Portrait of an Unknown Woman (11 page)

 
          
I waited for him to come downstairs before checking on Elizabeth again in the afternoon. She was lying on top of the bed, awake now, with some color back in her face. But sad.

 
          
“I’ve been making ginger tea all day,” I said brightly. “Have you heard? Margaret and Cecily are both pregnant. They’re feeling so sick they won’t touch anything else.”

 
          
She looked up, straight into my eyes. “So you know,” she said flatly. “So am I.”

 
          
“We’ll have three October babies, then!” I said, trying to pretend surprise.

 
          
“Yes,” she said. Even more flatly. Then she shook herself. “I do feel ill,” she said piteously. “Will you make me more tea?”

 
          
I pulled the counterpane up to her chin and tucked it round her.

 
          
“You stay warm,” I said. “It won’t take a minute.”

 
          
She was quiet while I grated and boiled my infusion. I thought she might be dropping off. So I was surprised to hear her tired voice mumble, even more piteously, from behind my back: “Was it you John Clement came to see yesterday?”

 
          
I paused, considering how best to reply. But by the time I finally turned round, with the steaming drink ready to take to her bedside and an answer ready on my lips, she’d fallen asleep.

 
          
So it will be a fruitful family
portrait,” opined Master Holbein as he led me into the little parlor that had been turned into his studio. It had a friendly, cluttered air. There was an easel (with the first sketches for Father’s solo portrait, made yesterday, still on it) and piles of cloths and props. At a table under the window he had the makings of his colors: almost as many jars and powders and oils and pestles and mortars and pans as I kept in my medicine chest. I felt instantly at ease.

 
          
I laughed. “Yes . . . So many babies! You’ll have to paint us quickly, before the house turns into a nursery.” And then I blushed, almost before I’d had time to catch my mind, or perhaps my body, flashing off into its private dream of my own belly rounding beneath me, and the pride I could imagine in John’s familiar, elegant hands touching the swelling and feeling proprietorially for the kicks and somersaults of a life to come. I touched my cheeks, trying to will the mental picture away, but not quite able to bring a self-possessed chill back to my expression.

 
          
He grunted. Looking at me without quite seeing me, reducing me to lines and blocks of color in his head, ignoring my flaming cheeks, arranging me in his mind in a way that still disconcerted me. Gesturing me to the chair.

 
          
“Oh,” I asked, full of curiosity, “but may I see Father’s picture before I sit?”

 
          
His face closed. He shook his head and moved his body against the stretched frame behind him, covered with a cloth, as if to protect it from me. “Not yet,” he said. “It’s not ready.”

 
          
“But when you start to paint?” I persisted.

 
          
A little surprised, he looked differently at me. Suddenly focusing on my face. Then he nodded and shook his head, both at the same time.

 
          
“Yes,” he said simply. “Later. This is only a first sketch. I want to get it right first. I hope this will be an important picture for my future. You understand.”

 
          
I did. And I didn’t mind his frankness. He’d only had a day to capture Father’s likeness. Father had already shot off back to court. Master Hans would have more time for the rest of us, since we weren’t going anywhere. But it was getting Father’s face right that would bring in commissions for him.

 
          
I sat, sometimes aching with stillness and tormented by tiny itches and sometimes lulled by my own inactivity, but always with a tiny, yearning part of me imagining that the footsteps approaching the door might be not those of whichever servant or sibling happened to be passing, on whatever mundane errand, but those of John Clement, come back, long before time, to announce to everyone in the house that he was claiming me as his bride.
 
Master Hans talked. Stolidly; perhaps to calm me and keep me still. Catching my eye every now and then—interrupting the train of thought in which Margaret Roper rushed merrily into my arms to congratulate both me and John, and Cecily laughed at the sight of my uncharacteristically girlish confusion, and young John More looked as surprised as he was by everything—but usually staring at the paper or at some part of me in his odd, impersonal craftsman’s way. And I listened from my pink cloud of happiness, from very high up and far away.

 
          
He was talking about fathers first: platitudes about how much they teach you and how they love you. Then, matter-of-factly, he also told me about his own father’s death: how relieved his wife had been not to have to send money out of their tiny budget to keep the old man afloat any
 
more; how hard it had been to get his father’s painting paraphernalia out of the Antonite monks at Issenheim who’d been the old journeyman’s last employers. “I had to write to the burgomaster for two years before it was settled,” he said. “Elsbeth would never have let it drop.”

 
          
He told me about the sketch he’d spent yesterday making. He’d already pierced the main outlines of Father’s sketched face and neck with tiny pinpricks, two or three to an inch. Next, when he’d done with me for the day, he would prepare the surface he would do the final painting on; then pin up the sketch on it—a map of Father’s face, a ghost of the reality he’d seen so briefly. He’d blow and smear charcoal dust through the tiny holes in the paper. That would give him the perfectly drawn outline of a face on his final canvas. That was when he’d show me.

 
          
And then he went quiet, and forgot me, and started to concentrate.

 
          
Sitting in silence left me all the time in the world to mull over the disquieting conversation I’d had yesterday with Dame Alice, when, as I hunted in her kitchen for more pipkins for the brewing of ginger tea, she’d materialized out of a pantry with a mess of capons’ brains for the next dinner in her big raw hands, encased in a gray-white pastry coffin ready for cooking. She had her usual entourage of boy servants behind her, loaded down with two headless capon corpses, bags of sugar, baskets of oranges, and jars of cloves, mace, and cinnamon, and she was about to supervise the business of collecting knives and pots for the scaldings and boilings and stewings that would give us another celebration meal. Having guests, especially one as appreciative of a hearty meat dish as Master Hans, gave her the opportunity she was always looking for to show off her culinary skills. She was always saying Father didn’t properly enjoy her cooking: he only ever took a little from whatever dish was nearest to him (though we all knew he had a furtive taste for her mess of eggs and cream). She was clearly planning to cook up a storm for Master Hans and looking forward to her afternoon.

 
          
But when she saw me near the spit, hesitating over two of the little copper pipkins hanging up around the fire that she had so carefully scoured with sand before Master Hans’s arrival (not that she’d expected him to go near the kitchen—it had just been an excuse to use up some of her vast resources of practical energy), she sent the boys off to the storeroom again for nutmeg. For all her lack of Latin and frank scorn of book learning, she had an innate sensitivity to other people’s moods, and she must have seen the yearning for a moment’s privacy on my face. So even though she looked curious to see me in the kitchen, she asked no prying questions, just said kindly, “Take the smaller one if you want to make one of your potions. I use the big one for cream.” And waited.

 
          
I was embarrassed for a moment. Naturally I didn’t want to tell her I was making ginger tea for all three of her More stepdaughters, which would have been as good as telling her straight out that they were all expecting. That was for them to tell. But something about the good-humored way she was looking at me—with the same twinkle in her small eyes that I’d warmed to when I first arrived at the house in Bucklersbury, the same take-it-or-leave-it offer of low-key friendliness—made me think I could, perhaps, sound her out, as I had John, about my worries about Father.

 
          
Perhaps she, too, would laugh away my fears, I thought hopefully. Now that I sensed happiness was possible, and probably not far away, it made sense to learn how to reach out and try to grab it. I wanted to be brave. But I didn’t like to come straight out with a question about why she thought Father would be holding a man prisoner in our gatehouse. I had no idea whether she even knew the man was there.

 
          
Still, I came as close as I dared. “Are you cooking for our guest?” I asked, smiling innocently back. “I like watching him wolf down your food. And it’s good to see Father so taken up with the idea of the picture.” I was feeling for words. “It’s been a long time since he thought of anything except the king’s business. Sometimes I worry . . .” I drew in a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Do you ever think Father’s got—well, harder—since we came to Chelsea?”

 
          
“Harder?” she said, but lightly, as if I’d asked something that made her feel cheerful. The invitation to confide that I thought I’d seen in her eyes wasn’t there anymore; a different thought had clearly come into her mind. Her smile broadened and her hands settled on her hips, and there was a housewife’s satisfaction in the look she gave her big, efficient new kitchen. “Well, if he has, it was about time too. I don’t mind having the odd good honest craftsman staying here, with some sensible skill to sell, like Master Hans, but it was high time your father put all those other wasters out the door and got on with his career. And that’s been much easier since we moved away from town, where just about anyone could come calling and then move in for months on end. And did. No, I can’t say I miss all that London foolishness at all.”

 
          
I sighed. That wasn’t the answer I’d wanted. She wasn’t talking about Father’s deepening fascination with heretic hunting at all. She was off on her old hobbyhorse instead: the fecklessness of our former guests, the for
  
eign humanists, talking in that comical way she so often slipped into, playing the grumpy, shrewish wife to the hilt.

 
          
“Erasmus and the rest of them,” she said, as if I hadn’t realized; nodding as if I and everyone else must naturally think of them as nuisances, beginning to laugh mockingly to herself at the memory of them. “All those clever-clever ex-priests. Too clever for their own good. Messing about with words, puffed up with pride, letting the devil in through the back door without even noticing half the time, no doubt, and bone idle, the lot of them.”

 
          
She took the two nutmegs that the boy was now holding out to her, nodded her thanks without looking at him, and put them down on the wooden table, carrying straight on, on her tide of well-rehearsed indignation.

 
          
“Now, the ones your father first got to know when he was a young man—the English ones, Linacre and Dean Colet—well, clearly they had their hearts in the right place,” she was saying, obviously choosing to take my silence for sympathy and warming to her theme. “I’ve only heard good things about them. Setting up schools for poor boys, healing the sick. John Clement too: a decent, kind man.”

 
          
She paused. Although my gaze was suddenly fixed to the floor, I thought I felt her shrewd eyes on my face. All I could do was pray that I showed no trace of the wave of secret happiness sweeping through my heart at the sound of his name—a feeling made up of fragments of memories that could not be shared with a stepmother, however kindly, of lips and tongues and the roughness of his jaw against my cheek and the strength his long arms had as they pulled me against him, and the scents of leather and sandalwood that lingered on his skin. But if she noticed any telltale signs of love on my face, she gave no sign of it. She simply drew breath and swept on: “I’m all for people who do some good in the world. But I never had any time for those others. The foreigners. The big talkers. Eating me out of house and home without even noticing what they’d had put in front of them. Sitting at my table chattering away in Greek without so much as a please or thank-you. And keeping my husband up all night waffling on about nothing—philosophy, translating poetry, putting the church to rights—without ever doing one sensible thing to make a single person’s life better.”

 
          
She narrowed her eyes in comic exasperation so that I began to laugh along with her. I knew the stories as well as she did, but she had a gift of timing that forced you to laugh in the right places. “Ohhh, how my fingers used to itch to box that Erasmus’s ears sometimes when he started teasing your father about being a ‘total courtier,’ ” she said, raising her hands in the air, as if she were about to box those vanished ears now. “Your father was the cleverest lawyer in London long before they all moved in with us. It was quite right for him to go on thinking about advancing his career, not just sitting around with a bunch of blabbermouths, wafting himself away on a cloud of hot air. The last thing I wanted was that dried-up Dutchman putting him off.