Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

Sitting in silence left me all the time in the world to mull over the disquieting conversation I’d had yesterday with Dame Alice, when, as I hunted in her kitchen for more pipkins for the brewing of ginger tea, she’d materialized out of a pantry with a mess of capons’ brains for the next dinner in her big raw hands, encased in a gray-white pastry coffin ready for cooking. She had her usual entourage of boy servants behind her, loaded down with two headless capon corpses, bags of sugar, baskets of oranges, and jars of cloves, mace, and cinnamon, and she was about to supervise the business of collecting knives and pots for the scaldings and boilings and stewings that would give us another celebration meal. Having guests, especially one as appreciative of a hearty meat dish as Master Hans, gave her the opportunity she was always looking for to show off her culinary skills. She was always saying Father didn’t properly enjoy her cooking: he only ever took a little from whatever dish was nearest to him (though we all knew he had a furtive taste for her mess of eggs and cream). She was clearly planning to cook up a storm for Master Hans and looking forward to her afternoon.

  But when she saw me near the spit, hesitating over two of the little copper pipkins hanging up around the fire that she had so carefully scoured with sand before Master Hans’s arrival (not that she’d expected him to go near the kitchen—it had just been an excuse to use up some of her vast resources of practical energy), she sent the boys off to the storeroom again for nutmeg. For all her lack of Latin and frank scorn of book learning, she had an innate sensitivity to other people’s moods, and she must have seen the yearning for a moment’s privacy on my face. So even though she looked curious to see me in the kitchen, she asked no prying questions, just said kindly, “Take the smaller one if you want to make one of your potions. I use the big one for cream.” And waited.

  I was embarrassed for a moment. Naturally I didn’t want to tell her I was making ginger tea for all three of her More stepdaughters, which would have been as good as telling her straight out that they were all expecting. That was for them to tell. But something about the good-humored way she was looking at me—with the same twinkle in her small eyes that I’d warmed to when I first arrived at the house in Bucklersbury, the same take-it-or-leave-it offer of low-key friendliness—made me think I could, perhaps, sound her out, as I had John, about my worries about Father.

  Perhaps she, too, would laugh away my fears, I thought hopefully. Now that I sensed happiness was possible, and probably not far away, it made sense to learn how to reach out and try to grab it. I wanted to be brave. But I didn’t like to come straight out with a question about why she thought Father would be holding a man prisoner in our gatehouse. I had no idea whether she even knew the man was there.

  Still, I came as close as I dared. “Are you cooking for our guest?” I asked, smiling innocently back. “I like watching him wolf down your food. And it’s good to see Father so taken up with the idea of the picture.” I was feeling for words. “It’s been a long time since he thought of anything except the king’s business. Sometimes I worry . . .” I drew in a deep breath and plunged ahead. “Do you ever think Father’s got—well, harder—since we came to Chelsea?”

  “Harder?” she said, but lightly, as if I’d asked something that made her feel cheerful. The invitation to confide that I thought I’d seen in her eyes wasn’t there anymore; a different thought had clearly come into her mind. Her smile broadened and her hands settled on her hips, and there was a housewife’s satisfaction in the look she gave her big, efficient new kitchen. “Well, if he has, it was about time too. I don’t mind having the odd good honest craftsman staying here, with some sensible skill to sell, like Master Hans, but it was high time your father put all those other wasters out the door and got on with his career. And that’s been much easier since we moved away from town, where just about anyone could come calling and then move in for months on end. And did. No, I can’t say I miss all that London foolishness at all.”

  I sighed. That wasn’t the answer I’d wanted. She wasn’t talking about Father’s deepening fascination with heretic hunting at all. She was off on her old hobbyhorse instead: the fecklessness of our former guests, the for eign humanists, talking in that comical way she so often slipped into, playing the grumpy, shrewish wife to the hilt.

  “Erasmus and the rest of them,” she said, as if I hadn’t realized; nodding as if I and everyone else must naturally think of them as nuisances, beginning to laugh mockingly to herself at the memory of them. “All those clever-clever ex-priests. Too clever for their own good. Messing about with words, puffed up with pride, letting the devil in through the back door without even noticing half the time, no doubt, and bone idle, the lot of them.”

  She took the two nutmegs that the boy was now holding out to her, nodded her thanks without looking at him, and put them down on the wooden table, carrying straight on, on her tide of well-rehearsed indignation.

  “Now, the ones your father first got to know when he was a young man—the English ones, Linacre and Dean Colet—well, clearly they had their hearts in the right place,” she was saying, obviously choosing to take my silence for sympathy and warming to her theme. “I’ve only heard good things about them. Setting up schools for poor boys, healing the sick. John Clement too: a decent, kind man.”

  She paused. Although my gaze was suddenly fixed to the floor, I thought I felt her shrewd eyes on my face. All I could do was pray that I showed no trace of the wave of secret happiness sweeping through my heart at the sound of his name—a feeling made up of fragments of memories that could not be shared with a stepmother, however kindly, of lips and tongues and the roughness of his jaw against my cheek and the strength his long arms had as they pulled me against him, and the scents of leather and sandalwood that lingered on his skin. But if she noticed any telltale signs of love on my face, she gave no sign of it. She simply drew breath and swept on: “I’m all for people who do some good in the world. But I never had any time for those others. The foreigners. The big talkers. Eating me out of house and home without even noticing what they’d had put in front of them. Sitting at my table chattering away in Greek without so much as a please or thank-you. And keeping my husband up all night waffling on about nothing—philosophy, translating poetry, putting the church to rights—without ever doing one sensible thing to make a single person’s life better.”

  She narrowed her eyes in comic exasperation so that I began to laugh along with her. I knew the stories as well as she did, but she had a gift of timing that forced you to laugh in the right places. “Ohhh, how my fingers used to itch to box that Erasmus’s ears sometimes when he started teasing your father about being a ‘total courtier,’ ” she said, raising her hands in the air, as if she were about to box those vanished ears now. “Your father was the cleverest lawyer in London long before they all moved in with us. It was quite right for him to go on thinking about advancing his career, not just sitting around with a bunch of blabbermouths, wafting himself away on a cloud of hot air. The last thing I wanted was that dried-up Dutchman putting him off.

  He was the worst, but I couldn’t be doing with any of them, to be honest,” she added more seriously. “Prate prate prate about reforming one thing and fiddling with another, changing this and improving that. They took themselves far too seriously for my liking. Nothing was ever quite good enough for them. My motto is, Take life as you find it. Go to mass. Give alms to the poor. Do your business. Advance yourself as God wills. And enjoy what He brings. Have your babies, love your family, look after your old folk. Have your play-acting evenings if you will; play the lute if you must. But don’t get so carried away with your foolish ideas that you put others off living their lives.”

  I moved a step forward, raising my hand, hoping I could get her to pay proper attention to a franker version of my question, now that her familiar flow of words had reached its natural end. “That’s just what I mean. Don’t you think Father’s more carried away by ideas now than he ever was when Erasmus lived with us?” I said quickly. “With all
this business of hunting down heretics? He’s always away, and even when he is here with us he always seems to be cooped up in the New Building writing some angry denunciation or other. And I don’t remember him being angry before. I never thought of anger as being his nature. The ideas he used to have with Erasmus always made him laugh. Doesn’t that worry you?”

  She didn’t quite meet my eyes this time. Dame Alice would never actually lie, but it now occurred to me that this one small bodily sin of omission might indeed signal worry. Yet if she was anxious, she wasn’t about to share her fears with me, or perhaps even admit them to herself. I should have known that from the start. She was too pragmatic to start wailing and beating her breast about anything she couldn’t do something about.

  She liked looking on the bright side of life too much. Perhaps she’d even brought out her old rant about Erasmus to choke off my first question.

  So I wasn’t altogether surprised when, instead of answering, she picked up the nearest capon and the small cleaver that the second boy had laid by her hand before slipping away, theatrically measured the distance between bird and implement, and began rhythmically chopping off small legs and wings. “Much better to be the king’s man and the friend of bishops is what I say, and doing a sensible job of work,” she pronounced firmly. Chop went the blade in her hand. “Archbishop Warham: a sensible, God-fearing man.” The cleaver rose again. “John Fisher, Cuthbert Tunstall”—chop, an approving look at the neat cut—“good men too.” She placed the pieces carefully in the pot. “Even Cardinal Wolsey,” she added, looking for an easy laugh to shift us back to the jocular kind of conversation she felt happier with. “He might be greedy and devious, Wolsey, and too worldly for a good churchman, but at least he appreciates good cooking,” she finished triumphantly. “He had three helpings of my capon in orange sauce at Candlemas. And he’s praised it to the heavens every time I’ve seen him since.”

  With a determined smile, Dame Alice brought her cooking anecdote to its cheery close and swept off to the fireplace to harass the waiting kitchen boys to hook up the pot and start boiling the capons. She might like to be seen as straightforward, but Dame Alice could be as much a mistress of diplomatic half-truths and evasions as any courtier. She clearly didn’t want to discuss any worries I might have about Father. I wasn’t going to get a chance now to raise the matter of the prisoner in the gatehouse, either, because our talk was firmly over. She was off hustling a boy out to fetch more kindling and water. She still wasn’t looking me in the eye. And, somewhere in her rush of words, the comfort I’d briefly taken from John Clement, that Father could only be keeping a prisoner here for the man’s own protection, had been quietly swept away.

  Hans Holbein looked at the glowing, fierce face of this tall, skinny, unworldly English girl, with her piercing eyes and angular movements, trying her best to stay still although some sort of worry kept furrowing her brow and making her very nearly fidget, and for reasons he didn’t understand, found himself remembering Magdalena. The softness of her: the ripeness of shoulders and breasts, the honey of her eyes, the vague scents of violets and roses. And the deceit. The soft mouth-shaped bruises on her neck. The confused look in her eyes when he asked where they came from; her silly explanation, murmured so gently that he was almost ready to believe they really could be gnat bites. The sheets on her bed, already rumpled and warm and sweaty on that last evening, when he’d tumbled her into it after a hard day at the print shop with Bonifacius and Myconius and Frobenius.

  More “gnat bites” on her: on breasts and belly and buttocks. And the hot red imprint of his palm on her white cheek, and her hands both fluttering up to hold the place he’d hit her as he slammed the door and clattered off back down the stairs, practically howling with his own pain. His last memory of her: wounded eyes staring uncomprehendingly back at him.

  Well, Magdalena was who she was. He shouldn’t have asked more of her. She had her own way to make in the world, after all, and times were hard. There weren’t many pickings for an artist’s model anymore. And so, when a few months later Master Mayer turned out to have taken her under his wing (“a young widow . . . angelically beautiful,” the old fool kept burbling), Hans made no bones about painting her face into Master Mayer’s family chapel as the Virgin of Mercy protecting the old man and his various wives and children, dead and alive, from ill fortune. Master Mayer could believe whatever nonsense he wanted in the privacy of his own home. Hans Holbein wasn’t going to argue with such a good patron. But he knew he’d never look without skepticism at another religious picture after that. He probably wouldn’t paint any more religious pictures, either.

  He’d had enough of dressing women of dubious virtue up in blue robes and pretending they were Madonnas. All that was just playacting, children’s stories. What he wanted now was to portray the real-life faces and personalities of the people God had put on this earth to enchant and torment one another, without costumes, without artifice. To get at the truth.

  But he was a bear at home. Snarling at his poor wife, Elsbeth, till her face turned as sour and rough as those hands sticking out from under her pushed-up sleeves, permanently reddened from tanning hides. Hating the stink of leather up his nostrils all the time, till even his food tasted of animal skins and poverty. Hating little Philip’s endless whining; yelling at Elsbeth’s scared-looking boy to take better care of the child. Even hating the long-winded abstract talk of his humanist friends, whom he usually admired. Part of him was now blaming them for his gloom—for starting the whole upheaval of these evil times with their clever, clever talk about the corruption of the clergy and their desire to purify the church. Look where those ideas had landed everyone now. And look how panicked the humanists and even the most determined of the reformers were, at the violent enthusiasm of the mob for their elegantly formulated ideas—even Brother Luther, thundering “strike, stab, slay” from his Wittenberg pulpit in a vain attempt to stop the thugs destroying civilization.

  Suddenly Hans Holbein hated the humanists’ silly, clever faces; suddenly even the Latin names they chose to call themselves seemed pretentious. His brother, Prosy, under their influence, had renamed himself Ambrosius; Hans wasn’t so grand, and in his current black mood, resented the Latinized name they insisted on calling him: Olpeius. If they had to be foolish enough to call him something classical, the only name he’d have liked was the one they were always giving Albrecht Dürer—the only real compliment a painter could desire—Apelles, the name of the greatest painter of antiquity, the court artist to Philip of Macedon and a famous portraitist. So he sat knocking back tankard after tankard at the tavern with them, in thunderous silence, hating whey-faced Myconius’s thin mockery: “Poor love-struck Olpeius—drowning his sorrows in beer.”

  And there was no work, or hardly any. With the hate-filled, frightening turn public life was taking—now that the peasants’ revolts in the countryside had given way to mobs of image breakers roaming the city streets and smashing windows and burning devotional pictures and hacking statues to bits—the rich weren’t keen on displaying their wealth by having frescoes painted on their houses. And of course there was no new work to be had in churches that were being stripped down and white-washed. Painters’ studios were closing down on all sides. Wood-carvers and carpenters were fighting over the same menial tradesmen’s work. And there was a limit to how hard you could fight for the few book-engraving jobs or tavern sign commissions that still came on the market.

  It had been so exciting before. Before the year of doom three years ago, when all the planets coalesced in the constellation of the fish and brought chaos and destruction. In the days when Magdalena had always been there in his studio, ready to drape her naked form in whatever scrap of velvet or silk he could find to pose for him. When there had still been enough work to justify keeping a model. When he personally had more work than he could cope with, doing the pictures for both Adam Petri’s and Thomas Wolff’s versions of Luther’s New Testament in German— and getting an extra payment
from Tommi Wolff, as well as an extra dose of grinning thanks from the impish little blond man, Basel’s biggest charmer, with his fangy teeth, sparkling eyes, and that dark mole on his right cheek, for making his most successful publication even more of a success—a payment big enough to buy Magdalena a dress and give Elsbeth extra housekeeping money. Well, they were good pictures, after all.

  His Latin had never been good, but with Luther’s New Testament he had read it properly for the first time. And he was painting at his peak. He was finally able to show the divine truth as he knew it really was in the Book, without recourse to a priest or a preacher to tell him how they read it. He had felt enlightened. Purified. Transfigured by the truth.

  Hans Holbein was all right for longer than most people, after things went wrong, because he had the Rathaus fresco commission. But then the burghers got scared of his daring design for the last wall—respectable if hypocritical Jews shrinking away from the presence of Jesus, in the parable of the woman taken in adultery; Christ warning the Jews, “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” So the respectable if hypocritical burghers cut off his contract. They preferred looking at a blank wall to being reminded that their integrity might also be questioned. And the money stopped.

  The last straw was his Dance of Death engravings. Forty-one of them, using every ounce of imagination and passion he possessed. He started them after his father died. They were the only way he had to show the truth about today as he saw it, through a theme he chose for himself without any interference from a patron. Two years’ work: his and Hans Lützelberger’s block making skill combined in merciless mockery of every one of the failings and offenses of the age’s corrupt priests, the powerful and pious and their bedazzled followers. All exposed as vanity-filled frauds at the moment they met Death. The pope crowning an emperor, waving a papal bull, full of hubris—and surrounded by devils. Death coming to the Judge, accepting a bribe from a wealthy litigant while a poor plaintiff looked disconsolately on. Death coming to the Monk, who, even though his calling meant he should have been prepared, was trying frantically to escape, clutching his money box. No one would publish the pictures. The council was scared. Erasmus had told them not to publish inflammatory pamphlets, and—too late—they’d begun to heed his advice. Then, last summer, Hans Lützelberger died. Bankrupt. The creditors settled on his goods like scavengers. The Dance of Death blocks ended up being snapped up by a printer in Lyon and shut up in a storeroom. And Hans Holbein hadn’t got a penny out of any of it.