Free Bonnie Dundee by Rosemary Sutcliff Page B

‘And for a soldier’s wife who must often golonely with her man not beside her, it would be a fine thing to have such a likeness.’ She fell silent a moment, and then speaking still more softly, said to me, ‘Hugh, may I have your picture?’
    That was the first time I knew the sorrow of a painter, that when he has painted something and set a bit of his own heart in it, folks want to take it from him – oh, maybe they give him gold and silver in its place, but never his painting with the bit of his own heart in it, back again. But it was not for that reason that I hesitated.
    ‘The paint and the board are no’ mine,’ I said, doubtfully.
    ‘It is not the paint nor yet the board that makes the picture,’ said Mynheer, ‘it is yours to do as you will with.’
    ‘Then when ’tis dry, my lady, ’tis yours for a wedding gift.’
    And that was the first time I knew the joy of the painter, in having such a great thing to give.
    ‘Thank you for my wedding gift, Hugh,’ said my lady.
    I got up, remembering at last that I should not be sitting in the presence of my betters, and propped the little picture carefully in the window recess.
    Mynheer was still looking at it, and rubbing his nose in the way that he had when he was thinking hard. ‘Boy,’ he said suddenly, as one making up his mind, ‘you are a bad painter, but with teaching you could be a goot one, which is more than can be said for Johannes, who vill never be goot for aught but to stretch canvases and grind pigments. If you come with me as my second apprentice – I have room for two at home in Utrecht – I will make of you one day a better painter than I am myself.’
    For the moment, as I stood silent, temptations tugged at me sore. But something else pulled more strongly the other way.
    ‘I am thinking Johannes would knife me,’ I said, ‘and beside then, when my lady is wed, I go with – ‘I almost said ‘with Claverhouse’, but I turned the words in time – ‘with her to her new home.’
    ‘And so you will be a groom all your life?’ said Mynheer. He said other things, too, but I did not hear them, for Colonel Graham had turned that clear hard gaze of his on to me again,and meeting it, I knew – I scarce know how to put it – it was as though he had heard what I had not said, and understood, and accepted, gravely, like a liege lord accepting the fealty of his newest knight. Och, it sounds daft, I know, but for that moment even my lady Jean was not there. Just the two of us. And I was no longer a lost dog without a heel to follow.
    ‘And now,’ Mynheer was saying, ‘allow me to show you vat ve came to see – how it goes with my portrait of Lady Jean.’
    A few days later, when the portrait was finished, and dry enough to be safely set in its frame, Mynheer Cornelius van Meere rode away, Johannes with him. The apprentice’s hands were not yet fully healed, and so I helped him to load up the pack beast. And when all was done, and the fat little man already perched aloft on his horse, he bent down and set a hand on my shoulder. ‘If ever you change your mind,’ he said, ‘ask for me at the third house beyond the kirk in Silver Spur Street – Silveren Spoor Straat – in Utrecht. Look for the two swans carved on the gable. My wife will take you in if I am on my travels.’

7
Wedding Favours
    ON THE NINTH day of June in the year of Our Lord 1684, Colonel John Graham and my lady Jean Cochrane signed their marriage contract. There was a fine gathering to see it done; Lord Cochrane that was my lady’s brother and Lord Ross and many more; and Captain Livingstone quiet in the background as usual. But my lady’s mother bided in her own house, hard black Covenanting woman that she was. And later I heard that old Lady Dundonel had signed the contract in her place.
    Ach well, it is all long ago.
    Next day, the Tuesday that would be, was the wedding. A soft day of skim-milk skies and hazy sunshine, and the scent of the first elder-blossom