Queen Without a Crown (8 page)

Meg came forward a little timidly, curtseying. I understood why his landlady had said she dursen’t say aught to him. For all his unkempt appearance, Arbuckle had presence. To Meg, I said encouragingly: ‘Don’t be nervous, my dear. Slip your cloak off. That’s right.’

‘Over here,’ Arbuckle said as he led her to where the sunlight could fall on her face. He pushed the window open, to get rid of the shadows from the square leads.

‘Ah,’ he said, in tones of satisfaction.

Meg was very much her father’s child, with Gerald Blanchard’s square features and brown eyes rather than my pointed chin and hazel eyes. As an adult, she would have a strong face, but it would be beautiful too. In the last year, delicate hollows had appeared under the cheekbones, and if the square little chin was more resolute than some people might say was desirable in a young girl, it was finely modelled, and her mouth was shapely.

Her colouring was warm. She loved the open air, and in summer it was no use telling Meg to keep out of the sun so as to preserve a fashionable pallor. She would walk and ride whenever she had the chance, and always her face bronzed a little, with a soft rose glow on each of those strong cheekbones, and her neat little nose would peel.

I truly adored my Meg and her emerging beauty, but I rarely spoke of it to anyone except Hugh because after all, as her mother, I thought I was bound to be biased. Here, however, was someone who had instantly seen what I saw, and appreciated it. He had with great skill positioned her perfectly, so that the light could pick out the planes of her young features and find the gloss in the waves of hair which Dale had carefully arranged in front of her cap.

‘Delightful,’ said Master Arbuckle, holding Meg’s chin and turning it slightly to the left. ‘And with character. It is hard work to depict sitters who have none. Or else the wrong kind, which they want to conceal, and then they resent my painting because I have seen what they would rather I didn’t. When my brush is in my hand, I cannot lie. With this young lass, I’ll have no need for lies. This is the dress you wish her to wear?’

He glanced at Hugh first, but Hugh said: ‘Meg is my stepdaughter. Ursula?’

‘Yes, that’s the dress,’ I said.

‘And how will you have her shown?’ Seeing that Meg was cold, he closed the window. ‘Standing? Seated? With a book in her hand, or some stitch-work?’

‘At a table, writing,’ I said. ‘Meg is studying Latin and Greek, and she does well at them. We want a picture which will help us, in years to come, to remember her as a young girl at her studies.’

‘I wish it were summer,’ said Arbuckle. ‘I see her in my mind, seated by an open window, with trees visible outside and the sunlight streaming in. Perhaps I can create such a picture even now, with December just round the corner. Would that please you?’

‘You can do that?’ Hugh asked.

‘I think so.’ He kept his eyes on me. ‘I have no example of my work here at hand, Mistress Stannard, but I believe your husband has seen one. I am a capable craftsman. I also use the finest materials. I create my ultramarine myself from genuine ground-down lapis lazuli. I grind it myself in that pestle and mortar there. I have my own formulae for certain other colours too, and they are therefore unique – and subtle. I believe,’ he said, ‘that I can do your daughter justice. And I see her, as I said, by a window, in June. I see it so vividly that I think I can paint the vision.’

With a pang, I thought of our houses, of Withysham and Hugh’s beloved Hawkswood. In each, there was a room which I used as a study for Meg because the view outside was so pleasant. So often, in summer, I had sat watching her at her books, seated by an open window, with fields of corn and tree-grown hills beyond.

I was homesick. I wanted to go home – to one of our homes; either would do, though for Hugh’s sake, my preference just now would be for Hawkswood. I wanted it so much that twice, during my sojourn in the castle, I had suffered from migraine, a condition which was apt to descend on me whenever I was unhappy or torn. At that moment the prospect of the war in the north not only frightened me, it also filled me with hatred.

I hated the rebellious northern earls, and Mary Stuart, and the Duke of Norfolk, whose idiotic notion of marrying her, helping her to resume her Scottish crown and putting a royal consort’s crown on his own foolish head, had started all the trouble. They were keeping me and Hugh from our own homes and our own lives, robbing my husband of what was all too likely to be his last chance to enjoy Hawkswood, and I loathed them all, with a passion which verged on the murderous.

I pulled my mind back to the present and realized that Arbuckle, a stranger, had taken one look at Meg and not only recognized her beauty, but also understood how best to set it off. I could almost believe that he had picked the image out of my mind. He was indeed the right artist to paint her, and when he had done so, I would have
Meg
,
by a window in summer
, to look at all my life, long after she had grown into a plump married dame with children of her own.

‘It would please me,’ I said. I looked at Hugh. ‘Do you agree?’

‘Indeed I do,’ Hugh said.

Arbuckle nodded. ‘Since we now have sunshine of a sort, your daughter’s first sitting can be at once, if you so wish. I’ll need the window open again, but she can wear a cloak, or two if she likes. It’s her face I want to capture first.’

Paint and Embroidery

‘
I
truly hate England,’ said Arbuckle, dragging the folded screen into the centre of the room and partially opening it. It had feet and would stand firmly even if opened out straight, like a movable wall. In the middle of it was a large square aperture. ‘I went to Florence as a young man and spent years there, and I wish I were there still. Ah, the light! The strong sunlight that one can harness! A thousand curses on these pitiful northern skies, say I!’

‘Why did you leave Florence, then?’ Hugh asked him.

‘Because I came home now and then to see my parents in Hereford, while they were still alive, and they drew me to the Reformed religion,’ said Arbuckle, now dismantling the stack of spindly tables. ‘Then the Italian states weren’t safe any more. You can get arrested for heresy too easily. When Queen Mary was on the English throne, I went to Flanders. The light there is nearly as bad as it is here. To hell with this table; why won’t its legs stay at the length I want them? Sometimes I think gadgets have minds of their own . . .’

There were three of the curious tables, and their thin legs were adjustable. Having set their heights to his satisfaction, Arbuckle motioned to Meg to sit on the stool, put the tables here and there close to her, opened the window again and was staring at the whole thing critically when his manservant, who had evidently been out, appeared with a basket of provisions. Arbuckle promptly barked at him to set them down. ‘And bring me some candlesticks – no, I think the sunlight will last awhile. I’ll use that, pitiful though it is. I’ll get an image of some sort, however faint it is. At least God gave me good eyesight. Bring me four mirrors instead.’

The manservant, a placid fellow, clearly accustomed to his employer’s peremptory manners, did so. Arbuckle gave Meg back her cloak, arranged the mirrors on their stands and set them on the tables. Having done so, he swore, removed them all again, dumped them on the floor and once more changed the height of the three spindly tables.

Then he moved Meg and her stool, cursing under his breath, and put the mirrors back on the tables. Meg screwed up her eyes and protested as a shaft of reflected sunlight dazzled her, and with a muttered apology, he adjusted the angle of one mirror. After that, he opened the screen out completely, setting it between Meg and the rest of us. Meg, sitting obediently on her stool and clearly as puzzled as we were, could just be glimpsed beyond the aperture.

Next, he fetched the iron stand with the lens attached to it, positioned it in line with the aperture, closed the shutters of the windows overlooking the street and blocked out the firelight with the fireguard, so that on our side of the screen we were in near darkness. After that, he stood there muttering further imprecations, apparently against the English winter, before squeezing round the end of the screen and once more altering the positions of Meg and the mirrors.

When he had finished, we found that, reasonable people though we were, we could see Mistress Browne’s point. It really did look like a magical trick. After shuffling the equipment about interminably and rearranging Meg several times, he had her sitting between the side window and the screen, half-facing towards the aperture. Where the sun did not touch her face directly, the mirrors reflected it instead. While the sunshine lasted, her features would be clearly lit.

The easel with the sheet of paper nailed to it had been carefully positioned, and so had the stand with the lens. To our amazement, the brightly lit view of Meg’s upper half, through the square opening, was somehow reflected from the lens on to the paper, where it appeared faintly but visibly, and upside down.

‘Horrible,’ said Arbuckle disgustedly, picking up a thin wooden cylinder and a knife from the work table and, to my surprise, beginning to sharpen the cylinder. ‘I can scarcely see it. This
accursed
climate!’

‘What is that you’re sharpening?’ Sybil asked with interest.

‘A modern device called a pencil,’ Arbuckle told her. ‘It isn’t as messy as charcoal. It is made of plumbago and clay, in a wooden casing. Now!’ Marching to the paper, he began to trace the lines on the paper with the point of the pencil. He worked, I saw, at tremendous speed and with the assurance that is the signal of the expert.

I said: ‘But you can only see the top part of your sitter. We would want to show her right hand, and a desk . . .’

‘I make studies of each section separately and then combine them all in the finished work. I can seat my subjects higher, by setting the stool on top of boxes, so as to bring, say, a desktop or the sweep of a skirt into view. For a while she will have to do without the cloak while I work on the upper part of her dress, for instance. This is just a way of obtaining fine detail, so that the final result is exact. If the sun goes in, I am reduced to candles in silver hoods. Bah! And now, if you please, let one of the ladies remain here with Meg but the rest of you should leave. It distracts me to have so many people in the room while I work.’

‘I’ll stay,’ said Sybil.

The rest of us, dismissed like schoolchildren at the end of our lessons, left the house and walked slowly back up Peascod Street towards the castle. A couple of wagons overtook us: one laden with live pigs and hens in coops; one full of guns and boxes presumably of ammunition.

Observing these things depressed us all. In silence, we made our way to our suite where we found that Gladys had gone out after all, enticed no doubt by the sunshine, even though it meant negotiating the spiral steps. As we were taking off our cloaks, we heard footsteps coming up, but they were too brisk and too heavy to be those of Gladys. Hugh went to meet them and reappeared with Mark Easton, who bowed, accepted some ale which Dale drew for him from our cask, and then said: ‘I came to find out . . .’

‘More about my efforts this morning?’ I said.

‘Well, yes. Your note said you’d spoken to a man called Sterry and to one of the actual witnesses, but that you had learned nothing that was likely to be of use.’

‘That’s true, I’m afraid,’ I said, ‘and I admit, I can think of no further way to make enquiries.’

‘Nor I,’ said Hugh regretfully.

‘Sterry did tell me why the manservant Edwards was never suspected,’ I said. ‘The witness I spoke to is sure that the man she saw put an extra item on the tray wasn’t Edwards. And in any case, he was never alone with the tray and couldn’t possibly have tampered with it.’

‘I see. But,’ said Mark enthusiastically, ‘I have had another idea! Since I talked to you first, I’ve realized that perhaps we, or you, should talk to my stepfather. He might remember something useful. Maybe my mother knew something – not realizing its importance – and maybe she told him about it in the time when they were married. It’s possible, isn’t it?’

‘Possible. Not probable,’ I said, feeling sorry for him. He was snatching at straws.

‘I’m sure he still lives hereabouts.’ Mark refused to be discouraged. ‘I’d know if he’d died, I think. Uncle Robert was in touch with him sometimes – in fact, I believe my uncle helped him financially more than once. Aunt Kate told me that. My stepfather wasn’t badly off, but he drank – rather as Hoxton’s man is said to have done. I can remember
that
,’ he added with feeling. ‘That’s when he’d get violent.’

And for a moment, I saw in him the vulnerable small boy he had once been, afraid of a drunken man who wasn’t even his own kin.

But I think my first response to Mark’s eagerness was to sink further into the grey depression brought on by the prepar-ations for war and my failure to learn anything useful from Madge or Sterry. Poor Mark Easton wanted our quest to prosper so very very much. So did I, but I had little hope of it, and fear for the future safety of us all was sapping my energy. It was Hugh who said: ‘What was your stepfather’s name?’

‘Bowman. Jonathan Bowman. He was a glover. He had a shop in Windsor, with rooms over the top and a little garden at the back.’ Mark’s eyes were reminiscent. ‘That’s where my mother and I went to live with him. People are strange,’ he said thoughtfully.

‘Strange?’ Hugh refilled Mark’s tankard and raised an enquiring eyebrow at him.

‘My stepfather. He could be hateful, and yet there was another side to him. If someone ordered embroidered gloves from him, he didn’t hire an embroidess; he did the work himself and did it beautifully.’

I said: ‘You don’t know where he’s living now?’

‘No. In fact, I have just been out in Windsor, searching for him. I called on some of his former neighbours. They remember him, but they didn’t know where to find him, though one thought he’d seen Bowman in a tavern a few months ago.’

Hugh said: ‘We’ll make enquiries of our own. Are you staying in Windsor for a while?’