“I have his recipes,” I continued quietly so as not to be overheard. “I will have our decoctions prepared by the apothecary who makes up my yellow starch. But the angels … I cannot persuade them to my bidding as he could. I went to his house this morning and made his wife give me everything from his study that pertained to us, especially your letters,” I said. “But I’m sure she kept something back.”

“She would not dare blackmail us, she is too timid.”

“She is resentful.”

“Much else has changed in your absence; the angels are already busy on our behalf. Come,” said Frankie, leading me toward the men hanging the painting. One, taller than the rest, bowed low as we approached. I remembered him. He had accompanied the painter in Frankie’s vestibule, the first morning I came to Court. He was perhaps Arthur’s age and well favored, although his attire was unusual, as if he had lived a long time abroad and wanted people to know it.

“Mistress Turner, this is Mr. James Palmer, Prince Henry’s purchaser of paintings, who is also finding wonderful things for the Viscount Rochester, for my great-uncle, and now for me.” I curtsied and he bowed again, very correctly. “Mr. Palmer has not yet succeeded in persuading me to sit to Larkin for my portrait.” Frankie’s mother had long argued for it but Frankie refused to commemorate her marriage to Essex in any manner. “But he has found me this.”

So shocking was the image before me that I was silenced. A young woman was severing a man’s head from his large, strong body. Ribbons of blood flew out from the butchered neck as the man gazed beseechingly at his killer, from whose strength of purpose the artist had not shied away. Before this I had only ever seen portraits, the faces all much alike, on bodies stiff as corpses.

“Judith and Holofernes,” said Mr. Palmer, “by an Italian. The artist has captured Judith’s strength, has he not?”

“Indeed. These Italians are well formed,” I said.

“It is thanks to the eye and talent of the artist as much as the beauty of the sitter, I believe. In this country, we seem rather more interested in displaying wealth than feeling.”

“It is so like life, I expect the figures to move,” I agreed.

“Mr. Palmer paints too,” Frankie said in a soft voice, not sure if he would want this known. Painters are a low lot on the whole, on a par with actors, living among the rougher sort while not being quite of them. That Mr. Palmer should willingly associate with such people was most eccentric. He laughed.

“In this country it is freakish to paint for the love of it, and yet the noblest of men redecorate their houses and reorder their gardens,” he said.

“They do not dig them,” I said.