Tudor Rose Page 6

  Tears streaming down her face, Rose stepped back from the bed. Of course, death was a big part of anyone’s life, but the brutality of this ending caught Rose totally unprepared. Confused and scared, she cast her gaze about the large room as if she might find someone better able to deal with this horror—and found only Sybille and the frightened maid.

  After a moment, Sybille took a breath and told Hester to close Agnes’s eyes. The maid just shook her head, too frightened to touch a corpse. So Sybille did it herself.

  “Goodbye, my lady,” she said gently when she was done.

  Minutes later, the maid was gone, and Agnes lay under the sheet. Rose’s tears had dried, and she was sitting with Sybille in front of the fire, pondering their future. Their very dismal future, Rose thought.

  Sybille’s standing as an attendant to a lady-in-waiting was gone. Now, she and Sybille were two powerless young women suddenly set adrift. They would get no help from Avis or the other Scarcliffs, that much was obvious. And Sybille’s brother, Robert, who had finally brought them their bags from the carriage and then disappeared again, was worthless in any situation that didn’t involve locating the closest pub. As tragic as it had been to watch, Agnes’s death would affect Rose and Sybille more than either wanted to admit.

  Rose waited for Sybille to speak, but she just stared into the fire.

  “Now what?” Rose finally asked.

  As if coming out of a deep fog, Sybille turned to her. “What do you mean? Isn’t it obvious?”

  “Yes, I guess they’ll want us out of here,” Rose responded.. “We should start packing our things. The Scarcliffs will probably send us to the dormitory where the servants sleep.”

  Sybille’s eyes pinned Rose to her seat. “I always say you’re the clever one, but maybe I’m wrong.”

  “All right, then,” Rose said, exasperated. “Tell me, what do we do?”

  Glancing back at the bed, Sybille smiled grimly. “God has just handed us a golden opportunity, Rose. We’re not going anywhere. This room is ours.”

  FOUR

  “Even death is a chance for the Scarcliffs to show off their power,” Sybille muttered as they trudged through the dirty snow to the cemetery

  Rose had to agree. It was only two days after Lady Agnes’s death but her funeral was like a spectacle that had been rehearsed for weeks.

  Twenty-one paupers dressed in black—one for each year of Agnes’s life—and twenty-one hymn-singing priests led the procession from the cathedral through the streets of London. Next came the Scarcliff family, dressed in long, rich brown furs that dragged in the snow. With their heads held high, they strode proudly in front of the mahogany horse liter that carried Agnes’s coffin.

  Supported at the front and back by two, plumed black horses, this liter belonged to the queen herself. Elizabeth, however, was not part of the parade. In fact, she hadn’t stepped foot in this part of London or Richmond Palace since her coronation anniversary. Not surprising, considering she had over sixty royal residences to choose from.

  Finally, at the back of the procession, forced to walk in snow turned muddy from so many before them, were the hundred or so mourners who had come to pay their respects, to grovel at the feet of the powerful Scarcliffs, or simply hoard the food at the banquet which would be held in the great hall after the funeral.

  It was to this last group of mourners that Sybille and Rose had been relegated—much to Sybille’s fury.

  She had tried her best to charm Valentyne’s mother on the steps of the cathedral after the service. “Shall I take your arm, Lady Anne?” Sybille had asked as they prepared for the trek to the cemetery. This was the first meeting between Sybille and Valentyne’s parents—and Rose knew she wanted it go off well.

  But Master Scarcliff and his wife had greeted Sybille not with hugs as the woman who would marry their son next month—but with cold handshakes as if she were a somewhat repulsive business associate. They turned away from Sybille, and Avis told her firmly she and her servant—Rose still couldn’t get used to hearing that—could walk at the back of the procession.

  Each church along the funeral route had been paid to ring its bells for an hour. The cacophony was deafening, but luckily it drowned out Sybille’s loud cursing as she stepped in a puddle. “Why not just throw a black sack over us and put us with the paupers?” she snapped.

  Rose hushed her. “Don’t give them any ideas.”

  A light snow started to fall as the procession wound its way through the gates of Richmond Priory, and into the cemetery where exhausted gravediggers had attempted but failed to chip out a final resting place in the near-frozen earth. Pulling Rose along insistently, Sybille pushed through the crowd for a good position, directly across the shallow grave from the Scarcliffs.

  “Fratribus et sororibus, qui hodierno die conuenistis nos …” The bishop began the graveside service in Latin. Valentyne, Avis, and their parents stared at Agnes’s coffin as the two workers, sweating after their efforts, leaned on their shovels, and waited to take the coffin back into the cathedral. With their blond hair and long, athletic limbs, Rose noted the Scarcliffs were like petals of the same flower—or teeth of the same lion.

  If they were giving each other support, however, it was the support a cold brick might give another in holding up a wall. True, Valentyne stepped forward at one point to read a poem he’d written about Agnes. But when he read the last line, “Now when I search for my missing heart, I will look to the heavens,” only Avis seemed genuinely grief-stricken. Tears streamed down her face and her chest heaved in small, sharp sobs.

  Poor girl.

  Unable to douse a growing sense of pity, Rose caught Avis’s eye and gave her a small smile.

  When that small-town harlot smiled at her, Avis almost leapt over the coffin to wring her neck. First the queen didn’t bother to show, Fulke Northwood was nowhere to be seen, and now she had to look over her sister’s grave at those bumpkin witches? This was too much. Far too much.

  “Are you all right?” Valentyne whispered, touching her arm. He’d just finished reading his poem, and the bishop was continuing the service, droning on about death as the snow fell more heavily. “Darling?” Valentyne prompted when she didn’t answer.

  “Hmmm,” Avis responded, surprised to find words catching in her throat. She touched her face, and her fingers came away wet with tears. She wasn’t used to being out of control, and right now her emotions were in charge.

  If only I hadn’t ignored Dorothie’s plea to return to the palace …

  “Father is watching you,” Valentyne warned under his breath. Their parents, who stood next to Valentyne, had commanded them to behave with dignity today. No weeping. No falling on the casket in fits of anguish. No public displays of grief.

  But Valentyne’s concern only made the tears come faster. He didn’t know that, by keeping Dorothie’s summons a secret, Avis had denied him the opportunity to say goodbye to his older sister.

  She felt a sob escaping her lips, but managed to turn it into a cough at the last second.

  Compose yourself!

  Desperate, Avis focused on her fury instead of grief—and turned her attention back to Sybille and Rose. She squinted at their ridiculous clothes and their out-of-date hairstyles. They had no right to be here, and they certainly had no right to live in Agnes’s room.

  The morning after her sister died, Avis had demanded they move their things to the servants’ dormitory where they’d share space with twenty or so other women.

  “Very well,” Sybille had said. But they had not left. Instead they had taken over the wardrobe, rearranged furniture, and were sleeping in her sister’s bed.

  Avis let the rage of injustice replace the unnerving grief and felt her control returning. That whore Sybille was taking her room and that witch Rose was taking her earl.

  Now that Avis’s parents were at the palace, they would see to that trash. And if they didn’t, Avis would take matters into her own h
ands.

  The sudden force of Avis’s glare jerked Rose’s head to the side as if she’d been slapped.

  “Oh,” she said out loud, and felt the blood rush to her face.

  Rose didn’t know why she was surprised by Avis’s hostility. Maybe it was because in the last two days she’d been making progress in establishing budding friendships and alliances with different people around the palace. She thought—wrongly, obviously—that somehow that goodwill would spill over to her dealings with Avis.

  Both Rose and Sybille had taken very seriously their mission to find out everything they could about the queen. Sybille’s father wasn’t due to arrive until the following week, so any protection he might provide was too far in the future. By then, if Avis had her way, the girls would be permanently banished to the lowest levels of the palace pecking order.

  So the day after Lady Agnes’s death, Rose began her quiet campaign to make contacts in the palace. She chatted with the maid who brought the chamber pot, she asked a lady’s maid named Jane how she managed to braid her hair so beautifully, and she brought small gifts—half loaves of bread or mugs of weak beer—to attendants forced to wait in the cold near the stables while their masters were off hunting.

  “Hello,” she’d call with a smile. “You must be awfully chilly out here. Thought you might like something to warm you up a bit.”

  To a boy named Jack, who claimed to run messages for the lords and ladies of the court on his nag of a beast—“This horse could outrun the sun in the sky!” he’d boasted—Rose gave a small pigeon pie she had pilfered from the kitchen.

  And she waited for the information to flow in. Rose had guessed that those in lower ranking positions would be the easiest to charm into opening up. But she quickly realized that was the thinking of a snob.

  “How does your master find the queen’s mood these days, Jane?” Rose had prodded the maid with the beautiful braids the day after their first encounter.

  Jane, who had been smiling just a second before upon running into Rose outside the kitchen, suddenly had a change of expression. A knowing look entered her eyes, and she kept moving down the corridor without replying.

  The palace servants weren’t toddlers who could be tricked with a bit of candy. They were loyal people. Yes, they were grateful for Rose’s attention and gifts, but they remained slightly mistrustful and surprisingly tight-lipped.

  She decided she’d have to shift her focus higher up the ladder of power.

  Sybille’s quest for information, on the other hand, took a different, far less delicate route. She preferred volume and loud demands to quiet words. She thought people should know from the very beginning that she wasn’t playing a game, that she was the one in charge.

  No gifts from Sybille; she thought her very presence was her gift.

  Where Rose would offer a timid batting of the lashes to a handsome young man, Sybille would press up against her target until he could feel the pounding of her heart. She’d found certain things learned in the haylofts and secluded fields of Gordonsrod served her well in the palace. Even the French Ambassador’s son who spoke only French understood what was expected when Sybille gave him a seductive smile and a gentle tug of the arm.

  And, of course, it didn’t take Sybille long to turn to blackmail.

  The day before the funeral, while on their way to find a seamstress who could help them update the fashion of their clothing, Sybille and Rose had been walking through one of the palace’s many sitting rooms. They came across Dorothie, Avis’s closest friend, perched by herself on a window seat, enjoying the late afternoon sun that streamed into the room and writing furiously on paper secured to a small board.

  When Dorothie spied the girls approaching, she immediately got to her feet to make a hasty exit. Avis had been away from the palace with her parents since the death of her sister but she still exerted control over her minions.

  “Please sit a while, Dorothie,” Sybille said and gestured for Rose to stay by the door. Rose touched the book through the fabric of her purse, wondering if she could steal a private moment to study its pages while the other girls talked.

  But Dorothie had no intention of staying. She raised her nose as if an odor wafted in the air. “I have better things to do than sit with you.” Hefting her writing board, she again moved quickly for the door.

  Before she could leave, Sybille called after her in an awe-struck voice: “It’s just … I wanted to ask where I might’ve seen you before.”

  The comment was right on target. As a girl who dreamed of being an actress, Dorothie’s vanity got the best of her and she turned back to Sybille. “My roles have been limited, of course, because of my gender. But I was on the stage at the Boars Inn and have performed here at Richmond Palace.”

  “No … ” Sybille mused, sitting on the window seat and tapping her chin thoughtfully. “No, it wasn’t that. Oh! I know!”

  Intrigued by her own fame, Dorothie asked, “When?”

  Sybille smiled, knowing she’d just hooked a fish. “It was when I first arrived in London. I saw your face … or your head I should say.”

  An eyebrow cocked in confusion, Dorothie asked, “Really?”

  “Yes, it was on a pike over a city gate.”

  Dorothie winced. “You’re disgusting.”

  Sybille continued to smile, locking her eyes on Dorothie’s. “Or maybe it was a premonition. Maybe I’m thinking about something that might very well happen to you in the future.”

  Looking a little sick, Dorothie breathed, “I beg your pardon?”

  “Oh, Dorothie,” Sybille said in a sing-song way. “It’s not my pardon you would need to beg. If the queen were to discover that you conspired in a plot to portray her in a comical light disguised as her jester as you did when I first arrived here, well … ” Sybille pantomimed holding out a head with one hand and jamming a spike up into it with the other.

  Dorothie’s hand flew to her chest in fear.

  “So do you think you might stay awhile?” Sybille asked sweetly and patted the spot on the seat next to her.

  Dorothie just nodded. What else can I do? her expression said as she sat reluctantly.

  But then, as Rose watched, something happened, as it usually did with Sybille. She was actually able to win Dorothie over, partially at least. There was a quality to Sybille’s brash, bold manner that made you happy to be on her good side. It was clear that she didn’t suffer fools lightly and her approval meant that you had passed some kind of test.

  By the end of their encounter, the two couldn’t be considered close friends by any stretch of the imagination, but Sybille had managed to get Dorothie to laugh at a small joke and had promised that they would take a walk together around the grounds of the palace soon.

  After Dorothie left the sitting room, Sybille turned to Rose. “And that’s how you do it.”

  Tired of standing in cold, wet shoes, Sybille just wanted Lady Agnes’s funeral to end so she could get out of this cemetery.

  But the bishop had other plans. He ordered Agnes’s coffin to be opened one final time—perhaps, Sybille wondered, to convince himself that such beauty had once existed in the world? No, it seemed he had another purpose. He produced a simple wooden crucifix, more than likely something a young Agnes had fashioned for him years ago. The bishop kissed the object and placed it next to Agnes’s body.

  Many around the future gravesite could now see inside the coffin. A raised eyebrow or two noted that her still beautiful blond hair had been tied up and secured to the side with a glittering pin of thirty-four perfect rubies, one of the Scarcliff family’s greatest treasures. From the neck down she had been wrapped in the finest white linen, her body decked with hothouse flowers, as befit a maiden of her stature on the way to meet her Lord.

  Normally the coffin would be lowered into the ground at this point, but, of course, the gravediggers had been unable to penetrate even a few inches into the frozen earth. Agnes’s coffin would be place
d in a chapel belonging to Master Scarcliff’s family in the cathedral until spring—or an early thaw.

  Sybille had never even seen Lady Agnes conscious or spoken with her. So while her death was tragic, it was difficult to summon too much emotion. If anything—and Sybille knew this was not a kind thought—she was angry with Agnes for dying and putting her in this precarious position.

  Out of the corner of her eye, Sybille noticed that Rose had just lifted two fingers to cover the birthmark under her lip. She looked around to see who was making Rose nervous.

  Ah … there.

  Even though the funeral was still going on, the paupers had already formed a line, snaking up a nearby hill, eager up for the bread and coins they’d been promised for participating in the procession. At the top of the hill, through the curtain of falling snow, Sybille spotted a handsome young man wearing monk’s robes handing out pieces of bread and small sums of money.

  “Is that Howell Digby?” she whispered to Rose, surprised to see him. Wasn’t he at Westminster? Was working with the poor part of his schooling?

  When Rose didn’t answer, Sybille purred, “My, my … ” She took notice of how nicely Howell had been maturing lately. Feeling Rose stiffen at her side, she murmured, “Oh, don’t be so sour, Rose. You can have him all to yourself.”

  Still … he did look virile. And the robes he was wearing meant he would be something of a challenge.

  And there was nothing Sybille liked better than a challenge.

  At the banquet after her sister’s funeral, Avis was seated at the head table by the windows of the great hall. And she was grinning.

  When Avis realized it, she raised a hand to block it from view.

  Completely inappropriate, of course, but she couldn’t help herself. The banquet had started off so incredibly well. First, Lord Northwood had finally arrived. He begged the forgiveness of her parents—he’d been detained by the death of one of his key advisors—and, after passing condolences along to Valentyne, he’d reached out and clasped Avis’s hand for a split second and said, “I’m so sorry.”