Portrait of an Unknown Woman (52 page)

 
          
He thought a lot about fear at the moment, sitting in his room at night, listening to the scuttling and the muttering about Merlin and dun cows and God knows what else and trying to concentrate on preparing his materials for the next day’s work by the light of the single candle that the old man put in his room. He thought about fear not just when he heard the apocalyptic gossip on the street. It was everywhere. There was even fear on the faces of the Hanse merchants he’d painted behind the high walls of the Steelyard. You couldn’t see the fear on Georg Gisze’s stolid face in the portrait Holbein had just finished painting, but Holbein knew it was there. That look belied Gisze’s imports of banned books for the underground trade here and his knowledge of the trouble he’d be in if the king’s men ever caught him.

 
          
It was a relief to meet people who had no fear. But there were precious few of them.
   
Apart from Kratzer, he’d only really come across two in his year here. Thomas Boleyn, now the Earl of Wiltshire—Anne Boleyn’s father—one of Erasmus’s humanist correspondents, to whom he’d taken a book from the old thinker and whose merry face had reminded him of a child’s waiting for a present it knows it will get.

           
And Thomas Cromwell, the coming man in the king’s entourage, Thomas More’s enemy, a pork barrel of power with narrow eyes looking consideringly out at the world. He wasn’t afraid of anything. He was going to become the king’s secretary if he had to kill half of England and finish off More with his own hands to get the job.

 
          
That was who Cromwell had talked about first, with his street toughness, when Wiltshire had sent him to Cromwell’s home to pay his respects as a first step toward getting a commission:

           
“Yes. Holbein. I remember you. You painted More, didn’t you?” Flashing those Thames-colored eyes—mud with glints—and making Holbein think his own name might be on one of those lists of people being investigated.

           
Holbein had kept his head straight and his eyes steady and answered yes, in his firmest voice, and no, when Cromwell had asked, “And have you been to see him since you got back?” and smiled quietly when Cromwell had clapped him on the shoulder and said, “Wise. Not the man to know these days,” as if he agreed and didn’t feel remorse at his own cowardice in failing to visit his biggest benefactor now he was down on his luck. Holbein didn’t think of himself as a man who scared easily. But he’d felt his own little prickle of fear.

 
          
So his landlord’s daily horrors were beginning to grate on him. He laughed the old fool’s nonsense off as genially as he could, just as he laughed off the man’s invitations to go and pray with the other bigots-in-training in Davy’s backyard. What he didn’t like was that he couldn’t help himself, every now and then, from watching the sky for comets too.

 
          
“You should have stayed with me,” Kratzer told him over a cup of beer in his warm parlor, where Holbein’s portrait of him, looking seriously out of the right of the picture over his astronomical instruments, had pride of place above the fireplace. They were celebrating Holbein finishing his biggest commission yet: two monumental paintings for the Steelyard’s 
long, timbered banqueting hall. He’d illustrated the merchants’ motto—“Gold is the father of deception and the son of sorrow; he who lacks it is sad; he who has it is uneasy”—with two enormous paintings, one showing the
Triumph of Riches
and the other the triumph of poverty.
  
Kratzer had popped in and out as he painted, full of ideas, fizzing with energy, suggesting things, chatting, bringing food and ale; his dearest friend.

           
“I don’t know what you’re doing in that dingy hellhole,” the astronomer went on.

“Your landlord’s family aren’t wrong about everything: the heavens
are
full of warnings. Sometimes when I look at the stars I believe the millennium is upon us too. But that’s not the point. You’ve got rats, for God’s sake. Fleas. Bugs. Flat ale. And stale bread.”

 
          
Holbein only shook his head. “There are always two ways to look at everything,” he said sententiously (he had had quite a lot of beer by that time in the evening). “On the one hand, fair enough, it’s not a great place to live. On the other . . .”

 
          
“What?” the older man asked, his big raw features alive with sarcasm. “What other hand?”

 
          
“Well,” Holbein said, leaning forward to pour more beer for Kratzer, “let’s just say there are things about it that suit me.”

 
          
He couldn’t tell Kratzer what he liked about it. He couldn’t tell any
       
one. His obsession was like a sickness—too private and shaming to share.

 
          
It was what he thought about in the poky little rooms tossing and turning all night long, unable to rest; what he thought about when he got up from the dusty straw sack with the rough blankets, scratching at himself and rubbing his eyes; what he thought about when he relieved himself in the yard and splashed water on his face and scrubbed at his painty hands; what he dreamed of, every minute of every day, until he felt his head would burst. The morning walks: through alleyways and down quiet lanes, as if by choosing the most inconspicuous route he could somehow prevent even himself from noticing what he was doing, skulking round corners, trying to keep his bulk out of people’s way and avoiding their eyes.

           
His daily trip was to the pissing conduit fifty paces from the entrance of St. Stephen’s Walbrook, which he had to reach in time to see her slip over the road from her house and through the church door with her eyes down. Her. Meg. Mistress Meg Clement. (Letting his mind conjure up her married name always made him wince; but he did it, to try and keep reality in the picture.) His long wait, pretending to relieve himself, or hanging round looking at what they were selling on the street, and whistling to himself to keep himself warm until she came out, shriven, in a cloud of incense, with the small dark boy at her side. The second glimpse of her as agonizingly short as the first. And then his second scuttle home to resume his life.

 
          
He felt dirtied by it. He was horrified by what he was becoming, creeping around town like his landlord in his dirty little house, as if he’d become the kind of ruffian who screwed little girls in back alleys, or picked pockets, or knifed old men for their purses. But he also felt so exhilarated by those two moments every morning that there was no way he could give them up. Those glimpses of her were shafts of light in his darkness. He carried them with him all day: the plane of her cheekbones, thinner now and more drawn than before; the few prematurely silver hairs he could see in the black hair peeping out from under her bonnet; the lanky, careless way her thin hips moved as she covered the ground. The sight of the little boy toddling along beside her pained him; so did the soft looks she sometimes gave the child as she tightened her grip on his hand. He tried not to think about them. But those images were burned into his brain too. His sightings of this ghostly Meg, seen as if behind glass, were the purpose and crystal-hard light of his life.

 
          
He knew he deserved the sour things Erasmus had started writing about him to Kratzer. He knew he was an ingrate who had failed to show respect to the man who had taken him in and set his career in motion. He should have been to see More. He knew himself to be a coward (though he often excused himself for his failing; he was a poor man with a future 
to think of, a reputation to build, clients to find, mouths to feed; he couldn’t afford the luxury of being seen visiting a man committing political suicide as More was by refusing to serve the king; the choices More had made weren’t his fault).

           
Sometimes he told himself that Erasmus wouldn’t be quite so disappointed in him if he realized that his painter disciple was, at least in part, fulfilling his promise to look out for Meg and her family; but mostly he was still enough in control of himself to know that the reason he couldn’t tell Erasmus this personally was that there was nothing in what he was doing now that would please his old friend. What he was doing was for himself and no one else. The love he was trapped in was like a sickness, or a madness.

 
          
It wasn’t what he’d meant to do in London—hang round in this limbo waiting for God to show him a way forward. He’d been so excited at the idea of seeing her again. He’d meant to do what Erasmus wanted and go openly to More’s house, then Meg’s house, but when he’d reached the Steelyard, and Davy the books man had told him the news about More 
walking out of his job (watching him carefully, like everyone did here nowadays, as if there’d be a secret to be unraveled in the way he reacted), he’d needed more time to assess the situation. He was on unfamiliar ground. It seemed more prudent to find lodgings through the Steelyard.

 
          
He didn’t want to jeopardize his friendships with those in high places who were positioning themselves to deserve yet more greatness by advertising his reliance on More. There would be time when he was established again in London to negotiate a meeting with his old benefactor.

 
          
Still, it had seemed like a God-given opportunity when the old man first said, “You stayed with Thomas More before, eh? You lived with him? His daughter cured the boy here of the sweating sickness.”

           
Holbein hadn’t ever heard the boy say a word before, but suddenly a mumbled story came out: the father who’d died of the sweat at Deptford; the rest of the family dying of it in the country; and him, left alone and expecting God to take him too, put into the gatehouse by the dark-haired lady, with a blanket and a bottle of physic and a hug and an agonized, frustrated look on her face. The physic cured the boy. He drank it when he got hot and his head started to ache and he threw off the blanket and thought he was done for. But he woke up drenched yet alive, and stumbled off back to London and his granddad. And that was how he started going to the prayer meetings with the old man: to give thanks to God for sparing him.

 
          
She was a good woman. Shy but kind. Looked hard, as if she didn’t want to know people; but she had a heart hidden away underneath. She was in London now with a family of her own. The boy sometimes went and looked at her outside the church by her new house and said his own private prayers for her.

 
          
“I could show you where she lives,” he said, with a burst of confidence; then he swallowed his Adam’s apple and stared at his feet and went a miserable crimson.

 
          
“Tomorrow morning,” Holbein said, and gave the boy a golden angel, which made him go even redder.

 
          
It had been that easy. And then, after he’d seen her for the first time, he’d lost his nerve forever. He couldn’t go and speak to her. (What if she wanted him to visit her father? What if she wanted to know how long he’d been here?) But he couldn’t go away either. And the trap was sprung. He kept hoping weakly that he’d wake up one morning not feeling like this. Find the strength not to go and hang around watching for her. He went to bed every night telling himself he wouldn’t go tomorrow morning. He went to bed every night knowing he was telling himself lies. The truth: he couldn’t wake up early enough to begin savoring the minutes leading up to the moment when he could set off.

           
He couldn’t even move lodgings now. There was a complicity about his relationship with the old man and the boy. They knew where he went on his own every morning. When the boy dumped his bread and ale on the table in the morning, he knew whose face Holbein had seen. He didn’t say anything, but Holbein liked the notion that they were companions in their unspoken, unseen love for Meg.

 
          
That was enough to make it tolerable to share living space with an old goat with rank breath who told him every night, in the same querulous voice, that Henry would be driven from his kingdom, or that the priests would rule for three days and three nights; or that the white lion would kill the king; or that the pope was about to arrive in England.

           
Almost enough, anyway. There was no one else he could tell. He was stuck, frozen in time like a fly in amber.

 
          
Kratzer often gave him the kind of calm look these days that said, “I’m not fooled; I know something’s up,” louder than any words. But he didn’t go further than that. He was a man of subtlety, for all his frank talking, Kratzer; he knew when not to stick his nose in.

 
          
Holbein began the double portrait Kratzer had wangled for him on the day after Queen Anne’s coronation ended.

 
          
They’d been dining together just before the beginning of Easter Week when Kratzer had suggested it. But he’d had too much work between that Easter Sunday—12 April 1533, when, within days of the bishops knuckling under and accepting that King Henry’s first marriage had been invalid, and Cromwell pushing through the law that ended the common era of Christianity by denying Queen Catherine the right to appeal to Rome against the decision, Anne had been declared queen from the pulpit of the king’s chapel at Greenwich—and the Whitsun weekend in May, when the new queen had been brought to London to be crowned, to have had time to think of new commissions. He’d been working on his contribution to the firework-studded four-day coronation, for the pleasure of the sullen, sparse crowd of Londoners who turned out to watch.