Paradoxically domestic: the phrase was exactly right. Nothing about the two serious gentlemen playing chess or the lady by the window dressed in black, reading, her eyes lowered, a demure expression on her face, would lead one to suspect the drama that lay coiled beneath the surface, like the twisted root of a lovely plant.

She studied the profile of Roger de Arras as he leaned over the chessboard, absorbed in the game, a game in which he was already dead. The steel gorget and the leather cuirass made him look like the soldier he once was, like the warrior whose insigne he had worn (perhaps dressed in burnished armour like that worn by the knight riding alongside the Devil) when he had escorted her to the nuptial bed to which she was destined by reasons of state. Julia could imagine Beatrice clearly – still a virgin, younger than she appeared in the painting, before bitterness had etched lines about her mouth – peeping out between the curtains of the litter, a maid by her side, and admiring the gallant gentleman whose fame went before him: her future husband’s best friend, still a young man, who, having fought beneath the fleur-de-lys of France against the lion of England, had sought peace by the side of his childhood companion. And Julia imagined Beatrice’s wide blue eyes meeting, just for a moment, the calm, weary gaze of the knight.

It was impossible that the two of them were never united by anything more than that one look. For some obscure reason, by some inexplicable twist of the imagination – as if the hours spent working on the painting had spun a mysterious connecting thread between her and that fragment of the past – Julia contemplated the scene in the Van Huys painting with the familiarity of one who had experienced every detail of the story alongside the characters depicted in it. The mirror on the wall in the picture reflecting the foreshortened figures of the two chess players also contained her, in the same way that the mirror in Las Meninas reflected the king and queen as they watched – was it from inside or outside the picture? – the scene being painted by Velazquez, or just as the mirror in The Arnolfini Double Portrait reflected the presence and the meticulous gaze of Jan Van Eyck.

The flame from the match as she lit a cigarette dazzled her for a moment, hiding The Game of Chess from her view until, gradually, her retina readjusted to the scene again, to the people and the colours. She herself had always been there – she was sure of that now – right from the beginning, ever since Pieter Van Huys first imagined that moment, even before he had begun the careful preparation of calcium carbonate and animal glue with which to impregnate the wood before he started painting.

Beatrice, Duchess of Ostenburg, a touch of melancholy in her eyes intent on her book – perhaps prompted by a mandolin played by a page outside at the foot of the wall – remembers her youth in Burgundy, her hopes and dreams. Above the window framing the pure blue Flanders sky, a stone St George plunges his lance into the dragon writhing beneath his horse’s hooves. It does not escape the implacable eye of the painter observing the scene – nor that of Julia observing the painter -that time has blunted the tip of St George’s lance, and where his right foot, no doubt once wearing a sharp spur, used to stand out in sharp relief, there is only a broken stump. This St George, putting the vile dragon to death, is not only half-armed, with his stone shield worn away by time, but also lame. Perhaps that only makes the figure of the knight all the more touching, reminding Julia, by a curious transposition of ideas, of the martial pose of a lead soldier.

She’s reading, this Beatrice of Ostenburg, who, by reason of lineage and family pride and despite her marriage, never really stopped being Beatrice of Burgundy. And she’s reading a strange book, whose binding is decorated with silver studs, and with a silk ribbon to mark her page, a book whose chapter headings are exquisite brightly coloured miniatures by the master of the Coeur d’Amour epris, a book entitled Poem of the Rose and the Knight, which, although the author is officially anonymous, everyone knows was written almost ten years before, in the French court of King Charles Valois, by an Ostenburg gentleman called Roger de Arras:

Lady, the same dew

that at break of day

lays on the roses

in your garden hoarfrost,

falls, on the field of war,

like teardrops,

upon my heart,

upon my eyes, upon my sword.

Sometimes those eyes, which have the luminous clarity of Flemish eyes, leave her book and look up at the two men playing chess at the table. Her husband is leaning on his left elbow, his fingers distractedly playing with the insigne of the Golden Fleece that his uncle by marriage, the late Philip the Good, sent him as a wedding present, which he wears about his neck, on the end of a heavy golden chain. Ferdinand of Ostenburg cannot decide on his next move; he reaches out a hand towards a piece, touches it, changes his mind, and looks apologetically into the calm eyes of Roger de Arras, whose lips curve in a courteous smile- “Touching a piece is the same as moving it, sir,” those lips murmur with just a touch of friendly irony, and a slightly embarrassed Ferdinand moves the piece he touched, because he knows that his opponent is not just a courtier, but his friend. He shifts on his stool, feeling vaguely happy, for he knows that it is no bad thing to have someone who, from time to time, reminds him that there are some rules even princes must abide by.

The notes from the mandolin drift up from the garden into another window, not visible from there, the window of the room where Pieter Van Huys, court painter, is preparing an oak panel, made up of three sections his assistant has just glued together. The old master is not sure yet what use to make of it – perhaps a religious subject that has been in his mind for a while now: a young Virgin, almost a child, shedding tears of blood as she gazes, grief-stricken, at her empty lap. But, after due consideration, Van Huys shakes his head and emits a discouraged sigh. He knows he will never paint that picture. No one would understand its true meaning, and in the past he’s had his fair share of problems with the Inquisition; his weary limbs would not withstand another encounter with the rack. With paint-encrusted fingernails, he scratches his bald head beneath his woollen beret. He’s becoming an old man and he knows it; he has too few practical ideas and too many vague phantasms in his mind. To exorcise them he closes his tired eyes. When he opens them again, he sees the oak panel still there, waiting for the idea that will bring it to life. In the garden someone is still playing the mandolin; some lovesick page no doubt. The painter smiles to himself and, after dipping a brush into a clay pot, he applies the primer in thin layers, up and down, following the grain of the wood. Now and then he looks out of the window, and his eyes fill with light. He feels grateful for the oblique ray of sunlight that warms his old bones.

Roger de Arras has just made a remark in a low voice, and the Duke is laughing, in a good mood now, for he’s just taken a knight. Beatrice of Ostenburg, or of Burgundy, is finding the music unbearably sad. She’s on the point of asking one of her maids to have the player stop, but she doesn’t, for she hears in its notes an exact echo, a perfect harmony of the pain flooding her heart. The music mingles with the friendly murmurings of the two men playing chess, and she finds a heartbreaking beauty in the poem whose lines tremble in her fingers. Born of the same dew that covers the rose and the knight’s sword, there is a tear in her blue eyes when she looks up and meets Julia’s gaze, watching in silence from the shadows. And she thinks that the gaze of that dark-eyed Italianate young woman is only a reflection in the dim surface of some distant mirror of her own gaze, fixed and anguished. Beatrice of Ostenburg, or of Burgundy, feels as if she were outside the room, on the other side of a pane of dark glass, from where she observes herself sitting beneath the mutilated St George, next to a window framing a blue sky that contrasts with the black of her dress. And she knows that no amount of confession will ever wash away her sin.