As she descended, the queen's heart began to pound even harder. She neared the bottom of the stairs before she realized it was not just her lantern throwing shifting light upon the walls. Someone else was here already.
Prepared to call for her men, she peeked from the stairwell into the pillared and vaulted stone room. What she saw made her mute. She lurched backward and dropped the lantern, which exploded to glass shards at her feet. In blinding torchlight thrust close to her face, the ghost of her dead sister lunged at her.
THE FIFTH
The oil which is pressed out of flax seed is profitable for
many purposes in physick and surgery, and is used of
painters, picture makers, and other artificers.
JOHN GERARD
The Herball
THE APPARITION SOUNDED LIKE HER SISTER, MARY, with its rough, masculine voice. Elizabeth couldn't catch the words over the banging of her heart. Nor did its mouth move or wide stare change.
“I said, sorry, milady, but you gave me a real fright,” the thing repeated when she just gaped at it.
She felt like a ninnyhammer, though it took her but a moment to realize that this was no ghost of her sister but a fully garbed effigy which could compete with the one of herself. The gown of crimson velvet, the replica of the scepter it held all seemed so real. Whoever had done that face had captured Mary's bland features and sullen stare. And the limbs of the short, squat form had moved with such lifelike suppleness, and its head had turned.
Elizabeth's guards, who had evidently heard the shattering of her lantern, came thundering down the stairs, but she held up her hand to stay them. In half stride, swords drawn, they waited.
This time when the effigy spoke, a man's blond head popped out from behind the wigged, crowned one. “Oh, no!” he cried as his torch illumined Elizabeth full in the face at the bottom of the staircase. “It cannot be—Your Majesty?”
“Stand away with that torch and figure,” she commanded, but her voice shook. A quick glance around made her realize this man was alone. Thinking she'd do better questioning him without her men here, she motioned them back up the stairs. Slowly, they retreated.
“Forgive me, but no one warned—informed me you would be coming, Your Majesty. I was just moving this image of your royal sister, Bloody Ma—I mean Queen Mary—to the table to dust it when I saw your shadow and grabbed a torch. I really had no idea, so perhaps the dean or canons forgot to tell me.”
As he spoke, he fumbled one-armed with the figure to lean it against the wall, then backed away, bowing so low to Elizabeth, though it looked like his obeisance was to Queen Mary, that it seemed the torch would singe his hair.
“Your name?” she inquired.
“Percival Oldcorn, Your Gracious Majesty, assistant to the dean, at your service,” the man introduced himself with another bow.
Over the grit of broken glass, she stepped into the room and glanced around. Two other torches in wall sconces cast fitful light into the deep recesses of the barrel-vaulted chamber. One chair, a long table, and a set of deep wooden shelves were the only furniture. Other effigies, as she correctly recalled, lay on the shelves, wrapped in sheets like winding cloths as if waiting for someone to call them forth from the tomb like Lazarus.
Despite Percival Oldcorn's low voice, he seemed a mere lad, she thought, with his beardless, smooth skin, and protruding ears. She was not used to men with no sun color; he looked as if he lived underground yearround.
“And your business here, Master Oldcorn?” she inquired, thinking he was yearning to ask the same of her.
“I see to the needs of these memorials of our realm's royalty, that is these funeral and tomb artificial personages,” he told her proudly, gesturing toward what must be the newest effigy, the one of her sister. He placed the torch in its sconce, then, as if to make the slumped figure presentable, he darted over to brush dust or cobwebs from Mary Tudor's velvet sleeves.
“Indeed, then I am pleased to find you here, for there are some things I would know,” Elizabeth told him, striding toward the effigies at the end of the room, where he hastened to follow. “I was told once how these are made, but I would see them and hear it from you, Master Oldcorn. Tell me all you know, especially about their heads, of what they are fashioned and who does such clever artifice.”
The man knew a great deal, so Elizabeth suffered him to lecture her about how the ancient Greeks and Romans first modeled the heads of revered family members to keep in their homes. “Though most of those were of stone, metal, or wax and these are painted wood or plaster,” he explained as he located the figures of King Henry VII and his queen. Oldcorn unwrapped them for her as he talked.
Elizabeth was amazed to see her grandmother's slender figure attired in a mussed but exquisite gold satin, square-necked gown, edged with red velvet. A fine fakery of a crown was wired to her wig, much more realistic than the crude one on the effigy in her coach. These painted wooden hands, one clutching an imitation scepter, were graceful, long-fingered, and so like Elizabeth's own.
“Even the limbs look real,” she observed, pressing the effigy's supple wrist.
“The Tudor images are jointed at the shoulder and elbow, and Queen Mary's that gave you such a start even turns her head. Their skins are leather or canvas stuffed with hay and herbs,” he added.
“To mold or sculpt, then paint these faces takes great skill,” she observed to prod him further.
“Oh, yes,” Oldcorn said smugly, as if he'd done the work himself. “See here on the king's face, the sunken lips, mouth gone askew, even the hollow cheeks and hard-set jaw. Features of a cadaver. Like these two, the best ones are from death masks.”
“Death masks?” she gasped as a bolt of fear shot through her.
“Indeed, though masks can be modeled from life too. With the assistance of the subject, of course, and breathing straws in the nostrils while the plaster hardens.”
She shuddered at the mere idea of her face being encased in a stiffening mask, whether she was dead or alive. But that reminded her of something else: Ned Topside had mentioned last evening that the poxed face on her effigy was a molded mask and she had not heeded him. Perhaps she'd best speak with Ned again about all he knew of how actors fashioned such a mask.
“But of course, it's much easier to make a death mask,” Oldcorn was saying. “Plaster is smoothed on the corpse's oiled face, then, when that hardens and is removed, a second batch is poured into that oiled mold to get the features true before it's painted. But I've heard that, on the continent, the future of such modeling lies not in plaster, but in a return to the old way of wax, which has the flesh color poured directly into the molten mixture instead of painted on.”
She was hardly listening now as she stared at, then touched, the copies of her grandparents' dead faces. They felt hard, whereas the poxed face on her effigy had seemed slightly malleable. Mayhap it had not quite set yet. And this false flesh seemed not so real and luminous as on her figure.
“Do the plasters harden and paints fade over time?” she asked.
“I've only tended them for several years, but I believe so. 'Tis said the coloring is mixed from the same pigments and flax seed that oil painters use on wood or canvas.”
She watched Oldcorn rewrap the form of her grandmother Elizabeth, for whom she had been named. Suddenly, the entire room closed in on
her. The stone ceiling holding up the Abbey floor seemed a huge, cold plaster mask stopping her breath. She hastened to the door, taking one of the torches.
“I need the name of the man who did the plaster and paint of this one,” she informed him, pointing to but not looking at her sister's effigy, which seemed to guard her escape up the stairs. “And of its wig-maker,” she added, turning back.
“The wig-maker I can tell you,” Oldcorn said, annoying her by coming over to brush at Mary's gown again, “but the man who did this face of your royal sister—”
“Half sister.”
“—half sister, Your Majesty, fled to the continent, they say, when you ascended the throne. Whether he's come back, I know not, nor his name because I've asked around before, just for the record, of course. I heard he was trained abroad as a doctor or some sort of surgeon.”
Elizabeth's knees went weak again. She prayed Cecil would find something she could use to tie Caius, Pascal, or their continent-visiting ilk to that effigy back at Whitehall.
“But the wig-maker lives out in Chelsea still,” Oldcorn went on, “a former prioress, who used to procure her supply of hair from novices and nuns. She may not be yet alive, for I hear she was aged when she did Queen Mary's wig, and that, of course, is nigh on four years ago.”
“I shall have someone look into it.”
“Forgive my curiosity, Your Majesty,” his words floated to her as she started up the stairs, “but surely you are not personally planning your own funeral effigy, and you so young and healthy?”
She stopped and turned back to him. “Inquire again most circumspectly as to who molded and painted the former queen's face and send word to me if you learn aught,” she ordered, clipping out each word. Then, desperate to escape this catacomb chamber, she nearly ran up the stairs.
