Queen & Country (26 page)

And Hew, glancing at the sketches of his wife Susanna, found he did not think it, though he knew that Vanson's boasting could not be quite true. ‘Are there no others here could invent such a trick?'

‘Not,' answered Vanson, ‘at this present time. Bronckhorst, perhaps, had he set his mind to it. But I would dare to swear to it, that it is not his work. And he is here no longer, since he left your country, three or four years back. He was not happy here. He was the king's painter, when he was a bairn. And that, you may be sure, was a thankless task.'

‘Why do you say that?'

Vanson smiled. ‘His Grace is a restless soul, who does not care to sit. And, when he does, he does not pay his bills.'

‘But there are other painters, surely, at the court?'

‘There are one or two. David Workman and his sons. And the Binnings too. And they are good, what you call, decorative painters. They can paint a coffin or a coat of arms. They can paint a door. If you want a banner, Binning is your man. But you will not find a Scotsman who can make a likeness. They do not have training for that. Who is to there to teach them? If I have a son, who wants to be a painter, I will send him to Italy. Not to Antwerp now. Antwerp is finished.'

‘Is that where you are from? I was there last year. Antwerp is a ghost town. The Protestants have fled the town. And the Scheldt is blocked,' Hew said.

If Vanson was from Antwerp, then perhaps he had been part of the first and savage routing of the refugees, meeting with Susanna somewhere further north. Then, he might be drawn into a deeper confidence, if Hew could win his trust. For what he said about the Workman family could not quite be true. What about the boy, and his subtle brush, that snatching at Giles Locke, had caught him to the life? Perhaps Vanson's views were coloured, by professional jealousy?

Though Vanson's eyes were dimmed a little, he did not respond. Whatever he had left, he did not wish to be reminded of it. He shrugged his shoulders. ‘I should care, now. Now my home is here. But Italy is where you will learn about perspective. Vignola has put it in a book, and I will have a copy sent for, for these idle boys, whenever they have mastered how to draw a piece of fruit. Which God knows for sure will not be some time soon. As for Antwerp, shall I tell you what will come from Antwerp? The engravers will be busy making pictures for the books, that will make a martyr of the Scottish queen. They will show the blade as it shivers her white neck, and every other mark of idolatrous hypocrisy. Whatever they come up with, it will not look like this, it will be, do you see, more subtle and insinuating, supple and persuasive as the serpent's tongue. Whatever you may think of it, however it may stir you,
this
is coarse and crude.'

‘Which makes me think,' said Hew, ‘it has not come so far. There is a John Workman at St Andrews, employed as a painter at the university.'

‘Doubtless, Davy's son. Workman by name, workmen by nature,' Vanson said impassively. ‘He will do a good job.'

‘He is painting a portrait of our college principal.'

‘That I find hard to believe. A Workman never painted such a likeness in his life. They are not portrait painters. For what reason
should they be, since they are Scots? He is likely to make a poor fist of it.'

‘He has with him a prentice boy, who is deaf and dumb. I heard that he can paint a little,' Hew ventured, carefully. Vanson stared at him. ‘John Workman has a prentice, now? I had not heard of that. Now that, indeed, is news.'

Chapter 17

Painters' Colours

On market day, Meg left her children home with Canny Bett and walked with Frances to the town. They did not take Robert Lachlan, who, Meg insisted, would attract more trouble than he kept away. ‘You will be safe enough with me.'

Frances was inclined to believe her. The country people who had called in at the house to consult with Meg looked upon her with a superstitious reverence. It was not because she was the wife of a physician, whose philosophy and art were not the same as hers; her remedies were based in nature, Giles Locke's on the art and understanding of the elemental humours, set down by the ancients. Often, they were brought together, in a pleasing concord, when Meg's own prescriptions chimed and tuned with his, and when that was the case, there was no one Giles Locke trusted better than his wife. Occasionally, they disagreed, on such contentious issues as the swaddling of a child, the cutting of a tooth, the colic or the croup, the danger to the infant stomach of a piece of fruit. On such occasions, generally, Meg had her way, and her little children were the safer and the stronger for it. Her physic she had learned from a country nurse, who when she was a child had taught her how to keep at bay the falling sickness to which she was thrawn. Frances had no doubt that woman was a witch.

The plants that Meg grew in the Kenly Green gardens formed the basis of her herbal remedies, and she showed to Frances the beds of herbs and flowers, the jars in the distillery, and in the drying room. The spices and the oils, she bought from the apothecar. June was the
month when the medicines were made, the herbs in full flower, the pickle jars filled with bright buds of broom. By March, the stocks which had lasted through bleak months of winter were thin, and the shelves of the still house threadbare. Meg had made a shopping list of button thread and silks, and several yards of cloth, of sugar loaf and saffron, which were running low. ‘Those we shall have at the apothecar. He is a stranger here, and not much liked in town. He came in, a newcomer, after the plague.'

Her words caused a pang of discomfit in Frances. Were all strangers unwelcome here? In London, she had met with a melling mix, of Muscovites and Frenchman, blackamoors and Turks. Though some people looked upon them with suspicion, they brought music and song with them, stories and dance.

She was thankful, still, to come at last to town. They walked inland, through the fields, and along a narrow track, where the country people came with their butter and their cheese, and the candle makers with their tallow wax, and through a busy harbour choked with little boats, where the shrieking gulls picked trails of fish from slabs. They came out from an archway that was called the Pends, to the apex of a wide uncluttered street, lined upon each side by an avenue of trees, shaking out their green buds, in a brisk sea breeze. This, Meg explained, was the South Gate. To its east, the ruin of the cathedral yearned towards a sky of billowing white cloud, from which the town swept west in three converging thoroughfares, and four converging streets – the South Street and the Mercat Gate, the North Street and the Swallow Gate, falling to the cliffs and its castle on its rock. Between them were the run and rigs that held an inner life, of cookshops, inns and taverns, gardens, sheds and shops, and in this grid enclosed the compass of the town.

They walked from the cathedral to the college of St Leonard, closed behind its walls. ‘We cannot go in, now, or we shall find the students at their private prayers. But on Sundays, we can come into the chapel there, which is our parish kirk. Then the college sits apart. It is a kinder kirk, than the Holy Trinity,' said Meg. ‘For the elders
there are searching, keen to pick out faults. It is a very strict and unforgiving church.'

The houses in this street were built of stone from the cathedral, stripped bare of its slates. They were merchant houses, opulent and fair, but seemed to Frances quite forbidding, sitting squat and grim. Between the college of St Leonard, and the college of St Mary – the new college, Meg called it – was the house that was given to Giles and his family, where his ongoing practice might benefit the town. It had at its back a small distillery, and gardens that stretched as far as the burn.

‘Here we shall do very well,' said Meg, ‘if we can fend off the New College dows.' The doves had flown off when the college closed; now they had returned, and were launching an offence upon St Leonard's College crops. Meg said the doves were presbyters.

The house was not far from the land where Matthew Cullan, and Nicholas Colp, had been laid to rest, on the very cusp of the chapel kirkyard, in a quiet glade. Here, Meg knelt, to gather up the weeds around her father's grave. Shy snowdrops had lifted their heads, and primroses too, that Meg had coaxed out from the frost. Frances felt like an intruder, in another person's life, that had somehow been mistaken for her own. ‘Does Hew like to come here?' she asked.

Meg smiled at that. ‘Hew is confused, in some things. But I think that he does, in his heart.'

Frances found this new world difficult to grasp. On a busy market day, the town seemed stripped of life, stony-faced and desolate. The colleges, that were home from home, and half a life to Hew and Giles, were closed to her and Meg. ‘Where do women go?' she asked. In London, they could walk abroad, through gardens and through parks. They had more freedom there, than anywhere on earth. There was laughter and music, Burbage's theatre, revels and plays, dancing and skating, card games and bowls. Here entertainments were forbidden by the Kirk, and no one danced in rounds or played upon the lute. Frances, in the hours she spent upon her uncle's books, had never felt the life she lived was profligate or frivolous. But Joan and
her five daughters liked to laugh and play, to entertain and sing, and gossip with their friends. St Andrews seemed to Frances now a cold and barren place. Some people who went past spoke a word to Meg, and looked at Frances carefully. They were civil and polite, gentle to her face. But when they had gone by, she felt their eyes upon her back, and heard them start to mutter in discordant, foreign tongues. By St Mary's, they encountered Matthew's tutor Gavan Baird, with a pudding for his dinner in a paper cloth. The ruffle of his hair brightened the grey town, and he smiled and raised his hat to them, a spark of warmth and friendliness that brought a little cheer, before he disappeared behind the college gate.

‘The kirk is the place where people like to congregate. And beside the mills,' Meg said. ‘You have not come to see the town when it is at its best. In another month, when the sun has warmed the colour in the sand, and softened the brisk breeze, you will come to see how beautiful it is. Our little town was ravaged sorely in the plague. But it has begun upon a brave recovery.'

‘You do not find it quiet here?'

‘Not in the least. But I am not inclined to living in a crowd. It brings the sickness on.'

Meg bustled Frances by the kirk of Holy Trinity, and quickly from the sight of its indignant glare, to the market place. Not far from the town house was the former weaver's shop, that now was owned and run by his daughter Tibbie, whose husband had a business dyeing woollen cloth. Tibbie Strachan had some lengths of wool for sale, of several weights and thicknesses, some in workday colours that were dull and serviceable, and some that were plain, and could be dyed in any shade. She kept some trays of silks, and smaller haberdashery, and, locked out of sight, a range of finer cloths, that could be had at cost. There was little that Tibbie could not put her hands on, whatever were the laws against excess in dress. She could cloak an earl, or whip up fancy dress, for Archbishop Adamson to wear in his sculduddery. Here Frances found at last a kind of kindred spirit, for there was nothing she knew better than the cloth trade.

With Tibbie, Meg was blunt. ‘This is Frances Phillips, who will marry Hew. She wants some satin silk, to make a wedding gown.'

And Tibbie said, ‘You have a guid man, there. What colour will you have? I should say, a rose, to flatter your fair face.'

Frances hesitated. Hew had said, sea-water blue, which seemed to her a washed out, melancholy shade. The morning sea was grey, reflecting layers of cloud. But when she mentioned it, both Meg and Tibbie cried, ‘That would be perfect, of course. And subtle, in the silk,' and that appeared to settle it.

‘When will you want it?' Tibbie asked. ‘For I doubt we do not have the silk you need as yet, though we have the other cloth. We are low on stock, until the Senzie fair.'

‘That is some weeks off. The banns have not been read, and we must wait for Hew.' Meg squeezed her hand. ‘What do you think?'

Frances did not know what to think. She felt alone, adrift. For she had no kenning, when Hew would be back. She took between her fingers a length of russet kersey, of a price and quality her uncle would approve. ‘This one is fine.'

Both women laughed. Tibbie said, ‘Leave it to me.' And Meg bought fine broadcloth in willow and grey, in flax blue and primrose, carnation and straw, and yard upon yard of cambric and lawn, to make sheets and smocks, handkerchiefs and caps.
‘That
is an outreiking,' Tibbie remarked. And afterwards, Meg said to Frances, ‘There, you may be sure, you have found a friend.'

They came last to the apothecary by the market cross, a little shop with a distillery and oven at the back. Two young men, as customers, were standing at the counter, one gazing up upon a shelf of jars, a frown upon his face, as though for some elixir he could never find, however hard he looked. The other was engaged in a dispute with the poticar, jiggling with his arms, in an agitated dance. It was not a dispute of the ordinary kind, for there were no real words in it. The young man pointed furiously to a cup of red powder next to the scale, while the apothecary mirrored his movements, by vigorously shaking his head. He snatched up a paper from the young man's
hand, and pointed at a word on it, then back at the cup. The young man responded with a stream of squawks, rising to a pitch of sheer and shrill indignance. ‘Look, son,' the poticar said, ‘That is what he asked for, and that is what it is. Awa. Shoo. Gang.' This was said aggressively, in the young man's face, and accompanied by gestures that could not be misread.

Frustrated, the customer picked up the pot, and emptied it over the counter. A powder ran out, of a muddy red brown.

‘Now why wad ye do that, ye daft dummy?' The poticar took up a pen, and wrote a line or two upon the piece of paper, which he pushed back in his hand. ‘Tak that to your master. Now then, out ye gang.' He came out from his stall, and physically and roughly, bundled the boy out. The boy was strong enough, indeed, to have resisted him; but he seemed a little sheepish at his own display of temper, and went quietly enough, withdrawn into the silence of a stubborn scowl. ‘Your pardon, ladies,' the apothecar excused himself, ‘But that man is a fool. And sometimes, wi' these naturals, they want a helping hand, for they will not be telt.'