Mistress of Mourning

by Karen Harper

  All that morn, when no customers came by, intent, my head down, I had been savoring the silence and the solitude, despite the hubbub outside on busy Candlewick Street. Perched on a stool behind the counter with its scales and measuring sticks, I had begun to carve my boy’s angelic face into a foot-tall, four-inch-thick candle. I would not burn it, for I could not bear to see dripping, curling wax cover his face as had the shroud I’d wrapped him in, then the coffin lid and the upturned soil of the burial ground in nearby St. Mary Abchurch, next to his father’s grave. After losing him, I’d acquired a horror of small, closed places.

  I have sold carved candles for a goodly price, but the ones with Edmund’s face as the angel I neither sell nor burn, but keep them stored in my coffer or linen chest, just as I hide my hurt deep in my heart.

  “All right then,” Gil said, interrupting my agonizing, “I’ll go for the boy and tell the ’prentices not to leave the grounds while you see to our fancy customers.”

  The grounds consisted of this half-timbered shop fronting the street, with storage and our living quarters in two stories above and in an L-shaped building running back along two small gardens, and a cobbled courtyard to stables and more storage at the rear. I wondered what our edifice looked like to the handsome pair coming in the front shop door, for they were gentry at least, nobility at best. The little bell over the door jangled to announce their arrival. By the saints, I wished I’d smoothed my tumbled bounty of hair back under a veiled headdress or a proper widow’s hood, for the lady looked most fashionable.

  And the man looked simply overwhelming.

  First, he was so tall he had to duck his blond head to enter. He was dressed well but not ostentatiously. His jerkin—imported Spanish leather, I warranted—seemed molded to his shoulders and chest. His cloak, black as ravens’ wings, was thrown back on one side. His face, broad with a high forehead, emphasized his taut-lipped mouth and compelling eyes, a most unusual clear gray.

  I hardly regarded the pretty woman at first. Of course, they must be man and wife and here to buy either feast or mourning candles, but why would ones of their carriage and rank not send a servant?

  “Mistress Varina Westcott?” the man inquired.

  I ducked them a quick curtsy. “I am. How may I serve you?”

  The couple—I would guess he was not yet thirty years of age, she a good bit younger—exchanged a fast glance I could not read. Perhaps it conveyed, You go first. No, you!

  “Let me make introductions,” the man said. His voice had a low timbre to it, both comforting yet arousing in a way I had not felt with Christopher’s avid wooing. “I am Nicholas Sutton, and this is Mistress Sutton. At least, that is the way of it for the ears of others, for we would speak with you privily and ask your promise that what we say here will go no farther.”

  I stared at them, my mind racing to find reasons for such a statement. Was either of them who they said they were?

  “I can offer candles for private weddings or votive candles for secret masses for departed souls, with all discretion,” I said.

  “Actually, we came about this,” Nicholas Sutton said, and produced from beneath his cloak a candle very much like the one I had been carving, not with Edmund’s face but rather with a smiling cherub’s. Indeed, it was an angel candle I had made. But did these people want to buy one, or were they wax guild sponsors, come to scold me as Christopher had for selling an item the brotherhood had not approved or priced?

  “The person who purchased this says you carved it,” he went on. “I think it is much too fine to burn, and so does the lady at the palace, who sent us to inquire whether you would visit her on the morrow so that she might employ your very talented services privily for a short period of time.”

  By the saints, he spoke well, once he got going. I prayed I did not gape at them overlong like the village idiot. The lady at the palace?

  “’Tis true,” the woman put in, and I really regarded her for the first time. She had russet hair and a comely face, perhaps enhanced by rice powder and cochineal on her cheeks and pert mouth. She sported a long, classical nose but balanced features and pale blue eyes. “One of the queen’s own ladies,” she said, “wishes to meet you and perhaps have you carve a large death candle for her, per her instructions.”

  “A death candle,” I said. “Yes, I admit that’s what they are, a memorial for someone lost.”

  “The thing is,” she said, standing quite apart from the man, as if they were not a couple as I had surmised, “if you can slip away on the morrow, we will call for you early morn, soon after sunrise. You may tell others we are taking you to our home, where we have lost a child—just a story so this can remain among the three of us and the lady. She will pay well for your time and talent, and we will be your escorts and your story—our secret.”

  I wondered whether they knew I’d lost a child and were playing on my sympathies. “Why would my telling someone be forbidden or dangerous?” I dared ask, wondering whether some lady dear to the queen had been delivered of a bastard child who had died and her reputation was to be protected at all costs. Perhaps I could also get an order for candles to burn at masses said for the deliverance of that child’s soul, all the sooner to be released from purgatory to heaven.

  “We can only hope you will agree to our regulations,” Nicholas Sutton said. “I promise that your well-placed trust will be profitable to you and your chandlery.” For the first time, my gaze locked with his. Strangely, everything else faded. Even his words bounced off me a bit, and I felt a foolish maid, a green girl, when I had been wedded for five years and borne two children. Though I was tall, I had to look up at him. He made me feel small but safe, so I nodded.

  “I understand,” I said, my voice shakier than I would have liked. “I shall trust you in this and be ready on the morrow. But are we actually going to the palace, into the palace?”

  “Not Baynard’s Castle or the palace at the Tower, but Westminster. We are indeed,” he said, and added a few parting words as they purchased four plain, foot-long beeswax candles. Perhaps those were their excuse for being here today, for they overpaid my price by half and made a quick exit.

  I stood in the middle of my shop, where nothing seemed familiar anymore. I had been invited into huge Westminster Palace, which sprawled along the Thames across the fields between the city and the great gray abbey where kings were crowned and buried. I, Varina Westcott, would walk where jousts, feasting, dancing, and huge, earthshaking events had happened. I was thankful too that I was going to a place where I wouldn’t imagine my lost child toddling about in every room.

  I jumped back to reality when the shop bell jangled again and my five-year-old, Arthur, bounded in from school, with Gil behind him. “Mother, Mother, we’re learning Latin but also sums and subtractions, so I can help in the shop and sell the candles. Wait and see!”

  I hugged him hard and kissed the top of his uncapped head. “I knew you would be a big help to me!”

  He squirmed a bit, but I hugged him all the harder, anxious, as ever, to keep him close, especially as I saw him growing up and sometimes pulling away from me. Like the Tudors’ Prince Arthur, he was my and Will’s heir, and I fretted for his health and safety. I might have lost my Edmund, but by all that was holy, I would die before I would lose Arthur too.

  How I would have loved to tell him—Maud and Gil too—what strange fortune had just befallen me, but, still holding Arthur to me, I said only, “Gil, I’ll need to have Maud tend the shop tomorrow morning, for I promised that couple I would visit their home and see about some candles for their chapel, and they are coming to fetch me.” Then the shop bell over the door rang, for coming through it was my suitor, Christopher Gage.

  He was a good decade my elder, in public a hail-fellow-well-met, popular in our parish ward and at our church and important in the wax chandlers guild. He looked suddenly short, after I had met Nicholas Sutton.

  Christopher was of broad build but carried his weight well, his shoulders back, h
is head always held high. His cheeks bloomed with health under his carefully combed brown hair that so perfectly matched his clear brown eyes. He dressed plainly but richly, and favored large, gem-set rings, one of which, twice, he had tried to give me as a betrothal gift. Christopher Gage was an intelligent man, a widower with two grown children. He was going places, and Maud and Gil thought I should be going with him. Well, I must admit my business merger with Will had turned out well in our personal lives, and our marriage had been solid.

  “Ah, my dearest!” Christopher cried, and seized and kissed my hand as if he were some chivalrous knight and I his lady. “Arthur,” he said, ruffling the boy’s hair until it resembled a bird’s nest. “Gil”—with a nod and a single pat on his shoulder. “I bring good tidings of great joy, as the gos-pels say.”

  The man was ever cheerful when he had an audience, though strangely that did not lift my dark moods of late. He was not attuned to my grief, telling me we could simply make another son to take Edmund’s place if I’d but wed him. Still, Christopher had not only been a friend of my husband but had known my father, Simon Waxman, which went far with me, for I had adored my well-traveled, urbane, and talented sire. When I was a child, I yearned to travel with him, but I’d barely been outside of London.

  “Tell us then, Master Gage, if you please!” Arthur begged.

  “Should I fetch Maud then too?” Gil asked.

  “Of course,” Christopher said. But the moment my brother-in-law left the room, he told us, “The wax chandlers have purchased land for a new guildhall, over on Maiden Lane where currently stands the Cock on the Hoop Tavern. God as my judge, the location is as fine as those of the major liveries, and we’ll build a grander guildhall too. It will benefit us to be nearer to the guilds with noble and royal patronage, like the broiderers and the haberdashers, away from the tallow chandlers, with their lesser candle products for the poor—smelly, dirty stuff,” he said with a wrinkled nose.

  “It’s all some folk can afford for lights,” I protested. “I’ve known one or two who saved all their lives to buy our good candles for their funeral processions and masses for their loved ones’ souls.”

  He shook his head almost imperceptibly and went on. “In addition, King Henry has granted our new motto, ‘Truth Is Light,’ to replace the old ‘Loyalty Binds Me’ granted by King Richard—ah, God rest his Yorkist soul,” he added in a whisper as he made a swift sign of the cross. “To top all that off, the guild is to have a new coat of arms, and the artist wants you to sit for it, Varina!”

  “I…That’s wonderful, but who is he?” I asked, feeling too many people I didn’t know were pulling the strings of my life today, however much bounty was bestowed. Besides, I wanted to create images, not become them. I truly longed to be an artist, like my father, and not only an artisan.

  “He’s the Italian who bought votives from you the other day. I suggested he come by. I believe you told him your father had been to Italy, and you discussed the wax effigies the wealthy Italians pay to have carved and clothed to their likenesses. That’s one way to stand near the holy altars to curry favor with the Virgin and other saints, eh?” he said with a sharp laugh. “But if that would catch on here, instead of only with our royalty and nobility ordering such effigies, the price of our beeswax would soar, I’m afraid.”

  “You mean the artist is Signor Firenze?” I said, finally getting a word in. “But why didn’t he discuss it with me when he was here?”

  “After he saw you, he needed the permission of the governors of the guild, of course.”

  “Including yours?”

  “I would be deeply honored to have my future wife’s beautiful face on our new coat of arms.”

  “Are you two wedding for certain then?” Arthur asked as Maud and Gil ran into the room.

  “Oh, is that the news?” Maud cried, clapping her hands, her pale face alight.

  “No,” I insisted. “We are getting ahead of ourselves. Christopher has brought us word of a new guildhall site and coat of arms for the company, and he asked me to pose for it.”

  “That’s all good, at least,” Maud said, though she looked less than enthusiastic now. She was my younger sister, and, I warrant, had had her fill over the years of hearing I was the pretty one, the clever one, when all I ever wanted was for her to love me. And now that the shop was mine, and I’d borne two children when she yearned for her own, her green-eyed envy was an unspoken barrier between us that I longed to somehow shatter.

  As they ever did to give Christopher and me time alone, she and Gil hustled Arthur from the room. I suggested we stroll in the herb garden at the edge of the courtyard, but he gently pushed me back onto the stool while he leaned against the edge of the counter, towering over me.

  “There is something I didn’t want your family to hear, because you are the one who must decide to cease and desist,” he said. “The guild council has ruled that you are to stop carving and vending those angel candles until we can decide on the pricing and distribution.”

  “But I’m offering them only to trusted customers—or once, when a grieving mother noticed several on the shelf but could not pay for one.”

  “See what I mean!” he said, smacking his knee with his fist, looking as if he’d stage a snit, the way little Edmund used to try to get his way. “You do not heed my helpful advice. My dearest, you know the guild governors set all the items and prices, and no one shop is allowed to strike out on its own, else the strength of our body be weakened.”

  “But I—any woman—am not admitted to guild membership, and Gil is only being considered now. I long to donate benevolences to our fraternal guild of the Holy Name of Jesus at St. Paul’s.” I hated my wheedling voice. Wishing I had some sort of power to bargain with him when it came to business, at least, I said no more.

  “All of which are reasons you need me,” he said, bending down to capture my hands in his. “You still must answer to the guild, of course, so I shall represent your efforts, and keep this chandlery in line and in the guild’s good graces since Will’s loss.”

  And, I thought, if we wed, this man would also control one-third of my assets. My shop and money would come under his aegis, even as I would pledge to obey him in bed and board. Until Arthur’s majority at age fifteen, or when his stepfather decided the lad was ready, Christopher could control another third of the worth of this store and of our family fortunes, that which was pledged to Arthur. It was a good system, I warrant, to build up a business, but I was not ready to entrust Christopher Gage with all that, or with myself. Not even this influential, avid man—not anyone right now—could sway me to wed, and it was the loss of my child as much as of my husband that made me feel so.

  Then too, of course, I was expecting on the morrow to receive a lucrative offer for the newly forbidden angel candles, either from my mysterious visitors or from some unnamed lady. After all, carving candles had not been forbidden to me when I agreed to visit the palace. Wouldn’t Christopher love to hear of that visit, if not my future sales there?

  “I can give you only my usual answer right now,” I told him, “despite your kind offer and support. I thank you for keeping me abreast of the guild’s opportunities and practices, which the Westcott Chandlery, of course, considers of utmost importance.”

  I felt my neck and cheeks flame, my fate with such a fair complexion when I was vexed or did not quite tell the truth, as now—or when he gaped at my breasts as if he could see right through my bodice when I’d merely used the word “abreast.” If Christopher and the guild learned of my secret visit on the morrow, I’d take their censure, but, by the all saints, I was going to the palace.

  CHAPTER THE SECOND

  The next morn I waited, pacing in the shop, just after the sun came up. I could hear our apprentices, who had cots in the storeroom overhead, beginning to stir. More than once, I had ripped through my clothes coffer, in a fret about what to wear to the palace. Something plain and dark, though not black, to show I knew my place as a merchant of m
ourning and funeral goods? Something with a bit of flair, to suggest I was an artist and not just a waxmonger? Father had told me once that white was the mourning hue in France, but that would hardly do and might get smudged. Indeed, whatever I wore, I was still in mourning for my son.

  I had finally decided on my tawny gown with brown piping and an edging of squirrel along the shoulders. The bodice was the newly fashionable square cut to show more of my gathered lawn chemisette beneath. My hair was gathered in a netted snood under a small green-and-white hat—Tudor colors. My best girdle dangled about my waist, the one of silver chain links, Will’s wedding gift to me. My skirts swished as I walked back and forth, with my cape rustling too. I kept tugging at my sleeves, full at the shoulders but tight to my arms from my elbows to wrists.

  Why didn’t they come for me? I wanted to leave before Maud opened the shop or Gil brought Arthur down to walk him to school. Surely this had not been some sort of clever hoax, perhaps some test of Christopher’s or the guild’s to see whether I would tell him about this when they had forbidden further angel candles.

  No, there were the Suttons, reining in before the shop, and with a third horse, a dappled gray with a fine leather sidesaddle. My heartbeat picked up. Careful not to be seen gawking out the window, I bent my knees to watch Nicholas Sutton as he dismounted, leaving the woman ahorse. I hurried to unlock the door before he could knock. I even held the bell so it did not sound.

  “I see you are quite ready, Mistress Westcott,” he observed as his gray gaze swept over me. Though it annoyed me when Christopher ogled my body, my insides cartwheeled at this man’s merest glance. I warrant I earned his approval, for he smiled, flaunting strong white teeth, and for a silent moment our eyes met.

  “I am ready indeed,” I told him, though the truth of that could be disputed.

  I joined him outside—the breeze, even here, was brisk—then closed and locked the door behind us. Though we had a three-step brick mounting stair for our customers, he evidently did not see it or was in a hurry, for he cupped his hands for my foot and gave me an easy boost up. I settled my skirts and took the fine leather reins in trembling hands before I realized I should have worn riding gloves.