Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  It was a mistake to know about that. It was even more of a mistake to know that Kratzer—whose wit and humor had earned him not only Sir Thomas’s patronage here but even that of Cardinal Wolsey, and who relied on having powerful English admirers promoting his work, and who also freely admitted to enjoying Sir Thomas’s company and the sharpness of his mind when they talked—at the same time secretly considered himself among the freest of freethinkers. The astronomer boasted (true, only in a whisper, and in the safety of German; a patron respected all over Christendom was a patron worth keeping) of having written to Hans Holbein’s hero, Albrecht Dürer, to congratulate him on Nuremberg turning “all evangelical” and to wish him God’s grace to persevere in the reformed belief. Because all that secret knowledge—and the open knowledge that Sir Thomas suspected the German merchants skulking uneasily around the Steelyard of being the main conduit for the smuggling of heresy into England—was coming out in his picture. And the face looking back at him from the easel now was the face of the persecutor: with red-rimmed eyes, a narrow mouth, and grasping hands. Even the composition wouldn’t come right. He’d meant to put a memento mori in the corner. But his usual prop—the skull he often used for the purpose of warning his sitters and viewers against worldly vanity—had somehow gone missing in his mess. Someone must have tidied it away somewhere, or he’d buried it under an avalanche of books or boots.

  He’d never been good at keeping track of things. He had no idea where in London to go to lay hands on a human skull—except to the Steelyard, where at least he could understand what was said to him without difficulty. But he also knew it would be worse than impolitic to go near the Steelyard.

  He couldn’t shake off the worry. It nagged at him while Meg sat for him every morning. He fretted secretly during his afternoon walks. He obsessed through the evenings over the painting that wouldn’t come right.

  And when he wasn’t worrying about More’s picture, he was worrying over what Meg Giggs felt about Clement. Meg glowed. And he’d noticed that she had started slipping outside to the cart to see the cook every morning, to ask for messages from town. If he only knew her better, he’d be able to tell whether her sparkling eyes meant she was in love. But he couldn’t see into her heart; she was as unreadable as a dazzle of sun on water.

  He didn’t dare ask directly. He was afraid of the anger that any forwardness might spark in Meg’s eyes. He sensed that she wasn’t someone who would take well to being interrogated. But as her portrait began to take shape, Hans Holbein found himself fishing cautiously for information.

  “Do you know,” he said, with his back to her, mixing paint, “that I published John Clement’s likeness more than ten years ago, back in Basel?”

  “You said something about it once,” she replied, ready to be engaged; with a sinking heart he noted her quickening interest as soon as Clement’s name came up.

  “Well, it wasn’t really his likeness, as it turns out,” he said awkwardly. “Your father has explained everything to me now. But I thought it was at the time. You see, I drew the frontispiece for a Basel edition of Utopia.”

  Now he had her attention.

  Holbein had spent his first day in Chelsea wondering whether this (old) John Clement had anything to do with the (young) John Clement whose picture he’d drawn, on Erasmus’s instruction, ten years before, when Utopia had just come out. More’s book had sold so well that Johannes Froben wanted some of the action; Erasmus had arranged for a new edition and got More’s permission to republish. The mischievous story was ironically framed by an account of how a sailor with a liking for tall tales described Utopia—the perfect society—to More himself, his real-life friend Pieter Gillis of Antwerp, and the character whom the author called “puer meus”: John Clement.

  “So naturally I drew a boy. With long hair. Fifteen years old at most. I’ve got it here somewhere,” Hans Holbein said now, gesturing helplessly around the worsening chaos of paints and pictures and props behind him, wondering for a moment at Meg Giggs’s sudden, secretive flash of a grin.

  “And then I got here and saw the real John Clement. And he’s not so young—he could be my father! So I was embarrassed. I realized I’d done a bad job. And I thought your father would sack me on the spot for being a bad painter, ha ha!”

  Meg was smiling more gently now, seeing and hearing his professional discomfiture. “But, Master Hans,” she said softly, “it was only a turn of phrase. Father just meant that John Clement was his protégé—not that he was really a young boy. John Clement was working as his secretary on a mission to the Low Countries while Father wrote Utopia. But you weren’t to know that. You were quite right to illustrate the words ‘ puer meus’ with a picture of a boy. No one would fault you for that.”

  It was a kindly meant answer, and he felt warmly toward her for it, even if it didn’t answer his unspoken question about what she thought of John Clement.

  “Yes,” he said, persisting a little more, “that is what your father told me when I asked. He was very kind. But I still felt uncomfortable. I was so sure that Erasmus had told me to draw a boy . . .”

  But she didn’t respond in a way Hans Holbein could understand. She just settled deeper into her chair, perfectly still in her pose, and began to dream of something private with a blissful smile on her face.

  “You’re glowing, Meg,” Margaret Roper said. “It must be all those walks you’ve been going on. You’ve caught the sun. You look radiant.”

  Margaret looked to Cecily, next to her on the bed, for confirmation, but Cecily only laughed weakly. “It’s probably just that you’ve spent the past week looking at me in this bed all day and I’m still all sick and green. Anyone would look radiant by comparison,” she said to Margaret.

  I was perched on the side of the bed. I was giving them another dose of ginger tea. It had become a habit. Then Cecily began to look curiously at me. She wasn’t as quick-witted as Margaret, or as kind, but now the idea had been suggested to her she was letting her imagination get to work.

  “It’s true, though,” she said mischievously. “She’s right. You’ve lost that tight-lipped look you’ve had all winter. And now I come to think of it, you haven’t flared your nostrils at me once in days either . . .” She twinkled.

  I stared. “What do you mean, flared my nostrils?” I said with a hint of sharpness, suspecting mockery.

  They looked at each other and began to giggle helplessly, two little dark heads lying on the bed like puppies and shaking with mirth. “. . . but you’re doing it again now,” Cecily said. “Look.” And she pulled a haughty face, with her nose in the air and her lips pursed together and her nostrils flared so wide that the tip of her nose went white. “You always do it when you’re cross,” she said, relaxing her face back into a giggle. “Didn’t you know?”

  “You did it every time we tried to introduce you to anyone at any of the wedding parties,” Margaret confirmed. “One handsome young potential husband after another, frozen by your deadly looks. Don’t you remember?”

  I was shaking my head in amazement. I recognized the expression Cecily was imitating as my own, all right, but I’d had no idea it looked so angry and so forbidding from the outside. And all I remembered of the endless winter parties was being fobbed off with one dull young man after another—the wallflowers no one in their right mind would want to talk to—and politely making my excuses to avoid spending more time than necessary with the spottiest, most unprepossessing stopgaps. It had never occurred to me that Margaret and Cecily were trying to find me a husband from among their new cousins-in-law. It took a pained moment or two of struggling with my pride before I could bring myself to react.

  But then I found myself grinning and screwing my face up in rueful acknowledgment. “Do I really do that all the time? And did I really scare off all the husbands?” I asked, joining in their giggles. “Oh dear.”

  “We were in despair,” Margaret said, and her laughter was tinged with relief.

  “Ready to give up on
you.”

  “You were so fierce . . .”

  “. . . that Giles started calling you the Ice Queen . . .”

  “. . . till Will stopped him.”

  “. . . But then you bit Will’s head off for introducing you to his cousin Thomas . . .”

  “. . . so he stopped sticking up for you . . .”

  I’d slipped down onto the bed with them now. I was holding my sides. We were groaning and snorting with laughter. Then Cecily rolled onto her tummy and took some deep breaths.

  “Ooh, I must stop,” she said, between bursts of giggles, “all this laughing is making me feel sick again.” She breathed herself back into seriousness again and propped her chin onto her hands and gave me an inquisitive look. “So what’s changed?” she asked. “You can tell us, Meg. What’s put you in a good mood again?” She paused before adding melodramatically: “Perhaps you are . . . in love?”

  It was such an innocent, relaxed moment that I almost let down my guard and blurted out a serious yes. For the first time, perhaps ever, I could imagine confiding in my nearly sisters. But they were still in the grip of the giggles, and Cecily’s question had been too much for them. Before I got a chance to say anything, they’d both subsided back against the pillows, and were rocking each other again in helpless, painful glee. I wasn’t sure whether I was pleased or not that I’d been saved from the indiscretion I’d been about to commit.

  “How’s Father’s picture coming along?” Meg asked, at the end of her fourth sitting. “Will you show it to me soon?”

  It was an overcast morning. The light was softer than usual. With a soft light in her eyes, too, she’d been telling Hans Holbein a long-ago story about Sir Thomas’s wit: about how he’d met a fraud of a Franciscan monk in Coventry who’d told him that getting to heaven was easy if you only relied on the Virgin Mary. All you had to do was say the rosary every day (and pop a penny into the Franciscan’s purse every time you recited the psalterium beatae virginis).

  “Ridiculum,” Sir Thomas said matter-of-factly, even after the monk brought out all his books “proving” that Mary’s intervention had worked miracles on many occasions. Finally, with a lawyer’s respect for logical argument, he silenced the monk with the reasonable argument that it was unlikely that heaven would come so cheap.

  Hans Holbein had roared with appreciative laughter. “That sounds like the kind of thing a friend of Erasmus’s would say,” he chortled. It was also the kind of thing that he might say, or Kratzer, if either of them had the presence of mind to get the phrases off their lips with More’s panache.

  But he also noted her nostalgic look, and the fleeting sadness on her face as she quietly said yes. They both knew that this wasn’t how the Sir Thomas of today, the defender of the church at all costs, would behave.

  He didn’t understand why, but something about the complicity of that moment meant that he instinctively nodded assent when she next asked to see the picture.

  “I am not usually shy about my work. But this one I am having problems with,” he said, dancing a little jig of unease in front of the covered picture. “I have seen your father, and talked to him, and I know he is an intelligent, good, gentle man who loves to laugh. Only the other day I was laughing to hear his judgment in court when your Dame Alice adopted a street dog, and a beggar woman took her to court saying the dog was hers; and Sir Thomas ruled that Dame Alice must buy the dog; and everyone was happy, the kind of justice I can understand, ha ha! But my picture is too serious. And nothing I do will put laughter into the face of the man I’m drawing.”

  She’d got up from her chair and was standing beside him, waiting for him to tweak aside the cloth. He could see the pale skin on the nape of her neck. Reluctantly, he stepped aside. But he couldn’t bring himself to raise his arm so close that he would maybe brush against her to show her the picture. Instead, he stepped back. “Look for yourself,” he said, almost closing his eyes.

  He stared out the window, not daring to look at her expression, making a futile effort to hear what her breathing said about her reaction to his picture. But there was nothing to be learned from listening to that soft, rhythmic in-and-out.

  Eventually, he turned and sneaked a look at her. She was standing thoughtfully in front of the picture, with the cloth in her hand, not moving her body but nodding her head very slowly up and down. He thought she recognized her father in the face before her, with its black cap and black furred cloak and gold chain of office against the simple backdrop of a green curtain; and he thought she looked resigned at seeing that this harsh version of Sir Thomas, staring into the shadows, was a true likeness.

  “You have a gift for the truth, Master Hans” was all she said as she became aware of him looking at her. And her voice was definitely sad now.

  “Father does a hard job. It’s changed him. It shows on his face, doesn’t it?”

  Their eyes met, and something in hers told him she knew at least some of the crueler rumors circulating now about Sir Thomas whipping heretics tied to trees in the garden, or taking gloating personal charge of physical interrogation sessions in the Tower. He looked away.

  She sat down again. Heavily. Looking at the floor. Looking up at him again; then, softening with sudden trust, she said, almost in a whisper:

  “People say ugly things about Father these days, don’t they? I expect you’ve heard some of them.”

  He realized she was sounding him out, but he didn’t know how to reply. He spread his hands helplessly. He had no idea how the witty, charming man who sat for him could be the same person as the villain of the Steelyard rumors. Personally he liked More; liked the way his mind sparked like fire and his eyes blazed with ideas. That was the paradox. “Ach, there are always slanders,” he stammered. “If you really want to know the truth about someone, the only honest way is to tell them the slanders against them to their face. And if you trust them enough to ask for the truth, you must believe the answer they give. Then you can forget the slanders.”

  She didn’t answer directly. She looked at her hands for so long that he wondered whether she was thinking of something completely different.

  Then she said, with a somber air: “Well, you’ve certainly painted truth in his face—he won’t deny that. You shouldn’t change your picture.” And suddenly she lightened. “But I’ve just thought of something you could put in too that would make him laugh.”

  She got up, suddenly almost floating with the idea she’d had, and skipped out of the room. “Don’t go away!” she whispered.

  Astonished, indulgent, hopeful, baffled, rejoicing at the laugh in her look, he waited.

  She came back with two heavy pieces of red velvet, grinning all over her face.

  “What are these?” he asked, getting more bewildered by the moment.

  “Sleeves, of course,” she answered briskly. “Look.”

  And she pulled them up over Hans Holbein’s own workmanlike linen shirtsleeves. Sleeves they were—big, sensuous, crimson velvet things, with a puff of splendor at the upper arm richly gathered at the elbow, and a long, soft, floppy forearm cuff. At the top there was a row of buttons, as if to attach them to a gown. But there was no gown. He’d never seen anything like them.

  He looked down helplessly, watching the top of Meg’s head moving busily under his as she tied the buttons on each side to the laces of his shirt. He didn’t want to start imagining her undressing him, or worse, but there was something so suggestive about her bobbing head below that he felt beads of sweat break out on his forehead. He turned his head hastily to stare out of the window.

  “There!” She stood back. Relieved, he also took a step away. He looked down at himself. From wrist to shoulder he was a grandee. Maybe one-eighth of his body was covered in Italy’s finest clothwork. The rest of him was the same rough artisan he’d been born, in humble wool and leather.

  She laughed at the look on his face. “It’s a family joke,” she said happily, transported back to easier days. “You know Father still does bits of
unpaid legal work for the London guilds, for old times’ sake? Well, when the Emperor Charles V came to London a few years ago, before the war with France, they chose Father to give a speech praising the friendship between the two kings, and they gave him a ten-pound grant toward the cost of a new velvet suit as a reward. But of course that wasn’t enough to pay for a whole set of clothes—and I don’t know if you noticed, but Father hates dressing up. So he ordered just sleeves. Ten pounds’ worth. He loves them. He puts them on over some ordinary old gown, and wears them to court. His manservant hates it—poor old John Wood, he thinks Father’s making a mockery of public office. But Father thinks it’s hilarious—a remedy against vanity. So do I.”

  There was a hint of defiance in her voice; the defiance of someone who knows that the person she loves is a mass of contradictions and is daring the inquirer to mock. But he didn’t want to mock. He was looking down at his red velvet arms, turning the idea over in his head, beginning to get excited about it.

  “So—just red velvet sleeves—sticking out of his cloak?” he asked. He could already see it. It was almost perfect. Now there was just one more problem. “Yes . . . yes . . . that would help. And I need to find the skull too . . .” he said, thinking aloud. “I want to put a memento mori in a corner. But I can’t think where it is. My fault; my big disorder. I can never find anything I want.”

  Halfheartedly he began ruffling through the top layer of his mess. He was disconcerted to see her put a hand to her mouth and start laughing behind it.

  “Master Hans, haven’t you noticed?” she was saying. “I put your skull away for you days ago. It’s under the table, on top of a pile of your pictures. I covered it all with a cloth to discourage people from prying. You shouldn’t leave things like that lying about. Your pictures, I mean, not the skull. You could get into trouble.”

  He was rooted to the spot. He felt his face go hot and cold. She’d seen his pictures.