Portrait of an Unknown Woman (48 page)

           
“Richard, the Duke of York; that’s who he once was.”

 
          
Yes, it was all coming back now. The deal Erasmus described had been struck through the good offices of two young men of the New Thinking.

 
          
One of the young men was Thomas More, the ex-page of the archbishop of Canterbury, who was fast becoming a prominent lawyer and official in his own right in London. “The other”—Erasmus went on, twinkling merrily—“was an orphaned ex-priest who’d never taken to the endless detail and prayer of holy orders; who found work instead under the Duchess of Burgundy’s adviser, the bishop of Cambrai. Yours truly,” and he’d sketched a modest bow. Both young men had been chosen by their masters for their diplomatic skills and discretion; they were given the task of discreetly protecting the man now known as John Clement for the rest of his life. Erasmus had studied in Louvain himself, once upon a time, so he already knew the young Englishman (back then, in Louvain, everyone knew Clement to be of noble blood, and half the university suspected him of being the love child of the bishop of Cambrai and the duchess herself). Erasmus was part of the same religious sect as the bishop and the duchess, Devotio Moderna. So he quickly acquired friends in high places. He was sent by his bishop to London for the first time as long ago as 1499, while John Clement was still mastering Greek and astronomy in the Low Countries, to 
meet his English counterpart in their secret business.

           
“We walked from Greenwich to the royal palace at Eltham one day. More took me to meet today’s King Henry—he was just a prince then, a younger brother, a ginger-haired boy of eight,” Erasmus recalled. “More had met the royal princes many times already, I could see,” the old man went on, with his bittersweet smile, “and he was a young man too, but he had all the ability to rise to the occasion that has made him a great man. He hadn’t come empty-handed. He just happened to have brought with him some verses to  read to the prince. When he brought them out of a pocket and started declaiming them, I felt absurdly unprepared. But it taught me something else too: that he would rise in his career; that he was ambitious.”

 
          
“That’s how we first knew each other, you see,” Erasmus finished wistfully, and he was staring into the candle again, seeing things that were no longer there. “Everything else came later—that we became friends, and that the New Learning we’d come to love swept the world, and that we were lucky enough to have some small part in shaping the way people learned to think. But my ties with Thomas More go a long way further back than that. Even what’s happening now in the realm of religion hasn’t stopped our friendship, though I will admit to finding some of the positions More adopts these days, well, difficult . . . But I’d say the most charitable way to look at his behavior now is to understand that he’s never been a modern. His mentality is medieval through and through.”

 
          
Holbein nodded, savoring the word
charitable
, aware of the disappointment in the old man’s voice. Erasmus shook himself.

 
          
“Anyway,” he said briskly, “the point is that what these religious quarrels have done—and my advancing age; we’re none of us getting any younger, after all—is to make it harder for me to travel across Europe to see the More family and fulfill my obligations to John Clement without being indiscreet. I don’t like to criticize my old friend Thomas More, but I can’t entirely feel easy about the letters he sends me now. His perspective isn’t what it was. But it wouldn’t do for me to just start writing directly to Clement myself. Who knows who might read the letters? Still, I want to know he’s well. Things won’t get easier for him if the king and More fall out over faith. And it’s still my duty to make sure that John Clement stays safe. So I’m grateful to you, young Hans”—he smiled, and the candlelight turned the lines stretching down his face into caverns and caves—“more grateful than you can know.”

           
They didn’t mention it again the next morning. Hans Holbein’s head was pounding, as it often was in the early part of the day. Erasmus was calm and urbane and a little withdrawn as he sat in his robe, twisting and turning to get his pose right.

           
Hans Holbein half wondered if he’d imagined the whole will-o’-the-wisp story. He fussed over the fall of a hem. He took longer than usual to mix his colors. Bursts of last night—phrases, looks, pride at having won Erasmus’s approval, and pricks of jealous pain, or incredulity, at the thought of Meg married to a man who might have been king—kept coming into his head. But he shut them out and tried to concentrate on today. He had to treasure his time with Erasmus. He had to let go of all the other thoughts crowding through his head.

 
          
This wasn’t the place to think about how Meg’s wistful line about the garden in Chelsea had almost made him pack his bags, head straight for the Rhine transport boat, and start a journey to London. It wasn’t the place to think about the drudgery of the Basel print shops or what Elsbeth said when she found out how much of the Council Chamber payment he’d spent in the tavern or how much he’d paid for the cottage beside their house, which he’d bought as an investment for the family.

 
          
It was easier to think about how to make himself the most famous and respected painter of his own day. However low he seemed to have fallen after his glorious three years in London, here, in these comfortable chambers in Freiburg, he was really winning the friendship of the greatest man in Europe.

 
          
So he’d made his request. But now he didn’t know what to do to follow through. He painted on, whistling through his teeth, increasingly embarrassed by his moment of greedy ambition. Erasmus had gone back into his dreams. His eyes were elsewhere.

 
          
“Do you want to take a rest now?” Holbein said nervously. He didn’t want to tire his friend. Erasmus nodded gratefully and began to stir his limbs, stiff from so much stillness. He stood up and looked straight at Holbein.

           
Holbein saw with relief that he was smiling.

 
          
“Have you never thought of going back to England?” Erasmus said, fixing Holbein with that luminous gray gaze. “You were doing so well there. If you want fame, surely that’s the place for you to go on building it?”

 
         
Holbein shook his head bashfully. “I had to come home. The family. And my travel permit was running out.” He stopped. None of that was true. Well, it was true, but none of it was enough to have stopped him from staying in London if he hadn’t got into such a state about Meg. And now she was writing to him. She was nostalgic for her walks in the garden 
in Chelsea with him. There wasn’t really any reason for him to stay home.

 
          
Erasmus was right.

 
          
“Things have changed,” Erasmus said briskly. “You’ve been back for three years now. It wouldn’t be hard. You could easily get someone to write you a new travel permit.”

 
          
He was getting interested in the idea now, Holbein saw. His eyes were lighting up with possibilities. There was nothing Holbein wanted more right now than to be persuaded that a return trip to England was in everyone’s best interests. But he needed someone else to persuade him.

 
          
“You have friends in high places there, after all,” Erasmus was going on. “The Mores, of course. And now the new court circle. Obviously the new man, Thomas Cromwell, is no friend of the Mores’. But he’s an astute man for all that. There’s a reform Parliament at work there that he’s helping. There’s just a possibility that he might steer England into some sort of 
bloodless, peaceful religious reformation—not like the violent shambles we’ve seen here. And you’d be well placed to find commissions. Anne Boleyn’s friends—I correspond with her father, the Earl of Wiltshire, who is an intelligent man. You’ve painted half the Boleyn circle already. It would be easy for you to find work.”

 
          
He grinned encouragingly at the young painter. Holbein was nodding, drinking in the words he wanted to hear, so delighted by them that he hardly stopped to wonder why Erasmus was pushing him to go. Surely the old scholar could see that Holbein’s feelings for Meg were not ones that should be encouraged if you had the best interests of Meg’s husband at heart? Or could he be so far removed from bodily things that he had no idea of the maelstrom Holbein had been plunged into in England—could it be that Erasmus simply didn’t know what it meant to be in love?

 
          
“All you need is a really ringing endorsement,” Erasmus was adding, and the gray eyes had a mischievous glint in them now. He edged toward Holbein on unsteady legs. “May I see your work?” he added inconsequentially, dodging round the easel.

 
          
Before Holbein could stop him, the old man was staring straight at the picture. He nodded and picked up a silverpoint pencil. “Something like this,” he added, and grinned, and leaned down to write at the bottom of the canvas.

 
          
Holbein nearly snatched the pencil out of his hand. No one had ever dared do this to his work. But he stopped himself. It was Erasmus, after all, defacing his own likeness. So, in an agony of resentful indecision, Holbein restrained himself and peered round Erasmus’s shoulder to see what he was doing.

 
          
There were four lines of Latin under the drawing. Holbein drew in his breath as he made out the agonizingly difficult writing: “
Pallas Apellaeam nuper mirata tabellam
. . .” His eyes widened.

           
What Erasmus had written was: “Pallas, recently admiring this Apellean picture, says that the library must keep it forever. Holbein shows his Daedalus-like art to the Muses, just as the great Erasmus shows a wealth of the highest intellect.”

 
          
He was still holding his breath. He called me Apelles, he thought.
He
called me Apelles
. He made an effort to let air out of his chest.

 
          
“Will you really write that?” he asked, hardly daring to believe his luck. “On the picture? About me?”

 
          
“Will you prove me right?” Erasmus asked, and twinkled merrily back at him. “Will you go back to London?”

 
          
Events moved fast after Bainham’s
execution. As April drew to a close, Father’s enemies closed in for their own kill.

 
          
We were silently at war at home too, in that tumultuous month. When I looked at John’s face now I could no longer see the beauty that had once pulled me into his arms. I recoiled in horror at even the memory of that—of having loved his sweetness, his softness, his sadness. It made my gut churn almost as much as the horror I felt for Father’s descent into active evil. All I saw in John’s features now was glassy-eyed, sinful stupidity; a cowardice and passivity that amounted to acquiescence in Father’s sin.

           
So I refused to look.

 
          
He went on sleeping elsewhere. I didn’t ask where. I stopped eating with him, avoiding dinner and supper and taking trays in my bed in the morning with the excuse that I was unwell (not entirely a lie; I was racked by the cramps in my stomach as the pennyroyal took effect and the untimely blood that might, in other circumstances, have made a baby came drenching out of me). I stalked out to church every morning with Tommy trotting sleepily beside me, avoiding any room where I heard footsteps, in case they might be John’s, to pay my respects to my God.

           
Later, once I’d settled Tommy with his nurse and his toys in the kitchen or the garden, I’d stalk out again alone, with my basket on my arm, to meet the gray-faced yet oddly comforting Kate and start our day’s perambulations among the rooms and tenements of her Bible brethren. It might have seemed odd to anyone else but Kate, the only person who knew of it, but it was the most honest compromise I could come up with while my head was still whirling with the horror of all I now knew. I’d find a clearer way later, perhaps; confide in one of my family, except that Margaret was away at Esher and there was no one else who would do.

           
Guidance will come, I muttered.

 
          
God will provide.

           
Meanwhile, my mixture of Latin worship and pastoral care for the church’s enemies was the best I could do.

 
          
Visiting the brethren meant I knew every rumor in London. Tiny George, the old man in the blanket cloak who’d said at my first meeting at Davy’s that Scripture had become sweeter to him than honeycomb, and to whom I made a point of dropping off a little dish of honey whenever I could, was a mine of information. George lived in an attic above his married daughter’s rooms at the cathedral end of Cheapside, and spent most of his days hanging around St. Paul’s churchyard, listening to street gossip, when he wasn’t slipping up to Greenwich to hear the furious theological debates that sermons at the Chapel Royal were becoming.