I dragged my medicine chest out from under the bed in the twilight. There were two things I needed to do.
First I took out the pennyroyal bottle and mixed up a dose just strong enough to bring on my monthly bleeding. I swallowed down the bitter, oily stuff and set my lips tight again. I didn’t want there to be any consequences of John’s lovemaking yesterday. I didn’t want to feel his child growing inside me. I’d been wrong to believe we could find compromise and contentment.
Then, sticking my hand in the drawer where I kept Master Hans’s mementos, I pulled out the painter’s letter of all those months before.
I’d started thinking of him again while I was standing in the dark of the church. A fond green summer memory. Not just Master Hans in the garden, under the mulberry tree, kissing me, folding me to his body with strong hands. But Master Hans’s hands, which had set a prisoner in the garden free with a slash of a palette knife. It was light in the darkness, the memory of those hands cutting the man loose. It would never have occurred to me to have freed the prisoner until he’d done it; but afterward I’d seen that I could have done it myself.
I wanted to think about the flash of that knife, not about my husband mincing about my room with his herbs and moral abdication. Perhaps John wasn’t to blame for a past that might make a coward of anyone; but he could no longer command my respect.
In Master Hans, at least I knew one truly courageous man. It was high time I answered his letter.
15
“Do you remember,” Hans Holbein began, with his eyes on the line on the canvas in front of him, “what you wrote in that first book of yours that Prosy and I illustrated?”
Erasmus waited, patiently, sitting at three-quarters face from the painter, looking left toward the pale light of the window, not moving as Holbein found words for his thought.
“. . . laughing at the way scholars glorify each other by giving each other the names of great men from ancient times . . . ?” Holbein went on.
Erasmus murmured encouragingly. He was even skinnier than last year, Holbein thought, and even more a martyr to the aches and pains that made him shift uneasily in his seat, trying obediently to stay still while also trying to move to ease his multiple discomforts. Holbein appreciated the old man’s consideration for the demands of his art and was touched by his uncomplaining stillness today. It was a miracle the old man was still here at all.
“I always agreed with you about that,” Holbein said. “Boastful idiots. Bloody stupid.”
Erasmus nodded, then stilled his head. It was clear there was more to come. But there was time to let the young hothead get it out in his own words.
Holbein blamed the bigots for the deterioration he could see in the old scholar’s physical condition. Holbein hated all the bigots now, Protestants as much as the other kind and maybe more, and he could see that the bigots made Erasmus worry. They stopped him eating properly. Fretting over their stupidity interrupted his sleep. It was obvious that Erasmus had worried all last winter through the council at Marburg that had tried to settle the religious differences between Brother Martin’s German reformers and the various quarrelsome Swiss factions, from states which had each settled on their own versions of the religious truth and promptly professed themselves horrified by the forms of worship all the others had chosen. And now he’d worried all through this summer while Protestants and Catholics met at the imperial Diet in Augsburg to try to stop Christendom splintering before their eyes. None of it had worked, of course; how could you stop these idiots taking things to extremes? It was a waste of good food and rest time to let the extremists put you off either simple pleasure. But it would be impossible for Erasmus, the last moderate intellectual left in civilization, to take things that way.
Now the scholar wanted his portrait done again to send to all the people he wrote to so energetically all around Europe, to remind them that his very existence symbolized moderation and hope for unity. Privately, Holbein thought it was too late to remind anyone of that. But he admired the effort the old man, whose first commission had got him started in life and whom he’d hero-worshipped ever since, went on making. And he was happier than he could believe to be back in Freiburg, recording those sunken cheeks and sharp, sharp eyes and spindly shanks in their furry wrap for posterity, and hearing the old man’s fears and secrets after dark.
“But,” Holbein blurted, “there is one name I’d like to be called if I were going to get a name like that.”
He was grinning bashfully down at his feet now, and his face was bright red. He was asking for a favor in the most tactful way he knew, but part of him felt he was making a pig’s ear of it. He’d always known diplomacy wasn’t his strong suit.
Erasmus blinked encouragingly.
“The name you were good enough, once, to call Albrecht Dürer, when you were recommending his work. Apelles. I’d like people to think of me as the Apelles of today.”
He was hot with relief when he saw Erasmus smile the smallest smile he could without changing the way his head was set, and murmur back, “I never thought you were so ambitious, young Hans,” but kindly. Holbein could hear real affection in that voice. It made his heart rejoice. He needn’t have worried so much. He wasn’t going to bring any sharp mockery down on himself by asking. By now he should have known Erasmus liked and trusted him. The old man would never have told him all those things last night if he didn’t.
Holbein still couldn’t really believe what Erasmus had told him after supper, sitting up late, as ever, to the very end of the light of the very last candle. He’d been a bit drunk himself, maybe, as anyone would be after the bumping and bruising and boredom of a long day’s boat ride, but Erasmus had been as sober as ever, with his goblet untouched beside him and his plate of food pushed to one side. The man seemed to live on air.
So you couldn’t put down what he’d said to a bit too much late-night worship at the Temple of Bacchus. It must be true, even if it was impossible.
Cozy catching-up talk had given way quickly to an anxious account of Erasmus’s various attempts to bring the religious maniacs back to their senses. It was only when Holbein brought out of his bag the letter from Meg Clement in London that the old man’s face completely changed. Holbein had known all along that Erasmus would be pleased his bidding had been done and contact had been reestablished between Holbein and the Clement household. But there was real urgency on that old face, a hunger Holbein wouldn’t have imagined the other man could feel.
“Excellent. Show me,” he said, and stuck out his hand for it.
“There’s nothing much to see.” Holbein faltered, handing it over, feeling his fingers protectively caress the pages Meg had touched as they left his safekeeping, fearing her luminously simple phrases would disappoint someone whose expectations were clearly so high.
“It doesn’t matter,” Erasmus said shortly, and he smoothed the crumpled, much-opened document down on the table under the candle and devoured every clear French word. He sucked in air between his teeth as he read. “Clement’s been made an elect of the College of Physicians . . .” he muttered, and nodded approvingly. “The baby’s called Thomas . . . and they’re living at the Old Barge.” Here he looked straight into the heart of the flame for a moment, thinking a thought Holbein couldn’t imagine. “I spent a lot of time in that house myself, long ago,” he added inconsequentially.
He turned over. “What’s this,” he muttered, poking a thin index finger at the lines Holbein knew by heart after staring at them for many hours of every day in the weeks since the letter had arrived. “Look, this bit, where she says: ‘This is what I always wanted, or I thought it was. But London life is more complicated today than when I was a child, especially now that Father is in charge. It seems paradoxical, but sometimes I wish we were all back in the garden at Chelsea, wondering how your painting would turn out. These days it seems that things were simpler back then.’ So she feels it, then, the threat of today. She feels it.” And Erasmus sat, staring at the candle again
and nodding his head several more times, thinking his private thoughts, so that Holbein hardly dared move to fill up his own empty goblet or scratch the place on his leg where a flea had been giving him hell.
Finally the old man shook himself out of his reverie. He laughed and said, “What must you think of me, a neglectful host!” and filled Holbein’s goblet. He met the younger man’s eye. “Thank you,” he said simply as Holbein drained the liquid, relieved that the moment of tension was passing, wondering why Erasmus seemed even more acutely sensitive to Meg’s every word than he was, when Erasmus could surely scarcely remember her all these years later.
Filling the painter’s goblet again, Erasmus said, “I’m glad you wrote. I didn’t think you would. And I worry about them. I fear they may soon need help. I’ve wondered for a long time now how to find a discreet way to be in contact with them if it becomes necessary . . .”
And it was after that, late in the night, that the other story had come trickling out, the one Holbein couldn’t believe he could have remembered right, the one in which John Clement, that Greek tutor and doctor with the remote, startling pale blue eyes, and that infuriatingly quiet air of distinction that always made Hans Holbein feel as though he had twenty left thumbs and his breeches were falling down, was actually someone quite different, of royal stock, a prince of the old English blood who’d been brought up in Louvain under a false name in the care of the Duchess of Burgundy, and eventually settled back into anonymity in England when the present king came to the throne. Fuzzy though he might feel this morning, Holbein knew he hadn’t imagined it: he could swear he remembered Erasmus leaning over with his eyes alight and hissing, practically into Holbein’s ear:
“Richard, the Duke of York; that’s who he once was.”
Yes, it was all coming back now. The deal Erasmus described had been struck through the good offices of two young men of the New Thinking.
One of the young men was Thomas More, the ex-page of the archbishop of Canterbury, who was fast becoming a prominent lawyer and official in his own right in London. “The other”—Erasmus went on, twinkling merrily—“was an orphaned ex-priest who’d never taken to the endless detail and prayer of holy orders; who found work instead under the Duchess of Burgundy’s adviser, the bishop of Cambrai. Yours truly,” and he’d sketched a modest bow. Both young men had been chosen by their masters for their diplomatic skills and discretion; they were given the task of discreetly protecting the man now known as John Clement for the rest of his life. Erasmus had studied in Louvain himself, once upon a time, so he already knew the young Englishman (back then, in Louvain, everyone knew Clement to be of noble blood, and half the university suspected him of being the love child of the bishop of Cambrai and the duchess herself). Erasmus was part of the same religious sect as the bishop and the duchess, Devotio Moderna. So he quickly acquired friends in high places. He was sent by his bishop to London for the first time as long ago as 1499, while John Clement was still mastering Greek and astronomy in the Low Countries, to meet his English counterpart in their secret business.
“We walked from Greenwich to the royal palace at Eltham one day. More took me to meet today’s King Henry—he was just a prince then, a younger brother, a ginger-haired boy of eight,” Erasmus recalled. “More had met the royal princes many times already, I could see,” the old man went on, with his bittersweet smile, “and he was a young man too, but he had all the ability to rise to the occasion that has made him a great man. He hadn’t come empty-handed. He just happened to have brought with him some verses to read to the prince. When he brought them out of a pocket and started declaiming them, I felt absurdly unprepared. But it taught me something else too: that he would rise in his career; that he was ambitious.”
“That’s how we first knew each other, you see,” Erasmus finished wistfully, and he was staring into the candle again, seeing things that were no longer there. “Everything else came later—that we became friends, and that the New Learning we’d come to love swept the world, and that we were lucky enough to have some small part in shaping the way people learned to think. But my ties with Thomas More go a long way further back than that. Even what’s happening now in the realm of religion hasn’t stopped our friendship, though I will admit to finding some of the positions More adopts these days, well, difficult . . . But I’d say the most charitable way to look at his behavior now is to understand that he’s never been a modern. His mentality is medieval through and through.”
Holbein nodded, savoring the word charitable, aware of the disappointment in the old man’s voice. Erasmus shook himself.
“Anyway,” he said briskly, “the point is that what these religious quarrels have done—and my advancing age; we’re none of us getting any younger, after all—is to make it harder for me to travel across Europe to see the More family and fulfill my obligations to John Clement without being indiscreet. I don’t like to criticize my old friend Thomas More, but I can’t entirely feel easy about the letters he sends me now. His perspective isn’t what it was. But it wouldn’t do for me to just start writing directly to Clement myself. Who knows who might read the letters? Still, I want to know he’s well. Things won’t get easier for him if the king and More fall out over faith. And it’s still my duty to make sure that John Clement stays safe. So I’m grateful to you, young Hans”—he smiled, and the candlelight turned the lines stretching down his face into caverns and caves—“more grateful than you can know.”
They didn’t mention it again the next morning. Hans Holbein’s head was pounding, as it often was in the early part of the day. Erasmus was calm and urbane and a little withdrawn as he sat in his robe, twisting and turning to get his pose right.
Hans Holbein half wondered if he’d imagined the whole will-o’-the-wisp story. He fussed over the fall of a hem. He took longer than usual to mix his colors. Bursts of last night—phrases, looks, pride at having won Erasmus’s approval, and pricks of jealous pain, or incredulity, at the thought of Meg married to a man who might have been king—kept coming into his head. But he shut them out and tried to concentrate on today. He had to treasure his time with Erasmus. He had to let go of all the other thoughts crowding through his head.
This wasn’t the place to think about how Meg’s wistful line about the garden in Chelsea had almost made him pack his bags, head straight for the Rhine transport boat, and start a journey to London. It wasn’t the place to think about the drudgery of the Basel print shops or what Elsbeth said when she found out how much of the Council Chamber payment he’d spent in the tavern or how much he’d paid for the cottage beside their house, which he’d bought as an investment for the family.
It was easier to think about how to make himself the most famous and respected painter of his own day. However low he seemed to have fallen after his glorious three years in London, here, in these comfortable chambers in Freiburg, he was really winning the friendship of the greatest man in Europe.
So he’d made his request. But now he didn’t know what to do to follow through. He painted on, whistling through his teeth, increasingly embarrassed by his moment of greedy ambition. Erasmus had gone back into his dreams. His eyes were elsewhere.
“Do you want to take a rest now?” Holbein said nervously. He didn’t want to tire his friend. Erasmus nodded gratefully and began to stir his limbs, stiff from so much stillness. He stood up and looked straight at Holbein.
Holbein saw with relief that he was smiling.
“Have you never thought of going back to England?” Erasmus said, fixing Holbein with that luminous gray gaze. “You were doing so well there. If you want fame, surely that’s the place for you to go on building it?”
Holbein shook his head bashfully. “I had to come home. The family. And my travel permit was running out.” He stopped. None of that was true. Well, it was true, but none of it was enough to have stopped him from staying in London if he hadn’t got into such a state about Meg. And now she was writing to him. She was nostalgic for her walks in the garde
n in Chelsea with him. There wasn’t really any reason for him to stay home.
Erasmus was right.
“Things have changed,” Erasmus said briskly. “You’ve been back for three years now. It wouldn’t be hard. You could easily get someone to write you a new travel permit.”
He was getting interested in the idea now, Holbein saw. His eyes were lighting up with possibilities. There was nothing Holbein wanted more right now than to be persuaded that a return trip to England was in everyone’s best interests. But he needed someone else to persuade him.
“You have friends in high places there, after all,” Erasmus was going on. “The Mores, of course. And now the new court circle. Obviously the new man, Thomas Cromwell, is no friend of the Mores’. But he’s an astute man for all that. There’s a reform Parliament at work there that he’s helping. There’s just a possibility that he might steer England into some sort of bloodless, peaceful religious reformation—not like the violent shambles we’ve seen here. And you’d be well placed to find commissions. Anne Boleyn’s friends—I correspond with her father, the Earl of Wiltshire, who is an intelligent man. You’ve painted half the Boleyn circle already. It would be easy for you to find work.”
He grinned encouragingly at the young painter. Holbein was nodding, drinking in the words he wanted to hear, so delighted by them that he hardly stopped to wonder why Erasmus was pushing him to go. Surely the old scholar could see that Holbein’s feelings for Meg were not ones that should be encouraged if you had the best interests of Meg’s husband at heart? Or could he be so far removed from bodily things that he had no idea of the maelstrom Holbein had been plunged into in England—could it be that Erasmus simply didn’t know what it meant to be in love?
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