The Exiled (10 page)

It was a very rich painting, with much detail in the lustrous, precisely depicted fabric of the clothes and the sensuously painted jewels, and now she saw why he’d taken so much time with her mouth and eyes. These were living faces he was dealing with, real people — he wanted them all to feel like that — alive for ever, modelled as strongly as statues, yet somehow captured on the flat surface of his work.

So much of the painting touched her, touched her deeply. There was her shield, prominent on one of the walls of the room the painter had conjured up. On it was her grant of arms from Edward: the Angevin Leopards and beneath them, two drops of blood — heart’s blood he’d called them. And there, too, on the middle finger of the left of her praying hands, the square-cut ruby that had been his last gift to her in Dover. She was overwhelmed by the memories.

The painter frowned, his client was upset — she was crying! This was disastrous!

‘Mistress? Are you unhappy with the painting?’ Blunt. That was his way, but he could not disguise the anxiety.

‘Not unhappy, maestro. Moved, so moved. Forgive me, there’s so much to absorb; my silence is awe, not judgment.’

She was sincere, and the painter slowly lowered his shoulders, flexed his neck. Viewings were always tricky, one way or another. He would try to relax.

He need not have worried. Anne was lost in what she saw, and the more she looked, the more there was to see. Some elements of the painting, for instance, almost seemed to overflow the flat surface. One of her own feet was about to slip down and out towards the viewer as if she herself would get up and move out of the frame!

As Anne had requested, there were four figures in the painting and together they formed a pleasing triangular composition. At the apex of the pyramid sat the ‘Holy Virgin’ in a beautifully detailed, carved Cathedra. The throne-like chair was itself on a dais with two steps, down which Mary’s blue robe flowed and folded as cleanly as running water. Behind her head was an open window through which could be seen a view of the town walls and fields outside Brugge — the sun just beginning to set, throwing mellow light onto the limpid waters of the canals curving around the feet of battlements and walls.

The beauty of the countryside, just glimpsed in the painted distance, brought wistfulness. Anne had so little time to give to that part of herself now: those empty fields, the dark forest and the glorious sky spoke of freedom, spoke of her childhood. How rare it was to be alone in this noisy city, how rare to touch natural things, smell the earth, listen to what the wind told her of the past, and the future.

Tears were near the surface again. Too many complex and contradictory feelings filled her now — she needed time to sort them privately.

It was a bold work she’d commissioned, herself at the centre of it, not out of vanity but out of certainty, out of hope. She’d made herself Mary’s companion and they looked like friends, because this mother of God was young and blonde like Jenna, with hair carefully arranged loose over her shoulders — the symbol of virginity. Anne recognised the model, she was a seamstress Deborah hired from time to time to help make up clothes for the household. That made her smile — how astonishing yet how apt to give the Virgin a servant’s face.

The ‘Christ Child’ sat on his mother’s lap, one tiny hand raised in blessing as his charmingly benevolent gaze took in both the viewer and the supplicant, and commissioner, of the painting — Anne at his ‘mother’s’ feet.

Anne was delighted with the likeness of the boy — she’d persuaded Memlinc to use little Edward. The painter chuckled as he saw her look carefully at Edward’s face. ‘He only squirmed a little, lady. I’ve had worse. Your sister’s son is a fine child. She would have been proud of him — if I may say that.’

Anne hardly heard what the painter said. She was lost in the face of the little boy in front of her. The baby looked amused, his mouth was open in a happy smile, you almost expected to hear the warm, milky gurgle of his laughter. He was the delightful, almost carnal centre of the picture, his flesh painted with a pearl-like glimmer. Surely, this eternally giggling child was an affirmation that life could be good and that God loved each one of his creatures. And how odd that viewers of this painting, in years to come, would not know that it was truly a picture of a mother and her son — though Anne was not the woman with the halo.

There was a fourth figure in the painting. The image of a knight wearing jousting armour, his plumed helm open so that face and eyes could be seen in the shadow of the visor, and in his hand, a shortened jousting lance. He also had a shield with the red cross of Saint George upon it, plain and unadorned.

This knight had one foot firmly upon a vigorously writhing, quarter-sized dragon, which, like Anne’s foot, seemed almost to fall out of the picture into the lap of the viewer.

And then Anne saw the colour of the knight’s armour. It was black; and the knight’s eyes were a most intense blue. Breath deserted her; this Saint George had Edward Plantagenet’s eyes — and his jousting armour. Ice touched her, fire also. Unwilling to believe what she saw, Anne’s voice shook slightly as she spoke.

‘Where did you find the model for Saint George, Meinheer?’ Even to her own ears, she sounded strained.

‘Well now, Sir Knight
is
an oddity; he’s got a bit from here, a bit from there. I use ordinary people for saint’s faces — as you know. I don’t want to use well-known people; if you’ve met them, it breaks the illusion and it’s too distracting. But this Saint George was hard to paint — he just wouldn’t come, wouldn’t form properly, even though I worked with two different men from the markets. They cost me to pay off, I can tell you that, though I kept something of each of them: the hands, there, they come from one man; the neck, the set of the shoulders from the other.’

It seemed to Anne that he was holding something back. She breathed her question, ‘But his eyes?’

The painter shuffled his feet, embarrassed. ‘Well, they came from an English boy I saw once: a young nobleman. There were family connections to the court here and he spent one summer with the old duke and his family. Our current duke taught this boy to joust when he was young — the boy had black practice armour, and I used to watch them sometimes, at the quintain. I just imagined what he might look like now. It was a strong face even then, of course, and I’ve never forgotten his eyes, but that’s my trade.’

It was an omen, a sign. They were still connected, why else would his face find its way into this painting?

‘Edward — the King of England? As a young man?’

He mistook her tone for dislike. ‘I can paint the face out if you like, mistress. I was guessing what he’d look like now, building on memory.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s a small skill I have, to remember people’s faces. But if you don’t like it?’

Anne shook her head and she could not keep the joy out of her voice. ‘No. It is a wonderful painting. Extraordinary. You are not to change it, any of it.’

That was enough for Meinheer Memlinc. If she was happy, so was he. He was reasonably unsentimental about his work generally. Perhaps, like a wet-nurse, he knew his ‘children’ — the paintings he made — never truly belonged to him, even though he gave them life. Sometimes, after all the sweat and anguish of making a picture work, he was even glad to see them swaddled in wrappings, ready to leave his studio. But this one was different, perhaps because Anne had been such an intriguing subject.

He’d badly wanted to capture that combination of vulnerability, purpose and sensuality he felt in her. She was capable of a direct innocence that generally deserted children quite early, but it was allied to an edge like a sword, when that was needed. And he wanted to paint her again, badly. A portrait this time — just of her. Perhaps as the Magdalene, if she would permit that?

He’d have to find a way to broach the subject, tactfully, when she was used to living with this work she’d commissioned. After all, now, as she aged, she would always have the reminder of what she’d once been. That might be disturbing, as beauty fled.

Yes, his picture might come to be a mixed blessing, in time.

A
nne was anxious as Phillip, the strongest man in Mathew’s stable, tried his best to hang the picture of her unexpectedly real family group — Anne, her Saint George and their son — in the parlour.

The painting had been brought home to Mathew’s house with some ceremony, arriving at almost the same time as Anne’s guardian and his wife tied up in their barge at their own water gate. Now the press of people in this small room, all giving poor Phillip contradictory advice, was actively getting in the way of what Anne wanted.

Mathew Cuttifer was the worst — he fancied himself a judge of artwork, having commissioned so much for Blessing House in London.

‘No, no, Phillip. Look man, that’s not nearly high enough. You want it to hang higher, where it’s out of the afternoon sun. We don’t want the colours fading!’

‘Mathew, I can’t agree. It needs the light to be seen properly — all those wonderful colours. It should come down a little and be
further
towards the window. The light is not direct in any case — it will not harm the pigments. Meinheer Memlinc said so.’

Lady Margaret, Mathew Cuttifer’s sensible wife, was brisk. She knew a thing or two about painting as well. Deborah discreetly rolled her eyes at Anne — at this rate they’d still all be going by evening prayers. The girl did her best not to laugh.

‘Sir Mathew, I think I agree with Lady Margaret. The painting needs the light. Each detail is so exquisite — they all deserve to be seen clearly. I will watch to see that the colours do not fade — perhaps we can have a cover made for summer days?’

Sir Mathew was not convinced, but he found himself out-voted. There were times when this formidable merchant found the look in his wife’s eyes more frightening than facing the king. This was one of those times.

‘Well then, I suppose we should live with it on the wall for a time. See if you like it in the place you have chosen. I find that things change — season to season, for instance, the light is different. You may not always want it on that wall. Or as low as that ...’ He caught Margaret’s eye. Oh, very well. He would not say any more.

Deborah left the room quietly to see about something pleasing to drink — they must celebrate. Today, now the painting had come home, was an extraordinary day, and it was somehow a symbol of changed times and strange possibilities.

Anne, Lady Margaret, Sir Mathew and Deborah. These four people alone — along with the formidable figure of ‘Saint George’ in the painting — knew the secret of Anne’s past.

Sir Mathew stood thoughtfully in front of the canvas of this unexpected family group. He knew it was a remarkable painting — finer than anything he had — and very bold, if one knew the true history of the figures within it.

It made him shiver that Edward’s eyes, an impression of his adult face, had found their way inside that jousting helm. Like Anne, it felt to him like an omen — something profoundly significant — but who did the dragon represent? There was a snake in the garden of Eden — dragons and snakes were both symbols of evil and destruction, surely?

Mathew was at war with himself, and he knew it. Hours before, when he and Margaret had landed in Sluis, he’d been presented with the news of the wedding to be, and of Anne’s bold plans for beating the merchants of Brugge at their own game.

Mathew Cuttifer had not made his money from being timorous. He understood risk, but prudent risk was always best: risk when one broadly knew that the odds were running in one’s favour. What Anne had proposed to him was something that ran against almost every trading instinct he possessed — almost, but not quite. A small flicker of excitement ran beneath the caution. He remembered the instinctive boldness of his youth, that boldness which had begun his fortune.

And so, with little time to assess all that Anne was proposing, he’d unexpectedly agreed: he would co-invest in the cargoes to come from Italy. Devilry lay deep in his soul it seemed; God grant that he would not live to regret backing his ‘ward’, his ex-servant, the illegitimate daughter of his own ‘old king’...

Deborah brought Mathew back to the present, offering a blue-green waldeglas beaker filled with hot wine. He took it and turned back to the women who surrounded him. ‘To Saint George. The Protector of England, the protector of women.’

So much was unsaid as they repeated his words ‘To Saint George’, but Anne was deeply warmed. Once more, against his own good judgment, it seemed, Mathew Cuttifer had committed himself and his house to stand beside her when the risk was at its greatest. If he had truly been her father, she would have kissed him now; and somehow he knew, she was sure of that, for when he raised his own glass, he smiled and winked!

A discreet knock at the open door of the parlour broke the moment. Friar Giorgio stood there uncertainly. This was very much a family gathering.

‘Father Giorgio, come in. See now, here is the Lady Anne’s fine new painting. You know much of such matters, as I’m told.’

Sir Mathew, like his friend William Caxton, was uneasy in the friar’s presence, but he hid it better.

Anne smiled at Giorgio and slipped an arm through his as they stood in front of the canvas together. ‘There. I cannot judge my own face, though others tell me that the likeness is good of the child.’

Ordinarily the friar was scathing about the so-called arts of the Low Countries — he saw them as primitive, old-fashioned and undeveloped. To him, real culture began and ended within the city states of his own divided homeland — and, just possibly, within the walls of Paris — but here, today, in front of this canvas, he was silenced. It was a great painting. Somehow the painter had caught the essence, the truth of each of his sitters.

The peasant seamstress who portrayed the Mother of God truly shone down on her audience, her own simple humanity as great a crown as that worn by the Empress of Heaven. Never had Christ’s mother seemed more accessible, more compassionate, more comforting and more real.