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wipe my tears and blow my nose, and then I would call upon the wax woman and my stalwart Nick in my hidden carving chamber. With the king away and my mother-in-law keeping a vigil today in the abbey with our daughter, her namesake, Margaret, praying for the coming safe arrival of the Spanish princess, it would be a good time to introduce Varina Westcott to my clever Henry and my little Mary.
    Mistress Varina Westcott
    “So, both Her Majesty and I have losses to mourn,” I told Nick as I brushed on melted wax to a make delicate raised eyebrow for the effigy of Princess Elizabeth, eyebrows I would have to either dye and fuse or have someone paint. Named for her mother and grandmother, the young child had emerged from beneath my knives and smoothing spoons—slender shoulders, neck, now her face.
    Despite the heaviness of this mazelike palace and the sadness that hung in this small stone chamber, the loss of my Edmund was somehow eased by my work, and I had shared that with Nick. Tears clumped my eyelashes together and blurred my vision as I had told him about my son’s death. Indeed, I would not have been here had not the queen lost children too. Misery loves company, the old saying went, but it was more than that. Despite the chasms in gender and rank, I had found a commonality of heart between Her Majesty and me.
    “Though I have no children, I too have lost loved ones to cruel fates,” Nick said suddenly, when I thought he mightshift the subject. “My father and uncle died opposing this king at Bosworth Field, and my older brother died in the Battle of Stoke.”
    “The Battle of Stoke?” I repeated, feeling the fool that I could not place that event. So—this man had suffered too. He’d been watching me and talking more today. Mayhap it was my telling him of my deepest wound that had made him share the same.
    “Yes, Stoke,” he said. “Two years after this king took the crown at Bosworth Field, Stoke was fought in June of 1487 in Nottinghamshire near my ancestral home. Do you remember hearing of the uprising in favor of a young pretender, Lambert Simnel? Tudor enemies were trying to pass him off as Richard, one of the princes in the Tower, saying the two boys had not been killed but rather escaped.”
    I had walked several steps toward Nick in the small chamber. I could see his nostrils flare in repressed anger and the pulse beating at the side of his throat. I swayed slightly toward him before I caught myself and stepped back, but how I yearned to put my arms around him.
    “I warrant,” I said, my voice catching, “that I was too young to remember that.”
    “Then let me tell you how it was,” he said, his voice crisp and cold. “At the Battle of Bosworth Field, where my father and uncle died fighting against this king’s forces, their commander, Francis, Lord Lovell, simply disappeared. The next year, Lovell led a poorly organized revolt which was put down, and again he escaped. The next year, Lovell led rebels against the royal forces at Stoke in a stronger effort, where my brother Stephen fought and died at his side, and stillagain Lovell disappeared. His body was never found, though I heard the king had men searching for it day and night among the wounded and fallen. Later, some said they saw Lovell fleeing the fighting by swimming the River Trent. Some said he escaped on horseback. Some said he vanished into thin air.”
    I gasped, and when Nick paused, frowning, I said, “Rumors. People always love rumors, the stranger, the better.”
    He seemed not to heed what I said, but plunged on. “Lovell became a damned legend—a heaven-rescued hero to some, a vengeful ghost to others. But where did he go? He hated the Tudors with a passion, so the fear is that he will try again, return again. Three times he’s evaded the king’s justice, and twice he left my family dead in his wake. But all that mattered to me after the Battle of Stoke was that my brother and hero, Stephen, was dead, and all the menfolk