Portrait of an Unknown Woman (61 page)

 
          
“Oh, poor Father,” Anne whispered.

 
          
“Could I leave him a draft?” John asked practically, turning back to Alice. “To help him sleep?”

 
          
She shook her head. “He’d never take it,” she said. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve suggested that. But he just starts talking about the will of God. He’s impossible.”

 
          
She crossed herself.

 
          
“Well, amen to that,” John said with resignation. He’d known it was what she’d say. “But he’d be more reasonable if only he could get some rest.”

 
          
John let me bind his knuckles when we got home. He lay on the bed with his arm awkwardly outstretched as I cleaned and bandaged.

           
“How could you go from hitting him to understanding him so fast?” I asked tenderly, admiringly, gratefully. But when I lifted my hand to stroke his face, I saw he was asleep.

           
Master Hans’s note came the next day. He would come to Well Hall in the last week of September.

 
          
I let it drop back to the table. I’d pinned all kinds of hopes on the remaking of the portrait and the renewal of our friendship with Master Hans. But after last night’s uproar, I couldn’t believe anymore (even if I carried on hoping) that the trip would really mark a new beginning for Father. He had no intention of retiring quietly, picking up the threads of whatever old friendships were still on offer now he was just a private citizen, or doing what he’d said he wanted to do when he first resigned: taking to his prayers and serving God. He didn’t know how to live a private life. John had proved that.

           
Father had taken the loss of the chancellorship as liberation from the constraints of doing the king’s bidding, but not as a cue to leave the public stage. And I woke up gloomily sure that, however frightened he was, he’d go on stubbornly fighting for the Catholic Church.

 
          
He’d be a crusader to the last.

 
          
My mood was linked to the unsettling moment I’d had on the boat ride home, hugged tight next to a John who was still sitting prouder and taller than usual, and sneaking admiring looks up at him. I didn’t know if it was the heat of the night air, or the fluttering of birds and bats on the shore reminding me of the devil visiting Elizabeth Barton, or just my mind being fuddled with the wine and emotion of the evening. But once John’s eyelids began to droop, I’d looked back at the night sky above the Chelsea house—and for a long, bewildering moment, I could have sworn I’d seen a long comet tail trailing back from a bloodred orb hovering over the house. No one else saw it. The boatman was grunting and watching his oars dipping rhythmically into the water.

           
When I nudged John, wrapped up beside me in his cloak, he took a moment or two to respond.

 
          
By the time I’d hissed “look” into his ear and pointed back at the sky, and got him to turn round to follow my finger, what I thought I’d seen had vanished. All that was left was the innocent white full moon, and a wisp of cloud, and the shadows.

 
          
The leaves were turning red and the
roads to mud as Hans Holbein rode uneasily out of London, mounted on an unfamiliar horse borrowed from the Steelyard, with his packs bumping behind him across the animal’s stout withers. He was leaving for Well Hall earlier 
than he’d originally planned, yet autumn was already on its way, and there was a chill in the air.

 
          
He’d spent all summer thinking about this. He’d stopped haunting Bucklersbury hoping for a glimpse of Meg—a man had to show some restraint—but nothing could stop him dreaming every night of arriving triumphantly at Well Hall on 21 September and of her rushing out to meet him with a face radiant with happiness.

 
          
Pride was all that had stopped him from trying to see Meg now, early, outside those dreams. But it was a pride fierce enough for him to catch himself on every stray thought that his rebellious mind began to form, every wisp of every idea of somehow bringing the meeting in the quiet safety of the countryside forward.

           
Stop, he’d been telling himself sternly, each time he found himself daydreaming. Late September is soon enough.

 
          
After that, we’ll see. The important thing is to make the painting perfect.

 
          
But in the end he’d not been able to be so patient. It was his interview with Thomas Cromwell on the morning of 7 September in London that had finally made up his mind that he should rush things after all.

 
          
Holbein had been asked days earlier to visit the politician to discuss painting his portrait. He’d woken up to a glorious golden late-summer dawn and walked through the quiet streets, so full of anticipation at the prospect of the important commission to come that he scarcely noticed the sights and sounds around him. It was only when he was being ushered 
into Cromwell’s chambers and beginning the affable bow he’d been rehearsing in his mind since he left his rooms that he realized he’d been walking for the best part of an hour through a frenzy of bells ringing from every church tower in London and Westminster.

 
          
The narrow eyes in the big slab of a face were watching him with what Holbein thought was amusement. The man at the table stopped writing and put down his quill. But he didn’t get up or answer Holbein’s bow, just jerked a thumb at the window, behind which the bells were going crazy.

 
          
“So. God be praised,” Cromwell said drily, and smiled his cunning, lopsided smile. Holbein straightened up, wrong-footed by having his courtesy ignored, and looked carefully at the other man for guidance as to how to respond.

           
“God has smiled on the king and queen, Master Hans,” Cromwell said, with exaggerated patience, and Holbein understood uncomfortably that it was his own ignorance that was tickling the politician. “Can’t you hear the bells?”

 
          
“Do you mean—the prince is born?” Holbein said, and quickly stretched his mouth into his broadest possible smile. Cromwell was making him just as nervous today as he had the last time they’d met. He was the kind of man, Holbein felt, who could never let an encounter with another man pass without establishing that he was tougher than him, superior to him, in some important way. Holbein had met plenty of brawny bullies like this in taverns in his time, and he knew he preferred to steer clear of them. He didn’t enjoy pointless arm wrestling. Still, this news would please Cromwell. And he’d associate Holbein with that moment of good fortune forever; so Holbein should rejoice.

 
          
“Not exactly,” Cromwell said, even more drily, and now Holbein could see something wolfish in the man’s grin. It was very far from an expression of joy. “Today we are celebrating the birth of the . . .
princess
. Princess Elizabeth.”

 
          
“God be praised! Long live Princess Elizabeth!” Holbein burbled hastily, and bowed again. Inside he was cursing his bad luck. To be here at the very hour when a daughter was born—meaning that the king had, despite setting all Europe on its ears through the break with the Church of Rome, failed to get an heir and secure his Tudor dynasty, and Cromwell, the statesman who had done most to guide the king down that risky path, must be feeling anxious about whether his policy was now going terribly wrong—was no way to begin his professional relationship with the man.

 
          
Cromwell bared his teeth again. “Well, to business,” he said, unceremonious as ever, and turned the conversation to practicalities: the size he wanted his picture to be and the date he could make himself available to be painted. “The first day of October,” he specified laconically. He didn’t offer alternatives. It was clear he could see no reason why a painter wouldn’t drop everything else to paint him.

 
          
Holbein swallowed, and nodded, and looked down at the papers on Cromwell’s desk. It would mean coming back early from his quiet week with the Mores.

           
“I’ll be here,” he said, with more enthusiasm than he felt.

 
          
There was no more to be discussed. Cromwell felt for paper, wrote him a new three-line permit to return, sanded it, and handed it over. Holbein bowed, murmuring thanks, and left.

 
          
Only when he was already outside, listening to the bells again while folding the paper into his pouch, did he notice there were other words on the back. Cromwell must have turned over the page he’d been writing as Holbein walked in to hide it from him, then forgotten what he’d done and reused the other side. There was just one sentence:
“Soon: look into Master
More’s friendship with the Maid of Kent.
”

 
          
Was persecuting More going to be Cromwell’s way of venting his anger, now that the birth of a princess had put a question mark over his own career rise? Holbein wondered. He didn’t know the answer, though the prickling down his spine made him feel that the danger More was in was coming closer. But he did, suddenly, know what he had to do. He went home and wrote a hasty note asking Margaret Roper if he could come to stay immediately to begin preparing the portrait, as he’d have to be back in town earlier than he’d thought. It wasn’t what he’d dreamed of: Meg wouldn’t get to Well Hall for days yet. But at least he’d have time with the Ropers and time to make the picture a perfect gesture of respect for More. He was already having a new idea about how to do that. He’d borrowed the horse, planned his route, gone and bought some extra materials—including several large planks of wood—and packed his bag by the time Margaret Roper’s welcoming reply came. There was nothing left to do but set off.

           
She was a little woman, Margaret Roper: dark and sweet-faced, full-bodied now after the birth of her third baby, which was in her arms (a second girl, called Alice in honor of the More children’s stepmother).

           
Her thoughtful eyes (with anxious wrinkles he didn’t remember from before) and long nose were not unlike Meg’s, but she had none of her stepsister’s fascinating bony, rangy sharpness. No glitter in her eyes. No hidden wounds in her heart, except those put there by her family’s current misfortunes. A nice, kind girl, and certainly a good wife, but not what Holbein would ever have called attractive.

 
          
But she was delighted to see him. She rushed out of the house—a solid new redbrick edifice which Holbein could tell at first glance would be comfortable and free of drafts and full of pretty tapestries and cushions and the tantalizing smells of good food—into the lush garden to greet him. She was holding the baby. She’d been watching for him from the nursery window.

 
          
“It’s so good to see you, Master Hans!” she cried in her soft, forgiving voice, squinting up against the afternoon sun at him as he tried to make a leg, exhausted from the unaccustomed exercise of riding, swing effortlessly over his horse’s back and dismount elegantly.

           
“We’ve been so excited that you’re coming. It will be just like the old days again for a while.”

 
          
He slithered to the ground, bringing one of the bags clattering down with him and looking a bit startled at the noise.

 
          
She laughed kindly. “It’s been years, hasn’t it? Far too long—but you look just the same. A bit more sleek and prosperous, of course. And tired from your journey. Let’s get someone to look after your horse and take your things into the house and get you some refreshments quickly. You must need feeding.”

 
          
She wafted him to the open door and into the welcome gloom, where the smell of roasting meat made his mouth begin to water. She had a gift for hospitality: he felt enfolded in affection already, so that he knew it didn’t matter that with all the new impressions crowding in on him he wasn’t taking in everything her soft voice was saying; just odd, welcome words, like “Ale or wine?” and “Little Alice sleeps beautifully . . . only Tommy and Jane adore her and keep waking her up to hold her,” and “Do you like pigeon?”

 
          
He had a pretty parlor with a great mullioned window that let in a torrent of late summer light and was fringed on one side by a luscious vine casting dappled, dancing shadows into the doorway. His bedchamber and privy were directly behind it: clean, comfortable, simple. He let out a great happy sigh. This visit was going to be a joy.