Free Mistress of Mourning by Karen Harper Page A

a corpse. John was a skilled embalmer; he had tended to both Will’s and Edmund’s bodies. “’Tis bad business,” he went on, “a death just before all the royal wedding festivities. And I was expecting your sister with the wax cloth.”
    Thomas Merridew, a wealthy haberdasher, had died suddenly the day before the Spanish princess was to make her grand entry into London. I could hear muted sobs and wailing from the upper floor of the Merridew house. Even his shop, where they had laid him out on the counter for embalming, was draped in black cloth.
    “You might know,” John went on, “that his family and guild will have to postpone his burial until after the wedding three days hence. Death may abide for no man, but the king has decreed that funerals and grieving are not welcome now,and what this king decrees, he gets,” he said with a small shudder. His helper, another barber-surgeon whose name I could not recall, did not speak a word or look up from his task of dressing the body.
    Indeed, the city was shivering with excitement as well as a biting November wind. My sister, Maud, usually delivered the wax-impregnated shrouds to the Worshipful Company of Barber-surgeons, the guild that prepared corpses for the grave and of which John Barker was an influential member, but Maud was ailing with pain from her monthly menses. And, sad to say, ailing because once again she had not conceived a child.
    Today was Thursday, November the eleventh, and the royal wedding would be on the fourteenth. This was also the first day in weeks, but for the Sabbaths, that I had not spent hours at the palace, working on the effigies for the queen. I was grateful for the break, but truth be told, I missed Nick.
    “Will you help us wrap him, then?” Master Barker asked as I stepped closer.
    I was not squeamish around a dead body, for I had seen many in various stages of preparation for the grave, but I did not wish to spend much time at this task today. I was to meet Christopher and several other chandlers at St. Paul’s to help oversee the positioning of the two hundred and twenty tall tapers for Princess Catherine’s thanksgiving service. If we were to have sunshine then, the light would be suitable inside the vast stone cathedral, but if it were cloudy like today, we must have banks and boards of candles, let alone the ones on the altar.
    I carefully unrolled the three ells of Holland cloth thatwe had soaked in wax at the chandlery. It clung to the corpse, kept any fluids in, and, at least people liked to think, it kept the mold and cold of the grave out. It took real skill to imbue the wheat-hued flax with just enough wax at the right temperature, to stretch it straight until it dried, and then to store it so it would not crack.
    As they rolled and lifted the body, I wrapped and tucked the cloth around it, fitting it snugly, keeping the arms to the torso and the legs together, tending carefully to the corpse’s head. Some families wanted the faces kept unwrapped until the coffin was closed, but farewells were best said before embalming.
    I was grateful the barber-surgeons had done their work before I came today, for they were not only healers of the ailing through bleedings and cuttings. Unless it was plague times when many died, or even during the sweat disease such as had carried off my family, each body buried in the city must be eviscerated and the soft organs of the abdomen and chest removed. Sometimes the organs were buried with the body in an urn. In the case of important people, the organs might be interred elsewhere.
    The corpse was washed inside and out and often stuffed with herbs and spices, depending on the wealth of the family. Major blood vessels might be seared before the body was wrapped in layers of our waxed cloth, most oft called cerements, for the Latin word
cera
meant wax.
    Even today, by the saints, this task brought back too many bad memories, so I was grateful Maud had lately taken it on. With Will’s and