Karen Harper Read online

  “No more questions?” he asked as we walked out to meet the others.

  “Of course. Do you know what your nemesis, Lord Francis Lovell, looks like?”

  “Why bring that up now? Women’s intuition? Yes, if there has been foul play in Wales, I warrant he or his lackeys could be involved, though he has always seemed to disappear alone. Lovell’s looks—no,” he said, frowning. “Only by hearsay, and his appearance could have changed with age, of course—if he’s still alive. If he is, and I find him, the bastard will not be around for long, at least, once he’s delivered to the king for questioning!”

  He mounted and another man boosted me up into our saddle. The long ride had done one thing for me, besides bond Nick and me a bit closer, and that to what end I knew not: Finally, putting aside personal fears and longings, I had found the strength to become fully committed to the dangerous, daunting task that lay before us.

  Ludlow loomed ahead; at least I’d been told so. Even the wearied horses must sense it, for they lifted their heads and picked up the pace. Yet I saw no sign of walls or towers through the thatchy maze of forest. No one could miss the change in the terrain, though. The low green hills of England had grown before our eyes to rolling moorlands with the hint of mountains ahead, and fertile fields edged by hedges turned to bare, reddish bracken. Thick blackthorn trees were in early blossom, with dark, spiny twigs and sprays of small white balls. Now and then, we emerged from the forest and passed pastures with ewes and their young lambs as I squinted ahead around Nick’s shoulder, looking for Ludlow.

  He had described the castle to me as the mightiest of the old York fortresses. He’d said it was originally one of the castles built by the early English kings along the Welsh Marches that bestrode the borderland between England and Wales. During the civil war that had placed first Richard, Duke of York, then our current king upon the throne, Ludlow had oft been Richard’s stronghold and headquarters.

  “Wales is known for its fierce fighters,” Nick had said, “the skilled bows and spearmen of the English armies. But don’t worry, Varina. It’s no longer a barbarian place. Most of the local chieftains speak English, and, on the inside, at least, Ludlow is a residence of palatial grandeur now.”

  When we rode from the final fringe of forest, there it was, of gray-white stone, huge and bulky and primitive-looking, with thick walls, battlements, and a moat. It was only as we rode into the thin sunlight that I saw what looked to be a yellow sea lapping at the skirts on one side of the castle before a stretch of bogs began.

  “Those daffodils have popped out since I rode away,” Nick told me, pointing. “Their Highnesses had to search high and low for ones in early bloom when they ventured out.”

  “So they did venture out? We shall have to trace their steps. But first, I must see whether those who have begun to embalm the prince will heed the advice and commands of a city chandler, and a woman to boot.”

  “I’ve no doubt,” he said as we clattered across the wooden drawbridge under the up-drawn portcullis that guarded the front entry, “that, with the queen’s letters and your strong will, they will listen and obey.”

  CHAPTER THE THIRTEENTH

  Although I suppose my tears were from grief and exhaustion, they were tears of gratitude too. I cried over the lovely, small chamber I had been given at Ludlow Castle, which overlooked the River Terne far below and blue-gray mountains in the distance, and for the box of gifts from the queen. Nick, whose chamber was just across the corridor from mine, had brought me the box once we were settled. Within lay two lovely gowns, warm stockings, a night robe, a hooded cape lined with squirrel, a hat with a veil—everything in black, of course—as well as two pairs of fine leather shoes and a leather purse puckered at its top with felt cloth and drawstrings.

  In addition Nick had already delivered letters to the castle steward and the two doctors who were overseeing the embalming of the prince. Those letters, in Her Majesty’s own hand, Nick said, gave me permission to oversee the final arrangements for the royal corpse.

  But it was the personal letter from the queen in the box of garments that shattered my poise and bolstered even more my conviction to carry out the duties with which she had entrusted me. After Nick left me alone to change my clothes, I read the words over and over, hoping to memorize them:

  Dear friend Varina, keeper of my secrets, I ask you to destroy this letter after you have read it. I declare you my mistress of mourning while on your journey. You must act in my stead—not, of course, when you oversee the preservation of my dear son’s body, but as my chief mourner. The king sends Thomas Howard, Earl of Surrey, Lord High Treasurer, as the official royal mourner, but you also, having lost a son and understanding my previous woes, are the one who must represent me in grief and in discovery of what occurred.

  I charge you to be faithful to the vow you made and to seek answers, should there be answers to find. And, I pray you, look closely upon my son’s face, even in death, so that you may create his sleeping countenance for me anon.

  Be wary and be safe, and bid my dear firstborn, the hope of my heart, a fond farewell for me, and see him to his eternal resting place. Please place this ring of mine upon his baby finger that he might wear it for all eternity.

  Elizabeth R, mother, queen, and friend

  Mother, queen, and friend, she had signed. As I had come to know her, she saw herself as a mother first. And so must I be to my own Arthur; yet here I was, charged to learn about the prince’s death, and with Nick at my side and watching my back.

  I examined the plain gold ring she had fastened to the piece of parchment with a ribbon stuck through it. Both ends were caught in a blob of wax in which she had impressed her signet ring with the initials E.R. and a blooming rose. I wondered whether Christopher’s chandlery had sold the palace the sealing wax. After prying it off the page and putting it in my purse for good luck—for the queen’s crest, not the wax—I put the ring upon my own little finger, so I would not lose it. It reached only to my second knuckle. How small, perhaps a ring Arthur had worn as a child, or one that the queen herself had from her own parents.

  As tired as I was, I needed to wash and change, eat something from the tray that awaited me here, then hurry to the anteroom of the chapel, where the prince’s body lay. I had been told that his two physicians had not left his side and had done some preliminary embalming, whatever that might mean. I skimmed the queen’s kind letter one more time. Friend Varina, she called me. Her mistress of mourning. And so I would be.

  Hoping I would ever remember her written words, I held the letter to the flames of the low-burning hearth fire—what a luxury here. How well Her Majesty or Nick had prepared things for me. I watched the paper catch the flame, then curl and burn to crisp, silvery ash.

  I examined the two gowns, both splendidly made, one obviously more formal than the other. I put the brocade one aside and donned the day gown, of fine, fitted wool with double sleeves and a gilt belt with a link for keys, small tools, and my purse. Dropping the fruit knife from the tray inside my purse also, I gobbled down a chicken leg and most of a meat pie to give myself strength. In the hall, to my surprise, Nick awaited, talking low to a guard. I wondered whether, under other circumstances, the halls would be so full of men-at-arms.

  “Let me escort you to the chapel,” Nick said, as his gaze swept over me. He seemed to approve of my appearance, for he nodded and smiled. He looked elegant, finely attired in black with dark green piping, with a flat, feathered hat upon his head. He had shaved; the shadow of his beard that had darkened on our full-tilt ride here was completely gone. “Time to beard the doctors in their den,” he told me, playing off the thought I had not spoken aloud, as if once again he had read my mind.

  “Will the doctors be difficult, do you think?” I asked him as he tucked my hand in the crook of his arm, and we started down a narrow, curving stone staircase, just wide enough for two abreast.

  “Not with the queen’s letter they have received. Not with me hovering in the
background. And should they be, just give them that quelling look you have perfected and go about your business.”

  “My quelling look? No, I shall save that for you. But do you know them?”

  “Just these last months, and from a distance. Dr. Matthew Martlet has the most experience and has been with the prince almost since his birth. He’s the one with the silver hair. I know it’s been a huge burden for him that Arthur was never as robust as his younger brother. I’ve seen him cringe every time Arthur coughed. The younger one, William Enford, is a climber, ever looking for ways to get closer to the king, but how can I disparage that?”

  I squeezed his arm in understanding and sympathy. How honest Nick had always been with me about his ambitions. But those were one of the things that must mean we could never be everything to each other, for he would spend his life closely serving the king. I had not a doubt that Nick Sutton would someday regain his lands and family prestige, whether through finding and besting Lord Lovell or not. And I…I would be blessed just to see Gil become a member in the chandlers’ guild and to be allowed to carve my angel candles, perhaps once in a while for “my friend,” the queen.

  Nick led me through the huge, high-beamed great hall, where servants were setting up tables and benches to feed many. Each long plank table was being draped with black cloth, and the dais, where no doubt the prince and princess had presided over festivities, was bare.

  Nick steered me down halls with tapestries draped in black. Where did they get all of that dark cloth so quickly? That reminded me of something. “The wax cloth has been delivered to the embalming room?” I asked.

  “It has.”

  Inside the chapel with its vaulted ceiling, I could see the four-foot-tall bier erected near the altar with the open coffin atop it, awaiting the body. Voices came from a small anteroom across the way. We traversed the chapel, where local and visiting mourners would file past and pray before the long funeral procession to take the prince to his resting place at Worcester Cathedral would set out.

  So much to do, for he was to be interred on April 23, and this was the ninth already, and he must be prepared to lie here in state by the morrow. With a procession hauling a coffin down dirt roads, how many days would it take us to get back to Worcester for the funeral and burial? I reckoned a week, so we had barely a week here, both for the prince’s lying-in-state and for Nick and me to learn what we must, to tell the queen. Would she share that with the king, I wondered, or would her secrets from him continue?

  At the door of the small anteroom, Nick introduced me to the doctors. Though both wore black shawls, they were decked out in their traditional red-and-gray robes lined with taffeta and their round, brimless hats with lappets. I could tell instantly that Dr. Martlet was the senior physician, because his robe had a wider fur band than did Dr. Enford’s. Both looked extremely nervous and, the moment they spoke, seemed defensive.

  “We did all we could for him, of course,” Dr. Martlet told me as Nick moved away to stand at the door. Despite the aroma of sweet herbs and aromatics, I could see why Nick retreated for fresh air. However chill it was in here, the embalming and encoffining needed to be completed at once.

  “I do not question that,” I told him. Noting that the rolls of waxen cloth had been, as I had ordered, stood on end in a row rather than piled, I moved past them to view the prince.

  They had covered him with a black velvet pall that draped itself to his thin form. His pointed-toed slippers peeked out the bottom as if he had been covered up in bed to keep warm.

  Dr. Martlet spoke again. “Despite the prince’s ever choleric humors—so light faced and slender, with his excess of yellow bile—I fear it was noxious vapors felled him. The princess too. Of course, diseases spread by airborne vapors can be absorbed through open pores of the body, and you might know the prince and princess insisted on venturing outside the castle on a womanly whim. Who knows what noisome vapors lurk on the walls as cave damp?”

  “Cave damp?” I said. “The prince and princess were in a cave?”

  “I knew curiosity could kill the cat, but what could I do?” Martlet said, with an elaborate shrug. “They did not even take us along, nor many guards. Prince Arthur wanted to see the old burial place of a king, and the princess yearned to traipse through the boggy meadow, looking for early flowers. Then too, but a few days ago, there was word of a man contracting the sweat in the village.”

  Caves and bogs forgotten, my head jerked up. “The sweat? My family died of that! Could the prince have contracted—”

  “I was going to say, it was simply rumor,” Enford put in, as if to take over for his medical partner. “We sent an apothecary to examine that man, and it was merely fever and ague, not the Sudor Anglicus.”

  Yet I tucked that tidbit away, as I did the fact that Arthur and Catherine had ventured out into damp areas. I had never heard of noxious vapors seeping into pores, but I meant to examine every possibility. If sweat could go out, could not vapors get in? I oft felt fogs from the River Thames creep up all clammy on my skin. But I knew this puzzle must become clear from a hundred scattered little pieces. And why had Nick not told me about caves and bogs, if he was one of their guards? Even if but a few had accompanied them, did not Nick at least know of it?

  “So,” Martlet was saying, “of course we prescribed herbs, pomanders, and scented cloths for both the prince and princess, for she became ill too, though her stronger constitution pulled her through. She has her own physician, of course. A great, great tragedy that, despite our Herculean efforts, the prince sickened so quickly.”

  “With what specific symptoms?” I asked.

  “Everything went awry after their day outside the castle walls, traipsing about,” Martlet said, not answering my question. “Of course, he always took poorly to drafts and was oft racked with coughs.”

  “Which we routinely treated with all sort of elixirs and bleedings,” Enford added.

  “Of course, if you must know, the more ill he became,” Martlet went on, as if the younger man had not spoken, “the more His Grace became listless and had trouble breathing. Nausea, running of the reyns—”

  “The kidneys. You mean heavy urination?” I asked.

  “Exactly, and at the end, swift organ failure.”

  “But the nausea,” I said. “How does that relate to a breathing infection?” I meant to pursue that more, then saw that Nick had advanced into the room, shaking his head so only I could see him. Evidently neither physician was going to answer my question. Was Nick implying I should not ask it, or that I had best turn to tending the body? That decision was settled by Dr. Enford’s slowly lifting the shroud from the prince, who was clothed only in a nightshirt.

  For a moment, in the blazing candlelight, I stood in awe of dreadful death. My parents, my beloved son—like this, the shell here and yet the essence, the soul, departed. Arthur Tudor, Prince of Wales, looked like a waxen effigy, one I could have carved for the queen. His face was blessedly serene, his features gone slack, and I would tell Her Majesty in all honesty that he looked peaceful. And yet so young, so much promise gone because of an attack of noxious vapors he and the princess caught when they ventured out? We shall see about that, I thought.

  “What have you done so far?” I asked the men.

  “Removed the soft organs, of course,” Dr. Martlet said. He sounded more annoyed by the moment at all my questions, but the man irked me too, with his “of courses,” as if he condescended to so much as explain things to me. “We are trained as full surgeons, not like the barber-surgeons, who had best stick to cutting hair, pulling teeth, and bloodletting. And, of course, the embalming, of commoners with occasional help from you chandlers. It has been decided that the prince’s heart shall be buried here, in the castle churchyard. We have it in an alabaster-covered jar—over there—and thought you could wrap it with your waxy shrouds too.”

  “Yes, of course,” I said, though I’d never wrapped an organ before and had to steel myself at the thought.

>   “As to what we’ve done,” Martlet went on, “we washed the body cavities with sweet wine and aromatic fluids, oils of turpentine, lavender, and rosemary—not all easy to get right now, but the village apothecary was of some assistance.” He wrinkled his nose in disdain, so I assumed the ongoing battle between London physicians and apothecaries about prescribing cures tainted their attitude even here.

  “Also,” Enford said, picking up the narration, “we rubbed his skin with preservative spices and balms. The chest and belly cavities we stuffed with herbs, so we are ready for the clothing, then the wrapping of him.”

  “Do you have his burial garments?”

  “They have been entrusted to us.”

  “Then I shall unroll the wax cerements while you dress him.”

  “Save some wrapping for his heart.”

  “Yes, there is plenty. Her Majesty insisted on that.”

  I moved away and unwrapped one roll of the wax-impregnated cloth and approached the jar, which had been pointed out to me as holding Arthur’s heart. It sat almost inconspicuously on the stone floor in a corner. Bless Nick, for despite the crowded quarters in this small, close chamber—it almost reminded me of the room at Westminster where I’d carved the effigies—he must have recalled how tight spaces affrighted me. He knelt at my side to help me lift the heavy lid from the jar. I moved a wall torch to the sconce directly over it. Within, brown and purple, still and soft, lay the heart that had beaten for the prince’s body, for his wife and family, for his future kingdom he would never rule.

  I had expected blood, but there was none, not a trace. How I wished the heart could whisper its secrets of what had happened to him. Together, Nick and I lifted it out—I thought I would be ill at the task—and laid it on the waxen wrapping. With Nick’s dagger, I cut a circle in the cloth around the heart, then wrapped the sides atop, and we slid the organ back into the jar, then sealed it by wrapping the entire alabaster vessel.