“We four are united by our shared love of learning,” as the French king’s fresh-faced ambassador to London, Jean de Dinteville—Sieur de Polisy, Bailly de Troyes and Maître d’Hôtel of the French court—elegantly put it. “We are honored to make your acquaintance.” And Holbein felt his back relax a little, and he almost forgot to bow as he turned to drop his bag, begin his preparations, and examine the scene.
“I’ve got some ideas,” Kratzer said to him, a hissed aside. “Don’t forget to ask me. I’ve brought some stuff to help.”
Holbein nodded calmly and laid his book and silverpoint pencil out on the table behind him next to a few of the props he had brought. His hands weren’t sweating anymore.
His nerves had gone.
Alongside de Dinteville was Georges de Selve, the twenty-five-year-old bishop of Lavaur, who had just been sent over from Paris to help the ambassador cope with King Henry’s rages whenever he had to be told that the French king couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help make the pope see sense over the king’s marriage. (“Oh, his tempers,” de Dinteville was saying ruefully, shaking his elegant head. “They’re quite debilitating. I haven’t had a week without being ill since I got here in February.”) The two wanted a big impressive record of their mission, as tall as a tall man and square. They were prepared to pay lavishly.
Holbein had had ten Baltic oak panels prepared and put together in advance to suit the grandeur of the commission. The giant square was already up against his easel, eighty inches tall and wide, which Kratzer had sent to the ambassador’s home in advance.
Holbein let the three men talk and sip at their wine while he watched them and wondered how to compose his picture to show the Frenchmen at their best. The bishop had pink cheeks above his beard, a black bonnet, and a gown the glowing purplish brown color of mulberries; the ambassador had liquid eyes, furs, scarlet sleeves, and fine hands below his lace ruffles. Their backs had the straight poise of years of command and fearless inquiry. Their eyes sparkled with intelligence. They were both men of learning and subtlety, versed in every modern liberal art. He couldn’t see anything but that poise; but he sensed the fear in them as he paced and sketched and stared.
The three others were talking about the coronation. Both Frenchmen had been part of the court entourage. Representing France at the event had been part of the reason for the young bishop to be in London. If the child the new queen was carrying turned out to be a son—making the royal dynasty safe—it would be an event people would remember for generations to come. France, the go-between in King Henry’s so far unsuccessful negotiations with the pope, needed to be well represented.
Holbein was only half listening. It was easy to shut out the French words after so long hearing nothing but English and German. He was trying to focus on getting a first glimmering of his layout: the ambassador on the left; the bishop on the right; their faces turned to him; the accoutrements of nobility and learning scattered around them in ways he couldn’t yet picture—he wasn’t quite sure yet what props Kratzer had brought with him; and a memento mori of some sort grinning down from the center of the piece. But it seemed formulaic to him; like any old bookplate. He needed something more.
“He wasn’t there, did you see?” he heard, and lifted his head. Then he lowered it cautiously again and carried on laying lines on paper. “They said beforehand he wouldn’t go, but I didn’t believe he’d have the nerve to snub the new queen.”
They were talking about More. Holbein almost held his breath.
“He told Bishop Tunstall he couldn’t afford a new gown,” the French bishop said, and Holbein saw out of the corner of his eye that the young man looked bewildered; it could never have occurred to de Selve to excuse himself from anything on grounds of poverty. “Tunstall and two friends sent him some money for clothes. They knew how important it was for him to be seen there. He took their twenty pounds.”
Kratzer knew the power of money over a man; Kratzer traded in Toulouse woad and Gascon wine (the wine they were sipping now might even be stuff he’d provided); he had an interest in prospecting for metal ores in Cornwall. But Kratzer shook his head understandingly.
“More’s a rich man,” he said in his heavily accented French. “He stayed away on principle. There’s another story going around. Perhaps you’ve heard it?”
They shook their heads. They drew closer.
“I had it from Will Roper the other day,” Kratzer said, pink with secret pleasure at knowing. “I saw him in the street. More wrote back to Tunstall. He reminded him of the story of the Emperor Tiberius being faced with the dilemma of having to sentence a virgin to death for a crime for which virgins couldn’t be punished. He recalled how Tiberius’s advisers had suggested that the emperor first deflower the woman, then kill her. And he finished by telling Tunstall to watch out for his own virginity.
He wrote: ‘I can’t know whether I’ll be devoured. But even if I am I’ll know I haven’t been deflowered.’ ”
All three men laughed, then sighed and shook their heads. “A proud and honorable man,” the bishop said.
Why didn’t Kratzer tell me that? Holbein thought. He knows I love More and his family. He knows I admire his honesty. But Kratzer also knew that Holbein hadn’t been to see them. He’d read Holbein bits of Erasmus’s letters criticizing him for failing to go. Perhaps he’d been hinting that Holbein should go? Perhaps Kratzer himself saw more of the Mores than he realized? Perhaps Kratzer thought him a coward but was too polite to say so? He moved closer, holding up his book like a shield of invisibility.
“We live in dangerous times,” he heard. One of the Frenchmen. “If they’re hunting down scholars of More’s eminence for not agreeing with whatever the authorities tell them to believe—even here, in what I’ve always taken to be the most moderate of lands—then it’s the end of the era we were born into.”
He saw Kratzer nod. “The bigots are winning,” he said gloomily. “Both kinds of bigots . . .”
The ambassador finished his sentence for him: “And the only losers are the learned.”
They all shook their heads.
Holbein stared down again at his sketch, then up at the trio in front of him. He was hot with shame now; hot with the sudden certainty that, by not going to see More when he first got to England, he’d compromised himself.
He’d revealed himself as a small man, he saw now: someone incapable of big gestures and generosity of spirit. One of the fearful. The knowledge churned poisonously in his gut. He’d failed the man who’d done most for him, the man with the rough chin and the luminous eyes and the mellifluous voice and the fascination with ideas and words, the one Englishman with whom discussing your thoughts was truly a pleasure and an adventure.
Perhaps it was the dawning realization that all the learned men in this room thought the uncertain future of More was symptomatic of the woes of the age that was crystallizing the anxiety he’d suppressed for so long. Or perhaps it was just the sight of the bishop plucking with one hand at his mulberry velvet skirts, with the expression of regret still on his face at the idea of witnessing the death of learning, which gave Holbein the first flickering of his idea.
“Of all the dates people give when they talk about the end of the world coming, of all the dates my colleagues give when they look at the darkness of the skies . . . ,” Kratzer was saying, “do you know which one I’d say was the most significant?”
Mulberry, Holbein thought, excited without yet knowing quite why, only half listening to Kratzer’s French. Morus. The skull that Meg had once hidden under a table in Chelsea, on top of all his dangerous sketches, was on the table right behind him. He wasn’t sure yet, but he was beginning to get that rush of euphoria that meant a big thought. Hovering somewhere just out of reach of his mind was a shape; the shape of learning and fear; the shape of everything that was hidden in the stars. It was just possible that this was going to be a great picture.
“It’s not any of these bogus dates they talk about on the street. It’s simp
ler by far. It was Good Friday this year,” Kratzer went on, looking round with that big, bony, serious yet mischievous look that he had when visited by an idea: reckless, impelled to get the idea out and see what those around thought of it. “A millennium and a half after Christ’s death, with the churches all in mourning. The last day of the universal church too; the dark day that heralded Anne being proclaimed queen and England breaking away from Rome. What kind of God I personally believe in doesn’t matter here; the point is, that was the day they let the darkness in. And only the good Lord knows what will come of it all.”
“Kratzer,” Holbein called urgently, before the Frenchman could respond, breaking into the conversation, then blushing at his own uncouthness and muttering, “I’m sorry to interrupt,” before going on in the same preoccupied tone, slightly too loud: “Kratzer. Can I get your stuff out of your bag?”
Kratzer waved an arm without really paying attention. He was lost in his lament; starting now about what the heavens said about the troubled state of things on earth today.
Holbein emptied the astronomer’s bag on the table, in the grip of the thought beginning to take shape, not caring now if the objects rattled.
Kratzer’s astrolabe and the white decagonal sundial he’d painted before, when he painted Kratzer. Yes.
A couple of globes—earthly and heavenly—and more astronomical instruments that he didn’t recognize. Yes.
Books. Yes.
And a lute on a chair, which he could borrow. Everything he needed to show the quadrivium of higher learning: astronomy, geometry, arithmetic, and music, the four mathematical arts of harmony and precision.
Everything he needed to celebrate culture and scholarship.
He pulled them all together. Looked at them.
Yanked open his own bag where the strip of Turkish carpet was wrapped round all his paints and bottles and jars and boxes. Spun it away from the encumbrances so that the paints and bottles and jars and boxes fell where they lay. Spread it on the table, enjoying the rich red glow of its patterns under his fingers.
Began building a display on it, under the gentle, tormented face of the Christ figure on the crucifix nailed to the wall. Instruments to measure the heavens on the Turkish carpet on the table’s top layer; instruments of earthly life—the lute, the globe of the world (he’d paint it turned toward France, of course), and Kratzer’s arithmetic book and Lutheran hymnal on the lower layer.
He was beginning to see it come together: a picture that would convey the things of heaven and earth, not just by painting these objects but in more subtle ways; ways that Kratzer would help him plot; ways that would impress the greatest minds in Europe.
His hands were shaking. If this picture came off—if he managed to convey all the things in it that were bursting through his head now—it might be not just the perfect way to fame and fortune. It might be the way to make his peace with the Mores. Just possibly, it could even be the way to win the right to see Meg again.
He looked up, breath coming fast, eyes sizing up the lute that he was about to stride over and grab to add to his tableau. He’d forgotten the others. He was almost surprised to see three pairs of astonished eyes staring at him.
Kratzer came home with him and tiptoed up the bare stairs to Holbein’s rooms behind him. Holbein was silent and preoccupied, striding ahead, carrying the bag.
“Look.” Holbein shoved the sketch under Kratzer’s nose as soon as the other man had sat down in the dying light of the window. “This is my idea. You’ve got to help me make it better.”
“Aren’t you offering me a drink, at least?” Kratzer said, half laughing, not taking the younger man’s enthusiasm seriously enough, not looking at the drawing. “To get me thinking?”
Holbein stifled an impatient rejoinder. He took a deep breath. Kratzer was still glowing with the pleasure of having done him a good turn and the joy of having spent an afternoon in conversation with intelligent men.
He didn’t realize that his real work was yet to come.
“All right,” Holbein said, consciously taking a few deep breaths and summoning what patience he could. He went to the door and yelled hastily downstairs to the boy, “Fetch us some pies and some beer,” then came back, stood behind Kratzer’s shoulder, and looked down at the rough picture: the two Frenchmen, de Dinteville on the left, de Selve on the right, with the tableful of implements between them. The light was going already, even on this June
evening, making the sketch look gray and blurry.
He lit a candle. “Look properly, Nicholas, before it gets too dark,” he said pleadingly. “They’ll bring the food up in a minute.”
And, to his intense happiness, the astronomer at last heeded the urgency in his voice, nodded more seriously, and turned his head down to examine the picture properly.
By the time the boy came stumbling up the stairs to set out the food, the two men were lost in their idea.
They were leaning toward each other over the rough table, over a pencil sketch, and jabbering together in loud German. They ignored him. Ignored the food too. He slunk out, shaking his head. It was true what they said about foreigners. An excitable, unpredictable lot. They hadn’t even tipped him for his service.
“If you’re going to make it a Good Friday picture, you’ll need to borrow some Lenten things from the chapel at Bridewell,” Kratzer was saying, very fast. “It’s June. They won’t mind. We could take their Lenten veil, for instance. Hang it behind the table. That would probably be enough.”
Holbein nodded, beguiled away from his bigger aim by this practical idea. “We could set it as if it were the end of Tenebrae,” he said, catching Kratzer’s thought.
Tenebrae: the Darkenings, the ceremony that began Good Friday, and Wednesday and Thursday of Holy Week too, in which the priest gradually extinguished all the candles in the church.
On Good Friday, the darkest of days, the priest gradually uncovered the crucifix, hidden by the green Lenten veil, as the candles went out, before beginning the veneration of the cross. He crept barefoot on hands and knees to kiss the foot of the cross, followed by the laity. Once the veneration—the Creeping of the Cross, they called it in London—was complete, Christ’s burial was represented: the cross washed in water and wine and placed in a mock sepulchre—some box or nook somewhere in the church—until Easter Day dawned and the sepulchre was ritually opened to mark the miracle of the day.
Showing the curtain as it was at the end of Tenebrae, tweaked back just enough to reveal the cross in deep shadow, would immediately signal to anyone looking at the picture what the thought behind the picture was.
He almost laughed with pleasure. Then he shook himself. “But I want more from you,” he said, mock-sternly. He looked around, saw the beer, gave it a surprised glance, drank deep, and paused for breath. “Something only you can help with,” he added. “I want you to set your astrological instruments to show the time and day we’re talking about. The darkest hour: the fourth hour in the afternoon, when Christ died on the cross.”
Kratzer nodded, as if to say that should be easy enough.
“And I also want you to show me how to put every influence in the skies this year, on that day, at that time—like we were saying, a millennium and a half afterward—into the picture,” Holbein went on.
Kratzer looked up from his own tankard with a comical froth mustache on his upper lip. Holbein didn’t think to laugh. There was no expression on the astronomer’s face. He was in the moment; thinking only how this could be done.
“What, make it a horoscope of that date this year, you mean?” Kratzer asked, consideringly.
Humanists weren’t supposed to trust horoscopes; but Thomas More and Pico della Mirandola before him had been so vigorously commonsensical about denouncing them as superstitious claptrap that many others had been perversely reminded of the store they’d always set by the predictions.
Kratzer, like most people, enjoyed thinking about astrology, Holbein remembered from the hours he and Kratze
r had spent together long ago, designing that floating astronomical ceiling for the king; it had been full of astrological hints. So he wasn’t surprised to see Kratzer’s face break into a grin. The astronomer grabbed the picture.
“Pencil,” he ordered. Lightly he sketched over it the shape used by every astrologer casting a chart: the horoscope square, a square with a second square set slantwise inside it, and a third square upright again, with sides half as long as the first, inside that. That gave twelve spaces for the twelve astrological houses through which the planets moved: twelve domiciles from which planetary influences malign and benign could exert their influence.
“You’ll have to add an extra bit of wood at the side here,” Kratzer muttered, squeezing his left-hand line for the outside square a little inward; “we’ll keep that crucifix right out of the horoscope square, if you don’t mind.”
Holbein nodded. He could see the force of the argument. It wouldn’t be prudent to put Christ into an astrological chart. The rough lines Kratzer was sketching in showed the first house, beginning with the ascendant—the horizon line at the time of the chart—starting from de Dinteville’s dagger.
“Look,” Kratzer said. He was scribbling signs on his lines. “This is where the most important planets were. It’s just from memory; I’ll do it properly later. But this is something I’ve been thinking about; it’s what I mean whenever I say the heavens have been full of warnings.”
Holbein looked closer. He couldn’t decipher the signs.
“I’ll just tell you the important bits. The very beginning of Libra: in the ascendant,” Kratzer said, pointing at his stylized scribble of scales, “in the second degree. The first degree is combatant; they draw it as a man holding a javelin in each hand. But the second degree is what they call the cleric, and they draw him with a censer, because they say Christ was born when the second degree of Libra was rising. So, a time when religion and fighting was on men’s minds.
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