Portrait of an Unknown Woman

I was embarrassed for a moment. Naturally I didn’t want to tell her I was making ginger tea for all three of her More stepdaughters, which would have been as good as telling her straight out that they were all expecting. That was for them to tell. But something about the good-humoured way she was looking at me – with the same twinkle in her small eyes that I’d warmed to when I first arrived at the house in Bucklersbury, the same take-it-or-leave-it offer of low-key friendliness – made me think I could, perhaps, sound her out, as I had John, about my worries about Father. Perhaps she, too, would laugh away my fears, I thought hopefully. Now that I sensed happiness was possible, and probably not far away, it made sense to learn how to reach out and try to grab it.

I wanted to be brave. But I didn’t like to come straight out with a question about why she thought Father would be holding a man prisoner in our gatehouse. I had no idea whether she even knew the man was there. Still, I came as close as I dared. ‘Are you cooking for our guest?’ I asked, smiling innocently back. ‘I like watching him wolf down your food. And it’s good to see Father so taken up with the idea of the picture.’ I was feeling for words. ‘It’s been a long time since he thought of anything except the King’s business. Sometimes I worry …’ I drew in a deep breath and plunged ahead. ‘Do you ever think Father’s got – well, harder – since we came to Chelsea?’

‘Harder?’ she said, but lightly, as if I’d asked something that made her feel cheerful. The invitation to confide that I thought I’d seen in her eyes wasn’t there any more; a different thought had clearly come into her mind. Her smile broadened and her hands settled on her hips, and there was a housewife’s satisfaction in the look she gave her big, efficient new kitchen. ‘Well, if he has, it was about time too. I don’t mind having the odd good honest craftsman staying here, with some sensible skill to sell, like Master Hans, but it was high time your father put all those other wasters out of the door and got on with his career. And that’s been much easier since we moved away from town, where any Tom, Dick or Harry could come calling and then move in for months on end. And did. No, I can’t say I miss all that London foolishness at all.’

I sighed. That wasn’t the answer I’d wanted. She wasn’t talking about Father’s deepening fascination with heretic-hunting at all. She was off on her old hobby-horse instead: the fecklessness of our former guests, the foreign humanists, talking in that comical way she so often slipped into, playing the grumpy, shrewish wife to the hilt.

‘Erasmus and the rest of them,’ she said, as if I hadn’t realised; nodding as if I and everyone else must naturally think of them as nuisances, beginning to laugh mockingly to herself at the memory of them. ‘All those clever-clever ex-priests. Too clever for their own good. Messing about with words, puffed up with pride, letting the devil in through the back door without even noticing half the time, no doubt, and bone idle, the lot of them.’

She took the two nutmegs that the boy was now holding out to her, nodded her thanks without looking at him, and put them down on the wooden table, carrying straight on, on her tide of well-rehearsed indignation.

‘Now, the ones your father first got to know when he was a young man – the English ones, Linacre and Dean Colet – well, clearly they had their hearts in the right place,’ she was saying, obviously choosing to take my silence for sympathy and warming to her theme. ‘I’ve only heard good things about them. Setting up schools for poor boys, healing the sick. John Clement too: a decent, kind man.’

She paused. Although my gaze was suddenly fixed to the floor, I thought I felt her shrewd eyes on my face. All I could do was pray that I showed no trace of the wave of secret happiness sweeping through my heart at the sound of his name – a feeling made up of fragments of memories that could not be shared with a stepmother, however kindly, of lips and tongues and the roughness of his jaw against my cheek and the strength his long arms had as they pulled me against him, and the man-smells of leather and sandalwood that lingered on his skin. But if she noticed any tell-tale signs of love on my face, she made no sign of it. She simply drew breath and swept on: ‘I’m all for people who do some good in the world. But I never had any time for those others. The foreigners. The big talkers. Eating me out of house and home without even noticing what they’d had put in front of them. Sitting at my table chattering away in Greek without so much as a please or thank you. And keeping my husband up all night waffling on about nothing – philosophy, translating poetry, putting the Church to rights – without ever doing one sensible thing to make a single person’s life better.’

She narrowed her eyes in comic exasperation, so that I began to laugh along with her. I knew the stories as well as she did, but she had a gift of timing that forced you to laugh in the right places. ‘Ohhh, how my fingers used to itch to box that Erasmus’ ears sometimes when he started teasing your father about being a “total courtier”,’ she said, raising her hands in the air as if she was about to box those vanished ears now. ‘Your father was the cleverest lawyer in London long before they all moved in with us. It was quite right for him to go on thinking about advancing his career, not just sitting around with a bunch of blabbermouths, wafting himself away on a cloud of hot air. The last thing I wanted was that dried-up Dutchman putting him off.

‘He was the worst, but I couldn’t be doing with any of them, to be honest,’ she added more seriously. ‘Prate prate prate about reforming one thing and fiddling with another, changing this and improving that. They took themselves far too seriously for my liking. Nothing was ever quite good enough for them. My motto is, take life as you find it. Go to Mass. Give alms to the poor. Do your business. Advance yourself as God wills. And enjoy what He brings. Have your babies, love your family, look after your old folk. Have your play-acting evenings if you will; play the lute if you must. But don’t get so carried away with your foolish ideas that you put others off living their lives.’

I moved a step forward, raising my hand, hoping I could get her to pay proper attention to a franker version of my question now her familiar flow of words had reached its natural end. ‘That’s just what I mean. Don’t you think Father’s more carried away by ideas now than he ever was when Erasmus lived with us?’ I said quickly. ‘With all this business of hunting down heretics? He’s always away, and even when he is here with us he always seems to be cooped up in the New Building writing some angry denunciation or other. And I don’t remember him being angry before. I never thought of anger as being his nature. The ideas he used to have with Erasmus always made him laugh. Doesn’t that worry you?’

She didn’t quite meet my eyes this time. Dame Alice would never actually lie, but it now occurred to me that this one small bodily sin of omission might indeed signal worry. Yet if she was anxious she wasn’t about to share her fears with me, or perhaps even admit them to herself. I should have known that from the start. She was too much of a pragmatist to start wailing and beating her breast about anything she couldn’t do something about. She liked looking on the bright side of life too much. Perhaps she’d even brought out her old rant about Erasmus to choke off my first question.

So I wasn’t altogether surprised when, instead of answering, she picked up the nearest capon and the small cleaver that the second boy had laid by her hand before slipping away, theatrically measured the distance between bird and implement, and began rhythmically chopping off small legs and wings. ‘Much better to be the King’s man and the friend of bishops is what I say, and doing a sensible job of work,’ she pronounced firmly. Chop went the blade in her hand. ‘Archbishop Warham: a sensible, God-fearing man.’ The cleaver rose again. ‘John Fisher, Cuthbert Tunstall,’ – chop – an approving look at the neat cut –

‘good men too.’ She placed the pieces carefully in the pot. ‘Even Cardinal Wolsey,’ she added, looking for an easy laugh to shift us back to the jocular kind of conversation she felt happier with. ‘He might be greedy and devious, Wolsey, and too worldly for a good Churchman, but at least he appreciates good cooking,’ she finished triumphantly. ‘He had three helpings of my capon in orange sauce at Candlemas. And he’s praised it to the heavens every time I’ve seen him since.’

With a determined smile, Dame Alice brought her cooking anecdote to its cheery close and swept off to the fireplace to harass the waiting kitchen boys to hook the pot up and start boiling the capons. She might like to be seen as straightforward, but Dame Alice could be as much a mistress of diplomatic half-truths and evasions as any courtier. She clearly didn’t want to discuss any worries I might have about Father. I wasn’t going to get a chance now to raise the matter of the prisoner in the gatehouse, either, because our talk was firmly over. She was off hustling a boy out to fetch more kindling and water. She still wasn’t looking me in the eye. And, somewhere in her rush of words, the comfort I’d briefly taken from John Clement telling me Father could only be keeping a prisoner here for the man’s own protection had been quietly swept away.

Hans Holbein looked at the glowing, fierce face of this tall, skinny, unworldly English girl, with her piercing eyes and angular movements, trying her best to stay still although some sort of worry kept furrowing her brow and making her very nearly fidget, and, for reasons he didn’t understand, found himself remembering Magdalena. The softness of her: the ripeness of shoulders and breasts, the honey of her eyes, the vague scents of violets and roses. And the deceit. The soft mouth-shaped bruises on her neck. The confused look in her eyes when he asked where they came from; her silly explanation, murmured so gently that he was almost ready to believe they really could be gnat bites. The sheets on her bed, already rumpled and warm and sweaty on that last evening, when he’d tumbled her into it after a hard day at the printshop with Bonifacius and Myconius and Frobenius. More ‘gnat bites’ on her: on breasts and belly and buttocks. And the hot red imprint of his palm on her white cheek, and her hands both fluttering up to hold the place he’d hit her as he slammed the door and clattered off back down the stairs, practically howling with his own pain. His last memory of her: wounded eyes staring uncomprehendingly back at him.

Well, Magdalena was who she was. He shouldn’t have asked more of her. She had her own way to make in the world, after all, and times were hard. There weren’t many pickings for an artist’s model any more. And so, when a few months later Master Mayer turned out to have taken her under his wing (‘a young widow … angelically beautiful,’ the old fool kept burbling), Hans made no bones about painting her face into Master Mayer’s family chapel as the Virgin of Mercy protecting the old man and his various wives and children, dead and alive, from ill-fortune. Master Mayer could believe whatever nonsense he wanted in the privacy of his own home. Hans Holbein wasn’t going to argue with such a good patron. But he knew he’d never look without scepticism at another religious picture after that. He probably wouldn’t paint any more religious pictures, either. He’d had enough of dressing women of dubious virtue up in blue robes and pretending they were Madonnas. All that was just play-acting, children’s stories. What he wanted now was to portray the real-life faces and personalities of the people God had put on this earth to enchant and torment each other, without costumes, without artifice. To get at the truth.

But he was a bear at home. Snarling at poor Elsbeth, till her face turned as sour and rough as those hands sticking out from under her pushed-up sleeves, permanently reddened from tanning hides. Hating the stink of leather up his nostrils all the time, till even his food tasted of animal skins and poverty. Hating little Philip’s endless whining; yelling at Elsbeth’s scared-looking boy to take better care of the child. Even hating the long-winded abstract talk of his humanist friends, whom he usually admired. Part of him was now blaming them for his gloom – for starting the whole upheaval of these evil times with their clever-clever talk about the corruption of the clergy and their desire to purify the Church. Look where those ideas had landed everyone now. And look how panicked the humanists and even the most determined of the reformers were, at the violent enthusiasm of the mob for their elegantly formulated ideas – even Brother Luther, thundering ‘strike, stab, slay’ from his Wittenberg pulpit in a vain attempt to stop the thugs destroying civilisation.

Suddenly Hans Holbein hated the humanists’ silly, clever faces; suddenly even the Latin names they chose to call themselves seemed pretentious. His brother Prosy, under their influence, had renamed himself Ambrosius; Hans wasn’t so grand, and, in his current black mood, resented the Latinised name they insisted on calling him: Olpeius. If they had to be foolish enough to call him something classical, the only name he’d have liked was the one they were always giving Albrecht Dürer – the only real compliment a painter could desire – Apelles, the greatest painter of antiquity, the court artist to Philip of Macedon and a famous portraitist. So he sat knocking back tankard after tankard at the tavern with them, in thunderous silence, hating whey-faced Myconius’s thin mockery: ‘Poor love-struck Olpeius – drowning his sorrows in beer.’

And there was no work, or hardly any. With the hate-filled, frightening turn public life was taking – now that the peasants’ revolts in the countryside had given way to mobs of image-breakers roaming the city streets and smashing windows and burning devotional pictures and hacking statues to bits – the rich weren’t keen on displaying their wealth by having frescoes painted on their houses. And of course there was no new work to be had in churches that were being stripped down and whitewashed. Painters’ studios were closing down on all sides. Woodcarvers and carpenters were fighting over the same menial tradesmen’s work. And there was a limit to how hard you could fight for the few book-engraving jobs or tavern sign commissions that still came on the market.

It had been so exciting before. Before the year of doom three years ago, when all the planets coalesced in the constellation of the fish and brought chaos and destruction. In the days when Magdalena had always been there in his studio, ready to drape her naked form in whatever scrap of velvet or silk he could find to pose for him. When there had still been enough work to justify keeping a model. When he personally had more work than he could cope with, doing the pictures for both Adam Petri’s and Thomas Wolff’s versions of Luther’s New Testament in German – and getting an extra payment from Tommi Wolff, as well as an extra dose of grinning thanks from the impish little blond man, Basel’s biggest charmer, with his fangy teeth, sparkling eyes and that dark mole on his right cheek, for making his best best-seller even more of a success – a payment big enough to buy Magdalena a dress and give Elsbeth extra housekeeping money. Well, they were good pictures, after all.

He had read the New Testament properly for the first time (his Latin had never been up to much; it was one of the things that the humanist circle that met at Johannes Froben’s publishing works laughed at him for). And he was painting at his peak – able, for the first time, to show the divine truth as he knew it really was in the Book; without recourse to a priest or a preacher to tell him how they read it. And he had felt enlightened. Purified. Transfigured by the truth.

Hans Holbein was all right for longer than most people, after things went wrong, because he had the Rathaus fresco commission. But then the burghers got scared of his daring design for the last wall – respectable if hypocritical Jews shrinking away from the presence of Jesus, in the parable of the woman taken in adultery; Christ warning the Jews, ‘Let him who is without sin cast the first stone.’ So the respectable if hypocritical burghers cut off his contract. They preferred looking at a blank wall to being reminded that their integrity might also be questioned. And the money stopped.

The last straw was his Dance of Death engravings. Forty-one of them, using every ounce of imagination and passion he possessed. He started them after his father died. They were the only way he had to show the truth about today as he saw it, through a theme he chose for himself without any interference from a patron. Two years’ work: his and Hans Luetzelberger’s blockmaking skill combined in merciless mockery of every one of the failings and offences of the age’s corrupt priests, the powerful and pious and their bedazzled followers. All exposed as vanity-filled frauds at the moment they met Death. The Pope crowning an emperor, waving a Papal bull, full of hubris – and surrounded by devils. Death coming to the Judge, accepting a bribe from a wealthy litigant while a poor plaintiff looked disconsolately on. Death coming to the Monk, who, even though his calling meant he should have been prepared, was trying frantically to escape, clutching his money box. No one would publish the pictures. The Council was scared. Erasmus had told them not to publish inflammatory pamphlets, and – too late – they’d begun to heed his advice.

Then, last summer, Hans Luetzelberger died. Bankrupt. The creditors settled on his goods like scavengers. The Dance of Death blocks ended up being snapped up by a printer in Lyon and shut up in a storeroom. And Hans Holbein hadn’t got a penny out of any of it.

‘Go travelling,’ Erasmus said phlegmatically. ‘Take a Wanderjahr. Go to quiet places where all this trouble isn’t happening. Learn something new; find new patrons; get your heartache out of your system.’ Erasmus never stopped travelling. True, he had to stay on the move these days. He’d just come back to Basel – still a relatively civilised and free-thinking place – after three years in Louvain; Louvain had got too militantly Catholic for his taste, but he was already worried that Basel was going too far the other way. Still, Erasmus genuinely didn’t mind taking to the road. He’d always travelled. Then again, he was a famous man; there were homes for him everywhere, and people begging him to endorse their religion or their political beliefs just by living among them. He had it easy.

So Hans Holbein cut the old Dutchman off in mid-flow, just as he was pronouncing his favourite maxim: ‘Live every day as though it were your last; study as though you will live forever,’ and asked, abruptly, ‘How could I travel? And where to?’

Hans Holbein wasn’t scared of moving. He and Prosy had managed to set themselves up in Basel when they were young men, after their father went bankrupt in Augsberg and even Uncle Sigmund started suing him for thirty-four miserable florins, the old skinflint. Hans had talked his way boldly into job after job – fresco painting and chapel decorating jobs he’d never actually done before, and certainly had no expertise in. But he’d coped. People trusted him. And he felt at ease with talking up his talents. No client of his would be disappointed in the results he produced. His kit packed up small and he was ready for anything. He’d een to Italy and France to look at the paintings of the south, and got back safely. He just needed practical advice.

‘Go to Aegidius in Antwerp,’ Erasmus said without a pause. ‘He can introduce you to Quentin Massys, who painted both our portraits long ago. Quentin’s a man of talent – he could help you. Or go to Morus in London. He can introduce you to people. England is full of rich men.’

Hans Holbein pocketed Erasmus’ loan and went travelling, saying goodbye to Elsbeth and the children and the stink of the tannery without more than a moment’s sadness. She was pregnant again, but she’d be all right. She had the business to keep her, and the money he was going to make on his travels would make it up to her later. He was beginning to feel ashamed of the passion he’d felt for a younger, lovelier woman. He didn’t want to face up to the uncomfortable truth of how badly he’d behaved. He needed to get away from the resigned knowledge in Elsbeth’s eyes. He went by cart and on foot and slowly. Pieter Gillis in Antwerp (Hans Holbein refused to call him Aegidius) hadn’t been particularly helpful. But he’d got here in the end, had a quick stroke of luck with that easy commission from Archbishop Warham, and he could see straightaway that things would work out for him in London. It was just as Erasmus said. It might be cold and muddy in these streets, but it was quiet, and everyone was rich. And he hadn’t thought of Magdalena for more than an instant in months.

So he was irritated to have his senses invaded again by the cloying memory of her as he looked at this English girl who was so unlike her. This long-nosed girl, Meg Giggs, whose dark blue eyes were snapping with intelligence in her pale face; who was leaning forward in her chair, ready to engage him in sprightly conversation, visibly trying to think of simple ways to talk to this foreigner whose grasp of her language was slow and whose grasp of Latin was almost non-existent.

‘Do you think,’ Meg was saying now, speaking slowly and carefully for his benefit, pushing back the messy wisps of black hair that were escaping from her headdress without really noticing them, and looking earnest (she didn’t make much of herself, though he could see she’d be pretty if she only tried a bit harder), ‘that it’s – vain – to have your portrait painted?’

Practically the first thing Nicholas Kratzer, the astronomer here, had told him in German, in a whisper of warning during dinner, was ‘They’ll all try and get you to talk philosophy with them. But don’t, for God’s sake, talk about anything serious until the two of us have had a proper talk and I’ve explained how things here are – because nothing is quite the way it seems. And loose talk could get you into trouble.’ Which sounded worrying. But Hans Holbein was so disarmed by the gravity in Meg Giggs’s face and voice as she asked her un-girlish question that he stopped worrying. He just burst out laughing.

‘I meant it seriously,’ she said, looking nettled, though with a flush coming into her cheeks that she probably didn’t realise softened her face into prettiness. ‘It wasn’t a silly question.’ She was talking faster, going pinker, and getting cleverer by the second. ‘It’s what Thomas à Kempis wrote, isn’t it – that you should renounce the world and not be proud of your beauty or accomplishments?’ And then she began quoting: ‘“Let this be thy whole endeavour, this thy prayer, this thy desire: that thou mayest be stripped of all selfishness, and with entire simplicity follow Jesus only; mayest die to thyself, and live eternally to me. Then shalt thou be rid of all vain fancies, causeless perturbations and superfluous cares.” … That’s what I mean. If you think that way, then you’d think a portrait was a vanity bordering on blasphemy, wouldn’t you?’

She stopped, a bit breathless, and looked provocatively at him. Hans Holbein had never seen a woman looking provocative in this completely unflirtatious way, any more than he’d ever come across a woman who had read the Imitation of Christ. She was challenging his mind instead of his body. But Erasmus had told him about More’s family school. This must be what happened to women when you taught them Latin and Greek and the skills of argument. He’d stopped laughing a while back; now he put down his silverpoint pencil, and nodded more respectfully. But there was still a smile on his lips. ‘You look like an elegant young gentlewoman,’ he said, liking the challenge, feeling as though he was home again and about to get caught up in one of the involved conversations at Froben’s print house that he now missed so much; ‘but I see you have the mind of a theologian.’

She tossed her head, more impatiently than in acknowledgement of his compliment. ‘But what do you think?’ she insisted.