Sisters of Treason (6 page)

George has come in now and stands silently behind his wife, watching her draw. She doesn’t acknowledge him. She is grateful of his respect for her work, that he never seeks to interrupt her, and she is tweaked by guilt for the annoyance she felt before. A strand of hair has fallen forward over her face, which she blows away with an upward exhalation. She can hear George’s breath. Now the charcoal seems to magically obey her wishes, the image appearing on the paper as if it were there already and it is some kind of mysterious alchemy that has made it visible. She stops and turns to George with a smile.

“You have captured him, Veena,” he says, lightly placing his hand on her shoulder. It is an unfamiliar touch for her. He has been on guard duty at court; they have been apart for several weeks and will have to find one another again among the detritus of their separate experience.

“How are you, George? You look tired,” she says.

“Don’t stop your drawing. I like to watch you draw.”

“Sit, then, and I shall draw you. Over there.” She indicates a stool in the sun by the window.

Sometimes, when she looks at her husband’s face, she feels she hardly knows him, for she cannot see anymore the young man
who presented himself nervously to her father all those years ago in an ill-fitting but expensive doublet and with a fringe of hair severely cut across his forehead that gave him the look of a monk. Levina remembers fearing there might be a tonsure beneath his cap, which made her want to laugh. He was the nephew of her mother’s friend and thought he might find a wife among the Bening family’s abundance of daughters.

Strictly speaking, they were not quite wellborn enough for him, but George Teerlinc was something of an oddity, with the cowed look of a beaten dog and a stutter that made it seem impossible for him to get from one end of a word to the other. His first greeting left an excruciating hiatus in the room while they waited for him to stammer out the usual niceties. Levina’s sisters, Gerte in particular, looked on anxiously, each of them silently willing him to pick one of the others. Levina felt desperately sorry for him and her sympathy must have shown on her face, for she was the one he chose.

Her father was sanguine on the outside at least—he knew he would lose her to marriage one day, though if he’d had his way he would have kept her always. But Levina was seventeen then, and it was seventeen years ago now; how time has surprised her in its passing. It was her mother who drove the deal and George Teerlinc took her without a dowry, which was unusual.

“Why so miserable?” Levina remembers her mother asking her father. “You have four girls left still.” He turned from her and left the room without a word.

Levina followed him, catching up with him in the garden, where the leaves were falling. “It will not be so bad, Father.”

“But, Veena, you are my special one,” he replied.

“Shhh,” she remembers saying. “The others might hear.”

“Do you think they don’t know it already, Veena?” He opened his arms out to his favorite daughter then, wrapping her with them, and she was glad not to have to look at his buckled face.

“Are you not suspicious,” Gerte had said that night, “that Teerlinc
takes you without a portion? Even with that awful speech impediment—he comes from a much better family than us. Perhaps he is incapable of it.”

It
was something the sisters talked of often. Levina was glad to get away from Gerte, even if it meant marrying the peculiar George Teerlinc. Gerte was wed soon after, to a cloth merchant who was wealthy enough, even for her, but she died in her first childbed. And Levina came to the English court, invited by Queen Katherine Parr, who had heard of her work, and with her came odd George Teerlinc, who was offered a position in the royal guard. She grew to love him, in the main because he tolerated her painting, as most men would not have done. George’s stutter has diminished over time but occasionally reappears unexpectedly, usually in a moment of heightened emotion, great joy, or great fear. He never mentions it, but Levina suspects it has made things hard among the ranks of guardsmen—for men together can be every bit as cruel as women. But by and large it is a good occupation for him, as it requires patience and silence, two of George’s greatest talents.

“There,” she says, laying down her nub of charcoal and handing the sketch to her husband. “What do you think?”

“I look old,” he replies. “Do I truly look this old?”

“Since when were you so vain, George?” She laughs, and he puts his arms about her, folding her into an embrace. “L-Levina,” he breathes, and she remembers how much she has loved him, the tenderness seeping out of her, blurring the boundaries between them. He pulls her towards the other room. She glances back at Marcus but he sleeps on, oblivious, with Hero, beside him again, now lolling on his back. The door swings shut and they fumble at each other’s laces, breath shallow and urgent, pulling the clothes from each other. As her kirtle falls to the floor she feels her bulk, suddenly self-conscious, afraid perhaps that he will not like the weight that has crept onto her recently. But he seems not to notice,
burying his face in her belly, inhaling deeply, as if to catch her very essence.

•  •  •

After they have supped and Marcus has retired, George picks up a sheaf of Levina’s sketches, looking through them.

“Whose hands are these?” he asks.

Levina crosses the room to look over his shoulder where he has leaned towards the candlelight to better see. He is holding a drawing she has made of Jane Grey’s hands blindly feeling for the block.

“Nobody’s, they are from my imagination.” She doesn’t want to explain how it was; doesn’t want to remember the horror of it, nor how she cannot bring herself to re-create the whole scene.

“This is Lady Mary Grey, is it not?” He has put that sketch to the bottom of the pile and looks at another now.

“It is.” Levina has drawn her from behind, seated at a three-quarter angle. She has made sketches of Mary, dozens of them, trying to imagine her little body beneath her clothes, the spine twisted and reptilian. She remembers her father taking her to a mortuary once and there seeing the corpse of a dwarf. He had her sketch the body over and over again. It was a lesson in anatomy. “You cannot assume the human body takes a single form,” he had said. “Look at each line separately and how it relates to the rest.” She was young enough then to be shocked at the strangeness of the little man’s proportions, the short legs, the long body, the square head. Mary Grey is different. Her proportions are perfect but miniaturized, like a marionette; her face is dominated by a pair of round liquid eyes and a mouth that sits in a smile whether she means it or not. But she is crooked, quite inhumanly so, and that is the thing that fascinates Levina, the juxtaposition of perfection and imperfection.

“I can’t imagine what it must be like for her,” murmurs George. Levina wonders if he is referring to the girl’s deformities or her situation.

“She is stronger than she looks,” Levina says. “It is the other sister I worry for most.”

“Lady Katherine?”

She nods. “Look.” Taking the sheaf of drawings from him, she shuffles through them until she finds one of Katherine.

“You have caught her fragility,” he says. “And her beauty.” He scrutinizes the drawing, holding it closer to the light. “I had never noticed before how she favors her father in her looks.”

“She has his charisma,” Levina says. And it is true; Henry Grey turned heads in his time.

“In the guards’ room I have heard some talk of
her
rather than Elizabeth as the heir.”

“God help her.” She tries to imagine capricious Katherine Grey as Queen of England. It seems impossible but it is not, for she doesn’t have the blot of illegitimacy on her as Elizabeth does, and it is she, with her abundance of Tudor blood, who comes next in the late King’s Device for the Succession. “But the Queen hopes to produce a boy to put things straight.” George throws his wife a look, rolling his eyes up.

He continues to look quietly through her drawings, alighting on one of Frances, an image she made from memory. She is smiling. Levina hasn’t seen her smile for some time now. “Why so many drawings of the Greys?” he asks.

“Frances is making a gallery at Beaumanor. She wants me to paint portraits of them all to hang there.” The Grey estates should have been lost to the crown when the duke was executed, but the Queen reinstated most of them almost immediately, though not Frances’s beloved Bradgate. Frances’s relief had been palpable. It meant far more than the lands and the houses; it meant she had regained a little of the Queen’s favor, but even so she still teeters on a knife edge with her two girls. Their pretence at Catholicism is scrutinized; Frances has told Levina that she feels Susan Clarencieux’s eyes on her constantly and that every last thing is reported back to the Queen—what they eat, with whom they correspond,
how often they pray. It is no wonder she wants to shore herself up with images of her fragmented family.

“More portraits!” George’s voice betrays his resentment. Perhaps he would like a wife at home birthing infants, one a year.

“Not this,” she says.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that you do not have the right to complain about my painting. We live in the main from the proceeds.” She spreads her arms out to indicate that almost all they have—the silver plate stacked in the sideboard, the glass in the front windows—came largely from her labors, aware that she is being unkind in reminding him of his shortcomings. She knows most husbands would have whipped her into submission years ago.

“Is it true Frances Grey means to wed her groom?”

“Do you have nothing better to do than gossip in the guards’ room?” Her annoyance sits on the surface of her voice. She knows well enough that George is jealous of her friendship with Frances and he will know it irks her to think that they are all prattling about her friend’s choice of husband. “Stokes is a good man, a kind one, and that marriage will mean a life away from court for her and the girls.” She is almost shouting now. “Nobody else sees it like that, though. It is as if the world will turn on its head if a duchess marries a commoner.”

“I didn’t mean—” George begins.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “I know.” She
is
sorry. She can’t bear to argue when they are together alone so rarely.

“I worry, though . . .” He pauses, bringing a hand up to his brow. “I fear that your connections to that family might visit trouble on us.”

“I am not a fair-weather friend, George. I would not abandon Frances. She has been good to me.” She is thinking of how little men seem to understand female friendship. “Besides, the Queen favors her.” She is aware of being disingenuous but can’t help it. She has caught herself up in this dispute and can’t seem to get out of it.

“The Queen was fond of Lady Jane, you said it yourself, but it didn’t stop—”

“Enough!” she says, lifting her palm as if conjuring an invisible wall between them, feeling her anger brimming again, but he is right.

“I fear the c-c-c . . .” It seems an interminable time before he can spit out the rest of the word. It no longer frustrates Levina, who has lived with her husband’s stammer for so long now she barely notices, but her anger with him continues to brew for what he implies. “The c-c-consequences of this new union, Veena.” He is talking of the Queen and her Spanish Prince Felipe. He is not the only one who fears the Catholics; many of those who cleave to the reformed faith have fled abroad, where they can practice it safely.

“If you are afraid, if you are not man enough, then go back to Bruges.” She instantly claps a hand over her mouth, admonishing herself for being sharp-tongued again. “I didn’t mean . . . That was not fair.”

She moves behind him to massage his shoulders. He is stiff and unyielding and they are silent for some time until he says, “We have a good marriage, do we not, V-V-V—”

“We do, George,” she murmurs.

“Are you cold?” he asks. She nods. The evening has brought a chill with it.

“The Queen will be married by now,” he says, as he gathers things together to light the fire. “God alone knows what changes will occur. I fear there will be burnings. There was a fight in Smithfield earlier today. Worse than usual.” He is hunched over the hearth with the tinderbox.

“Catholics and reformers?” Levina asks, though she does not need to, for it seems increasingly the case. There is one kind of scuffle or other between opposing religious groups most days.

“Bonner thrashed a man for not raising his eyes to the host at Mass. That started the trouble.”

“Bishop Bonner.” She has an image of him in her mind, his
rotund shape and boyish expression belying a cruel streak of monstrous proportions. “Now there is a man who will be first in line to Hell.” It all seems so distant, the time under young King Edward, when they could practice their faith openly; England is still reeling from the abrupt shift to Catholicism with the new Queen.

“Veena, do we have anything here in our house that might condemn us?”

“A few pamphlets. A Bible.” George has never engaged much in religious matters but Levina has found the reformed faith fixed into her indelibly, as egg renders paint immutable. She knows that a Bible written in English is a dangerous thing to own. “As long as we are seen to attend Mass.”

“And raise our eyes to the host.” She looks through a pile of things for a pamphlet she was handed in the marketplace the other day. “Here.” She gives it to him.

“It seems fairly innocuous,” he says, scanning it then throwing it onto the fire nevertheless, “but you never know.” She adds another to it, which she had been using to mark a page in one of her books of anatomical drawings. They have seen too many changes in the last years and caution hovers over them constantly.

“They wouldn’t see harm in these, would they?” She opens a book to a drawing of a dissected corpse. “Are they ungodly, perhaps?”

“The day those become heresy, Veena, is the day we return to Bruges.” He gives her an affectionate squeeze. “And your Bible?”

“George, you can’t mean to burn that?”