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