Portrait of an Unknown Woman (54 page)

           
Books. Yes.

           
And a lute on a chair, which he could borrow. Everything he needed to show the quadrivium of higher learning: astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music, the four mathematical arts of harmony and precision.
        

           
Everything he needed to celebrate culture and scholarship.

 
          
He pulled them all together. Looked at them.

           
Yanked open his own bag where the strip of Turkish carpet was wrapped round all his paints and bottles and jars and boxes. Spun it away from the encumbrances so that the paints and bottles and jars and boxes fell where they lay. Spread it on the table, enjoying the rich red glow of its patterns under his fingers.

 
          
Began building a display on it, under the gentle, tormented face of the Christ figure on the crucifix nailed to the wall. Instruments to measure the heavens on the Turkish carpet on the table’s top layer; instruments of earthly life—the lute, the globe of the world (he’d paint it turned toward France, of course), and Kratzer’s arithmetic book and Lutheran hymnal 
on the lower layer.

           
He was beginning to see it come together: a picture that would convey the things of heaven and earth, not just by painting these objects but in more subtle ways; ways that Kratzer would help him plot; ways that would impress the greatest minds in Europe.

 
          
His hands were shaking. If this picture came off—if he managed to convey all the things in it that were bursting through his head now—it might be not just the perfect way to fame and fortune. It might be the way to make his peace with the Mores. Just possibly, it could even be the way to win the right to see Meg again.

           
He looked up, breath coming fast, eyes sizing up the lute that he was about to stride over and grab to add to his tableau. He’d forgotten the others. He was almost surprised to see three pairs of astonished eyes staring at him.

           
Kratzer came home with him and tiptoed up the bare stairs to Holbein’s rooms behind him. Holbein was silent and preoccupied, striding ahead, carrying the bag.

           
“Look.” Holbein shoved the sketch under Kratzer’s nose as soon as the other man had sat down in the dying light of the window. “This is my idea. You’ve got to help me make it better.”

 
          
“Aren’t you offering me a drink, at least?” Kratzer said, half laughing, not taking the younger man’s enthusiasm seriously enough, not looking at the drawing. “To get me thinking?”

 
          
Holbein stifled an impatient rejoinder. He took a deep breath. Kratzer was still glowing with the pleasure of having done him a good turn and the joy of having spent an afternoon in conversation with intelligent men.

 
          
He didn’t realize that his real work was yet to come.

           
“All right,” Holbein said, consciously taking a few deep breaths and summoning what patience he could. He went to the door and yelled hastily downstairs to the boy, “Fetch us some pies and some beer,” then came back, stood behind Kratzer’s shoulder, and looked down at the rough picture: the two Frenchmen, de Dinteville on the left, de Selve on the right, with the tableful of implements between them. The light was going already, even on this June

evening, making the sketch look gray and blurry.

           
He lit a candle. “Look properly, Nicholas, before it gets too dark,” he said pleadingly. “They’ll bring the food up in a minute.”

 
          
And, to his intense happiness, the astronomer at last heeded the urgency in his voice, nodded more seriously, and turned his head down to examine the picture properly.

 
          
By the time the boy came stumbling up the stairs to set out the food, the two men were lost in their idea.

           
They were leaning toward each other over the rough table, over a pencil sketch, and jabbering together in loud German. They ignored him. Ignored the food too. He slunk out, shaking his head. It was true what they said about foreigners. An excitable, unpredictable lot. They hadn’t even tipped him for his service.

 
          
“If you’re going to make it a Good Friday picture, you’ll need to borrow some Lenten things from the chapel at Bridewell,” Kratzer was saying, very fast. “It’s June. They won’t mind. We could take their Lenten veil, for instance. Hang it behind the table. That would probably be enough.”

 
          
Holbein nodded, beguiled away from his bigger aim by this practical idea. “We could set it as if it were the end of Tenebrae,” he said, catching Kratzer’s thought.

           
Tenebrae: the Darkenings, the ceremony that began Good Friday, and Wednesday and Thursday of Holy Week too, in which the priest gradually extinguished all the candles in the church.

           
On Good Friday, the darkest of days, the priest gradually uncovered the crucifix, 
hidden by the green Lenten veil, as the candles went out, before beginning the veneration of the cross. He crept barefoot on hands and knees to kiss the foot of the cross, followed by the laity. Once the veneration—the Creeping of the Cross, they called it in London—was complete, Christ’s burial was represented: the cross washed in water and wine and placed in a mock sepulchre—some box or nook somewhere in the church—until Easter Day dawned and the sepulchre was ritually opened to mark the miracle of the day.

           
Showing the curtain as it was at the end of Tenebrae, tweaked back just enough to reveal the cross in deep shadow, would immediately signal to anyone looking at the picture what the thought behind the picture was.

 
          
He almost laughed with pleasure. Then he shook himself. “But I want more from you,” he said, mock-sternly. He looked around, saw the beer, gave it a surprised glance, drank deep, and paused for breath. “Something only you can help with,” he added. “I want you to set your astrological instruments to show the time and day we’re talking about. The darkest hour: the fourth hour in the afternoon, when Christ died on the cross.”

 
          
Kratzer nodded, as if to say that should be easy enough.

           
“And I also want you to show me how to put every influence in the skies this year, on that day, at that time—like we were saying, a millennium and a half afterward—into the picture,” Holbein went on.

 
          
Kratzer looked up from his own tankard with a comical froth mustache on his upper lip. Holbein didn’t think to laugh. There was no expression on the astronomer’s face. He was in the moment; thinking only how this could be done.

 
          
“What, make it a horoscope of that date this year, you mean?” Kratzer asked, consideringly.

           
Humanists weren’t supposed to trust horoscopes; but Thomas More and Pico della Mirandola before him had been so vigorously commonsensical about denouncing them as superstitious claptrap that many others had been perversely reminded of the store they’d always set by the predictions.

           
Kratzer, like most people, enjoyed thinking about astrology, Holbein remembered from the hours he and Kratzer had spent together long ago, designing that floating astronomical ceiling for the king; it had been full of astrological hints. So he wasn’t surprised to see Kratzer’s face break into a grin. The astronomer grabbed the picture.

 
          
“Pencil,” he ordered. Lightly he sketched over it the shape used by every astrologer casting a chart: the horoscope square, a square with a second square set slantwise inside it, and a third square upright again, with sides half as long as the first, inside that. That gave twelve spaces for the twelve astrological houses through which the planets moved: twelve domiciles from which planetary influences malign and benign could exert their influence.

 
          
“You’ll have to add an extra bit of wood at the side here,” Kratzer muttered, squeezing his left-hand line for the outside square a little inward; “we’ll keep that crucifix right out of the horoscope square, if you don’t mind.”

           
Holbein nodded. He could see the force of the argument. It wouldn’t be prudent to put Christ into an astrological chart. The rough lines Kratzer was sketching in showed the first house, beginning with the ascendant—the horizon line at the time of the chart—starting from de Dinteville’s dagger.

 
          
“Look,” Kratzer said. He was scribbling signs on his lines. “This is where the most important planets were. It’s just from memory; I’ll do it properly later. But this is something I’ve been thinking about; it’s what I mean whenever I say the heavens have been full of warnings.”

           
Holbein looked closer. He couldn’t decipher the signs.

 
          
“I’ll just tell you the important bits. The very beginning of Libra: in the ascendant,” Kratzer said, pointing at his stylized scribble of scales, “in the second degree. The first degree is combatant; they draw it as a man holding a javelin in each hand. But the second degree is what they call the cleric, and they draw him with a censer, because they say Christ was born when the second degree of Libra was rising. So, a time when religion and fighting was on men’s minds.

 
          
Then Jupiter. Jupiter is what we associate with Christ: the mightiest and most benevolent of the planets. And do you see where it is?” His finger pointed at the bottom of the horoscope square: “Down here, in the third house, and within three degrees of falling into the lowest and darkest place of all; pretty much as inauspicious a position as it could possibly 
be in.”

 
          
“Finally, Saturn,” Kratzer said. “Planet of misery and malevolence. Here”—the finger jabbed upward—“in the ninth degree of Cancer. Overhead. Near to midheaven. At its zenith, just at the time when the planet of Christ has sunk as low as it can be.” He looked up, bony head slightly cocked to the left, expecting praise. “The darkest set of influences imaginable,” he added cheerfully.

           
Holbein stared, nodded, felt his brain whir with ideas.

 
          
“There are plenty of other things too, though,” Kratzer said, leaning over to pull something else to draw on from Holbein’s bag. He began to sketch a six-sided figure. A hexagon.

 
          
By the time the boy came to take away the plates and bring more beer, there were half a dozen drawings on the table, propped up against the tankards: hexagons, sketches of skulls, and several two-line scribbles shaped like wedges of pie with the number twenty-seven marked inside their two lines.

           
This time Holbein, half aware of the feet padding around the table,
       
dragged himself away from the conversation for long enough to put a hand in his purse and slip the boy a coin. That was enough to bring the boy gratefully back a third time, an hour later, to clear away the tankards. He found both men asleep in their chairs, fully dressed and snoring, and the table and the floor so littered with drawings that the room looked as though a freak summer snowfall had hit it. The boy shook his head, extinguished the candle still burning at the table, and tiptoed away with the tankards in his hands.

 
          
Kratzer and Holbein woke up groaning in the midsummer dawn to a shout of birdsong. Kratzer moaned and, from where he was slumped backward on his chair, put his hands over his eyes. Holbein snuffled, stirred, took two steps over to his bed, and collapsed fully clothed on the mattress to try and sleep out the night.

 
          
But it was too late. Ten minutes later they were staring blearily at each other, feeling their aches and pains with tired hands.

           
“It’s morning, all right,” Kratzer said, his voice blurred. “No hiding from it. Let’s go and find some food.” They pulled themselves up. Saw the pictures. And Holbein’s face lit up as recollection flooded back about what they’d been doing before they passed out.

           
“It was worth sitting up late,” he said. “This is good stuff.”

 
          
They were whistling so loudly as they tramped down the stairs, with the papers in their hands, that they woke the boy from his light sleep by the embers in the kitchen. It was going to be another beautiful day.

           
The painting raced ahead. There was no time to think of anything else.

 
          
Kratzer came back so often to Holbein’s place that the old man put a second mattress in the room. At dawn, the pair got up, splashed in the water butt in the yard, and went off to buy bread and ale before marching off past the traders setting up their benches, eating as they went, to Bridewell in the clear morning light. There was simply no time anymore for loitering 
outside St. Stephen’s Walbrook, waiting for Meg. She prayed too late; he just couldn’t make that trip in the wrong direction when he had so much else on. Holbein scarcely even thought of what he’d done in the mornings before this painting began; he was filled with light; too busy and happy to remember even to eat until, suddenly ravenous, hunger pangs overcame him as he and Kratzer walked back into the street during the burning afternoons, filled with divine appetite for bread, cheese, and beer.