Karen Harper Read online

  “Mistress Varina! ’Tis Jamie. You have a visitor from the palace!”

  My pulse pounded so hard I shook. In the middle of the night? Did he mean to lure me out with the same lie my pursuer in the crypt had used?

  “What’s amiss?” I called, my voice not my own.

  “Nick Sutton’s here from Wales with sad news and a command.”

  “Nick?”

  “’Tis I, Varina,” came that unmistakable voice. “The Prince of Wales has died. I’m to take you to Richmond Palace as soon as you can get your things together. The queen needs funeral candles, winding sheets—and you.”

  I could barely take in his words. Her Majesty’s son, the pride of the Tudors, dead? She wanted funeral goods for him, but why send for me too?

  I unbolted and opened the door a crack, then looked out. Jamie held a lantern; I blinked into its light. Yes, praise God, Nick Sutton in the flesh, looking harried but handsome. When his eyes dropped from my face to my breasts, I remembered my sopped night rail clung to me. He swallowed hard and glanced back to my face.

  “I’ll have to dress,” I said.

  “We’ll be riding hard and fast. I’ve brought boy’s breeches, and you’ll ride with me for now. I’ve packhorses and guards waiting in the street to carry candles and waxen cloths, and I’ll leave a bag of coins to cover things with Gil.”

  He thrust at me a lace-neck shirt, breeches, woven cap, boots, and cape, all of blackest hue, perhaps to hide me at night but also for the formal period of mourning.

  “I’ll have to tell my family, say good-bye to my Arthur,” I said, stunned at the sadness and speed of all these events. As much as I had yearned for Nick’s return, was I dreaming, this time not about the loss of my own child Edmund? That is when it truly struck me that the death was not only of our prince but of Her Majesty’s son, another of her cherished, lost children she so grieved. I wondered whether she wanted a waxen effigy of Arthur too. No, if I was reasoning all that out, I surely was not dreaming.

  Keeping his voice low, Nick said, “I understand if you want to wake your son and then leave him. But Jamie and I think you’d best tell just Gil and let him and your sister handle things here. Waking your lad—saying good-bye—could confuse or upset him.”

  “Yes, all right. I’ve never been to Richmond, but it isn’t far. I’m sure I can be back on the morrow.”

  I was certain he started to say something else but held back. I closed the door and scrambled into the clothing, which fit amazingly well, however foreign it felt to be garbed as a man. I pulled my hair back in a horsetail, tied it up, and pinned it as best I could beneath the leather cap.

  Jamie had roused Gil, who gaped at me as I clomped out into the hall in my manly garb and unfamiliar boots. Tears trickled down my cheeks as we went downstairs into the workroom and storage areas below. Gil quickly pulled out and rolled six huge sheets of wax-impregnated cloth—far too much for one corpse, but I didn’t say so, for perhaps that is what had been ordered and paid for. Among the forty votive candles we counted out, I wrapped six black candles, then added two angel candles, one for the queen and one for Princess Catherine, a widow so soon, so young. Just think, I marveled: Westcott cerements would enclose the body of our dear Prince of Wales, and our candles would light his tomb.

  “There’s a certain way to wind these cloths,” Gil was telling Nick, who hovered close, as if they’d been boon companions for years. “They’d better have someone skilled in Wales to do it lest they crack.”

  “I will see to that,” Nick assured him. For once, I doubted something the man had said, but perhaps on the way to Richmond I could give him advice to pass on to the embalmers there.

  Even though he was all brusque business, I drank in the sight and sound of Nick Sutton. He was truly here, and I was going with him to see Her Majesty. I’d somehow forgotten how tall he was and failed to recall completely his gray eyes and the way his eyebrows could slant when he frowned. His hair looked shorter, his face paler, and new frown lines seemed to furrow his forehead. Perhaps he had lost a bit of weight, for he looked leaner.

  Gil and Jamie carried out what we had selected. “Jamie,” I told him on his way back in, “please keep a special watch over Arthur—and no more frightening tales of torture in the Tower.” He nodded and went to lug out another load as Nick came closer, watching as I stuffed a few more things in a satchel in which I had already put a day dress and a better gown, a hairbrush and slippers.

  “I’m sorry things are rushed, so desperate,” he said, lifting a hand to cup my chin and caress my wet cheek with his thumb. “You’ll have to trust me on this, trust the queen too.”

  “I am honored to serve her in her dark hour.”

  “We’ll talk later—on the barge from Westminster to Richmond,” he promised.

  “I’ve seldom been outside London.”

  I sensed he wished to say something important, but he only nodded, then said, “Clothing and goods will be provided for you if you are away a little while. Let’s ride.”

  It became even more obvious that I had been sent for in all haste, for barges seldom plied the Thames at night. But the oarsmen were skilled and fought against the incoming tide. They bent their backs against the current as we headed westward on the Thames. It might have been the same barge in which Nick first fetched me, for we sat on a similar padded bench, close together in the chill April air, holding—no, gripping—each other’s hands.

  “Soon the entire city will waken to the dreadful news,” Nick said, scanning the darkness on both banks of the river.

  “How did it happen—his death?”

  “Both he and the princess took suddenly ill late last month, over a week ago in Wales. Events and symptoms are yet unclear. Some sort of throat infection…difficulty breathing, weak lungs, which he’d had all his life, of course, and had recovered from. He became unconscious and died on April second, and his body is lying in state at the castle, but needs better—formal—tending before his funeral and burial on the twenty-third of this month. There will be a huge funeral cortege between Ludlow and Worcester, with many nobles in attendance. Their Majesties long to be there, but protocol and tradition deem it otherwise, of course, even for lesser folk.”

  “I always thought it sad that the family are seldom the chief mourners.”

  “But the king and queen are making the plans,” he said, as if to defend them.

  “Yet it seems wrong that even Princess Catherine won’t attend. When my husband died—little Edmund too—I cloaked and masked myself and slipped into the graveyard to watch the interment from a ways off. I’ve never told anyone else that.”

  “You brave and bold girl, my little iconoclast, yearning to be in the chandlers’ guild, breaking in on that holy guild’s secret service—and turning down a profitable marriage proposal from an influential man. Jamie told me about all that, and how Master Gage has reacted since then.”

  I nodded to all he had said and clung to his praise, however much I longed to know what “iconoclast” meant. A female who did not keep to her place? Someone who broke the rules? I did not intend to be any of that, but this was no time to argue, and I changed the topic.

  “You brought the dreadful news back to Their Majesties from Wales?” I asked. “What a burden to have to be the bearer of that.”

  “At least they did not kill the messenger, as they say. I’ve been blessed that they have seemed to trust and employ me more and more.”

  He nodded proudly, but I saw light from the lantern in front of the barge reflected in a single tear track on his left cheek. Was he thinking of the royal family’s losses or his own? Either way, I understood, and longed to comfort him.

  “When I reached Richmond,” he went on, “I told the king’s confessor, and he related the tragic news. They both took it terribly hard, then sprang into action, making decisions. The queen sent for me and, again secretly, for you.”

  But why secretly this time, I wondered, if the funeral would be public and we were
simply selling and delivering funerary goods for it? I did not ask that question. Rather, I yearned to tell Nick I had missed him and thought of him incessantly. I wanted to ask what it really meant to him that I had turned down Christopher Gage’s ultimatum to wed. I wanted to throw my arms around Nick and hold tight, to climb into his lap, but we huddled together, almost cuddling. I felt strangely safe, my thigh pressed to his through my man’s garb instead of my thicker skirts, my hands between his, skin to skin. The barge thrust on through the Thames, push, pull, up and down, my exhausted mind spinning ’round and ’round.…

  I must have dozed, slumped against him. He started too as one of the bargemen called out, “Richmond! I can see the towers and turrets!”

  The oarsmen had an easier time of it now. Not only was our destination in sight, but Nick said the tide turned here, which would help their rowing. Dawn pearled the sky, silhouetting the intricate, many-storied buildings and fantastical towers as we came closer. It was so rural here, the palace set among forests and orchards. A long row of flowering cherry trees stretched along the riverbank before the palace, so it seemed the rosy brick and stone buildings emerged from a sea of foaming white.

  “The king was once the Earl of Richmond, you know,” Nick said as I gathered the sack of my wrinkled garments and the wrapped, carved angel candle I would give the queen. “When old Sheen Palace burned on this site, he helped design Richmond, and, I warrant, loves it best of all his royal houses. It was finished only last year, and—the wonder of the age—has running water in the royal chambers. The wooden floors still smell fresh, and even the ceilings are painted and gilded to the hilt.”

  Indeed, the beauty of the palace awed me. When I had first entered Westminster, I had been excited. Now, soon to face the sorrowing queen—and for what secret purpose?—I felt reluctant. Perhaps she did want an effigy of Prince Arthur. But at least, through it all, Nick was with me.

  “What is that mournful sound?” I asked him as, with unsteady legs, I disembarked upon the landing. “Could they be holding a funeral mass already? It’s like distant voices humming or singing.”

  “When the wind is right, you can hear it rushing past the painted and gilt weather vanes that protrude from the onion dome cupolas on the towers—the singing weather vanes they call them. It always sounds eerie, and yes, it seems as if the palace itself is mourning.”

  Sunlight was peeping over the forest and tall stone walls when we entered the palace by the front gate, which guards flung open for us. I still clung to my sack of garments, for surely I would not be taken to the queen or even to one of her ladies looking like a lad. But evidently I was much mistaken—and mistaken about what else?

  We strode across an outer courtyard, where only a few guards were astir. Beyond that enclosure, I glimpsed gardens with sanded paths adorned with clipped, low bushes and guarded by the king’s painted and carved stone beasts as at Westminster. Nick kept one hand on my elbow, steering me along as we strode into the inner quadrangle, where a huge fountain splashed.

  “The privy lodgings,” he told me as we went through a door on the far side, “a labyrinth of them. We’re to go straight to the queen.”

  “But I…Looking like this? I need a moment’s privacy.”

  “I understand, but do not take time to change your clothes.” Nick gave me a moment to relieve myself in a small garderobe, one decorated no less with golden griffins and dragons on the walls.

  We went upstairs, then down corridors as my wide gaze devoured timbered ceilings painted azure between beams and Tudor roses picked out in gold. Huge bay windows opened to the outside. It staggered me to realize how bounteous must be the royal wealth, but then the prince’s death, my summons here, and Nick’s presence all stunned me the more.

  I rejoined him, and we turned into a narrow hall, a back way in again. Did all the royal residences have secret doors and chambers, perhaps for trysts or for escape—or for servants to be brought in covertly for particular favors? How sad that after sixteen years of rule the Tudors could not rest easy that the throne was indeed theirs. Now to lose their future, though no doubt the young Henry, Duke of York, would be elevated to become Prince of Wales.

  As Nick knocked on the door, I recalled how the guards had called out for the crowd to uncap when Arthur and Catherine rode past en route to Wales. I removed my cap, accidentally snagging my hair, which spilled down my back. I swear, it was my only proof I was not a lad. My old acquaintance, Sibil Wynn opened the door. Though she was attired in black mourning garb, not prettily gowned and jeweled as usual, for one moment I felt as if the clock had been turned back to my first royal summons. But the smile on her face when she saw Nick sobered me.

  “She’s been waiting,” she told Nick with no greeting but a narrow-eyed glance at me. “She hasn’t slept.”

  We entered and passed through two more small chambers, elegant but empty. Ahead, through an open door, I could see Her Majesty within the last chamber, pacing. She too wore black, and ebony satin draped the tapestry I could see from here. At least two lanterns glowed on a cluttered table. She heard us and turned. Her once beautiful complexion looked sallow and blotched; gray half-moons hung under her red, pinched eyes. Like mine, her long blond hair was loose and wild. Nick closed the door behind the three of us.

  He bowed and I curtsied, though I felt my attire meant I should bow too. “Blessed saints, you are here,” she said, drawing us both up by our hands. Her skin was clammy and cold.

  Dared I speak before she said more? “Your Majesty, I was undone to learn of the loss of our dear prince. I have brought you an angel votive candle in his precious memory.” I unwrapped and extended the candle to her.

  She took it, cradled it as if it were a baby, then did not look at it again, but only at me, then Nick. “Yes—yes—I thank you. And Nick for fetching you. The best funeral goods have been selected? Plenteous winding sheets for the damp Welsh spring?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” Nick assured her. “Packed on fresh horses and waiting to head west.”

  “Varina, I am in desperate need of your services again,” she said, drawing me a bit away from Nick. “I greatly regret that someone harmed the brilliant Firenze, and I vow to you that I am—indirectly—pursuing who might have murdered him and tried to harm you.”

  “I thank you for sending Jamie Clopton—and now Nick.”

  Merely nodding, evidently intent on her own thoughts, she pulled me down beside her onto an ornately carved and thickly padded bench. That intimate move shook me. We were sitting close, eye to eye. Our knees almost touched. For one swift moment it was as if we were kin, both with our blond hair spilling over our shoulders, both in mourning for lost sons. In that moment, I felt closer to her than I ever had to my own sister, Maud.

  Not only grief but desperation emanated from the queen. As she had been in her compulsion to possess the effigies, again she seemed driven by demons. The little butterflies that beat in my belly turned to flapping bird wings.

  “I am not asking for an effigy this time,” she went on in a rush, as if she’d read my mind. “Not now, at least. I need someone I can trust utterly to attend the prince’s body, oversee his doctors or rustic embalmers to be certain all is well-done in that wild place—a place still teeming with Yorkist loyalists, I vow. You see, Ludlow Castle, though it has been in Tudor hands for these years of our reign, was once the mightiest of York fortresses. Our enemy, my uncle King Richard, used it as his stronghold and headquarters from time to time in the battle against my lord’s forces. Two villains we discussed before—Sir Francis Lovell and Sir James Tyrell—have been familiar with the area, as has the Earl of Surrey, whom His Majesty is sending to Wales as our chief mourner. It was a necessity that the Prince of Wales be sent there with his council to command the area, but it was a…a risk—I did not realize how much—and now…”

  She hesitated as tears flowed again. Evidently, she realized she was still cradling the carved candle in one arm, and laid it down between us on the bench. F
or the first time, I caught a glimpse of what she might want from me. To personally take the Westcott funerary goods to Wales? To go clear to Wales to oversee the prince’s embalming? I almost blurted out that I could not bear to leave my son Arthur without a fond farewell, but his very name almost on my lips made me sit mute.

  And nod. Dear Lord in heaven, despite my reservations and fears, I had just nodded my understanding, which the look on her face said she read as my agreement!

  She nodded too, pressed my hand in hers, and that was our bargain.

  “Nick, to me,” she said, raising her voice, and he came over. Evidently to avoid towering over Her Majesty, he knelt before us, between us. “Varina has agreed,” she told him, “to go to Wales to tend the prince’s body and to accompany the funeral procession to Worcester and help to oversee arrangements for the service there.”

  I had? I had agreed to all that?

  “I know you will guard her with your life, Nicholas Sutton. The king has agreed to this service from both of you. But there is one more thing I speak only to the two of you, and I need your sworn vow of secrecy for the task. This boon must be kept secret from everyone—everyone!—unless I give you permission otherwise.”

  She stared at Nick. “Yes, I swear it, Your Majesty,” he said.

  She turned her head toward me. However bloodshot her eyes were, they bored into mine. “Yes, I swear all secrecy, Your Majesty.”

  “I fear—I think…” she whispered, her voice breaking before she went on. She cleared her throat and began again. “It occurs to me that our son and heir could have met with foul play. Though the Welsh chieftains, untamed as they still are, are loyal to our throne, Yorkist remnants remain of those who do not wish us well. Having lost my dear brothers in what was surely vile murder, I must know the circumstances of the illness and death of Arthur Tudor. It…it could be the same villain, though I must have proof. I have written letters to his widow giving both of you access to her presence, permission to inquire for me about all that led up to…to their illness and his death. You must find someone to interpret her Spanish for you, so choose that one carefully, and do not overly distress the princess, if that is possible. She is, of course, like me, distraught.”