Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  “Well, I don’t know,” he answered, with a bark of laughter, “but I tell you what. For all I spent so many evenings sitting with Kratzer criticizing More for being a brute with the new men, now that I’ve seen what a mess our new men are making of governing Basel, I’m beginning to think More might not have been so wrong after all!”

  Erasmus snuffled with laughter at that, and Holbein retreated quickly to safer territory. “And More’s still famous for charm,” he said, with an easier chuckle. “They love him for that. They even teach schoolchildren Latin by getting them to translate sentences like ‘More is a man of singular learning and angels’ wit.’ ”

  “Ah, my old friend; I do hope it will be granted me to see him again before I die.” Erasmus sighed, sounding nostalgic. “And his children. How well I remember those little dark-haired girls . . .”

  “All grown up and married now,” Holbein said, suddenly wistful. “All probably with children of their own too.”

  “Margaret and Cecily . . . little Lizzie . . .” Erasmus sighed. “Even little Johnny. How well my old friend More chose the wards he adopted, and two of his children have made fine marriages to them. Good inheritances on them from their parents; a good education from him; an eminently sensible arrangement. Even little . . .” He paused, giving Holbein his bright, birdlike stare from the side. “Little . . .”

  “Meg,” Holbein said flatly, bitterly resenting the thumping of his treacherous heart. “Meg Giggs.”

  “Yeeess,” Erasmus drawled. “Meg Giggs. A lovely child. Clever too. She came late to the household, I remember . . .” He looked thoughtfully at Holbein’s burning cheeks. “I call them little, but of course purely from force of habit. Foolish of me, when I can see from your portrait that they’re all taller and more graceful these days than either you or me!” He cackled encouragingly at the painter.

  “She’s in her twenties now,” Holbein said. Thunderously. To his secret horror, he felt tears pricking at the inside of his eyes. He wiped furiously at his nose. “Summer cold,” he excused himself, indistinctly. “She got engaged just before I left. That was more than a year ago now. She’ll be long married.”

  “To John Clement . . .” Erasmus prompted again, with one eyebrow going up that quizzical quarter inch.

  Holbein nodded, only half surprised to find Erasmus already knew.

  He had admirers from all over Europe writing to him, after all. “We were friends,” he added, continuing to wipe at his face with his big striped scarf. “Meg and I, that is. Clement, well, I didn’t understand . . .” And he stopped, suddenly aware of his voice drunkenly beginning to blurt out his secret.

  Erasmus nodded kindly. The little half smile on his delicate old face, with its crumpled-paper skin, always seemed to suggest he understood far more than was being said. The eyebrow went up an extra fraction.

  “A good husband for Meg, do you think?”

  Holbein nodded glumly. “I suppose so,” he said lugubriously. “She said she was in love with him, anyway.” He stopped. He shouldn’t be talking about this.

  “Have you kept in touch with her?” Erasmus went gently on. “Your friend Meg? Where’s she living with her new husband? How is she finding married life?”

  Holbein began to feel uneasily that there might be a point behind these questions. “No,” he mumbled, looking away. “I haven’t. I wouldn’t know what to say.”

  Erasmus laughed again, with the slightest note of mockery. “Dear Olpeius,” he said. “You must get over your fear of the written word. You’re an intelligent man. And what’s the point of travel if you don’t let it broaden your world and make you new friends to keep from a distance?”

  The probing went on for a few more minutes. If Erasmus had been Elsbeth, Holbein thought, he’d have called it nagging. And he went on bashfully shaking his head.

  “Well, it’s a pity you feel that way,” Erasmus finally said, graceful in defeat, and turning for the jug to pour the painter another drink. “I used to know John Clement myself when he was a younger man. I thought you might be in a position to help me renew my old acquaintance. Still . . .” He concentrated on pouring straight. His brown-spotted hands shook these days, Holbein noticed.

  “Never mind that, anyway. I want to ask you a favor,” Erasmus said, suddenly seeming serious. “I’d like you to come back and paint my portrait again.” He stopped and coughed. “When you have time, that is,” he added politely. “I appreciate you’re a busy man.”

  Holbein’s heart raced. Paint Erasmus again? Have his work displayed all over Europe by the great man’s many noteworthy admirers? Get proper payment, get weeks off his joyless grubbing round the print shops for scraps of work that in London he’d have sneered at, especially the job he’d just been offered fixing the town clock? Get out of Basel and out of the house and away from the family? He’d do it tomorrow. It was almost enough to chase away all those tormented dreams in which dark heads slipped away from him in remote gardens. He nodded, trying not to look too eager. “I’ll come back in the next couple of months,” he said, then thought he’d sounded graceless and added hastily, “of course. I’d be honored. I’ll come as soon as I can.”

  “You must be tired, and I should go to bed soon too,” the old man added, watching one of the three surviving candles sputter out and stifling a yawn. “But if you’ll sit here and finish your drink with me, I’ve another favor to ask. I’ll just write a brief note to the Mores myself to thank them for the picture. Then perhaps you’ll be kind enough to arrange for it to be sent on your way home tomorrow?”

  Holbein nodded. The old scholar nodded back, got up lightly from his bench, and took one of the last two candles over to the stand-up writing table in the corner, where his inks and papers and feather pens were laid out for him. He still stood very upright and his veiny hand moved fast over the paper. Holbein watched the way the light fell on his face from below, creating a circle of somber color in the dusk and showing the hollows of the old man’s cheeks and eyes and temples, and marveled at the speed with which Erasmus covered paper without even pausing for thought.

  “There,” the old man said, flattening the page into his tray of sand and turning to fix Holbein with another encouraging birdlike stare, “that wasn’t so difficult, was it? I’m delighted you’re coming back to make another likeness of me. And there’s just one more thing.”

  Holbein nodded eagerly. If he couldn’t have love in the dreary new Protestant world he’d wanted to see created, then he’d still do a lot to have the companionship of geniuses again. It was only this evening, after more than a year back, that he’d remembered he could feel alive again.

  “If you do find, before your next visit, that you have time to contact that dear girl Meg Giggs . . . Clement . . .”—Erasmus fixed that beady look on the painter again—“I’d love to know how she is getting on.”

  “Naturally,” he said, “you’re delighted to be home again, with your family and friends. But you never know, do you, when you might begin to feel a little, mmm, bogged down in Basel.”

  He gave Holbein another of those bright, considering glances, and it showed the painter more clearly than any words that his secret was exposed and that the wish he’d hidden even from himself to return to London and beg, plead, shout, or do violence to make Meg change her mind had been noted.

  “Now that her father’s been made lord chancellor of England”—Erasmus rolled his tongue luxuriantly over the words, reminding the painter how valuable a connection like that could be—“the Mores could be in a better position than ever to advance your international career. Or, who knows? It may be the other way round. These are troubled times in England as well as in Basel. Meg and her husband may soon need real friends more than ever. Either way, my advice to you, dear boy, is keep the door open. Write. Tuck a little note of your own in when you send mine. There’s really nothing to it.”

  Holbein nodded, looking more reluctant than he was beginning to feel. He couldn’t go on saying no now, not if he w
anted the portrait commission. And writing at Erasmus’s request would at least give him an excuse to approach Meg again. Not that he understood what bee Erasmus had got in his bonnet; but it didn’t matter. This was clearly a command, only thinly disguised as a request. So he’d just have to do it well—force himself to be elegant and persuasive enough on paper to impress her.

  “Well, I’m no scribe,” he said, tucking the parchment into his bag. “But you know that, so perhaps it doesn’t matter. Perhaps I should. Try.” And without really wanting to know why, he felt his heart lighten.

  It was only when he was already in the boat the next day, with the parchment safely wrapped in his bag next to the bread and cheese and beer that Erasmus insisted on providing him for the journey, watching the herons dip and dive over the fish in the shallows, that the fresh river breeze chased last night’s fog out of his brain enough for him to remember that he’d been meaning to ask Erasmus all the time he was in London about how, and when, the scholar had first met John Clement anyway.

  12

  They were hardly aware of me there, on a cushion in the corner of the parlor, under the window, in the fading light, with my embroidery. John, at his desk, was listening, enthralled, to Dr. Butts, on the bench, expounding his theories on the causes and treatment of plague in his reedy, high-pitched voice. I hadn’t minded at all that Dr. Butts couldn’t talk about anything except his knowledge of the human body. I’d hoped to learn so much from hearing England’s greatest physician discuss the science of medicine with my learned husband. But if I were honest, my first few experiences of listening to their professional conversations were proving a disappointment.

  Perhaps my own education had been too much based on skepticism, on marrying the findings of learned men and books with the common sense of the simple wise women of the street. What had fascinated me in medicine was the examination of disease—the intellectual challenge of painstakingly assessing symptoms—and the gentle application of whatever minimal herbal remedies tradition suggested might calm and cure the patient, from aqua vitae to cleanse a wound or relieve the pain of an aching tooth, to herbal lotions and grease for smallpox and measles scabs.

  Of course, those were simple skills, perhaps not sophisticated enough for the treatment of the kings and courtiers Dr. Butts dealt with. But some of the great theories that were taught at medical schools and occupied the minds of serious physicians of his stature, which I was now hearing for the first time, seemed uncannily like the superstitions of the odder salesmen on the street outside. They featured astrology, magic, and even, at times, the application of the unicorn horn sold by the likes of Mad Davy. I couldn’t take them seriously.

  I stabbed a needle into the heart of a silk flower, puzzling over what was making me doubt all Dr. Butts’s knowledge. I didn’t have the experience to know whether the human pulse really beat in dactyls in infants and in iambs in the old, which he’d just told us had been the learned Pietro d’Abano’s contribution to medical knowledge, or whether there could be, as he said, nine simple varieties and twenty-seven complex varieties of musical rhythms in our pulses that made up part of the musica humana of our bodies, which could be described in terms of comparison with animals as, among other things, antlike, goatlike, or wormlike, and which changed as we aged. Yet, even if I didn’t know what caused plague, I couldn’t credit what Dr. Butts had just been saying about it either: that the particularities of one person’s horoscope, or the balance of the four bodily fluids within his body, contained the secret of whether or not he personally would get sick during an epidemic of plague, when other people all around were dying.

  “It’s too dark for me to sew anymore,” I murmured. “If you’ll excuse me.” and I slipped away. Perhaps it was because they were so entranced with their ideas that they hardly noticed me go.

  “Good night, my dear,” Dr. Butts said absently as I reached the door, but John was still gazing at him with that disciple’s look of hushed devotion and didn’t even turn round. (He looked like that at me most of the time too, I thought, suddenly critical; but did he always look so foolish when he did?)

  I put the embroidery down on a table and climbed the stairs as quietly as I could, with the memory of that conversation still hot on me. It took me a long while, as I prepared myself for bed, to reason myself back to a kind of understanding. Of course John had to follow every turn of his new master’s mind. It was only right for him to do so with respect; and natural too, since John, an orphan like me, had always sought out the kindly guidance of older men. Equally, I told myself firmly, it was only right for Dr. Butts to reexamine every kind of old folk remedy in the light of the university men’s new thinking. Yet I still thought some of Dr. Butts’s ideas for treatment were frivolous and silly at best; at worst they were cruel and thoughtless.

  When John stumbled into the darkened room an hour or so later, and got into the bed beside me, I found I couldn’t look into his eyes. So I shut mine and pretended to be asleep. I didn’t want to look into his face and see the reverent stupidity I thought I’d glimpsed downstairs—a look which, for a moment, had stripped his features of the beauty I usually saw in them. That wasn’t a look I’d seen much of in the men who surrounded Father, whose minds were always as sharp as sword blades, whose eyes sparkled with lively, skeptical questions. Apart from my weeks of lying-in, it was our first night together without making love.

  Margaret only laughed when I asked her.

  “Heavens, no,” she said cozily, settling her hands on her belly, which was already round with another baby. “To tell you the truth, Meg, I’m actually relieved to be out of the hothouse atmosphere Father creates around himself. All that obsessiveness. I don’t miss it a bit.”

  “And you don’t miss the way Father’s friends go to the very heart of the ideas they’re discussing?” I persisted, disconcerted. “You don’t feel we’ve settled for second best by marrying husbands who don’t have it in them to do that?”

  She grinned, almost impishly. She’d stopped behaving like England’s most learned woman since she left Chelsea for Will’s home at Eltham. She looked better for it too. She was glowing with happiness. She shook her head.

  “I love Will just the shambling way he is!” she said with no doubt in her voice, and no offense at the question. “Of course I love Father too, but he’s impossible,” she said, seeing me still looking unconvinced. “Always in the grip of an idea . . . doesn’t come to meals . . . sits up half the night in the New Building writing . . . and fills the house with priests and protégés who end up staying on for years. I know it drives Alice half mad with frustration, however well she hides it. She never has her husband or her house to herself. It’s no life for a wife.

  If you really want to know, Meg, I only wish Will would do what John’s done and find some nice sensible new master to adore. Preferably someone abroad, whom he’d have to write to rather than go and see. Will spends far too much time hanging round Father, doting on him. And I’d like him to be with us at Eltham, so I didn’t have to traipse up to London or Chelsea so much with the children.

  What I want to do more than anything is plant a really beautiful new garden at Well Hall,” she said, and her eyes sparkled at the idea, “somewhere the children will be happy playing. My dream is to have Will in it too, not lurking around here, getting all worked up about Father’s latest ideas.” She laughed sweetly. She meant it. I wished I had her gift for contentment.

  The two women brought the man to the church door before they called me over. It was December by then, with the kind of snowless, loveless cold that turns earth to iron. I was shivering even under the cloak I’d thrown on by the time I’d walked the ten paces across the flagstones.

  They were respectable-looking women in anonymous shrouds of gray wool. One, judging by her weight and gait, might have been my age; the other could have been her mother, but their anguish had turned both into ageless spectral sister hags. It was still dark; too early for crowds. I think they’d been waiting for a wh
ile. I think Mad Davy, hunched over at their side, wanted to make sure Father and John were out of the house before knocking at my door. For once he wasn’t grinning. He just jerked a thumb at the two women and trotted away. “He says you’re good with herbs,” the younger one quavered. “Can you do anything, missus?” and she pointed at the human-size pile of rags on a plank in the doorway. She was heaving, breathless, hiding her hands in her blanket, and her eyes, puffy and bruised with past tears, had an agony of hope in them. The older woman didn’t speak. She was breathing in great gulps of air and holding her sides; I didn’t know whether it was fear or exertion that had turned her face purple even in that cold and got her tongue. I had a feeling they’d been carrying the man themselves.

  He was as good as dead, of course. I should have known from their faces. I had him brought into the quiet dry room by the stables where I saw the simple people who sometimes came asking for treatment. (There’d be someone most weeks, some desperate-looking soul who’d heard that I’d gone out to look after the poor during the sweating sickness and believed I might know a poultice for their ailments or a binding for their wounds.) When the servants had gone, puffing and blowing, I pulled away the blanket. The man underneath had injuries I’d never seen or even imagined possible. For a nauseating moment, I couldn’t do anything except stare. The wounds looked methodical. The body below the lolling head was crushed; arms broken straight across just above the wrist and elbow; legs broken straight across just above ankle and knee; and the surface in between a mangled stew of imploded ribs and twisted back and great dark bubbles of blue and red. There was blood coming from his anus. There was blood coming from his ears. He wasn’t quite dead; there were little whimpering noises coming from the smashed mouth, under a blancmange of swellings and caked blood where eyes and nose could only be guessed at.