Portrait of an Unknown Woman (66 page)

 
          
More didn’t even begin to offer explanations until he’d shut the door behind the three of them in the parlor. It seemed dark. Holbein’s eyes were still dizzy with sunlight. He began fussing like a housemaid with candles, eager to show Meg his picture at its best.

           
The lawyer’s voice behind him said: “Of course, the light isn’t good enough any more to appreciate Master Hans’s full artistry. But you’ll understand in a minute why I wanted you to see this before everyone else does.”

 
          
Holbein lit candles at two walls and at his painting table and offered pewter candlesticks to his two guests. Meg’s face looked as innocent and bewildered as a child’s in the circle of golden light, he thought. She stared at the picture for a few minutes without seeing the changes. Then he saw her begin to take note. Her eyebrows rose. She moved her candle up to examine the most obvious new element—his portrait of John Clement.

 
          
Then she stared at the red and white Tudor roses in the fool’s cap. Then she began stepping backward and forward, to left and right, trying to make out more with the little pool of light she was holding like a weapon against the gathering gloom.

 
          
It seemed an age before she turned to her adoptive father with a silent question on her face.

 
          
“Erasmus told him,” More said gently, and Meg’s eyes flickered uncertainly up at Holbein as if, for the first time, it was crossing her mind that he might represent danger.

 
          
“It’s all right for him to know, Meg,” More reassured her. His voice sounded almost as relaxed as it had in the old days. “Master Hans is our friend. He can be trusted. I just didn’t want you to stumble on this unawares and be frightened.”

 
          
She stared at him, wide-eyed and still doubtful.

           
“There’s no doubt this could be dangerous if anyone outside the family saw it,” More went on. “But of course they won’t. It’s private; just for us. It will stay here at Well Hall.”

 
          
Holbein nodded, disappointed but reluctantly accepting the wisdom of More’s judgment.

 
          
Meg nodded too, but Holbein could see she still wasn’t entirely reassured. “But what do you think the others will say when they see it?” she asked her father, and Holbein realized with a stab of shock that John Clement’s past was a secret that not even the rest of the More family knew.

 
          
“Simple coincidence of features,” More answered glibly; Holbein could see he’d thought the argument out beforehand. “If anyone asks, we’ll just say that John’s face happened to be enough like the Plantagenet portrait we all know that Master Hans ‘borrowed’ it. Why not? He did the same thing with Henry Pattinson,” and More laughed.

 
          
Meg smiled back, relaxing at last, and Holbein breathed a suppressed sigh of relief. “After all, why worry?” she said more lightheartedly. “They’ll probably never even ask. It’s astonishing how people don’t notice the most extraordinary things, even when they’re right under their noses. I’ve thought that for years.”

 
          
The men nodded, understanding what she was talking about, complicit as conspirators in the flickering darkness.

           
Then Meg turned directly to Holbein for the first time, as if realizing that she hadn’t praised the picture she’d made so much effort to get him to paint.

           
“You see straight into our souls, Master Hans,” she said with poise; then, more warmly, putting a hand on his arm, “you’re an astonishing man.”

 
          
Holbein was grateful for the candlelight now, knowing it would wash the color out of the tremendous blush he could feel turning his face scarlet with pleasure. He couldn’t speak. The best he could manage was to bob his head forward in a bow.

 
          
“They’ll be sitting down to eat,” he said in a strangulated voice, trying to sound self-possessed. “Shouldn’t we go back and join them?”

           
But she shook her head gaily, as if she was throwing herself with all her heart and soul into the project of trusting him. “Oh, wait just a moment more,” she said, and that hand squeezed his arm entreatingly. “Let me try and make out a bit more of what you’ve done.”

 
          
And she stepped forward again with the candle, moving away from the kings this time and, confident she’d like what she saw, toward the opposite corner, where she knew she’d find her own likeness.

 
          
He watched her; a silhouetted head very still again behind her candle flame.

           
“Oh,” she said, then fell silent again. Then, in a less carefree voice: “You’ve changed this too, Master Hans. You’ve put Elizabeth in my place. I’m right on the edge of things now. And how sad you’ve made me look . . .”

 
          
More laughed. “Everyone looks first at their own likeness, Meg,” he said expansively. “No one else will notice that, either. Come. Master Hans is right. We’re finished here. It’s time we ate.”

 
          
She came obediently out of the room with them, still holding her candle. But even in the near-dark, Holbein could see the puzzled little frown she’d worn earlier settle on her face again as a new anxiety replaced the old one.

 
          
The questioning, vulnerable line stayed on her forehead right through the simple family supper. For once, Holbein wasn’t able to do his food justice.

 
          
He picked at his meat and bread. He was too busy watching.

 
          
“Meg,” Elizabeth called from across the room, with her pretty mouth curling up at the corners. She fluttered over to her sister, put an elegant arm around the taller woman’s waist, kissed her with grace. Not a feeling reunion, Holbein thought, with growing understanding; this was behavior for public consumption. “It’s been too long,” Elizabeth said, with the practiced charm of the politician’s wife. Her smooth, creamy fingers were playing with her choker of pearls, their jeweled ornament set off-center on her neck—the new fashion set by Anne Boleyn; they said to hide the dark wen on the new queen’s neck—as if, Holbein thought with hostility, she wanted to draw Meg’s attention to them.

           
Elizabeth, in a yellow brocade stomacher that set off the gentle curves motherhood had given her, was dressed far more elaborately than anyone else in this country parlor. “How lovely you look,” Elizabeth went on, sizing up her sister, “as willowy as ever. Like a young girl.”

 
          
Holbein winced at the spite he saw in the remark. Surely Elizabeth was mocking Meg, with that falsely rueful look down at the swell of breasts and stomach and hips that the birth of her own three healthy children had left on her.

           
Wasn’t that a rivalrous woman-to-woman reminder that Meg had borne only one baby? He ached with admiration for Meg’s gallantry when she just smiled cautiously back, not responding to the remark’s hidden barb, and said, inoffensively enough, “You’re still the 
beauty of the family, Elizabeth.”

 
          
A desultory conversation began between the two women, led by Elizabeth, who peppered her bright remarks with inquisitive sidelong looks at her sister.

           
Holbein noticed that Elizabeth didn’t mention her husband. By building new bridges to the Boleyns and Cromwells and Cranmers, who were now in the ascendant at court, he seemed to be salvaging his political career from the shipwreck that had brought down the rest of the Mores.

 
          
But she did lean forward to say, pointedly and so quietly that no one but the eavesdropping Holbein heard: “Still, I’m not too much out of circulation to hear how well John’s doing with Dr. Butts. The king’s physician! It’s a great honor for your family, Meg. We’re so proud of you. Especially since I know how hard it must be for a man in John’s position to negotiate a way through all the intriguing,” and she raised a delicately inquiring eyebrow. “Of course, one never believes the rumors . . . but I’ve heard people say Dr. Butts is becoming one of the new men . . . that he’s carried messages in his time from university men being investigated for heresy to”—her voice, already only a murmur, dropped to a whisper for the next two words—“Queen Anne.” She paused significantly. “I’ve often thought how tricky it must be for John to be so close to him yet steer his own path.” Her whole body, led by her eyebrows, had become a cunning, curving question mark, inviting Meg’s confidences.

 
          
“Oh,” Meg said, with blank eyes, rejecting the invitation as if she weren’t aware of it being there. “John’s never been very interested in all that. I never hear about politics at home. All he cares about is doctoring.” Her eyes lit up with sudden interest.

           
Holbein leaned forward to hear more.

           
“What John thinks about most is whether physicians should still base their work on Galen. You know: heroic doctoring. A lot of bleeding.”

           
Holbein was aware of Elizabeth drawing back with a faintly disgusted look on her face. This wasn’t at all what the beauty of the family had wanted to find out.

           
“He and Dr. Butts have taken against Galen,” Meg was saying. “John says Galen was a bit of a fraud—a man who got all his knowledge from dissecting pigs and didn’t actually know much about the human body at all. He and Dr. Butts have been looking at copies of Italian drawings of the human body—they have public dissections of criminals there, and theaters of anatomy, it’s not like England, and artists are allowed to watch. And they’re reading parts of the treatise that a colleague of theirs is writing—Vesalius of Padua. It isn’t finished yet, but when it’s published it will change the way we do medicine. I think that’s the only kind of ‘new man’ John wants to know about.”

 
          
Elizabeth nodded, but she looked as though she’d rather be elsewhere.

 
          
Holbein was full of pride in Meg for the effortless way she’d blanked out her sister’s potentially damaging inquiry. If diplomacy was what she’d been doing, in fact; her expression was still so innocent that he couldn’t be sure whether she wasn’t just genuinely interested in the medical theories on her husband’s mind.

 
          
“You must know all about this, Master Hans,” Meg said, turning to Holbein, as if she’d known all along he was listening. “Have you seen Leonardo’s drawings, or Buonarroti’s?”

 
          
And so intense was the joy Holbein felt at having her dark gaze on his face that he was only vaguely aware of Elizabeth’s turning away, with a look of relief on her face, to begin a new conversation with young John More.

 
          
There were already yawns and sleepy looks around the table. Some of the family had made their excuses and gone to bed. When More and Dame Alice left, the glow went out of the room with them. The shadows were beginning to advance. The wind was gusting against the windows.

 
          
The Ropers were snuffing out candles at the empty end of the table as if encouraging the stragglers—Elizabeth, comparing notes on children’s behavior with Cecily; and Meg, still discussing Italian discoveries with Holbein, about human anatomy and the moral difficulty of cutting open dead bodies to learn how muscles and veins and hearts functioned. Still with that absentminded little line of worry scarring her forehead.

 
          
Suddenly the tired peace was broken. There was a suppressed giggle at the door. Holbein knew what it meant. When he looked up, there were the bright eyes and dark tousle-heads peeping in out of the blackness. The children, all in woolly nightgowns, had crept out of their dormitory to spy on the grown-ups. Now, seeing they’d been discovered, they swarmed in: a noisy, cheerful, high-pitched invasion, pouring over to the table, snatching at bits of bread and the dish of apples, gleefully dodging the adult hands that reached out to catch them, hiding behind chairs and under tables.

 
          
It was pandemonium. Rightly or wrongly, all the parents instantly identified their own eldest child as the ringleader. Each of them rushed to grab whichever offending offspring they could lay hands on.

           
“Tommy!” shrieked Margaret Roper.

           
“Tommy!” shrieked Cecily Heron.

           
“Tommy!” shrieked Elizabeth Dauncey.

           
“Tommy!” shrieked Meg Clement.