Free Sisters of Treason by Elizabeth Fremantle Page A

the heart of her. Then sickeningly there is a whiff of roast pork, which sets Levina’s mouth watering involuntarily. Disgusted with her body’s response, her eyes prickle and she wraps a kerchief tightly around her face to shut out the stench. Thankfully now the mob has thinned and they can pick up the pace.
    •  •  •
    Cardinal Pole sits before Levina, his hands folded in his lap. He has not spoken a single word; it is as if she doesn’t exist. Perhaps he doesn’t like being painted by a woman. But it is the Queen’s commission, so he has no choice in the matter. He avoids meeting her gaze. His hooded brown eyes give the appearance of kindness, but Levina is sure they are deceiving. She cannot get that terrible stench out of her mind, it clings to her clothes; she fears it will never wash out of her and that she will be cursed with the sound of that anguished howl reverberating about her head forever.
    There are five more imprisoned awaiting the same fate next week, and that is just the beginning. Archbishop Cranmer hasbeen taken. They will want to make an exhibition of him —the one who annulled the marriage of the eighth Henry and the Queen’s mother, rendering Mary Tudor a bastard. The Queen will have her revenge now. Levina asks herself how much of it is driven by the man sitting before her, how much the King, how much the Queen. She has taken to attending Mass daily, even at home away from court, for you never can tell who might be watching and Bishop Bonner has eyes everywhere. George had been right to get rid of her English Bible.
    She puts down her brush to look at her sitter more carefully, watching the light play on the jewel in his ring, stretching her hand down absently to stroke Hero’s ear. Pole has an abundance of beard, which obscures his features, making him hard to read. She tries to tease the man out from those eyes that will not look at her. But she struggles to depict him, so focuses on rendering the red of his robes, mixing a vermilion pigment paste, looking carefully at how the scarlet satin is touched with a bright sheen, almost white, where the light kisses it and how it darkens in the folds, to the color of blood.
    She cracks an egg, allowing the white to slip through her fingers into a bowl and rolling the tender glob of yolk around in her palm to dry it a little, so it takes on a thicker texture. She takes up her knife and slices through the yolk’s membrane, dripping it into the pigment, stirring fast until it reaches the perfect consistency, looking again at the Cardinal’s robes, adding a few grains of cadmium. She rarely uses egg tempera these days, but this picture, with its crimson expanses, calls for it. She hears her father’s voice: “It will still be bright a thousand years hence.” He said it more than once of tempera.
    She begins to apply the color in tiny cross-hatched strokes. The Cardinal heaves out a deep breath, shifting in his seat. His robes settle differently, which irritates her, for she felt she was on the brink of something with her red pigments. There was a dead cat hung from a gibbet. She saw it the other day on her way to thevellum merchant at Cheapside. Someone had dressed the creature in a cardinal’s habit. After six firm years of reform under the boy King Edward they do not suppose it will be such a smooth transition to return the English to the Catholic faith, do they? People are not so malleable, and Levina is beginning to believe that if those who feared the Inquisition finding its way to these shores with the Spaniard might have been right. There is a palpable sense of fear hanging over the city, and she is wondering too if the people have come to regret favoring Mary Tudor when there was a choice to be made, if they might not be ruing the day they rejected Jane Grey.
    The English are looking for alternatives; they fear becoming an annex of Catholic Spain. Elizabeth’s name is whispered about, as is Katherine Grey’s. There are many who