Winter, 1506
Bayonne, Gascony
Mira
Mira awoke to the sounds of Arnaud getting dressed for work and lighting a fire in the hearth. Outside, the dull thwack of an icepick echoed in the square. The fountain must have frozen overnight again.
She stretched languidly, heart pounding with anticipation. Tristan slept curled at her side, his puckered mouth slightly open. His flushed cheeks were so enticing she could barely resist smothering them with kisses.
A sigh of happiness rippled through her. Today Nekane would watch the baby and Mira would take up the threads of her old life—the artist’s life—once more. She turned her head and eyed the stack of oak panels in the sitting room. There was so much she still needed—pigments and brushes, for a start. And there was a bigger problem: she possessed not one scrap of evidence that she could, in fact, paint at all.
The portrait she made of her mother at Castle Oto was gone, stolen by a bandit in the mountains soon after she and Arnaud left Ronzal for Béarn. Where was it now? Rotting at the bottom of a ravine, perhaps—or chopped up into kindling for a winter fire. The thought struck her heart like a sharp blade.
Mira forced her mind to the day ahead. She planned to knock on the door of every merchant and sea captain in the city, seeking a commission. But she had no portraits to show off, no letter of recommendation from a venerated master, nothing but her own words to sell her work. And what were the words of a woman artist worth?
Arnaud sat on the bed, a welcome distraction from her worries. He reached into his satchel and pulled out a cloth-wrapped parcel.
“I thought this might come in handy today,” he said softly, unwrapping it. Inside was a rectangular piece of Venetian glass painted black on one side. He held it out.
Mira sat up, stared at her reflection in the glass.
The face looking back at her was paler than she remembered, a bit gaunt, the cheekbones jutting out too sharply. Her gray-green eyes looked different, too. They were eyes that had witnessed enough sorrow for a lifetime, with faint shadows lurking underneath.
“Why do you give me a looking glass?” she asked, glancing up at him in confusion. “There are so many other things we need.”
Arnaud traced his fingertip over the edge of the glass. “You said you need an example of your work to show merchants, so they can see your talents. Now you’ve a subject to practice on.”
She gave him a blank look.
“Paint yourself, Mira,” he said.
“But I have no pigments, my love.”
He rummaged in the satchel again.
“It’s time I told you what happened when I went off with your brother.” He lay a leather sack on the bed next to the mirror. “These are pigments. And brushes. Cornelia’s, all of them.”
“What?” Mira was aghast. “You took Cornelia van der Zee’s things when we left the Valley of Maury?”
He shot her an irritated look. “How could I have managed that? The lord ran us off his land as soon as Rose died.”
“Did her husband give them to you after he helped—when he...” Mira faltered.
When he helped us bury our Rose.
Arnaud shook his head. “No. But later, when I went to Carcassonne, I saw him. Cornelia died soon after Rose did. And, like us, her husband was turned out by Lord and Lady de Berral. He headed to Carcassonne to sell her things and pay his way back to Flanders. I ran into him at the market there and bought it all. It was the least I could do, after his kindness.”
Mira swallowed a sob, willing her grief away. “Why were you there?” she asked.
Arnaud stole a quick glance at Tristan. Reassured that the boy still slept, he spoke again.
“I told Pelegrín and his men I had seen you and your husband traveling east. I claimed I was heading east myself and offered to lead them to you.” He half-smiled. “The lies I told them. Couldn’t think straight. First I led them to Fanjeaux, where a local told me about a market in Carcassonne where artisans gathered. I’d no idea Carcassonne was a fortified town, crawling with French soldiers. A group of Aragónese knights can’t just walk through its gates. So your brother and his men waited in the woods while I went searching in the city—”
“But Arnaud,” Mira interrupted. “What if the French soldiers had seized you?”
He raised an eyebrow. “The entire adventure was a fool’s errand, Mira. I only undertook it to protect you.”
She dropped her gaze, chagrined. “Go on.”
“As I told you, I stumbled into Cornelia’s husband there and bought the art supplies he was selling. Then I returned to your brother and his men, concocted a tale that it was you who had died, said I had purchased your art supplies from your husband. I offered them to your brother, but he didn’t want them.”
“What did he say about me?” she asked, dreading Arnaud’s answer.
“At that moment, nothing—because a pack of French soldiers jumped us. I got a bit scratched up.”
“The wound on your cheek when we met in Lourdes!” she said triumphantly.
He nodded. “I fought alongside your brother and his men. He ordered one of them to give me a pair of boots in thanks—boots he’d stripped from the feet of a French soldier at the battle for Naples.”
“Why boots?”
“Because I rode off from the abbey of Camon shod only in slippers,” he explained. “We departed in haste, if you’ll remember.”
Mira took in his words, her mind unravelling the details and spooling them out one by one.
“All you have described happened quickly,” she said. “And yet you did not come to me until I had reached Lourdes. Why did it take you so long?”
“I wasn’t about to let those men out of my sight. I rode all the way to Perpignan with them, made up some story about wanting to buy tools at the market there. Then I watched their ship sail south for Aragón. Only then did I turn and ride for the west again.”
Mira felt hollowed out inside. “You saved me from him,” she whispered, leaning against Arnaud.
He hesitated. “Pelegrín told me he wanted to find you, but he never said he wished to hurt you. He said he wanted to right an old wrong.”
She drew in a sharp breath. “He must have meant to finish what my father had started—to kill the girl who was never meant to live at all.”
“From that point of view, his words could be taken as a threat,” Arnaud conceded. “But I was there, not you. And I’m still not sure what to make of it.”
“Would he have told you, a stranger, what he truly meant to do?”
“Pelegrín’s the baron of Oto now,” Arnaud replied. “Who knows what he promised his father before he died? But the truth is, I found no fault in the man. He treated his knights well, and they clearly loved him.”
“My father...” Mira fell silent a moment. “He doted on Pelegrín. I am certain my brother would try to end my life if that was our father’s wish.”
Arnaud enfolded her in his arms. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter now. Pelegrín’s in Aragón. And you’re here. Safe.”
Tristan stirred and opened his eyes. He looked directly at his father and beamed.
“Do you see this?” Arnaud said with hushed reverence. “He’s smiling at me.”
All thoughts of her brother and father were banished from Mira’s mind at the sight of her son and husband grinning at each other.
A comfortable routine developed over the next few weeks. Each morning, after Arnaud left for work, Mira fed and changed Tristan, then took him downstairs and handed him over to Nekane. Returning to their rooms, she mixed her paints and set to work on the self-portrait, layer by painstaking layer.
One morning Mira examined the portrait and was satisfied all the major elements were there. She mixed ground white lead with linseed oil and added a few highlights in strategic places. Wiping her hands on a rag, she stood back, surveying the painting with a critical eye.
Mira had painted a self-portrait, it was true, but the only accurate representation of what she glimpsed in the mirror was her face. The rest was all imagined. She painted herself garbed in a fine red dress like her mother wore in the portrait Mira painted at the castle of Oto, with the same black slashed sleeves, the same white blouse decorated with Moorish-inspired embroidery. After some deliberation, she had added her shell necklace on its thin gold chain and the Oto medallion around her waist, also in homage to her mother.
The background was where she diverged from her mother’s portrait. Instead of creating an elaborate landscape, she used alternating layers of burnt umber and black paint to build up a somber backdrop. Her primary goal was to show merchants and nobles that she could paint their images with great skill. A detailed background might be distracting.
On the back of the portrait, under Arnaud’s mark, she painted in tiny script the words, ‘In memory of my mother Marguerite.’ She also concealed her name in two places on the painting itself, just as Cornelia van der Zee had advised her to do one hot summer afternoon in the Valley of Maury. Had that really been only two seasons ago? It seemed a lifetime had passed since their little family arrived in the lavender-scented valley and she completed the portraits of Lord and Lady de Berral which Cornelia was too ill to finish.
Mira’s painting skills were unchanged since those sweltering summer days. But making an image of herself was strange. It had taken Mira several days to get used to staring into the small rectangle of glass, studying her reflection, then daubing paint on the oak panel. She felt oddly self-conscious, as if she were being observed—though the baby and Arnaud were the only ones who saw what she was doing. No one else had any idea that a young woman was painting her own portrait in these modest rented rooms above a small square in one of Bayonne’s unfashionable quarters.
She gave the portrait another appraising look and frowned. There were at least a dozen flaws to fix. It was nowhere near perfect. And perfect was the only acceptable outcome. After all, Carlo Sacazar was not here to smooth the way. She had no champion, no mentor, no advocate in Bayonne. She would succeed on her own merits, or she would fail.
Mira reluctantly slipped off her leather apron. The last details would have to wait.
It was time to fetch Tristan.