The Exiled by Posie Graeme-evans

destruction, surely?
    Mathew was at war with himself, and he knew it. Hours before, when he and Margaret had landed in Sluis, he’d been presented with the news of the wedding to be, and of Anne’s bold plans for beating the merchants of Brugge at their own game.
    Mathew Cuttifer had not made his money from being timorous. He understood risk, but prudent risk was always best: risk when one broadly knew that the odds were running in one’s favour. What Anne had proposed to him was something that ran against almost every trading instinct he possessed — almost, but not quite. A small flicker of excitement ran beneath the caution. He remembered the instinctive boldness of his youth, that boldness which had begun his fortune.
    And so, with little time to assess all that Anne was proposing, he’d unexpectedly agreed: he would co-invest in the cargoes to come from Italy. Devilry lay deep in his soul it seemed; God grant that he would not live to regret backing his ‘ward’, his ex-servant, the illegitimate daughter of his own ‘old king’...
    Deborah brought Mathew back to the present, offering a blue-green waldeglas beaker filled with hot wine. He took it and turned back to the women who surrounded him. ‘To Saint George. The Protector of England, the protector of women.’
    So much was unsaid as they repeated his words ‘To Saint George’, but Anne was deeply warmed. Once more, against his own good judgment, it seemed, Mathew Cuttifer had committed himself and his house to stand beside her when the risk was at its greatest. If he had truly been her father, she would have kissed him now; and somehow he knew, she was sure of that, for when he raised his own glass, he smiled and winked!
    A discreet knock at the open door of the parlour broke the moment. Friar Giorgio stood there uncertainly. This was very much a family gathering.
    ‘Father Giorgio, come in. See now, here is the Lady Anne’s fine new painting. You know much of such matters, as I’m told.’
    Sir Mathew, like his friend William Caxton, was uneasy in the friar’s presence, but he hid it better.
    Anne smiled at Giorgio and slipped an arm through his as they stood in front of the canvas together. ‘There. I cannot judge my own face, though others tell me that the likeness is good of the child.’
    Ordinarily the friar was scathing about the so-called arts of the Low Countries — he saw them as primitive, old-fashioned and undeveloped. To him, real culture began and ended within the city states of his own divided homeland — and, just possibly, within the walls of Paris — but here, today, in front of this canvas, he was silenced. It was a great painting. Somehow the painter had caught the essence, the truth of each of his sitters.
    The peasant seamstress who portrayed the Mother of God truly shone down on her audience, her own simple humanity as great a crown as that worn by the Empress of Heaven. Never had Christ’s mother seemed more accessible, more compassionate, more comforting and more real.
    And the baby, the happy Christ child, still gave hints of strength, even majesty, in the blessing of that raised hand, confidently signing the cross over Anne as she knelt at his feet.
    But it was in Anne’s face and Saint George’s face that the greatness of the work was most strikingly displayed. The sheer technical accomplishment — the luminance of the flesh, the solidity of the figures, the pleasing balance of the shapes, the remarkable depth of the world they inhabited — was far outweighed by the natural power of these two painted faces. It was as if Hans Memlinc had dipped his brush in truth and laid it out on his canvas — and the personal qualities he’d found in each of his subject’s faces sent Father Giorgio’s scalp into a prickle of strangeness.
    Hans Memlinc had painted strength and purpose into Anne’s eyes, and charm also. It was not a look he saw often from the girl herself, like many women she was careful to keep her eyes down