His twisted torso and dangling, withered appendages were dressed in a matching outfit to his brother’s.
“I tell you, evil times are upon us,” said the fat lady. “A fish
ninety feet long
beached itself at Dover!”
“You’re a doom monger, Annabel,” said the wolfman. “Not twenty miles up the coast, the face of the Virgin was seen in the clouds, on the
same day.
”
“One cancels the other out,” Nell heard the tall man say as she passed. He was caressing his twin brother’s tiny slippered foot.
“Good lady!”
Nell turned back and saw another of the weird troop, a man who squatted on his haunches with his back to her, examining the rosebushes.
“Was it me you were addressing, sir?” she asked him.
“ ’Twas indeed,” he said, at the same time standing and turning to face her.
He was an ordinary sort of man, of average height and weight, brown hair hanging about the shoulders of his simple tunic.
But he had no eyes.
Where they once had been were two dark, puckered holes.
“How did you know I was a
lady
?” asked Nell, sincerely curious. “My scent? The sound of my skirts brushing past? Were my footsteps lighter than a man’s?”
“None of those. You wear no French perfume. Monks and priests wear skirts. And your footfall”—he paused to correctly fashion his answer—“is strong and decisive, as a man’s would be.”
“Then how—?”
“I need no eyes to see what I see.”
Nell regarded the man closely. His friends might have signaled him her sex, and so far, even his observation that her gait was more a stride than a dainty, ladylike tread told Nell nothing of the man’s true gifts.
Nell, like her father before her, was skeptical of superstition.
The mysteries, terrors, and portents that pervaded everyday life were meaningless to her, and she had little patience with the gullible.
“I foretold the coming of the comet with the long, wispy white beard,” said the eyeless man.
“As did the learned astronomers at Oxford,” Nell countered.
“I predicted the death of Maximilian to the hour.”
“And what do you ‘see’ in these roses in the royal garden?” she demanded to know.
The man cocked his head at the question. Then he held his palm over a bloom on one of the white rosebushes. He stayed quietly thus, as if feeling it through the skin of his hand. “The York blood is stronger than most know.”
How did he know that the bush was a white one, for the Yorks?
Nell wondered. Then she remembered that white and red roses gave off their own distinctive fragrance. Surely the man was a char-latan.
The man snatched his hand away and tilted his head in Nell’s direction. If he’d had eyes, he surely would have been gazing directly into her own.
“Most,”
he repeated pointedly,
“though
you
know the strength of the Yorks, mistress.” The other hand he now held above a bush of red roses. The same long silent moment passed. “Madness flows in the Lancaster line.”
“You’re speaking treason, sir,” said Nell, and, suddenly uncomfortable, began to move away.
“ ’Tis the
Tudor
rose which blooms in no man’s garden that most haunts my visions,” he said, just loud enough for Nell to hear.
Looking round her carefully, she moved back to the sight-less man.
“What do you see of the Tudors?” she whispered.
“Mixed blood of the Yorks and Lancasters is the most vital.
The Tudors will reign in peace for a hundred years. Great queens as well as kings.”
“One hundred years is a very long time for a dynasty to rule,” said Nell, her skin beginning to crawl. “And as for peace—”
“You mark my words!” he insisted, then laughed ruefully.
“But how will you know I am right? You’ll die in the year 1542.”
“Really?” said Nell, unsure whether or not she was amused.
“I shall be an old woman by then. Will I outlive my children?”
“You
haven’t
any children,” he answered, “nor will you ever.” Shaken and quite speechless, Nell reached into the leather purse at her waist. The seer’s hand opened, palm up, the instant before she dropped the coin into it.
“Thank you, good lady. God be with you.”
“And you, sir,” she said.
She turned and left him. Without her realizing it, her pace and length of stride quickened, and she found she was relieved to be away from the blind seer and his freakish friends.
Once she arrived at the queen’s apartments, the two unfamiliar guards, their long-handled halberds crossed before Bessie’s door, stared straight ahead, refusing to meet Nell’s eye.
When she moved forward to knock, their weapons suddenly crossed lower. If she’d not pulled her hand back quickly, her wrist would have been cracked by their handles.
She felt her fury building. Was Bessie a prisoner now? “Let the queen know her friend Nell Caxton is here,” she demanded of the guards in a voice that sounded more fearless than it was.
“We have our instructions, madam,” said one of them.
“The devil take your instructions!” Nell cried.
With a loud creaking, the double doors of the apartment opened inward and there stood the Queen of England. Bessie was thin as a reed and her normally pink, creamy skin was oddly translucent. Her sky-blue eyes were red-rimmed and lines of grief were etched into her still-beautiful face.
“Nell, you’ve come! Let her through,” she ordered the sentries.
“But Lady Margaret—” one objected.
“Am I the Queen the England?” Bessie asked him with rare tartness in her voice.
“Yes, Your Majesty. But—”
“Then do not risk my displeasure.”
The halberds uncrossed smartly. Bessie reached out and, grabbing Nell’s hand, pulled her inside. Together, before the guards could do so, the two women slammed the double doors shut behind them. Then they fell into each other’s arms laughing.
Soon, though, Nell felt Bessie’s shoulders begin to quake.
Her laughter had turned to sobs. Nell held her friend as she wept, trying to murmur words of comfort through her own tears. After a time, the queen straightened and composed herself. She sniffed back her grief and attempted a smile.
“Come, sit,” Bessie said, leading Nell to two chairs by a window.
“You look to need a lie-down, friend,” said Nell.
“You’re right. Come on.”
They left the presence chamber and, moving through a doorway, entered the queen’s bedchamber, a place of almost obscene opulence. Its centerpiece was the Bed of State, hung with red velvet, and covered, all eleven square feet of it, in the soft-est ermine.
In this bed,
thought Nell,
have been conceived each of Queen
Bessie’s twelve children, only two daughters and two sons of which have
survived infancy.
But it was here too that the women had whiled away many happy afternoons, talking, laughing, reading, commiserating, and conspiring. With more than twenty-five years of shared history, there was not a secret between them, a single subject unexplored, a single emotion unexpressed.
“Go on, put your feet up,” Nell ordered, a mother hen. She tucked a pillow behind Bessie’s back so she sat comfortably against the gilt headboard. Then Nell kicked off her slippers and climbed up beside her. They had often joked that Bessie much preferred Nell in that spot than her husband.
Indeed, Henry Tudor was a dreadful man, with a demeanor as sour and severe as his countenance. By his subjects he was feared rather than loved, or even respected, and his avarice was legendary. Through the work of his two unholy tax collectors, Henry Tudor had amassed a fortune off the blood and sweat of the peasantry, craftsmen, and merchants. The noble class felt his sharp pincers too, but their wealth was so great that the king’s taxation was hardly an inconvenience.
After winning the crown from King Richard the Third, Henry Tudor had carefully observed European royalty and the economies of all the world’s greatest kingdoms. He con-cluded, quite rightly, that
wealth equaled power
. Though first in his line—perhaps
because
he was the first in his line—he determined that he would become the most powerful prince in Christendom. Hence his lust for gold. Indeed, after seventeen years on the throne of England, he was well on his way to at-taining his goal.
Bessie had always complained to Nell that all but a few grams of her husband’s passion were spent on his quest for money and power, and the rest on devotion to his mother, Lady Margaret.
Whilst still married to her third husband, Lord Stanley, that lady had taken the veil, but she had not retired to a nunnery, as Bessie’s own mother—once Queen of England—had done.
The Venerable Margaret instead had seized control of her son’s court. Along with King Henry, she was—like one of his human oddities—one half of the two-headed beast that ruled England.
With her son’s full consent, she pushed her daughter-in-law, Queen Bessie, aside, and oversaw every detail of daily life, including, and especially, the royal children’s education. She advised the king on matters domestic, worldly, and religious. To the outside world she seemed to live an exemplary life, pious and virtuous to a fault. Her generous patronage to charities, from convents to the college at Cambridge, had earned her the moniker “the Venerable Margaret.” She wore a hair shirt under her nunlike gowns. This torturously coarse garment, worn next to the skin by religious ascetics to “mortify the flesh,” as well as her daily praying that sometimes surpassed six hours, led many to believe that she was a saint.
In truth, all four feet and eight inches of her were as fear-some as Saint George’s dragon.
By Lady Margaret’s displacement of her daughter-in-law, it appeared to all that Bessie was queen in name only.
Nell and Bessie knew better, but as they had always done, they kept their council. Moved in secret and mysterious ways.
Together navigated through, and ruled, a world unseen. It was how it had been for most of their lives together, and whilst in the court’s eyes Queen Bessie’s status was humiliatingly low, the friends had their private reasons for preferring it that way.
“I noticed yet another troop of oddities in your rose garden,” Nell said, choosing to ignore her conversation with the blind seer.
“Ah yes. Henry’s second attempt at cheering me.”
“I worry to ask of the first,” said Nell.
“Oh, you
should
worry.” Bessie sighed. “The king has grown stranger every year, but I fear Arthur’s death”—she hesitated, as though it might have been the first time she’d uttered aloud that terrible phrase—“may have unhinged him altogether. I must say, he grieved for Arthur with a passion he never displayed for life,” Bessie went on. “He’d even shown me rare moments of kindness, but more often he was flinging himself from meeting to meeting, lashing out at courtiers, ambassadors, and bishops.
Even, to his mother’s horror, he railed at God Himself for taking his precious treasure.”
“So what was his first attempt to cheer you?”
“He decided that nothing would do the children and me more good than a bearbaiting, but instead of a bear he brought in a lion from the Tower menagerie and had it chained to the stake. The four mastiffs set on him, quite unexpectedly took the poor beast down.” Bessie’s eyes clouded. “But rather than reward the dogs for their victory, my dear, deranged husband
insisted they be
hung
‘like the traitors they are.’ Right before our eyes the executions were carried out.” Bessie sighed. “You see, the lion was the Tudor symbol. When the ‘common curs’
had ripped the king’s precious cat to pieces, they had, in effect, defiled the Tudor crown.” Her face crumpled and tears began silently coursing down her cheeks. “I miss my sweet Arthur,” she whispered.
“Ah, Bessie . . .” Nell grasped her friend’s hand and brought it to her lips.
“I cannot believe that only six months ago we were celebrating his wedding so happily. How beautiful was Arthur’s Spanish bride. Mary and Margaret so lovely.”
“And little Harry on the dance floor . . .” Nell remembered.
“The way he kicked and twirled and leapt like a young stag through the steps.”
Bessie smiled through her tears. “And how proud was Arthur. On the morning after his wedding night, he came out to his men and called for a large cup of ale. He was thirsty, he said, for he’d been ‘in the midst of Spain that night.’ ” Bessie sought Nell’s eyes. “I’m yet blessed with three perfect children. How can I complain to you?”
“That I have no children is no excuse for you not grieving in front of me. ’Twas not my destiny to be a mother, save
godmother. And that is what I am to all your children, Bessie . . .
to the great consternation of the Venerable Margaret.”
“Sod the Venerable Margaret,” Bessie said.
The women laughed at that, the pain beginning to lift somewhat.
“Mother?”
Nell and Bessie turned at the small voice from the doorway.
There stood Prince Harry, tall and leggy at ten, with a wild mop of red-gold hair framing a cherubic face.
“Mother, are you all right? Have you been crying?” He saw her friend sitting next to her on the Bed of State. “Nell!” he cried, and, after greeting his mother with a great embrace, came round and hugged his godmother with equal ferocity.
“How is it you’re here?” he demanded of Nell, genuinely perplexed. “Grandmother is letting no one in.”
“Then how did you get in, Harry?” Nell inquired with a wry smile.
“I told them I would be King Henry the Eighth one day, and if they displeased me, I’d not forget and whack off their heads for their disobedience!” He laughed merrily, then went back round to Bessie’s side. “Look what I’ve brought you.” Harry produced a twisted wreath of flowers and herbs—
what sweethearts called a love knot—something that was given as a token of affection.
“I went to Apothecary Coke this morning, and he helped me with it. I thought that if made with healing plants and herbs, it would prove medicinal, and if you laid it beside your pillow”—