Portrait of an Unknown Woman (18 page)

           
“Ach, I have only English been learning for twenty years or whatsoever,” Master Nicholas said, laughing back, exaggerating his foreignness, enjoying the cut and thrust, “and how can anyone speak this terrible language properly in so little time?” That exchange made Master Hans, who until then had been sitting quietly slurping up his food with his usual gargantuan appetite, suddenly hoot with laughter—he knew his own English could do with some improvement—and Master Hans’s laughter was so infectious that it made everyone else start gurgling and slapping their sides with mirth. Father smiled approvingly, and after supper he took Kratzer and Holbein away to talk to them.

 
          
It was Friday the next day, and Father was locked away in the New Building, praying and fasting from long before dawn, with the rain still lashing down outside, so it fell to Master Hans to tell me what had been decided.

 
          
When I went into his studio at the end of the morning to call him for dinner, there was no sign of Cecily, who was supposed to have been sitting for him. At first I assumed he’d told her to go because the light wasn’t good enough to paint by. We had candles everywhere in the great hall, even at midday. But he was packing paints into his leather bags. He was wrapping each jar in one of his rags, carefully, before stacking it inside.

 
          
The easel and silverpoint pencils were already rolled up into a bundle. He was beaming all over his snub-nosed face, and the short beard on his stubby chin was practically curling with delight. Even the damp smell of boiled carp wafting from the kitchen, a fish he’d told me he didn’t like, couldn’t take the grin off his features.

 
          
“What’s happening?” I asked, bewildered.

 
          
“We’re going to court!” he answered, a bit too loud, a bit too happily.

 
          
Then he seemed embarrassed at his own puppyish excitement, looked down, and composed himself. “Kratzer and I. Your father has a job for us there. A court job!” He was bubbling with joy again.

 
          
“But,” I stammered, surprised at the little stab of selfish, childish disappointment I was feeling, “what about unveiling Father’s portrait? And finishing ours?”

 
          
“Later,” he answered, suddenly looking curiously into my eyes, as if trying to see the answer to a question of his own there. More gently, he added: “It is only for a month or two. We will come back. I will finish the family picture by the end of the summer, and it will be beautiful. Your likeness”—he paused—“will be beautiful.” He hesitated again, almost as if there was something more he was thinking of saying.

 
          
I smiled, remembering to be pleased for him. “Well, it will be much duller here without you around, Master Hans,” I said lightly. “What will your court job be?”

 
          
It was to do with the peace treaty that Father and Cardinal Wolsey were supposed to start negotiating with the French ambassadors. So confident was Father of the successful outcome of the talks for the English side—and so confident too that Master Hans shared his impish sense of humor and would be able to weave some anti-French jokes into his artwork—that he was getting him and Master Nicholas involved early on in designing the artwork for the celebrations that would result from his achievement: an astronomical design for the ceiling of the pavilion at Greenwich Palace in which, at some future point, the signing of the treaty would be celebrated. (William Dauncey had been talking about the preparations at dinner one day: talking half mockingly, half full of admiration, about the king’s lavishness, in what must have been an echo of his own father’s mixed feelings as he tried to balance the royal household’s books.)

 
          
The pavilion itself had yet to be built for a peace that had yet to be
       
made. But hundreds of craftsmen of every sort—from leatherworkers to ironworkers to casters of lead to gilders to carvers to carpenters to painters—were already being hired. Having a brilliant display of memorable pictures and decorations would cement Father’s diplomatic victory. So it was in his own interest to ensure that the best possible talents were working on the display as soon as possible; it was worth waiting for the completion of the paintings his own family would later enjoy if that public point could be made first. And it was a big opportunity for Master Hans, something for which the painter should be forever grateful to Father. I’d seen the polite note Father had written to Erasmus after Master Hans got here, agreeing that he was a wonderful artist, though doubting he’d make his fortune here—but I hadn’t realized he’d try so hard to help the painter get on his feet quite so soon.

 
          
I could have wished he’d make the same effort to launch John’s medical career, but I stifled any resentment that thought might arouse. Like Master Hans, I had a sense now that life was beginning to go my way. Father might not have confided to me his intentions for my marriage, but I felt that John was determined enough to win me, that he’d find a way to meet Father’s condition and get elected to the College of Physicians. “
Dr. Butts has become something like a friend
,” John had written in the letter I’d received that morning:
I think you’ll like him. He’s an innocent; long, gray beard, very seri
ous, passionate about his studies, rather disorganized at everything
 
else, no conversation to speak of, but very kind, worries endlessly about his protégés and the scrapes they get themselves into. And there 
are plenty of scrapes, so he has plenty to worry about. It seems the College of Physicians is a hotbed of religious radicalism. He doesn’t tell me
 
everything, but I’ve heard that when Dr. Butts unaccountably goes missing for a day, he’s off paying calls on anyone he thinks might be able to help get one of his students off a heresy charge. He came in last 
night looking very downcast. He’d been away on one of his mystery
 
errands for two days. I took him for a good dinner at the Cock Tavern
 
to cheer him up, and didn’t ask any awkward questions, and I got the
 
impression he was grateful for both things. He hugged me very warmly
 
when we got up to go. And he said I could go to him and go through
 
what we’ll talk about formally, later, at the College of Physicians, so
he can help me present it in the best way to his colleagues. So you
 
see—he’s a good man. And a remarkable man. He seems the opposite
of your father in many ways. But I think his passion and compassion give him something of Sir Thomas’s magnetism, even if his concerns and the ways he addresses them are so very different. And I think he genuinely likes me too—maybe just because my calm is something that all these excitable men of genius are drawn to. They all want someone to bounce their ideas off, someone who will listen intelligently. So he’s being very friendly. And I really think I’ve got a chance of being elected
 
with his help.

 
          
I thought John’s election was a foregone conclusion (though I crossed fingers and spat over my left shoulder to ward off evil spirits whenever I found myself thinking it). Very soon, it wouldn’t matter to me anymore whether or not Father treated me as affectionately as he did his real children, and whether, out in the cold on the edge of the family, I’d stumbled on the darkness in Father’s soul. I wouldn’t care anymore once the man I loved came to claim me. Father wouldn’t stand in John’s way. I woke every morning now with hope in my heart; it was only a question of time.

 
          
“
And
he says I will probably be asked to paint a big fresco of a battle scene”—Master Hans was rattling on, lost in his triumph again—“
and
who knows what else will come up on such a big project that I might be able to help with too?
And
Kratzer and I will be paid four shillings a day.
Four shillings a day!
 
Six or seven times more than I’ve ever got before.
 
Four . . . shillings . . . a . . . day.” His eyes were glittering greedily. For the first time, I noticed that his breeches and shirt had been patched, many times, in tiny, careful stitching.

 
          
At dinner, ignoring the somber weather and the spartan Friday food, Master Nicholas was even more euphoric than Master Hans. They sat next to each other at the bottom of the table and grinned and wolfed down carp, and whispered excitedly in German, trying Dame Alice’s patience, even if she did her best not to show it.

 
          
By Sunday evening—7 February, Father’s fiftieth birthday, which we’d once been supposed to celebrate with the unveiling of at least one of the portraits, but which, since both were unfinished and most of the assembled diners were leaving, we just marked with a morning prayer for the success of the French talks—they’d gone. Master Hans must have stowed his pictures away under his bed, or in Master Nicholas’s room. The painter’s studio was as empty (except for the skull he’d forgotten under the table) as the house now felt.
 
Father was away at Greenwich, closeted with the French ambassadors and Cardinal Wolsey, his big, proud, cunning, devious, greedy, intelligent master, who wrapped his portly body in the crimson robes of his office, wore a sable scarf and a scarlet hat on his head, and liked to poke his nose into an orange pomander full of vinegar and herbs to ward off the infections in the air and the smell and infestations of the populace. Will Roper was mostly with Father, working as an extra secretary. Even William Dauncey was off at Greenwich.

           
My More sisters had left to visit their new families (their in-laws having all, as one, developed a passionate new interest in them, now they were expecting).

 
          
It was going to be quiet, with only Dame Alice, the children, and the servants in the house, though it wouldn’t be unpleasant to be left alone with my peaceful, expectant thoughts, now I could see events shaping up more positively. I could stop worrying about what I’d find in the western gatehouse. I could stop sneaking into the New Building. I was happy to read and embroider and take solitary spring walks whenever the rain let up. But I thought I would miss Master Hans. So there were only two women in the house (and young John and Anne Cresacre, who didn’t count, in the schoolroom) when, after a wet spring, the first cases of sweating sickness began to be reported as a hot April prefigured that year’s burning summer.

 
          
I’d had firsthand experience of the sweating sickness the last time it had ravaged London. When I was fourteen and John Clement had still been my teacher, it had struck our house on Bucklersbury. It was a lightning strike of an illness. Andrew Ammonius had lasted twenty hours, raving in his darkened attic as we rushed doctors and cool drinks and poultices in and out. But the disease killed most people on the first day, sometimes within an hour, dissolving them into heat and profuse sweat, raging thirst and delirium. Then they fell asleep and died.

 
          
It was just me and John Clement, Ammonius’s friend, in the sickroom when his moment came. The stink was unforgettable. All the talk I’d heard about the sweating sickness until that moment was forgotten, though the words came back later: John Clement telling me about the very first time it appeared, in 1485, at the uncertain start of old King Henry’s reign—a sign he would rule by the sweat of his brow, people said then, in trouble forever; and the second outbreak in 1517, which came while we were at Bucklersbury, in the year of Martin Luther’s declaration of war on the church, and which, according to Father, was the fault of the heretics who’d started to poison the body politic anew.

 
          
Ammonius had been yelling, “Liars, liars, liars!” and we didn’t know whom he was talking to. We were exhausted from restraining him, and the room was full of wet cloths and buckets and doctor’s instruments, and it was dark, and it was dangerous for us to be there with him. But none of that mattered; the point was that his tormented, quivering frame was still full of life. Until he started drooping. “I’m tired” was all he said, and suddenly he was so heavy that even with one of us on either side of him, with his arms draped over our shoulders, we couldn’t hoist him up.

           
“Stay awake,” I murmured, and there were tears on my cheeks.
          

           
“Please.” John was crying too. “You mustn’t go to sleep!” he said as persuasively as he knew how. “Listen to me!” But this time the Italian was in no state to listen. His eyes were closing, and there was nothing we could do to shake him awake. We both knew his eyes would not open again.

 
          
I never felt so helpless as in that moment: gasping for breath myself, laying the suddenly heavy form down; pulling the sheet up over the dying man as though there were any chance he was still going to live; watching the tears on my teacher’s face; listening to the weird rhythms of our two wild exhausted sets of breath and the other mouth that had just stopped inhaling. John had told me since that this was when he resolved to become a doctor; it was certainly what strengthened my own interest in treating the sick. But at that moment all I could think of was the smell of defeat: dark and absolute. What Father called the smell of heresy.