The Queen's Lover: A Novel Read online

  "They call Paris the mother of liberal arts and letters," Christine said breathlessly, in her deep, throaty, musical voice with its rolling southern r's. She walked quickly and easily, propelling her lean little body so expertly over the dirt that her feet didn't seem to touch the ground. Owain liked the respect in her voice. "Equal to ancient Athens," he added. He was just repeating a chance remark he'd heard somewhere; but he felt proud when she turned to him in surprise, and rewarded him with a glowing smile.

  "The other colors you dilute in water, with gum...pine gum or fir gum," Anastaise said, her voice flat and concentrating, watching the thick liquid hover before dropping into the little vessel. "It's only these two--the red and white lead--that you mix with egg white. Minium, the red one's called. The white is ceruse."

  They'd found her fumbling with the bolts at the courtyard gate when they got back to Christine's home in Old Temple Street, Owain loaded up with Christine's purchases--parchment scrolls and a cloth-wrapped package they'd stopped to pick up from a tiny, bent-over goldsmith in a workshop filled with slanting sunlight and glittering dust, one of several workshops they'd dropped in at. She'd looked up in relief as they'd walked up. "I can't open it," she'd said, without preliminaries, and nodded down at herself. Owain realized why: she was trying to do the bolts with one hand. The other big raw hand was nursing a bunch of wilting blue cornflowers, wrapped in muslin.

  Anastaise was a big, blowsy woman in her middle years, who towered over Christine. She had a bold look in her eye and a ready tongue, and a rude good humor shining on her reddish cheeks; but she and the fine-drawn, high-minded Madame de Pizan were clearly on the best of terms. "They say Paris is the center of the world of illuminations," Christine told Owain proudly, as they walked inside and put their packages down on the scriptorium table, "and you've met some of the finest illuminators and miniaturists in the world today; but, whatever you hear anywhere else, Anastaise is the greatest of them all."

  "Ahhh--get along with you," Anastaise replied roughly, but Owain could see her color up, redder than before; and he caught her smiling to herself as she tucked her greasy pepper-and-salt hair back inside her kerchief.

  He stayed in the room, hovering, unwilling to go and miss finding out how this queen of illuminators worked, but uncertain what to do with himself as Anastaise got to work and Christine opened the big ledger in the corner to enter her purchases. He whistled under his breath and tried to be inconspicuous, and watched. He was going over in his mind their brief stop at the illuminators' table on the way out of the busy scriptorium in central Paris, where Christine had bought the parchment scrolls. The little man in there, wearing a splotched apron, almost a hunchback, with piercing pale eyes under a bare head, only a few wisps of baby hair still wafting out of its freckles, had caught the newcomer trying to see what he was drawing.

  "You want to see, don't you?" asked the little man, whom Owain now knew was Jean Malouel (until last year the head painter to the Duke of Burgundy). And he'd scuttled off, sideways, like a crab, Owain thought, to the shelves and tables at the back of the room, where unattended pieces of parchment were laid out, weighed down with stones and pots--which Owain guessed must be uncompleted work at different stages, drying, waiting for the next coat of color, or just to be bound.

  "Here," Malouel said finally, "no one is supposed to see this; but you've got no one here to tell, have you?" He beckoned Owain over. There was a pleased, expectant grin on his face.

  The little square was a jewel: so bright and vividly alive that Owain gasped. He'd never seen anything like this. It was almost like reality. No, it was better than reality: more perfect than anything he'd ever have thought it possible to imagine. The world writ small; but with its everyday flaws and dirt and minor uglinesses painted out. He could see at once that it showed the Royal Palace he'd just walked past outside, though from an angle he didn't yet know. He recognized the blond walls, the gatehouse at the western tip of the Island, and the blue-green roofs, with tall round cones topping the towers, mostly in the same almost turquoise blue as the roofs, but a few marked out in a red as rich as rubies. The delicate tracery of the Holy Chapel tower, with its rose window and fingers of stone rising to the heavens, topped by a gleaming golden cross. The river, lapping against the green by the shore, with a boat and a blue-coated boatman approaching the steps of the gatehouse. The glory of daylight and sunshine. His eyes dwelt greedily on the paler greens of the picture's foreground--the Left Bank, showing early summer grass and sprouting vines, with each tiny tendril somehow got down separately, and three bare-legged laborers, one in blue, one in white, one in red, backs bowed with effort, reaping their corn, swinging their scythes and sweating in their field, under their straw hats. But it was the blue of the sky that truly caught Owain's imagination. It deepened, from a pale, delicate near-white behind the rooftops, through a thousand peaceful shades, to the deep, near-night color of the summer heaven at its heights. How had the artist done that, he wondered; bending down; peering closer; not quite daring to touch. How could anyone but God have so effortlessly imitated the Creator's design?

  Malouel had met Owain's eye; bashful and welcoming, both at once. Sagely, he'd said: "That's June, that one. My three nephews are doing it--it's good work. You can see that, can't you?...But what you don't know yet is that now you've seen it, you'll see the June outside differently from now on. It changes your eye forever, seeing something as good as this. You mark my words."

  Owain remembered that now, as he edged closer to where Anastaise was beginning to lay out careful brushstrokes of whitish paint on her own small, empty square drawn on a leaf of parchment covered in neatly sloping writing. There was another blank--a margin--around the edge of the page. She'd already told him the cornflowers she'd harvested that morning, at dewfall, from the garden of the beguine convent by the Hotel Saint-Paul, where she was a lay sister, were the ingredient that gave the azure blue of the sky that had so mesmerized him while he was looking at the Limbourg brothers' picture of June. And he wanted to see her make that.

  Quietly, from the other side of the room, from above her ledgers, Christine watched Owain inch forward as Anastaise pulled the heads off the cornflowers, ground them with mortar and pestle until there was nothing but a slimy blue juice in the bottom, and dipped her paintbrush into it. She let herself enjoy the pleasure that the boy's intent gaze brought her. It was so long since she'd seen innocence this childlike. It made her feel young.

  "There, you see," Anastaise said contemplatively. Owain didn't jump; but he realized she was talking to him, holding out the square to him, and he was grateful. She'd filled the page with wet, gleaming blue the color of the sky. "That's the first layer," she went on. "It's not how it's going to look in the end, though. To get the color the way you want, you need to paint over it--four or five layers, one by one."

  "What will you paint on top of the blue?" Owain asked, but she only rumbled with laughter. "Listen to the boy!" she chortled. "We're not there yet. Do you know how long this will take to dry?"

  He felt abashed. Malouel had told him. "Ten days," he said.

  She nodded; gave him a twinkle.

  "Learning already," she replied; then, play-reproachfully, "and that's just one coat. So it can take a good couple of months to do the purple of a cloak or the green of a wood properly. But it's important to get it right. The beauty is in the brightness. And it's important to make it as beautiful as you can."

  "May I...?" Owaines sayed, growing bolder. "May I see something you've already finished?"

  She put her big hands on her big hips, gave him her bold stare, and burst out laughing. "You've got the bug, all right," she said. "Madame Christine; you've infected this one, good and proper."

  Christine was smiling too, from her corner. "Show him this," she said; and pulled out another book from the shelf. She brought it forward to the table. Owain hardly noticed the text. His eyes were drawn only to the picture under Christine's pale fingers: another little square full of more mov
ing, breathing vitality than seemed possible. It showed a woman in a modest blue dress, whose white kerchief was pulled up in imitation of a proper fashionable two-horned court headdress. The woman was kneeling in the center of a group of women, and handing over a book to a magnificent red and gold lady with a green and gold silk sash and a rich jeweled headdress and ermine sleeves; a lady sitting with two attendants on scarlet and green cushions by a mullioned window, hung with fleur-de-lys cloths in blue and gold, and with the sky outside glowing the azure blue Owain now knew how to prepare. There was so much to look at; so much to take in.

  "That's you," he said, turning to Christine. "Giving your book to the Queen."

  The painted Christine looked just as she did in real life: alert, watchful, ready both to fight and charm. But the Queen of France had deteriorated since this picture was made: the painted Queen was still a beautiful woman, with traces of kindness lingering on her face; though you could also see in her set eyes that she'd brook no one else's nonsense. The much fatter, older person he'd seen in the flesh yesterday had become a spoiled, glinty-eyed monster. He'd smelled the selfishness, the willfulness, coming off her; he'd known her at once for the kind of woman who'd stop at nothing to get her own way.

  "I knew at once," Owain said warmly, "what a picture." But he was wondering as he spoke, and saw Anastaise dimpled with pleasure, whether she'd deliberately made the Queen seem younger and kinder--she didn't seem the type for flattery. Instead, he asked, "How do you get the gold so bright?"

  Anastaise was breaking open one of Christine's packages to show him the wafer-thin sheet of beaten gold and beginning to explain that you took beaten egg white, without water, and painted it over the place the gold was to go, then, moisturizing the end of the same brush in your mouth, you touched it onto the corner of the leaf, ready cut, then lifted it very quickly, put it on the prepared place, and spread it out with a separate dry brush. "And whatever you do, don't breathe; or your piece of gold will fly off and you'll have the worst trouble finding it again. And then it's the same as the painting. You let it dry. You put another layer on. You let it dry. You put another layer on. It's all just patience." When the gold was ready, you polished it--with the tooth of a bear or a beaver; or with an agate, or an amethyst stone--first quite gently, then harder, then so hard that the sweat stood out on your forehead.

  Christine slipped away. Owain was so enthralled he didn't notice.

  Jehanette's maid was in the kitchen, preparing a meal. The children were playing with their grandmother upstairs; while Jehanette was at the Halles market. "Take some meat and bread and wine out to Anastaise," Christine directed. "But tell the boy to come here and eat with me."

  She didn't think why. It was an instinct: like warming yourself at the fire, or opening your shutters when the sun was bright. Usually she liked her quiet meals with Anastaise: everyone else out of the house; hearing the idle talk the beguine brought with her from the convent where the sisters worked in the cloth trade of Temple New Town, or tending the poor. The beguines knew everything; and no one more than Anastaise. But today she wanted some time alone with this boy with hope in his eyes and hunger in his mind. It was a waste of his intelligence to let him go back to soldiery.

  He came quickly, eagerly, glowing as if someone had applied gold leaf to him.

  He said, with genuine warmth: "I don't know how to thank you," and, taking a piece of bread and a slab of meat and a slice of onion on his knife, without waiting to be asked, as if he felt at home, while munching, "This has been the best day..." Then he paused, and she saw the thought he couldn't name begin to take form on his brow: "I only wish--"

  She said, a little brusquely, cutting him off: "Eat up. I find I have some time today after all. When we're done, I'll take you over the river if you like. We could look at the University districts. I can see you're interested."

  The look on his face was reward enough. It encouraged her to go on.

  "Tell me," she said, leaning forward, supporting her little heart-shaped face with both her hands, and caressing the boy with the gentlest look imaginable, "you're a bright boy; I can see you want knowledge; and, as I understand it, your family history means you aren't encumbered by estates that would take up all your time either. So why haven't you thought of giving a bit of time to educating yourself?" She nodded hypnotically at him, willing him on. "You could, you know..."

  She saw him stop looking happy. His face got a pinched, miserable expression she didn't like at all.

  "What, go to the University, you mean?" he said in a small voice. "In England?"

  He didn't know how to explain it to her. He didn't know how to summarize all those years of snubs and sneers from beefy English pageboys and knights and even servants--the jokes about being a wild man from Wales, an eternal outsider--in a voice that wouldn't betray his feelings. "I never thought about it, because I don't think I could. You see, I'm foreign..." He gave her a desperate look. "Welsh," he added.

  She looked bewildered. "So?" she said; "I'm Venetian by birth; and Guillebert de...well, no point in making a list. But there's hardly a native-born Parisian at the University here, or in the world of letters at all. We're all some sort of foreigner. What difference would it make to you, being foreign?"

  Owain tried to keep the memory of the sneers he was so used to out of his ears, the mocking of his singsong intonation in English. But he couldn't quite stop tears prickling behind his eyelids.

  He took a moment to compose himself. He managed a smile. "In England," he explained, striving for a lightness that still somehow eluded him, "since the uprising in Wales, you can't even marry an Englishwoman if you're Welsh, not without a special dispensation allowing you to be considered an Englishman, which is impossible to get. We're a conquered race, you see..."

  He looked warily at Christine from under his lashes. Once he'd believed there would be two Welsh universities; they'd been ordered into existence by Owain Glynd?r when he'd been crowned at Machynlleth ten years before. How could he explain all the details of that history? He thought she'd think he was making excuses. He thought she might get angry.

  But Christine wasn't angry. To his surprise, he thought she looked strangely sympathetic. She was gently nodding her head. "So you'd have to teach yourself," she said slowly. "Like I did."

  Then she laughed; and she was laughing with him, not at him, he could see. "My God," she said, with grim satisfaction, as if she'd been proved right yet again, "I don't know what would become of our University if there were no foreigners! How provincial the English are..."

  In this respect, at least, Owain found he was guiltily enjoying her contempt for his adopted country--so much he almost nodded.

  She put a sympathetic hand on his, and looked deep into his eyes again. "Shall I tell you how things are here?" she went on. "Norman, Picard, English, German, Fleming, Provencal, Spaniard, Venetian, Roman, you name it, they're all here. The colleges have bursaries, too, so good students don't have to pay for their own studies. You just have to enroll at a college that deals with your nation--they count four nations, and the one that's called the English nation takes the English and the Germans and Flemings and Dutch too. Why ever wouldn't they take the Welsh? If you were ever to want to go to university in Paris, there would be no problem. And if they turned you down, it certainly wouldn't be because of your nationality."

  There was a deliberately comical look of astonishment in her eyes at that outlandish notion. She was shaking her head.

  "Eat up," she said, suddenly purposeful, and he let himself be drawn to his feet. "Let's go."

  It was late when they came back from the University. But Owain's eyes were still shining.

  She said: "I'll put another book out for you. For when you've finished this one. It's one of my early ones, something I wrote when Jean was going to go away to England. Advice to a young man; on how to learn to learn. I thought it might appeal."

  His face lightened even more; then suddenly darkened with memory. He said: "But I'll h
ave to go..."

  She said: "How long can you stay?"

  He fell silent. He scuffed one toe against the other foot. She could see him remembering his pointless existence; waiting in palace corridors; being left out by English pageboys and aides with a proper claim to their lords' time. "My lord of Clarence will be off in a day or two," he said eventually. He eyed her for a moment, as if thinking.

  What Owain was fumbling toward articulating was that he wanted to find a way to stay on after Clarence left. These Parisians--fearful as they all seemed, with the memory of their conflict so recent on them that you could practically smell the blood on them, so fresh that they didn't yet have words to talk about it--were, at the same time, full of a joy he didn't know: the pleasure of being here, where they were, doing what they did. They knew something that made it almost irrelevant if the great men of the day destroyed each other over their heads. They might tremble at the profound crisis they were caught up in, and mourn the passing of the established order of the world they knew. But they believed in something universal that couldn't be destroyed. They were putting their hope in beauty. Owain had never had a day when so many enticing futures opened up before him. He didn't know whether he wanted to go and enroll at the University, or just stay in this house with these warm, kindly people and read himself into the life they lived. But he wanted to be here.

  "Did Anastaise tell you?" she asked, as if she were changing the subject. "She took a poultice this morning to an old woman with sores under her arms that Anastaise said looked like plague sores."

  She saw the flicker on his face; she didn't think it was fear. "I'm wondering," she went on. "Perhaps I should tell my lord of Clarence you've been exposed to the miasma, out here in the town. Perhaps I should suggest you stay on until a doctor gives you the all-clear." She poured him a cup of wine. "You could rejoin them at Calais later," she murmured; the voice of temptation. Then, realizing that the Duke of Clarence might well be heading straight back to Normandy to go on making war, she added, with asperity, "or wherever the Duke prefers." She put the jug down. There was a hint of mischievous laughter in her voice when she said: "After all, it would be a service to him to make sure his men didn't get ill." She could take Owain to meet a friend or two from the University in the next few days; set wheels in motion.