Portrait of an Unknown Woman (31 page)

 
          
“Your father and the Rickmansworth men . . .” he said, trying to explain, but felt his voice trail away when he saw an unexpected coldness creep into her expression.

           
“My father’s a good man, Master Hans,” she said faintly but firmly, closing her eyes. “I don’t know what rumors you’ve heard, but he hasn’t done anything wrong.” Then she was taken over again by whatever was troubling her. She drew in her breath in a gulp that was almost a hiccup, and closed her eyes.

 
          
“I’ll be fine,” she said weakly, glancing up at him, pulling feebly away. “Honestly, Master Hans. Just give me a few minutes.”

 
          
But Holbein wasn’t listening—or at least he wasn’t obeying. A glimmering of a much bigger idea had just come to him; a flicker of wild hope that maybe, just possibly, John Clement might have rejected Meg altogether. The idea was so intoxicating that, instead of letting go of her arms, he found himself pulling her closer to him.

 
          
Until she was crushed against his chest, and he could hear the rush of her heart and feel her breasts pushing up against him and the warmth of her back under his arms. Until he felt her face rise slowly toward his, like a bubble escaping out of water, and his mouth lower itself onto hers. Until the tongue he began sliding through her lips met an answering tongue.

 
          
Until . . .

           
It took me longer than I like to remember to pull away. But somewhere in the swoony mess of breath and teeth and arms and heartbeats that we’d so unexpectedly become, with his great warm hands massaging me into his big fleshy body, I began to separate.

 
          
In my head at first; when I put a shivery hand on the head so close to mine and was shocked to feel coarse, wiry waves of hair under my palm instead of the fine dark mane that it seemed should be there. But it was when he half stepped back to put one hand on my shoulder and another under my chin, so he could peer into my eyes—and I looked at those big fingers on my dress, with ginger hairs coming off them and broken nails blackened with charcoal, and knew they weren’t the hands that should ever touch me—that I finally came to my senses. Suddenly I knew that the only hands I wanted to feel on my body were thin and long-fingered and elegant. And that they were John’s.

 
          
I stood there for a moment longer, with those wrong hands still on me, letting my private realization sink in. A peace that I’d probably never known before was stealing into my heart. Nothing I’d heard in the night mattered, I suddenly saw. John’s story was shocking; there were risks in his future. But there was nothing worse. However emotionally I’d reacted when I found that one of my dearest childhood memories was based on falsehood, there was no malice in the creation of that falsehood.

 
          
He’d done nothing that wasn’t dictated by need. He’d deceived but never acted in bad faith. He loved me. Now, irrationally, insanely, even while I stood there in the arms of a man I didn’t love, I felt my heart soar with joy that I’d at last understood what I felt, with a kind of ecstatic nostalgia for the feel of John’s body on mine, the sense of profound rightness in the world that I’d briefly thought I’d lost. Now I knew I would experience it again.

 
          
Poor Hans Holbein felt me retreat. His grin faded. The corners of his mouth began to droop. He dropped his hand from my shoulder. He was a gentleman after his own fashion.

 
          
“No?” he whispered, and then he answered his own question with a lugubrious sigh and a shake of the head. “No. I see. I’m sorry.” And he took a few more stumbling steps back until we were standing staring at each other across a space the width of a grave. He was blushing furiously.

 
          
“I’m so sorry,” I said, meaning it. I didn’t know a kinder, more likable man; one whose feelings I’d less like to hurt, even though that moment of proximity was now making me resent him too. “I didn’t mean . . . I don’t know what I meant . . . I should have . . .” I shook my head. “I mean, I shouldn’t have.”

 
          
I took a deep breath. “What I mean is, I have something to tell you,” I said, trying to make my expression convey gentleness as well as honesty. I wanted to get out of this embarrassing situation as fast as possible, but I knew I had to put things right first with Master Hans. “My secret. I’m going to marry John Clement.”

 
          
He nodded his head. Gloomy but not surprised. I was probably more surprised at what I’d said than he was.

 
          
He went on nodding, rhythmically, and making little
tk-tk-tk
noises with his tongue against his teeth. He was thinking his own thoughts. He folded his arms across his chest.

 
          
“Yes,” he said simply in the end. “I see. You love him.”

 
          
“Yes,” I said. Feeling the green sunlight in my hair; sunlight in my heart. Seeing him look a little sardonically at my teary face; thinking it wouldn’t be beyond him to ask why I was crying at the good news. “Tears of happiness,” I said hastily, wiping at my face. “It was a shock. I didn’t expect it to happen the way it did.” Then I fell silent, feeling I’d said too much.

 
          
But he just went on nodding. “I have a secret too,” he said somberly, after a few more
tk-tk
s, with his arms still tightly crossed. “I’ve been thinking of going back to Basel for some time.”

 
          
I had no idea; and since his career, moribund there, was going so well here, and he had half the gentry of England waiting for him to paint their portraits, it struck me as an odd decision. I nodded without questioning it, though; forming my lips into a politely disappointed “oh”—a minimum response. The encounter between us had robbed me of all spontaneity with him; but not of all questions in the privacy of my own mind. Perhaps he missed his family. Or perhaps there was another embarrassing personal reason for this announcement, connected with me; something I’d do anything to avoid him telling me.

 
          
Did he look disappointed by my failure to expostulate, to try and persuade him to stay? I couldn’t tell. And not because of any subtlety of expression flitting across his face either, but just because he’d turned and started ferreting through the big leather poacher’s bag he kept his sketching materials in. Head down, arms flying, back muscles rippling: full of energy. I laughed to myself, relieved; he’d already got some new idea in his head; he wasn’t the type to let confusion over trying to kiss me ruin his life.

 
          
He grunted with satisfaction and began pulling a paper out of the bag.

 
          
“I’ve got something for you,” he announced, raising his head, with a forlorn smile on his face. “I’ve been working on it for a while.” He held it out.

 
          
A little jewel of a painting; bright colors on paper. Me in my white fur cap and a simple black dress. Behind, the blue of the summer sky and a few green leaves in sunlight. The painted me was looking very seriously out of the side of the picture, apparently lost in thought. From a perch on one of the twigs, a starling was sitting, looking beadily over my shoulder, as if about to hop onto it, trying to get my attention. It took me a few moments to see that there was a second animal in the picture: a red squirrel, not noticing the chain that linked him to my hand, happily sitting in my lap and eating a nut.

 
          
Somehow he’d given the starling the intent, questioning look of John.

 
          
I stared at it, entranced, moved. “Oh, Master Hans, it’s beautiful,” I whispered.

 
          
“It’s a good-bye present,” he said firmly. “There’s nothing to keep me here anymore. I could take the afternoon boat into London. Time to break my chain.”

 
          
And I blushed, hotly realizing who the squirrel represented, astonished and ashamed that he could have been making that picture in these past days, thinking of me and putting such care into portraying my hands and throat and skin tone when I’d scarcely noticed his existence.

           
“Remember me,” he added.

 
          
I nodded, nearly ready to cry again now, with a soft lump in my throat.

 
          
“I’ll miss you, Master Hans,” I said, realizing, now it was too late, how true that was; trying to find some way of conveying the real affection and respect I’d come to feel for him.
 
“Write to me from Basel if you ever get a moment. Tell me how you are . . .”

 
          
It sounded weak. He nodded, but sadly; I could see him thinking he never would. It wasn’t likely, I realized; I’d never seen him pick up a pen if he could avoid it.

 
          
We bowed our farewells at each other from our distance, awkward now about touching. I muttered, “Thank you again” and “I’ll see you in the house later.”

 
          
I knew how our last seconds together should go. Dignity was important. I should set off gently back across the lawn with the picture in my hand. There was no need to hurry, now that I knew my mind. I could enjoy the sunlight. I should feel Hans Holbein’s eyes on my back, watching as I made my way to the New Building to find my father and my husband to-be. But I shouldn’t let that spoil the pleasure of the decision I’d made.

 
          
It didn’t turn out quite like that, though. It was Hans Holbein who got in first with the final word; who said, in a tight little voice, “Well, goodbye,” and who began to walk away across the lawn, toward the house, without looking back. Never look back, John liked to say. And it was me, clasping his picture to my breast, who was left staring at those solid shoulders moving out of my life with a disconcerting sense of loss that I didn’t fully understand.

 
          
That confused dawn in the garden
was the end of my suspicious, lonely girlhood, from the moment when I walked back into the New Building, with my head held as high as I knew how, and moved toward the tall, still figure standing with his back to me in the shadows, looking up at Master Hans’s noli-me-tangere picture, and realized I didn’t know what to call him.

 
          
“. . . Richard?” I whispered hesitantly.

 
          
He didn’t move, but I thought there was a more alert quality in his stillness. He waited until I was almost touching him before turning a ravaged face down to me. His eyes searched mine; but he must have seen something reassuring in my face. He closed his eyes and wrapped me in his arms. “That’s not my name,” he murmured in my ear. “My name is John Clement. It has been since before you were born. You’ve always known me,” and from deep in the folds of the cloak still draped over his racing heart I guessed the beginning of a smile was coming back to his lips.

 
          
When, gaining courage, I whispered, “I will marry you,” he sighed back, “Thank God,” then “Thank you.” But he wouldn’t say any more about what we’d talked about in the night.

           
I tried. “Do you believe people might really come and try to find you?,” I asked, still timidly, “people who would want you to be king?” He shook his head, but more to stop any further conversation about that than to answer my question.

           
“That’s all over,” he said, so firmly that I felt he might be trying to convince himself 
as much as me that this was the truth. “Long ago. Dead and buried like Edward. It won’t make any difference to our lives. We don’t need to think about it, whatever your father says.” I nodded. Even if he didn’t quite believe what he was saying himself, anything else seemed too fanciful to live with.

           
“Forget it all, Meg,” he added, and his voice was getting stronger and more confident. “I have. It would drive anyone mad to spend their days going over the past, and I’m no exception. I want an ordinary life, and ordinary happiness. Perhaps it was wrong of me not to tell you about this before, but I didn’t want you to start worrying over it. No one else’s life should be poisoned by what happened years ago. It means nothing to me now. I never look back, never think about it. And you shouldn’t either.” And he shut his mouth tight.

           
Now that my resolve had come flowing back, and I’d realized that I still only wanted one thing in life, and that was to marry John, there was so much more I wanted to know. It was on the tip of my tongue, for instance, to ask, Was that really the king in the chapel?—but I stopped myself before those particular girlish words came out. I didn’t want to seem as unsophisticated as Master Hans. I knew he wanted to cut off my questions and drag me back to the present; I guessed I wouldn’t get many chances to ask them in the future. So I tried just one more.