Portrait of an Unknown Woman (69 page)

 
          
“You’re the very image of her, you know,” he whispered. “So painfully alike . . . sometimes I could hardly bear to be near you. I can’t begin to tell you how much I loved her.”

 
          
Every other discovery of the past tumultuous day and night was blotted out of my mind by this one: the sudden blinding, absolute certainty that filled me now that I too had always been loved.

 
          
Of the thousand questions bursting into my mind, I didn’t know which to ask first.

 
          
I could more or less guess for myself what elaborate steps he’d have had to take to get me back into the London home he’d started making by the time I was nine and my first father died. He’d have known my mother had died in childbirth. He’d have paid for information about me from Norfolk ever since. He’d have petitioned the king to buy my wardship as soon as my father was killed and paid whatever extortionate fee was demanded for the right to raise an orphan of means who might later repay the debt by marrying one of his own children.

 
         
I’d always thought I couldn’t marry into the More family because God had granted Father three daughters and only one, much younger, son.

 
          
Now I saw that I could never have been brought into the family to marry any of a dozen sons, even if he’d had them; they’d all have been my half-siblings. Father must have had someone from outside the family in mind as my husband from the very start. He’d hired John as our tutor within weeks of my arrival, I recalled; but that was too painful to dwell on now.

 
          
“What was my mother like?” I asked instead. When I was a child, I’d always pictured her kneeling in church, but that was just because her effigy in the little Norfolk church had its slim hands crossed in eternal devout prayer.

 
          
He laughed. “Like you. Inquisitive. Impulsive. A bit of a loner.
Full of difficult questions.”

 
          
I laughed back through my tears, so perfectly happy in the light of his blue eyes on my face and in the warmth of this embrace that I realized now I’d always been waiting for. Every other embrace I’d ever felt—even the passion of Hans Holbein, which had seemed so all-encompassing just moments before—faded into distant memory.

 
          
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I whispered.

 
          
He waited a second or two before replying, as if gathering his thoughts.

 
          
But when he did there was a great tenderness on his face. “I used to think the things of this world were more important than I do now . . .” he said hesitantly, as if he were feeling his way toward a difficult truth. “Appearances. Public behavior. Surfaces. But Master Hans has shown us something in the past day or two about the value of honesty. What I know now is that I want my family to be happy in the truth, and to do the right thing before God.”

 
          
He paused again, and this time I realized he was waiting for me to speak. He took a half step back, though only far enough to put his hands on my shoulders, and gazed into my eyes again.

 
          
Suddenly I understood something else. By revealing that I’d guessed this secret, I’d also revealed the intimacy between me and Hans Holbein.

 
          
No one but he could have told me about Father’s past. Father had been cleverer than I’d realized. By confessing his long-ago sin, he’d brought mine out in the open too.

 
          
He was nodding kindly at the appalled dawning of realization in my eyes.

           
“It wasn’t hard to guess,” he said gently, but his voice was serious as he added, “don’t do it, Meg. Please. I was lucky to get you back and have a second chance of happiness. You might not be so lucky. Master Hans is a good man, but he’s not your husband. Don’t let sin destroy your life the way it nearly did mine.”

 
          
“But,” I said, with my joy fading at the unfairness of what he was asking, “this is different. It wasn’t me who broke my vows first. It was John.”

 
          
I thought he’d be shocked. But he wasn’t. He just went on smiling, still holding me at arm’s length, still looking at me as if he were memorizing every inch of me.

 
          
“You’ve seen Elizabeth’s son, haven’t you?” I added, trying to jolt him into seeing my raw pain, and I couldn’t keep the betrayed anger out of my voice. But there was no changing the look on his face. Nothing I could say about this could surprise him, I saw. It hardly surprised me to realize that he already knew about John and Elizabeth.

 
          
He nodded, as if he understood my feelings. But what he said, as he slipped one arm around my shoulder and pulled me close to him again, was: “It’s irrelevant. It’s only now I see my children making these mistakes that I realize how insignificant they are.”

 
          
“It’s not insignificant to me!” I cried, abandoning any attempt at measured conversation, feeling my hands tremble in his and almost howling with the cruelty of what I’d found out. “My husband is the father of my sister’s child! How can you call that irrelevant?”

 
          
But he only smiled an old wise man’s smile and put a finger to my lips.

 
          
“Hush,” he said, almost absentmindedly. “You’re doing John an injustice. I’m going to tell you what really happened. We’ve both had enough of living with secrets, haven’t we?”

 
          
He waited till I nodded, then delved in his clothes for a kerchief and gave it to me to wipe my eyes. He turned his face toward the window, so his pale, graying features were suffused with watery light as well as kindness as he remembered.

 
          
“I married Elizabeth badly. It was my mistake. I chose a man for her whom she didn’t really love. I took her away from court as soon as I realized the mischief she was getting herself into. John didn’t even know who she was until it was too late.”

 
          
I could see the scene he began to describe now so clearly that it was almost as if I’d been there myself. A masked ball; John and a beautiful married woman flirting; a rumple of clothes against the arras; rose petals in his hair. John, idling away his time at court while he waited for a place at the College of Physicians; petitioning Father every day to be allowed to come to me at Chelsea (“He tormented me for months, Meg; there was no doubting who was on his mind,” Father said ruefully); then relaxing for an evening into the whispery, secretive, licentious ways of the court. Afterward, terrified when the woman he’d so hurriedly made love to giggled and whispered, “But you don’t need to unmask for me to know you,” and revealed herself as a More daughter, but the wrong one. My little sister Elizabeth.

 
          
“She’d never have done it if I’d found her the right husband in the first place,” Father said rather sadly, “and he’d never have done it if he’d known she was your sister. She was a lady in a mask to him. It was part of the mischief of a young king’s court. It meant nothing.”

 
          
“How did you find out?” I whispered.

 
          
“He didn’t know what to do. He took her for a walk in the rose garden and begged her not to tell. He told her he’d come back to England hoping to marry (though he didn’t say whom) and threw himself on her mercy. He told me she was dignified about it. She told him it would stay their secret.

 
          
She was married already, after all. He took her back to her husband and fled off to his rooms.”

 
          
Father’s face crinkled into the beginning of self-deprecating laughter. “So the last thing he expected was for me to be at his door the next day, angrily demanding explanations. I’d heard a completely different story. Elizabeth was hysterical by the morning. She came to me and told me she’d realized she wasn’t intended for Dauncey. She wanted her marriage annulled so she could marry Clement. She said they were lovers; she said she could make him love her forever. I was struck dumb. After all the years I’d spent making sure he was the right man for you, it was the last thing I’d ever expected to hear. I wasn’t far off horsewhipping him.”

 
          
“But John was even more distraught than me. He was terrified I’d keep him away from you now I knew,” he went on. “And I had half a mind to.”

 
          
I was beginning to breathe again. “But you didn’t,” I said.

 
          
“No,” he answered, and twinkled sideways and down at me. “If I’ve learned something about sin in my life, I’ve also learned enough about repentance to know when someone truly wants to right the wrong they’ve done. The man was eaten up with love for you. He’d have died rather than give you up.

 
          
So I smoothed things over. I told Elizabeth she must live the life she’d chosen with the husband she’d chosen before God. ‘You can’t look to go to heaven at your pleasure or on feather beds,’ I said. And I sent her home to Chelsea. My idea was to send her quietly off a bit later to live with Dauncey’s parents in the country, before I let John come to Chelsea to claim you. That would have been the kindest way. But John spoiled that plan by just turning up to find you. He surprised me, to be honest. I thought he’d been so hollowed out by his young years that he’d obediently do whatever I told him to. I was wrong. When it came to winning you, it turned out he still had a spark of his old fire.”

 
          
I was so full of emotions I didn’t understand that it felt as though a whirlpool was churning up my insides. “He came to you and won your hand,” Father was saying now, from what seemed like very far away. “He’s been an honest husband. He loves you.”

 
          
Those words made me feel as though a late ray of sunlight must be breaking through the autumn gloom. But when I looked up at Father, his face was still running with the reflection of the streams of water pouring down the window.

 
          
“Don’t think,” he added somberly, “that Elizabeth hasn’t suffered. She had to feel a child grow inside her and watch the man who fathered it in love with you. She’s had to make compromises you can know nothing about to go on with her life. And she’ll carry her sin, and her punishment, with her to her dying day. It’s Elizabeth who lost by loving John, not you. 
For you to make a quarrel of it now would be wrong.”

 
          
Less reluctantly than I might have expected, I found myself nodding. Flashes of memory were coming back to me: Elizabeth running white-faced from the great hall at Chelsea when I told her John Clement had left; Elizabeth throwing herself down the stairs, and stealing my pennyroyal, to try and get rid of the baby she was carrying; Elizabeth listening wistfully to Master Hans’s stories of mother love.

           
However rivalrous and suspicious our relationship had always been, I thought the feeling starting to stir in my heart at those memories might be pity.

 
          
The churning inside me was beginning to subside; a new kind of peace, a warm stillness I’d never experienced, was taking its place.

 
          
I stole another look at Father’s profile, expecting him to be suffused with the same calm simplicity. I was almost surprised to find him still looking worriedly down at the floor, as if choosing his words.

 
          
“They’ve done their best to atone for their sin,” he said slowly. “Now you have to be honest about yours too.”

 
          
I shook my head. I didn’t even want to think about it. Now the other thing was coming back: the feel of Hans Holbein’s body on mine, the whole tangled, beautiful confusion of my future. But he ignored me and went determinedly on:

 
          
“No, hear me out. You think you’re attracted to Holbein’s genius. You think it’s more exciting than the quietness John has chosen in his life. And part of me can see why. There have been so many secrets between all of us that you’ve let yourself be carried away by Holbein’s passion for truth telling. And I agree it’s exciting to watch his mind work—in ways he doesn’t always understand himself. I feel it too.

 
          
But you’re wrong to be so impressed by it that you can think of throwing everything you’ve made of your life away for it. You can’t live with genius any more than you can pick up ice or fire. Genius is too cruel. Look at what’s happened even here, in these few days. Master Hans didn’t think twice before putting a secret in his painting that was bound to cause you pain. That’s the fire in him. His gift warms people and makes them feel more alive; but it will burn up anyone who comes too close. I’m not doubting that he loves you, but how much good did loving him do the family he’s already left behind in Basel? If you went to him, you might be happy for a while. But it would be a flimsier happiness than you think now. You’d 
be dishonored. You’d live with shame. And he’d hurt you too in the end, and maybe destroy you—because Hans Holbein’s greatest passion is his painting.