Portrait of an Unknown Woman (64 page)

 
          
He could hardly see now. The light had faded, and he was peering at the darkening picture through shadows. Turning to light a candle, he realized his energy was completely exhausted. He was hungry and thirsty.

 
          
His legs ached from hours of standing, and his arms from more non-stop hours of lifting a brush without pausing for breath than he ever remembered. He fumbled for the wooden tray of bread and cheese Cecily had left, then realized he’d eaten the lot hours before. There was just a bit of beer left. He drank it down, then turned back to stare obsessively, admiringly, lovingly at the picture, moving his flickering light up and down to examine each of the details that he’d worked out in that day’s frenzy of creativity. He liked it. He loved it. It was still rough. There were still great empty patches on it. But he’d fill them. And what he’d done so far would be enough to show More.

 
          
Slipping out into the stairwell, he could hear the sleepy sounds of sisterly chat coming from the fireside in Margaret’s parlor. But he knew he wouldn’t find the energy to join the women this evening. All he could imagine doing now was sneaking into the kitchen to fill himself up with great chunks of Margaret’s fresh bread and salty cheese, downing a big tankard of something pleasantly alcoholic, then throwing himself onto his bed fully dressed to catch up with his sleep.

 
          
Thomas More stood in front of the canvas for a long time. It wasn’t like when he’d seen the other picture. He didn’t move excitedly from corner to corner of the painting, looking for secrets and clues. He just stared.

 
          
Holbein hovered beside him, hardly breathing, sneaking sidelong glances at the older man whenever he dared, learning enough from that immobile face to see that at least More’s eyes were flickering over the paint, looking down the diagonal of hands; reading the texts; gazing at the red-cheeked Henry VIII and the ghostly Richard III with John Clement’s face.

 
          
Every second of silence was making Holbein feel sicker. His hands were clammy. His stomach was full of black churning acid. He wanted to groan and hide his head in his arms and bash it against a wall to stop the blood drumming in his temples. How could he have gone to bed so pleased with himself? How could he have taken such liberties? Why hadn’t he seen 
that what he was doing was terribly wrong? Why was he such a fool?

 
          
When More finally turned to face him, still expressionless, Holbein was ready to start mumbling apologies; to run out of the room, out of the house, out of his life.

 
          
So he could hardly take it in when More whispered: “So you understand.”

 
          
And he was taken completely by surprise by the arms wrapping themselves round him in an awkward, bristly man’s hug.

 
          
After a few minutes, More stepped back. Looked down. Put a hand to the bridge of his powerful nose and squeezed the corners of his eyes. The hand came away wet. But Holbein couldn’t believe he was weeping until More said, a little shakily: “The wine of angels . . . Do you know that’s what the monks at the Charterhouse call tears?”

 
          
Holbein shook his head, trying not to let his own bewilderment show, trying not to think at all about anything except keeping his eyes fixed kindly on his hero to help him find his own way back to poise.

 
          
“I spent a year with them when I was young,” More went on, his voice gradually regaining its strength. “I thought I wanted to become one of them. I sometimes still think I made the wrong choice by deciding not to.

 
         
But Erasmus said I was mad. He couldn’t be doing with all the visions and visitations. Or the tears.” He laughed wistfully. “Or the fish dinners, come to that. He kept saying, ‘But why do you think it’s godly to go round smelling like an otter?’ ”

 
          
Holbein could just imagine Erasmus’s thin nose wrinkling fastidiously as he made that remark. He burst out laughing: a laugh that was full of his own dawning realization that instead of being thrown out of the house he was being embraced as an intimate; a great gust of relief.

 
          
“I miss him, you know,” More said, smiling with the painter but still sounding lost. “He’s the last of the old friends from those times. I don’t hear much from him anymore. And it can be a lonely business keeping secrets.”

 
          
He stopped. Got a grip on himself. Beamed the full beam of his public charm on Holbein. “Well, Master Hans, I won’t talk more now,” he added more forcefully. “I should clean up”—More gestured ruefully down at his mud-spattered riding boots—“and I don’t want to hold you up. You have a painting to finish!”

 
          
But he stopped at the door for a final word. “I’m glad Erasmus told you,” he said, looking Holbein straight in the eye.

 
          
Holbein was surprised, when he turned back to his work, to find his hands shaking so hard he couldn’t pick up the paintbrush.

 
          
He needed to calm down. He managed to get working quietly on the figure of old Sir John More, who’d died a couple of winters back. That was just the sort of good, simple, hard work he needed now: nothing more intellectually demanding than copying and accurate coloring.

 
          
But he was almost relieved when the children came to interrupt him: a giggling tumble of raven-haired Tommies and Janes and their gurgling toddler siblings.

 
         
He didn’t hear a sound at first. He just had an instinct he was being watched. And when he turned round there they were, bright-eyed and mischievous, peeping at him from the doorway. They scuttled back in mock alarm for a minute, but he could see they weren’t really scared of him at all. They knew he was harmless.

 
          
Within minutes they were swarming all over the room, getting under the table, standing on the stool, touching the picture, tugging at curtains, sticking their heads into bags, putting their fingers in his paints, smearing the expensive colors on one another and, roaring with laughter, presenting their tummies to him to be tickled.

           
“Hey!” he yelled comically, flicking at them with a rag. “Don’t do that! Ach, you naughty little monkeys!”

 
          
But it only made them shriek more excitedly.

 
          
He didn’t really mind. He let them swarm. Looking at them romp around underfoot, it occurred to him that there seemed to be more of them now than there had been the last time he’d counted, at breakfast. He hadn’t heard a thing, but another group of grown-ups must have arrived with them while he’d been with More.

 
          
He looked more closely at the child sitting eagerly on his foot and clutching at his calf, clearly hoping that Holbein would start walking and give him a ride round the room. This little boy had the black pudding-bowl hair and the dark eyes and the long, bony face that all the cousins shared. But, unlike the rest of them—who had the long, thin straight noses with slightly downward-pointing tips that the whole family seemed to have inherited from More—this child’s nose was already distinctly aquiline.

 
          
Holbein could swear he knew this child’s face from somewhere. He racked his brains, going through every set of features he’d ever scrutinized with his keen painter’s eyes. Then light began to dawn. Surely this was the solemn little boy he’d seen walking with Meg across the road to church in London so many times in the last year? John Clement’s son?

 
          
Tommy?

 
          
He felt his hands start shaking again. Could he have missed Meg arriving?

 
          
Urgently, he put his hands under the boy’s arms, pulled him off his foot, and lifted him, squirming and squeaking, up to his own eye level.

 
          
“Is your name Tommy?” he asked. The child giggled and nodded his head.

           
“I thought so!” Holbein said triumphantly. “And have you just arrived this morning?” Another beaming smile of agreement.

           
“With your mother?”

           
The little legs kicked the air for joy. “Yeth!” the boy lisped delightedly. “With my muvver!”

 
          
Holbein put him down. “Well, I want to say hello to her,” he said firmly. “Right now. So come on, Tommy, take me to her. And the rest of you: out of here.”

 
          
He shooed them all out, shut the door firmly behind them, and headed off for the parlor at the back of the squeaking, joyous pack of children with his heart thudding eagerly in his chest.

           
There was a buzz of cozy women’s voices in the parlor, and four heads in a semicircle with their backs to the door.

 
          
Margaret Roper’s was the first to turn at the sound of the children.

 
          
“Shhh, children,” she called gently. “You’re getting far too excited.”

 
          
Then she saw Holbein, skulking nervously in the doorway. “Master Hans!” she said, and the three other heads also turned his way.

           
He heard her voice say, “Come in, come in,” as if from far away; he was already staring hungrily at the faces under the bonnets. He saw Cecily and Dame Alice; he did two polite half bows to them before turning, with almost painful anticipation, toward the last face.

 
          
He blinked. Perhaps it was the drumbeat of his heart that was stopping him thinking and seeing straight, but he was having trouble making Meg’s features come into focus in the face swimming in front of him.

 
          
It took him a few more seconds to realize why. It wasn’t Meg at all, even though the child who looked like a miniature John Clement was clinging to her skirts. It was Elizabeth.

 
          
It was all falling into place. He’d always known Elizabeth had been in love with Clement. But he hadn’t realized until now that Clement might actually have fathered her child.

 
          
He paced furiously through the garden, bursting with pity for Meg, raging against the deceiver she’d been gullible enough to marry, and feeling a nameless, shameful excitement at the unfathomable possibilities his discovery might open up. How humiliated she must have felt when she realized the truth, he thought, stamping his feet heavily down the path.

 
          
How she must hate her husband. How she must resent Elizabeth. A woman as honest as Meg would never again dream of touching a man who’d humiliated her so openly. No wonder she always looked sad to the bottom of her soul when she left her house to pray. No wonder her marriage had been barren since the birth of that first child.

 
          
His head was still swimming with indignation when he slipped back into the house, quietly so as not to alert the others, tiptoeing back into his parlor as if, by making no noise, he might avoid stirring up any more of the family’s secrets.

 
          
He couldn’t paint Meg and Elizabeth now in the same way he had before. His discovery had made them part of his picture of barren futility.

 
          
It was all the same story; all the workings of the same implacable fate. Almost without knowing what his hands were doing, he found himself transposing the two figures on the left-hand side of the canvas so that Meg was standing forlornly at the very edge of the picture, holding a book with blank pages; and a sly, determined Elizabeth was pushing her out of the way, pulling a glove suggestively off her hand and giving the ghostly John a bold stare from across the room.

 
          
It worked. It was the extra element his painting had needed. These two standing forms, a picture of discord and disharmony, now made a perfect contrast with the two happy, fulfilled sisters sitting in the opposite corner wearing swapped sleeves. To reinforce the disharmony between Meg and Elizabeth, he drew in a viol on top of the cupboard behind them with the point of its bow turned back to front. Then he put a plate next to it, between the outlines of their two heads. Another French pun: “
pas dans la meme assiette
,” meant “at odds,” but it also literally meant “not in the same plate.”