The Serpent Garden - Judith Merkle Riley (2 page)

Two

I
T
was really the fault of the rain. I would never have listened to the temptations of strangers, and foreigners, too, if the rain hadn’t been going on so long. Long rain steals away the light and leaves everything gray and possibly mildewed, and you can’t get out to church to see who has new shoes or who has recut her bodice in the new French style because they wouldn’t even wear them anyway, on account of the weather. So rain had spoiled my mood, and made me crazy for change. Love of novelty and amusement is a bad thing in a woman, for it leads her from duty. Or so says my book,
The Good Wyfe’s Book of Manners
, which my mother gave me long ago for the time I would be married and which is as stuffed as a sausage with wise advice as well as excellent recipes for dainty dishes, medicines, and soap. I used to study this book every day, being young, and lacking my dear mother’s advice, for I wanted to bring honor to her memory with my fine and praiseworthy housekeeping. Also I thought my husband, Master Rowland Dallet of the Painter-Stainers’ Guild of London, would love me better if my cooking would come out. The book assured me that he would. It was just a matter of reading it correctly, which up to that time had eluded me.

Now the day the strangers came was late in March of the Year of Our Lord 1514, and it had been raining five days straight almost like Noah’s flood. My husband had been away on business the whole time, and I was just perishing with needing to go out.

“I hate rain, Nan, I do hate it. Here it’s supposed to be spring, and it’s very near as cold and dark as winter, and there’s not a spot of green anywhere outside, and besides that, this poky little room gets duller by the hour.”

“You must always remember, you can’t have flowers without the rain,” said Nan, looking up from her knitting where she sat on the bench by the fire. Nan’s face was serious because it nearly always was. She was so much older, you see, and people who are thin and old and serious like that always pray a lot, because they have renounced the shams of the world for higher thoughts about God and the Devil. Myself, I loved the shams of the world, but I loved Nan, too, who was my nursemaid when I was small and helped with the house, or rather, I should say rooms, now that I had become a married woman. It would not be fair to call her a servant even though I paid her, or, to be really honest, I would have paid her, if my husband had given me more household money.

“But it’s dark, Nan. Everything’s so gray. And that rattle, rattle, rattle! It’s just going to make me lunatic! I need to hear the birds again, and talk to people. Spring! I need spring!” I leaned over my mother’s big old brass-bound chest that used to have my wedding linen in it and threw open the shutters with a crash. The wind flew in and the rain spattered straight in my face. Below our front window, the Sign of the Standing Cat clattered and swayed as the rain beat on it. The gutter in the center of Fleet Lane rushed as deep as a river. The brightly painted housefronts shone gray and dismal beneath the sheets of water that tore down from the sky. Not a soul was out. So I leaned out the window and shook my fist and shouted up at the streaming heavens.

“Rain, stop now! I need the sun! I want light!”

“Hush this very instant!” cried Nan, pulling me in by the skirts. “Do you want people to think you’ve gone insane? You could get wet and ill! Think of the baby. Come in at once and stop shouting!” she pulled the shutters closed with a thump. “Oh, just look at you,” she scolded, “you’re all wet. What
will
become of you? I promised your mother I wouldn’t let you be foolish. You know I did. Now settle down and have sense, for once. You wouldn’t appreciate the sunshine half as much without the rain.”

“Yes I would,” I grumbled. “I love beautiful things. I don’t need to see ugly ones just to like the nice ones better.”

“You are entirely too interested in what shows on the surface for your own good,” muttered Nan, who had earned the right of criticism not only by long service but by great forbearance on that little matter of wages.

“Master Dallet says that the appearance of things is very important, and that is why he has to take such great care with his clothes. Besides, I should not be seen to burden him when he must give seemly attendance on princes and patrons.” My head and shoulders still damp, I wiped off my face on my sleeve and sat down on the bench by the fire. Mending was looking up at me from the basket by my ankles. I gave it an evil stare back.

“I suppose he considers that sufficient reason to spend your dowry at the tailor’s and pawn your mother’s wedding ring.”

“That is the sacrifice that a woman must make to ensure her husband’s great success and fortune. A virtuous woman will be repaid with honor a hundredfold for her uncomplaining patience, says my book. And when he brings home a purse of gold and buys me a silk dress, you’ll be sorry you ever let a word of complaint pass your lips.” I stuck my feet, clad in heavy stockings and homely old clogs, straight out in front of me, not touching the ground, the better to see my homespun skirt, dyed black in mourning and spotted with the gesso that
would
escape my apron, and imagined it transformed into sapphire blue silk, bravely spotted with embroidery. I was certain back then that all this was sure to happen someday, when he attained success because of my labors. And I did labor, more than any other woman, for another woman would not have known his art. I boiled glue for him and I gessoed his tables and made his brushes and ground his paints just as I had learned to do in my father’s house. But I never painted anything of my own anymore because it was not proper for a married lady who must live only for her husband’s good and not her own selfish pleasures.

“Ah, God, that I should have ever lived to see this day,” said Nan, looking down at her knitting and making the needles go faster and faster, clickety click. “Three days already at that godless Mistress Pickering’s, heaven give me strength!” Nan always said things like that, especially calling on heaven, because she was always full of worries—most of them imagined. But I would have been very sorry if she quit worrying about death and the devil and doomsday, because that would have meant she was getting sick, and with Mother and Father dead I did not want to lose Nan, because then I would just have had Master Dallet and he didn’t talk much.

“Oh, Nan, always so suspicious! He told me himself he is finishing an important portrait of Captain Pickering’s old mother, which Mistress Pickering is planning to hang in a place of honor to surprise him when he gets home. I think that’s
lovely
. That is exactly like the part where it says that a woman should always plan elegant and thoughtful surprises to bring pleasure to her husband.” I threaded my needle as I spoke and took the darning egg from on top of the mending in the basket.

“And I suppose he told you himself that Mistress Pickering was ugly, too.”

“Oh, no, he would never say anything to unflattering about a patroness, but he says she has a great deal of trouble getting around on her club foot, and that she must come very close to the portrait to see through her spectacles, and I said I hoped he was gracious to her and he said he would take care to follow my advice. So you see I know she is very plain, although Master Dallet always tries to be tactful about people with money.”

Nan sighed as if she were the greatest martyr on earth, which was one of her favorite things to do. It clears the lungs and lightens the digestion, said Goody Forster, who is a very clever midwife and also sells a powder that will make you rich if you burn it at midnight when there is a full moon. I had got some from her, but it hadn’t worked yet. And I did need something to pay Nan so she could send money to her brother who was in prison most unjustly and also for the baby, who was very badly in need of a cradle and swaddling bands.

I became very upset thinking about money and jabbed my thumb with the darning needle, leaving a big drop of blood on Master Dallet’s brown stocking. But just as I was rubbing it in so it wouldn’t show, there was a heavy sound of boots downstairs, which was very surprising, because men in boots did not come to the Sign of the Standing Cat very often. Ordinarily there were just women there, upstairs and down. That is because when Master Dallet got the lease of the house, it was on the condition that Mistress Hull, who is a widow of the Painter-Stainer’s Guild, could live in the downstairs room for her lifetime. The lease said we had the use of the kitchen once a week for laundry, and the right to come through the shop on the ground floor and up the stairs at the back of it to our own rooms, which were only two: one for Master Dallet’s studio, and one for a bedroom, parlor, dining hall, and everything else all squashed together.

This arrangement made Master Dallet malcontent because he wanted all the space for himself to have a large studio with several apprentices someday, and also because the widow and her gossipy grown-up daughter had the shop filled with very ugly paintings left by the late Master Hull which my husband feared might be taken for his and spoil his custom. Besides that, they had spread out many strange objects they had made to sell, such as knitted women’s sleeves and lumpy mittens, which Master Dallet said lowered the tone of the whole establishment.

But the oddest thing about what went on downstairs was that besides women coming to buy pins, mostly it was a lot of monks and other gentlemen of religion who came to the shop. When I asked Mistress Hull why monks wanted pins, she said they came for the devotional paintings left by the late Master Hull. Now that was the greatest mystery of all, I thought, because those paintings never changed. The Christ in Chains was in the same place every day, and that poor, ugly Madonna was dustier all the time, and the Sebastian that had his eyes painted on different levels just squinted away in the corner no matter how many religious gentlemen came and went.

So you see my ears just pricked up when I heard boots clumping instead of slippy-sloppy sandals. That could only mean one thing, and that was the bailiff had come at last to collect our furniture for my husband’s debt, and I knew Nan thought so too. Her head popped up and her nose quivered like an old hound that smells danger. Now we could hear the sound of men’s voices below, and the voice of the widow’s daughter spitefully directing the strangers upward to our rooms. We couldn’t hear what they said because that dreadful rain was rattling on the closed shutters. The fire was low and cast little light, leaving the room all dim and gloomy.

“Oh, Nan, I’ll hide in back and you just tell them Master Dallet’s not home—he left very suddenly for the Continent. A big commission—he’ll be able to pay everything he owes.”

“Which they’ll believe about as much as I do,” grumbled Nan. “No, I have every intention of telling them exactly where to find Master Dallet this time.” Nan sounded just as spiteful as the widow’s daughter, though I wasn’t sure why.

But the strangers that Nan showed up the stairs and into the bedroom did not appear to be bill collectors. They paused to peer into the open door to the studio. I watched them look with puzzled eyes at the plaster models of hands and arms, the finely made drawings, and the bright colors on the half-finished portraits of fashionable persons, so handsome and neatly painted compared to the dusty old saints downstairs. They eyed the cupboards and shelves with the boxes and distended bladders containing colors and medium, as if they would be able to judge the quality of work that might come from them.

The floor of the studio was without rushes, scrubbed down to the boards with lye and water weekly by Nan and me, the walls fresh washed with turpentine and chalk, and the whole room spotless. You see, this is how a house must be kept if anyone is going to be making miniatures and illumination, for in fine work the greatest danger is of dust, the second greatest danger being of dampness in the breath, to say nothing of gross coughing and blowing. And Master Dallet was more than just an easel painter who could turn out a neat portrait in stained canvas or a wood tablet. At the tall worktable by the window, he prepared portraits in miniature, an art that my father had made fashionable in England when he first came from Flanders to paint for the king. Master Dallet learned all his cunning in miniatures from Father, when he studied with him at our house.

“This is the house of Maître Roland Dolet, the painter?” the taller one asked. The glistening silk and rich velvet of their clothes made a bright splash of color in the somber room. The taller one had on a blue velvet long-sleeved doublet slashed to reveal a flame-colored silk lining, and a linen shirt embroidered in gold thread beneath his heavy, rain-damp cloak, while the shorter, broader one was in green, his long sleeves lined in yellow satin, and his gown edged with marten. Each wore several costly, jeweled rings. Their spurred boots told me that they had not walked. Each had both sword and dagger at his girdle. Foreigners, I thought, from a land of sunny colors, trapped in the gray northern spring. French, by the bold cut of their clothes, and the way they spoke my husband’s name, which is really French, though his family made it English long ago. They looked me up and down with arrogant, calculating eyes, and I could feel my face turning hot.

“Yes it is, but my husband is not at home,” I answered, and still clutching my sore thumb, I showed them where they could dry their cloaks by the fire.

“Good,” said the shorter one in French, “perhaps we can deceive this woman into giving us what the master has refused.” Now I must say, that made me angry. It was not just that they were trying to trick me but that they thought me so common that I couldn’t understand them. Me, the daughter of Cornelius Maartens, painter of the greatest princes of Europe? Did they imagine I was some simpleminded, uneducated woman? In my father’s house, I learned French, Italian, music, and manners, as well as painting. I was silent with rage, and I could tell those Frenchmen took my stare for dumbness. That made me even angrier.

“Madame,” said the shorter of the two Frenchmen, “your husband last month had the honor of painting a most excellent portrait of the Princess Mary, sister to His Majesty.” Now here was something interesting. That was supposed to be a secret, but of course I had wormed it out of him when he was drunk.