Portrait of an Unknown Woman (53 page)

 
          
The Hanse merchants, who had reluctantly undertaken to pay for the decoration of the corner of Gracechurch Street for the Whitsun weekend, put the work his way.

 
          
Holbein was proud of the tableau he designed. He made Mount Parnassus, with a white marble fountain of Helicon, and four streams meeting in a cup above the fountain, and Rhenish wine flowing up and down (and into the mouths of passersby, or their cups if they’d had the wit to bring cups) until nightfall. He had a pretty golden-haired Apollo on top of the mountain, and a pretty Calliope at his feet, and a muse on each of the mountain’s four sides, 
each playing music and praising the new queen. Kratzer, who’d been in London so long now that he knew almost everyone in the city, found an out-of-work poet to compose the necessary poetry, epigrams, and jokes; he also found a scrivener fallen on hard times who wrote out the best bits in gold letters so that those who were able to could appreciate them in writing.

 
          
First thing in the morning, before the city was even cleaned up after the tight-lipped, reluctant city people who hadn’t really wanted to celebrate, Kratzer took him to meet his important sitters and introduced them.

 
          
Kratzer had a big bag full of stuff on his back—props for the picture—and a big smile on his face. The two Frenchmen who were to be in the picture were younger than Holbein, in their late twenties, with the finest of velvets and cambrics and silks against their peachy skins and the noblest of faces and the purest French on their lips and the longest and largest of titles. Holbein might have felt intimidated by their effortless loveliness and aristocratic virtue—in this grand and unfamiliar room in Bridewell Palace, full of the most beautiful of furniture and objets d’art, with fine chased goblets of wine laid out on a table—but for Kratzer and his absolute confidence in the leveling power of learning. Kratzer bowed low and was a little more elegant than usual in his dress, but he was fizzing with words and ideas, as if the Frenchmen were old friends. He spoke French with the same fluency but execrable accent which he brought to English. He didn’t care; what he had to say was more important to him 
than the accent he said it in. And Holbein saw, as the Frenchmen responded, that although they didn’t truly know Kratzer they paid him the compliment of treating him like an old friend too. He might have been born the son of a Munich sawsmith, but he’d become a learned and respected man; he’d been an astronomer in the king’s service for fifteen years now; he’d studied at Cologne and taught at Oxford; and he was the friend of Erasmus and Pieter Gillis and Thomas More and most of the scholars of Europe.

 
          
“We four are united by our shared love of learning,” as the French king’s fresh-faced ambassador to London, Jean de Dinteville—Sieur de Polisy, Bailly de Troyes and Maître d’Hôtel of the French court—elegantly put it. “We are honored to make your acquaintance.” And Holbein felt his back relax a little, and he almost forgot to bow as he turned to drop his bag, begin his preparations, and examine the scene.

 
          
“I’ve got some ideas,” Kratzer said to him, a hissed aside. “Don’t forget to ask me. I’ve brought some stuff to help.”

           
Holbein nodded calmly and laid his book and silverpoint pencil out on the table behind him next to a few of the props he had brought. His hands weren’t sweating anymore.

 
          
His nerves had gone.

 
          
Alongside de Dinteville was Georges de Selve, the twenty-five-year-old bishop of Lavaur, who had just been sent over from Paris to help the ambassador cope with King Henry’s rages whenever he had to be told that the French king couldn’t, or wouldn’t, help make the pope see sense over the king’s marriage. (“Oh, his tempers,” de Dinteville was saying ruefully, shaking his elegant head. “They’re quite debilitating. I haven’t had a week without being ill since I got here in February.”) The two wanted a big impressive record of their mission, as tall as a tall man and square. They were prepared to pay lavishly.

           
Holbein had had ten Baltic oak panels prepared and put together in advance to suit the grandeur of the commission. The giant square was already up against his easel, eighty inches tall and wide, which Kratzer had sent to the ambassador’s home in advance.

 
          
Holbein let the three men talk and sip at their wine while he watched them and wondered how to compose his picture to show the Frenchmen at their best. The bishop had pink cheeks above his beard, a black bonnet, and a gown the glowing purplish brown color of mulberries; the ambassador had liquid eyes, furs, scarlet sleeves, and fine hands below his lace ruffles. Their backs had the straight poise of years of command and fearless inquiry. Their eyes sparkled with intelligence. They were both men of learning and subtlety, versed in every modern liberal art. He couldn’t see anything but that poise; but he sensed the fear in them as he paced and sketched and stared.

 
          
The three others were talking about the coronation. Both Frenchmen had been part of the court entourage. Representing France at the event had been part of the reason for the young bishop to be in London. If the child the new queen was carrying turned out to be a son—making the royal dynasty safe—it would be an event people would remember for generations to come. France, the go-between in King Henry’s so far unsuccessful negotiations with the pope, needed to be well represented.

           
Holbein was only half listening. It was easy to shut out the French words after so long hearing nothing but English and German. He was trying to focus on getting a first glimmering of his layout: the ambassador on the left; the bishop on the right; their faces turned to him; the accoutrements of nobility and learning scattered around them in ways he couldn’t yet picture—he wasn’t quite sure yet what props Kratzer had brought with him; and a memento mori of some sort grinning down from the center of the piece. But it seemed formulaic to him; like any old bookplate. He needed something more.

 
          
“He wasn’t there, did you see?” he heard, and lifted his head. Then he lowered it cautiously again and carried on laying lines on paper. “They said beforehand he wouldn’t go, but I didn’t believe he’d have the nerve to snub the new queen.”

 
          
They were talking about More. Holbein almost held his breath.

 
          
“He told Bishop Tunstall he couldn’t afford a new gown,” the French bishop said, and Holbein saw out of the corner of his eye that the young man looked bewildered; it could never have occurred to de Selve to excuse himself from anything on grounds of poverty. “Tunstall and two friends sent him some money for clothes. They knew how important it was for him to be seen there. He took their twenty pounds.”

 
          
Kratzer knew the power of money over a man; Kratzer traded in Toulouse woad and Gascon wine (the wine they were sipping now might even be stuff he’d provided); he had an interest in prospecting for metal ores in Cornwall. But Kratzer shook his head understandingly.

           
“More’s a rich man,” he said in his heavily accented French. “He stayed away on principle. There’s another story going around.
Perhaps you’ve heard it?”

 
          
They shook their heads. They drew closer.

 
          
“I had it from Will Roper the other day,” Kratzer said, pink with secret pleasure at knowing. “I saw him in the street. More wrote back to Tunstall. He reminded him of the story of the Emperor Tiberius being faced with the dilemma of having to sentence a virgin to death for a crime for which virgins couldn’t be punished. He recalled how Tiberius’s advisers had suggested that the emperor first deflower the woman, then kill her. And he finished by telling Tunstall to watch out for his own virginity.

 
          
He wrote: ‘I can’t know whether I’ll be devoured. But even if I am I’ll know I haven’t been deflowered.’ ”

 
          
All three men laughed, then sighed and shook their heads. “A proud and honorable man,” the bishop said.

 
         
Why didn’t Kratzer tell me that? Holbein thought. He knows I love More and his family. He knows I admire his honesty. But Kratzer also knew that Holbein hadn’t been to see them. He’d read Holbein bits of Erasmus’s letters criticizing him for failing to go. Perhaps he’d been hinting that Holbein should go? Perhaps Kratzer himself saw more of the Mores than he realized? Perhaps Kratzer thought him a coward but was too polite to say so? He moved closer, holding up his book like a shield of invisibility.

 
          
“We live in dangerous times,” he heard. One of the Frenchmen. “If they’re hunting down scholars of More’s eminence for not agreeing with whatever the authorities tell them to believe—even here, in what I’ve always taken to be the most moderate of lands—then it’s the end of the era we were born into.”

 
          
He saw Kratzer nod. “The bigots are winning,” he said gloomily. “Both kinds of bigots . . .”

 
          
The ambassador finished his sentence for him: “And the only losers are the learned.”

 
          
They all shook their heads.

 
          
Holbein stared down again at his sketch, then up at the trio in front of him. He was hot with shame now; hot with the sudden certainty that, by not going to see More when he first got to England, he’d compromised himself.

 
          
He’d revealed himself as a small man, he saw now: someone incapable of big gestures and generosity of spirit. One of the fearful. The knowledge churned poisonously in his gut. He’d failed the man who’d done most for him, the man with the rough chin and the luminous eyes and the mellifluous voice and the fascination with ideas and words, the one Englishman with whom discussing your thoughts was truly a pleasure and an adventure.

 
          
Perhaps it was the dawning realization that all the learned men in this room thought the uncertain future of More was symptomatic of the woes of the age that was crystallizing the anxiety he’d suppressed for so long. Or perhaps it was just the sight of the bishop plucking with one hand at his mulberry velvet skirts, with the expression of regret still on his face at the idea of witnessing the death of learning, which gave Holbein the first flickering of his idea.

 
          
“Of all the dates people give when they talk about the end of the world coming, of all the dates my colleagues give when they look at the darkness of the skies . . . ,” Kratzer was saying, “do you know which one I’d say was the most significant?”

 
          
Mulberry, Holbein thought, excited without yet knowing quite why, only half listening to Kratzer’s French. Morus. The skull that Meg had once hidden under a table in Chelsea, on top of all his dangerous sketches, was on the table right behind him. He wasn’t sure yet, but he was beginning to get that rush of euphoria that meant a big thought. Hovering 
somewhere just out of reach of his mind was a shape; the shape of learning and fear; the shape of everything that was hidden in the stars. It was just possible that this was going to be a great picture.

 
          
“It’s not any of these bogus dates they talk about on the street. It’s simpler by far. It was Good Friday this year,” Kratzer went on, looking round with that big, bony, serious yet mischievous look that he had when visited by an idea: reckless, impelled to get the idea out and see what those around thought of it. “A millennium and a half after Christ’s death, with 
the churches all in mourning. The last day of the universal church too; the dark day that heralded Anne being proclaimed queen and England breaking away from Rome. What kind of God I personally believe in doesn’t matter here; the point is, that was the day they let the darkness in. And only the good Lord knows what will come of it all.”

 
          
“Kratzer,” Holbein called urgently, before the Frenchman could respond, breaking into the conversation, then blushing at his own uncouthness and muttering, “I’m sorry to interrupt,” before going on in the same preoccupied tone, slightly too loud: “Kratzer. Can I get your stuff out of your bag?”

 
          
Kratzer waved an arm without really paying attention. He was lost in his lament; starting now about what the heavens said about the troubled state of things on earth today.

 
          
Holbein emptied the astronomer’s bag on the table, in the grip of the thought beginning to take shape, not caring now if the objects rattled.

 
          
Kratzer’s astrolabe and the white decagonal sundial he’d painted before, when he painted Kratzer. Yes.

           
A couple of globes—earthly and heavenly—and more astronomical instruments that he didn’t recognize. Yes.