Portrait of an Unknown Woman (63 page)

 
          
In the garden with Margaret Roper. “I wish Father could be at peace out of the public eye,” she said wistfully, looking at the first leaves of autumn fluttering down. And then, bookish creature that she was, she found a classical quotation for her mood, and murmured it to Holbein. “ ‘If I were allowed to change fate according to my will, I would move my sails 
with a gentle zephyr, so that the spars would not be strained to breaking point by strong winds. A calm breeze would ripple softly along the sides of my rocking ship.’ ” Her voice trailed away.

 
          
“That’s beautiful,” Holbein said, awestruck for the thousandth time at the erudition of these young women. “What’s it from?”

 
          
“Seneca’s
Oedipus
,” she said, not quite adding “of course,” but looking faintly surprised, as if everyone must know that.

 
          
His spine tingled. His instinct told him he was onto something here.

 
          
“I like it,” he said. “Will you read me more Seneca after supper?”

 
          
And so she told him, by the fireside, about Seneca, a classical scholar-statesman who, after being disgraced and forced to leave his job running Nero’s government, had devoted his retirement to writing. But Seneca’s acerbic thoughts didn’t please the frivolous emperor. After writing the
Epistulae Morales
, which advocated stoic resignation in the face of public vices, he was forced to commit suicide.

 
          
At the same hearth, in a later episode of the same fitful evening conversation, on that evening or another—they were beginning to blend into one another in Holbein’s preoccupied mind—he heard about another philosopher who died at a king’s hands: Boethius, servant of King Theodoric of Italy. Boethius wrote
The Consolation of Philosophy
after he’d been thrown into prison for subversion and witchcraft. He discussed good and evil, fame and fortune, suffering and injustice, and concluded that happiness lay only in the serene contemplation of God. But he was executed anyway. Holbein noted the names.

 
          
He couldn’t stop watching little Margaret’s hands as she talked. She kept her face as serene as she could, stopping the conversation from time to time to tend to one of the sleepy children she liked to keep in her arms or cuddle next to her while watching the flames. She was a gallant creature. She wanted to be happy. She wasn’t going to let herself or her children be easily downcast. But her hands told a different story.

           
They were busy, fretful, fidgety hands. They had bitten nails. They were the hands of
 
a daughter wondering whether her father would meet the same fate as the philosophers of antiquity who had crossed their kings. They tweaked at things: a child’s hair, a tassel, a burr from the garden. And when she finished her Boethius story, she was gripping the book she’d brought to show him so tightly that her knuckles were white.

 
          
When he started laying paint on the great wooden blank that would be his picture—he knew its predecessor so well that he could get a lot of the basic work done now, as the family was arriving, using his memory and his drawings—Holbein kept the sketchy outline figures in the family group approximately as they had been before. He kept the same line of bodies 
and faces surrounding More, who would still be looking gently down at a seated Margaret Roper. What he changed first was the hands. The new picture would be a study of hands. A long diagonal line of hands pointing and prodding, poking and plucking in a great downward sweep from the top left to the bottom right of the composition. Busy, fretful, fidgety hands. Hands that betrayed fear.

 
          
Margaret Roper’s nervy hands, at the center of the picture, pointed to the words in the book she was holding: words that would show More’s wish to devote himself to learning and prayer now he’d been disgraced by leaving office. He chose the wistful words she’d quoted from Seneca’s
Oedipus
. And, on the facing page, he put the lines she’d found him from Icarus on the futility of ambition as another wistful comment on More’s fate: “
madly he makes for the stars, and, relying on his new limbs, tries to outdo the real birds. Thus, the boy trusts too much to his false wings.
”

 
          
Next Holbein turned the clock back to the time of the first family portrait. Literally. There’d been a clock in the old picture, but now he gave it more prominence by moving it to the top center of his space and painting its door open, as if it had just been wound or adjusted, to suggest that he was changing the time. The one hand that he put on the clock face pointed to just before twelve noon, by which he meant just before the present day. To show when he meant to turn time back to, he painted the clock’s lower weight directly above the number fifty, the birthday More had commemorated with the original portrait. He wanted the family to understand that this was a wry look back at the household as it had been a few years before “noon,” or “now,” as a starting point for charting the misfortunes that had befallen them since.

 
          
It was easy enough to paint in signs of More’s fall from royal grace since the time of the first painting. Holbein skewed the pendant Tudor rose at the end of the ex-chancellor’s chain of office, and reversed half the S-links in the chain in a vaguely disturbing way that could never happen in nature. All around, he scattered a host of other impossible, unsettling details conveying a world in which nature was being turned topsy-turvy: a vase with one handle upside down; a monkey clinging to Dame Alice’s skirts.

 
          
Other affectionate jokes came bubbling into his mind. He drew young John (to put it kindly, never the cleverest of the More brood) standing, staring intently but a bit vacantly at a book, as if he couldn’t quite make out the words. Then, chuckling to himself, he put one of the young man’s characteristic spelling mistakes into the name he wrote above the painted figure’s head, making it read “Joannes Morus Thomae Filuis” instead of “Filuis.”

           
When he saw Cecily again, the first of the other More children to arrive at Well Hall with her own three infants, including a black-haired Tommy, the same age as Margaret’s Tommy, and he remembered how close she and Margaret Roper had always been, and saw how well their children also got on—now bedding down together with a lot of shrieking and toddler horseplay in a chamber full of straw pallets where all the under-seven cousins were going to sleep and play—he hit on a French pun that he thought even the subtle ambassadors would have appreciated. “
Être dans la manche de quelqu’un
,” he said, laughing to himself. It meant “to be close friends,” but what the words literally meant was “to be in someone’s sleeve.” So he mixed up the rich material of the two sisters’ clothes in the picture, where they were sitting side by side, so that each of the fruitful, childbearing women was shown wearing sleeves in the contrasting material of the other’s comfortably loosened bodice. He thought they’d appreciate being remembered as friends.

 
          
“It’s getting impossible to drag you out of here, Master Hans.” Cecily laughed as she brought him a jug and plate of bread and cheese. She had the same pointy dark face as her older sister, and the same dimples when she smiled. “You’ve been locked up for three days without a breath of air.

 
          
Father will be here tomorrow and you’ll have to come out of your lair then. But won’t you join us to eat now?”

 
          
“Later,” Holbein said, staring distractedly at his work, then, realizing how rude he must sound, looking guiltily away from it and into her eyes. “Later, definitely,” he added more gently.

 
          
But he didn’t join them later. He was getting intoxicated by the boldness of his truth telling. And it had just dawned on him how to paint his biggest and most dangerous idea: to make the painting a metaphor for the misfortunes that York and Tudor houses had brought on themselves, which in turn had brought misfortune down on More’s head. His picture would show that, after all the bloodshed of the Plantagenet years, the nation was no better off now. In spite of all Henry’s attempts to sire a male successor, his self-indulgence had doomed his own line to extinction too.

 
          
Now only frustration reigned. Before More arrived, Holbein was determined to get enough of this down to show him. And he could use members of the household to do it.

 
          
The old picture had already had the fool, Henry Pattinson, between More and Margaret, staring straight out at the viewer, as if daring them to remark on his squat gingery resemblance to the king. But this time Holbein dressed him up in earnest as Henry Tudor. He strengthened the resemblance with the real king’s swagger and assertive royal stance, and put 
Tudor red and white roses in the fool’s cap and a sword at his belt (another chance to show hands playing nervously with the hilt).

 
          
If he was going to have Henry Pattinson personify the Tudor dynasty, he needed to depict someone else personifying the Plantagenets. And only one face fitted the bill.

 
          
What had been a doorway in the top right-hand corner of the first picture, leading to an outer room where a secretary could be glimpsed crouched over a distant table, he now transformed into something altogether more enigmatic to draw the eye and intrigue the mind’s eye: an optical illusion that could be viewed either as an open doorway or the edge of a door. Then, deliberately, he began sketching in an altogether new face and figure inside the mysterious space—the only person not in the first picture at all.

 
          
Holbein’s racing hand gave life to the three-quarter-length figure standing wistfully in his impossible doorway, leaning forward to observe a family group he didn’t belong to. He gave the man he was painting dark clothes in antiquated fashion; then a sword and shield for the bloody business of kingship; and finally a sealed scroll for secrecy. He gave him the anxious, pinched expression on the famous portrait that went with More’s history of the murderous hunchback Plantagenet, Richard III. He gave him a deathly pallor that contrasted with the living complexions of the rest of his subjects. But what made Holbein’s hand shake as he drew in the face was that he was giving this ghostly Plantagenet the familiar black hair 
and aquiline nose and sky blue eyes of John Clement.

           
Remembering Erasmus’s late-night revelations back in Freiburg about Clement’s true identity, he was making a mirror image to his full-blooded burlesque of the Tudor king out of the man that some members of this family knew to be a Plantagenet descendant who could never be king.

 
          
He knew this was a gamble. A swagger. A boast. He knew More and Meg might be horrified to see this secret revealed in paint. But the reckless belief that had taken hold of him and was moving his brush across the boards almost independently of his will was that this revelation would prove to the Mores that he was one of them. A man of intellectual substance to match theirs. One of the elect. A person of integrity, so close to Erasmus that he could be trusted with any secret. And someone Meg could turn to with her most private troubles.

 
          
Sweating, almost dancing from paint table to wooden rectangle, determined to race the idea into being before the light faded altogether, he painted the words
Johanes Heresius
—John the Heir—above the figure’s head. Would that be enough to make his point clear? His hand jerked on.

 
          
On the table beside the doorway into the other world that was Johanes Heresius’s home, he painted a vase of flowers. Not real flowers. Punning flowers: unbelievable bluish purple peonies, an extra clue marrying the French word
peon
, or physician, and the color of the blood royal. Would that be enough? His hand—full of the trembling madness of inspiration now—led him back again to Margaret Roper’s fidgety fingers. He scrubbed at them and repainted them so her right index finger pointed directly at the word
Oedipus
. He knew more about the story of Oedipus after the recent firelight evenings—the man who won the crown of Thebes by unknowingly murdering his own father, and thus unleashed an appalling wave of tragedies, had been a murderous usurper just as Holbein felt Plantagenet and Tudor kings alike to be. He used Cecily’s twitching fingers to show he had two doomed dynasties in mind, making her count, one, two, with the fingers of her left hand against the palm of the right.

 
          
Moving up the diagonal of hands, he turned to Sir Thomas. First he painted in more of the rough undergarment to which his rich red velvet sleeves were attached, to make the contrast between them more obviously a visual version of another French pun that would have amused the ambassadors. The expression he was thinking of now was a joke about More’s reduced circumstances in retirement. “
Il fait le richard
” could mean “he’s posing as a rich man”—an appropriate comment in view of that red velvet and dirty wool contrast. But it could also just mean—appropriately for the author of a history of the Plantagenet usurper—“he makes Richard.” To emphasize that second meaning, Holbein changed the configuration of More’s arms from what it had been in the first painting and added three fingers peeping out from the politician’s black furry muff to signify “Richard III.”