Mistress of Mourning Read Free

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 undera 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 votivecandles 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