‘Then she was allowed to cut off his head,’ Gregory says. ‘Which she greatly enjoyed. There were heads bouncing everywhere, you could not go a pace without one rolling out of an olive grove and eyeing you. In the end she married a man who outran her, but he only did it with the help of the goddess of love.’
Later, back at his own house, in the gallery’s waning light. ‘You see the golden apples?’ Gently, Gregory aligns her, points them out. ‘Venus gave them to the suitor, and when they began to race, he threw them at Atalanta’s feet.’
‘Those are apples?’ Helen is staring at the arras. She sucks her finger, laughs. ‘I did not know they were running, I thought they were having a bowling match. Look at her hand – I thought she had just sped the ball away.’
He sees how it scoops the air. He grasps her error. ‘So, what happened,’ someone says, ‘did she trip on the apples?’ Their voices are a murmur. They recede. The light falters. Nesting birds rustle under the eaves. Vespers are sung and Compline, the offices of night. The dew is cold in the grass. Shutters are closed against the exhalations from meres and ponds. Atalanta snapped up the gold, she sold the race. You cannot say she lost on purpose, but she knew the consequence if she swerved. ‘Perhaps she was tired of running,’ Helen says.
‘She was not insensible to the value of money,’ he says. ‘
‘Did she like being married?’ Helen appraises her – a wild-haired woman, a bare arm flung before her. ‘I suppose her husband stopped her running around like that, with her duckies on view. Or perhaps a husband didn’t mind in those days.’
He thinks, I have seen her in Rome, carved in marble: her slim running legs, her pleated tunic, her torso straight as a boy’s. She got a taste, some versions claim, for the carnal life. She bedded her spouse in the temple of a heathen god, after which she was changed into a lioness.
At least, he thinks, that’s one worry I don’t have. Daughter into beast, it won’t happen to Henry’s child. One day she will have to marry, but for now she is safe from adventurers who have special arrangements with the goddess of love. She is to go back to Hertfordshire tomorrow morning. The king and queen are planning their first summer together. They will make their visit to Dover. When Parliament rises, they will go hunting. The ring, impulsively offered, will be reduced to fit. In recompense, the emerald pendant will be worn not by Mary, the branch and flower of Aragon and Castile, but by Jane, the daughter of John Seymour of Wolf Hall.
Perhaps you have seen, in Italy, a painting of a house with one wall removed? The painter does this to show you the deep interior of a room, where at a prie-dieu a virgin kneels, surrounded by bowls of ripening fruit. Her expression is private and reserved; she has kicked off her shoes and she is waiting to be filled with grace. Already you can see the angel hovering above the rooftops, a blur of gold on the skyline, while below in the street the people go about their business, and some of them glance upward, as if attracted by a quickening in the air. In the next street, through an archway, down a flight of steps, a housewife is hanging out washing, and someone is rising from the dead. White pelicans sit on rooftops, waiting for Christ’s imminence to be pronounced. A mitred bishop strolls through the piazza, a peacock perches on a balcony among potted plants, and striated clouds like bales of silk roll above the city: that city which itself, in miniature form, is presented on a plat for the viewer, its inverse form dimly glowing in the silver surface: its spires and battlements, its gardens and bell towers.
