He hardly noticed the tall, thin figure in a cloak disengage itself from a wall near his house as he turned into Maiden Lane. There were always stray people about on a summer evening, taking the air, thinking their thoughts, weren’t there? He hardly heard the light footsteps patter along behind his.
For a few minutes, at least. And then he began to worry. The street was deserted. He didn’t want to have to fight for his life without hope of help if this was a footpad attack. He whipped around, ready to attack.
But the face staring wide-eyed back at him from under the hood of the cloak stopped him in his tracks.
It was a well-bred face; a face from his dreams, if a strangely unfamiliar one now. A woman’s face—at least as far as he could tell in what was left of the twilight.
He froze. His heart was beating even louder now. He didn’t know his mouth had opened until he found himself speaking. Gargling, more like: with the air suddenly rasping into his lungs making him realize he hadn’t breathed for several agonizingly long seconds.
And the word his lips were forming, independent of anything he could recognize as his own will, was “Meg . . . ?”
But before he could move forward to grab her shoulders, the stranger with Meg’s face had taken to her heels and fled off away from St. Paul’s, vanishing eastward into the evening’s uncertain light.
Hans Holbein’s head was spinning. It couldn’t really have been her, could it? Could it? Or was it just a drunken mirage—his brain playing tricks on him? He’d never know now. He was a little tipsy, alone under the stars in Maiden Lane, and all he had in his hands were shadows.
18
When I saw him back outside my house the next morning, as if he’d never been away, a great rush of joy went through my body. It was as if I’d been drenched in sunlight.
And then I almost laughed at the sight of him, waiting for me to go to church and congratulating himself on his subtle hiding place. It was typical of Master Hans that he’d choose to wait by the pissing conduit pretending to relieve himself. I think he genuinely believed that would make him invisible to a lady; he couldn’t imagine I’d actually be able to see him doing something so physical. It had made me laugh quietly into my psalter the first time I’d seen him hanging round up there, nearly a year ago, stealing glances at me from under his golden eyelashes. But perhaps my laughter had been relief as much as anything else: relief that he’d turned up, that he was there, undecided, wavering, so nervous of our family disgrace that he didn’t dare come up to me and say good day in a straightforward way, but at least wanting to resume a friendship from before our lives went dark enough to hover nervously at the corner of the street for hours on end. I’d found the comical sight of him strangely comforting.
I scarcely admitted it to myself at the time, but gradually, as the season rolled by and he went on faithfully being there, I’d found myself dressing up for my early-morning church outings more carefully than before: dressing up to look more elegant, but also to look wistful, sadder, thinner, paler, and more tragic than before; and sighing gently as I unseeingly passed him by. Things were certainly bad enough to sigh and look wistful about anyway; it wasn’t that I was pretending to have these feelings. But for reasons I didn’t completely understand myself it was reassuring to know someone was watching me feel that way.
So I couldn’t believe it when, suddenly, he wasn’t there one morning in spring. And then not the next morning, or the next. He just stopped coming. I looked and looked for him, scared by the emptiness inside me at the idea he’d gone for good. But however hard I looked, he wasn’t there.
Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that Davy knew him. Davy always knew everything.
Davy sidled up to me in the street one day after church. “Your admirer’s stopped hanging round, innee,” Davy said. He put his head on one side. He looked inquiringly at me. I shrugged, as if I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I kept my face soft and welcoming. I didn’t talk much to Davy these days—I’d stopped buying medicine or going on the street more than I had to, so there were few chances of accidental meetings; our family disgrace made me want to keep away from crowds of people in case of chance unpleasantnesses; and in any case Davy didn’t try that hard to keep my friendship either. Perhaps cynically, I thought it was because Father no longer held his job. I thought it was because there was no point in converting me to heresy anymore; I’d stopped being a prize worth winning. He never gave any sign, for instance, of knowing that when he saw me and Kate in the street, with baskets on our arms, we might be on our way to tend his flock. I still treated the Lutheran sick, from time to time, even if I went out less than before.
There weren’t so many of them so afraid of the authorities anymore that they chose to exist underground, among their own. And I didn’t want to bring more danger down on my family; things were bad enough as they were.
But at the same time I didn’t want to lose altogether the quiet companionship I’d developed with my fellow nurse, the flicker of something maternal I sometimes surprised in Kate’s gray eyes. So I looked about for people from outside Davy’s cellar to treat; and brought Kate with me sometimes when I dressed the sores of the poor of St. Stephen’s and fed broth to the elderly.
Still, in my new circumstances a gratefulish smile was politic; people with as few friends as we had these days couldn’t afford to toss their heads and be high and mighty to street salesmen anymore, even if they were being impertinent.
“Master Hans, I mean,” Davy went on, giving me another little nod as he watched me keep my face impassive at the mention of that name. “Holbein.” Davy was like a city bird, a sparrow or a raven, I thought: all chirps and dirty feathers and knowing looks and sudden bursts of intent intelligence. “Living over at Maiden Lane,” and he gestured toward St. Paul’s.
“Not surprising he can’t find the time at the moment, though. They say he’s working down Fleet way now. Painting the French ambassador. Early starts.”
The French ambassador had put up at Bridewell Palace, I knew; over the Fleet, and even farther west than Maiden Lane. “Oh,” I said, and felt myself blushing with relief.
Davy smiled secretively at his feet. “Nice to talk to you, anyway, Mistress Meg,” he said, and ambled off without looking back. I thought about it a lot afterward but I couldn’t work out why, if Davy was acting as agent provocateur for some enemy of my father’s, as he might easily be, he’d have been interested in telling me that particular piece of comforting information. The only explanation that seemed remotely plausible was that he was being kind. It was as if he were sorry for me. Or was that just me being naïve?
A lot of things were confusing just then. Perhaps it was the spring playing tricks on me.
Perhaps it was the fear for Father and the rest of us that ran through everything now. Perhaps it was not having anyone much to talk to, with old friends keeping a cautious distance, and the servants so tricky and easy to take offense and leaving faster than I could hire new ones.
Or perhaps it was John being out of the house so much and our love, which had lost its old innocence, still so watchful and cautious and threadbare of trust. The spring weeks of war were over, at least, and we’d gone back to trying to be good to each other—though now it was me, full of remorse, who was trying to make up to him for my betrayal.
I didn’t know what to do to take the sad, lost look off his face.
Whenever I apologized, he’d just smile gently and say “It doesn’t matter,” and “Don’t worry, Meg,” and “It was bound to come out sooner or later,” with the generous kindness I was only now realizing I loved, but with none of the warmth I now realized I missed.
So I tried subtler ways of feeling toward reestablishing his trust. I pounded his medicines for him. I embroidered his linens and strewed lavender in his chests. And he thanked me for each gesture with wistful, remote smiles and small chaste kisses on my head or cheeks. But, though he’d come back to sleep in my bed since we returned from Chelsea,
he slept exhaustedly at the extreme edge of it, as far as possible from me, with his back turned. I couldn’t see his heart.
What everyday conversations we had at table, over the meals that I supervised with more anxious care than ever before, were fitful and broken. And he left the house every day to meet Dr. Butts far earlier than he ever had before, and never brought him inside our house in the evenings.
How could I have been so suspicious of him? I wondered, now that my fear he might have more secrets to hurt me with had faded away, now that there seemed nothing more desirable than taking refuge from the cares of the world in private love, as I tried to win back the ease we’d once had with each other. Often it felt hopeless, struggling to find a way out of this cloud of contrition and regret, penitence and discouragement; with too little chance of success, and too much my own stupid fault to be bearable.
I drew what hope I could from a murmured conversation I overheard between him and Butts, holding their horses’ bridles, saying good-bye to each other under my window one evening.
“Give my regards to your lovely wife, dear boy,” I heard the doctor say archly, while I drew as close to the window as I dared, hoping to hear what John would say without being seen. “I hope she’s well?”
He must wonder why he wasn’t invited in anymore. He must be angling for information. Perhaps that harmless old man might even worry that it was his fault, that he’d somehow given offense. The thought wrung my heart.
“As well as can be expected,” John was saying, quietly, loyally. “Of course these are hard times for all of us.” Then he laughed, gently, more to himself than to Butts but with genuine warmth.
“I’m learning that marriage is a bit like medicine, Dr. Butts,” he went on. “If you open your heart to someone, whether it’s a doctor or a wife, it’s inevitable that you expose yourself to pain. Shocks. Disappointments.
Luckily I can see that the healing process is very similar in both cases too. If you have faith in your remedy, and go on doing your honest best to achieve a cure for long enough, you find the right way in the end.”
They both chuckled, and Butts reached up to pat John sympathetically on the shoulder before setting off for his own home.
Did that mean, I wondered, heart racing, that John knew he’d forgive me as soon as his hurt had healed; that he felt his wound knitting back together; that it was just a question of time?
“We must ask you in for a meal again,” John called after his colleague, mounted now, retreating into the twilight. “Soon.”
Meanwhile, Tommy was my consolation: rising four now, with a peachy skin and that elegant little nose that would one day be his father’s great beak, and John’s elegant hands too, lisping and running determinedly round the garden. But whether there’d be any more children, even if John were to find his old joy in me, I couldn’t have said. However modest the dose of pennyroyal I’d taken in my angry attempt to purge my womb of his baby, it had set off its own fury of bleeding and pain. It was beyond my medical knowledge to try to treat myself. All I could do was hope that my sickness, like so much else in my life, would cure itself.
So perhaps it was no wonder that everything seemed so confusing. Distinguishing reasons had become too complicated for my overtaxed mind.
And perhaps that’s why I missed the sight of Master Hans looking nervously at me out of the corner of his eyes so much that I took a chance and went to Maiden Lane one evening. Perhaps I was missing the hearty simplicity, the joyous lust for life that I remembered in him.
I didn’t go just once, if I’m to be honest about it. I went several times. Time after time, as spring deepened into summer, whispering to the maid that I was just off to stretch my legs if the master asked where I was, slipping away in the warm dusk on my private business and coming back as quietly as I could more than an hour later.
It took two or three visits before I saw his back in the shadows and identified the house where he’d taken rooms. After that I went past, as if by chance, whenever I could get away. Sometimes I saw that solid, purposeful back again; more often I didn’t. I had a lot of time on my hands. It was something to do; something to keep me feeling alive.
But I’d have given anything to avoid running into him on the street.
Anything. I ran home afterward with my heart beating as if it would burst and a lump of shame swelling so big in my throat that it seemed to be pushing out into my mouth. I stayed awake, pacing around in the dark garden until the city was completely quiet except for the occasional wavering footsteps of a drunk, shutting my eyes against the recurring nausea of embarrassment at the memory. His hands on me. His eyes boring into mine. Hands on my shoulders, or about to be. His voice, a bit slurred, a bit drunk, muttering: “Meg . . . ?”
Still, one good thing had come out of it. He was here this morning. I saw him hanging round outside the church door from my bedroom window ten minutes before the bell rang for matins. He wasn’t taking any chances today. He had no intention of missing me. And, through the window, as he stared up, he was exactly as he’d always been: big, gingery, capable, determined, and so visibly ill at ease and anxious about what he might or might not have seen the night before that my heart warmed painfully toward him. My heart was lurching like a lunatic’s anyway.
“Tommy, you’ll have more fun playing in the orchard than coming to church on a beautiful morning like this,” I said, pulling my lovely little dark boy off the bed with my hands under his armpits and swinging him against my dress, loving the small, solid barrel-chested strength of him.
“But I lub matins with you, Muvver,” he lisped indignantly in his treble voice. “Pater noster quis es in coelis. I know it all.”
I kissed the top of his head, put him down on the floor, and placed his hand in the maid’s. “Yes, I know, you’re doing really well. But today you and Jennet go and water the apple trees,” I said briskly, with not a moment’s regret. “You’ll be pleased you did when we have apple pie in the autumn.” And as they went downstairs, I whisked quickly over to the glass on the wall to look guiltily at my face: the pallor and pinched panic of so many recent days vanished; instead there was a flush of what I feared might be excitement on my cheeks. Sparkling eyes. Pink lips. I looked better than I had for months.
I sprinkled sweet rosewater on my cuff before picking up my psalter.
Absentmindedly; I swear I didn’t mean to. Then I slipped away down the stairs to mass feeling my feet almost fly over the boards. I couldn’t explain even to myself why I was suddenly almost floating.
I pretended not to see him on the way into church. Under the brilliant sunshine, under the pretty whiteness of my lace and bonnet, I stared at my feet, looking soulful. It wasn’t just pretense; I needed to compose myself. I needed a moment alone with God.
And then, somewhere in that moment with God, in the welcoming of candle and shadow and incense and holiness and peace, I decided to brazen it out.
On the way out, after I’d blinked into the sunlight and seen that the crowds were already pressing up and down the road and no one was paying particular attention to me, I raised my eyes straight to the waiting figure down the way from me and watched him blush a deep pinky red that clashed with his dirty blond hair.
“Master Hans!” I exclaimed, a little unkindly, a little theatrically, but with the welcome in my eyes undercutting any tartness. “You’re back in London! What a surprise!”
He was thunderstruck.
He stood for a long moment as if turned to stone. Only his big, solid snubby face—like a child’s, like a great adult version of Tommy’s, I suddenly saw, with a surprised stab of almost maternal affection—was too open to hide the emotions chasing through his heart. I saw fear and embarrassment on that face, struggling with something else, making his eyes open wide and his neck tighten and his teeth chew at his lower lip.
I didn’t mind. All the fear that I’d found went with living in the darkness of the king’s disfavor meant I’d learned more about the kind of life calculatio
ns other people had always had to make: who they should or shouldn’t be seen with if their careers were to prosper; how to keep themselves on the up; how to avoid the shadow of someone else’s misfortune falling on them. I’d never needed to think about that before trouble came to us: we’d been so settled. Now, watching Master Hans, I felt sympathy for his dilemma.
It was the something else in his heart that won, though. As he finally conquered himself and rushed forward to greet me, his arms came out as if he would embrace me, and a look of pure, innocent joy suffused his features.
“Mistress Meg!” he said, with happiness powering those broad shoulders forward.
He came to a halt towering over me, very close, so I could smell the familiar painty smell that always came off him, but when it came to it he didn’t quite dare put his arms around me. “I’ve come . . .”—he fell silent, and blushed again, and shuffled his feet—“I’m here . . .”
Once upon a time, I remembered dreamily, I’d found his uncourtly straightforwardness both uncouth and often, unintentionally, funny. But after all this time living uneasily with the secrets inside my own family, avoiding them—my husband and father and sisters—with gentle words and polite skating around on the surface of our lives, and becoming aware of so many people outside our family stepping quietly to the other side of the road and looking the other way when we passed, I was rejoicing in the visible play of honest emotions on this man’s intelligent face.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman Page 38