“Don’t you worry about that, Mistress Margaret,” he said as kindly as he could, as if she were a nice child he was making friends with. “Look.” And he pointed at the boards against the wall. “I’ve been thinking, and I’ve had an idea. I’m a better painter now than I used to be. I’ve learned a few new tricks along the way. I’ve found new ways of making my painting more true to life. It would be pointless just to make a few changes to an old picture, and not use all that knowledge. So I’ve brought everything I need to make a new one from scratch. It will mean working much harder than I’d planned while I’m here—it would have been so easy to just fix the background of your father’s painting while I enjoyed sitting around talking with all of you for a couple of weeks—but we’ll all be happier if I do it this way, because this painting will be far better than the one I did before.
But I’ll need to do lots of planning and preparation. So I’ll be busy enough until the others get here.”
Her mouth was an O of astonishment: not quite the overjoyed reaction he’d expected. Perhaps she’d got out of the habit of expecting people to go out of their way to do kindnesses to her now ill-starred family? Or perhaps she was worried about money?
“Look, I lived with your family for months,” he went on hastily. “You were all kinder to me than I’d ever expected anyone to be. This is the only way I have to repay my debt. And”—he gulped as he said it; he hadn’t thought about this: was it too crazy an offer for a man with his way to make in the world?—“it won’t cost you anything. You’ll get two paintings for the price of one; maybe one for here and one for Chelsea. It’s my thank you. It’s a present.”
He still didn’t know which question he’d answered with his awkward little speech. But when he saw the sweetness suffusing her face and turning her cheeks a surprised, happy pink, he felt that his gesture of generosity had been worth it. If he was going to have the courage of his convictions, and do the right thing at last by the people his heart was drawn to before the fate he suspected lay ahead finally caught them up, he might as well do it properly.
He had time to think out his plan in more detail as he sawed his boards and joined them together; as he planed and sanded and primed them; as he played with the Roper children or listened to their high, thin, happy voices playing out of sight in the garden; as he dug out his last little copy of the original picture to work from; as he walked with Margaret and her scampering children under the canopy of golden leaves that ran down the long path to her barn and back and she pointed out the flowers and herbs that she’d planted; as he sketched the outline of the picture he was going to make.
His idea was so big that it seemed like a great storm all around him, muffling the rest of the world, crackling with sparks of energy and booming in his ears as he planned, walked, ate, and talked. His painting would be a rejection of fear. He was going to draw on every ounce of knowledge he possessed and show everything, in ways both open and veiled, as he’d learned to by painting the ambassadors: the truth and nothing but the truth. This would be a picture of a family he loved and had finally found the courage to come back to, but it would contain far, far more than the simple scene he’d painted before. It would be an expression of the anguish filling his soul at the world going mad. It would show his sorrow at the way all the humanistic harmony that Erasmus had striven for—the life of debate and serene tolerance that he, Holbein, had once found so uplifting and full of hope—was being thrown away, both by the Protestant bigots whose excesses had lost his respect at home, and now by English politicians who were proving themselves ready to do anything, and believe anything, that would win them advancement by slaking a king’s lust.
Even if More had been part of that political battle while he was lord chancellor—and had been brought down by the passion with which he’d defended the old faith—he was still a man of principle. He’d had the grace in the end to withdraw from politics with his honor intact.
You only had to look at him to see that he was really still part of Erasmus’s world: a wit, a thinker, a humane and efficient lawyer whose reputation for kindly justice had taken decades to build up and hadn’t been tarnished beyond repair by his recent Catholic excesses. That’s why so many people on the streets in London still spoke fondly of him. Holbein couldn’t imagine More behaving in the overbearing, bullying way of Cromwell, that natural-born thug who would no more resign from power on a point of principle than he’d let himself be willingly fed to the wolves.
Holbein knew More to be innately a finer kind of person: someone who played the lute with his wife and watched the movements of the stars through the heavens.
Whatever you thought about the burnings More had ordered, there was no avoiding the conclusion that the men who’d pushed the king’s second marriage—and now found their designs unmade by God sending the queen a daughter and consigning the dynasty to history—hadn’t exactly been blessed by the good Lord either.
Holbein was determined to get every scrap of his disillusionment and anger in. He was going to show that the bullying ways of this king were condemning the Tudors to futility as surely as the violent cheating of the Plantagenets had an earlier dynasty. He was going to show humanism being destroyed by the madness, and More’s fate and that of England being bleak and intertwined as the bigots took over. He was going to show the magic in More’s mind being ignored and belittled. He was going to show the destructiveness of fear. He was going to show every trait and tic of the family that had welcomed him into their home and made him one of them. And he was going to make this ultimate gesture of respect one that
everyone he loved could understand: More, his children . . . and, of course, Meg.
Meg, whom he’d see in just a few days. Meg, whose failure to produce three children—as he now realized her sisters all had in five years of marriage—might just possibly mean that her marriage was now barren of love (a thought so wildly intoxicating that he could hardly bear to let it into his mind).
Meg, whose respect he wanted almost more than anything else.
Meg, who was at the back of every thought he’d had for years. If he was to be really honest, this painting was going to be a love letter to her as much as anything else. But he didn’t dare let himself dwell too much on that.
For now, he was happy to lose himself in the idea he’d lay it at her feet later. He couldn’t get ahead of himself.
He felt all-powerful, unstoppable, walking on air. Even the fact that he didn’t have the vast learning of Kratzer to help him stuff this painting with the subtle allusions to the life of the mind that had distinguished the portrait of the ambassadors didn’t bother him. He was full of sublime confidence that he’d somehow be shown the way—so confident that, when fate brought his way just the bits of knowledge he needed, he was hardly even surprised.
Dinner with Will Roper, back home from Parliament for a Sunday of rest, looking older now, hiding his youthful blondness with a long, shaggy beard.
When Holbein asked him how London was taking the birth of a princess, a gleam of I-told-you-so Catholic feeling in the parliamentarian’s eyes made him seem a mischievous boy again for a moment. But then he sighed and went back to looking like the graybeard he was imitating. “It came too late for Father,” he said heavily. “He’s already flown too close to the sun.”
The unqualified sadness in Roper’s eyes made Holbein aware of how easy it was to be with these More children, the ones who loved their father with the same painful simplicity they loved their own children and—unlike impetuous, critical, hard-to-please Meg—never, ever questioned the rightness of their father’s actions.
“Icarus,” he said to Will Roper, a little hesitantly, and marked that thought down in his head for private consideration.
In the garden with Margaret Roper. “I wish Father could be at peace out of the public eye,” she said wistfully, looking at the first leaves of autumn fluttering down. And then, bookish creature that she was, she found a classical quotation for her mood, and murmured it
to Holbein. “ ‘If I were allowed to change fate according to my will, I would move my sails with a gentle zephyr, so that the spars would not be strained to breaking point by strong winds. A calm breeze would ripple softly along the sides of my rocking ship.’ ” Her voice trailed away.
“That’s beautiful,” Holbein said, awestruck for the thousandth time at the erudition of these young women. “What’s it from?”
“Seneca’s Oedipus,” she said, not quite adding “of course,” but looking faintly surprised, as if everyone must know that.
His spine tingled. His instinct told him he was onto something here.
“I like it,” he said. “Will you read me more Seneca after supper?”
And so she told him, by the fireside, about Seneca, a classical scholar-statesman who, after being disgraced and forced to leave his job running Nero’s government, had devoted his retirement to writing. But Seneca’s acerbic thoughts didn’t please the frivolous emperor. After writing the Epistulae Morales, which advocated stoic resignation in the face of public vices, he was forced to commit suicide.
At the same hearth, in a later episode of the same fitful evening conversation, on that evening or another—they were beginning to blend into one another in Holbein’s preoccupied mind—he heard about another philosopher who died at a king’s hands: Boethius, servant of King Theodoric of Italy. Boethius wrote The Consolation of Philosophy after he’d been thrown into prison for subversion and witchcraft. He discussed good and evil, fame and fortune, suffering and injustice, and concluded that happiness lay only in the serene contemplation of God. But he was executed anyway. Holbein noted the names.
He couldn’t stop watching little Margaret’s hands as she talked. She kept her face as serene as she could, stopping the conversation from time to time to tend to one of the sleepy children she liked to keep in her arms or cuddle next to her while watching the flames. She was a gallant creature. She wanted to be happy. She wasn’t going to let herself or her children be easily downcast. But her hands told a different story.
They were busy, fretful, fidgety hands. They had bitten nails. They were the hands of a daughter wondering whether her father would meet the same fate as the philosophers of antiquity who had crossed their kings. They tweaked at things: a child’s hair, a tassel, a burr from the garden. And when she finished her Boethius story, she was gripping the book she’d brought to show him so tightly that her knuckles were white.
When he started laying paint on the great wooden blank that would be his picture—he knew its predecessor so well that he could get a lot of the basic work done now, as the family was arriving, using his memory and his drawings—Holbein kept the sketchy outline figures in the family group approximately as they had been before. He kept the same line of bodies and faces surrounding More, who would still be looking gently down at a seated Margaret Roper. What he changed first was the hands. The new picture would be a study of hands. A long diagonal line of hands pointing and prodding, poking and plucking in a great downward sweep from the top left to the bottom right of the composition. Busy, fretful, fidgety hands. Hands that betrayed fear.
Margaret Roper’s nervy hands, at the center of the picture, pointed to the words in the book she was holding: words that would show More’s wish to devote himself to learning and prayer now he’d been disgraced by leaving office. He chose the wistful words she’d quoted from Seneca’s Oedipus. And, on the facing page, he put the lines she’d found him from Icarus on the futility of ambition as another wistful comment on More’s fate: “madly he makes for the stars, and, relying on his new limbs, tries to outdo the real birds. Thus, the boy trusts too much to his false wings.”
Next Holbein turned the clock back to the time of the first family portrait. Literally. There’d been a clock in the old picture, but now he gave it more prominence by moving it to the top center of his space and painting its door open, as if it had just been wound or adjusted, to suggest that he was changing the time. The one hand that he put on the clock face pointed to just before twelve noon, by which he meant just before the present day. To show when he meant to turn time back to, he painted the clock’s lower weight directly above the number fifty, the birthday More had commemorated with the original portrait. He wanted the family to understand that this was a wry look back at the household as it had been a few years before “noon,” or “now,” as a starting point for charting the misfortunes that had befallen them since.
It was easy enough to paint in signs of More’s fall from royal grace since the time of the first painting. Holbein skewed the pendant Tudor rose at the end of the ex-chancellor’s chain of office, and reversed half the S-links in the chain in a vaguely disturbing way that could never happen in nature. All around, he scattered a host of other impossible, unsettling details conveying a world in which nature was being turned topsy-turvy: a vase with one handle upside down; a monkey clinging to Dame Alice’s skirts.
Other affectionate jokes came bubbling into his mind. He drew young John (to put it kindly, never the cleverest of the More brood) standing, staring intently but a bit vacantly at a book, as if he couldn’t quite make out the words. Then, chuckling to himself, he put one of the young man’s characteristic spelling mistakes into the name he wrote above the painted figure’s head, making it read “Joannes Morus Thomae Filuis” instead of “Filuis.”
When he saw Cecily again, the first of the other More children to arrive at Well Hall with her own three infants, including a black-haired Tommy, the same age as Margaret’s Tommy, and he remembered how close she and Margaret Roper had always been, and saw how well their children also got on—now bedding down together with a lot of shrieking and toddler horseplay in a chamber full of straw pallets where all the under-seven cousins were going to sleep and play—he hit on a French pun that he thought even the subtle ambassadors would have appreciated. “Être dans la manche de quelqu’un,” he said, laughing to himself. It meant “to be close friends,” but what the words literally meant was “to be in someone’s sleeve.” So he mixed up the rich material of the two sisters’ clothes in the picture, where they were sitting side by side, so that each of the fruitful, childbearing women was shown wearing sleeves in the contrasting material of the other’s comfortably loosened bodice. He thought they’d appreciate being remembered as friends.
“It’s getting impossible to drag you out of here, Master Hans.” Cecily laughed as she brought him a jug and plate of bread and cheese. She had the same pointy dark face as her older sister, and the same dimples when she smiled. “You’ve been locked up for three days without a breath of air.
Father will be here tomorrow and you’ll have to come out of your lair then. But won’t you join us to eat now?”
“Later,” Holbein said, staring distractedly at his work, then, realizing how rude he must sound, looking guiltily away from it and into her eyes. “Later, definitely,” he added more gently.
But he didn’t join them later. He was getting intoxicated by the boldness of his truth telling. And it had just dawned on him how to paint his biggest and most dangerous idea: to make the painting a metaphor for the misfortunes that York and Tudor houses had brought on themselves, which in turn had brought misfortune down on More’s head. His picture would show that, after all the bloodshed of the Plantagenet years, the nation was no better off now. In spite of all Henry’s attempts to sire a male successor, his self-indulgence had doomed his own line to extinction too.
Now only frustration reigned. Before More arrived, Holbein was determined to get enough of this down to show him. And he could use members of the household to do it.
The old picture had already had the fool, Henry Pattinson, between More and Margaret, staring straight out at the viewer, as if daring them to remark on his squat gingery resemblance to the king. But this time Holbein dressed him up in earnest as Henry Tudor. He strengthened the resemblance with the real king’s swagger and assertive royal stance, and put Tudor red and white roses in the fool’s cap and a sword at his belt (a
nother chance to show hands playing nervously with the hilt).
If he was going to have Henry Pattinson personify the Tudor dynasty, he needed to depict someone else personifying the Plantagenets. And only one face fitted the bill.
What had been a doorway in the top right-hand corner of the first picture, leading to an outer room where a secretary could be glimpsed crouched over a distant table, he now transformed into something altogether more enigmatic to draw the eye and intrigue the mind’s eye: an optical illusion that could be viewed either as an open doorway or the edge of a door. Then, deliberately, he began sketching in an altogether new face and figure inside the mysterious space—the only person not in the first picture at all.
Holbein’s racing hand gave life to the three-quarter-length figure standing wistfully in his impossible doorway, leaning forward to observe a family group he didn’t belong to. He gave the man he was painting dark clothes in antiquated fashion; then a sword and shield for the bloody business of kingship; and finally a sealed scroll for secrecy. He gave him the anxious, pinched expression on the famous portrait that went with More’s history of the murderous hunchback Plantagenet, Richard III. He gave him a deathly pallor that contrasted with the living complexions of the rest of his subjects. But what made Holbein’s hand shake as he drew in the face was that he was giving this ghostly Plantagenet the familiar black hair and aquiline nose and sky blue eyes of John Clement.
Remembering Erasmus’s late-night revelations back in Freiburg about Clement’s true identity, he was making a mirror image to his full-blooded burlesque of the Tudor king out of the man that some members of this family knew to be a Plantagenet descendant who could never be king.
He knew this was a gamble. A swagger. A boast. He knew More and Meg might be horrified to see this secret revealed in paint. But the reckless belief that had taken hold of him and was moving his brush across the boards almost independently of his will was that this revelation would prove to the Mores that he was one of them. A man of intellectual substance to match theirs. One of the elect. A person of integrity, so close to Erasmus that he could be trusted with any secret. And someone Meg could turn to with her most private troubles.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman Page 42
