Portrait of an Unknown Woman (62 page)

 
          
“It’ll be very quiet for you for a bit, Master Hans,” Margaret said, a bit apologetically as she showed him the rooms and a groom brought in his pile of bags.

           
“Just me, and Will when he’s not in town. Father and the Dame”—she dimpled affectionately at the pet name for her stepmother—“will be here in a week or so—they were delighted you were coming sooner than they thought. And Cecily and Meg say they’ll try and come early too, though they can’t answer for their husbands. But my brother, John, is held up in town with Anne. And we’re not sure about the Daunceys, though Elizabeth says they’ll come when they can. We don’t see much of them these days . . .” She paused, looking wistful.

 
          
Holbein could just imagine why. He remembered William Dauncey with no great affection from Chelsea: a whey-faced youth with pretentious ways, obsessed by his own personal advancement, unwilling to share a word with a humble painter whose friendship could have no possible bearing on William Dauncey’s career and so who wasn’t worth speaking to. He wouldn’t imagine that someone like that would take the risk of having too much to do with a father-in-law who had fallen into the deep shadow More had—even one who had done so much to start Dauncey’s parliamentary career. He’d heard Dauncey had been the only MP from what Cromwell sneeringly called the “Chelsea group” not to have spoken out against Cromwell’s Act of Restraint of Appeals that spring, the law that broke the unity of the Catholic Church and stopped Queen Catherine appealing to Rome against her divorce decree. It made him angry to think of the disloyalty of it. It was easy to see why his pretty wife, as Holbein recalled, had been more than a bit in love with John Clement.

 
          
“It’s because they live outside London,” Margaret was going on, rushing to excuse them. “I know how hard it is to keep up, if you’re far away and your children are with you and there’s really no reason to go to town . . . I try to make the effort. I go and see them sometimes. But they hardly ever come here, and Meg says she hasn’t seen them since she married, except William occasionally at dinner at Chelsea while Parliament’s sitting. Still”—she sighed—“it’s not surprising really. Elizabeth has three lovely children now: another Tommy, like mine, and another Jane, and now little Henry too. You won’t have seen any of them, will you? We were all still just about to have them when you left. Well, you’ll be overwhelmed. We all are. They’re a handful. No wonder she doesn’t like to travel with them.”

 
          
She stopped and put the dimply smile back on her face. “Listen to me running on, tiring you out with family gossip,” she added apologetically. “All I mean is that when they do come it will be a pleasure for all of us: our first proper reunion in years.”

 
          
“I’ll enjoy that,” Holbein said heartily, relaxing into the soft atmosphere she created, liking her more and more.

 
          
But there was a sudden shadow on her face. She was looking doubtfully round at the mountain of stuff the groom was piling up. Holbein’s box of paints, ready for mixing. His tool kit with hammers and saws and nails. His bag of clothes. His poacher’s bag with the sketchbook and silverpoint pencils and crayons. His Turkish carpet. He’d brought almost everything he possessed, except the skull. In fact, he’d alarmed the old man so much by packing everything up to go that he’d had to pay a month’s rent in advance as proof he was planning to come back to Maiden Lane. And then there were the boards: great big things, from the same timber merchant who’d sold him the Baltic pine for the painting of ambassadors, now being propped gently against the clean lime-washed wall. How had he ever got so many packages on the back of a single horse?

 
          
“You do know the picture’s still in Chelsea, don’t you, Master Hans?” Margaret said, looking as though she felt guilty at having misled him over something important. “Father is bringing it with him. And I’ve been so excited at the thought that we’d see you that I’d almost forgotten that you’re here on business. I’m worried that you’ll think you’re wasting your time with me—though I’ve got lots of gardens to show you, and the countryside around here is lovely. It’s just that you won’t be able to do much painting till he gets here with the picture.”

 
          
Holbein laughed, a big reassuring belly laugh that was an expression of much more than just his wish to banish the anxious look from her face.

 
          
He was full of the idea of the picture he was about to make, in the sunshine pouring through this window into this lovely room that she’d so generously made his. It was going to be a triumph: a fearless, peerless depiction of the truth. He was fed up with skulking around being scared among the fearful. He was itching to start.

 
          
“Don’t you worry about that, Mistress Margaret,” he said as kindly as he could, as if she were a nice child he was making friends with. “Look.” And he pointed at the boards against the wall. “I’ve been thinking, and I’ve had an idea. I’m a better painter now than I used to be. I’ve learned a few new tricks along the way. I’ve found new ways of making my painting more true to life. It would be pointless just to make a few changes to an old picture, and not use all that knowledge. So I’ve brought everything I need to make a new one from scratch. It will mean working much harder than I’d planned while I’m here—it would have been so easy to just fix the background of your father’s painting while I enjoyed sitting around talking with all of you for a couple of weeks—but we’ll all be happier if I do it this way, because this painting will be far better than the one I did before.

 
          
But I’ll need to do lots of planning and preparation. So I’ll be busy enough until the others get here.”

 
          
Her mouth was an O of astonishment: not quite the overjoyed reaction he’d expected. Perhaps she’d got out of the habit of expecting people to go out of their way to do kindnesses to her now ill-starred family? Or perhaps she was worried about money?

 
          
“Look, I lived with your family for months,” he went on hastily. “You were all kinder to me than I’d ever expected anyone to be. This is the only way I have to repay my debt. And”—he gulped as he said it; he hadn’t thought about this: was it too crazy an offer for a man with his way to make in the world?—“it won’t cost you anything. You’ll get two paintings for the price of one; maybe one for here and one for Chelsea. It’s my thank you. It’s a present.”

 
          
He still didn’t know which question he’d answered with his awkward little speech. But when he saw the sweetness suffusing her face and turning her cheeks a surprised, happy pink, he felt that his gesture of generosity had been worth it. If he was going to have the courage of his convictions, and do the right thing at last by the people his heart was drawn to before the fate he suspected lay ahead finally caught them up, he might as well do it properly.

 
          
He had time to think out his plan in more detail as he sawed his boards and joined them together; as he planed and sanded and primed them; as he played with the Roper children or listened to their high, thin, happy voices playing out of sight in the garden; as he dug out his last little copy of the original picture to work from; as he walked with Margaret and her scampering children under the canopy of golden leaves that ran down the long path to her barn and back and she pointed out the flowers and herbs that she’d planted; as he sketched the outline of the picture he was going to make.

 
          
His idea was so big that it seemed like a great storm all around him, muffling the rest of the world, crackling with sparks of energy and booming in his ears as he planned, walked, ate, and talked. His painting would be a rejection of fear. He was going to draw on every ounce of knowledge he possessed and show everything, in ways both open and veiled, as he’d learned to by painting the ambassadors: the truth and nothing but the truth. This would be a picture of a family he loved and had finally found the courage to come back to, but it would contain far, far more than the simple scene he’d painted before. It would be an expression of the anguish filling his soul at the world going mad. It would show his sorrow at the way all the humanistic harmony that Erasmus had striven for—the life of debate and serene tolerance that he, Holbein, had once found so uplifting and full of hope—was being thrown away, both by the Protestant bigots whose excesses had lost his respect at home, and now by English politicians who were proving themselves ready to do anything, and believe anything, that would win them advancement by slaking a king’s lust.

 
          
Even if More had been part of that political battle while he was lord chancellor—and had been brought down by the passion with which he’d defended the old faith—he was still a man of principle. He’d had the grace in the end to withdraw from politics with his honor intact.

           
You only had to look at him to see that he was really still part of Erasmus’s world: a wit, a thinker, a humane and efficient lawyer whose reputation for kindly justice had taken decades to build up and hadn’t been tarnished beyond repair by his recent Catholic excesses. That’s why so many people on the streets in London still spoke fondly of him. Holbein couldn’t imagine More behaving in the overbearing, bullying way of Cromwell, that natural-born thug who would no more resign from power on a point of principle than he’d let himself be willingly fed to the wolves.

           
Holbein knew More to be innately a finer kind of person: someone who played the lute with his wife and watched the movements of the stars through the heavens.

           
Whatever you thought about the burnings More had ordered, there was no avoiding the conclusion that the men who’d pushed the king’s second marriage—and now found their designs unmade by God sending the queen a daughter and consigning the dynasty to history—hadn’t exactly been blessed by the good Lord either.

 
          
Holbein was determined to get every scrap of his disillusionment and anger in. He was going to show that the bullying ways of this king were condemning the Tudors to futility as surely as the violent cheating of the Plantagenets had an earlier dynasty. He was going to show humanism being destroyed by the madness, and More’s fate and that of England being b
leak and intertwined as the bigots took over. He was going to show the magic in More’s mind being ignored and belittled. He was going to show the destructiveness of fear. He was going to show every trait and tic of the family that had welcomed him into their home and made him one of them. And he was going to make this ultimate gesture of respect one that

everyone he loved could understand: More, his children . . . and, of course, Meg.

 
          
Meg, whom he’d see in just a few days. Meg, whose failure to produce three children—as he now realized her sisters all had in five years of marriage—might just possibly mean that her marriage was now barren of love (a thought so wildly intoxicating that he could hardly bear to let it into his mind).

           
Meg, whose respect he wanted almost more than anything else.

 
          
Meg, who was at the back of every thought he’d had for years. If he was to be really honest, this painting was going to be a love letter to her as much as anything else. But he didn’t dare let himself dwell too much on that.

 
          
For now, he was happy to lose himself in the idea he’d lay it at her feet later. He couldn’t get ahead of himself.

 
          
He felt all-powerful, unstoppable, walking on air. Even the fact that he didn’t have the vast learning of Kratzer to help him stuff this painting with the subtle allusions to the life of the mind that had distinguished the portrait of the ambassadors didn’t bother him. He was full of sublime confidence that he’d somehow be shown the way—so confident that, when fate brought his way just the bits of knowledge he needed, he was hardly even surprised.

 
          
Dinner with Will Roper, back home from Parliament for a Sunday of rest, looking older now, hiding his youthful blondness with a long, shaggy beard.

           
When Holbein asked him how London was taking the birth of a princess, a gleam of I-told-you-so Catholic feeling in the parliamentarian’s eyes made him seem a mischievous boy again for a moment. But then he sighed and went back to looking like the graybeard he was imitating. “It came too late for Father,” he said heavily. “He’s already flown too close to the sun.”

 
          
The unqualified sadness in Roper’s eyes made Holbein aware of how easy it was to be with these More children, the ones who loved their father with the same painful simplicity they loved their own children and—unlike impetuous, critical, hard-to-please Meg—never, ever questioned the rightness of their father’s actions.

           
“Icarus,” he said to Will Roper, a little hesitantly, and marked that thought down in his head for private consideration.