Portrait of an Unknown Woman (17 page)

 
          
She didn’t answer directly. She looked at her hands for so long that he wondered whether she was thinking of something completely different.

 
          
Then she said, with a somber air: “Well, you’ve certainly painted truth in his face—he won’t deny that. You shouldn’t change your picture.” And suddenly she lightened. “But I’ve just thought of something you could put in too that would make him laugh.”

 
          
She got up, suddenly almost floating with the idea she’d had, and skipped out of the room. “Don’t go away!” she whispered.

 
          
Astonished, indulgent, hopeful, baffled, rejoicing at the laugh in her look, he waited.

 
          
She came back with two heavy pieces of red velvet, grinning all over her face.

 
          
“What are these?” he asked, getting more bewildered by the moment.

 
          
“Sleeves, of course,” she answered briskly. “Look.”

 
          
And she pulled them up over Hans Holbein’s own workmanlike linen shirtsleeves. Sleeves they were—big, sensuous, crimson velvet things, with a puff of splendor at the upper arm richly gathered at the elbow, and a long, soft, floppy forearm cuff. At the top there was a row of buttons, as if to attach them to a gown. But there was no gown. He’d never seen anything like them.

 
          
He looked down helplessly, watching the top of Meg’s head moving busily under his as she tied the buttons on each side to the laces of his shirt. He didn’t want to start imagining her undressing him, or worse, but there was something so suggestive about her bobbing head below that he felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead. He turned his head hastily to stare out of the window.

 
          
“There!” She stood back. Relieved, he also took a step away. He looked down at himself. From wrist to shoulder he was a grandee. Maybe one-eighth of his body was covered in Italy’s finest clothwork. The rest of him was the same rough artisan he’d been born, in humble wool and leather.

 
          
She laughed at the look on his face. “It’s a family joke,” she said happily, transported back to easier days. “You know Father still does bits of unpaid legal work for the London guilds, for old times’ sake? Well, when the Emperor Charles V came to London a few years ago, before the war with France, they chose Father to give a speech praising the friendship between the two kings, and they gave him a ten-pound grant toward the cost of a new velvet suit as a reward. But of course that wasn’t enough to pay for a whole set of clothes—and I don’t know if you noticed, but Father hates dressing up. So he ordered just sleeves. Ten pounds’ worth. He loves them. He puts them on over some ordinary old gown, and wears them to court. His manservant hates it—poor old John Wood, he thinks Father’s making a mockery of public office. But Father thinks it’s hilarious—a remedy against vanity. So do I.”

 
          
There was a hint of defiance in her voice; the defiance of someone who knows that the person she loves is a mass of contradictions and is daring the inquirer to mock. But he didn’t want to mock. He was looking down at his red velvet arms, turning the idea over in his head, beginning to get excited about it.

 
          
“So—just red velvet sleeves—sticking out of his cloak?” he asked. He could already see it. It was almost perfect. Now there was just one more problem. “Yes . . . yes . . . that would help. And I need to find the skull too . . .” he said, thinking aloud. “I want to put a memento mori in a corner. But I can’t think where it is. My fault; my big disorder. I can never find anything I want.”

 
          
Halfheartedly he began ruffling through the top layer of his mess. He was disconcerted to see her put a hand to her mouth and start laughing behind it.

 
          
“Master Hans, haven’t you noticed?” she was saying. “I put your skull away for you days ago. It’s under the table, on top of a pile of your pictures. I covered it all with a cloth to discourage people from prying. You shouldn’t leave things like that lying about. Your pictures, I mean, not the skull. You could get into trouble.”

 
          
He was rooted to the spot. He felt his face go hot and cold. She’d seen his pictures.

 
          
Then, in the middle of his terror, he noticed that she was smiling—almost conspiratorially—at him. He breathed for the first time in what seemed an eternity. She was still talking.

 
          
“And while we’re on the subject, if Master Nicholas takes you to London, you shouldn’t go to the Steelyard,” she was saying. Rushing her words; lowering her voice. A warning. “Father doesn’t like what goes on there; especially after he nearly lost Will Roper to the heretics. You must be very careful.”

 
          
He nodded, meeting her eyes again and seeing for certain now that she knew every dark thing he’d been finding out.

 
          
“Don’t make the mistake of thinking Father is always the scholar and gentleman you see in this house,” she said. “Flirting with Lutheran ideas can get people into serious trouble. You shouldn’t take risks.”

 
          
He nodded, even more dumbly.

 
          
“And if you doubt what I’m saying, just take a look in the western gatehouse next time you go for a walk,” she added. Then she stopped, as if
          
she’d gone too far, and bit her lip. “Isn’t it nearly dinnertime?” she said, in a quite different voice. Hans Holbein nodded, now slavishly ready to obey her every word, and began to follow her out of the room. Then he realized he was still wearing the flamboyant red sleeves, and he fell behind for a rueful few minutes of solitary pulling and teasing at buttons and strings with his big sausages of fingers, which, for a variety of reasons, were trembling.

 
          
I should have kept my mouth shut. I knew it almost at once. But I got carried away by the moment. Master Hans seemed such an innocent that I wanted to make quite sure he understood that his behavior could put him in danger.

 
          
There was pandemonium the next morning in the servants’ quarters when it emerged that the prisoner in the gatehouse had escaped during the night. The stocks were broken, swinging loose on their hinges. The rope that had tied his arms was frayed loose. The door was open. Mary, the cook, and Nan, our maid, were full of the news—which was odd, considering that none of us would have admitted to knowing the man was there at all until he’d got away. How had the door come to be left unlocked, they chattered: would the gardener be sacked?

 
          
I went to see the scene of the crime for myself before my last sitting began. It was a relief not to see those thin shoulders inside, heaving with their prayers for death; secretly I hoped the man would have the sense not to go straight home to Fleet Street and instant rearrest but would lie low for a while. I tidied away the rope into a bag and pulled the door shut. As I walked back, I noticed something glinting in a bush not far from the gatehouse. It was a palette knife with one sharpened edge. I put that in the bag too.

 
          
It was Friday, and Father had come home. He was sitting by the fire, looking into its depths, still in his cloak and dirty boots. He looked tired but calm. The first thing he’d done after getting off the boat had been to speak to the gardener, but we knew he’d let the man off with a reprimand.

 
          
I wondered whether I would ever dare to follow Master Hans’s advice to tackle rumors head-on, and ask Father to his face who the man was, what the charge against him was, and why he’d been kept at our home in the first place. The thought made my heart thud crazily against my ribs. But my courage failed me. It was Will Roper—sweet-natured Will, now the world’s most passionate Catholic and Father’s devoted slave—who was bravest. But when he timidly expressed distress over the escape of a miscreant in Father’s charge, and we all nodded and murmured assent, Father only laughed, as if the loss of his prisoner was a matter of no importance.

 
          
“How could I possibly object to someone who has been sitting so uncomfortably for so long taking his chance to move around at his ease?” he said lightly. Discountenanced, Will smiled uneasily back. We all dispersed to begin the day’s business.

 
          
The first thing I did was to give the palette knife back to Master Hans.

 
          
I didn’t say a word. He blushed to his gingery roots and put it clumsily down.

 
          
“Do you remember our conversation yesterday?” I said, by way of warning.

 
          
He nodded and stared at his tree-trunk legs. I could see he was truly terrified of his own carelessness.

 
          
“About the memento mori,” I went on, less coldly, thinking I’d scared him enough now. “I’ve thought of a different idea. Something a bit more sophisticated than a skull.” And I pulled out the rope from the bag, with a flourish worthy of a unicorn-horn salesman on Bucklersbury. “The Latin for rope is
funis
,” I said, “and the Latin for deathly is
funus.
 
You could make the rope your memento mori. They’d be impressed by your grasp of Latin”—I paused—“and it might teach you to be less forgetful.”

 
          
His face was a study in bewilderment again. Mouth gaping like a fish. Chest heaving in and out. He was a sweaty, straightforward sort of person, too prone to melt into a puddle of damp when shocked to have a hope of succeeding at diplomacy or deceit. Then he picked up the rope and looked from it to me several times. Once it dawned on him that he could trust me, which took some time, he began shaking his head with appreciation and the beginning of a twinkle in his eye. And then the laugh began to well up out of deep inside him. “
Funus
,” he said, chuckling, “
funis
. It might just work.”

 
          
It was a fortnight later, and the solo portrait of Father was nearly finished, while the group portrait, a more complex affair, was still in its early stages.

 
          
Master Hans had followed all my suggestions in portraying Father. He’d painted the rope dangling loosely down the side of the green curtain, behind Father’s shadowed chin and scowling face. Red velvet sleeves had made an appearance on Father’s painted arms. And somehow all the different jokes worked together. I felt almost as proud when I looked at the picture as I could see he did.

 
         
I was sitting in the window reading when I heard him and Elizabeth come in from their after-dinner turn round the garden. She was beginning to look bigger already, but she was calmer and sweeter too, in the soft, accepting way of pregnant women—even with me. And she was touchingly grateful to Master Hans (as I was) for his devoted kindness to her.

 
          
“If my baby is a son,” I could hear her saying now, scraping her boots as he took her cloak from her shoulders, “I’ve a good mind to call him after you, Master Hans.”

 
          
I laughed silently to myself. So she hadn’t completely lost her old taste for empty compliments, then. I couldn’t imagine haughty William Dauncey taking kindly to a son with the workmanlike foreign name of Hans, I was thinking, and I was beginning to have a quiet chuckle to myself at the absurdness of the idea when I heard the rest of what she had to say.

 
          
“Johannes,” her thin little voice was piping, sounding unexpectedly cheerful. “Well, that’s what it would be in Latin, anyway. But of course my child will be English, won’t he? So what I’d actually call him would be John.”

 
          
No sooner had I got used to the
new, livelier rhythm being established at Chelsea—the sittings with Master Hans each morning, first for Father, then me, then all the true More children, Elizabeth, Margaret, Cecily, and young John, and his fiancée Anne Cresacre, then old Sir John, then, as it was to be, Dame Alice, one by one—when it stopped, as suddenly as it had started.

 
          
One Thursday evening at the beginning of February—a dark, wet winter’s night in which the swollen river raged past the garden and the wind beat at the trees—Father came back from court soaked to the skin but with an idea glimmering in his eyes. The idea was still lighting him up even after he’d removed every other trace of his journey: changed his clothes and warmed up at the fire and joined us at supper. It was almost bursting out of him as he watched Nicholas Kratzer being teased by Dame Alice at table. “I swear, Master Nicholas, you’ve been long enough in this country not to speak such terrible English,” she was saying, with her usual twinkle. She was fond of Master Nicholas and Master Hans, with their down-to-earth ways, solid bodies, and general willingness to fetch things down for her from tall cupboards; they were nothing like the fey, penniless, Latin-speaking humanists she’d loved to hate before, she now often said; they were real men. And they liked her robust humor too.