Portrait of an Unknown Woman (51 page)

 
          
“Then let me share my thoughts with you,” he went on. “You needn’t worry: we aren’t going to have to go out and gather bracken for the fire.

 
          
We just need to be more careful. Those who can will perhaps be good enough to contribute to the costs of the household. And we can all save by gradually learning to eat more modestly.”

           
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Will Dauncey push away the dish of meat by his elbow.

 
          
“I plan to lead a quieter life in any case,” Father continued calmly, changing the subject. “I get pains in my chest sometimes; my doctors have been telling me for years to do less.”

 
          
Will Dauncey saw his cue for courtly politeness. “May we ask what your plans are, sir?” he said, smiling and bowing his head.

 
          
“I shall . . .”—Father paused, as if gathering his thoughts—“pray more, and write more . . . Carry the cross in procession at the parish church at Chelsea . . . and, I hope, see more of all of you.”

 
          
And he smiled and bowed back at Will Dauncey with all the glowing warmth he was capable of.

           
Margaret slipped away from the table early. I followed her to her room a few minutes later, knowing she’d be as relieved as me to talk. Knocking on the door, I slipped inside without waiting for an answer.

           
“Who’s that?” she called, more sharply than I’d expected. She was by the fire, kneeling on the floor, scrubbing at a rag in a pink-stained bowl. “Oh, it’s you, Meg,” she said, hurriedly putting herself between the bowl and me.

 
          
I looked away. “I’m sorry,” I said awkwardly, imagining it was the rag from her monthly bleeding and wondering why she hadn’t had a maid scrub it instead of doing it herself. “I should have waited at the door.”

 
          
“It’s all right; I don’t mind you seeing,” she said, relaxing. “I used to do it for Father when we lived here. And I feel so helpless now—I wanted to do it just to have something to do to help. But don’t tell anyone else. It would embarrass him so.”

 
         
I looked again. The scraps of wet cloth sticking out of the bowl were rough enough to scrape the skin: Father’s hair shirt. The sight of it made me want to cry. I found myself wishing I was gentle Margaret, and that it had been in my nature to willingly do Father this quiet domestic service for years to help him in his prayers, instead of myself, poking round his study when he wasn’t there and recoiling in horror from his scourge and furious writings. “Oh sweetheart,” I said, and we hugged, and found tears on our cheeks as we came apart that neither of us knew who had shed.

 
          
“Do you think he’s really worried about money?” I asked when we were both sitting on the floor watching the flames.

 
          
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t think he cares. Will says the bishops wrote to him today with an offer to find a lot of money—four thousand pounds—to pay him for his defense of the clergy in Parliament.

 
          
But he just laughed and said no. He told Will he’d rather they threw the money in the Thames. He said he looked for thanks to God, not bishops, and that he’d done his work for God’s sake, not theirs.”

 
          
“Do you know what I think, Meg?” she went on. “I think he’s relieved. I think he wants to live as plainly as possible because he doesn’t have to do anything else anymore. He’s always wanted to devote himself to God. And now he’s free of the world, perhaps he can.”

 
          
There was something so wistful in the look she fixed on me that I nodded my agreement. We would both have loved that idea to be true.

 
          
But when I heard John’s footsteps on the stairs and followed him back to the room we’d been put in to share (he hadn’t objected, but I hadn’t known if he would end up sharing it with me; I was grateful to find us both in there), I couldn’t believe anymore that Father’s life would become simple. I stood with John at the window, watching the flickering light of Father’s candle as he went down the path to the New Building to start his long night of prayer and thought.

 
          
“What do you think he’ll be doing in there tonight?” I asked cautiously, and was warmed when I felt John’s dry, warm hand on mine in the darkness. I was grateful that he wasn’t gloating, as I might have done to him if our positions had been reversed on this subdued, unhappy May night: telling me that I had only myself to blame and that I’d got what I wanted. “What do you think he’s thinking?”

 
          
“The same as before,” John said, carefully avoiding letting into his voice any intonation suggesting blame. “Nothing’s changed. I asked him. He’s going to start another volume of arguments against Tyndale. It’s his passion, Meg; what matters most to him in life. He’s going to go on hunting heretics.”

 
          
Into the silence that fell then, in the starless, moonless, blackness of that early summer night, I found my mind drifting back to the other confidence Margaret had shared with me. It was part of the rather shamefaced worry she’d started confessing to about whether Father’s hundreds of courtly friends would still want to know our family now.

           
“I think we might get lonely,” Margaret had whispered. “I think all kinds of people 
will just stop calling—even the ones who owe Father everything. For instance . . . do you remember Master Hans, the painter?”

           
I’d nodded, mystified.

           
“Well, my maid says he’s back in London. She saw him wandering round Smithfield yesterday. But he’s staying at the Steelyard. I may be wrong, but I don’t think you or I will be seeing Master Hans again any time soon.”

 
          
Hans Holbein watched the rat’s tail whip
against the drapes as Hit scuttled away from the candle’s light. The rooms were small and mean: bare boards on the floor, a rough table and bench and two chairs by the fire in the first room and a straw-filled pallet on the bedframe of the second room next to a wormy old chest. But that’s what you got in Maiden Lane. That’s why they let foreigners live around Cordwainers’ Hall. There was no point in complaining too much. The house came recommended by Davy, the sharp-eyed manager of the underground market in religious books and the Steelyard’s most trusted London friend.

 
          
It was safe here, and near the Steelyard, even if you’d be lucky to get half an hour’s good light to draw by.

 
          
“There’s no pot,” he said firmly.

           
The old man nodded sadly.

           
“There’s no carpet.”

           
Another toothless, apologetic baring of gums.

           
“There’s nothing to eat off.”

 
          
“They broke, didn’t they,” the old man intoned. His voice was an irritating whine. There was a drip coming down from his nostrils, which he didn’t bother to wipe away. “No point in buying new ones, see, not when the end of the world is nigh.”

 
          
Holbein laughed and put down his bundle. “Well, I still need to piss and eat until Judgment Day comes,” he said. “Don’t I?” he added, feeling secretly pleased that he was mastering the London idiom.

 
          
The old man nodded reluctantly, though he brightened when Holbein put the warm coins he’d already counted out into the gnarly old hand and pursued the advantage by saying: “So you take that and go and get me what I need, and send your boy in every morning to clear up, and feed me when I’m home, and I don’t know how much that will be, and I’ll take your house for a year.”

 
          
His gait as he scuttled out before Holbein could change his mind reminded the painter of the rat.

 
          
Holbein thought: Amazing how quickly a few coins stopped all that droning about Judgment Day. Fourteen suicides in London in fourteen days. The two giant fish pulled out of the Thames. Allhallows Church in Bread Street closed and its two priests imprisoned after they came to blows at the altar and wounded each other so badly that blood sprayed onto the altar cloth. That was a lot of bad-luck stories for less than an hour; and a lot of lugubrious shaking of the head; and a lot of mean little flashes of the eyes with the lip-smacking commentary: “Bad times coming. Oh yes. And it’s no surprise to me. Fifteen hundred years next spring since the crucifixion and God’s angry enough to smite us for our sins. Smite us good and proper. No wonder, with the way things are going down here.”

           
It could be worse to have to listen to that all the time than to have to live without a chamber pot or a dish and cup. Holbein could only hope that, once he was installed in the room and the money was coming in regularly, the old man would stop going on about the apocalypse and cheer up. He had enough problems of his own without the end of the world being nigh.

 
          
But the old man didn’t calm down. Holbein could hear him from his room, muttering away to the rabbity, scared-looking young boy who did the work around the place. There was a new story every day, chewed over with a mixture of terror and gusto. The great red globe the brothers had seen suspended over the Charterhouse. The comets every night in the sky.

The horse’s head on fire. The flaming sword. The blue cross above the moon. If they’d been orthodox believers they’d have crossed themselves in midmumble. But they didn’t cross themselves in this house. They thought it superstitious.

           
Holbein thought that ironic.

           
He found these secretive Lutheran types just as superstitious and bigoted as the other lot, the old-fashioned Catholics who loved poor Queen Catherine and went round muttering all the time about the Holy Maid of Kent and what she’d said to the king to put him off his idea of marrying the whore. “You won’t stay on the throne for more than a month if you do it,” she was supposed to have said. “You won’t be a king in the reputation of God even for that month; not even for one hour. And you’ll die a villain’s death.”

 
          
He’d heard that one in the alehouse every night for a month a few months after he got here last spring and settled in to paint the Steelyard men’s portraits.

           
It had happened in the autumn, when the king had taken Anne Boleyn with him to France to meet the French king and get him to talk the pope into letting Henry annul his marriage. Henry and Anne had stopped at Canterbury and walked in the garden. So it had been easy for the Holy Maid (or “Mad Nun,” as Holbein’s landlord called her, remembering for once to sniff up his snot in his indignation) to slip into the garden from the chapel where she went into her trances and where her priestly minions bowed and scraped around her, writing down her every word, and start shouting at the king.

 
          
“It may be just my big German bonehead, but I admire her,” Holbein said to the old man one night, trying to make him look another way at the thing, trying to be reasonable.
 
“Elizabeth Barton. The nun. Of course I don’t believe she’s a saint. But she was just a kitchen maid before she started having visions, and now look at her. We all talk about her all the time. She’s famous up and down the land and never has to lift a finger.

 
          
Bishop Fisher weeps when he listens to her because he believes he’s hearing the voice of God. It’s not a bad return for a few prophecies.”

 
          
But the old man only looked disgusted. He didn’t mind the king marrying again if it meant the government calming down about heresy, so he could go to his furtive prayer meetings at Davy’s without fear of arrest and execution. “She’s as crazy as they get, that Barton,” he said with contempt. “And as evil. She’s the Shape of Things to Come. It’s people like her they should be burning.”

           
And the scared rabbit-boy in the corner shuffled his feet and stirred his pot and looked more frightened than ever.

 
          
It hadn’t taken Holbein long to see that people here were as full of fear nowadays as they had been in Basel when he got back there.

           
The only difference was that here they didn’t know yet which way things were going to go. But they all had the terrors anyway, the pains in the gut, the hackles rising, the eyes flickering nervously toward the unknown, the horror of the beast slouching toward them.