“Because he wanted to show us he’s afraid, but he couldn’t find the words to tell us,” John said simply. “He’s an old-fashioned man at heart. He grew up in a time when people lived in the public eye all the time, and they each had their public role to play, and they did it perfectly. The only time you ever saw people wail and beat their breasts and display their feelings was on the stage. The mummers’ plays and all the holy days of pageants and disguisings and misrule were the only good excuse there used to be for a bit of riot and upheaval—the only chance for people to go wild.
So what I think is that—now he’s lost his own public role, and been left alone with his thoughts, and he’s trapped with all these terrors he doesn’t know how to discuss—he took refuge in the only way he knew to show us his feelings. He got in the mummers.”
Everyone was staring at John with dumbfounded expressions. Except the Dame. She was nodding, as if it made perfect sense to her. She and John were from the age of mummers too.
“You’re saying,” she said, and her face had softened, “that what he was doing out there was putting on a kind of mystery play for us of what’s in his heart."
We’d never heard her so poetical.
“Yes,” John said, with a conviction that no one would gainsay. He was too obviously right. “I shouldn’t have hit him. I thought he was being cruel. But he must just be desperate.”
I saw tears gather in Cecily’s eyes and the dawning of sympathy on every other face. “That’s a clever idea,” Giles Heron murmured, and his well-modulated politician’s voice vibrated with respect for John. “I’d never have thought it out for myself.”
“Oh, poor Father,” Anne whispered.
“Could I leave him a draft?” John asked practically, turning back to Alice. “To help him sleep?”
She shook her head. “He’d never take it,” she said. “I can’t tell you how often I’ve suggested that. But he just starts talking about the will of God. He’s impossible.”
She crossed herself.
“Well, amen to that,” John said with resignation. He’d known it was what she’d say. “But he’d be more reasonable if only he could get some rest.”
John let me bind his knuckles when we got home. He lay on the bed with his arm awkwardly outstretched as I cleaned and bandaged.
“How could you go from hitting him to understanding him so fast?” I asked tenderly, admiringly, gratefully. But when I lifted my hand to stroke his face, I saw he was asleep.
Master Hans’s note came the next day. He would come to Well Hall in the last week of September.
I let it drop back to the table. I’d pinned all kinds of hopes on the remaking of the portrait and the renewal of our friendship with Master Hans. But after last night’s uproar, I couldn’t believe anymore (even if I carried on hoping) that the trip would really mark a new beginning for Father. He had no intention of retiring quietly, picking up the threads of whatever old friendships were still on offer now he was just a private citizen, or doing what he’d said he wanted to do when he first resigned: taking to his prayers and serving God. He didn’t know how to live a private life. John had proved that.
Father had taken the loss of the chancellorship as liberation from the constraints of doing the king’s bidding, but not as a cue to leave the public stage. And I woke up gloomily sure that, however frightened he was, he’d go on stubbornly fighting for the Catholic Church.
He’d be a crusader to the last.
My mood was linked to the unsettling moment I’d had on the boat ride home, hugged tight next to a John who was still sitting prouder and taller than usual, and sneaking admiring looks up at him. I didn’t know if it was the heat of the night air, or the fluttering of birds and bats on the shore reminding me of the devil visiting Elizabeth Barton, or just my mind being fuddled with the wine and emotion of the evening. But once John’s eyelids began to droop, I’d looked back at the night sky above the Chelsea house—and for a long, bewildering moment, I could have sworn I’d seen a long comet tail trailing back from a bloodred orb hovering over the house. No one else saw it. The boatman was grunting and watching his oars dipping rhythmically into the water.
When I nudged John, wrapped up beside me in his cloak, he took a moment or two to respond.
By the time I’d hissed “look” into his ear and pointed back at the sky, and got him to turn round to follow my finger, what I thought I’d seen had vanished. All that was left was the innocent white full moon, and a wisp of cloud, and the shadows.
19
The leaves were turning red and the roads to mud as Hans Holbein rode uneasily out of London, mounted on an unfamiliar horse borrowed from the Steelyard, with his packs bumping behind him across the animal’s stout withers. He was leaving for Well Hall earlier than he’d originally planned, yet autumn was already on its way, and there was a chill in the air.
He’d spent all summer thinking about this. He’d stopped haunting Bucklersbury hoping for a glimpse of Meg—a man had to show some restraint—but nothing could stop him dreaming every night of arriving triumphantly at Well Hall on 21 September and of her rushing out to meet him with a face radiant with happiness.
Pride was all that had stopped him from trying to see Meg now, early, outside those dreams. But it was a pride fierce enough for him to catch himself on every stray thought that his rebellious mind began to form, every wisp of every idea of somehow bringing the meeting in the quiet safety of the countryside forward.
Stop, he’d been telling himself sternly, each time he found himself daydreaming. Late September is soon enough.
After that, we’ll see. The important thing is to make the painting perfect.
But in the end he’d not been able to be so patient. It was his interview with Thomas Cromwell on the morning of 7 September in London that had finally made up his mind that he should rush things after all.
Holbein had been asked days earlier to visit the politician to discuss painting his portrait. He’d woken up to a glorious golden late-summer dawn and walked through the quiet streets, so full of anticipation at the prospect of the important commission to come that he scarcely noticed the sights and sounds around him. It was only when he was being ushered into Cromwell’s chambers and beginning the affable bow he’d been rehearsing in his mind since he left his rooms that he realized he’d been walking for the best part of an hour through a frenzy of bells ringing from every church tower in London and Westminster.
The narrow eyes in the big slab of a face were watching him with what Holbein thought was amusement. The man at the table stopped writing and put down his quill. But he didn’t get up or answer Holbein’s bow, just jerked a thumb at the window, behind which the bells were going crazy.
“So. God be praised,” Cromwell said drily, and smiled his cunning, lopsided smile. Holbein straightened up, wrong-footed by having his courtesy ignored, and looked carefully at the other man for guidance as to how to respond.
“God has smiled on the king and queen, Master Hans,” Cromwell said, with exaggerated patience, and Holbein understood uncomfortably that it was his own ignorance that was tickling the politician. “Can’t you hear the bells?”
“Do you mean—the prince is born?” Holbein said, and quickly stretched his mouth into his broadest possible smile. Cromwell was making him just as nervous today as he had the last time they’d met. He was the kind of man, Holbein felt, who could never let an encounter with another man pass without establishing that he was tougher than him, superior to him, in some important way. Holbein had met plenty of brawny bullies like this in taverns in his time, and he knew he preferred to steer clear of them. He didn’t enjoy pointless arm wrestling. Still, this news would please Cromwell. And he’d associate Holbein with that moment of good fortune forever; so Holbein should rejoice.
“Not exactly,” Cromwell said, even more drily, and now Holbein could see something wolfish in the man’s grin. It was very far from an expression of joy. “Today we are celebrating the birth of the .
. . princess. Princess Elizabeth.”
“God be praised! Long live Princess Elizabeth!” Holbein burbled hastily, and bowed again. Inside he was cursing his bad luck. To be here at the very hour when a daughter was born—meaning that the king had, despite setting all Europe on its ears through the break with the Church of Rome, failed to get an heir and secure his Tudor dynasty, and Cromwell, the statesman who had done most to guide the king down that risky path, must be feeling anxious about whether his policy was now going terribly wrong—was no way to begin his professional relationship with the man.
Cromwell bared his teeth again. “Well, to business,” he said, unceremonious as ever, and turned the conversation to practicalities: the size he wanted his picture to be and the date he could make himself available to be painted. “The first day of October,” he specified laconically. He didn’t offer alternatives. It was clear he could see no reason why a painter wouldn’t drop everything else to paint him.
Holbein swallowed, and nodded, and looked down at the papers on Cromwell’s desk. It would mean coming back early from his quiet week with the Mores.
“I’ll be here,” he said, with more enthusiasm than he felt.
There was no more to be discussed. Cromwell felt for paper, wrote him a new three-line permit to return, sanded it, and handed it over. Holbein bowed, murmuring thanks, and left.
Only when he was already outside, listening to the bells again while folding the paper into his pouch, did he notice there were other words on the back. Cromwell must have turned over the page he’d been writing as Holbein walked in to hide it from him, then forgotten what he’d done and reused the other side. There was just one sentence: “Soon: look into Master More’s friendship with the Maid of Kent. ”
Was persecuting More going to be Cromwell’s way of venting his anger, now that the birth of a princess had put a question mark over his own career rise? Holbein wondered. He didn’t know the answer, though the prickling down his spine made him feel that the danger More was in was coming closer. But he did, suddenly, know what he had to do. He went home and wrote a hasty note asking Margaret Roper if he could come to stay immediately to begin preparing the portrait, as he’d have to be back in town earlier than he’d thought. It wasn’t what he’d dreamed of: Meg wouldn’t get to Well Hall for days yet. But at least he’d have time with the Ropers and time to make the picture a perfect gesture of respect for More. He was already having a new idea about how to do that. He’d borrowed the horse, planned his route, gone and bought some extra materials—including several large planks of wood—and packed his bag by the time Margaret Roper’s welcoming reply came. There was nothing left to do but set off.
She was a little woman, Margaret Roper: dark and sweet-faced, full-bodied now after the birth of her third baby, which was in her arms (a second girl, called Alice in honor of the More children’s stepmother).
Her thoughtful eyes (with anxious wrinkles he didn’t remember from before) and long nose were not unlike Meg’s, but she had none of her stepsister’s fascinating bony, rangy sharpness. No glitter in her eyes. No hidden wounds in her heart, except those put there by her family’s current misfortunes. A nice, kind girl, and certainly a good wife, but not what Holbein would ever have called attractive.
But she was delighted to see him. She rushed out of the house—a solid new redbrick edifice which Holbein could tell at first glance would be comfortable and free of drafts and full of pretty tapestries and cushions and the tantalizing smells of good food—into the lush garden to greet him. She was holding the baby. She’d been watching for him from the nursery window.
“It’s so good to see you, Master Hans!” she cried in her soft, forgiving voice, squinting up against the afternoon sun at him as he tried to make a leg, exhausted from the unaccustomed exercise of riding, swing effortlessly over his horse’s back and dismount elegantly.
“We’ve been so excited that you’re coming. It will be just like the old days again for a while.”
He slithered to the ground, bringing one of the bags clattering down with him and looking a bit startled at the noise.
She laughed kindly. “It’s been years, hasn’t it? Far too long—but you look just the same. A bit more sleek and prosperous, of course. And tired from your journey. Let’s get someone to look after your horse and take your things into the house and get you some refreshments quickly. You must need feeding.”
She wafted him to the open door and into the welcome gloom, where the smell of roasting meat made his mouth begin to water. She had a gift for hospitality: he felt enfolded in affection already, so that he knew it didn’t matter that with all the new impressions crowding in on him he wasn’t taking in everything her soft voice was saying; just odd, welcome words, like “Ale or wine?” and “Little Alice sleeps beautifully . . . only Tommy and Jane adore her and keep waking her up to hold her,” and “Do you like pigeon?”
He had a pretty parlor with a great mullioned window that let in a torrent of late summer light and was fringed on one side by a luscious vine casting dappled, dancing shadows into the doorway. His bedchamber and privy were directly behind it: clean, comfortable, simple. He let out a great happy sigh. This visit was going to be a joy.
“It’ll be very quiet for you for a bit, Master Hans,” Margaret said, a bit apologetically as she showed him the rooms and a groom brought in his pile of bags.
“Just me, and Will when he’s not in town. Father and the Dame”—she dimpled affectionately at the pet name for her stepmother—“will be here in a week or so—they were delighted you were coming sooner than they thought. And Cecily and Meg say they’ll try and come early too, though they can’t answer for their husbands. But my brother, John, is held up in town with Anne. And we’re not sure about the Daunceys, though Elizabeth says they’ll come when they can. We don’t see much of them these days . . .” She paused, looking wistful.
Holbein could just imagine why. He remembered William Dauncey with no great affection from Chelsea: a whey-faced youth with pretentious ways, obsessed by his own personal advancement, unwilling to share a word with a humble painter whose friendship could have no possible bearing on William Dauncey’s career and so who wasn’t worth speaking to. He wouldn’t imagine that someone like that would take the risk of having too much to do with a father-in-law who had fallen into the deep shadow More had—even one who had done so much to start Dauncey’s parliamentary career. He’d heard Dauncey had been the only MP from what Cromwell sneeringly called the “Chelsea group” not to have spoken out against Cromwell’s Act of Restraint of Appeals that spring, the law that broke the unity of the Catholic Church and stopped Queen Catherine appealing to Rome against her divorce decree. It made him angry to think of the disloyalty of it. It was easy to see why his pretty wife, as Holbein recalled, had been more than a bit in love with John Clement.
“It’s because they live outside London,” Margaret was going on, rushing to excuse them. “I know how hard it is to keep up, if you’re far away and your children are with you and there’s really no reason to go to town . . . I try to make the effort. I go and see them sometimes. But they hardly ever come here, and Meg says she hasn’t seen them since she married, except William occasionally at dinner at Chelsea while Parliament’s sitting. Still”—she sighed—“it’s not surprising really. Elizabeth has three lovely children now: another Tommy, like mine, and another Jane, and now little Henry too. You won’t have seen any of them, will you? We were all still just about to have them when you left. Well, you’ll be overwhelmed. We all are. They’re a handful. No wonder she doesn’t like to travel with them.”
She stopped and put the dimply smile back on her face. “Listen to me running on, tiring you out with family gossip,” she added apologetically. “All I mean is that when they do come it will be a pleasure for all of us: our first proper reunion in years.”
“I’ll enjoy that,” Holbein said heartily, relaxing into the soft atmosphere she created, liking her more and more.
; But there was a sudden shadow on her face. She was looking doubtfully round at the mountain of stuff the groom was piling up. Holbein’s box of paints, ready for mixing. His tool kit with hammers and saws and nails. His bag of clothes. His poacher’s bag with the sketchbook and silverpoint pencils and crayons. His Turkish carpet. He’d brought almost everything he possessed, except the skull. In fact, he’d alarmed the old man so much by packing everything up to go that he’d had to pay a month’s rent in advance as proof he was planning to come back to Maiden Lane. And then there were the boards: great big things, from the same timber merchant who’d sold him the Baltic pine for the painting of ambassadors, now being propped gently against the clean lime-washed wall. How had he ever got so many packages on the back of a single horse?
“You do know the picture’s still in Chelsea, don’t you, Master Hans?” Margaret said, looking as though she felt guilty at having misled him over something important. “Father is bringing it with him. And I’ve been so excited at the thought that we’d see you that I’d almost forgotten that you’re here on business. I’m worried that you’ll think you’re wasting your time with me—though I’ve got lots of gardens to show you, and the countryside around here is lovely. It’s just that you won’t be able to do much painting till he gets here with the picture.”
Holbein laughed, a big reassuring belly laugh that was an expression of much more than just his wish to banish the anxious look from her face.
He was full of the idea of the picture he was about to make, in the sunshine pouring through this window into this lovely room that she’d so generously made his. It was going to be a triumph: a fearless, peerless depiction of the truth. He was fed up with skulking around being scared among the fearful. He was itching to start.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman Page 41
