The Fyre Mirror (24 page)
Authors: Karen Harper
Tags: #Fiction - Historical, #Mystery, #16th Century, #England/Great Britain, #Royalty
“Kat’s coming first!” she cried. “Keep talking!”
“Right here. We’re right here. Lots of good soft summer hay, sweet smelling, right here …,” Jenks’s voice went on.
“Do it now before this damned hay burns!” Cecil shouted.
Elizabeth hugged Kat hard and shoved her. But Kat clung, and they both went down through the flames and smoke together. They hit hard and bounced, then the hay wain was pulled away to fresher air. A fine mist was falling like tears, but Elizabeth was sure she could still see burning stars.
| 1533 | Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn, January 25. Elizabeth born at Greenwich Palace, September 7. |
| 1536 | Anne Boleyn executed in Tower of London. Elizabeth disinherited from crown. Henry marries Jane Seymour. |
| 1537 | Prince Edward born. Queen Jane dies of childbed fever. |
| 1538 | Henry VIII takes over village of Cuddington and begins to build Nonsuch Palace. |
| 1544 | Act of Succession and Henry VIII’s will establish Mary and Elizabeth in line to throne. |
| 1547 | Henry VIII dies. Edward VI crowned. |
| 1553 | Queen Mary (Tudor) I crowned. Tries to force England back to Catholicism; gives Margaret Stewart, Tudor cousin, precedence over Elizabeth. Queen Mary weds Prince Philip of Spain by proxy. |
| 1554 | Protestant Wyatt Rebellion fails, but Elizabeth sent to Tower for two months, accompanied by Kat Ashley. |
| 1558 | Mary dies; Elizabeth succeeds to throne, November 17. Elizabeth appoints William Cecil secretary of state; Robert Dudley made master of the queen’s horse. |
| 1558 | Elizabeth crowned in Westminster Abbey, January 15. Parliament urges queen to marry, but she resists. Mary, Queen of Scots, becomes queen of France at accession of her young husband, Francis II. |
| 1560 | Death of Francis II of France makes his young Catholic widow, Mary, Queen of Scots, a danger as Elizabeth’s unwanted heir. Elizabeth names Earl of Sussex lord lieutenant of Ireland. |
| 1561 | Now widowed, Mary, Queen of Scots, returns to Scotland. |
| 1563 | William Cecil drafts a proclamation designed to control productions of Elizabeth’s royal likenesses. |
TUDOR FAMILY
by Karen Harper
THE POYSON GARDEN
THE TIDAL POOLE
THE TWYLIGHT TOWER
THE QUEENE’S CURE
THE THORNE MAZE
THE QUEENE’S CHRISTMAS
THE TIDAL POOLE
THE TWYLIGHT TOWER
THE QUEENE’S CURE
THE THORNE MAZE
THE QUEENE’S CHRISTMAS
MAY 16, 1565
“HERE IS DOROTHEA’S MIRROR BACK, GILBERTO SHARPINO,” the queen said, handing it to him as she joined him in the privy garden at Whitehall Palace nine days later. She also greeted Cecil, Dr. Dee, and Jenks, whom she’d summoned to meet her and Gil here this morning.
Already from over the palace walls and down the street, they could hear workmen pounding iron nails into boards to rebuild the Ring and Crown Inn, which had burned to its cellars. Only one nearby thatch-roofed edifice had caught floating cinders and ignited, so the plan of Flavia, alias Floris, to kill the queen and burn London had ended with her own death, a flaming torch still in her hands, on the cobbles of the street.
Gil was busy setting up the experiment he had explained in his written confession of why he’d lied to his queen more than once since his return from Italy. Cecil had forgiven Gil for his escape from custody when he’d learned that the lad had gone to try to warn the queen that the fire-mirror murderer was in London.
“Will the mirror be a keepsake of your first love, Gil, or will you use it to make copies of your art?” she asked as the lad merely glanced into the mirror, then laid it aside on the ground.
“I did adore her, Your Grace,” he admitted. “Still, she was not the first woman I adored, but the second. And that other paragon has told me I can recover from this lovesickness, so I shall.”
“That paragon has learned the hard way that we must all recover from dreadful losses in our lives,” Elizabeth intoned. Then deciding she sounded too somber for this lovely day, she sat on the bench outside the tent which had been pitched for Gil’s demonstration.
Though they were all nervous to be near tents and mirrors on such a sunny day, Gil had written that he needed such to show the secret he had nearly died for and thought he was protecting her from.
But there is power in knowledge, dear Gil,
Elizabeth had written him during her period of grieving Kat’s death,
so I wager it is best if I know all.
But there is power in knowledge, dear Gil,
Elizabeth had written him during her period of grieving Kat’s death,
so I wager it is best if I know all.
Now their eyes met and held; for the first time since Kat had died, a small smile lifted the corners of the queen’s lips as she nodded her encouragement to him. Cecil and Dr. Dee both moved to positions behind her, while Jenks kept a watch over them all. Gil—using Dr. Dee’s now famous concave mirror—kept popping in and out of the tent.
Her men were obviously not certain whether to make conversation or not. She had taken the loss of Kat hard, despite the fact that she had been preparing for it for months. Kat had lived through the terror and fall from the burning roof, but had slipped into a coma and died the next day without another word. But at the end, she had known Elizabeth was queen, and that was some solace. Although the queen considered Kat to be Floris’s victim too, she had still ordered the murderess buried on Nonsuch land, under the tree where Dench had died—but without a marker on her grave.
Still, but for sending out written instructions the week before, the queen had emerged only once for her brief appearance and briefer pronouncement at Kat’s memorial service in the palace chapel: “Katherine Ashley,” she had declared in her clarion voice, “was like a mother to me and will never be forgotten by her friend and sovereign, Elizabeth Tudor. Queen Anne Boleyn gave me life, but Kat Ashley gave me love.”
And that was all. She had returned to her royal apartments as soon as the service ended. She had not even seen Cecil, but had communicated to him only through writing. To take courage from the past to prepare for the future, she had simply needed time in silence and solitude. Mary, Queen of Scots, whose name Floris had invoked on the roof, would not go away, but perhaps, with care, she could be kept at bay.
It amused Elizabeth to see Dr. Dee staring in awe as Gil set up the demonstration, checking angles and distances for his mirror and other equipment. She announced to everyone, “Just as the artists’ guild of Urbino takes a secrecy oath to protect this so-called camera obscura, the five of us shall not speak of this beyond these walls, even if we decide to use this technique to replicate my official portrait.
“And Gil,” she added, rising and stepping closer to watch him adjust the chair his subject would sit in, “I’m expecting you to get busy on your new portrait of me, as close to the lost original as possible. My two remaining artists got burns on their hands in the fire at the inn, meeting as they must have been,” she said, lifting her eyebrows, “to confer about painting the human form or some such.”
Shaking his head, Cecil said, “They came tearing out of there like scalded cats, half dressed. That will teach them not to burn with lust, I wager.”
“I’ve already begun to repaint the portrait, Your Grace,” Gil said as he motioned Jenks to the chair. He would pose outside the tent, in which had been cut a square window. “All right, Jenks,” Gil went on, “don’t move.”
Looking more nervous that he would have in combat, Jenks settled himself. Gil indicated the rest of them should step into the tent.
They went inside and gasped. On a piece of parchment Gil had positioned inside the tent was Jenks’s living picture, in color, though upside down. When he sneezed, it sneezed. Gil explained how the image was reflected through the window cut in the tent and bounced off the mirror to the opposite side to the parchment. Moving the mirror or parchment could make the image come into clear focus or blur and fade.
“You see,” Gil said, “if I were doing Jenks’s portrait, all I would now need to do would be to sketch what I see down to the last detail, rather than painting if from just looking—from life.”
“Why, the perspective is perfect,” Dr. Dee said, bending close to the image. “Once the outlines are sketched in, of course, it can be turned right side up. But it reverses everything, just like a mirror, so that right-handed people—say, holding a pen or paper—would be made left-handed.”
“Or their hair would be parted on the wrong side,” Cecil put in.
“But no one cares,” Gil said, “not when they see how exacting this is. It’s made some Italian fortunes. And now that I realize how detailed even Hans Holbein’s portraits are, I wonder if he hadn’t learned of it somehow.”
“Wouldn’t that unsettle Heatherley even more?” the queen cut in, and even Gil, as nervous and engrossed as he was, had to grin.
“
Camera obscura
means ‘dark room,’” he explained, still evidently relishing lecturing Cecil and Dee, not to mention his queen. “Of course, the darker the artist’s area, the better.”
Camera obscura
means ‘dark room,’” he explained, still evidently relishing lecturing Cecil and Dee, not to mention his queen. “Of course, the darker the artist’s area, the better.”
“But in a way,” Cecil said, “this is cheating—a falsehood, for the viewer and owner of the portrait believe it is all the artist’s inherent, God-given skill.”
“And so it becomes a secret,” Elizabeth said, “one some misguided men will kill for by sending an assassin after
my
English subject, the lad
I
entrusted to their court to learn to paint. The damned Catholic plotters. Why, I’ll take raw English talent over fancy foreign fripperies any day!”
my
English subject, the lad
I
entrusted to their court to learn to paint. The damned Catholic plotters. Why, I’ll take raw English talent over fancy foreign fripperies any day!”
“As I said before,” Gil replied, nodding, “Maestro Titian doesn’t use it. But I tell you, it still takes great skill to fill it all in. Each detail is needed to complete the whole.”
“Much like solving any puzzle,” Dee said.
“Or crime,” Cecil added. “But if we keep working at it long enough, it comes into view, even shading and shadows.”
“Exactly,” Elizabeth said, unwilling to dwell on all they had just been through. “Gil, will you also paint me a portrait of Kat Ashley, one from memory?”
He followed her out of the tent, where she motioned to Jenks that he could stop posing. “Of course I can,” Gil vowed, hurrying to keep up with her. “I can paint her from heart.”
“From heart, that’s good. Just remember that working that way is more important than reflecting someone else’s talent, however much you admire that person. Even when life becomes fearful, always paint—and live—from the heart.”
She dismissed him and the others with a simple gesture and walked the sharp angles of the garden paths alone.
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