Portrait of an Unknown Woman

 
          
The house was turned upside down
and inside out on the day the painter was to arrive. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence that everyone was in a high state of excitement about the picture the German was to make of us. If anyone had asked me, I would have said vanity comes in strange guises. But no one did. We weren’t admitting to being so worldly. We were a godly household, and we never forgot our virtuous modesty.

 
          
The excuse for all the bustle was that it was the first day of spring—or at least the first January day with a hint of warmth in the air—a chance to scrub and shake and plump and scrape at every surface, visible and invisible, on a mansion that was only a year old, had cost a king’s fortune, and scarcely needed any more primping and preening to look good in the sunshine. From dawn onward, there were village girls polishing every scrap of wood in the great hall. More girls upstairs were turning over feather pillows and patting quilts and brushing off tapestries and letting in fresh air and strewing pomanders and lavender in chests. The hay was changed in the privies. The fireplaces were scraped clean and laid with aromatic 
apple logs. By the time we came back from matins, with the sun still not high in the sky, there were already clankings and choppings from the kitchen, the squawking death agony of birds, and the smell of boiling savories. We daughters (all, not necessarily by coincidence, in our beribboned, embroidered spring best) were put to work dusting off the lutes and viols on the shelf and arranging music. And outside, where our stepmother, Dame Alice, kept finding herself on her majestic if slightly fretful tour of her troops (casting a watchful eye up the river to check what boats might be heading toward our stairs), there was what seemed to be Chelsea’s entire supply of young boys, pruning back the mulberry tree. The mulberry tree had been Father’s first flourish as a landowner—its Latin name,
Morus
, is what he called himself in Latin too (and he was self-deprecating enough to think it funny that Morus also meant “the fool”).

 
          
It was the garden that kept drawing everyone outside, and the ribbon of river you could see from Father’s favorite part of the garden, the raised area that gave the best possible view of London—the rooftops and the smoke and the church spires—which used to be our home until, by the grace of our king, Henry VIII, we got quite so rich and powerful, and which Father, almost as much as I, couldn’t bear to pass a day without seeing.

 
          
First Margaret and her husband, Will Roper, came out. The oldest of the More children and my adopted sister, Margaret was twenty-two, a bit more than a year younger than me; but they were already so long settled in their shared happiness that they’d forgotten what it was to be alone. Then Cecily with her new husband, Giles Heron, and Elizabeth with hers, William Dauncey, all four younger than me, Elizabeth only eighteen, and all smirking with the secret pleasure of newlyweds, not to mention the more obvious pleasure of those who had had the good fortune to make advantageous marriages. Then Grandfather, old Sir John More, puffed up and dignified in a fur-trimmed cape. And young John, the youngest of the four More children, shivering in his undershirt, so busy peering upriver that he started absentmindedly pulling leaves off a rosebush and scrunching them into tiny folds until Dame Alice materialized next to him, scolded him roundly for being destructive, and sent him off to wrap up more warmly against the river breezes. Then Anne Cresacre, another ward like me, managing, in her irritating way, to look artlessly pretty as she arranged her fifteen-year-old self and a piece of embroidery. In my view there was no need for all of her humming and smiling. With all the money and estates she’d been left by her parents, Father would have John marry her the day she came of age.

           
Of all his wards, it was only me he seemed to have forgotten to marry off, but then I was several years too old to marry his only son. Anne Cresacre didn’t need to try half so hard. Especially since you could see from the doggy way John looked at her that he’d been in love with her all his life.

 
          
The sun came out on young John’s face as he came back, better dressed now for the gusty weather, and he screwed up his eyes against the harshness of the light. And suddenly the peevish ill temper that had been with me through a winter of other people’s celebrations—a joint wedding for Cecily and Elizabeth and their husbands, followed by Christmas celebrations for our whole newly extended family—seemed to pass, and I felt a pang of sympathy for John. “Have you got your headache again?” I asked him in a whisper. He nodded, trying like me not to draw attention. His head ached all the time; his eyes weren’t strong enough for the studying that made up so much of our time, and he was always anxious that he wasn’t going to perform well enough to please Father or impress pretty Anne. I put a hand through his arm and drew him away down the path to where we’d planted the vervain the previous spring. We both knew it helped with his headaches, but the clump that had survived was still woody and wintry. “There’s some dried stuff in the pantry,” I whispered.

“I’ll make you a garland when we get back to the house, and you can lie down with it for a while after dinner.” He didn’t say anything, but I could sense his gratitude from the way he squeezed my hand.

 
          
Father was the only one who wasn’t here. He was away somewhere, as he always was since we’d moved to Chelsea. Court affairs; the king’s business. I lost count of what and where. But I had heard him promise Dame Alice when he set off that he’d be back as soon as the painter arrived. And I happened to see that in the morning she’d laid out some of his grandest clothes—the glistening fur-lined black cape, the doublet with the long, gathered sleeves of lustrous velvet attached that were long enough to hide the hands whose coarseness secretly embarrassed him. He liked to believe he just wanted his portrait painted to return likenesses of himself to his learned friends in Europe, who were always sending him their pictures. But being painted in those clothes spoke of something more. Even in him, worldly vanity couldn’t quite be extinguished.

 
          
And so our eyes devoured the river in anticipation of displaying ourselves to Hans Holbein, the young painter sent to us from Basel by Erasmus—a living token of the old scholar’s continuing affection for our family.

 
          
Except me. Even if I was staring upriver as longingly as anyone else, I certainly wasn’t looking for any German painter. No, I was waiting for someone else. And even if it was a secret, childish kind of waiting—even though I had no real reason to believe my dream was about to come true—it didn’t lessen the intensity with which I found myself staring at each passing boat. I was looking for a face from the past. My hope for the future. The man I’ve always loved.

 
          
John Clement came to live with us when I was nine, not long after my parents died and I was sent from Norfolk to be brought up in Thomas More’s family in London. He had been teaching Latin and Greek at the
  
school that Father’s friend John Colet had set up in St. Paul’s churchyard, and Father and Erasmus and all the other friends of those days—Linacre

and Grocyn and the rest—had made their passion.

 
          
They were all enthusiasm and experiment back then, all Father’s learned friends. When the new king, Henry VIII, was crowned, and the streets of London were hung with cloth of gold for the coronation, they somehow got it into their heads that a new golden age was beginning in which everyone would speak Greek and study astronomy and cleanse the 
church of its medieval filth. Erasmus once told me that the letter his patron Lord Mountjoy sent him, telling him to come to England at once, was half-crazy with happiness and hope about the new king Henry. “The heavens laugh; the earth rejoices; all is milk and honey,” it said.

 
          
That milk and honey would surely have curdled if only they’d known that within ten years one of Erasmus’s European disciples, Brother Martin of Wittenberg, would have pushed their notion of religious reform so far that peasants all over the German lands had started burning churches and denouncing the pope. That Father would have responded by giving up his belief in reforming church corruption, taken court office instead, got rich, and been transformed into the fiercest defender of the Catholic faith against the radical new reformers he now called heretics—a “change of heart” so dramatic that we didn’t dare discuss or even mention it. That King Henry would stay golden but get portly and extravagant in his prime, and that even though he’d taken to dallying with every pretty girl at court, and had fathered more than one bastard, the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had not, in nearly twenty years, been blessed with a male heir.

 
          
Erasmus, the only one to preserve the memory of those hopes, would leave our house and go back to Europe, where he’d spend his old age wearily mocking his greatest English friend for becoming a “total courtier.”

 
          
When John arrived we were still living in London. His chambers were up at the top of the old-fashioned stone house, which had so many creaking wooden floors and dark little corridors and hidden chambers that it could easily have been a ship, so it was natural that its name was the Old Barge. He lived at the other end of the corridor from our rooms, next to 
Erasmus and Andrew Ammonius. If we were playing in the corridor, we had to tiptoe past the grown-up end, shuffling our toes through the rushes, so as not to disturb them while they were thinking.

 
          
John Clement was big and tall—a gentle giant with an eagle’s nose and long patrician features and a dark, saturnine aspect that could easily have lent itself to looking bad-tempered if he hadn’t always worn a weary, kind, rather noble look instead. He had black hair and pale blue eyes with the sky in them. He was Father’s age, though taller, with broad warrior shoulders. You could guess at his physical energy—he strode off down the paving stones of Walbrook or Bucklersbury every afternoon, instead of sleeping after dinner, and he taught us our Latin and Greek letters by pinning them to the archery target in the garden and letting us shoot them through with arrows. We were city children, being raised in a mercantile elite of burghers and aldermen, who only kept bows and arrows gathering dust on a hook because they were obliged to by law, and would never need to raise a sword, so that was our only experience of the aristocratic arts of war. We loved it. Dame Alice raised her eyebrows at John Clement’s preference, but Father just laughed. “Let them try everything, wife,” he said. “Why ever not?”