Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  After all the punishment the German merchants at the Steelyard had taken for smuggling their heretical books into London, Master Hans was playing with fire. Literally. It was obvious to me that he’d brought his past work only to show potential clients in the hope of attracting new commissions. But that proved he had no idea of the danger he would face if anyone saw these pictures. If our jolly, open-faced painter was to survive here in these watchful times, he was going to need saving from himself.

  Without quite knowing why I was taking it on myself to help—except that I liked his bluff ways—I pushed the portfolio under a table and piled his sketchbooks on top of it to make it harder for anyone else to have an unauthorized pry. I found a skull and put it on top of the heap. I draped the table with one of Master Hans’s scraps of cloth so nothing was visible.

  Then, wishing I could see my way upstairs without my candle, which marked me out to any observer who might want to come and ask what I was doing, I vanished upstairs.

  It was only when I’d reached the solitude of my room, with my heart beating faster than usual, that I wished I’d sneaked a look at Master Hans’s portrait of Father so I could tell John about it in my letter. But it was too late now. Knowing what I knew, I wasn’t about to go back downstairs.

  “I was surprised you didn’t come out of your room last night. So much noise,” Master Hans said. His eyes, slightly puffy after what must have been a late night with Master Nicholas, were fixed on his drawing of me.

  He didn’t appear to have noticed that his pictures had been stowed under the table.

  “Noise?” I asked.

  “Your sister falling down the stairs,” he said, and I could feel him watching me. “Perhaps she had too much drink. That is not good, with a baby on the way.”

  “I didn’t hear anything,” I said, feeling a new kind of unease. I must have been too wrapped up in my letter writing, or asleep. “Do you mean Elizabeth?” She hadn’t come to breakfast.

  Master Hans nodded. And suddenly I had a nasty idea about where the pennyroyal might have gone. I needed to get it back. What I hadn’t told Elizabeth was that pennyroyal didn’t just bring on abortion; it was a dangerous poison that could cause internal bleeding and would kill a mother as easily as an unborn child.

  The painter must have seen a hint of my alarm and tried to offer reassurance. “She hurt her ankle, but I helped her up to her room. She fell as I came out of Kratzer’s room—right from the top step. But I think she will be all right.”

  “Poor Elizabeth,” I said, trying to sound light and natural. “I didn’t hear a thing. I must have been fast asleep. Will you excuse me for a few minutes, Master Hans? I think I’ll just run up now and check to see if she’s all right.”

  She was asleep, sprawled on her bed. She was breathing as lightly and naturally as I’d been trying to sound. I didn’t try and wake her. But I did fish around under her bed. The bottle was hidden there. She must have stolen it. I breathed out in relief when I saw it was still full. I put it back in my medicine chest, locked it carefully, and took the key back downstairs with me.

  “She’s fine, Master Hans,” I said as I settled myself back into my pose.

  He furrowed his brow. He wasn’t ready to drop the subject. “I think she is worried, to be going up and down corridors in the night and falling down stairs,” he said a little dogmatically. “So, I know she is married and happy to be a mother. But this is an accident that often happens to a woman who is unhappy to find she will have a child.”

  For someone who was so blissfully unaware of danger to himself, I thought with new respect, he was acute enough at observing other people’s feelings.

  “Sometimes it is difficult for sisters to talk to sisters, brothers to brothers,” he went on. Then he laughed from the pit of his stomach. “Now, my brother is impossible to talk reason to! But perhaps you will talk and make sure she is all right.”

  “I’ll definitely have a chat with her when she wakes up,” I said, impressed by the kindness of his heart. “But she’s happy. You don’t need to worry.”

  I only wished I believed it.

  Mary, the cook, was back from market. Two serving boys were unpacking packages and baskets and scurrying off with them toward the kitchen.

  I noticed her through the glass when Master Hans and I came out of the studio; and I saw Elizabeth, coming out to take the weak sunshine, called to her side. Mary delved into the big bag she had propped on the seat beside her and pulled out two letters and a bottle. Her big raw arms pushed them under Elizabeth’s nose. I saw Elizabeth take both and look at them. Then I saw her pick up the bottle and give it a long stare. Then she put it back down and, with very visible composure, took just one of the letters and walked slowly back inside. She was shielding her eyes against the sun, but she saw me as she pushed the outside door quietly shut.

  “Mary has something for you from town,” she said, looking down. And she continued her slow path toward the stairs.

  Only when her back was turned to me, and I was already stepping blinking into the daylight to collect my letter, did it cross my mind that the last sound that had come from Elizabeth might have been a stifled sob.

  “Love letter for you too, Miss Meg,” Mary said hoarsely as soon as she saw me. She had a ribald sense of humor: to her, all letters were love letters. “And a love potion to go with it, I don’t doubt.” She cackled.

  It was a jar of pennyroyal oil. Forgetting everything else, I reached for the letter that went with it and, just managing to restrain myself for long enough to put a few paces between myself and Mary as I turned toward the garden’s main avenue, tore it open. “My darling Meg,” began the short note, in the spiky writing I remembered so well: I can hardly convey my happiness: first at the joy of our meeting, with all its promise for the future, then the pleasure of receiving your note. Here is the gift you were asking for. You will see from the speed of my reply that I went straight to Bucklersbury to buy it. The first person I saw there was Mad Davy—still alive, though with precious few teeth these days, and a lot more wrinkles. As soon as he knew I was shopping for you, he sent his fondest respects and tried to sell me a piece of unicorn’s horn to bring you eternal youth. I told him you were looking enchantingly beautiful and were the picture of youth, and he’d do better to keep it for himself. He insisted he’d only lost his teeth because he got into a brawl. I didn’t like to ask how he’d mislaid his hair.

  I laughed out loud, with sunshine pouring into my soul, and turned a corner as I turned over the page, so no one’s prying eyes could see my blushes and probably foolish smiles.

  It was a while before I came in, with the letter carefully tucked inside my dress. While I was still dazzled in the house’s darkness, I hid it in my room, in my medicine chest, locked away with the new jar of pennyroyal.

  I could hear voices in Elizabeth’s room: at least one voice, hers, raised in the querulous tones that were becoming characteristic of her.

  I didn’t like to interfere. I still felt uncomfortable when I remembered William’s barely polite refusal of my first attempt to help. But he wasn’t there; he was in London; and when I looked in the corridor, I saw her door was open. So I plucked up my courage and put my head inside. Slightly to my surprise, it was Master Hans who was with her. Sitting at a chair by the bed where she was reclining; with a little posy of snowdrops from near the front door beginning to wilt from the heat of his forgetful bear-hands. He must have picked a few flowers and trotted straight off after her. He was leaning forward and murmuring something comforting.

  Her eyes were red-rimmed; but she was already composed enough to smile at me with dignity.

  “Oh, Meg,” she said brightly. “Could you possibly find a little vase? Look what Master Hans has brought me. Aren’t they lovely?”

  “I am telling Mistress Elizabeth,” he said, with a touch of embarrassment on his broad features, as he brazened out my gaze, “how to have a baby is the most beautiful thing anyone can ever hope for. A miracle
in everyday life. And how lucky she is to have this joy ahead.”

  He blushed slightly. Surprised at his forceful enthusiasm, I asked, “I didn’t know you had a family, Master Hans?” A little unwillingly, as if he didn’t want to discuss this with me, he nodded.

  “In Basel?” I went on, and he looked down and nodded again.

  “Tell me again—tell Meg—what it was like when you first looked at little Philip,” Elizabeth interrupted, and even if she didn’t really want to look at me there was a hint of pretty pink back in her cheeks, and her eyes were fixing his and drawing him back into the conversation I’d interrupted. “When the midwife held him out to you . . .”

  “She said he was the spitting image of his father . . . and I couldn’t believe that this tiny bundle of white could be a person at all. And then I looked into his eyes, and he was staring at me so curiously, from big blue eyes, wide open and watching everything, and blowing kisses and bubbles out of his tiny mouth. And I saw his little hands were the same shape as my big German bear’s paws, ha ha!” said Master Hans, warming to his theme again. His eyes were sparkling with memory. “That’s when I knew what love was.”

  “That’s beautiful,” Elizabeth whispered. “And what about your wife— did she feel the same way?”

  And they were off on a long conversation about childbirth, and prayer, and the shortness of pain, and what happens to women’s hearts after they see the child they’ve carried for so many months for the first time.

  They didn’t need me, and I couldn’t join in—I didn’t know the feelings they were talking about. But I was pleased to see Elizabeth beginning to look reassured. Perhaps she’d just been scared, in these last days, of the heaviness of pregnancy or the pain of childbirth, or fearful of leaving her own childhood behind. Whatever it was, Master Hans must have guessed. It was unorthodox to come visiting her in her room; but he was clearly doing her good.

  Quietly, I took the sagging snowdrops out of his hand. I arranged them in a little glass by Elizabeth’s bed. And I moved the letter on her bedside table to make way for the glass. As I did so, I recognized the spiky writing I’d loved for so long. John’s writing. Stifling my sudden indrawn breath, I folded it into my hand.

  Murmuring an excuse, I left the room. I needn’t have bothered excusing myself. Master Hans’s head followed me for a moment, but Elizabeth hardly noticed me go, so deep was she in this earthy new kind of talk.

  I had no qualms about opening the letter. There was too much I didn’t know about John Clement to pass up any opportunity of knowing more.

  There was no doubt in my mind, no morality, just crystal clarity of purpose. But this note was short and formal. Shorter than the one he’d written me.

  “My dear Elizabeth,” it said: I write to congratulate you. I hear that you and William are to have a child in the autumn. You will remember from the classroom that my favorite advice has always been: look forward, not back. Your husband is a good man with an excellent career ahead of him; I wish you both every happiness in your family life.

  By the time I’d got this far, my conscience had caught up with my hands.

  I didn’t usually think twice about inspecting any correspondence that might relate to me; life is too uncertain not to look after yourself any way you can. But this was a harmless expression of formal good wishes, a private matter not intended for me. Feeling awkward at the contrast between my own coldhearted prying and the warmth being shown by Master Hans, a stranger in our midst, I slipped back in, plumped up Elizabeth’s pillows, rearranged her quilt, and contrived to drop the letter back on the floor by her bed. She’d think it had simply fallen down; she’d never guess I’d looked it over. Then I went away properly, secretly relieved to leave the two of them to their conversation, which had turned to full-blooded midwives’ anecdotes about waters breaking and forceps that I didn’t much like the sound of—but which the usually fastidious Elizabeth seemed to be finding fascinating. If I’d been a different person—less self-contained, less able to reason—I might even have felt a little jealous that she was so effectively managing to monopolize the attention of my new friend the painter. But I’d never been the jealous type. I was pleased she was finding comfort in his gory stories, even if I didn’t really want to stay and listen.

  So I went back out to the garden to find a patch of sunlight far from the western gatehouse where I could close my mind to everything but the warmth on my back and the drifting clouds of blossom to come, and read my own letter over and over again until I knew it by heart.

  Hans Holbein felt almost unbearably sorry for the pitiful little scrap of femininity huddled up in the bed, hating her life. He hadn’t completely understood all the words in her wounded outpouring: “It was me who found John Clement and brought him here—and he as good as ignored me when he got here, and just talked to Meg, and went away without so much as a word. They all do that: talk philosophy to clever Meg Giggs and Greek to intellectual Margaret Roper. No one here has time to waste on an ordinary girl—someone with nothing better to recommend her than a pretty face. And now he’s sent the kind of pompous little note a stranger might write. As if he hardly knows me. As if I’m nothing to him . .

  But Hans Holbein had understood the sense of what she was saying; he knew she was feeling something like the howling pain he’d felt with Magdalena.

  And when she bit her lip, and tears started out of her eyes, and she began to furtively dash them away, he wanted to give her a big comforting hug and tell her any sensible man should love her for her lovely eyes and her heart-shaped face. But he couldn’t tell her that. Who was he to tell a client’s daughter things like that? It was her husband’s job. But it wasn’t difficult to see Elizabeth was in love with the wrong man. And who should rightly comfort a married woman crying because a man not her husband was being too distant with her (and not distant enough with her witty, bookish sister)—even Hans Holbein, with his respect for truth, couldn’t tell. He was too fascinated himself by Meg Giggs’s awkward movements, blazing eyes, and odd ideas to fail to understand if other men also fell under her spell.

  Personally, he couldn’t see the attraction of John Clement. The older man he’d shared a wherry with down the river might have chiseled, fine, noble features and a handsome athlete’s body. He might speak Greek and know medicine. But his pale, kind eyes didn’t have any of the fierce glitter of intelligence that you could see in More’s eyes, or Erasmus’s, or for that matter, young Meg’s. You could see at once that his mind wasn’t of the same caliber as those of the people around him. He gave the impression too that he’d fought hard battles in his past and learned what failure was.

  If Hans Holbein had been feeling more objective, he’d have admitted more easily to a grudging respect for a man who he also felt had probably learned to accept his defeats gracefully and find a different kind of victory in adapting to new circumstances. But Holbein had taken against the other man, with a rivalrous male prickle of muscle and brawn. He wasn’t about to give John Clement the benefit of any doubt. The man was a waste of time, he’d decided; it would be better for both women if they could see it too.

  But it wouldn’t help Elizabeth to tell her his opinion of John Clement. The one thing about women that he knew for sure was the fierce, devoted way they fell in love with their babies. The kindest thing he could do for Elizabeth was to hold out that hope to her—that a happiness she couldn’t yet imagine was waiting around the corner. Over the next few days, he made it his business to walk in the garden every afternoon with Elizabeth. He found her birds’eggs and pretty pebbles. He sketched her little newborn cherubs. And—stifling his guilt about Elsbeth alone in Basel with two children to feed and his baby growing in her belly—he talked about the joys of bringing life into the world.

  It was a relief to do this small good deed every day, because Hans Holbein was worrying about his work. His picture of Sir Thomas wasn’t coming out the way he’d imagined when Erasmus had first talked to him about the man who was the witty, hum
ble, perfect model of humanist friendship. Hans Holbein was beginning to wish he hadn’t got drunk two nights in a row with Nicholas Kratzer, and heard from him the frightening stories the Germans of the Steelyard had been telling about More ever since he’d smashed his way into their London enclave at the head of a troop of men at arms. The merchants were sitting innocently down to dinner in their hall at Cousin Lane, next to their river mooring with its wooden crane, hungry after off-loading all the day’s import of grain and wax and linen safely into their storehouses, when a scowling Thomas More, with dark shadows about the chin and surrounded by a bristle of swords, burst in on them, hunting for heretics. “I have been sent by the cardinal. Partly because one of you has been clipping coins; but also be cause we have reliable news that many of you possess books by Martin Luther. You are known to be importing these books. You are known to be causing grave error in the Christian faith among His Majesty’s subjects.”

  He arrested three of the merchants and had his men drag them off into the night. He had a list of the rest drawn up by dawn. The next morning he was back, watching, narrow-eyed, thin-lipped, as his heavies searched rooms and slashed into boxes. Eight more Germans were forced off to Cardinal Wolsey that day to be rebuked.