The Fyre Mirror Read Free Page B

interior with my throne, but I trust you have the skills to manage that while painting out of doors.”
    “Oh, indeed, and we are deeply honored to be included in the royal retinue,” blonde, big-boned Lavina Teerlinc said, gripping her hands together. Though tall, the queen’s only female artist had to stretch her strides to keep up with the queen’s quick pace on the geometrically laid out garden paths.
    “Ah, yes, back to Nonsuch,” Will Kendale, fat as a woolsack and already puffing, put in from her other side. “You may recall, Your Gracious Majesty, that I myself was one of the artists your royal father chose to bestow the fantastical beauty that is Nonsuch. I lived there nearly six months, painting several scenes on interior walls when the building was going up. It will be, in a way, a home going for me, though my great successes were also achieved here in London after I studied with great painters who—”
    “Master Kendale,” Henry Heatherley said as his highly polished boots spit gravel, “we do not need a recital of your well-known list of good fortune. You are hardly being attentive to Her Majesty’s expressly voiced concerns. I have studied my craft under Master Hans Holbein himself, but I’ll not flaunt that here. Yes, Your Majesty, a slight concern exists about the conditions under which we go to Nonsuch in your retinue.”
    “But not,” Lavina added, “about the conditions of painting outside or living there in a tent. I am sure dat vill be quite pleasant.”
    Lavina had been reared in the Netherlands with Dutch as her first language; dat s and vill s crept back into her speech when she was excited or upset, which, Elizabeth noted well, she must be now.
    “Are we correct to assume, Your Majesty,” Heatherley said, “that the work of at least one of us three will be the final, officially approved portrait? Odds then are one-third for each of us that it will be a marvelous opportunity—that is unless …”
    “’S blood, unless what?” Elizabeth finally got a word in as she halted and faced them near the marble fountain.
    “Unless dat lad vill be included,” Lavina blurted, but so quietly that the queen almost had to read her lips.
    “Gil Sharpe?”
    “Ah, yes,” Kendale said with a sharp sniff, “or Gilberto Sharpino as he styles himself now.”
    “It was my suggestion and my support,” the queen explained, “that sent Gilbert Sharpe to the ducal court of Urbino to study portraiture. And yes, I intend to see what he can do, though God knows, he is so greatly gifted—as I’m sure all of you were in your youth before someone taught and gave you opportunities—that he almost didn’t need the help. Why, Lavina, you were reared in a painter’s household, so how could you begrudge the boy some teachers? And Masters Kendale and Heatherley, both of you have just emphasized to me that you studied in the schools of masters.”
    She stared down the disgruntled Lavina, who was trying hard to hide how annoyed she’d been the other day at the queen’s critique of her style. At last, looking abashed, Lavina dropped her sharp blue gaze and unfolded her arms from across her broad breasts to clasp her hands together as if in petition.
    “Of course, Your Majesty,” Heatherley put in, “I’d be willing to help the lad in any way I can.” Elizabeth turned her gaze on him. He was as compact and dark-haired as Kendale was fat and silver-haired. Heatherley’s olive complexion made him look Mediterranean, quite swarthy in a land of fairer folk.
    “That is kind of you, Master Heatherley.”
    Though she’d heard the man drank too much expensive Bordeaux, his hand was still steady with a brush, and his work was as polished as his deportment. Yet, today, for the first time, Elizabeth sensed burning ambition beneath that suave exterior, the like of which she’d seen only in her own dear Robin, Earl of Leicester.
    In this day of unsigned portraiture, Henry Heatherley liked to sign his paintings