Portrait of an Unknown Woman (56 page)

 
          
“Yes,” said Kratzer simply.

 
          
“Excellent,” said the bishop.

 
          
“Come on, hold the candle yourself, so I can take a look from the right,” Kratzer said impatiently. They swapped. Kratzer shuffled round with a hand over one eye, squinting to the left, raising and lowering his head until he got himself into the one place at which the skull undistorted itself and became the only truly drawn figure on the entire canvas.

 
          
Then he nodded, and grinned.
“Yes,” he said. “
Oui, oui, oui!
 
It really works. This will be the most unusual picture ever painted. You’re a genius, my friend!”

 
          
For a glorious moment, Holbein knew it. Every clever detail he and Kratzer had thought of was part of the same somber message: he was showing a world that had once been united by religious harmony but that was now being destroyed by nationalist ugliness and factional feuding. He was using the things of this earthly life to tell a solemn story about the 
divisions rending God’s universe asunder. He’d seen a deeper kind of truth, and revealed it.

 
          
It was only much later that evening—after a self-congratulatory stop at the alehouse with Kratzer—that Holbein made his way back up Ludgate Hill toward his lodgings. For once he was alone. Kratzer had burped sleepily as they left and said it was time he slept in his own bed for once; he was getting smelly enough to make a change of linen urgently necessary.

           
“You don’t need me to talk to tonight,” he slurred, “we’ve solved all the problems in this painting now.” And he wandered off down the alley to the river.

 
          
Holbein was listening to the drunks and the nightingales sing as his feet planted themselves, one in front of the other, on the filth of the street.

 
          
His heart was singing too. No one had commented on the symbolism that he’d first thought of to use in the painting—the simplest game of all—in which every one of the strong diagonals around which he’d constructed his painting led to the mulberry skirt of de Selve’s robe. His own idea had been for the true meaning of the painting to be mulberry color –
morus -
 
to those who spoke Latin, like the tree More grew in his own back garden and, symbolically, on his coat of arms: More’s name for himself.

           
The lesson he wanted to learn from making this painting was one anyone who saw it could also remember: that every eye would be drawn to the color that was an eternal reminder of More; that
memento mori
can also mean just “remember More.”

           
That would have been enough for him before he’d begun the intellectual voyage of discovery that he’d made in the past few weeks with Kratzer and the Frenchmen. But now, with all the extra layers of meaning and wisdom that four intelligent men had managed to pack into it, his painting was going to be a more elaborate triumph. He grinned, slowed down as he skirted the cathedral and filled his lungs with hot, smelly, happy night air. It was time to start taking more exercise, he was thinking cheerfully; it was bad to be so breathless after nothing worse than that small hill.

 
          
He hardly noticed the tall, thin figure in a cloak disengage itself from a wall near his house as he turned into Maiden Lane. There were always stray people about on a summer evening, taking the air, thinking their thoughts, weren’t there? He hardly heard the light footsteps patter along behind his.

 
          
For a few minutes, at least. And then he began to worry. The street was deserted. He didn’t want to have to fight for his life without hope of help if this was a footpad attack. He whipped around, ready to attack.

 
          
But the face staring wide-eyed back at him from under the hood of the cloak stopped him in his tracks.

           
It was a well-bred face; a face from his dreams, if a strangely unfamiliar one now. A woman’s face—at least as far as he could tell in what was left of the twilight.

 
         
He froze. His heart was beating even louder now. He didn’t know his mouth had opened until he found himself speaking. Gargling, more like: with the air suddenly rasping into his lungs making him realize he hadn’t breathed for several agonizingly long seconds.

 
          
And the word his lips were forming, independent of anything he could recognize as his own will, was “Meg . . . ?”

 
          
But before he could move forward to grab her shoulders, the stranger with Meg’s face had taken to her heels and fled off away from St. Paul’s, vanishing eastward into the evening’s uncertain light.

           
Hans Holbein’s head was spinning. It couldn’t really have been her, could it? Could it?
 
Or was it just a drunken mirage—his brain playing tricks on him? He’d never know now. He was a little tipsy, alone under the stars in Maiden Lane, and all he had in his hands were shadows.

 
          
When I saw him back outside my house
the next morning, as if
 
he’d never been away, a great rush of joy went through my body. It was as if I’d been drenched in sunlight.

 
          
And then I almost laughed at the sight of him, waiting for me to go to church and congratulating himself on his subtle hiding place. It was typical of Master Hans that he’d choose to wait by the pissing conduit pretending to relieve himself. I think he genuinely believed that would make him invisible to a lady; he couldn’t imagine I’d actually be able to see him doing something so physical. It had made me laugh quietly into my psalter the first time I’d seen him hanging round up there, nearly a year ago, stealing glances at me from under his golden eyelashes. But perhaps my laughter had been relief as much as anything else: relief that he’d turned up, that he was there, undecided, wavering, so nervous of our family disgrace that he didn’t dare come up to me and say good day in a straightforward way, but at least wanting to resume a friendship from before our lives went dark enough to hover nervously at the corner of the street for hours on end. I’d found the comical sight of him strangely comforting.

           
I scarcely admitted it to myself at the time, but gradually, as the season rolled by and he went on faithfully being there, I’d found myself dressing up for my early-morning church outings more carefully than before: dressing up to look more elegant, but also to look wistful, sadder, thinner, paler, and more tragic than before; and sighing gently as I unseeingly passed him by. Things were certainly bad enough to sigh and look wistful about anyway; it wasn’t that I was pretending to have these feelings. But for reasons I didn’t completely understand myself it was reassuring to know someone was watching me feel that way.

 
          
So I couldn’t believe it when, suddenly, he wasn’t there one morning in spring. And then not the next morning, or the next. He just stopped coming. I looked and looked for him, scared by the emptiness inside me at the idea he’d gone for good. But however hard I looked, he wasn’t there.

 
          
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Davy knew him. Davy always knew everything.

           
Davy sidled up to me in the street one day after church. “Your admirer’s stopped hanging round, innee,” Davy said. He put his head on one side. He looked inquiringly at me. I shrugged, as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I kept my face soft and welcoming. I didn’t talk much to Davy these days—I’d stopped buying medicine or going on the street more than I had to, so there were few chances of accidental meetings; our family disgrace made me want to keep away from crowds of people in case of chance unpleasantnesses; and in any case Davy didn’t try that hard to keep my friendship either. Perhaps cynically, I thought it was because Father no longer held his job. I thought it was because there was no point in converting me to heresy anymore; I’d stopped being a prize worth winning. He never gave any sign, for instance, of knowing that when he saw me and Kate in the street, with baskets on our arms, we might be on our way to tend his flock. I still treated the Lutheran sick, from time to time, even if I went out less than before.

           
There weren’t so many of them so afraid of the authorities anymore that they chose to exist underground, among their own. And I didn’t want to bring more danger down on my family; things were bad enough as they were.

 
          
But at the same time I didn’t want to lose altogether the quiet companionship I’d developed with my fellow nurse, the flicker of something maternal I sometimes surprised in Kate’s gray eyes. So I looked about for people from outside Davy’s cellar to treat; and brought Kate with me sometimes when I dressed the sores of the poor of St. Stephen’s and fed broth to the elderly.

           
Still, in my new circumstances a gratefulish smile was politic; people with as few friends as we had these days couldn’t afford to toss their heads and be high and mighty to street salesmen anymore, even if they were being impertinent.

 
          
“Master Hans, I mean,” Davy went on, giving me another little nod as he watched me keep my face impassive at the mention of that name. “Holbein.” Davy was like a city bird, a sparrow or a raven, I thought: all chirps and dirty feathers and knowing looks and sudden bursts of intent intelligence. “Living over at Maiden Lane,” and he gestured toward St. Paul’s.

 
          
“Not surprising he can’t find the time at the moment, though. They say he’s working down Fleet way now. Painting the French ambassador. Early starts.”

 
          
The French ambassador had put up at Bridewell Palace, I knew; over the Fleet, and even farther west than Maiden Lane. “Oh,” I said, and felt myself blushing with relief.

           
Davy smiled secretively at his feet. “Nice to talk to you, anyway, Mistress Meg,” he said, and ambled off without looking back. I thought about it a lot afterward but I couldn’t work out why, if Davy was acting as agent provocateur for some enemy of my father’s, as he might easily be, he’d have been interested in telling me that particular piece of comforting information. The only explanation that seemed remotely plausible was that he was being kind. It was as if he were sorry for me. Or was that just me being naïve?

 
          
A lot of things were confusing just then. Perhaps it was the spring playing tricks on me.

           
Perhaps it was the fear for Father and the rest of us that ran through everything now. Perhaps it was not having anyone much to talk to, with old friends keeping a cautious distance, and the servants so tricky and easy to take offense and leaving faster than I could hire new ones.

           
Or perhaps it was John being out of the house so much and our love, which had lost its old innocence, still so watchful and cautious and threadbare of trust. The spring weeks of war were over, at least, and we’d gone back to trying to be good to each other—though now it was me, full of remorse, who was trying to make up to him for my betrayal.

           
I didn’t know what to do to take the sad, lost look off his face.

           
Whenever I apologized, he’d just smile gently and say “It doesn’t matter,” and “Don’t worry, Meg,” and “It was bound to come out sooner or later,” with the generous kindness I was only now realizing I loved, but with none of the warmth I now realized I missed.

           
So I tried subtler ways of feeling toward reestablishing his trust. I pounded his medicines for him. I embroidered his linens and strewed lavender in his chests. And he thanked me for each gesture with wistful, remote smiles and small chaste kisses on my head or cheeks. But, though he’d come back to sleep in my bed since we returned from Chelsea, he slept exhaustedly at the extreme edge of it, as far as possible from me, with his back turned. I couldn’t see his heart.

          
What everyday conversations we had at table, over the meals that I supervised with more anxious care than ever before, were fitful and broken. And he left the house every day to meet Dr. Butts far earlier than he ever had before, and never brought him inside our house in the evenings.

           
How could I have been so suspicious of him? I wondered, now that my fear he might have more secrets to hurt me with had faded away, now that there seemed nothing more desirable than taking refuge from the cares of the world in private love, as I tried to win back the ease we’d once had with each other. Often it felt hopeless, struggling to find a way out of this cloud of contrition and regret, penitence and discouragement; with too little chance of success, and too much my own stupid fault to be bearable.