Sisters of Treason (16 page)

“I remain to serve Her Majesty,” she’d replied, forcing a smile onto her face.

He seemed satisfied with that and had suggested then that they pray together. She felt a moment’s reprieve from the constant worry, but only a moment. She has forgotten what it is like to live without fear, and is glad to be recalled to court. Even though it is grim at the palace, at least she doesn’t spend her nights listening to every shout in the street and each creak of the beams, imagining Bonner’s men coming to take her to Newgate, or worse. But now she is certain someone has been searching among her things here, so nowhere feels safe.

Mary shifts again, saying, “Veena, how long do you suppose I will have to stay at court?”

“We cannot know, dear. Though I’m sure when your sister is back, you will be given leave to return to your mother.”

“And will Katherine be named as heir?”

“I hope not, Mary,” she replies, wishing she could reassure the girl, but the truth is that nobody knows, and the hope is that the shadow of her father’s treason will save her.

They are quiet again for a while, and her thoughts continue to tumble about in the silence—if she could only lose herself in her work. She has an idea of how she wants to compose this portrait,
but the proportions seem wrong and she cannot manage to convey the thoughtfulness of Mary’s disposition and the look she wears. What
is
that look? It is not in her eyes alone, it is in the set of her jaw, in her posture, but Levina cannot depict it. She puts her charcoal down with a sigh and takes a new sheet of paper.

“Have you painted the Queen often?” asks Mary.

“Once or twice.”

“And do you paint her as she is or . . . or as she would wish to be?”

“I suppose my attempt is to be faithful to the essence of her. But I fear if I showed her as she is, so frail, so emaciated—” Levina stops herself from admitting that she dares not show the Queen as she truly is.

They are silent again and Mary seems deep in thought, as if she has a clock’s complicated workings whirring in her head. Eventually an idea appears to rise to Mary’s surface. “I would like you to draw me as I truly am—my crookedness, my ugliness—I want you to show it, for anything else would not be me.”

“You are sure?” asks Levina, suddenly understanding what it is she is not capturing in the image before her—the truth.

“Never more so.” Mary seems excited, her eyes bright. “If I were to remove my overgown, you could better see me.” She begins to unhook the front of her gown, peeling it from her shoulders and then unlacing her stiff stomacher and untying the tapes that attach her sleeves, tugging them undone, until she is standing in just her white linen shift with her clothes in a pile about her feet. But she is still fumbling beneath her shift, eventually pulling out a garment, some kind of truss, and flinging it to the corner of the room.

Levina sketches the scene, the lines of charcoal suddenly coming to life beneath her fingers, the contents of her leather bag temporarily forgotten. “Perfect, you are perfect,” she mutters, almost to herself.

“No one has called me that before.”

There is no hint of self-pity in her, or if there is she hides it well.
Levina sketches on, indulging in the malformations of the girl’s shape, working out how the parts of her hang together beneath her shift, imagining her spine. It makes her think of the painting of Adam and Eve’s banishment from Paradise on the wall of the church her family used to attend when she was a child. How she had remarked that Eve’s breasts were high, hard mounds, nothing like her mother’s heavy lolling globes. Now she thinks about it, that long-forgotten artist, a man of the church, perhaps, had likely never seen an undressed woman. It makes her want to draw Mary naked. She smiles at the thought, for Mary is already skimming along the boundaries of decency by offering herself up thus, and she knows these images will never be shown.

“Here, Mary,” she says, getting up and moving to the vast chimneypiece. “Try standing here, that I may show your smallness as it truly is.”

Mary crosses the chamber, stopping to take a look at the pile of sketches. “Oh, Veena!”

Levina looks over to her, worried that she finds the images disturbing, but she is engrossed, holding the drawings up to the light the better to take them in. Eventually she moves over to the hearth. “How is this?” She places one hand on the stone upright and turns her body away, looking back over her shoulder, then with her free hand she loosens the ties at her throat, allowing her shift to drop down, exposing her shoulders and spine. There are deep red creases where the truss has left its mark, making it seem as if she has been lashed.

“Yes,” says Levina, feeling herself in the grip of something exciting. “This is our picture.” She rummages among her things for the ink bottle, finding it, lining up her brushes, taking a sheet of vellum. An animal scent lingers on it. She pegs it to her easel and begins to imagine, with a flickering thrill, the lines she will draw on its virgin surface.

“You know they have never allowed me a mirror. They think that by obscuring the truth from me I will be better off.” Mary pauses. “It is not the case. Their intentions are good, but—”

“You mean your parents, your sisters?”

Mary nods. “They sought to protect me from reality.” She pauses again, seeming deep in thought, before saying, “I too have the feelings of a young woman. I sometimes see a lad and wonder what it would be like to . . . There is a scribe in Maman’s house: Percy. I sometimes wonder what it might be like. He doesn’t notice me.”

Levina says nothing, allows Mary to talk, feeling the privilege of being trusted with her innermost thoughts.

“I have been reading Plato—his
Symposium
. Have you read it?”

“I have not.” Levina feels a little ashamed that this young girl is versed in Plato when she has failed, in near on forty years, to read the ancients.

“It is all about love. There is an idea in it, that in our true state we were once like wheels, two heads, four arms, four legs, spinning across the earth, and that somehow we became split and are destined to seek out the other half of ourselves. It is silly, of course, but a little like the story of Man’s fall, is it not?”

Levina nods and smiles, then is surprised at the force with which Mary says, “Do you suppose there is the misshapen half of a wheel somewhere in the world to match me?”

Levina is touched to the heart but doesn’t know how to reply, can think only of meaningless, comforting words, so remains silent and Mary continues. “They all think I bear my cross like a saint. But I don’t—I sometimes hate God for what He made me.”

“It is your right to feel angry, Mary, even with God.” Levina finds her voice at last. “But you are worth a thousand of those ordinary pretty girls.”

“Ordinary prettiness is a thing I shall never know. And don’t say it—” She holds up a hand. “That I am beautiful on the inside.”

“Patronize you with platitudes? That I would not do.”

“I know.” Her voice has softened. “You are the only one I feel I can be honest with.”

“There is honesty in
this
.” Levina taps at her drawing. “Despite the fact that no one else will ever see it.”

They fall into a deep silence, she in the thrall of what is before her, in the image taking shape on the page. Now she sees the truth of that look Mary wears—it is more than just a stoic mask; it is filled with tightly censored anger and passion. She absorbs herself in the mechanics of her craft, holding out a brush at arm’s length, measuring what she sees, making minuscule marks on the vellum, looking until she sees the things that are not at first apparent, the relationship between the parts of the figure before her, the empty space around her.

After a while Mary says, “Thank you, Veena, for this . . . For doing this.” She stops and a smile dances over her lips. “The truth is so very important. Do you not think?”

“It is all there is.” Levina remembers now, quite vividly, the dwarf’s corpse at the morgue in Bruges. She can hear her father’s voice guiding her, as she sketched the odd proportions over and over again until he was satisfied she had learned the lesson—that nothing is as you suppose it to be. It strikes her that she is still learning that lesson.

She sees Mary with new eyes: her permanent shrug, as if she is seen through a flaw in a pane of glass; her round eyes with their grave seriousness hiding that passionate rage; her hands, fragile as butterflies; the particular tone of her dark chestnut hair that carries with it the memory of her dead sister, Frances too, the three of them so alike really—so unlike Katherine, for Katherine is entirely her father’s daughter.

She stops herself from being dragged away by her thoughts, bringing her attention back to what lies before her, how the light sculpts the planes of Mary’s face, how the edge of her blurs into the shadow behind. Levina, entirely captivated by what she sees, works almost in a trance—the chink of her brush in the bottle, the metallic tang of the ink, the eager pat of her heart—now finding the composition that eluded her, barely aware that the day is fading. She stands back eventually to survey her work, then, taking her most delicate three-haired squirrel brush, adds the finest details,
fronds of hair, a stitched pattern of ivy on Mary’s shift, the perfect discs of her small fingernails.

“If I am ever to be a great artist,” says Levina, “then it will be you, Mary, who has made me so.”

“Who would have thought?” Mary exclaims with a wry laugh. “The runt inspiring such greatness.”

“Runt,” says Levina. “That is a harsh word.”

“But it is the truth.”

The chapel bell rings out announcing Mass, interrupting them. The two women respond without thinking. Levina pulls her apron off and reaches for her hood, tying it beneath her chin, then drapes a cloth over her easel, careful not to smudge the drying ink. When she turns back to Mary she realizes to her horror that the girl has pulled out the roll of papers from her satchel.

“What are these that you have been guarding so closely?” she asks, unfurling them, her eyes moving over them. The color drops from her face. “Why do you have such things? You risk your life with them.”

The hinges of the door squeal slightly as it is pushed ajar. “Is someone within?” calls a man’s voice.

“What is your business?” asks Mary.

“We are ordered to search these chambers, my lady.”

The two women swap a look of alarm. Levina swallows.

“Enter not!” cries Mary, with authoritative firmness. “I am unclothed.” She shoves the papers inside her shift and pulls on her truss over them, tying its tapes, then steps into her kirtle, hitching it onto her shoulders.

When Mary looks up Levina shakes her head but the girl nods defiantly, saying, loud enough to be heard beyond the door, “Would you kindly pass me my stomacher and gown, Mistress Teerlinc.”

Levina does so, helping to fit her into her clothes, burying the drawings beneath the layers.

“You may enter now,” Mary calls out.

Two men appear. One Levina recognizes from the courtyard
earlier. He had been a little too eager to take her satchel off her, which had roused her suspicion. The other she has never seen.

“Come, Mistress Teerlinc, let us leave these men to their duties, or we will be late for Mass.”

At this Mary glides from the chamber. Levina, at her side, feels like an infant in the face of such courage, scolding herself inwardly, horrified that she has been so careless with her charge’s safety. Mary only betrays her fear once they have reached the far end of the corridor, with a deep expulsion of air.

It is not only in the color of her hair and the features of her face that she resembles her sister Jane, thinks Levina.

May 1558

Hanworth Manor

Katherine

I have my Juno back. It is six weeks since I sat with her that night, when none thought she would survive; it seems longer, but now the color is returning to her cheeks. Here at Hanworth the days stretch out with little to do, save stroll by the lake with the dogs when the weather is fine, though Juno still cannot walk far. The Duchess has allowed me only two of my dogs here, the rest of them, with Hercules, are at Beaumanor. I am glad to have Stim and Stan to keep me company in the long hours when Juno is resting and I ride out with them in the park where they chase rabbits and bark at the deer, generally making a nuisance of themselves. I find ways to occupy myself; there is music and a relatively handsome dance master who comes twice a week, but I am restless for the bustle of court where there is always scandal of one kind or another to swap.

Here it is the nights, though, that are the best times, when we are tightly curtained in bed, snuggled together for warmth and Juno and I explore each other’s bodies, taking it in turns to pretend
we are boys. Sometimes, in the half-light when I see the silver blonde of her hair and the curve of her cheek, I imagine she is me and I her. I run the tip of my tongue along her neck, tasting the salt tang of her skin, and nuzzle into her, enveloping myself in her particular scent, rosewater and something beneath it that reminds me of the sea, feeling the firm grip of her hand on my thigh and hearing only the mingling sound of our breath. I never imagined such pleasure was possible.

Juno, bundled up in furs though the weather is clement, holds my arm as we stroll in the gardens. I mimic Mistress Poyntz, firing orders like arrows, to draw a laugh out of her. It is washing me through with joy to hear that laugh once more, but the effort of it provokes a fit of coughing and we have to stop on a bench that she may recover her breath.

“Shall I send for a drink of hot lemon for you?” I ask, rubbing her shoulders.

“I should like that,” she replies, with a limp smile.

I run to the house to find Mr. Glynne, Juno’s manservant, and make my request. On my way back out I bump into the Duchess in the hall.

“Katherine,” she snaps. “Walk!” she commands me as if I were a wayward mare.

“Yes, my lady,” I mutter, stopping before her and bobbing in a curtsy.