Read Mistress of Mourning Online
Authors: Karen Harper
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Mistress of Mourning
“She perceives that her merchandise is good,
And her candle goes not out by night.”
—
PROVERBS 31:18
“Alas! When sleeping time is, then I wake;
When I should dance, for fear, lo, then I quake;
This heavy life I lead for your sake,
Though you thereof in no wise heed take.”
—“
A COMPLAINT TO HIS LADY
,”
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
LONDON
October 20, 1501
“J
ust think on it—us making candles for the royal wedding,” my brother-in-law, Gil, called to me from the door of the wax workshop.
“Us and six other chandleries,” I reminded him as I sat behind our shop’s counter, which was cluttered with stacks of candles. “Four hundred tapers for the thanksgiving service, the mass and wedding banquet. I’m so excited that the marriage itself will be out on a public platform for all to see. I do so adore weddings, especially when I’ve seen so many funerals.”
Gil shuffled all the way into the shop, which fronted the street and which I oversaw. He was a short man but with a powerful upper torso from hefting metal molds and bales of woven wick from the days when he had his own small shop out by Wimbledon. I think his far better position in “fancy London,” as he always called it, went to his head, though he had not yet been admitted to the Worshipful Guild of Wax
Chandlers. It was one of my goals for him, since women could not belong and my deceased husband had been so prominent in the guild. Gil did a fine job for me here: Our four apprentices jumped when his piercing voice ordered them to tasks he once had to do himself.
I myself had jolted at his voice and stabbed the wing feathers I’d been carving on a wax angel. I would have to smooth it over. It was entirely possible to correct mistakes in wax, at least. Dear heaven, how I rued the ones I’d made in life. Why, if I hadn’t been so careless, perhaps my dear Edmund might still be among the living.
I slowly slid the half-carved candle under the counter so Gil would not see that this angel, like the others I’d carved, had my dead son’s face again. Maud and Gil thought I was weak for mourning him so deeply, but they’d never had or lost a child. It was my sister’s cross to bear that she longed desperately for one, but Maud had never conceived.
“The ’prentices were talking ’bout seeing the Spanish princess enter London,” Gil said, wiping his hands on his waxy apron. “So, by the by, you going to walk our own Arthur home from school or want me to? I thought Christopher’d be calling on you again afore we close up, and I know you want someone waiting for the lad the moment he comes out the door.”
I was, as usual, tempted to go myself to greet and accompany my boy home, though most of the lads walked by themselves. But Gil was right about my possible visitor. Like many a widow with a prosperous shop, I had been courted by several men, and Christopher Gage, an officer in the Worshipful Guild of Wax Chandlers, had emerged as the
most determined. I was in no rush to wed again after a year alone. Though there would be much profit in our shop’s assets being merged with his, I wished he would do more to make my son Arthur like him. Such a union with another chandler had helped me once, when I wed after my family died, but then, as ever in a merchant’s marriage, it brought my money and skills to the Westcott Chandlery too. That had been my dowry to my husband, Will, and my dower from him was this fine house and larger shop—and most of all, a kindly husband who gave me my two sons, though one of them was lost to me now.
In truth, I was not prepared to deal with Christopher again, so I was about to say that I would walk to fetch Arthur. Then, through the shop window—panes of real glass, I thought proudly, not just thin horn—I saw a fine ebony stallion ridden to a stop just before our door. No, two fine horses. A well-attired couple dismounted, and the man, tall and broad shouldered, gave a street boy a coin to hold their horses.
“You’d best go for Arthur,” I told Gil, standing up and shaking out my burgundy wool skirts. “Well-heeled customers, I warrant, ones I don’t recognize.”
“So I see,” he said, stooping to squint past me.
And then the great adventure of my life began.
On that momentous day, I, Varina Westcott, was twenty-six, a wax chandler with a fine home and shop, a widow with a son named Arthur, after England’s Prince of Wales. My other son, a two-year-old boy, my dear Edmund, had died but four months past. Of course, I had suffered losses before,
for my parents and brother had died of the sweat seven summers ago. My husband’s death more recently was a great blow, but, by the blessed saints, how I had loved Edmund.
He had so resembled me, with his curly, golden hair, green eyes, and slender frame, while Arthur favored his stocky, chestnut-haired father. Sweet Edmund had looked at me so piteously upon his bed, as if to cry,
I beg you, save me, Mother.
My summoning the apothecary, a barber-surgeon, and paying much for herbal cures, bringing in a priest and saying prayers, prayers, and more prayers could not save him. Had I not kept him warm enough at night? Had I accidentally fed him something rank? Should I have seen signs of his ailment? I lit ten perfect candles to bathe him in light at the end, but he still stepped into the valley of the shadow of death.
Since then, I have carried on as best I could, tending the front shop of the Westcott Chandlery while my sister, Maud, and her husband, Gilbert Penne, moved in with us to oversee the workshop. I put one foot before the other. I employ a solemn voice for our customers in mourning, for many of our wares are funeral candles or wax-soaked shrouds. In our shop window and on our wooden shelves, I display votives to be burned on London’s many altars for the masses of departed souls. When I take pity on a grieving mother, I show or even give a candle I have carved, an angel with wings furled, its face looking upward in heavenly hope.
And at night I sleep with a braided circle from Edmund’s ring-toss game and his deflated bladder ball, the latter of which rolls out of bed during my own tossing and is
found in a corner of my bedchamber each morn as if I had cast it off.
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?