Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  Then, in the middle of his terror, he noticed that she was smiling—almost conspiratorially—at him. He breathed for the first time in what seemed an eternity. She was still talking.

  “And while we’re on the subject, if Master Nicholas takes you to London, you shouldn’t go to the Steelyard,” she was saying. Rushing her words; lowering her voice. A warning. “Father doesn’t like what goes on there; especially after he nearly lost Will Roper to the heretics. You must be very careful.”

  He nodded, meeting her eyes again and seeing for certain now that she knew every dark thing he’d been finding out.

  “Don’t make the mistake of thinking Father is always the scholar and gentleman you see in this house,” she said. “Flirting with Lutheran ideas can get people into serious trouble. You shouldn’t take risks.”

  He nodded, even more dumbly.

  “And if you doubt what I’m saying, just take a look in the western gatehouse next time you go for a walk,” she added. Then she stopped, as if she’d gone too far, and bit her lip. “Isn’t it nearly dinnertime?” she said, in a quite different voice. Hans Holbein nodded, now slavishly ready to obey her every word, and began to follow her out of the room. Then he realized he was still wearing the flamboyant red sleeves, and he fell behind for a rueful few minutes of solitary pulling and teasing at buttons and strings with his big sausages of fingers, which, for a variety of reasons, were trembling.

  I should have kept my mouth shut. I knew it almost at once. But I got carried away by the moment. Master Hans seemed such an innocent that I wanted to make quite sure he understood that his behavior could put him in danger.

  There was pandemonium the next morning in the servants’ quarters when it emerged that the prisoner in the gatehouse had escaped during the night. The stocks were broken, swinging loose on their hinges. The rope that had tied his arms was frayed loose. The door was open. Mary, the cook, and Nan, our maid, were full of the news—which was odd, considering that none of us would have admitted to knowing the man was there at all until he’d got away. How had the door come to be left unlocked, they chattered: would the gardener be sacked?

  I went to see the scene of the crime for myself before my last sitting began. It was a relief not to see those thin shoulders inside, heaving with their prayers for death; secretly I hoped the man would have the sense not to go straight home to Fleet Street and instant rearrest but would lie low for a while. I tidied away the rope into a bag and pulled the door shut. As I walked back, I noticed something glinting in a bush not far from the gatehouse. It was a palette knife with one sharpened edge. I put that in the bag too.

  It was Friday, and Father had come home. He was sitting by the fire, looking into its depths, still in his cloak and dirty boots. He looked tired but calm. The first thing he’d done after getting off the boat had been to speak to the gardener, but we knew he’d let the man off with a reprimand.

  I wondered whether I would ever dare to follow Master Hans’s advice to tackle rumors head-on, and ask Father to his face who the man was, what the charge against him was, and why he’d been kept at our home in the first place. The thought made my heart thud crazily against my ribs. But my courage failed me. It was Will Roper—sweet-natured Will, now the world’s most passionate Catholic and Father’s devoted slave—who was bravest. But when he timidly expressed distress over the escape of a miscreant in Father’s charge, and we all nodded and murmured assent, Father only laughed, as if the loss of his prisoner was a matter of no importance.

  “How could I possibly object to someone who has been sitting so uncomfortably for so long taking his chance to move around at his ease?” he said lightly. Discountenanced, Will smiled uneasily back. We all dispersed to begin the day’s business.

  The first thing I did was to give the palette knife back to Master Hans.

  I didn’t say a word. He blushed to his gingery roots and put it clumsily down.

  “Do you remember our conversation yesterday?” I said, by way of warning.

  He nodded and stared at his tree-trunk legs. I could see he was truly terrified of his own carelessness.

  “About the memento mori,” I went on, less coldly, thinking I’d scared him enough now. “I’ve thought of a different idea. Something a bit more sophisticated than a skull.” And I pulled out the rope from the bag, with a flourish worthy of a unicorn-horn salesman on Bucklersbury. “The Latin for rope is funis,” I said, “and the Latin for deathly is funus. You could make the rope your memento mori. They’d be impressed by your grasp of Latin”—I paused—“and it might teach you to be less forgetful.”

  His face was a study in bewilderment again. Mouth gaping like a fish. Chest heaving in and out. He was a sweaty, straightforward sort of person, too prone to melt into a puddle of damp when shocked to have a hope of succeeding at diplomacy or deceit. Then he picked up the rope and looked from it to me several times. Once it dawned on him that he could trust me, which took some time, he began shaking his head with appreciation and the beginning of a twinkle in his eye. And then the laugh began to well up out of deep inside him. “Funus,” he said, chuckling, “funis. It might just work.”

  It was a fortnight later, and the solo portrait of Father was nearly finished, while the group portrait, a more complex affair, was still in its early stages.

  Master Hans had followed all my suggestions in portraying Father. He’d painted the rope dangling loosely down the side of the green curtain, behind Father’s shadowed chin and scowling face. Red velvet sleeves had made an appearance on Father’s painted arms. And somehow all the different jokes worked together. I felt almost as proud when I looked at the picture as I could see he did.

  I was sitting in the window reading when I heard him and Elizabeth come in from their after-dinner turn round the garden. She was beginning to look bigger already, but she was calmer and sweeter too, in the soft, accepting way of pregnant women—even with me. And she was touchingly grateful to Master Hans (as I was) for his devoted kindness to her.

  “If my baby is a son,” I could hear her saying now, scraping her boots as he took her cloak from her shoulders, “I’ve a good mind to call him after you, Master Hans.”

  I laughed silently to myself. So she hadn’t completely lost her old taste for empty compliments, then. I couldn’t imagine haughty William Dauncey taking kindly to a son with the workmanlike foreign name of Hans, I was thinking, and I was beginning to have a quiet chuckle to myself at the absurdness of the idea when I heard the rest of what she had to say.

  “Johannes,” her thin little voice was piping, sounding unexpectedly cheerful. “Well, that’s what it would be in Latin, anyway. But of course my child will be English, won’t he? So what I’d actually call him would be John.”

  7

  No sooner had I got used to the new, livelier rhythm being established at Chelsea—the sittings with Master Hans each morning, first for Father, then me, then all the true More children, Elizabeth, Margaret, Cecily, and young John, and his fiancée Anne Cresacre, then old Sir John, then, as it was to be, Dame Alice, one by one—when it stopped, as suddenly as it had started.

  One Thursday evening at the beginning of February—a dark, wet winter’s night in which the swollen river raged past the garden and the wind beat at the trees—Father came back from court soaked to the skin but with an idea glimmering in his eyes. The idea was still lighting him up even after he’d removed every other trace of his journey: changed his clothes and warmed up at the fire and joined us at supper. It was almost bursting out of him as he watched Nicholas Kratzer being teased by Dame Alice at table. “I swear, Master Nicholas, you’ve been long enough in this country not to speak such terrible English,” she was saying, with her usual twinkle. She was fond of Master Nicholas and Master Hans, with their down-to-earth ways, solid bodies, and general willingness to fetch things down for her from tall cupboards; they were nothing like the fey, penniless, Latin-speaking humanists she’d loved to hate before, she now often said; they were real men. And
they liked her robust humor too.

  “Ach, I have only English been learning for twenty years or whatsoever,” Master Nicholas said, laughing back, exaggerating his foreignness, enjoying the cut and thrust, “and how can anyone speak this terrible language properly in so little time?” That exchange made Master Hans, who until then had been sitting quietly slurping up his food with his usual gargantuan appetite, suddenly hoot with laughter—he knew his own English could do with some improvement—and Master Hans’s laughter was so infectious that it made everyone else start gurgling and slapping their sides with mirth. Father smiled approvingly, and after supper he took Kratzer and Holbein away to talk to them.

  It was Friday the next day, and Father was locked away in the New Building, praying and fasting from long before dawn, with the rain still lashing down outside, so it fell to Master Hans to tell me what had been decided.

  When I went into his studio at the end of the morning to call him for dinner, there was no sign of Cecily, who was supposed to have been sitting for him. At first I assumed he’d told her to go because the light wasn’t good enough to paint by. We had candles everywhere in the great hall, even at midday. But he was packing paints into his leather bags. He was wrapping each jar in one of his rags, carefully, before stacking it inside.

  The easel and silverpoint pencils were already rolled up into a bundle. He was beaming all over his snub-nosed face, and the short beard on his stubby chin was practically curling with delight. Even the damp smell of boiled carp wafting from the kitchen, a fish he’d told me he didn’t like, couldn’t take the grin off his features.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, bewildered.

  “We’re going to court!” he answered, a bit too loud, a bit too happily.

  Then he seemed embarrassed at his own puppyish excitement, looked down, and composed himself. “Kratzer and I. Your father has a job for us there. A court job!” He was bubbling with joy again.

  “But,” I stammered, surprised at the little stab of selfish, childish disappointment I was feeling, “what about unveiling Father’s portrait? And finishing ours?”

  “Later,” he answered, suddenly looking curiously into my eyes, as if trying to see the answer to a question of his own there. More gently, he added: “It is only for a month or two. We will come back. I will finish the family picture by the end of the summer, and it will be beautiful. Your likeness”—he paused—“will be beautiful.” He hesitated again, almost as if there was something more he was thinking of saying.

  I smiled, remembering to be pleased for him. “Well, it will be much duller here without you around, Master Hans,” I said lightly. “What will your court job be?”

  It was to do with the peace treaty that Father and Cardinal Wolsey were supposed to start negotiating with the French ambassadors. So confident was Father of the successful outcome of the talks for the English side—and so confident too that Master Hans shared his impish sense of humor and would be able to weave some anti-French jokes into his artwork—that he was getting him and Master Nicholas involved early on in designing the artwork for the celebrations that would result from his achievement: an astronomical design for the ceiling of the pavilion at Greenwich Palace in which, at some future point, the signing of the treaty would be celebrated. (William Dauncey had been talking about the preparations at dinner one day: talking half mockingly, half full of admiration, about the king’s lavishness, in what must have been an echo of his own father’s mixed feelings as he tried to balance the royal household’s books.)

  The pavilion itself had yet to be built for a peace that had yet to be made. But hundreds of craftsmen of every sort—from leatherworkers to ironworkers to casters of lead to gilders to carvers to carpenters to painters—were already being hired. Having a brilliant display of memorable pictures and decorations would cement Father’s diplomatic victory. So it was in his own interest to ensure that the best possible talents were working on the display as soon as possible; it was worth waiting for the completion of the paintings his own family would later enjoy if that public point could be made first. And it was a big opportunity for Master Hans, something for which the painter should be forever grateful to Father. I’d seen the polite note Father had written to Erasmus after Master Hans got here, agreeing that he was a wonderful artist, though doubting he’d make his fortune here—but I hadn’t realized he’d try so hard to help the painter get on his feet quite so soon.

  I could have wished he’d make the same effort to launch John’s medical career, but I stifled any resentment that thought might arouse. Like Master Hans, I had a sense now that life was beginning to go my way. Father might not have confided to me his intentions for my marriage, but I felt that John was determined enough to win me, that he’d find a way to meet Father’s condition and get elected to the College of Physicians. “Dr. Butts has become something like a friend,” John had written in the letter I’d received that morning: I think you’ll like him. He’s an innocent; long, gray beard, very seri ous, passionate about his studies, rather disorganized at everything else, no conversation to speak of, but very kind, worries endlessly about his protégés and the scrapes they get themselves into. And there are plenty of scrapes, so he has plenty to worry about. It seems the College of Physicians is a hotbed of religious radicalism. He doesn’t tell me everything, but I’ve heard that when Dr. Butts unaccountably goes missing for a day, he’s off paying calls on anyone he thinks might be able to help get one of his students off a heresy charge. He came in last night looking very downcast. He’d been away on one of his mystery errands for two days. I took him for a good dinner at the Cock Tavern to cheer him up, and didn’t ask any awkward questions, and I got the impression he was grateful for both things. He hugged me very warmly when we got up to go. And he said I could go to him and go through what we’ll talk about formally, later, at the College of Physicians, so he can help me present it in the best way to his colleagues. So you see—he’s a good man. And a remarkable man. He seems the opposite of your father in many ways. But I think his passion and compassion give him something of Sir Thomas’s magnetism, even if his concerns and the ways he addresses them are so very different. And I think he genuinely likes me too—maybe just because my calm is something that all these excitable men of genius are drawn to. They all want someone to bounce their ideas off, someone who will listen intelligently. So he’s being very friendly. And I really think I’ve got a chance of being elected with his help.

  I thought John’s election was a foregone conclusion (though I crossed fingers and spat over my left shoulder to ward off evil spirits whenever I found myself thinking it). Very soon, it wouldn’t matter to me anymore whether or not Father treated me as affectionately as he did his real children, and whether, out in the cold on the edge of the family, I’d stumbled on the darkness in Father’s soul. I wouldn’t care anymore once the man I loved came to claim me. Father wouldn’t stand in John’s way. I woke every morning now with hope in my heart; it was only a question of time.

  “And he says I will probably be asked to paint a big fresco of a battle scene”—Master Hans was rattling on, lost in his triumph again—“and who knows what else will come up on such a big project that I might be able to help with too? And Kratzer and I will be paid four shillings a day. Four shillings a day! Six or seven times more than I’ve ever got before. Four . . . shillings . . . a . . . day.” His eyes were glittering greedily. For the first time, I noticed that his breeches and shirt had been patched, many times, in tiny, careful stitching.

  At dinner, ignoring the somber weather and the spartan Friday food, Master Nicholas was even more euphoric than Master Hans. They sat next to each other at the bottom of the table and grinned and wolfed down carp, and whispered excitedly in German, trying Dame Alice’s patience, even if she did her best not to show it.

  By Sunday evening—7 February, Father’s fiftieth birthday, which we’d once been supposed to celebrate with the unveiling of at least one of the portraits, but which, since both we
re unfinished and most of the assembled diners were leaving, we just marked with a morning prayer for the success of the French talks—they’d gone. Master Hans must have stowed his pictures away under his bed, or in Master Nicholas’s room. The painter’s studio was as empty (except for the skull he’d forgotten under the table) as the house now felt. Father was away at Greenwich, closeted with the French ambassadors and Cardinal Wolsey, his big, proud, cunning, devious, greedy, intelligent master, who wrapped his portly body in the crimson robes of his office, wore a sable scarf and a scarlet hat on his head, and liked to poke his nose into an orange pomander full of vinegar and herbs to ward off the infections in the air and the smell and infestations of the populace. Will Roper was mostly with Father, working as an extra secretary. Even William Dauncey was off at Greenwich.

  My More sisters had left to visit their new families (their in-laws having all, as one, developed a passionate new interest in them, now they were expecting).

  It was going to be quiet, with only Dame Alice, the children, and the servants in the house, though it wouldn’t be unpleasant to be left alone with my peaceful, expectant thoughts, now I could see events shaping up more positively. I could stop worrying about what I’d find in the western gatehouse. I could stop sneaking into the New Building. I was happy to read and embroider and take solitary spring walks whenever the rain let up. But I thought I would miss Master Hans. So there were only two women in the house (and young John and Anne Cresacre, who didn’t count, in the schoolroom) when, after a wet spring, the first cases of sweating sickness began to be reported as a hot April prefigured that year’s burning summer.

  I’d had firsthand experience of the sweating sickness the last time it had ravaged London. When I was fourteen and John Clement had still been my teacher, it had struck our house on Bucklersbury. It was a lightning strike of an illness. Andrew Ammonius had lasted twenty hours, raving in his darkened attic as we rushed doctors and cool drinks and poultices in and out. But the disease killed most people on the first day, sometimes within an hour, dissolving them into heat and profuse sweat, raging thirst and delirium. Then they fell asleep and died.