A Court Affair (14 page)

It seems a whole lifetime ago now, as if I am a withered and ancient crone looking back on the fond days of her girlhood, not a mere ten years. It breaks my heart all over again to look back over the years and see it all gone so wrong, all the honey sweetness of our love turned to vile and sour vinegar, and so soon; I often marvel at how little a time our love—the time when we were
both
in love—lasted.

Hemsby seems little more than a dream now, a fairy tale, a magical time like King Arthur’s Camelot; all that is left of it now are memories and the ornamental box the deed was gifted to us in. All the pretty shells were packed away in a box; I’ve moved so often since, I don’t know where they are now—like our love, they got lost along the way. As for the castle itself, Robert sold it, to pay off his gambling debts, or buy gifts for Elizabeth, or help pay her expenses when she was in disfavour, or perhaps to pay his tailor when he declared he would not make another garment for Robert until the bill was settled, or buy yet more horses; the money came and went
so
fast, it was there and gone again, like a flash of silver white lightning, vivid and bright against the night sky. My mind was never quick enough to keep up with it and follow where it went. And that was the way Robert liked it; he preferred that on this subject my mind should always remain a darkened muddle, a dingy mud puddle rather than a crystal clear spring. “You have your pretties and a roof over your head, my angel,” he would say, kissing my cheek. “Best to leave it at that; I have men in my pay to balance the books and dole out the coins. No need for
you
to spend your days squinting and wrinkling your pretty brow over the ledgers when you could be embroidering roses on the hems of your petticoats instead. And you
know
how much I like that, knowing that I am the only man to see them, and these rosy buds,” he would add, then bend his head to nuzzle and kiss my nipples and fly all facts and figures right out of my head on passion’s wings.

Hemsby-by-the-Sea, near Great Yarmouth
Summer’s End, 1550

A
nd then the day came—as I knew it must—when he had to go, back to London and the court, and leave me. I begged him on my knees to take me with him, even though the thought of it scared me sick. I clung to him and trembled and wept. But Robert said that since the King was still in his minority and too young for marriage, the presence of women was frowned upon. Men were not encouraged to bring their wives and daughters to court except to celebrate holidays and other festive occasions; not even the King’s sisters were allowed to lodge there except for during their brief and rare visits. But he promised he would send for me soon, for a brief visit, to have me presented, and I must see to having a new gown made, so that when he summoned me, there would be no delay over feminine fripperies. And this would give me something to do, Robert said, something fun and diverting, for he knew how I delighted in pretty clothes. It would give me something to look forward to and would help ease my loneliness and the sharp pain of missing him.

I didn’t know it then, but it was a sign of things to come, the first stitch in a pattern, and the first of many such absences when I would be left alone with only servants or strangers to keep me company. It would be my fate to spend most of my marriage parted from and pining for my husband, to wait and want in vain.

Before he left me, he bade an artist come and capture my likeness. Robert wanted a miniature to wear over his heart and lay on the table beside his bed every night so that my face would be the first thing he saw upon awaking and the last he gazed upon when he put out the candle and closed his eyes at night. He would order the frame set with a bail at the top so he could wear it on a ribbon or a chain about his neck while he went about his business, and I could know that, in this way, I was always with him. Touched by his words, spoken as we prepared for bed, I took some of my hair ribbons from the carved wooden box upon my dressing table and sat down by the fire to braid them to make a satin chain for him.

“Buttercup yellow for my favourite flower, and the bed of buttercups by the river where we first made love, spring green for the grass beneath us, and blue for the sky above us,” I said.

Robert went to my dressing table and selected another ribbon and, with a kiss, handed it to me. “And pink for these two rosebuds I love to caress and kiss so much and watch as they bloom beneath my fingers and lips from the palest pink to the rosiest,” he said, reaching down to caress my nipples through the sheer linen of my shift. And then the satin braid fell forgotten to the floor, to be finished on the morrow, as he knelt before me and drew me down to make love on the hearth.

Much to my surprise, the artist was a
woman
!—a bright-eyed, merry little Flemish woman who wore her flaxen hair in an intricate pattern of lacquered and beribboned braids that made my eyes dizzy trying to follow and work out where they ended and began. I was
astounded
; I had been expecting a man. I know it sounds silly, but I did not know there was such a thing as a female artist. I thought all artists were men, as though one must possess a phallus to wield a paintbrush.

Tears sprang to my eyes as Robert chided me on my lack of manners, for “behaving like a gape-jawed peasant”, as he stepped past me to greet our guest, gallantly bowing over her hand and apologising for his wife’s “conspicuous lack of manners”, assuring her that “we are not
all
country bumpkins beneath this roof”.

But she laughed and smiled good-naturedly. Gently, she put her hand under my chin and closed my mouth.

“This is far too pretty a jaw to risk bruising by letting it hit the floor. Nor would you like to swallow a fly—a candy would be sweeter,” she said in her charmingly accented English. And, just as if I were indeed a child, she opened a pretty comfit box that hung from a braided cord at her waist and popped a honeyed sweetmeat into my mouth, then showed me the miniature of her little son, Tobias, which she had painted on the lid.

Her name was Lavinia Teerlinc, and she specialised in miniature portraits, which she painted with the most delicate little brushes I had ever seen. Watching her dainty hands expertly wield them made my own hands seem as big and clumsy as bear claws. I was
fascinated
to hear her tell of her work, the techniques she had learned from her father, and the pigments she ground and mixed herself. There was a costly but beautiful blue made from lapis lazuli that she liked to use as the background for all her portraits, “as a sort of signature without words,” she explained, a deep, vibrant green derived from crushed malachite, and a red that came from ground insects that also produced the cochineal the court ladies liked to rouge their cheeks with. She showed me the long string of beads of malachite and lapis she always kept somewhere about her person, so that should she find herself in desperate need of either the precious blue or exquisite green, she would simply remove and grind and mix some of the beads to produce the desired colour.

I thought it all such a breathtaking marvel, and I spent hours poring over the sketches and painted miniatures, both complete and in progress, that she had brought along with her, asking questions about them, and how the colours were made and the particular shades achieved, and about the people whose likenesses had been captured by her gifted hands and elfin brushes. I’m sure I must have made quite a pest of myself asking so many questions, but she smiled and assured me that this was not so, and she hoped her son would evince the same curiosity and enthusiasm when he was old enough.

I was as nervous as could be about having my picture painted, but Lavinia put me right at ease, telling me stories as I sat for her about her life and travels and all the people she had met and painted along the way. She told me the story of how she had left her home in Belgium and come to England, after Hans Holbein died and left the Tudor court bereft of his brilliance, to become “the paintress” to His Majesty King Henry VIII at “the stupendous sum of £40 per annum. More than even the great Holbein himself was paid!”

The “regal mountain”, as she called King Henry, who had grown quite bloated and fat in his later years, had doted upon his new court painter and called her his “Flemish Fairy” because she and her work were so dainty, exquisite, and magical. He had told her more than once that if he were not so old and his legs not so bad, he would have her sit upon his knee.

She had painted all his children, from the precious heir Edward, whom the King called his “golden boy” and beamed like the sun upon, to the pious and dour Catholic spinster Mary, and the vibrant, flame-haired Elizabeth, whom Lavinia clearly liked best from the way her face lit up when she spoke of her. “That one, she will be the light of the world, I predict,” Lavinia declared. “I would bet my last paintbrush upon it!” From her descriptions, I discovered that she had painted the portrait of the Princess my husband kept hidden inside his trunk, buried beneath his linen shirts.

“At the risk of speaking treason,” Lavinia confided, “she is King Harry’s
true
heir,
not
the boy; if he were cloven instead of crested between his legs, no one would think that”—she snapped her fingers—“of him; a cock does not a great monarch make!” She had even painted all three of the King’s nieces, the Grey sisters: woebegone Lady Jane, whose books were her only pleasure, a quiet little mouse who turned into a fierce lion at the mention of the Protestant religion; pert, pretty flirt Katherine, whose eyes danced and skirts swayed and sashayed at the sight of anything in breeches, eager to make men’s hearts her baubles; and, though she had neither been asked nor paid to do so, little Mary, the hunchbacked dwarf who was kept hidden away as an embarrassment by her ashamed and angry parents. Lavinia had painted her as a kindness, so the little girl would not feel left out. “Little things can be pretty too,” she had said as she handed the child her miniature and been rewarded with the rare, fleeting ghost of a smile from little Lady Mary Grey. And she had even sketched a design for a dress that draped and flowed in back to make the hump that disfigured the little girl’s spine appear less noticeable, telling her, “When you have new dresses made, show this to your dressmaker and tell her to make the back just so. Perhaps the dark purple of a plum in velvet?” she suggested, which would be both “regal and flattering” to the fair-haired child.

She painted first a miniature, since time was pressing and Robert wanted to take my likeness away with him.

I chose a sombre but fashionable gown of glossy satin that appeared in some lights black and in others the deepest, darkest blue. It had a square bodice edged with a wide band of thick, raised gold embroidery that bared my shoulders and showed just a hint of my cobweb lawn shift bordered with a row of tiny black embroidered gillyflowers. My satin under-sleeves and petticoat were the colour of cream, trimmed with a rich froth of golden lace and embroidered all over with gilt buttercups. Though neither sleeves nor skirts would show in the miniature, it made me feel good to wear them, as they reminded me of my wedding gown, which I would soon don again for a full-length portrait.

Around my neck I doubled a long, sparkling strand of deep blue sapphire and diamond blossoms set in gold that my father had bought me on a long-ago trip to London, the one and only time I had been there, when I was five years old. And upon my bodice I pinned the brooch he had also bought for me that day, despite my mother’s purse-lipped disapproval, when I had taken a fancy to it. It was such a curious thing, an ornate textured gold circle, rather like an antique coin or a round shield perhaps, set with a carved black onyx head of Julius Caesar with his prominent nose and laurel-crowned brow in profile. It was still a great favourite of mine, and I wore it often. As I prepared for my portrait, I used the brooch to pin a spray of yellow gillyflowers, the emblem of marriage and fidelity, and some oak leaves and a cluster of acorns to my bodice, beautifully framing the brooch. Even if my name were never put upon it, I wanted everyone who beheld my likeness to know when they saw those oak leaves, acorns, and gillyflowers that I belonged to Robert and would love him, loyal and true, heart, body, and soul, until the day I died and, if God were willing, for all eternity afterwards.

I wanted everyone who thought Robert had married beneath him to see that I could hold my own against all those lofty, elegant, highborn ladies of the court, that the squire’s daughter could pose for a portrait every bit as good as theirs. And if mine were ever mixed amongst theirs and a stranger from a foreign land asked to pick which one did not belong, he would not single me out like a leper.

Lavinia came into my room as I was dressing. When she saw me with my hair down, she pleaded with me to leave it so, so taken was she by the cascade of harvest gold curls rippling down to my hips. But I was stubborn and said no and had Pirto part it down the centre and braid and pin it up smooth and tight, as if I were daring even one tiny curl to escape, and fasten over it a white satin French hood edged in gold braid with a long black silk veil in back. I was a wife now and proud of it; I wanted to flaunt it, to revel and glory in it, like a pig wallowing in muck; I wanted everyone who saw my picture to know that they were looking at a married woman. I had even asked Lavinia to paint me with my hand up, resting on my bodice, to show off my betrothal ring, but she gently dissuaded me that this was not the done thing and would only detract from the beauty of my brooch, and that the gillyflowers coupled with my husband’s oak leaves and acorns made the point well enough.

Though I did not want to be mistaken for an unmarried girl, a virgin maiden with her hair unbound, even though in truth I preferred to wear it thus, hanging free without pins poking and stabbing my scalp and making my head ache, I could not bear to disappoint Lavinia, and after each session of posing for the miniature I would take out the pins and shake my hair out and give her leave to sketch me if she pleased. She would later sketch me in a pensive pose, looking out the window, waiting for Robert to come home, and again sitting on the window seat wearing a bright smile upon my face as I dangled a string for my cats—fat, fluffy Custard and sleek black Onyx, whom I’d found as a mewling, half-starved kitten, like a blot of ink spilled upon the clean white snow, with her ribs poking out and her tail broken and bleeding. I had bound it up myself to set the bones, but it had mended a trifle crookedly.