and again. Today, September 4, the annual birthday celebration of the second Duke of Buckingham, my long-dead grandfather, the maze was put to use. We cousins were blindfolded and led to the center. Then they whipped the cloths off and told us to race out, to see who’d be first. “Tread the maze! Tread the maze!” my uncle cried from outside the tall winding hedges.
I was one of the youngest and immediately fell to the back of the pack. Soon I was alone. I ran this way and that, hoping to see the hedge walls open to the gardens, but my instincts were always wrong and just led me deeper into the maze.
“What’s wrong with you, Joanna?”
“Think, girl, think!”
The voices grew louder, more impatient. “Joanna, don’t be such a doddypoll,” shouted one Stafford boy. An elder hushed him.
I’d become the center of attention, something I always hated. Had I turned right at this corner, or left? Panic made me forget which paths I’d already tried.
How my head spun with the smell of the roses. Dozens of sternly tamed red bushes dotted the maze. It was almost the end of the season; the rose petals had frayed and loosened. And the hour of the day had passed for peak freshness. But there were so many bushes, and I had passed them so many times. I could almost taste those cloying, dusty, imperious roses.
I turned a corner, fast, and slammed into Margaret.
We both fell down, laughing, the beads of our puffy sleeves hooked together. After we’d disentangled, she helped me up: Margaret was a year older and two inches taller, and always a hundred times cleverer and prettier. My first cousin. My only friend.
“Margaret, where have you gone to?” bellowed the Duke of Buckingham. “You better not have slipped back in the maze for Joanna.”
“Oh, he’s going to be angry with you,” I said. “You shouldn’t have done it.”
Margaret winked. She brushed the dirt off my party finery and hers and led me out, holding my hand the whole way.
At the mouth of the maze, they’d gathered, what looked like the entire Stafford clan and all of our retainers and servants. My uncle the duke, the preeminent peer of England, wore cloth of silver and a long ostrich feather in his hat. His youngest brother, Sir Richard Stafford, my father, stood at his side. A long shadow stretching across the garden almost reached them. It was cast by the square tower that soared above us all. Thornbury Castle, in Gloucestershire, was built to withstand attack. Not from a foreign enemy but from generations of covetous Plantagenet kings.
Margaret walked right up to the duke, unafraid. “See, Father, I found Joanna,” she said. “You can play tennis now.” He looked us both over, eyebrows raised, as everyone waited, tense.
But the Duke of Buckingham laughed. He kissed his cherished daughter, his bastard, raised alongside the four children of his meek duchess. “I know well that you can do anything, Margaret,” he said.
My father hugged me tight, too. He’d been sporting all day, and I remember how he smelled of sweat and soil and dry, flattened grass. I felt so relieved, and so happy.
The London cart lurched and shuddered, throwing me down on the straw. My reverie was finished.
We’d left the city walls and taken a side street. The cart’s wheels were trapped in the muck. The cart horses whinnied, the driver cursed, the boisterous men moved to the back of the cart.
“No matter,” the woman said to me. “We are almost at Smithfield.”
I followed the group to the end of the street and then down another one lined with taverns. It opened into an enormous flat clearing, teeming with people already arrived and awaiting the day’s execution. There were hundreds of them: men and women, sailors and seamstresses, children as well. A family pushed ahead of me, the mother carrying a basket of bread, the father with a boy sitting on his shoulders.
Without warning, a foul stench filled my nose, my throat, and my lungs. My eyes watered. It was worse than anything I’d breathed in London so far. With a cry I clutched my burning throat.
“That’s the butcher yards to the east,” said the woman I had ridden with. “When ye catch the wind, the blood and offal can be rank.” She touched my elbow. “Ye be unused to Smithfield, I can see that. Walk with me, stay close.”
I shook my head, blinking. I wouldn’t bear witness to the end of Margaret’s life with