Sweating, almost dancing from paint table to wooden rectangle, determined to race the idea into being before the light faded altogether, he painted the words Johanes Heresius—John the Heir—above the figure’s head. Would that be enough to make his point clear? His hand jerked on.
On the table beside the doorway into the other world that was Johanes Heresius’s home, he painted a vase of flowers. Not real flowers. Punning flowers: unbelievable bluish purple peonies, an extra clue marrying the French word peon, or physician, and the color of the blood royal. Would that be enough? His hand—full of the trembling madness of inspiration now—led him back again to Margaret Roper’s fidgety fingers. He scrubbed at them and repainted them so her right index finger pointed directly at the word Oedipus. He knew more about the story of Oedipus after the recent firelight evenings—the man who won the crown of Thebes by unknowingly murdering his own father, and thus unleashed an appalling wave of tragedies, had been a murderous usurper just as Holbein felt Plantagenet and Tudor kings alike to be. He used Cecily’s twitching fingers to show he had two doomed dynasties in mind, making her count, one, two, with the fingers of her left hand against the palm of the right.
Moving up the diagonal of hands, he turned to Sir Thomas. First he painted in more of the rough undergarment to which his rich red velvet sleeves were attached, to make the contrast between them more obviously a visual version of another French pun that would have amused the ambassadors. The expression he was thinking of now was a joke about More’s reduced circumstances in retirement. “Il fait le richard” could mean “he’s posing as a rich man”—an appropriate comment in view of that red velvet and dirty wool contrast. But it could also just mean—appropriately for the author of a history of the Plantagenet usurper—“he makes Richard.” To emphasize that second meaning, Holbein changed the configuration of More’s arms from what it had been in the first painting and added three fingers peeping out from the politician’s black furry muff to signify “Richard III.”
He could hardly see now. The light had faded, and he was peering at the darkening picture through shadows. Turning to light a candle, he realized his energy was completely exhausted. He was hungry and thirsty.
His legs ached from hours of standing, and his arms from more non-stop hours of lifting a brush without pausing for breath than he ever remembered. He fumbled for the wooden tray of bread and cheese Cecily had left, then realized he’d eaten the lot hours before. There was just a bit of beer left. He drank it down, then turned back to stare obsessively, admiringly, lovingly at the picture, moving his flickering light up and down to examine each of the details that he’d worked out in that day’s frenzy of creativity. He liked it. He loved it. It was still rough. There were still great empty patches on it. But he’d fill them. And what he’d done so far would be enough to show More.
Slipping out into the stairwell, he could hear the sleepy sounds of sisterly chat coming from the fireside in Margaret’s parlor. But he knew he wouldn’t find the energy to join the women this evening. All he could imagine doing now was sneaking into the kitchen to fill himself up with great chunks of Margaret’s fresh bread and salty cheese, downing a big tankard of something pleasantly alcoholic, then throwing himself onto his bed fully dressed to catch up with his sleep.
Thomas More stood in front of the canvas for a long time. It wasn’t like when he’d seen the other picture. He didn’t move excitedly from corner to corner of the painting, looking for secrets and clues. He just stared.
Holbein hovered beside him, hardly breathing, sneaking sidelong glances at the older man whenever he dared, learning enough from that immobile face to see that at least More’s eyes were flickering over the paint, looking down the diagonal of hands; reading the texts; gazing at the red-cheeked Henry VIII and the ghostly Richard III with John Clement’s face.
Every second of silence was making Holbein feel sicker. His hands were clammy. His stomach was full of black churning acid. He wanted to groan and hide his head in his arms and bash it against a wall to stop the blood drumming in his temples. How could he have gone to bed so pleased with himself? How could he have taken such liberties? Why hadn’t he seen that what he was doing was terribly wrong? Why was he such a fool?
When More finally turned to face him, still expressionless, Holbein was ready to start mumbling apologies; to run out of the room, out of the house, out of his life.
So he could hardly take it in when More whispered: “So you understand.”
And he was taken completely by surprise by the arms wrapping themselves round him in an awkward, bristly man’s hug.
After a few minutes, More stepped back. Looked down. Put a hand to the bridge of his powerful nose and squeezed the corners of his eyes. The hand came away wet. But Holbein couldn’t believe he was weeping until More said, a little shakily: “The wine of angels . . . Do you know that’s what the monks at the Charterhouse call tears?”
Holbein shook his head, trying not to let his own bewilderment show, trying not to think at all about anything except keeping his eyes fixed kindly on his hero to help him find his own way back to poise.
“I spent a year with them when I was young,” More went on, his voice gradually regaining its strength. “I thought I wanted to become one of them. I sometimes still think I made the wrong choice by deciding not to.
But Erasmus said I was mad. He couldn’t be doing with all the visions and visitations. Or the tears.” He laughed wistfully. “Or the fish dinners, come to that. He kept saying, ‘But why do you think it’s godly to go round smelling like an otter?’ ”
Holbein could just imagine Erasmus’s thin nose wrinkling fastidiously as he made that remark. He burst out laughing: a laugh that was full of his own dawning realization that instead of being thrown out of the house he was being embraced as an intimate; a great gust of relief.
“I miss him, you know,” More said, smiling with the painter but still sounding lost. “He’s the last of the old friends from those times. I don’t hear much from him anymore. And it can be a lonely business keeping secrets.”
He stopped. Got a grip on himself. Beamed the full beam of his public charm on Holbein. “Well, Master Hans, I won’t talk more now,” he added more forcefully. “I should clean up”—More gestured ruefully down at his mud-spattered riding boots—“and I don’t want to hold you up. You have a painting to finish!”
But he stopped at the door for a final word. “I’m glad Erasmus told you,” he said, looking Holbein straight in the eye.
Holbein was surprised, when he turned back to his work, to find his hands shaking so hard he couldn’t pick up the paintbrush.
He needed to calm down. He managed to get working quietly on the figure of old Sir John More, who’d died a couple of winters back. That was just the sort of good, simple, hard work he needed now: nothing more intellectually demanding than copying and accurate coloring.
But he was almost relieved when the children came to interrupt him: a giggling tumble of raven-haired Tommies and Janes and their gurgling toddler siblings.
He didn’t hear a sound at first. He just had an instinct he was being watched. And when he turned round there they were, bright-eyed and mischievous, peeping at him from the doorway. They scuttled back in mock alarm for a minute, but he could see they weren’t really scared of him at all. They knew he was harmless.
Within minutes they were swarming all over the room, getting under the table, standing on the stool, touching the picture, tugging at curtains, sticking their heads into bags, putting their fingers in his paints, smearing the expensive colors on one another and, roaring with laughter, presenting their tummies to him to be tickled.
“Hey!” he yelled comically, flicking at them with a rag. “Don’t do that! Ach, you naughty little monkeys!”
But it only made them shriek more excitedly.
He didn’t really mind. He let them swarm. Looking at them romp around underfoot, it occurred to him that there seemed to be more of them now than there h
ad been the last time he’d counted, at breakfast. He hadn’t heard a thing, but another group of grown-ups must have arrived with them while he’d been with More.
He looked more closely at the child sitting eagerly on his foot and clutching at his calf, clearly hoping that Holbein would start walking and give him a ride round the room. This little boy had the black pudding-bowl hair and the dark eyes and the long, bony face that all the cousins shared. But, unlike the rest of them—who had the long, thin straight noses with slightly downward-pointing tips that the whole family seemed to have inherited from More—this child’s nose was already distinctly aquiline.
Holbein could swear he knew this child’s face from somewhere. He racked his brains, going through every set of features he’d ever scrutinized with his keen painter’s eyes. Then light began to dawn. Surely this was the solemn little boy he’d seen walking with Meg across the road to church in London so many times in the last year? John Clement’s son?
Tommy?
He felt his hands start shaking again. Could he have missed Meg arriving?
Urgently, he put his hands under the boy’s arms, pulled him off his foot, and lifted him, squirming and squeaking, up to his own eye level.
“Is your name Tommy?” he asked. The child giggled and nodded his head.
“I thought so!” Holbein said triumphantly. “And have you just arrived this morning?” Another beaming smile of agreement.
“With your mother?”
The little legs kicked the air for joy. “Yeth!” the boy lisped delightedly. “With my muvver!”
Holbein put him down. “Well, I want to say hello to her,” he said firmly. “Right now. So come on, Tommy, take me to her. And the rest of you: out of here.”
He shooed them all out, shut the door firmly behind them, and headed off for the parlor at the back of the squeaking, joyous pack of children with his heart thudding eagerly in his chest.
There was a buzz of cozy women’s voices in the parlor, and four heads in a semicircle with their backs to the door.
Margaret Roper’s was the first to turn at the sound of the children.
“Shhh, children,” she called gently. “You’re getting far too excited.”
Then she saw Holbein, skulking nervously in the doorway. “Master Hans!” she said, and the three other heads also turned his way.
He heard her voice say, “Come in, come in,” as if from far away; he was already staring hungrily at the faces under the bonnets. He saw Cecily and Dame Alice; he did two polite half bows to them before turning, with almost painful anticipation, toward the last face.
He blinked. Perhaps it was the drumbeat of his heart that was stopping him thinking and seeing straight, but he was having trouble making Meg’s features come into focus in the face swimming in front of him.
It took him a few more seconds to realize why. It wasn’t Meg at all, even though the child who looked like a miniature John Clement was clinging to her skirts. It was Elizabeth.
It was all falling into place. He’d always known Elizabeth had been in love with Clement. But he hadn’t realized until now that Clement might actually have fathered her child.
He paced furiously through the garden, bursting with pity for Meg, raging against the deceiver she’d been gullible enough to marry, and feeling a nameless, shameful excitement at the unfathomable possibilities his discovery might open up. How humiliated she must have felt when she realized the truth, he thought, stamping his feet heavily down the path.
How she must hate her husband. How she must resent Elizabeth. A woman as honest as Meg would never again dream of touching a man who’d humiliated her so openly. No wonder she always looked sad to the bottom of her soul when she left her house to pray. No wonder her marriage had been barren since the birth of that first child.
His head was still swimming with indignation when he slipped back into the house, quietly so as not to alert the others, tiptoeing back into his parlor as if, by making no noise, he might avoid stirring up any more of the family’s secrets.
He couldn’t paint Meg and Elizabeth now in the same way he had before. His discovery had made them part of his picture of barren futility.
It was all the same story; all the workings of the same implacable fate. Almost without knowing what his hands were doing, he found himself transposing the two figures on the left-hand side of the canvas so that Meg was standing forlornly at the very edge of the picture, holding a book with blank pages; and a sly, determined Elizabeth was pushing her out of the way, pulling a glove suggestively off her hand and giving the ghostly John a bold stare from across the room.
It worked. It was the extra element his painting had needed. These two standing forms, a picture of discord and disharmony, now made a perfect contrast with the two happy, fulfilled sisters sitting in the opposite corner wearing swapped sleeves. To reinforce the disharmony between Meg and Elizabeth, he drew in a viol on top of the cupboard behind them with the point of its bow turned back to front. Then he put a plate next to it, between the outlines of their two heads. Another French pun: “pas dans la meme assiette,” meant “at odds,” but it also literally meant “not in the same plate.”
How else to tell his story? He added books. He put Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy on the cupboard near Meg. And finally, with heavy irony, he painted the title of Seneca’s Epistulae Morales on the spine of the book under Elizabeth Dauncey’s deceitful arm.
He stopped and scratched his head, wondering what to do next. He felt flat when he realized that he’d probably finished. Wearily, he poured out water and oil and began the slow job of cleaning his tools. He didn’t want to eat, or drink, or think anymore. He didn’t even want to sleep. He just wanted Meg to arrive.
The last little cavalcade of horses and ponies of the day arrived as the sun set.
Young John, his wife, Anne, and their three children in front; Meg and her little Tommy bringing up the rear.
Holbein was waiting for them in the garden, standing under the mulberry tree Margaret Roper had planted in her father’s honor, patiently watching the shadows lengthen.
The rest of the family came pouring out of the house to greet the newcomers when they heard hooves and snorting and the creak of saddle leather in the courtyard.
But Holbein made sure he got to Meg first, so that it was his chest her tired arms in their simple brown wool sleeves could cling to as she slithered gratefully to the ground. If there’d been no other reward for being there but the shy smile she flashed him now, from under her lashes, as he stood in front of her, forgetting to take his hands off her waist in the sheer joy of seeing her face again, he thought it would be enough.
Then she laughed and stepped back, deftly freeing herself from him. “I’m glad to see you,” she murmured, before turning to her sleepy child with John Clement’s aquiline nose, who was slumped on the pony beside her—“Come on, Tommy”—and putting out her arms to help him down too.
There was a new timidity between him and Meg, he thought, trotting proprietorially indoors behind mother and child. But there was also a new radiance in the way she looked at him—as if he could offer a hope of salvation she hadn’t dreamed might come her way—that filled him with a great hope he didn’t dare put words to.
Holbein wouldn’t have had the nerve to try to separate Meg from her family until all the greetings and huggings and welcomings and settlings-in were finished. He hung back from the family, drinking in the sight of her, enjoying the way his heart had swollen so inside his chest that he was breathless with his feelings, trying to keep a look of fatuous adoration off his face.
Finally she stepped back from her last embrace and came over to where he was standing in the shadows. Her face was lit up with happiness.
“This is just like the old days, isn’t it?” she said. And then, with a more searching look at him: “You’re very quiet over here in the corner, Master Hans.”
He didn’t know what to say. He was still breathless. But it hardly seemed to matte
r, now that he was basking in the joy of her presence.
“Oh,” he said awkwardly, watching her hands because he didn’t dare go on staring into her eyes. “I’ve been working. You know how it is. I suppose I’m tired.” But he felt as though he could stay awake forever.
“Margaret says you’ve started again, from scratch?” she said, still gazing into his face. “I’m so looking forward to seeing.”
Perhaps, he thought, with a wild burst of hope, he could take her off now and show it to her. Be alone with her. But he dismissed the thought almost as soon as it came to him. She wouldn’t want that. She was being reunited with her family.
“I’ve done a lot already,” he said hesitantly. “And I was thinking . . . it would be good to take tomorrow morning off. Have a break. Now that you’re here . . .”
Or was that invitation too forward? He felt her eyes drop. Sneaked a look at her face, fearing he’d see it close against him. But all he saw was a faint flush making her cheeks even more beautiful, and a slight, repeated movement of the chin. He could hardly believe it, but she was nodding.
“There’s a bumper crop of apples,” she said in a quiet rush, and her voice was light. “Will says. And Cecily says you haven’t been out of your room since she got here. You probably need a bit of fresh air, don’t you?
We could go first thing. Be back before dinner. Get baskets from Margaret. I’ll ask her now.”
She grinned, meeting his eyes for a moment, and flitted off to talk to her sisters. Holbein went to his bed full of anticipation. Tomorrow he’d have hours and hours with her, sitting on a branch in the orchard, admiring the innocent wisps of dry grass on her skirt and the golden sunlight in her hair. He fell asleep imagining the drunken buzzing of wasps and the cidery promise of fallen apples, with laughter in his heart.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman Page 43
