Portrait of an Unknown Woman (47 page)

 
          
“What could I have said? What would have been the good of encouraging you to torment yourself?”

 
          
“Because there’s no point in living a lie,” I snapped. “Because it was someone we knew being chained up and set fire to. Because before they lit the flames he said he was dying because of Father.”

 
          
He looked appalled. He crossed himself. He dropped his hands so they hung limply by his sides. There was another silence.

 
          
“He walked through Chelsea with you,” I said cruelly, trying to shock a response out of him now, aware of my voice rising but not even caring anymore if the servants heard. “Don’t you remember? He believed the same things Dr. Butts does. That was his crime. That was what Father has had him killed for. You know that. So how can you just pretend nothing has happened? How can you come home and order a bath?”

 
          
He hushed me then; swished me back inside the bedroom; shut the door. “Listen to me,” he said, suddenly firm. “Hear me out at least. We’ve talked about this before and you know how I feel. I don’t believe in letting all the horrors of the world outside into our private life. I don’t know today what to say or even think about the burning. Or about your father, if it comes to that. But I don’t have to. I’m a doctor. I’m a man with a wife and son whom I love and want to cherish forever. That’s all I need to know.

           
That’s why I’m back now: because I want to show you my love, because I want to be with you and shut away the cruelty of the world outside. Nothing else matters if we have each other. If we can make each other happy.”

 
          
He was looking almost as though he believed I might agree—beginning to dart little pleading glances almost at my eyes. I didn’t let him finish.

           
“We can’t,” I said. “Not without the truth.” And then I walked out of the room, and down the stairs, and back into the garden to watch the sun set.

 
          
There was no point in arguing anymore. I could say “But don’t you see?” until I lost my voice; the point was that he wouldn’t see. It no longer seemed a problem that John’s past had been a tangle of discarded identities and that I couldn’t really know who any of them had been, or whether he had more secrets to reveal. The problem was that all those people with 
John’s face were fool enough to think you could wash away the evil of a person being burned to death with a lavender bath.

 
          
Still, I half thought he’d follow me. But he didn’t. The bathwater was cold by the time I tiptoed back upstairs. A tray of syllabub and wine was untouched outside the bedroom door, and there was no sign of John. He must have gone to sleep in another room.

           
I dragged my medicine chest out from under the bed in the twilight. There were two things I needed to do.

 
          
First I took out the pennyroyal bottle and mixed up a dose just strong enough to bring on my monthly bleeding. I swallowed down the bitter, oily stuff and set my lips tight again. I didn’t want there to be any consequences of John’s lovemaking yesterday. I didn’t want to feel his child growing inside me. I’d been wrong to believe we could find compromise and contentment.

 
          
Then, sticking my hand in the drawer where I kept Master Hans’s mementos, I pulled out the painter’s letter of all those months before.

 
          
I’d started thinking of him again while I was standing in the dark of the church. A fond green summer memory. Not just Master Hans in the garden, under the mulberry tree, kissing me, folding me to his body with strong hands. But Master Hans’s hands, which had set a prisoner in the garden free with a slash of a palette knife. It was light in the darkness, the 
memory of those hands cutting the man loose. It would never have occurred to me to have freed the prisoner until he’d done it; but afterward I’d seen that I could have done it myself.

 
          
I wanted to think about the flash of that knife, not about my husband mincing about my room with his herbs and moral abdication. Perhaps John wasn’t to blame for a past that might make a coward of anyone; but he could no longer command my respect.

 
          
In Master Hans, at least I knew one truly courageous man. It was high time I answered his letter.

 
          
“Do you remember,”
Hans Holbein began, with his eyes on the line on the canvas in front of him, “what you wrote in that first book of yours that Prosy and I illustrated?”

 
         
Erasmus waited, patiently, sitting at three-quarters face from the painter, looking left toward the pale light of the window, not moving as Holbein found words for his thought.

 
          
“. . . laughing at the way scholars glorify each other by giving each other the names of great men from ancient times . . . ?” Holbein went on.

 
          
Erasmus murmured encouragingly. He was even skinnier than last year, Holbein thought, and even more a martyr to the aches and pains that made him shift uneasily in his seat, trying obediently to stay still while also trying to move to ease his multiple discomforts. Holbein appreciated the old man’s consideration for the demands of his art and was touched by his uncomplaining stillness today. It was a miracle the old man was still here at all.

 
          
“I always agreed with you about that,” Holbein said. “Boastful idiots. Bloody stupid.”

 
          
Erasmus nodded, then stilled his head. It was clear there was more to come. But there was time to let the young hothead get it out in his own words.

 
          
Holbein blamed the bigots for the deterioration he could see in the old scholar’s physical condition. Holbein hated all the bigots now, Protestants as much as the other kind and maybe more, and he could see that the bigots made Erasmus worry. They stopped him eating properly. Fretting over their stupidity interrupted his sleep. It was obvious that Erasmus had worried all last winter through the council at Marburg that had tried to settle the religious differences between Brother Martin’s German reformers and the various quarrelsome Swiss factions, from states which had each settled on their own versions of the religious truth and promptly professed themselves horrified by the forms of worship all the others had chosen. And now he’d worried all through this summer while Protestants and Catholics met at the imperial Diet in Augsburg to try to stop Christendom splintering before their eyes. None of it had worked, of course; how could you stop these idiots taking things to extremes? It was a waste of good food and rest time to let the extremists put you off either simple pleasure. But it would be impossible for Erasmus, the last moderate intellectual left in civilization, to take things that way.

           
Now the scholar wanted his portrait done again to send to all the people he wrote to so energetically all around Europe, to remind them that his very existence symbolized moderation and hope for unity. Privately, Holbein thought it was too late to remind anyone of that. But he admired the effort the old man, whose first commission had got him started in life 
and whom he’d hero-worshipped ever since, went on making. And he was happier than he could believe to be back in Freiburg, recording those sunken cheeks and sharp, sharp eyes and spindly shanks in their furry wrap for posterity, and hearing the old man’s fears and secrets after dark.

 
          
“But,” Holbein blurted, “there is one name I’d like to be called if I were going to get a name like that.”

 
          
He was grinning bashfully down at his feet now, and his face was bright red. He was asking for a favor in the most tactful way he knew, but part of him felt he was making a pig’s ear of it. He’d always known diplomacy wasn’t his strong suit.

 
          
Erasmus blinked encouragingly.

 
          
“The name you were good enough, once, to call Albrecht Dürer, when you were recommending his work. Apelles. I’d like people to think of me as the Apelles of today.”

 
         
He was hot with relief when he saw Erasmus smile the smallest smile he could without changing the way his head was set, and murmur back, “I never thought you were so ambitious, young Hans,” but kindly. Holbein could hear real affection in that voice. It made his heart rejoice. He needn’t have worried so much. He wasn’t going to bring any sharp mockery down on himself by asking. By now he should have known Erasmus liked and trusted him. The old man would never have told him all those things last night if he didn’t.

 
          
Holbein still couldn’t really believe what Erasmus had told him after supper, sitting up late, as ever, to the very end of the light of the very last candle. He’d been a bit drunk himself, maybe, as anyone would be after the bumping and bruising and boredom of a long day’s boat ride, but Erasmus had been as sober as ever, with his goblet untouched beside him and his plate of food pushed to one side. The man seemed to live on air.

 
          
So you couldn’t put down what he’d said to a bit too much late-night worship at the Temple of Bacchus. It must be true, even if it was impossible.

 
          
Cozy catching-up talk had given way quickly to an anxious account of Erasmus’s various attempts to bring the religious maniacs back to their senses. It was only when Holbein brought out of his bag the letter from Meg Clement in London that the old man’s face completely changed. Holbein had known all along that Erasmus would be pleased his bidding had been done and contact had been reestablished between Holbein and the Clement household. But there was real urgency on that old face, a hunger Holbein wouldn’t have imagined the other man could feel.

 
          
“Excellent. Show me,” he said, and stuck out his hand for it.

 
          
“There’s nothing much to see.” Holbein faltered, handing it over, feeling his fingers protectively caress the pages Meg had touched as they left his safekeeping, fearing her luminously simple phrases would disappoint someone whose expectations were clearly so high.

 
          
“It doesn’t matter,” Erasmus said shortly, and he smoothed the crumpled, much-opened document down on the table under the candle and devoured every clear French word. He sucked in air between his teeth as he read. “Clement’s been made an elect of the College of Physicians . . .” he muttered, and nodded approvingly. “The baby’s called Thomas . . . and they’re living at the Old Barge.” Here he looked straight into the heart of 
the flame for a moment, thinking a thought Holbein couldn’t imagine. “I spent a lot of time in that house myself, long ago,” he added inconsequentially.

 
          
He turned over. “What’s this,” he muttered, poking a thin index finger at the lines Holbein knew by heart after staring at them for many hours of every day in the weeks since the letter had arrived. “Look, this bit, where she says: ‘This is what I always wanted, or I thought it was. But London life is more complicated today than when I was a child, especially 
now that Father is in charge. It seems paradoxical, but sometimes I wish we were all back in the garden at Chelsea, wondering how your painting would turn out. These days it seems that things were simpler back then.’ So she feels it, then, the threat of today. She feels it.” And Erasmus sat, staring at the candle again and nodding his head several more times, thinking his private thoughts, so that Holbein hardly dared move to fill up his own empty goblet or scratch the place on his leg where a flea had been giving him hell.

 
          
Finally the old man shook himself out of his reverie. He laughed and said, “What must you think of me, a neglectful host!” and filled Holbein’s goblet. He met the younger man’s eye. “Thank you,” he said simply as Holbein drained the liquid, relieved that the moment of tension was passing, wondering why Erasmus seemed even more acutely sensitive to Meg’s every word than he was, when Erasmus could surely scarcely remember 
her all these years later.

           
Filling the painter’s goblet again, Erasmus said, “I’m glad you wrote. I didn’t think you would. And I worry about them. I fear they may soon need help. I’ve wondered for a long time now how to find a discreet way to be in contact with them if it becomes necessary . . .”

 
          
And it was after that, late in the night, that the other story had come trickling out, the one Holbein couldn’t believe he could have remembered right, the one in which John Clement, that Greek tutor and doctor with the remote, startling pale blue eyes, and that infuriatingly quiet air of distinction that always made Hans Holbein feel as though he had twenty left thumbs and his breeches were falling down, was actually someone quite different, of royal stock, a prince of the old English blood who’d been brought up in Louvain under a false name in the care of the Duchess of Burgundy, and eventually settled back into anonymity in England when the present king came to the throne. Fuzzy though he might feel this morning, Holbein knew he hadn’t imagined it: he could swear he remembered Erasmus leaning over with his eyes alight and hissing, practically into Holbein’s ear: