Queen's Pleasure Page 11

  9

  Amy Robsart Dudley

  Hemsby-by-the-Sea, near Great Yarmouth

  Summer’s End, 1550

  And 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 favorite 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 apologizing 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 specialized 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 color.

  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 colors 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 you
r 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 somber 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 color 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 favorite 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 afterward.

  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 center 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.

  The day before Robert rode away to London, I put on my wedding gown to begin posing for the full-length portrait. I had just finished dressing when Robert walked unexpectedly into the room. I had thought him gone for the day, but he had come back to retrieve a letter he had forgotten, and my face lit up at the sight of him. Lavinia snatched up a stick of charcoal and began to sketch wildly, feverishly trying to capture the true and naked love she saw upon my face.

  “This,” she would later say when she showed the rough and hasty sketch to me, “is the real Amy. This is what a bride should look like if we were not such mercenary people who make marriage a business like wool or any other trade all about goods and profits.”

  The finished painting would be as different from the usual staid and formal wedding portraits as night from day—“a woman in love, not just a lady showing off her wedding gown,” Lavinia would proudly say.

  I described the meadow at Syderstone, and she painted me there, walking barefoot in love and sunshine, with a big bouquet of buttercups in my hand and wreathing my wild, tumbled-down hair. And, at Robert’s request, made the night before he left, as we sat beside the fire after supper and he regaled her with the tale of how I had saved the goose’s life, she painted the goose in beside me, with a golden bow about her neck, eating from my hand.

  “This is my masterpiece,” Lavinia declared when we at last stood before the finished portrait.

  Robert had already been weeks away by then, and I wished fervently that he could see that happy painted girl who seemed poised to step out of the golden frame as if she were about to walk right into the arms of the man she loved. That love, that longing, showed clearly upon her face.

  “That’s me,” I marveled as I stood before it, my hand rising up tentatively, then falling back down, not quite daring to reach out and touch it lest I smear the paint. “That’s how I feel inside! Oh, thank you, Lavinia, thank you! Now the feeling will live forever. Should it ever start to fade, all I will need to do is look at this portrait, and it will all come rushing back again. Thank you!”

  I liked it far better than the miniature Robert had taken with him, galloping off wearing it over his heart under his riding leathers upon the braided satin chain I had made for him from my hair ribbons. I thought the young woman captured against the azure ground looked far too solemn and grave, as though she were inclined to melancholy, as if her eyes and lips were a stranger to smiles and laughter. “Is that really me?” I bit my tongue lest I say it aloud and Lavinia see how disappointed I was and think the failure was hers, when it was in truth all mine. Without my habitual smile, I thought my nose appeared a trifle too large and my mouth too small, almost as if it were pursed in disapproval. And my eyes looked oddly vacant, flat, more blue gray than blue green, and entirely lacking their accustomed vivacity and sparkle. I looked so cold, so aloof and chilly, and that was a great shame, when I was in truth so warm and friendly; I was a little shy, that’s true, but I was not unapproachable; I wanted everyone to like me. I feared that anyone Robert might show it to would come away thinking him encumbered by a dull and grim wife whose bed was as cold as the grave.

  Now, when it was too late to change it, the elegant dark gown seemed a poor choice, far too funereal, and I wished I had worn the maiden’s blush pink or the sky blue or apple green, or even one of several gowns I owned in my favorite buttercup yellow. I was a sentimental young bride, and my trousseau brimmed over with exquisite gowns embroidered, woven, and figured with hearts, flowers, and lovers’ knots. I even had a white gown sumptuously embroidered in red and pink silks with cupids and hearts and flying arrows. I should have worn something like that, something that showed who I really was, that was true to the giddy young girl who walked on pink perfumed clouds of love, not the staid and elegant lady I was trying to be. I should not have tried to impress, for in doing so I had made my face a stranger even to myself, who was accustomed to seeing
it every day in the looking glass. Even Pirto, when she saw it, furrowed her brow and asked, “But where’s your smile, pet? You don’t look half like yourself without it!”

  If I were superstitious, I would think the face in the portrait was a portent of the sad and somber woman I would become.

  When the larger portrait was finished, Lavinia had to pack up her paints and return to court; she had many commissions awaiting her and could not tarry, and I was left alone again, with only the servants to bear me company. Robert, though I wrote him many anxious and yearning letters, was vague and evasive about when he would return, and when he would send for me to visit him he simply could not—or would not—say. I spent my days walking listlessly upon the sandy beach, alone, with the gray waves crashing and the gulls circling overhead, sometimes pausing to pick up a shell, remembering all the joyous hours we had spent there, frolicking and loving. It made my loneliness even harder to bear.

  A fortnight later, unable to bear it a moment longer, I leapt from my lonely bed in the middle of the night and shook Pirto awake and bade her, “Pack my things at once; we’re going home to Stanfield Hall!”

  At my parents’ home I would at least be among familiar faces, and there was work I could be doing. I would no longer be the idle, pitiful bride the servants and common folk at Hemsby whispered about walking the beach alone with her hair billowing in the wind, pining for her husband in a windblown white gown embroidered with gold lovers’ knots. They said the sight of me reminded them of a ghost, and I wondered if such would someday be my fate, that my lonely shade would return one day to walk the beach for all eternity, waiting for Robert to come back to me. I shuddered at the thought and even had nightmares about it and prayed it was not an omen; I wanted to rest in peace when I died, not continue to exist as an anguished spirit doomed to walk the earth forevermore without peace or rest; to me that was like being damned, another version of Hell, only without the flames and demons. And resuming my old duties as chatelaine was a far better way to occupy my time than weeping and yearning and letting fearful fancies about the beautiful ladies at court, who would not scruple to flash their most beguiling smiles and gaze at Robert with invitations in their eyes, rob me of my sleep and peace of mind. So I packed up my things and went home to my parents.