Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

He wasn’t looking at me, but at the hot, dry ground opening up before him. I kept my steps steady. I didn’t want to appear startled. I hadn’t expected him to feel so threatened by a picture that he’d commissioned himself and which, to me, looked so like an act of worship anyway. The secret part of me that distrusted Father and suspected him of hiding a growing taste for cruelty felt a twinge of alarm—a protective sort of unease on behalf of that great German innocent in the parlor, who’d looked so radiantly happy that his picture had touched us as deeply as it had. But the man at my side was speaking so trustingly, as any affectionate father might to a child he loved, that I stifled my worry and only nodded, and made a little noise to encourage him to go on speaking his mind.

  And he did. “The ideas I enjoy are those that everyone has a share in; the work that’s accomplished together,” he said, almost to himself. “The cathedral whose loveliness is the work of hundreds of artists whose individual names we don’t need to know; the choral singing whose beauty is that no single voice dominates; the riches brought by a prosperous guild for the benefit of every master and journeyman.” And he sighed again, a little sadly, like rain melting into a sunny garden.

  “But, Father, you’re famous for welcoming men of genius. Every man of learning in Europe comes to you. And they don’t come to show off. They come to bring their gifts to you. They come because you’re one of them, and you can appreciate them intelligently. They come to be near your genius,” I said cautiously.

  “Oh no,” he said with a modest wave of the hand, a denial of vanity. “There’s no genius in me. I’m just a humble lawyer, a public administrator. And, more and more often now, I feel I’m a man of the past too. I can’t help feeling nostalgic for when people all worked together, when the world was held together by people doing God’s bidding together at God’s direction.”

  He turned his face toward me now, for the first time, and I could see it shining with sincerity. “What’s a good way to explain it to you, Meg? When I was a boy, there were wars in the land and we should have felt more uncertain in every way, every day, than we do in this time of peace and plenty,” he said. “But we didn’t. When I walked to school at St. Anthony’s in the morning, with a candle in my hand, London looked like a map of the face of God. Monasteries, nunneries, guilds, churches; it used to be a city where everyone—every man, woman, and child—knew his place and his role. Life was an act of worship and a dance. We knew the weight of a loaf of bread and the dowry of a silk-woman in the Mercery and the fee for a mass for our dead and the length of service of an apprentice in the rope-makers’ guild and the words of the Holy Bible and the proper respect to show to our fathers and our monarchs and the princes of the church; that was all part of what made up our lives, the whole that God had created for us. Even if there was war, we lived at peace with God.”

  We were at the door of the New Building now, and he was fiddling at his belt for the key. And I was still nodding and murmuring encouragingly, honored that he’d reveal his mind to me, doing whatever I could to spin this rare moment out, and he was saying: “But now the world seems so full of loud discordant voices, each crying out ‘Listen to me!’ ‘No, me!’ ‘No, me!’ that it sometimes feels like anarchy.

  Some of them are genuinely evil—like the pretenders who’ve tried so often to take the throne from our kings, or the renegade priests who want to tear the Holy Church apart. Luther, Tyndale: the men of darkness. But others aren’t evil at all. They’re just young people, brought up with all the choices of our times and not enough reverence for God’s holy order, who think they can ignore it and scream for attention for themselves. Like young Holbein. But in some ways it’s those people—the Holbeins—that make me feel uneasiest of all. Because if you see it as your life’s work to bring back the harmony that’s been lost from the world, to draw men back together into that virtuous bond with one another and God and banish the darkness, it’s easy enough to condemn a man who openly spits anathema at all that—a Luther, say. But what do you do with a Holbein?”

  “Oh, Father,” I said helplessly. I understood a little of why he’d find Hans Holbein’s boisterous individuality to be part of the same continuum that led, at its most dangerous, to Martin Luther or William Tyndale. His own instincts, his upbringing, were so different. With sudden tenderness I found myself recalling all his public acts of respect and obedience to Grandfather, even today. The family authoritarian, a tough judge and a man of the old school who favored beatings and hunger and the hard school of life, was always seated first at church and at table. His every barked opinion and desire was deferred to even though now he was wrinkled and infirm. And even the twitch of Grandfather’s stick in his constantly irritated hand had Father looking deferentially his father’s way to bring the old man whatever comfort he might need. I knew Father hadn’t been brought up in the soft way we had. He’d been left to the mercies of a nurse even before his mother died. There’d been no suckets and marchpane for him if his lessons were learned well—just the fear of beatings if they weren’t, that would never have been with the peacock feathers he’d waved so laughingly at us, but with real sticks. The fact that he’d made our childhoods so different from his own, rewarding us so lavishly for developing unexpected gifts and talents, suggested that a part of him had rejected that constricting old order. But he must have had more respect than I’d previously understood beaten into him for the old ways—for things being the same, generation in, generation out, because that was God’s will. And that hidden part of him probably did fear the very fearlessness with which someone like Master Hans loved experimenting with his art.

  My glimmer of understanding wasn’t enough to make me agree, though. My hands tightened on my skirt, crimping little pleats into it. “But Master Hans is a good, kind man, Father,” I said, in a sort of weak protest, “and surely he’s using his gift as God intended. You can’t see anything ungodly in that.”

  He laughed, but gently, and I felt myself beginning to relax. “Oh, I don’t think he’s ungodly; I’m not saying that; you know I’m a man of moderation, Meg,” he acquiesced.

  And when I peeped sideways at his face, and saw not harshness but a soft, almost pleading expression on it, a wave of tenderness for him swept through me. I whispered: “I know.”

  “I know Holbein’s a good man as well as a wonderful artist,” Father went on warmly. “I like him. All I mean is that he makes me realize how life has changed since I was young. That sometimes I find his vision too overwhelmingly, selfishly, his own. That Holbein feels life as a freedom that makes me dizzy; the kind of freedom which I fear threatens to destroy the ties that bind us and send us all toppling together into the abyss.”

  He unlocked the door and began lighting the candles inside. Behind him I could see Master Hans’s noli-me-tangere picture, sold to Father when he first reached our house, with its ethereal Christ shying away from Mary Magdalene’s fleshy curves, glowing in the dim light. “I don’t worry about all his work,” Father added reassuringly, catching my glance at the religious picture and turning to look up at it himself. “In this picture, for instance, it’s easy to see a painter who recognizes his gift is God-given. I love it for its humbleness, for being a work in which the man has harnessed his genius to giving thanks to God. It’s pictures like this that make me recognize Master Hans as a kindred spirit . . .”

  I felt confident enough by now to try to argue. “But, Father,” I said, holding his gaze, “our family portrait was never going to be a religious picture, and even if you don’t like the way it’s come out you can’t hold Master Hans solely responsible. Don’t you remember? It was you who encouraged him to paint it the way he did. You spent most of an evening plotting it out with him. You made us all rehearse our positions in the hall; you roared with laughter at the thought of putting a fool at the heart of the family. It was your idea as much as his.”

  There was a small silence. He looked down. Then he sighed again, put a weary hand to his forehead, smoothed away what might have been
a pain under the lined olive skin, and looked back at me, meeting the challenge in my eyes with a nod of recognition.

  “You go straight to the heart of things, Meg,” he said ruefully. “And you’re more right than you know. I’m to blame for more than I like to recognize. I have encouraged freethinking and experiment in my time—perhaps too much. Change for its own sake seemed so exciting in the golden years, when we were young and everything looked fresh and innocent. And now when I hear these innocent shouts of ‘Me! Me!’—let alone when I see the destruction being perpetrated by those who are really doing the devil’s work—I often wonder how far I’m to blame in the eyes of God for having enjoyed all that tinkering and altering. How far my own idle curiosity has been responsible for opening Pandora’s box and letting so much evil fly out into the world . . .”

  His eyes were full of anguish now, so much so that I felt mine filling with compassionate tears too. I couldn’t find the words to banish his cares, but I did find the courage I had never had before to put a hand out and touch his fingers—an inarticulate gesture of comfort, but one I hoped he would understand.

  His skin was dry and cool. He didn’t draw his hand away from mine, didn’t take his eyes away from mine, and I was heartened to see some of the pain in his dark gaze fade away. “The world changes, that’s all,” I found myself muttering. “Not through any one man’s fault . . . Not be cause of any one man’s actions. You can’t turn back time . . . don’t blame yourself. Nothing is your fault.”

  He went on looking at my face, and slowly the blurry look of pain left him and something of the familiar quizzical amusement with which he usually met the world came back into his expression.

  “I see you’re a child of the new world too, Meg,” he said in a more everyday voice. “And I know”—he lifted a hand to stop me pointing out the obvious—“it’s the education I’ve given you that has made you that way. I can see you think I’m just an old man being old-fashioned. And perhaps I am. Perhaps I am.”

  He gave the beginning of a hesitant smile. And I was suddenly, radiantly certain of something else. It would be impossible for this man to commit any kind of cruel act. John must be right; I’d leaped hastily to what must have been the wrong conclusions and needlessly tormented myself for months with the fear that darkness had crept into Father’s soul, simply because I didn’t know his reasons for bringing a prisoner home to our gatehouse. But now that we were talking from the heart, just the two of us, it seemed blindingly obvious to me that Father was simply too reasonable to turn fanatic. I was struck dumb by the force of the relief that the revelation brought.

  How long had we been standing like this? I wondered—on the edges of the same pool of candlelight, with the figures from the devotional picture looking down at us, gazing at each other almost like lovers.

  “Will you pray with me, Meg?” he asked, very gently, detaching his arm from my hand. “Give thanks for Margaret’s salvation?”

  There was a lump in my throat. I nodded, and we dropped awkwardly to our knees. Keeping my eyes turned away from the scourge hanging be hind the door, I prayed, like him, that we could all believe the same things and be at peace with one another and God. As my mouth formed the Latin words that believers like us had spoken for a thousand years and more, I let my mind dwell nostalgically on Father’s childhood London: a city that was still a prayer in stone and wood to God’s goodness, in which even walking the tracery of lanes leading out from St. Paul’s, with their holy names, Ave Maria and Paternoster, had been an act of worship. I couldn’t help but believe Master Hans’s family portrait was also God’s work, worship in a new shape, worship for our richer times. But I was honored to have been invited to share Father’s private vision of God—his search for the lost innocence of childhood. It felt like one more proof that God was smiling on me and making my life come right. Even if this encounter between the two of us wasn’t quite the embrace I used to dream of, it was the closest my adopted father had ever let me come to him.

  “What would Father say?” I whispered, watching almost drunkenly in the dapples of sunlight as John stretched my arm out straight and traced a line down it, very slowly, with a single finger. I shivered with pleasure and half closed my eyes, following the touch as it moved toward wrist and palm.

  “He knows,” John murmured back as his finger reached the end of its journey, and he raised my hand to his lips. Gently he kissed the little mound of flesh between thumb and forefinger, pushing it slowly open with his tongue and nipping softly at the thin web of skin under it with his teeth. Then he stopped, and glimmered with laughter. “Of course. And you know he knows, Meg.”

  The funny thing was that I did. Everything had become so simple when we’d woken up the next morning. In the midday heat on the way home from the village, where no one new had fallen sick, in the shady copse he’d led me into and where I’d unquestioningly followed, sleepily enjoying the sound of insects buzzing tipsily and the sight of sun glittering on the golden river water, it was getting simpler all the time. I nodded as if I understood. I felt I did.

  John covered my hand, still tingling from being kissed, with his, and guided it down to rest on his hip. I felt his other hand slide around my waist and move down. As if we were dancing, as if our bodies knew the steps to take next, I found we were turning toward each other and my body was leaning back against a tree trunk while his pressed up against me so close that I could feel his heartbeat, very fast, as fast as mine under my rumpled cloak. From very close, I could see his eyes on mine and the little half-smile on his lips as he whispered, between breaths, “He might horsewhip me if he saw me now . . . true. But this is the point. He married off everyone else. But he saved you for me. And he knows why I’m here now. To claim you.”

  His words were part of it—the relief of the idea that I hadn’t been forgotten by my family as Father arranged marriage after marriage; that there had been a quiet purpose to it all. The heat of the sun on my arms was part of it too. But if I found myself turned into a trickling sweetness of honey it was also because of the feel of him against my skin, all hard muscle and flesh surging forward, kissing my neck.

  I had no idea, I thought hours afterward, drawing the crumpled clothes around my sticky nakedness with a sense of wonderment. No idea.

  I snuggled closer inside his heavy, sleepy arms, full of memories that were all sensation and no words, just happiness. There were rough black hairs on his chest and a line of black hair leading down his flat torso. He had pale skin and more dark hair on the big bones and lean muscle of his arms and legs. He stirred and half opened his eyes to look at me, lifted a hand to raise my chin and smiled as he put his lips to mine. Then he ran his hand down my body, following it with his eye, circled my breast and laughed very softly, with the same wonderment I was feeling. “Beautiful,” he said sleepily. “Mine.” And his arms enfolded me again.

  I woke to find him raised on one elbow, looking at me, and the happiness inside me welled up at the tenderness of his smile.

  “So ours will be a marriage of doctors,” he said. He seemed not to be aware that he was still naked; not to feel the light breeze ruffling his hair.

  Suddenly self-conscious, I looked down and started fumbling for my shift. I didn’t just feel naked; I realized I’d been dishonest not to have told him about the way I’d tended to Margaret, yet I was still embarrassed to mention willow-bark tea to someone of his high learning and have him laugh off my remedy as an old wives’tale, and I also thought I might, in his place, feel discountenanced that an untrained girl had saved a life which his science might not have rescued. Which was unfair; the disease took some and spared others; it was the will of God and not necessarily anything to do with the simple tea I’d made Margaret. And no one could have been braver than John in risking his own life and health to treat the diseased strangers from the Deptford slums.

  Rushing awkwardly into my linen, getting lost in sleeves, buttons, and laces, I was wondering what to do, when I heard his voice say:


  “So tell me, what did you give her?”

  And there was nothing in it but interest.

  “Your father said you gave her a draft . . .” he went on, and now I looked up and saw kindness in his eyes—the look I remembered from the schoolroom, when he wanted to draw some discovery from me. “I’m listening,” he said, and I knew he truly was. And suddenly I also knew he wouldn’t laugh at me.

  I answered, still a little awkwardly, “Well . . . while I was waiting for you to get word . . . I gave her willow bark. Something one of the women on Bucklersbury told me about long ago. It’s supposed to cool the blood. It’s worked before for me, and I was desperate. I thought it might help . . . But I think we were just lucky.” My voice trailed away.

  He smiled, but without mockery. He was genuinely intrigued by the idea, and I thought he looked impressed. There was so little selfish pride in John, I thought, in a happy muddle of love for his simplicity and relief that he didn’t seem to feel threatened by my having tried a remedy he hadn’t thought of and which had, miraculously, worked. I thought his modesty might have come from being of an age to have grown up in the aftermath of the wars; he’d probably been shaped by the suffering of back then in ways that we prosperous children of peacetime couldn’t even imagine. “Willow bark, eh,” he murmured. “Well, you have healing hands and good instincts. I wonder if that’s something I should talk to Dr. Butts about, now I’m going to be working with him. We could try using it more; start trying to understand how it helps. Would you mind, Meg?”

  I shook my head. I was blushing, but with pleasure now and not just out of shame at my nakedness. I’d be so proud if my homespun remedies could somehow help his medical career. More bravely, I said, “I was relieved she survived her crisis before you needed to cut her. I’m scared of bleeding people.”

  And instead of frowning at my small medical heresy, he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “I sometimes wonder about whether these things work too.”