Portrait of an Unknown Woman (15 page)

 
          
Her eyes were red-rimmed; but she was already composed enough to smile at me with dignity.

 
          
“Oh, Meg,” she said brightly. “Could you possibly find a little vase? Look what Master Hans has brought me. Aren’t they lovely?”

 
          
“I am telling Mistress Elizabeth,” he said, with a touch of embarrassment on his broad features, as he brazened out my gaze, “how to have a baby is the most beautiful thing anyone can ever hope for. A miracle in everyday life. And how lucky she is to have this joy ahead.”

 
          
He blushed slightly. Surprised at his forceful enthusiasm, I asked, “I didn’t know you had a family, Master Hans?” A little unwillingly, as if he didn’t want to discuss this with me, he nodded.

           
“In Basel?” I went on, and he looked down and nodded again.

 
          
“Tell me again—tell Meg—what it was like when you first looked at little Philip,” Elizabeth interrupted, and even if she didn’t really want to look at me there was a hint of pretty pink back in her cheeks, and her eyes were fixing his and drawing him back into the conversation I’d interrupted. “When the midwife held him out to you . . .”

 
          
“She said he was the spitting image of his father . . . and I couldn’t believe that this tiny bundle of white could be a person at all. And then I looked into his eyes, and he was staring at me so curiously, from big blue eyes, wide open and watching everything, and blowing kisses and bubbles out of his tiny mouth. And I saw his little hands were the same shape as my big German bear’s paws, ha ha!” said Master Hans, warming to his theme again. His eyes were sparkling with memory. “That’s when I knew what love was.”

 
          
“That’s beautiful,” Elizabeth whispered. “And what about your wife— did she feel the same way?”

 
          
And they were off on a long conversation about childbirth, and prayer, and the shortness of pain, and what happens to women’s hearts after they see the child they’ve carried for so many months for the first time.

 
          
They didn’t need me, and I couldn’t join in—I didn’t know the feelings they were talking about. But I was pleased to see Elizabeth beginning to look reassured. Perhaps she’d just been scared, in these last days, of the heaviness of pregnancy or the pain of childbirth, or fearful of leaving her own childhood behind. Whatever it was, Master Hans must have guessed. It was unorthodox to come visiting her in her room; but he was clearly doing her good.

 
          
Quietly, I took the sagging snowdrops out of his hand. I arranged them in a little glass by Elizabeth’s bed. And I moved the letter on her bedside table to make way for the glass. As I did so, I recognized the spiky writing I’d loved for so long. John’s writing. Stifling my sudden indrawn breath, I folded it into my hand.

 
          
Murmuring an excuse, I left the room. I needn’t have bothered excusing myself. Master Hans’s head followed me for a moment, but Elizabeth hardly noticed me go, so deep was she in this earthy new kind of talk.

 
          
I had no qualms about opening the letter. There was too much I didn’t know about John Clement to pass up any opportunity of knowing more.

 
          
There was no doubt in my mind, no morality, just crystal clarity of purpose. But this note was short and formal. Shorter than the one he’d written me.

           
“My dear Elizabeth,”
it said:
 
I write to congratulate you. I hear that you and William are to have a child in the autumn. You will remember from the classroom that my favorite advice has always been: look forward, not back. Your husband is
a good man with an excellent career ahead of him; I wish you both every
happiness in your family life.

 
          
By the time I’d got this far, my conscience had caught up with my hands.

 
          
I didn’t usually think twice about inspecting any correspondence that might relate to me; life is too uncertain not to look after yourself any way you can. But this was a harmless expression of formal good wishes, a private matter not intended for me. Feeling awkward at the contrast between my own coldhearted prying and the warmth being shown by Master Hans, a stranger in our midst, I slipped back in, plumped up Elizabeth’s pillows, rearranged her quilt, and contrived to drop the letter back on the floor by her bed. She’d think it had simply fallen down; she’d never guess I’d looked it over. Then I went away properly, secretly relieved to leave the two of them to their conversation, which had turned to full-blooded midwives’ anecdotes about waters breaking and forceps that I didn’t much like the sound of—but which the usually fastidious Elizabeth seemed to be finding fascinating. If I’d been a different person—less self-contained, less able to reason—I might even have felt a little jealous that she was so effectively managing to monopolize the attention of my new friend the painter. But I’d never been the jealous type. I was pleased she was finding comfort in his gory stories, even if I didn’t really want to stay and listen.

 
          
So I went back out to the garden to find a patch of sunlight far from the western gatehouse where I could close my mind to everything but the warmth on my back and the drifting clouds of blossom to come, and read my own letter over and over again until I knew it by heart.

           
Hans Holbein felt almost unbearably sorry for the pitiful little scrap of
 
femininity huddled up in the bed, hating her life. He hadn’t completely understood all the words in her wounded outpouring: “It was me who found John Clement and brought him here—and he as good as ignored me when he got here, and just talked to Meg, and went away without so much as a word. They all do that: talk philosophy to clever Meg Giggs and Greek to intellectual Margaret Roper. No one here has time to waste on an ordinary girl—someone with nothing better to recommend her than a pretty face. And now he’s sent the kind of pompous little note a stranger might write. As if he hardly knows me. As if I’m nothing to him . . 

            But Hans Holbein had understood the sense of what she was saying; he knew she was feeling something like the howling pain he’d felt with Magdalena.

 
          
And when she bit her lip, and tears started out of her eyes, and she began to furtively dash them away, he wanted to give her a big comforting hug and tell her any sensible man should love her for her lovely eyes and her heart-shaped face. But he couldn’t tell her that. Who was he to tell a client’s daughter things like that? It was her husband’s job. But it wasn’t difficult to see Elizabeth was in love with the wrong man. And who should rightly comfort a married woman crying because a man not her husband was being too distant with her (and not distant enough with her witty, bookish sister)—even Hans Holbein, with his respect for truth, couldn’t tell. He was too fascinated himself by Meg Giggs’s awkward movements, blazing eyes, and odd ideas to fail to understand if other men also fell under her spell.

 
          
Personally, he couldn’t see the attraction of John Clement. The older man he’d shared a wherry with down the river might have chiseled, fine, noble features and a handsome athlete’s body. He might speak Greek and know medicine. But his pale, kind eyes didn’t have any of the fierce glitter of intelligence that you could see in More’s eyes, or Erasmus’s, or for that matter, young Meg’s. You could see at once that his mind wasn’t of the same caliber as those of the people around him. He gave the impression too that he’d fought hard battles in his past and learned what failure was.

 
          
If Hans Holbein had been feeling more objective, he’d have admitted more easily to a grudging respect for a man who he also felt had probably learned to accept his defeats gracefully and find a different kind of victory in adapting to new circumstances. But Holbein had taken against the other man, with a rivalrous male prickle of muscle and brawn. He wasn’t about to give John Clement the benefit of any doubt. The man was a waste of time, he’d decided; it would be better for both women if they could see it too.

 
          
But it wouldn’t help Elizabeth to tell her his opinion of John Clement. The one thing about women that he knew for sure was the fierce, devoted way they fell in love with their babies. The kindest thing he could do for Elizabeth was to hold out that hope to her—that a happiness she couldn’t yet imagine was waiting around the corner. Over the next few days, he made it his business to walk in the garden every afternoon with Elizabeth. He found her birds’eggs and pretty pebbles. He sketched her little newborn cherubs. And—stifling his guilt about Elsbeth alone in Basel with two children to feed and his baby growing in her belly—he talked about the joys of bringing life into the world.

 
          
It was a relief to do this small good deed every day, because Hans Holbein was worrying about his work. His picture of Sir Thomas wasn’t coming out the way he’d imagined when Erasmus had first talked to him about the man who was the witty, humble, perfect model of humanist friendship. Hans Holbein was beginning to wish he hadn’t got drunk two nights in a row with Nicholas Kratzer, and heard from him the frightening stories the Germans of the Steelyard had been telling about More ever since he’d smashed his way into their London enclave at the head of a troop of men at arms. The merchants were sitting innocently down to dinner in their hall at Cousin Lane, next to their river mooring with its wooden crane, hungry after off-loading all the day’s import of grain and wax and linen safely into their storehouses, when a scowling Thomas More, with dark shadows about the chin and surrounded by a bristle of swords, burst in on them, hunting for heretics. “I have been sent by the cardinal. Partly because one of you has been clipping coins; but also be
  
cause we have reliable news that many of you possess books by Martin Luther. You are known to be importing these books. You are known to be causing grave error in the Christian faith among His Majesty’s subjects.”

 
          
He arrested three of the merchants and had his men drag them off into the night. He had a list of the rest drawn up by dawn. The next morning he was back, watching, narrow-eyed, thin-lipped, as his heavies searched rooms and slashed into boxes. Eight more Germans were forced off to Cardinal Wolsey that day to be rebuked.

 
          
It was a mistake to know about that. It was even more of a mistake to know that Kratzer—whose wit and humor had earned him not only Sir Thomas’s patronage here but even that of Cardinal Wolsey, and who relied on having powerful English admirers promoting his work, and who also freely admitted to enjoying Sir Thomas’s company and the sharpness of his mind when they talked—at the same time secretly considered himself among the freest of freethinkers. The astronomer boasted (true, only in a whisper, and in the safety of German; a patron respected all over Christendom was a patron worth keeping) of having written to Hans Holbein’s hero, Albrecht Dürer, to congratulate him on Nuremberg turning “all evangelical” and to wish him God’s grace to persevere in the reformed belief. Because all that secret knowledge—and the open knowledge that Sir Thomas suspected the German merchants skulking uneasily around the Steelyard of being the main conduit for the smuggling of heresy into England—was coming out in his picture. And the face looking back at him from the easel now was the face of the persecutor: with red-rimmed eyes, a narrow mouth, and grasping hands. Even the composition wouldn’t come right. He’d meant to put a memento mori in the corner. But his usual prop—the skull he often used for the purpose of warning his sitters and viewers against worldly vanity—had somehow gone missing in his mess. Someone must have tidied it away somewhere, or he’d buried it under an avalanche of books or boots.

 
          
He’d never been good at keeping track of things. He had no idea where in London to go to lay hands on a human skull—except to the Steelyard, where at least he could understand what was said to him without difficulty. But he also knew it would be worse than impolitic to go near the Steelyard.

 
          
He couldn’t shake off the worry. It nagged at him while Meg sat for him every morning. He fretted secretly during his afternoon walks. He obsessed through the evenings over the painting that wouldn’t come right.

 
          
And when he wasn’t worrying about More’s picture, he was worrying over what Meg Giggs felt about Clement. Meg glowed. And he’d noticed that she had started slipping outside to the cart to see the cook every morning, to ask for messages from town. If he only knew her better, he’d be able to tell whether her sparkling eyes meant she was in love. But he couldn’t see into her heart; she was as unreadable as a dazzle of sun on water.

 
          
He didn’t dare ask directly. He was afraid of the anger that any forwardness might spark in Meg’s eyes. He sensed that she wasn’t someone who would take well to being interrogated. But as her portrait began to take shape, Hans Holbein found himself fishing cautiously for information.