Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  She held the baby while I washed. By the time John brought Father back from mass, I was clean and smelling of roses and milk in the new white-embroidered nightgown she’d made for me.

  John sat on the bed with his arms around me; Margaret pulled a stool up for Father beside us. Every head turned toward the baby, murmuring and marveling. And I lay back against my husband’s arm, feeling the baby’s body lying against my breast and glowing at the simplicity of a life where everyone who mattered most to me could be enclosed in a single room, where I could have weeks more lying here with little Tommy before I’d need to walk across the street and be churched and go back to normal life.

  It was Margaret who broke the spell. “Listen!” she said suddenly, and went to the window with a look of great surprise on her face. We all looked up, a little startled to hear her talk above her usual soft semiwhisper. She pulled at the window.

  “Don’t,” John said sharply, “no cold breezes.”

  But she took no notice. “What are they saying?” she said, just as sharply. “Did you hear?” and she turned back from our uncomprehending faces and struggled with the catch until the urgency on her face infected John too, and he got up and opened it for her, just a few inches, to keep the harshness of outside at bay.

  And then his face changed too as he listened to the hubbub coming in with the chilly air. As I hugged little Tommy closer to me to keep him warm, I saw astonishment dawn on John’s dark, even features—astonishment mixed with consternation. And Father leapt up to pace toward the window, so I couldn’t see his face, just his dark head in its velvet cap. He was listening intently. I saw his body go tight.

  I must have been the last to distinguish the words coming up from the street outside, though I could hear from the start that they weren’t the usual come-and-buy cries of the apothecaries’ market.

  “Yes of course it’s true!” I made out in Mad Davy’s cracked falsetto. “The scarlet carbuncle’s been burst!”

  Hubbub; cheers mixed with jeers. I thought I heard the strange words “Wolf-see” caterwauled in the background. “I swear to Almighty God!”

  John leaned down and boomed: “Davy! Keep it down! You’re disturbing the peace! What’s this nonsense you’re howling?”

  More noise from the street; footsteps edging back from our window. I could imagine the half circle of faces looking uneasily up. But Mad Davy wasn’t embarrassed. I could hear him hawk in disgust at the stupidity of those around him; I could almost see the demented look of triumph in his eye, now that he had a respectable witness.

  “It’s not nonsense, Dr. John!” I heard him bellow back, and this time there couldn’t be any doubt about the words. “I just heard it at St. Paul’s Cross! Everyone on Cheapside’s talking about it! Go listen for yourself if you don’t believe me!” He paused for effect.

  “What, then?” John yelled back impatiently. “Come on, spit it out, man.”

  “Cardinal Wolsey’s under arrest!” the voice yodeled triumphantly back up. And this time there were more cheers than jeers behind him.

  There was no more unpopular man in London than the grasping, paunchy lord chancellor—the butcher’s son, and the only royal servant closer than Father to the king. Even Father, for all his forbearance, didn’t respect the cardinal much. You could see it in the lift of his eyebrow, and his sideways smile. John felt in his purse, dropped a coin into the street, and closed the window without another word.

  Even with the window shut, the room suddenly felt cold. We all stared at Father, who looked expressionlessly back at us.

  Margaret broke the silence. “Is it true, Father?” she asked timidly, putting a little white hand on his arm.

  He softened a little as he looked down at her face, framed in her modest bonnet. Then he nodded.

  “It appears the king is making his disappointment in his servant plain,” he said, raising a quizzical eyebrow, Erasmus fashion. “For all his fraudulent juggling, the cardinal hasn’t been able to juggle the matter of the royal marriage to the king’s satisfaction.”

  He stopped. He had no more to say on the subject.

  “So who,” Margaret persisted bravely, “will the King make lord chancellor instead?”

  “Margaret,” Father said in gentle reproof, “you know I don’t have an answer for you. All I know is that I’m summoned to see the king tonight. I may know more afterward.”

  He would never admit to wanting the job himself. “But I tell you this,” he said as he got up to go. “I’d happily be bagged up and drowned in the Thames if it would make three things come true in Christendom. If all the princes who make war would make peace . . . If all the errors and heresies afflicting the church would melt away and leave us in perfect niformity of religion . . . And if the question of the king’s marriage were brought to a good conclusion.”

  He bowed. I didn’t think that his idea of a good conclusion for the question of the king’s marriage could possibly coincide with the king’s idea of the best outcome, but no one commented on what he’d said. We hardly heard his footsteps on the stairs. When he wanted to, Father could move as quietly as a cat in the night.

  Afterward, clucking her children into place around her as she got ready to take them to bed, Margaret said, “It will be him, won’t it?” and she had hope in her voice.

  But it was the way John said “It will be him, won’t it?” when we were alone in the room again that I remembered afterward. His voice was harsh. “The cleverest men can be the biggest fools. He doesn’t realize himself how much of a court man he’s become. But I can tell: he’s now interested enough in the exercise of power that he won’t be able to resist taking the job. He’ll find himself conveniently forgetting that the only thing the king really wants of his next chancellor is to make Anne Boleyn his queen. He may even find himself thinking he can use his new powers to persuade the king to change his mind.”

  I remember not really taking in the seriousness of John’s tone as he spoke. I was kissing the top of Tommy’s head, thinking sleepily that the smell of his tiny scalp was the smell of happiness, feeling the sharp aches around my body but not minding them.

  Yet I did look up at John’s next words, spoken with utter certainty: “Nothing’s going to stop this king marrying that woman. You only have to look at his face to know that. Sensuality is in his blood. A wise man would keep away from the mess that Henry’s going to make.” He was staring into the fire, and maybe it was the red flickering light from below that lent his features their brooding otherworldly aspect, or maybe just the darkness of what he was thinking. “I worry that your father’s about to fly too close to the sun,” he added. He prodded at the embers of one half-burned log with his boot. With a rush of flame and ash, it fell forward into the grate as John added, “And crash.”

  11

  So write to her, dear boy,” the old man murmured. He was leaning across the table, over the ruins of a dinner he’d only pecked at (though Holbein had made more serious inroads into it), and his face in the candlelight was more alive than those of most men a third of his age, and shining with persuasive charm. “You could, for instance, tell her how much I admired your picture.”

  Holbein couldn’t resist sneaking a sideways look at the small copy of the painting of the Mores, propped up against a jug on the table on top of its cloth wrapping. He’d been quietly saying good-bye to it all day. But then he turned his eyes down toward his tankard again and wriggled the feet he couldn’t see under the table. Mulishly, he shook his head. “You know me,” he muttered. “I’m no writer.”

  It was the first time he’d seen Erasmus since his return to Basel. The old man, appalled by what was happening to the cheerfully freethinking city he’d made his home for eight years—at the damage the evangelical hot-heads had done to the physical fabric of the city and to its mood with their rampages and violent demands for change—had wrapped his thin body in his furs and left Basel for placid Freiburg, a short ride downriver, right after the rioters had succeeded in getting new
religious laws put through in April.

  “There was no one who didn’t fear for himself when those dregs of the people covered the whole marketplace with arms and cannons,” he’d been telling the younger man earlier this evening. Holbein could see that he’d never forgive the uncouthness of that mob, smashing the cathedral and hurling statues through stained glass. No wonder people had started calling the evangelicals Protestants. “Such a mockery was made of the images of the saints, and even of the crucifixion, that you’d have thought some miracle must have happened,” Erasmus added waspishly, with all the disdain that a man who always seemed a little surprised that his mind was attached to a flesh-and-blood body would naturally feel for the kind of people coarse enough to revel in their muscle and brawn and ability to intimidate with hot breath and roars of rage and clenched fists. Still in his nostrils was the smell of the ashes of the bonfires of the vanities in the square. He was never going to accept praying in a whitewashed church.

  The old man’s absence had been one of the things Holbein had found to mourn in the pious new Basel of the Reformationsordnung. There were plenty of others. Prosy had been killed in a tavern fight. Old Johannes Froben, the publisher, was dead. Bonifacius Amerbach had absented himself, though he hadn’t formally left; he could usually be found in Freiburg too. Holbein’s two best patrons, Jakob Meyer and Hans Oberreid, had openly refused to declare for the reformed faith and so had lost their positions in the council. The university had been closed since the riots. The printers were under strict censorship. The spirit had gone out of the rest of the crowd he’d expected to find discussing the state of the world over a tankard of ale at the taverns and print shops. Now that everything they’d all dreamed about and discussed endlessly in their late-night conversations long ago was actually coming to pass, Basel didn’t feel quite like home anymore. The newly reformed authorities were watching public morality too zealously for comfort. That wasn’t why the center had gone out of Holbein’s world; but it was a good enough lie to try and fool himself with for now. And whenever he found his head turning hopefully after a dark female head of hair, or his heart lightening at a tall girl’s body tripping awkwardly down the street, he always muttered to himself, in that dreary moment afterward when she would turn out not to be English Meg

  after all, “the bloody bigots,” as if somehow the authorities were to blame for the gnawing wretchedness that had been consuming him all these months.

  He looked at the picture that was meant for Erasmus all the time—a small copy of the More family portrait, a present from Thomas More to his old friend, with Meg’s head leaning forward to point out a line in a book to old Sir John. He kept it in his bag. He took it out in the safety of the tavern several times a day and stared at it with a pain he couldn’t name mixed up with his pride in its execution, and drank too much beer to take away the darkness inside. In one burst of guilt at the bad-tempered failure of a family man he’d become, he painted Elsbeth and the children. It was meant to be a love gift. But it came out as he felt, a picture of gloom: a worn old hausfrau and whining children, all looking hopelessly out of the frame and away from a father who loved someone else and hated himself for it.

  Still, for months Holbein resisted the notes that came to him from Freiburg. He recognized Erasmus’s spidery writing straightaway. He told himself he didn’t want to go gallivanting off down the Rhine just to sit around moaning with the Freiburg exiles about how hard times were. He was going to make a go of it in Basel, where, however hard the times were for painters as the churches were whitewashed, he was still somehow finding scraps of print shop work here and there to keep money flowing in.

  Deep down, he knew there was a better reason why he was avoiding visiting his first patron. He hadn’t yet worked out what he could tell the sharp-eyed philosopher about his time in England without betraying himself as a broken hearted fool. Anyway, he didn’t want to give away the picture just yet.

  So he stuffed the notes under the half-tanned hides in the smelly downstairs room at St. Johannes Vorstadt. After little Catherine, scooting round the floor with apparently endless energy, found them and began tearing them up for a game and scattering the scraps, he took to crumpling them into balls and pushing them down the mouth of the big jug that never seemed to get moved from the top shelf in the kitchen. It was Elsbeth this time. She didn’t say anything. Just put the three notes she’d found, with their crumples smoothed out, in a heap beside him at dinner one day, and fixed him with her usual tired, reproachful stare. He couldn’t stand the guilt. Why did she always have to look like that? He’d bought them a new house with his London money, hadn’t he? She had a new brown dress, bought with the proceeds from the sale of his velvet jacket, didn’t she? He stuffed the letters angrily in his pocket without a word and swung himself out, past Froben’s book depository and into town, stomping down the riverbank without eating the stew she’d made for him. Then he got hungry and stopped for a meat pie at a cookshop. With the reassuring smells of beer and pork all around him, lulled by the restrained hubbub of the other men in drab clothes escaping their wives, he calmed down. He pulled out the notes and read them. They were as full of easygoing friendliness as Erasmus always was, with none of the grandeur you’d expect from someone of his fame: longing to know about London, eager for news of More and his family, and especially, all the papers said, hopeful of hearing how Holbein himself was faring. “Bonifacius and the others ask after you,” one note added. Holbein felt his heart softening.

  He was no writer. He could only put his own thoughts to paper with a clumsiness that embarrassed him. There was nothing for it but to go to Freiburg. He went home, pulled Elsbeth into the rough half shrug, half embrace that he so often let pass for an apology after he’d gotten irritated with her, registered the reluctant half smile on her face that usually passed for acknowledgment, if not quite forgiveness, and got her to put together a bag for him. Then he got on the river transport.

  So he was here, and full of food and drink in the comfortable house that the city fathers had put at their important guest’s disposal, and Amerbach had been at dinner, and he’d shown him the copy of the family picture he’d brought from More to Erasmus, and the two others had praised it to the heavens, and he’d gone at a brisk trot through his tales of London, careful to spend more time describing the glitter of the court and his successes at getting commissions and all the sights of that huge, stinking, lively city than the family, and everything was all right. While he’d been talking about London, he’d felt the city spring to life in his mind, and his dreamlike sense that Meg too was just a boat ride or a walk through the garden away hadn’t yet dissipated into the wretchedness of reality. The exiles hadn’t even complained much. All Erasmus had said about the troubles, as he looked thoughtfully up and down the river during their predinner stroll, was: “Strasbourg, Zurich, Berne, Constance, St. Gallen, and now even Basel: all gone the way of the bigots. It’s hard to find a place these days where you can think your own thoughts. But it’s not bad here.”

  So Holbein hadn’t had to make a decision about whether to be disloyal to the city he’d returned to; and that was a relief.

  And now it was a hot night in the middle of August, but Erasmus had a fire. And Holbein was mellow enough to be enjoying the sweaty warmth of the fire and the renewed friendship, and feeling affectionate at the sight of Erasmus wrapping himself all the time in that furry robe that was always falling open—the old man felt the cold, even when it wasn’t cold; those skinny limbs with no real flesh on them, Holbein thought with benevolent contempt, complacently aware of the power in his own big powerful frame—and he’d relaxed right back into his bench long before Amerbach left for the night. For the first time since leaving England, he was feeling truly at home.

  “Tell me more, dear Olpeius,” Erasmus said, with his bright eyes glittering, settling back into his seat after saying good-bye to his guest. “More about More.” Erasmus liked his puns, Holbein remembered fuzzily; his best-selling book a
ll those years ago, Moriae Encomium, meant In Praise of Folly.

  But the title, which had been written at More’s house and was prefaced by lavish compliments to his host that had made More famous all over Europe, could also be read as In Praise of More, whom Erasmus had praised as the best friend and wisest scholar in Europe. Erasmus laughed his small, dry, inviting laugh at his own little sally, and fixed his eyes on Holbein’s flushed face, and waited.

  Holbein was too relaxed now to care if Erasmus guessed his secret. He settled his hands comfortably on the table and began to talk—about the Mores, Erasmus’s old friends, with an enthusiasm he’d tried to forget he felt; about the beauty of the house and the garden at Chelsea; about the earthy humor of Dame Alice; about the vibrancy of More’s mind and the pleasure of discussing any subject under the sun with him; about the lute duets; and about the esteem in which the lawyer was held at court.

  “Of course the Steelyard men didn’t like him breaking up the trade in religious books,” he recalled too, in the interests of fair-mindedness, “and Kratzer and I spent more time than I like to remember puzzling over how hard he was on the people who read them.” He stopped to see how Erasmus reacted to that before venturing further.

  Erasmus nodded sympathetically, not seeming to mind a hint of criticism of his friend. “Yessss. What he writes about religion these days often puzzles me too,” he said in his thin, precise voice, leaning encouragingly forward.

  He looked so receptive that Holbein wondered whether he could tell the story of the prisoner in the gatehouse. In the end he decided not to.

  Frankness was one thing, but he wasn’t a gossip. And he couldn’t be sure himself what the truth of that episode was, any more than he could be sure how far he sympathized with the wretched Rickmansworth villagers: he couldn’t believe that a man of More’s integrity could have had anything but a worthy motive for keeping a man with his face beaten to a pulp in a shed; he just couldn’t think what the worthy motive could be. So he changed the subject.