Portrait of an Unknown Woman (14 page)

 
          
“No,” he said stolidly, not meeting Kratzer’s eye. “Just doing my job.”

 
          
I tidied my medicine chest that night. I couldn’t see where I’d put the pennyroyal oil.

 
          
It was the excuse I’d been waiting for to write my first letter to John Clement: asking for him to shop for a replacement in Bucklersbury Street, for old times’ sake. He’d surely send a reply with the gift. I spent a while wondering whether to mention Dame Alice’s evasiveness when I’d tried to ask her about Father, and finally decided not to. I didn’t want him to think I was doubting his faith in Father. And then I lost myself, spreading the handwritten sheets over the table, making my writing as elegant as I knew how, in a long account of the portrait painting and of some, though not all, of Master Hans’s previous paintings, and his stories about his father, and his nerves about painting my father, and the endless brewing of ginger tea in recent days, and the three pregnancies, and the walk I’d gone on by myself to the river when I’d finished with Master Hans that morning, to look at the brisk waves on the shingle with young John and Anne Cresacre, trying not to notice the way their arms crept so hungrily around each other’s waist whenever my gaze was politely averted. (My willingness to avert my gaze so politely, so often, had made me their favorite chaperone in recent days.) Though I didn’t write this but hugged myself indulgently in the knowledge of it as I sealed the letter, I’d found it easy enough to look away. Encouraged by their breathlessness and flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes locked on each other, I’d felt myself becoming almost as much of a happy child as my companions. However hard I tried, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from seeing, in every boat coming toward us from London, a host of imaginary John Clements, with long legs and elegant backs hunched against the wind, each of them with sky blue eyes fastened longingly on me as the water brought us closer and closer together.

 
          
But even while I was losing myself happily in the rose-petal common-places that every lover thinks are unique, I did go on wondering where the little jar of pennyroyal had gone. And, as the house settled into night, that took the edge off my joy. Gradually all the other worries that buzzed round my head like gnats, but which I’d briefly stopped noticing, became louder and more insistent too, and my vision of John Clement’s eyes, looking at me with love, faded into uneasy recollections of the man in the garden, Father writing in the New Building, and Master Hans’s artwork.

 
          
One way or another, I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing. My body was full of unspent energy. I needed to do something. So I went downstairs. I waited till Master Nicholas had shut himself and Master Hans inside his room, and listened outside the door until I heard them unstopper the bottle Master Hans had brought. Once they began to clink glasses and laugh, I tiptoed back downstairs toward the studio. I couldn’t get the Christ corpse out of my head. I wanted to see the pictures he hadn’t wanted to show me.

 
          
It didn’t take more than a peep to show what a simpleton the man was.

 
          
An engraving of the pope—surrounded by devils, waving a papal bull— leapt to my eyes. And right under it was an engraved frontispiece for the New Testament in German. I didn’t know the German words, but anyone could understand what
Das Neuw Testametrecht
must mean. And the date was 1523, so it must be Luther’s work. The discovery was so explosive that it took me a while to notice that Master Hans’s drawings of St. Peter and St. Paul, on either side of the text, were extraordinarily beautiful and finely executed. They didn’t look any more the work of the devil than Will Roper had sounded during his flirtation with heresy. But that didn’t mean that Father—if he was becoming the persecutor I feared—would hold back if he found out what kind of work his painter had been doing before he appeared in Chelsea. Part of me wished that Hans Holbein and I could talk freely about what kind of God he believed in. I’d never knowingly talked to one of the new men (Will Roper in his Lutheran phase didn’t count—he was just a sweet, silly boy having a rebellion), and I wanted to hear for myself what God looked like if you believed whatever it was that the heretics believed. But another part of me was grateful that neither he nor I had tried. It was too frightening. I shut the portfolio cover as hastily as Master Hans had earlier in the day.

 
          
After all the punishment the German merchants at the Steelyard had taken for smuggling their heretical books into London, Master Hans was playing with fire. Literally. It was obvious to me that he’d brought his past work only to show potential clients in the hope of attracting new commissions. But that proved he had no idea of the danger he would face if anyone saw these pictures. If our jolly, open-faced painter was to survive here in these watchful times, he was going to need saving from himself.

 
          
Without quite knowing why I was taking it on myself to help—except that I liked his bluff ways—I pushed the portfolio under a table and piled his sketchbooks on top of it to make it harder for anyone else to have an unauthorized pry. I found a skull and put it on top of the heap. I draped the table with one of Master Hans’s scraps of cloth so nothing was visible.

 
          
Then, wishing I could see my way upstairs without my candle, which marked me out to any observer who might want to come and ask what I was doing, I vanished upstairs.

 
          
It was only when I’d reached the solitude of my room, with my heart beating faster than usual, that I wished I’d sneaked a look at Master Hans’s portrait of Father so I could tell John about it in my letter. But it was too late now. Knowing what I knew, I wasn’t about to go back downstairs.

           
“I was surprised you didn’t come out of your room last night. So much noise,” Master Hans said. His eyes, slightly puffy after what must have been a late night with Master Nicholas, were fixed on his drawing of me.

 
          
He didn’t appear to have noticed that his pictures had been stowed under the table.

 
          
“Noise?” I asked.

 
          
“Your sister falling down the stairs,” he said, and I could feel him watching me. “Perhaps she had too much drink. That is not good, with a baby on the way.”

 
          
“I didn’t hear anything,” I said, feeling a new kind of unease. I must have been too wrapped up in my letter writing, or asleep. “Do you mean Elizabeth?” She hadn’t come to breakfast.

 
          
Master Hans nodded. And suddenly I had a nasty idea about where the pennyroyal might have gone. I needed to get it back. What I hadn’t told Elizabeth was that pennyroyal didn’t just bring on abortion; it was a dangerous poison that could cause internal bleeding and would kill a mother as easily as an unborn child.

 
          
The painter must have seen a hint of my alarm and tried to offer reassurance. “She hurt her ankle, but I helped her up to her room. She fell as I came out of Kratzer’s room—right from the top step. But I think she will be all right.”

 
          
“Poor Elizabeth,” I said, trying to sound light and natural. “I didn’t hear a thing. I must have been fast asleep. Will you excuse me for a few minutes, Master Hans? I think I’ll just run up now and check to see if she’s all right.”

 
          
She was asleep, sprawled on her bed. She was breathing as lightly and naturally as I’d been trying to sound. I didn’t try and wake her. But I did fish around under her bed. The bottle was hidden there. She must have stolen it. I breathed out in relief when I saw it was still full. I put it back in my medicine chest, locked it carefully, and took the key back downstairs with me.

 
          
“She’s fine, Master Hans,” I said as I settled myself back into my pose.

 
          
He furrowed his brow. He wasn’t ready to drop the subject. “I think she is worried, to be going up and down corridors in the night and falling down stairs,” he said a little dogmatically. “So, I know she is married and happy to be a mother. But this is an accident that often happens to a woman who is unhappy to find she will have a child.”

 
          
For someone who was so blissfully unaware of danger to himself, I thought with new respect, he was acute enough at observing other people’s feelings.

 
          
“Sometimes it is difficult for sisters to talk to sisters, brothers to brothers,” he went on. Then he laughed from the pit of his stomach. “Now, my brother is impossible to talk reason to! But perhaps you will talk and make sure she is all right.”

 
         
“I’ll definitely have a chat with her when she wakes up,” I said, impressed by the kindness of his heart. “But she’s happy. You don’t need to worry.”

 
          
I only wished I believed it.

 
          
Mary, the cook, was back from market. Two serving boys were unpacking packages and baskets and scurrying off with them toward the kitchen.

 
          
I noticed her through the glass when Master Hans and I came out of the studio; and I saw Elizabeth, coming out to take the weak sunshine, called to her side. Mary delved into the big bag she had propped on the seat beside her and pulled out two letters and a bottle. Her big raw arms pushed them under Elizabeth’s nose. I saw Elizabeth take both and look
 
at them. Then I saw her pick up the bottle and give it a long stare. Then she put it back down and, with very visible composure, took just one of
 
the letters and walked slowly back inside. She was shielding her eyes against the sun, but she saw me as she pushed the outside door quietly shut.

 
          
“Mary has something for you from town,” she said, looking down. And she continued her slow path toward the stairs.

 
          
Only when her back was turned to me, and I was already stepping blinking into the daylight to collect my letter, did it cross my mind that the last sound that had come from Elizabeth might have been a stifled sob.

 
          
“Love letter for you too, Miss Meg,” Mary said hoarsely as soon as she saw me. She had a ribald sense of humor: to her, all letters were love letters. “And a love potion to go with it, I don’t doubt.” She cackled.

 
          
It was a jar of pennyroyal oil. Forgetting everything else, I reached for the letter that went with it and, just managing to restrain myself for long enough to put a few paces between myself and Mary as I turned toward the garden’s main avenue, tore it open. “
My darling Meg,”
began the short note, in the spiky writing I remembered so well: 
I can hardly convey my happiness: first at the joy of our meeting, with all
 
its promise for the future, then the pleasure of receiving your note. Here
 
is the gift you were asking for. You will see from the speed of my reply
 
that I went straight to Bucklersbury to buy it. The first person I saw
 
there was Mad Davy—still alive, though with precious few teeth these days, and a lot more wrinkles. As soon as he knew I was shopping for
 
you, he sent his fondest respects and tried to sell me a piece of unicorn’s
 
horn to bring you eternal youth. I told him you were looking enchantingly beautiful and were the picture of youth, and he’d do better to keep it for himself. He insisted he’d only lost his teeth because he got into a
 
brawl. I didn’t like to ask how he’d mislaid his hair.

 
          
I laughed out loud, with sunshine pouring into my soul, and turned a corner as I turned over the page, so no one’s prying eyes could see my blushes and probably foolish smiles.

 
          
It was a while before I came in, with the letter carefully tucked inside my dress. While I was still dazzled in the house’s darkness, I hid it in my room, in my medicine chest, locked away with the new jar of pennyroyal.

 
          
I could hear voices in Elizabeth’s room: at least one voice, hers, raised in the querulous tones that were becoming characteristic of her.

 
          
I didn’t like to interfere. I still felt uncomfortable when I remembered William’s barely polite refusal of my first attempt to help. But he wasn’t there; he was in London; and when I looked in the corridor, I saw her door was open. So I plucked up my courage and put my head inside. Slightly to my surprise, it was Master Hans who was with her. Sitting at a chair by the bed where she was reclining; with a little posy of snowdrops from near the front door beginning to wilt from the heat of his forgetful bear-hands. He must have picked a few flowers and trotted straight off after her. He was leaning forward and murmuring something comforting.