Portrait of an Unknown Woman
Vanora Bennett
Perfect for fans of ‘Girl with a Pearl Earring’, this is a remarkable love story with a background of religious and political turmoil in Tudor England.The year is 1527. Hans Holbein makes his first visit to England, sent by the great Erasmus to paint Thomas More, courtier, scholar, patron, and his family. More's splendid house on the river in Chelsea is at the centre of Tudor society, frequented by distinguished astronomers, artists, politicians and men of religion, as well as wards of court, protégés and many others.Two visitors to the great house find themselves irresistibly drawn to Meg Giggs, one of More's foster daughters. John Clement – dark, tall, elegant – studying to be a doctor, is a man of compelling presence and mysterious background. The other man is Holbein himself – warm, ebullient, radical and a painter of great renown. Meg finds herself powerfully drawn to these two wildly contrasting men. She will love one, and marry the other.A wonderful, rich novel, presenting the atmosphere of this Tudor household as rarely achieved, with an astounding ability to present to us the world of Holbein's paintings as well as a gallery of vividly realised characters.
VANORA BENNETT
Portrait of an Unknown Woman
To Chris, with love
Many more people than the writer find themselves working on an unfinished book. I am enormously grateful both to Susan Watt and her team at HarperCollins for their wonderful editing, guidance and even a desk to finish the writing, and to my delightful agent Tif Loehnis and all her colleagues at Janklow & Nesbit. I’m no less indebted to my family. My sons Luke and Joe have been extraordinarily patient while I shut myself away to finish my chapters. Their nanny Kari has kept the house going while my parents offered all sorts of moral support. My father-in-law George has turned out to be a superb marketing manager. And I owe more thanks than I can find words for to my husband Chris for all the brilliant story ideas he came up with while reading many early drafts and chapters in whatever spare multi-tasking minutes he could make between legal cases. Most of all, though, I’d like to express my gratitude to Jack Leslau, whose lifetime’s work – the development of a fascinating theory about John Clement’s true identity, based on his study of Holbein’s paintings – was the starting-point for this book.
CONTENTS
Plan for FIRST PORTRAIT OF THE MORE FAMILY by Hans Holbein the Younger, painted at Chelsea in 1527-28, destroyed by fire in the 18
century.
PART ONE (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)
Portrait of Sir Thomas More’s Family
1 (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)
The house was turned upside down and inside out on the day the painter was to arrive. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence that everyone was in a high state of excitement about the picture the German was to make of us. If anyone had asked me, I would have said vanity comes in strange guises. But no one did. We weren’t admitting to being so worldly. We were a Godly household, and we never forgot our virtuous modesty.
The excuse for all the bustle was that it was the first day of spring – or at least the first January day with a hint of warmth in the air – a chance to scrub and shake and plump and scrape at every surface, visible and invisible, in a mansion that was only a year old anyway, had cost a king’s fortune in the first place, and scarcely needed any more primping and preening now to look good in the sunshine. From dawn onwards, there were village girls polishing every scrap of wood in the great hall until the table on the dais and the panels on the walls and the wooden screens by the door alike glistened with beeswax. More girls upstairs were turning over feather pillows and patting quilts and brushing off tapestries and letting in fresh air and strewing pomanders and lavender in chests.
The hay was changed in the privies. The fireplaces were scraped clean and laid with aromatic apple logs. By the time we came back from Matins, with the sun still not high in the sky, there were already clankings and chop-pings from the kitchen, the squawked death agony of birds, and the smell of energetically boiling savouries. We daughters (all, not necessarily by coincidence, in our beribboned, embroidered spring best) were put to work ourselves dusting off the lutes and viols on the shelf and arranging music. And outside, where Dame Alice kept finding herself on her majestic if slightly fretful tour of her troops (casting a watchful eye down the river to check what boats might be heading towards our stairs), there was what seemed to be Chelsea’s entire supply of young boys, enthusiastically pruning back the mulberry tree that had been Father’s first flourish as a landowner – its Latin name, Morus, is what he called himself in Latin too (and he was self-deprecating enough to think it funny that it also meant ‘the fool’). Others were shaping the innocent rosemary bushes, or tying back the trees espaliered around the orchard walls like skinny prisoners; their pears and apples and apricots and plums, the fruits of our future summer happiness, still just buds and swellings, vulnerable to a late frost as they took tomorrow’s shape.
It was the garden that kept drawing everyone out, and the river beyond the gate. Not our stretch of wild water, which the locals said danced to the sound of drowned fiddles and which was notoriously hard to navigate and moor from. Not the little boats that villagers used to go after salmon and carp and perch. Not the view of the gentle far shore, where the Surrey woods with their wild duck and waterfowl stretched back to the hills of Clapham and Sydenham. But the ribbon of river you could see from Father’s favourite part of the garden, the raised area which gave the best possible view of London – the rooftops and the smoke and the church spires – which used to be our home until we got quite so rich and powerful, and which he, almost as much as I, couldn’t bear to pass a day without seeing.
First Margaret and Will Roper came out, arm in arm, decorous, stately, married, learned, modest, handsome and happy, seeming to me, on that scratchy morning, unbearably smug. Margaret, the oldest of the More children and my adopted sister, was twenty-two like her husband, a bit more than a year younger than me; but they were already so long settled in their shared happiness that they’d forgotten what it was to be alone. Then Cecily with her new husband, Giles Heron, and Elizabeth with hers, William Dauncey, all four younger than me, Elizabeth only eighteen, and all smirking with the secret pleasure of newlyweds, not to mention the more obvious pleasure of those who had had the good fortune to make advantageous marriages to their childhood sweethearts and find their new husbands’ careers being advanced by regular trips to court and introductions to the great and good. Then Grandfather, old Sir John More, puffed up and dignified in a fur-trimmed cape (he’d reached the age where he worried about chills in the spring air). And young John, the youngest of the four More children, shivering in his undershirt, so busy peering upriver that he started absentmindedly pulling leaves off a rose bush and scrunching them into tiny folds until Dame Alice materialised next to him, scolded him roundly for being destructive, and sent him off to wrap up more warmly against the river breezes. Then Anne Cresacre, another ward like me, managing, in her irritating way, to look artlessly pretty as she arranged her fifteen-year-old self and a piece of embroidery near John. In my view there was no need for all the draping of her long limbs and soft humming in her tuneful voice and that gentle smiling with her lovely little face that she did whenever John was around. It was obvious. With all the money and estates she’d been left by her parents, Father would have John marry her the day she came of age. What would be the point of bringing up a rich ward otherwise? Of all his wards, it was only me he seemed to have forgotten to marry off, but then I was several years too old to marry his only son.) Anne Cresacre didn’t need to try half so hard. Especially since you could see from the doggy way John looked at her that, even if he wasn’t very clever, he knew enough to know that he’d been in love with her all his life.
The sun came out on young John’s face as he came back, better dressed now for the gusty weather, and he screwed up his eyes painfully against the harshness of the light. And suddenly the peevish ill-temper that had been with me through a winter of other people’s celebrations – a joint bride-ale for Cecily and Elizabeth and their husbands, followed by Christmas celebrations for our whole newly extended family – seemed to pass, and I felt a pang of sympathy for the newly man-height boy. ‘Have you got your headache again?’ I asked him in a whisper. He nodded, trying like me not to draw anyone’s attention to my question. His head ached all the time; his eyes weren’t strong enough for the studying that made up so much of our time, and he was always anxious that he wasn’t going to perform well enough to please Father or impress pretty Anne, which only made it worse. I put a hand through his skinny arm and drew him away down the path to where we’d planted the vervain the previous spring. We both knew it helped with his headaches, but the clump that had survived was still woody and wintry. ‘There’s some dried stuff in the pantry,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll make you a garland when we get back to the house, and you can lie down with it for a while after dinner.’ He didn’t say anything, but I could sense his gratitude from the way he squeezed my hand against his bony ribs.
One moment of kindness reassured him; and it was enough to add honey to my view of everything too. When Dame Alice came back from her own spontaneous little stroll in the garden, rejoining the crowd gathered as if by chance and staring towards the spire of St Paul’s, I was touched to see our stepmother – Father’s second wife, who’d married him just before I’d come to the house, and looked after his four children and the wards he’d taken on, as sensibly and lovingly as if they’d been her own – had been quietly taking trouble with her hair. She always laughed robustly but she didn’t like it when Father teased her about the size of her nose. Her great beauty was her beautiful broad forehead, and now she’d brushed her hair – with its stray streaks of grey blackened with the elderberry potion she liked me to make for her – back off it to show the unlined, luminous skin at its best.
Father’s teasing could be cruel. Even Anne Cresacre, who had nerves of steel, wept with frustration over the box he gave her for her fifteenth birthday. She thought it would contain the pearl necklace she’d been asking for for so long. But it turned out there was nothing in it but a string of peas. ‘We must not look to go to Heaven at our pleasure or on feather beds,’ was his only comment, along with that quizzical, birdlike look from far away that reminded you he wore a hair shirt under his robes and wouldn’t drink anything but water. At least she had enough presence of mind to overcome her disappointment and say to him at dinner, as prettily as ever, ‘That is so good a lesson that I’ll never forget it,’ and win one of those sudden golden smiles of his that always made you forget your fury and be ready to do anything for him again. So that time it came out all right, and anyway Anne Cresacre could look after herself. But I thought he should be kinder to his own wife.
Dame Alice could do what she liked to her hair on this day, anyway. Father was the only one who wasn’t here. He was away somewhere, like he always was since we’d moved to Chelsea. Court affairs; the King’s business. I lost count of what and where. Even when he reappeared, looking tired, with the new gold spurs that he didn’t really know what to do with clinking uselessly against a horse’s muddy sides, and we all rushed out to see him, he just shut himself away in the private place he’d built in the garden – his New Building, his monk’s cell – and prayed, and scourged himself, and fasted. We hardly knew him any more. But I had heard him promise Dame Alice when he last set off that he’d be back as soon as the painter arrived. And I happened to see that morning that she’d laid out some of his grandest clothes – the glistening fur-lined black cape, the doublet with the long, gathered sleeves of lustrous velvet attached that were long enough to hide the hands whose coarseness secretly embarrassed him. He liked to believe he just wanted his portrait painted to return likenesses of himself to his learned friends in Europe, who were always sending him their pictures. But being painted in those clothes spoke of something more. Even in him, worldly vanity couldn’t quite be extinguished.
And so our eyes devoured the river. I could almost feel the pull of everyone’s waiting and wishing. Longing to display ourselves to Hans Holbein, the young man sent to us from Basel by Erasmus – a living token of the old scholar’s continuing affection for us, long after he stopped living with us and went back to his books abroad – in memory of the good old days when Father’s friends were men of the mind, instead of the spare-faced bishops whose company he’d come to prefer these days. In those times ideas were still games, and the worst argument you could imagine was Father’s with Erasmus over what he should call the book he was writing about an imaginary nowhere land (which had ended up being as much of a best-seller as any of Erasmus’ works). We were longing to show ourselves as the accomplished, educated graduates of an experimental family school that Erasmus had always, in his almost embarrassingly flattering and charming way, praised to the heavens all around Europe as Plato’s Academy in its modern image. And longing to be back, at least on canvas, in a time when we were all together.
Except me. Even if I was staring upriver as longingly as anyone else, I certainly wasn’t looking for any German craftsman bobbing up and down in the distance with a pile of travel-stained boxes and bags bouncing around next to him. He’d be along soon enough. Why wouldn’t he, after all, with his way to make in the world, a recommendation in his pocket, and the chance to make his reputation by painting our famous faces? No, I was waiting for someone else. And even if it was a secret, childish kind of waiting – even though I had no real reason to believe my dream was about to come true and the face I so wanted to see was truly about to appear before me – it didn’t lessen the intensity with which I found myself staring at each passing boat. I was looking for my teacher from the past. My hope for the future. The man I’ve always loved.
John Clement came to live with us when I was nine, not long after my parents died and I was sent from Norfolk to be brought up in Thomas More’s family in London. John Clement had been teaching Latin and Greek at the school that Father’s friend John Colet had set up in St Paul’s churchyard, and Father and Erasmus and all the other friends of those days – Linacre and Grocyn and the rest – had made their passion.
They were all enthusiasm and experiment back then, all Father’s learned friends. When the new king was crowned, and the streets of London were hung with cloth of gold for the coronation – a sure sign that there’d be no more of the old King Henry’s meanness – they somehow got it into their heads that a new golden age was beginning in which everyone would speak Greek and study astronomy and cleanse the Church of its mediaeval filth and laugh all day long and live happily ever after. Erasmus once told me that the letter his patron Lord Mountjoy sent him, telling him to come to England at once and sending him five pounds for his travel expenses, was half-crazy with happiness and hope about the new King Henry. ‘The heavens laugh; the earth rejoices; all is milk and honey,’ it said.
It would surely have curdled all that milk and honey they were swimming in back then if only they’d known how quickly everything would go wrong. That within ten years their playful shared mockery of the bad old ways the old Church had got into would have turned into the deadly battle over religion that we were living through now. That one of Erasmus’ European disciples, Brother Martin of Wittenberg, would have pushed their notion of religious reform so far that peasants all over the German lands had started burning churches and denouncing the Pope and declaring war on both their spiritual and temporal rulers. That Father would have responded by giving up his belief in reforming Church corruption, taken court office instead, got rich, and been transformed into the fiercest defender of the Catholic faith against the radical new reformers he now called heretics – an about-face so dramatic that we didn’t dare discuss or even mention it. That Erasmus, the only one to preserve the memory of those hopes that we’d all entered a more civilised age of debate and tolerance when the new king came to the throne, would leave our house and go back to Europe, from where he’d spend his old age wearily mocking his greatest English friend for becoming a ‘total courtier’ and wondering at the evil real-life form his gentle dreams had taken.
But even back then, the happy humanist throng couldn’t just sit around all day laughing at the wonder of being alive in their land of milk and honey. They had to do something to mark the start of the golden age. First there was the school at St Paul’s. And then, when Father realised how many children he’d gathered in his own house, his four and the orphans like me and Giles and Anne, he persuaded Dean Colet to let him hire away a teacher from the school and set up his own personal humanist academy.
John Clement’s chambers were up at the top of the old-fashioned stone house we were brought up in in London, which had so many creaking wooden floors and dark little corridors and hidden chambers that it could easily have been a ship, so it was natural and pleasing that its name was the Old Barge. He lived at the other end of the corridor from our rooms, next to Erasmus and Andrew Ammonius. If we were playing in the corridor, we had to tiptoe past the grown-up end, shuffling our toes through the rushes, so as not to disturb them while they were thinking.
John Clement was big and tall – a gentle giant with an eagle’s nose and long patrician features and a dark, saturnine aspect that could easily have lent itself to looking bad-tempered if he hadn’t always worn a weary, kind, rather noble look instead. He had black hair and pale blue eyes with the sky in them. He was Father’s age, though taller, with broad warrior shoulders. You could guess at his physical energy – he strode off down the paving stones of Walbrook or Bucklersbury on great impatient legs every afternoon, instead of sleeping after dinner, and he taught us our Latin and Greek letters by pinning them to the archery target in the garden and letting us shoot them through with arrows. We were city children, being raised in a mercantile elite of burghers and aldermen who only kept bows and arrows gathering dust on a hook because they were obliged to by law, and would never raise a sword, so that was our only experience of the aristocratic arts of war. We loved it. Dame Alice raised her eyebrows at John Clement’s preference but Father just laughed. ‘Let them try everything, wife,’ he said. ‘Why ever not?’
Despite his long, athletic body with its muscles and quick reflexes, there was nothing in John Clement that signalled any wish to fight. He had a natural authority that commanded our respect, but he was also very patient with us children, and always ready to listen to other people and draw stories out of them; a comforting paternal presence. He wasn’t like the other adults we knew – the brilliant talkers and thinkers who came to Father’s table – because he was shy about talking of himself. He read a lot; he studied Greek in his room; but he was modest about sharing his thoughts with adults, and especially quiet and respectful around the great minds Father gathered around himself.
It was a different story when he was alone with us. He was so good at playing with words that we children hardly noticed we were also learning Latin and Greek, rhetoric and grammar. To us it was all a great game: verbal melodies and counterpoint in which every voice was always on the verge of laughing and one voice, his, was shaping the jokes.
Of all the games, the one he played best was history. Our serious rhetoric lessons – we studied rhetoric and grammar for several years before moving on to the higher arts of music and astronomy – were drawn from the history games we played together. So were our Latin translation lessons and our first attempts at Greek. He took snippets of street stories about the long-gone wars and embroidered them into tales of derring-do that made it easy for the youngest children in the group to enjoy themselves as much as Margaret and myself. We would put whatever had struck us most in our own lives into the story, then translate the latest bit of play-acting into Latin and back into English. One day, when I was still young and greedy and letting my mind wander to the strawberries ripening in the garden, I even put my gluttonous wish to eat them in. I made the wicked King Richard III pause before some villainous act and tell the Bishop of Ely: ‘My Lord, you have very good strawberries at your garden in Holborn. I require you to let us have a mess of them.’ It made everyone laugh. Father came into the classroom and helped us write the episode down exertationis gratia – for the sake of practice. One day, he said, he’d write a proper history of Richard III, and publish it, and it would be based on our games and the similar ones John had played with the boys at St Paul’s school when he was teaching there. And there was a dish of strawberries on our own table for dinner that day.
But it wasn’t all laughter and strawberries. There was always something sad about John Clement too: a sense of loss, a softness that I missed in the bright, brittle Mores.
He found me alone in my room one rainy Thursday, crying over the little box of things I’d brought with me from Norfolk. My father’s signet ring: I was remembering it on his little finger – a great sausage of a finger. And a prayer book that had belonged to my mother, whom I’d never seen, who died when I was born, but who my father had told me looked just like me – dark, and long-legged, and long-nosed, and creamy-skinned, with a serious demeanour but the hope of mischief always in her eyes. I didn’t remember much about my real father (except the official fact that he was a knight who left me just enough of a dowry to put me on the market for adoption by rich Londoners after his death). But I still felt the warmth of him. He was a bear-hugger with a red face and a shock of dark hair. And when he had you inside one of his embraces, half-stifled but happy, you knew he’d always keep you safe. In his arms, talking about the person we’d both lost, so gently and fondly that our yearning for her almost re-created her. She would be kneeling at her prayers, with the book in hand. (That was the only way I could imagine her – like she was in the effigy in the chapel – impossible to picture what it would have felt like for this perfect woman to have touched or talked to me.)
My father and I were united by this love. So nothing prepared me for them bringing him back from hunting one morning on the back of his horse. He’d broken his neck at a jump – a foolish sort of death. No one comforted me. You’re not really a child any more at nine. I dressed myself for his funeral, and dropped my own handful of soil on his coffin, and began several years of quiet life in corridors: watchful, eavesdropping on the lawyers and relatives as they made plans for me; picking things up, magpie fashion, storing away my few memories and what tokens of my parents I could before I was sent away to be watchful in other people’s corridors. My mother had known Thomas More long ago, in London, before her marriage. It was a whim on his part – a kindly whim – to take me. But he wanted me to think of him as my father from now on. He told me that, with a sweet look on his face, when I turned up at the Old Barge.
Of course I knew nothing back then about how famous this man’s mind had become all over Europe. And I had no clue that, because of my proximity to him, I too would now be moving in the kind of exalted intellectual circles where you could find a man of genius in every room in the house, with one or two to spare on a good day. Or that we girls – I was to have several new ‘sisters’ – would be trained up to be Christendom’s only women of genius. All I noticed on that first day was that the stranger I was to call ‘Father’ had a gentle face: kindly, with its dark features full of life and light. I warmed to him at once, to the face and the smile, Thomas More’s compact body and the sense he gives everyone that only their wellbeing is important to him. Even if this stranger never quite replaced the memory of my real father, Thomas More’s presence was comforting and flattering enough that the country child I still was then found herself eagerly trying out the word ‘Father’ as she looked at him, full of a hope she was too young to understand.
Life with the Mores had turned out to be many kinds of joy I could never have imagined at the age of nine; and now I couldn’t think of living any other way or being anyone except a bit-player in this familiar company of mighty intellects. But the reality of my relationship with Father had never lived up to those first hopes. He was kind, proper, and distant. There were no embraces, no comforting, no special moments. He kept me at arm’s length. He saved his hugs and horseplay for his own Margaret, Cecily, Elizabeth and John.
He saved his cheerful banter for their stepmother Alice, who came to him a widow eight years older than him, with her own estates and her own strong commonsensical views on life, just a year before I came to the house. Father’s foreign houseguests found the new Mistress More harder going than the soft-spoken first wife. If you went along the upstairs corridor late at night and listened to what Erasmus and Andrew Ammonius were whispering in Greek, you’d always be sure to hear the words ‘hag’ and ‘hook-nosed harpy’ somewhere in the conversation. But More wasn’t as delicate a flower as his learned foreign friends. He gave as good as he got from the Dame (we children all called her that, half-jokingly – the name seemed to suit her). He joshed back like a real Londoner, enjoyed her plain cooking and ribald talk, and after his attempts to interest her in Latin had failed, he had some success in making her at least learn music. Father’s new marriage seemed to suit something robust and down-to-earth in him, even if it coincided with – and perhaps caused – the end of some of his humanist friendships. In many ways it suited me and the other wards they adopted too, since no one could have been kinder or run a more welcoming home than Dame Alice. But no one treated me like a beloved child. And I’d have given almost anything for someone to act as though I was special.
For the first few years I was there I almost never dropped my guard except in the books I started reading (something I’d never have done if I’d stayed in Norfolk). Without feeling truly accepted by my new father, I found it hard to make friends with my new stepmother and sisters and brothers. An empty heart was safer than the darkness. At night I would wake up with jaws aching from not crying; eventually they put me in a room by myself because I ground my teeth in my sleep. Being by myself was both welcome and frightening: frightening because I didn’t know what to do with the hot, dark, snivelling, smeary, gut-wrenching, dog-howling breathlessness of the misery that sometimes came to me now when there was no one to pretend to.
Until the teacher, with his big frame and his floppy dark hair, appeared when I was too lost in my feelings to stop, and stood in front of me with his own eyes filling with tears, just like mine. ‘I understand how you feel, little Meg,’ he said softly, understanding everything with so few words that my shame gave way to wonder. ‘I lost my own father when I was a boy. I’m an orphan like you.’ And he hugged me, and let me scrabble into the dark forgetfulness of his chest and arms like a lost infant and sob my heart out, then found a handkerchief for my eyes, and took me on his walk.
‘Come on,’ he said lightly – looking even a bit naughty and conspiratorial – as we slipped out of the front door while everyone else was sleeping off their midday meal. ‘Don’t let’s wake everyone up.’ It must have been when I was thirteen or fourteen; early in the year; cold, in that London way, with a fierce drizzle beating into our faces. Even so, when we started down Walbrook (paved over by then, already, but our house on the corner had been called the Old Barge since the days when it really had been a brook, and boats had come up it from the Thames), the street stank. Naturally, since the pissing conduit was only a few yards away. Equally naturally, neither of us much wanted to walk in that stink.
‘Tell me …’ John Clement began, with a furrow up his forehead. I thought he might have been about to ask me about my real father, but I could also see that my grown-up tutor didn’t know how to continue or what comfort to give. I didn’t want to encourage him to try; it was too private to talk about. So it may have been me who, taking a rare decision on behalf of someone else, pulled John Clement the other way, out of the odours of Walbrook and into sweet-smelling Bucklersbury Street and the shadow of St Stephen Walbrook – where the paving stones were newer and smoother and the smells were gentler and we were more sheltered from the fitful rain.
Some of the apothecaries and herbalists on Bucklersbury had shops, with scales in the window and herbs and spices and preserves on shelves behind. Some plied their trade from the street. We were followed the length of the street by a mad beggar with rolling eyes, yelling comically, ‘Unicorn’s horn! Unicorn’s horn!’, which made John Clement laugh and give the man a coin to go away; which only made the man, who said he was called Davy, follow us closer and louder than ever. It wasn’t the unicorn’s horn that John bought me in the end, or the dragon-water or treacle of the more respectable traders, or the dried crocodile hanging in the shop under the sign of the harp. It was a little bottle, painted sweetly with flowers, from an old countrywoman who had set up her stall on a wall away from the main rush of business.
‘Good day, mistress,’ he said courteously to her, ‘I’m looking for heartsease,’ and the wrinkled old white head nodded wisely at us both with a flash of pale eyes.
‘Washes away your sorrows … raises your spirits,’ she said knowingly. ‘Add it to a glass of wine. Twice a day, morning and evening, six drops.’
He presented it to me with an adult’s flourish; ‘for sorrow,’ he said lightly, and his favourite motto, ‘never look back; tomorrow brings new joys’; but he didn’t quite meet my eyes. It was as if this grown man, my teacher, had suddenly become just a little bit shy.
I kept the heartsease in its pretty bottle. (I couldn’t bear to drink it. But it did its job even so.) It was only the first of my presents from walks in Bucklersbury, because we went back and back. That was just the beginning of our joint fascination with the secrets of the street. It wasn’t just those two herbalists – Mad Davy with his unicorns’ horns, pigs’ trotters and tall stories, or old Nan with her pretty coloured potions – whom we got to know. They were my first favourites, but there was a whole crowd of other odd fish packed into Bucklersbury. Alchemists and barbers and surgeons and tooth-pullers; scientists and frauds and soothsayers. As the weeks and months went by, we got to know every wise man and eccentric in the place.
It was always on a Thursday, every week. It was our secret. I would put on my cape after dinner and be waiting for him by the door. (‘You’re like a dog, waiting so faithfully, grinning,’ Elizabeth said when she saw me there once; even at eight she had her sharp tongue. ‘You make me want to kick you.’ And she gave me a mean little smile. But I didn’t care what she said.)
And every Thursday he’d give me something else for the medicine chest I was building up. When I was fifteen and Father asked John Clement to accompany him abroad for the summer and work as his secretary – on Father’s first diplomatic mission to Calais and Bruges, a gesture of trust as Father moved into the King’s circle that John said delightedly he’d never expected – John bought me a bigger present to remind me of our walks: a pair of scales to weigh the medicine I’d go on buying for myself and that I’d tell him about at harvest time.
But John didn’t come back to us at the end of the summer. Father came back alone. He had no private explanation for me about what had become of John – as if he had never noticed the friendship developing between the two of us – just a bland phrase addressed to everyone present at his first dinner at the family table. ‘John needs to broaden his horizons,’ he said. ‘I’ve helped him get some teaching at Oxford. There aren’t many people there who know Greek.’
The looks Father gave me were as kindly as ever, the encouragement he gave to my studies just as heartwarming. But I knew he was more at ease with talk of philosophy and public expressions of goodwill than with private feelings, and I found that I wasn’t brave enough to take him aside and venture into the personal. I couldn’t find the courage to ask for more information about why John, the first adult I’d made a bond of friendship with – someone whose apparent warmth had reminded me of my country past – had vanished without a word. I retreated into my books and watchfulness again. But for all the sadness that went with that second loss of an adult I’d become close to, I found the strength in the end to take it philosophically and see some good had come of it. My friendship with John had been interrupted, but my fascination with herbs and healing continued. For the awkward, learned but slightly shy girl I’d become, hesitating over how to or even whether to expose myself by expressing an emotion, the ability to treat those near me for the small ailments of everyday life was, if nothing else, a release: not just my form of excellence, my small spark of genius in the great fire of mental energy generated by the More household, but, perhaps more importantly, my way of showing love.
Even though John never wrote to me in the years that followed, I kept an ear tuned for mentions of him in other people’s conversation. That’s how I found out that his first Greek lecture was the best attended in the whole history of the university. It’s also how I discovered, a year or so later, that he’d gone travelling again – the kind of travelling that men in the More family’s circle of people of genius did. He’d gone to Italy – Padua and Siena – to study medicine. He’d learned his Greek when he’d attended another university abroad, long ago, even before he started teaching; I thought in the Low Countries, though he’d never said much about it. Perhaps he just felt now that there was nothing to draw him back to London. No family. No close friends. He probably thought I was just a child in need of kindness, and forgot me.
We had plenty of other tutors after that, and we crammed our heads with so much geometry and Greek and astronomy and Latin and prayer and virginal practice that we started being trotted out in front of all and sundry as an example of the new learning. There was nothing private about our lives, even if once we moved to Chelsea we were far from court. We were always on display. Father took to publishing every scrap of work we produced: all those daily letters we were supposed to write him through our schooldays, practising verse composition and disputation, translating our every thought from Latin to Greek to English and back again, were much less private than we realised. He sent the best ones slyly off to Erasmus, complaining that our handwriting was terrible, and waited for Erasmus to profess himself ‘amazed’ by our wit and style – which of course Erasmus kindly did. And even the letters Father sent us – Latin letters to the ‘schola’, talking about how deep and tender his love was for all of us, how often he took us in his arms, how he fed us cake and pears, how he dressed us in silken garments and all the rest of it – got published too, and polished up and improved long after the event.
Yes, by the time the idea came up of getting our family portrait painted, Father had really got into the habit of dining out on stories of our brilliance. He loved to tell people that there was no reason why women’s brains, even if they were poorer spiritual soil than men’s, couldn’t produce wonderful plants if they were properly tended and planted; or to boast that he was so soft-hearted a parent that he’d only ever beaten his children with peacock feathers. In fact, we’d set such a fashion that the Eliots and the Parrs also started copying Father’s teaching methods. Little Katharine and William Parr were at risk of becoming as clever as us if they didn’t watch themselves. Father had even got interested enough in my modest medical expertise – it was more than just herbal remedies by the time I grew up; of course I’d also started taking a look at some of the Galen and Hippocrates that I imagined John Clement to have been studying in Italy – to be begging the others to read more medical texts too.
Still, none of the tutors we had after John Clement had ever become my special friend. Nor did anyone seem to have remembered to look for a husband for me through all the alliance-making of the past few months, which had taken up so much of Father’s time and effort on everyone else’s behalf. That had left me all the time in the world to feel nostalgic about John Clement, who I still believed had loved me most, once, however impossible it now seemed given that all we’d heard about him for years was the occasional mention in a letter from Basel or Bruges from one of the learned friends who didn’t come to the house any more.
Until yesterday. (It seemed incredible that it had been just a day, and here I was with my heart in my mouth already waiting for a sighting of him.)
Yesterday, when Elizabeth suddenly leaned forward at the end of dinner. It was a casual day; Dame Alice didn’t bother so much about Bible readings when Father wasn’t there, and Elizabeth’s strangle-voiced new husband William had left the table to write letters. She gave me a meaningful look down her straight nose, and said, quietly, so only I could hear, ‘I saw John Clement in London.’
I practically choked on my posset. But I kept my face composed.
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘He’s in Italy, studying for his MD. Isn’t he?’
‘Not any more,’ she said.
Elizabeth was one of those women I would never be: not a thinker, but small, neat and with alluring manners; catlike in the sense that she always landed on her feet and made it look effortless. She was the prettiest of the More daughters and the worldliest. She reeled in William Dauncey, with his Adam’s apple and substantial income, on the basis of one evening at a court function and some demure-looking flirting; she got Father to place him in a sinecure job in the Duchy of Lancaster office right after their marriage and she was already fishing for better placements for him. I’d known from the first moment I saw her, when we were children, that we would never be close. I didn’t like to think it was just envy of her milky skin and blankly beautiful features that made me imagine her as the kind of person who’d always get her own way, and who would be as spiteful as a scratching kitten if she didn’t. I preferred to think that I’d spotted a deep-seated mean-spiritedness in her that I knew I could never love. And now it flashed through my mind that her meanness might just stop her talking if she saw me wanting desperately to know what she had to say.
Still, I couldn’t resist trying. Casually, very casually, I asked: ‘How interesting. What’s he doing now?’
‘He’s a server in the King’s household for the moment. He’s been back in London since he qualified last summer.’ She paused. She always knew the details of people’s positions. ‘He says Father got him the job.’
We both let Father’s omission in telling us that important fact pass, and our shared silence drew us closer. Some things were best left unsaid. There had been a lot of eloquent pauses in our household since we moved to Chelsea.
‘He was at a dinner Father sent us to last month, right after the wedding. Part of this plan to get William and Giles seats in the next parliament.’ (I tried, not completely successfully, to still the twinge of envy that this casual mention of her wifely plans set in motion inside me.) ‘We were in the Duke’s chambers and Father was called away suddenly to read something for the King before we even went in to dinner,’ she paused again, looking at her golden ring, ‘and then John Clement turned up. I nearly died of shock …’ She stopped and looked out of the window. There was sunlight beating down on us. ‘It’s hotter than you’d expect for the time of year, isn’t it?’ she went on, even though the inside of the room, bare of decoration still because there’d been no time to commission drapes and pictures yet (hence the Holbein portrait idea) was actually draughty and rather cold. ‘He looks older,’ she said, and there was something a bit wistful in her face. She twisted the wedding ring on her finger. ‘I saw quite a bit of him after that, actually.’
She’d been back for three days. Father had sent her and Cecily home on Sunday evening, earlier than they’d expected, to help prepare for the painter’s arrival. I’d hardly seen her. She’d kept to her room and her prayers and whatever whispered conversations young married women might have among themselves, but she hadn’t sought me out. Why had she held on to this piece of information for so long? And why was she telling me now? I could sense that, in her devious way, she was probing for some reaction from me. Not knowing what reaction she could be looking for made me feel uneasy, and stubbornly unwilling to give an inch.
‘He’s not going to become a “total courtier” too, is he?’ I asked. Eyes firmly down on my own ring-free hands. Erasmus’ nickname for Father when he first saw him on the King’s business had stuck. I laughed a tinkling girlish laugh, which sounded forced to my ears. Elizabeth didn’t seem to hear its falseness, but she wasn’t in a mood to laugh. She was looking gentler than usual, playing absentmindedly with her spoon in the ruins of the dish of beef that (with more than her usual birdlike appetite) she had demolished. She just smiled.
‘I don’t think so – he can dance, though, did you know? – but he says he wants to practise medicine soon. He’s trying to join the College of Physicians.’
‘And does he have a family?’ I asked. Holding my breath.
Perhaps it was a mistake to ask the question direct. Remembering to look modestly down at my hands again, I found they weren’t where I’d left them. My fingers were plucking at my brooch. To cover my embarrassment, I took the whole thing off and put it down on the table.
She shook her head, and a little smile appeared on her face, like a fisherman’s look as he starts playing the fish he knows is hooked at the end of his line. She bit her lip, then looked up at me, with her demurest public look. ‘He said he would love to see the new house. He said he’d come and visit us.’
I waited. I’d gone too far. I wasn’t going to ask when. I concentrated on the sunlight in the garden.
The silence unsettled her. ‘He was asking after you, actually,’ she went on, unwilling to let go, and under the flirtatious eyelashes sweeping her cheeks I could sense anxious, watchful eyes. ‘That was when he said he’d come and see us.’
‘Oh,’ I replied, feeling my heart secretly leap, and suddenly confident too that I could get off the hook of her questions. I shrugged, almost beginning to enjoy the game. ‘I doubt we’d have anything to say to each other any more, now that we’ve finished with school … though,’ (and here I smiled noncommittally) ‘of course I’d like to hear about his travels.’
‘Oh no,’ she answered. ‘He was particularly interested in you. I was telling him how you’d become a medical miracle and practically a doctor yourself. I told him how you’d cured Father’s fever by reading Galen. He liked that.’
I did cure Father once, a few years ago. And I did consult Galen. De differentiis febrium, the book was called; on the difference between fevers. It was when Father came back exhausted and hot and sweating and fitting from one of his diplomatic trips to France, and none of the doctors who came to the house could do anything for him. They all loved it when I pronounced that he had what Galen called tertian fever. But the truth is I couldn’t appreciate Galen – what they called heroic doctoring, with lots of recommendations to purge and bleed your patient and show off in your diagnosis – it seemed like hot air to me. All I did was quietly give him a simple draught of willow-bark infusion that I’d bought on Bucklersbury. One of the apothecaries told me it would cool his blood. It did – he was up and about again within a day. I couldn’t tell any of them how easy it was, though; they’d have thought me simple-minded. It was easier to let them go on believing in Galen’s three-day fever.
‘He said you were the one who got him interested in medicine in the first place. He said it was all because you used to go walking in Bucklersbury talking to the herbalists,’ Elizabeth went on, and I was aware of her eyes on my face again, ‘and how he’d love to see you again. And then he said, “It would have to be on a Thursday, of course.” But he was laughing, so perhaps he didn’t mean anything by it.’
Another silence.
I pushed my platter gently back.
‘Well, it would always be good to see John again. I miss the old days in London, when it was easy for so many people to call by. Don’t you?’ I said finally, looking round for the brooch I’d put down and displaying so little interest in the idea of a visit from John that I could see her secret curiosity, over whatever it was, finally wane.
But of course I could think of nothing else afterwards. And I’d woken up this morning earlier than usual and full of hope – because today was Thursday.
It happened more awkwardly than I could possibly have imagined. When we finally saw a likely-looking wherry crawling down the edge of the river, we all poured out of the wicket gate like an overenthusiastic welcoming committee and rushed to the landing stage to freeze our spontaneous selves at the water’s edge.
But there were two people, not one, arranged uncomfortably around the pyramid of bags and boxes stowed in the bottom of the boat. They didn’t seem to know each other, or be talking. But both wore foreign clothes. And both began to gather their belongings about them as if they were going to get out.
Dame Alice was staring at them, perplexed, visibly wondering which was our guest and inspecting the packages for signs of paints and easels and an artist’s paraphernalia.
One was a thick-set man of about my age, whose square face was covered, from head to blunt yeoman chin, with a layer of shortish, fairish, curlyish hair. He had eyes set in solid pouches of flesh, and ruddy cheeks, and a short nose. He was looking out with a stranger’s hesitant hope of a kind welcome. The other was a tall man with an old dark cloak wrapped around his face up to the ears. It was only when he stood up, making the boat wobble, and jumped out on long, energetic legs, that I recognised his big hook of a nose and the indefinable sadness in eyes that reflected the sky. He didn’t look a day older.
‘John?’ I said, questioningly. Then there was an explosion of sound from behind me.
‘John!’ Elizabeth yelled joyfully, completely forgetting the decorum expected of a married woman, and slid out from William’s arm to rush forward into those of the tall man. He took a half-step back, then braced himself, caught her, and opened his arms wider as if to catch more children.
‘Little Lizzie!’ he called, putting a smile on his face, and looked round rather anxiously as though hoping that his other former pupils would join the embrace.
Then something went through the whole group. A shiver, as though they’d all come out hoping to console themselves with a taste of imitation happiness and had suddenly been offered a plateful of the real thing. They tightened around the newcomers like starving beasts of prey. Everything else they might have been out in the garden to do went clean out of their heads. Everyone was suddenly caught up in the old days. One beat behind their sister, Margaret Roper and Cecily Heron ran up to the newcomer. He looked relieved at the warmth of this three-woman collective embrace, so relieved that he seemed almost about to swing them all around in the air at once, but perhaps remembered that they were three young matrons now, and not small girls, or started worrying about the danger of flinging them into the choppy river in mid-arc. He let go of them all, a little suddenly.
‘That’s never John Clement?’ Dame Alice said, and for a moment I thought I saw tears in her eyes. That was impossible, of course – she was always so brisk. But that moist glimmer I must have imagined did remind me how she and John Clement used to huddle together to discuss how best to handle the younger me. She never knew I was listening from the gallery; he probably didn’t either, though I stopped being sure of that. I remembered feeling reassured that this forthright, no-nonsense woman worried over my nightmares and studied quietness back then; reassured too at how she trusted our first teacher, and at how carefully she’d listen to his slow, thoughtful responses. They were old friends.
‘Clement!’ old Sir John barked, looking astonished – the closest that the old authoritarian could get to being excited. And he began shuffling vaguely forward.
John Clement bowed low to Dame Alice (in his quiet way, he’d always had elaborate manners). He bowed lower still to Grandfather. But then his formality gave way and he put those long arms, which still waved more than most other people’s, around both of their backs at the same time. I thought he was only a breath away from whirling them off the ground too.
There was a sudden babble of welcome. Voices testing their strength. Cheeks and hands and arms proffered in greeting. And all those insincere phrases people say. ‘You haven’t changed a bit!’ ‘You look younger than ever!’
But it stopped as quickly as it started. He was looking around, as if he hadn’t seen everyone he was looking for. And then he caught sight of me, and I saw his face light up.
‘Meg – I’ve come on Thursday,’ he began. And this time his arms hung down awkwardly, and he didn’t try and swing me round like a little girl. Feeling the happiness inside me surging out towards him, it was me who stepped forward.
But Dame Alice had recovered from her shock and got the measure of the situation by now, at least enough to talk properly to her surprise guest.
‘Well, now, Master John,’ she said playfully, stepping in front of me to give his cheek an affectionate tweak. ‘What are you doing fondling all our daughters as if they were Southwark Queens? And what are you doing here anyway, turning up like a bad penny after all these years away without so much as a word to any of us? Not that it matters why – we’re just all very pleased indeed to see you. No – stop – don’t tell us anything here. Come up to the house at once, and tell us around the fire instead. We can’t stand around gossiping on the riverbank. It’s January, for mercy’s sake. Whatever can have possessed us all to come out and hang around in the cold in the first place?’ And she rolled her eyes comically and guided him away with a firm arm, still talking, with Grandfather and the rest of them streaming along behind, screeching like ravens. ‘As if it were spring!’ I heard her say from way in front.
Which left me alone, in the river breeze that suddenly seemed to have a touch of ice in it, on the jetty. Alone, that is, except for the boatman, now pulling boxes and bags out of the boat, and his squat passenger, who was looking as crestfallen as I felt as the crowd on the jetty disappeared.
The fair-haired man caught my eye. ‘If it please you, mistress,’ he said in halting English, fumbling in pockets and pouches. ‘I am to put up at Sir Thomas More’s house at Chelsea. Am I here?’ And he pulled out a much-folded letter, which I could see even from a distance was covered in Erasmus’ dear, cramped scrawl, and gave me a mute, pleading look from his spaniel eyes.
‘Oh heavens above,’ I said, struck with remorse. One of the items piled on the boards came into sudden focus for me – a long wooden frame tightly wrapped in woollen cloth: painter’s tools. The poor man was shivering in his rough cloak. And everyone else had gone without him. ‘You’re Hans Holbein, aren’t you?’
After a few minutes it stopped seeming such a messy encounter. ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,’ I was muttering, full of confusion and excruciating embarrassment, but the big man beside me just burst out laughing. He had a big laugh that came up from his belly; he didn’t look a man to be bothered by embarrassment. He just looked capable and friendly, with big thick hands and fat spatula fingers, the muscular sort of hands you need to grind up powders with a mortar and pestle and mix them together. I didn’t know much about painting, then, but I could already sense he would be good at his craft.
So I could feel the sunshine again as I walked up from the jetty to the house where I knew I’d find my family fussing happily around John Clement and where, sooner or later, the two of us would have a chance to talk again. I had Hans Holbein trotting beside me, trying to make his massive frame small in the manner of humble men, and the skinny boatman trotting behind, weighed down with bags and squawking, ‘Thought it was the right thing to put them in together if they both wanted to come down here. Save them a few pennies, I thought, missis.’
With Master Hans beside me, with his easel balanced on his shoulder as if it weighed nothing, drinking in the vista unfolding before us, I saw it again myself as if for the first time. And it became beautiful to walk onto our land through the wicket gate (ignoring the gatehouse with the dark secrets whose windows I can’t bear to look through), and up through the lawns and beds, which suddenly seemed full not just of withered trees and shrunken shrubs, but of tomorrow’s berries and buttercups and lilies and gillyflowers and sweet cabbage roses, and up the steps towards the dignified redbrick frontage Father had chosen for us all – a porch, two bays, and two sets of casement windows on each side. There were jasmine and honeysuckle stalks already growing over the porch. We planted them last year, when we moved into the new house, built to show Father’s ever-rising status, and left our old London life behind. And one day soon we’d be seeing cascades of sweet-smelling colour coming from them.
‘My English is not good, and I am sorry,’ Master Hans was saying, slowly, so you had to concentrate on what he was saying, but I liked watching his sensible, no-nonsense face and the hearty voice, so that was all right. ‘But this is a very beautiful house. Peaceful. So I congratulate you. You must be happy living here.’
Talking to him was like dipping into a great vat of warming soup. Chunky broth with savoury vegetables and a meaty aroma – not the grandest of food, but more wholesome and comforting than the most elaborate dish of honeyed peacocks’ tongues. Cheerfulness was spreading through me now, as I pushed open the door. ‘Yes,’ I said, feeling more certain than I had for a long time. ‘Yes, we are happy.’
‘Give me your cloak, leave your things here and come straight to the table – you must be cold and hungry,’ I went on, smelling the food being laid on the table behind the wooden screens and hearing the murmur of voices. He paused. Suddenly he did look embarrassed. ‘Mistress, excuse me, I have one question before we sit with your other guest. Tell me, what is his name?’
In what I thought was a reassuring manner, I laughed. ‘Oh, he’s an old family friend. He’s called – John – Clement,’ I said, pronouncing the words so clearly that even a foreigner could copy them, happy to have the chance to say the name. I began to nudge the German towards the hall, but Holbein didn’t seem to want to move. He chewed on the thought, looking puzzled.
‘John Clement,’ he repeated. ‘That is the name I remembered. I drew a picture once of a John Clement. A young boy who would be our age now. It was my first commission from Master Erasmus. Would he be the son of this gentleman?’
I laughed again. ‘Oh no,’ I said, shaking my head firmly. ‘This John Clement hasn’t got a son of our age. He’s not married. It must be someone else, or maybe you mistook the name. Anyway, do come in properly, Master Hans. You might not believe it, but my family is very eager to meet you. And I can smell dinner on the table.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and met my eye, and laughed again. ‘I must have made a mistake.’ He let me guide him forward at last, and Dame Alice sent him to wash his hands and settled him at the table with a barrage of explanations and good-humoured apologies and expostulations and platters of steaming roasted food, and there was a lot of bowing and loud talk for foreigners, in clear, over-enunciated voices, and the kind of slightly forced good humour that you get among strangers meeting for the first time. I watched her dash off a note to Father telling him the guest we’d been expecting had arrived – and a second unexpected guest into the bargain – and took it to find a boy who could go to town to deliver it. Everyone had packed in, among them Nicholas Kratzer, the astronomer, who had not yet managed to start talking German to his compatriot. By the time I sat down to eat, there was only one chair left – on the same side of the table as John Clement but at the other end. I could hardly see him, let alone talk to him. He had Elizabeth and Margaret on either side, and all I could really see was Elizabeth chattering excitedly enough for all three of them, with pink in her cheeks again. I didn’t hear him say a single word through the meal – but there was plenty of chatter all around, and I couldn’t really catch the drift of what they were talking about. My own vis-à-vis was Master Holbein, on the other side of the table. The German was a restful companion, wolfing down vast quantities of food in silence. But I also caught him doing something other than wiping up sauces at speed with great wedges of bread. Once or twice I looked up and saw him chewing on his bread, thoughtfully, like a cow on its cud, and giving John Clement long, slow, considering looks. Whatever the odd thought was that he’d had as we walked in through the door, he was still clearly turning it over in his head now.
2 (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)
After dinner – after the settling and snuggling of the midday nap had begun, after the merciful silence that descended on the house whenever Dame Alice fell asleep – I slipped downstairs and found my cloak and boots.
It was what I’d always done at fourteen, on Thursdays. But now I felt my hands patting nervously at my white ermine cap and pushing some stray black hairs back under it. My heart was beating faster than usual. It wasn’t really just like old times. I had no idea what would happen next. John Clement had no bedroom door here from which to emerge, fumbling for his cloak, tripping carelessly against the banisters and cheerfully cursing under his breath. Was he about to come out from somewhere in this unfamiliar house, gangly and grinning, to sweep me off? And where would we walk if he did? Or would he not remember at all? Would I stand here by myself, feeling foolish, until there was nothing to be done but take my cap off again and go back upstairs?
It was completely quiet, but something made me look round. From the chapel doorway at the other end of the great hall, in the shadows under the gallery, Elizabeth was watching me. It was her eyes I’d felt in my back.
‘Woof,’ she said, with a nasty glint in her eyes, and retreated into the candlelit darkness. So she remembered. She knew. I could hear her husband William’s nasal voice inside, raised in prayer, until the door closed.
I thinned my lips, determined not to be downcast. But suddenly I felt very alone in my cloak in the doorway, hot under its prickly heat, looking down the corridor and up at the gallery in hopes of detecting the sounds that weren’t beginning. I could, I thought, take a turn round the garden by myself. No one would think I’d expected anything different (except Elizabeth). But I felt unsteadily close to tears at the idea.
Then I forgot Elizabeth, because the front door opened from outside. A roaring gust of air and sunshine blew in. And a pair of usually sad eyes, now filled with laughter, looked down gently at me. ‘Come for a Thursday walk with me, Mistress Meg,’ John Clement said lightly, in his magical voice. He’d been waiting in the garden. He was good at secrets. He held out his arm. ‘It’s been a long time.’
We walked in silence for a while, into the wind.
There were so many things I wanted to ask him. So many things I wanted to tell him.
But there was no hurry now he was here.
‘Sometimes,’ he said, more softly than ever, looking straight ahead and not at me. (A mystifying haze had come over us both; a glorious kind of embarrassment; we couldn’t quite look into each other’s eyes, and I was snatching sideways glances at him instead – committing to memory each feature and joyfully relearning the contours of cheek, nose, throat and chin as if I were caressing them with my eyes. His dark hair was just as I remembered it, though with a dusting of silver at the temples now. His eyes were the same: light blue and piercing, with that heartbreaking hint of learned sadness always in them.) ‘Sometimes, it’s good to be so at ease with a person that you don’t have to say anything. I’ve missed that. I don’t know many people this well, anywhere.’
At ease was absolutely the opposite of how I was feeling at this moment; but the wonder of this joyful embarrassment I’d been stricken with stopped me from laughing at the idea. I couldn’t quite believe he was feeling so at ease with me either. He couldn’t meet my eye even more than I could his. But hugging that secret knowledge to myself only made me happier.
He was matching his long, athletic stride to my shorter one. I could feel him reining back his legs. We were so close I could almost feel the muscles in his legs brushing against my skirt. I was half-turned towards him, against the wind, my arm hovering weightless and nervous above his, trying not to melt into the warmth we made together. But, all down the side of my body that was next to his, I couldn’t help but feel the line and life of him, and rejoice in silence at the loveliness of it.
‘I could walk like this forever, with you,’ he said, almost whispering.
I made a small sound back; I didn’t know what to say, because I couldn’t say, ‘I’ve been waiting for years for you to come back, and if I died now I would die happy just to have seen you again’, but it didn’t matter. Because I’d just half-seen him snatching one of the same glances at me that I’d been secretly throwing at him – memorising my features before turning away back into his silent contemplation of his memory of me – and a new soft little explosion of happiness was happening inside me.
He laughed. ‘But it is cold,’ he added. We were down by the river already, with a bank of snowdrops coming up behind us under the oak tree and a fierce glitter on the water, and the wind was coming at us hard and fast, snatching at his foreign-looking black beret. ‘Shall we sit down somewhere, out of the wind? In one of the gate houses – maybe this one right here?’
I didn’t understand the surge of feeling sweeping me along. All I knew was that there was nothing I wanted more than to be alone with him, somewhere warm and still, so that I might at last be brave enough to look into his face and we could talk forever. I started to nod my head, feeling my body slide closer into his arm. Then I realised what he was pointing at: the westernmost of the two gatehouses. The place I never go.
‘No,’ I snapped, surprising even myself with the sharpness of my tone. ‘We can’t go in there,’ I added, feeling his surprise and making an effort to keep my voice calm. ‘Father’s started keeping … things … in that gatehouse. Come away. I can’t tell you about that yet.’
Urgently I pulled at his arm, aware with another part of my mind of the closeness of his chest as he laughingly surrendered and let me manoeuvre him away. It was three hundred yards upriver to the second gatehouse. ‘But this other gatehouse is all right, is it?’ he asked breathlessly, catching me up and sliding his arm around my waist now as we walked towards it. I could feel it across my back. Fingers on my hip bone, moving. ‘What does he keep in here?’
What he kept here was his pets: a fox, a weasel, a ferret, a monkey, all on chains; rabbits in a wooden hutch; and a dovecote of fluttering white birds on the roof. Erasmus used to watch Father’s doves with me, out in the gardens at Bucklersbury, long ago. ‘They have their kindnesses and feuds, as well as we,’ he wrote afterwards. And he loved to tell how we’d seen the monkey, off its chain because it was ill, watching the weasel prising loose the back of the hutch. That monkey had run over, climbing on a plank and pushing the wooden back into a safe position again, saving the rabbits. Animal humanism – just the kind of story that Erasmus would treasure. Just the kind of thing that used to amuse Father, too, before his life took the turn it has now.
It was peaceful in the eastern gatehouse. It smelled of straw and feed and wood – calm country smells. We pushed open the door and sat down on a bench, side by side, with his arm still round my back, and listened to the wind on the water.
With his free hand, John Clement loosened his cloak, and turned to gaze down sideways at me. The arm behind me was bringing me round to face him, a process my body seemed, independently of my brain, to be joyfully helping. There was a little smile playing on his lips. He lowered his head and nudged his nose against mine. His eyes were cast down still, but his lips were so close now that he only had to whisper. ‘So, grown-up Mistress Meg Giggs – what shall we talk about?’ He smiled wider, and his smile filled my whole field of vision. ‘I hear that while I’ve been away becoming a doctor you’ve been becoming one too.’ His fingers were exploring my side, his arm was drawing me closer. ‘And I want to know all about that. But first, I want to say,’ he paused again, ‘how beautiful you’ve grown,’ and he looked straight into my eyes at last.
And then, somehow, we were kissing, and I was so dizzy with longing that I found myself clinging to him, aware of his cloak and the ribbons on his foreign-made jacket sleeves and the heat of my blood and – at the same time as losing myself in the bewildering mix of hardness and softness and wetness and roughness and gentleness and sensation on every inch of our bodies as they strained together – feeling touched to have the power to make his heart pound so audibly in his chest, and his hands shake so.
With a sigh, we came apart, and sat, rumpled and flushed, looking at each other from under our eyelashes, and laughing at our own shared confusion. ‘Oh Meg,’ John whispered. ‘Now I know I’ve really come home at last. You’ve always been home to me.’
Which was just about exactly what I had wanted to hear him say ever since he went away, almost half my life ago. And just about exactly what I had begun to think that neither he nor any other man ever would say to me, while I passed my empty spinsterish days buried alive in the countryside, watching all the others get fat with happiness, and became more isolated and eccentric and embittered by the day. So almost all of me wanted to believe the wonderful words I was hearing now. But I couldn’t stop myself also hearing another voice. It was Elizabeth’s, and it was taunting, ‘He’s been back in London since last summer,’ and ‘Father got him the job.’
I looked up at him, hesitating over how best to put my difficult question, with prickles of frustration in advance at trying to believe the answer could only be simple and honest, and at the same time feeling almost dizzy with the desire to slide back into his arms and lose myself in another kiss.
‘So tell me …’ I began, feeling my way into a new kind of uncharted territory. I couldn’t bring myself to say, ‘You’ve been back in London for six months, just one hour’s boat ride away, and never sent word; you went off abroad ten years ago; you never once wrote – and you expect me to believe you’ve treasured your walks with the little girl from all those years ago so much that you’ve always thought of me as your home?’ So I started as gently as I knew how: ‘What has it been like being the King’s server for all these months?’
He met my eyes now with a different kind of look, a little wary. Then he nodded once or twice, as if he’d answered some mysterious question of his own, and kissed me chastely, a brush of lips on lips.
‘Well, it’s a sinecure; a place at court while I set myself up properly; your father’s kindness to me for old times’ sake,’ he said. ‘But I know what you’re really asking. You think I should have done something better than just turn up out of the blue to see you after so long. You’re asking for explanations.’
I nodded, relieved that he’d grasped my thought. He paused again. He was thinking hard. I became aware of the rabbits scratching around in their straw.
‘Listen, Meg,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t give you enough explanations to satisfy you completely. Not yet. But you have to trust me. The first time I asked your father if I could marry you was nearly ten years ago, when he took me abroad for the summer.’ I held my breath. I hadn’t expected to hear that. My heart started beating even faster, so fast that I had to make a conscious resolve to keep my face studiedly turned down towards my knees so he couldn’t see my shock (though I was aware that his face was turned studiedly towards his own knees). ‘But your father said no,’ he went on. ‘He said I had to settle myself in the world before I could think of marrying you. He told me that if I’d got so interested in herbalism I should go and turn myself into a learned and rational physician – get my MD on the Continent – and bring something new to the new learning in England. Well, I have. And I came back to England with you in my heart. I swear I did. The first thing I wanted to do when I got to London was to come to you.’
He sighed. ‘But the problem was that your father still said no,’ he said.
I couldn’t stop myself looking up now. He must have seen a flash in my eyes. ‘Why?’ I said, and I could hear my voice – which I’d thought would come out breathless with a happiness I’d never even imagined might be mine – sounding hard and vengeful instead.
‘There are things he wants me to be able to tell you,’ he said. He stopped again. Looked down again. Took a big breath, as if making a decision, and went on. ‘He says I have to become a member of the College of Physicians first,’ he continued, and there was anxiety in his voice. ‘Not just a member, but one of the elect. I’m doing everything I can. I’m talking to Doctor Butts, the King’s physician. It’s not easy; I’ve been away for years; I have to prove myself as a good physician to someone I’ve never worked with. But your father won’t be swayed. He says I have to be able to tell you I’ve succeeded in my work.’
It was the More household attitude: everyone must bow to the things of the mind. Usually I shared it. I revelled in my knowledge of things no ordinary woman knew, and most men didn’t either. But now, when the picture of a life of ordinary domestic happiness seemed both tantalisingly within reach and impossibly out of reach, Father’s strict intellectual requirements of John Clement suddenly seemed unnatural and harsh.
‘I shouldn’t be here now, to be honest; I promised him I’d stay away. But when I met Elizabeth,’ he looked down and scuffed the straw with a boot, ‘and started thinking about how close you were here, just down the river, and I knew your father was away at court, and it was about to be Thursday – well, you’ll have to put it down to a lover’s impulse: I just couldn’t resist coming to take you out for a walk.’
I didn’t know what to say. His words and my feelings were going round and round, somehow failing to blend, leaving me speechless. I tried to control my spasm of anger with Father and concentrate on the happiness of being with the man I loved at last. He was looking searchingly at me.
‘Say you believe me,’ he said.
‘Say you love me,’ I heard myself say. With self-loathing, I heard myself sounding petulant. Like a child not understanding a story but wanting a happy ending.
‘Oh, I love you all right,’ he whispered. ‘I’ve always loved you, whoever you were – the little orphan crying over your lost past, the bright-eyed child storing up everything the apothecaries could show you, the girl who couldn’t stop asking difficult questions, the beauty you’ve turned into now,’ and he stroked my black hair, exposed now, with my white cap gathering straw on the floor. ‘And I always will love you. We’re two of a kind. And even though I’m twice your age, and not quite settled in life even in my dotage – if you’re willing to have me, nothing will stop me coming back to ask your father for your hand. Again and again. Until the time is right. Don’t you ever doubt that.’ And he folded me back into his arms so that his cloak covered us both, and moved his face over mine.
‘Stop,’ I said breathlessly, almost unable to pull back but with a new, more urgent question suddenly bursting through my head. ‘Tell me one thing. Why are you letting Father just give you orders like this? You’ve known him for years. You know he loves a good argument. Can’t you at least try and talk him round?’
I couldn’t bear what I saw next. His face fell, and the lover’s antennae I had just discovered felt him moving away somewhere very distant.
A defeated look came over John’s face. ‘I owe it to him to do as he asks,’ he said, very quietly. ‘I can’t even begin to go into all he’s done for me over the years. It sounds odd to say this, since we’re much the same age as each other, but he’s been like a wise father to me for most of my life. I can’t start defying him now.’
‘John,’ I said, with a new resolve in my voice, groping inside my head for a way of showing him how things were for us these days. ‘Let me show you Father’s new life.’
And this time it was my hand on the door, pushing it open into a roar of fresh wind and sunshine, and my strong young arm guiding this man with the troubled eyes out of our darkness.
3 (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)
‘Listen,’ I whispered, and tiptoed to the very edge of the gatehouse window, beckoning John forward.
I’d brought him to the western gatehouse again. He was hanging back, bewildered, clearly wondering why I wanted to return to this little brick building when I’d been so scared of it just an hour before. But it had become important to show him the truth. I took his hand and drew him up in front of me so he could peer into the darkness inside too, and the touch was a fresh revelation of how my skin loved being against the skin of those long, fine, delicate fingers. Regretfully, I put that private joy aside. This was no place to think of love.
In that stillness of bodies waiting, with the wind on our cheeks and flapping in our cloaks, we gradually began to hear the whispering from inside the window. Lost, hopeless, desperate; a thin Cockney chant. ‘Lord of your endless mercy bring my body to death … Lord of your endless mercy bring my body to death … Lord of your endless mercy bring my body to death.’ It had been going on from morning to night for the entire week that Father had been away. It had been chilling me every time I crept this way on my walks. I heard it in my dreams. All I could see of John was his shoulders and the back of his head, but I could almost feel the goose bumps rise on his flesh. Slowly he turned his head around towards me, and there was horror on his face, and his mouth was forming the silent words: ‘What is it?’
‘Look inside,’ I mouthed back, ‘but carefully. Don’t let him see you. Don’t scare him any more.’ He peered forward. I knew what he would see when his eyes got used to the gloom: the wooden stocks, and the pitiful little stranger’s figure with his legs and arms trapped in its holes, a living arc of thinly covered bones and torn clothes topped by two bloody eyes, half-closed, over swollen lips moving in perpetual prayer.
John stepped back quickly from the window and I came with him. He looked sick. He hurried twenty steps away with me trotting behind before he paused for me.
‘A heretic?’ he asked in a whisper.
I nodded. ‘This one’s called Robert Ward. He was a shoemaker on Fleet Street until last week. They arrested him as part of a conventicle praying in the leather-tanner’s rooms upstairs. He has six children.’
‘Why has your father brought him to your home?’ I thought there was pity in the hush of his voice, too, and it gave me strength. ‘What’s wrong with a prison?’
‘There’ve been half a dozen of them in the past few months. Father doesn’t tell us anything about them, not even that they’re here. But he told the gardener who feeds them that he just wants to talk them out of evil. I happened to overhear –’ I felt my cheeks redden, though John let my blush pass and didn’t ask how I happened to overhear a conversation so obviously not intended for me and how long it had taken to pick the mulberry twigs out of my hair afterwards ‘– him saying he’d brought them home to interrogate “for their own safe-keeping”.’
‘Well,’ John said, stopping and looking straight into my eyes, visibly trying to follow my thoughts, searching for an explanation to hold on to, ‘perhaps he’s right to do that. Someone’s clearly been beating that man up. He probably is safer here.’
There was something comforting about hearing him say those sensible words. I liked the searching way he looked at me, really listening to my concern, trying to get to the bottom of what was on my mind. But it was too easy to cling to the belief he was offering. I hesitated, then plunged on. ‘But what if …?’ I didn’t know how to end that sentence. I tried again. ‘He’s been here for days. If he looks that way now, when was he beaten up?’
John looked even more closely at me. ‘I’m listening, Meg,’ he said seriously. ‘Are you saying you think it’s your father who’s been beating him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I confessed miserably. The darkest of the thoughts I’d been having seemed impossible now that he’d voiced my suspicion in that familiar, sensible voice – but not quite impossible enough. ‘But sometimes I think it’s possible. So many other things have changed that you don’t know about.’
The sun was a deceptive mellow gold, but the lawn our feet was thudding against was turning hard as iron and John’s breath was freezing to white.
There was more to show. He was shaking his head, looking too unsettled to hear everything at once, as I pulled him forward again. He certainly knew that Father had been at war with heretics ever since Brother Martin had declared war on Church corruption ten years ago and plunged Europe into upheaval. But he might easily not know how far Father’s personal war against evil had taken him: that, as well as his liveried life at court as the King’s most urbane servant – not just a royal counsellor and attendant, in and out of the King’s chambers, but Speaker of the House of Commons in the last parliament, and, since last year, with a knighthood and the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster among his privileges as well – Sir Thomas More now spent large parts of every day trying to stop up every crack through which heresy might seep into England.
It wasn’t the Father we saw at home who’d become a persecutor of men. The man who ate and laughed and talked with us, only less often than before, was the same sunny wit we’d always known. I’d only become aware by accident – by stumbling on his victims – that he seemed to have become someone else too. A frightening stranger with a face turned towards the shadows.
The prisoners I’d been spying on in the gatehouse were the small fry caught in the net of Father’s surveillance and entrapment in the gutters of London; the victims of his agents’ creeping among the leather-sellers and the drapers and fishmongers of the city, hunting down evil in the shape of little men grappling with their consciences in back rooms, before bringing out broken prisoners with piles of logs on their backs as a symbol of the eternal fires they would have faced if they hadn’t recanted.
I didn’t understand the high politics of it. I couldn’t see how the whole spiritual and temporal edifice of the Church of Rome could be threatened by these terrified tradesmen. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them.
Still, I knew that these humble men weren’t the only ones Father was investigating. There were others in his sights who were far closer in their outlook and beliefs to the way we used to be. The men he was going for hardest these days, people were saying, were the bright young scholars at the universities, who he said were ‘newfangly minded’ and ‘prone to new fantasies’ and might corrupt the very sources of faith, like little Cuthbert Bilney, arrested after preaching a seditious sermon in London, or the six Cambridge students imprisoned in the fish cellar of their college for keeping heretical books. Perhaps these men of learning were genuinely a danger. But it chilled me to think that Father’s new position in the world might be turning him into a defender of the worst as well as the best traditions of the Catholic Church, part of the sequence of foolish friars and grim clerks arguing about the number of angels you could fit on a pinhead whom Erasmus and he had once poked so much fun at.
‘Of course I want to believe he’s being kind,’ I went on, breathless even though we’d stopped walking. ‘That he’s getting these men out of prison because they’re in danger there. That he’s trying to give them time, that he’s reasoning with them and persuading them to recant, and saving their souls. But what if it’s worse than that? What if it is him bloodying these men’s faces out here where no one can see? What if he’s worse than a “total courtier” these days,’ – and I took a deep breath – ‘what if he’s started enjoying torturing people?’
John shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said stoutly. He stopped again and put reassuring arms around me. ‘I can see why that idea would worry you, Meg, but you must see how fanciful it is.’ Then, perhaps sensing that I wasn’t relaxing and giving up my fancy as easily as he’d expected, he added: ‘For instance, look how easy he went on young Roper. There are people who’d say that shows he’s too soft for his job.’
I almost laughed with the shock of that thought from another, less worried part of my mind. I had no idea how John Clement had heard about Will Roper’s brief love affair with Lutheranism a few months back. I didn’t think anyone outside our family knew anything about how Will, just qualified as a barrister, had been hauled before Cardinal Wolsey for attending a heretical prayer meeting with some of the German merchants in London. It was all thanks to Father that Margaret’s husband was sent home with nothing worse than a reprimand, when the other men arrested with him were forced to parade to Mass loaded down with firewood and jeered at by the crowd.
Officially, I didn’t know any of this. But there’d been no stopping Will talking while he was in the grip of the new idea, telling us excitedly that it was corrupt to pay to pray for the souls of the dead, because Purgatory had never existed except in the minds of money-grubbing monks; nonsense to believe in the age-old communion of the faithful, living and dead, joined through time in the body of the Church, because faith was a private matter between God and worshipper; and that it was foolish to see divine purpose in the Church of Rome. Forget priests, forget monks; refuse to respect your fathers; break every tie with the past.
Will was nothing if not sincere. He’d argued with Father in every corner of the house and garden. And Father was nothing if not gentle back. I’d seen him walking in the garden with Will, an arm around the younger man’s back, a sorrowful look on his face. ‘Arguing with your husband has got us nowhere,’ he’d told Margaret in the end, ‘so I’ll just stop arguing.’ Perhaps it was his prayers for Will’s soul, and his forbearance, that finally persuaded my brother-in-law to stop his flirtation with the forbidden and rediscover his passionate belief in a more familiar form of God (and his passionate admiration of Father into the bargain).
‘That wasn’t the work of a bigot, now, was it?’ John was saying gently. ‘No one could have been more restrained.’ And he was encouraging me to smile, to wipe the fears from my heart. My mouth twitched back at him. It was a relief to remember that moment of sweetness. I almost gave in. But not quite.
‘But it doesn’t make sense,’ I said stubbornly. ‘How he behaved with Will doesn’t fit in with the other things he’s been doing. In the New Building, where we’re not invited. And in London, and at court. That’s what I don’t understand.’
John was towering beside me, with an anxious look on his face again that probably matched the anxious look on mine. I felt disloyal to be snooping through the parts of my father’s public life that he didn’t tell us about at home, but I’d been a secret agent in my own home ever since we came to Chelsea. So I kept drawing on his arm, pulling him on through the garden. The only way I could show John what troubled me about the direction Father’s mind was turning – how he was leaving behind the civilised thinking that had created our bookish, loving family; how he was now to be more feared than trusted or obeyed – was to show him what I’d seen.
We were walking towards the New Building – Father’s sanctuary from court life: his private chapel, his gallery, his library, his place of contemplation and prayer, the place where he wrote his pamphlets. It had monkish bare walls, a single bench and a plain desk. He prayed, then he sat at that desk and poured out the filth of his public letters. I couldn’t imagine how he could bring himself to even think some of the words he came up with, let alone write them, let alone publish them:
Since Luther has written that he already has a prior right to bespatter and besmirch the royal crown with shit, will we not have the posterior right to proclaim the beshitted tongue of this practitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she-mule until he shall have learned more correctly to infer posterior conclusions from prior premises?
I opened the door, brought John inside (he seemed taller than ever, hunched inside its austere confines), and closed it, silently pointing out the brown-stained tangle of the scourge swinging from a hook on its inner side. The scourge was another new manifestation of Father’s conscience: his protection against the bodily lusts that kept him from becoming a priest himself long ago; the weapon he turned on himself in his bigger war against instinct and unreason.
What private lusts, and for whose bodies, would made him flail his own skin until he drew blood? It hurt me to think of his poor innocent skin, already chafed and broken by his hair shirt, lashed into worse pus and scab by that ugly sliver of bloodied leather. It was almost as bad as seeing the tortured prisoners at the other end of the garden, to imagine him torturing himself, alone, in here.
He kept his pamphlets and writings in the library, along with the confiscated, banned and impounded books that he had special dispensation from Bishop Tunstall to read and refute. He had a complete library of heresy here, in his place of prayer, down to William Tyndale’s New Testament in English – one of the few copies that had escaped the bonfire at St Paul’s. Cardinal Wolsey had thrown the rest into the flames. Watching him were 30,000 cheering Londoners and my grimly approving father.
On the desk was last week’s draft of the letter Father had been writing to Erasmus for so long, begging him to get off the fence and denounce Luther. I’d read it before, and been chilled by the fury of Father’s phrasing: he wrote that he found all heretics ‘absolutely loathsome, so much so that unless they regain their senses I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be’.
Hateful indeed. I shivered. The word brought back the image of Robert Ward, the scared little shoemaker locked up in our garden, praying to die.
I knew Father was wasting his ink trying to persuade Erasmus. Nothing I’d seen the old man write suggested there was the least chance of him publicly supporting Father in any crusade against the religious reformers. He was too busy feeling disappointed, in Luther and Zwingli on one hand, in Father on the other. In everyone who’d once been a humanist but had since become a zealot.
Erasmus might have taken to calling the most ranting evangelicals ‘rabble-pleasers’, ‘mangy men’, and ‘utterly lacking in sincerity’. But he was no more impressed with the ‘uncouth, splenetic’ style of Father’s written attacks, which he said, ‘could give Luther lessons in vehemence’.
I felt for Erasmus. Deserted on both sides by the former disciples of the new learning as they forgot the classics and rushed into their violent religious extremes instead. Sitting in Basel, looking forlornly round for intellectual playmates who might still enjoy Greek writings and Arabic geometry, or revel in moderation, mockery, learning, laughter, inquiry, beauty, truth and all the rest of the last generation’s forgotten dream. The same dream that Father brought all of us up to be a living illustration of; the same dream that Master Hans would tomorrow start illustrating us as illustrating. A charming public image coming into existence of a private reality in danger of fading away.
‘Look at this,’ I heard myself whispering to John, pulling out one offending volume after another and opening them to the worst pages. ‘And this. And this.’ There was still enough January sunshine to read by inside. But he screwed up his eyes with a show of reluctance and took them to the desk, by the window, to see properly.
‘Don’t you see, John?’ I pressed, and my whisper hissed against the bare plaster. ‘He’s lost his reason. We could wait forever for him to give us permission to be together. He might never do it. He can’t think about any of us any more. He’s too obsessed with this. He’s gone mad with hate.’
I’d been thinking this about Father for so long, while I’d had no one to share it with, that it was a relief to speak my doubt aloud, especially to the man I loved.
But John was squaring his shoulders, and giving me the same kind but unconvinced smile that my smaller self had seen whenever I offered the wrong answer in a lesson. He shook his head.
‘It’s his job,’ he said simply, dropping the page of foulmouthed nonsense about Luther’s posterioristics. ‘That’s William Ross speaking, not Thomas More.’
Another neat commonsense blow at my fears; another sign that John knew a lot about Father’s work. I had to admit that Father had been asked by the King – and not chosen himself – to reply to Luther’s writings against the Pope. And it was true that he’d been ashamed enough of the crass language, zealotry and poor reasoning of the writing he was doing in service of King and country that he’d only published it under a pen name. It still made me hot with shame to read those words: William Ross was a bullying bigot, and everyone knew William Ross was Father. Still, if John Clement could separate the two names in his mind, perhaps that meant Father hadn’t compromised himself as disastrously as I’d thought.
‘He’s not imagining the danger of heresy,’ John said gently, sensing that he’d found a chink in my armour. ‘I know that the man you showed me in the gatehouse looked pitiful. But we have to remember that he’s not what he seems. He’s part of the darkness that might envelop Christendom.’
‘How can he be? He’s just a skinny little cobbler from Fleet Street!’ I said hotly, on the defensive again.
‘But a skinny little cobbler from Fleet Street can be the darkness,’ John answered persuasively. ‘Or he can to most people. Look, you’re young enough, and lucky enough, to have been brought up in a time of peace and in a sophisticated household where everyone has read about different peoples through the ages having had very different kinds of beliefs and lived in very different kinds of states and still prospered. Your head is full of Greek gods and Roman lawmakers and Eastern men of learning and stars moving in orderly fashion through the heavens. You think civilisation is everywhere. So you have a confidence that you don’t even know is unusual. You don’t live with the fear of chaos breaking through and destroying the way we live that haunts the rest of us. You have no idea how other people feel. Most people feel mortal terror at the idea of the unholy chaos outside, waiting to engulf them. And I don’t just mean the poor and superstitious and unlettered, the people brought up without sucking in Seneca and Boethius and algebra with their mother’s milk. I mean everyone brought up in the shadow of war. Everyone brought up before this rare time of peace and outside the very unusual household you’re lucky enough to come from. I mean everyone older and less lucky than you. I mean people like your father and me.’
‘But you and Father are men of learning! You know everything I know and more!’ I cried, full of frustration that he wasn’t following my train of thought.
‘Ah, but we weren’t brought up to it, and that’s the difference,’ he said, with a certainty that made me pause. ‘We grew up in a world where there was nothing but the fear of the darkness. When death was waiting round every corner. When London could be surrounded at any time by an army threatening to string up every man and rape every woman and throw babies onto their sword blades and torch every parish church. When books were rare and locked up inside the monasteries, and our only hope of salvation was the One True Church and the priests who could mediate for us with God. Of course men of my age and your father’s age fell in love with the new learning and the new freedom to think as soon as we had peace and leisure enough to explore it. But we haven’t forgotten the fear we grew up with. It’s always at the back of our minds. And we can’t feel easy when people take up arms against the Church. You can’t expect that of us.’
He paused, waiting to see the light of acquiescence in my eyes. But I ploughed on, even though his assurance was beginning to make me feel I’d only understood part of the problem. ‘But Father and Erasmus and all the rest of you used to talk about uprooting corruption in the Church,’ I said plaintively. ‘And none of you expected to be treated like criminals for it. So why is it so much worse if a few cobblers get together to pray in a leather-tanner’s room?’
He sighed patiently. ‘It’s not just a few cobblers or a few prayers any more, Meg. It’s not a bit of mockery at the table about crooked priests selling indulgences either. It’s gone much further than that. What’s happening now is an assault on God and His Church. It’s armies of peasants running amok in the German lands burning down churches and murdering the faithful. It’s rogue monks betraying their oaths of celibacy and marrying the nuns who’ve sworn to be the brides of Christ. It’s the old chaos, the horror you’ve never known, threatening us all. Even if you did understand, it would be hard for you to see the danger from the calm of England, but anyone who’s been in Europe in the past few years and knows the signs can see the darkness looming again all over Christendom. It could happen here. Your father is right to be frightened, and he’s right to fight it. We couldn’t hope for a better general than him to lead us in the war against the heretics – precisely because he is the same scholar and gentleman who brought you up. The same good, subtle, generous, wise man. Which is why nothing will make me believe what you’re afraid of – that he could enjoy causing pain. You have to put that idea aside. It makes no sense.’
His certainty sounded stronger than mine. His loyalty to Father made me feel ashamed. I looked down.
‘It’s simpler than you think, Meg,’ he said. ‘You and I will find happiness together. Neither of us will ever be alone again. But we have to do as he says. We mustn’t distract his attention. He’s fighting his war on many fronts. It’s not just cobblers who are a danger. There’s worse elsewhere. There’s heresy rearing its ugly head everywhere – even at court.’
He shifted his shoulders, looking around for the door, clearly unwilling to continue trespassing in Father’s private place. And, taking my arm again as we stepped out into the clean light, he told me the secret of the King’s Great Matter.
Henry VIII, in love with a lady-in-waiting. Henry VIII, in love with a lady-in-waiting at a court so full of rose bowers and Canary wine and dancing till dawn and flashes of leg and cleavage and canopied beds with feather pillows that it seems made for love. Henry VIII, so in love with the one lady-in-waiting who refuses to recline in any of the rose bowers or feather beds at the court made for love that he wants to get rid of his Queen and marry again.
The King is a glittering bubble of gold and bombast.He never takes no for an answer. He is being tormented equally by love and by the Book of Leviticus. ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless,’ says Leviticus. And Leviticus is telling the King just what he wants to hear, now that he wants to be shot of the Queen, because once, long ago, for a few months, the Queen was the child bride of the King’s child brother Arthur, who died.
The Queen’s first marriage has only begun troubling the King’s conscience since he has begun to want a second marriage for himself. It didn’t need to trouble anyone’s conscience back when it happened, because back then the Pope formally pronounced that the first unconsummatedmarriage of children hadn’t counted as God’s holy union.But now the King is full of doubts. As he dances attendance on the scented girl with the pointy chin and the witchy eyes and the fascinating mole on her neck, he’s also wondering: is God punishing him for his sinful marriage by denying him a son?
Queen Catherine; devout, learned, Spanish, and in her forties, with powerful friends at court and all round Europe but just one young daughter to show for twenty years in the King’s bed. And worried.
And a clique of ambitious nobodies forming around her rival: pretty, witty, elegant Anne Boleyn. The kind of courtiers known collectively as a ‘threat’. They’re throwing her together with the King; parting the tapestries with a wink and a glitter of excitement.
‘I was with the court at New Year at Hampton Court, and I saw them together myself,’ John said sombrely. ‘They were in a group of maskers. But there was no disguising the King. And no disguising what he felt about the lady in yellow.’
‘But what does the lady in yellow have to do with us?’ I asked.
‘Don’t be impatient, Meg,’ he said. ‘This is the point. The lady in yellow is making your father’s battle against heresy many times more dangerous. She has the King’s ear – and she’s flirting with the heretics too. At a time when the King’s of a mind to be interested in anything that undermines the Queen, the Church of Rome and the Pope, she’s poisoning him in the most subversive way imaginable by giving him the new men’s books to read.
‘If her influence grows, who knows how far the heretical thinking might spread? And who knows what chaos we might be plunged into? Peace is an illusion, an agreement between civilised people, and something your father has worked all his life to promote; but it’s the nature of humanity that the beast is always lurking somewhere beneath the surface.’
The phrases were echoing emptily in my head now. I pleated a fold of my cloak. I didn’t understand. ‘You’re talking politics,’ I said sulkily. ‘Not ordinary life. Not us being in love and getting married.’
‘But Meg, politics is life. If you lose peace you lose everything else: love, marriage, children, the lot. You should thank God you’re too young to remember how things were before – in the time of wars,’ he answered bleakly. ‘But anyone a bit older than you will say what I’m saying now. I lost my family in that madness’ – he shivered – ‘and I know there can be nothing worse.’
Had he? He was old enough to have lost family in the wars, but he’d never talked about it. All I knew for sure was that he’d been taken into a family friend’s household as a boy, after his own father’s death. I’d asked him about his childhood once. He’d just shaken his head and twinkled at me. ‘Very different from the way I live now,’ was all he’d said. ‘I like this way of life a lot better.’
‘The best we can do, in the weeks and months to come,’ his voice rolled on now, ‘is to hope that the King’s fancy turns elsewhere and this crisis passes. And meanwhile, try not to judge your father too harshly. Some of the things he’s doing may look cruel, but it’s up to him to root up the evil spreading over English soil before it starts clinging to the King. The only thing we can do is let him concentrate on doing his job, and wait for the moment to be right for us.’
He swung me round in front of him like a doll, lifted my face, and looked searchingly into my eyes. ‘Oh Meg, don’t look so scared. Have faith. It’s going to happen. I’m going to marry you. I only wish,’ he added, leaning down and kissing the top of my head, very gently, ‘that it could be today.’
I stayed very still, looking down, treasuring this moment of quiet togetherness, warmed by the sincerity in his voice and the folds of his cloak flapping in the rising wind, watching the shadow of the anxious clouds scudding through the deepening sky chase across the lawn at my feet. Still hardly able to believe that he could be here, saying he felt about me as I always had about him, still swimming with delight. And feeling half-reassured that he didn’t think Father was becoming a vengeful, sadistic stranger, though not sure I completely agreed. Still feeling twinges of unease and uncertainty; but willing, more than willing, to do whatever John Clement said, because he said he loved me and because I loved him.
‘You said,’ I whispered, with my face so close to his chest that I could smell the warm man-smell of him, trying to focus on the questions I needed answers to but not sure any more what they were, ‘that there were things Father wanted you to be able to tell me … was that just about the College of Physicians? Or was there something else?’
He hesitated. For a moment I thought I saw his eyes flicker, as if there was something he wanted to hide. But then he smiled and shook his head. ‘No. Nothing else,’ he said firmly. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’
We huddled together, looking up at the house, knowing it was time to go back. I knew I should feel nothing but joy, but this snatched meeting was so unexpected, and so incomplete, that my pleasure in it was bittersweet too, and tinged with sadness. So what I found myself saying, as we turned back up the path, arm in arm, was, ‘You know, I miss the innocence of before … the time when there was nothing more to worry about than putting on a play that made us laugh after supper … when there was nothing worse than a weasel in the garden … when Father did nothing more dangerous than hearing court cases about ordinary street crimes … and when everything he wrote was just a clever game, instead of a war of words …’
‘My darling girl, I think what you’re saying is that you miss Utopia,’ John quipped, and I thought for a moment that he might be laughing at me. That was the title of Father’s most famous book, written in the summer that John went away, in which a fictional version of my teacher – known in the book as ‘my boy John Clement’ – had been given a minor role. It was the story of a perfect world, as perfect in its way as our own contented past.
I didn’t feel like laughing back. ‘Well, I do miss it,’ I said defiantly. ‘Who wouldn’t?’
But the wind had got into his cloak, and was tugging at his beard, and he was very busily fidgeting his accoutrements back into submission.
‘Let’s go,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard, stepping ahead of me, ‘before we get blown away.’
But he had heard, after all, because a few steps later he added, rather bleakly, over his shoulder: ‘Nostalgia is dangerous. Never look back.’
Or perhaps I’d imagined the chill, because by the time we got up to the door and stopped to catch our breath, now we were out of the wind, he was smiling again, and his face was as softly radiant as I could have hoped. He smoothed down the hair escaping out of my cap, and touched a finger to my lips.
We might have lingered for longer on the threshold, glowing with wind and love. But suddenly the sound of two lutes in duet began drifting out into the late afternoon: invisible fingers plucking, hesitantly and very slowly, at a bittersweet popular air.
‘Listen!’ he said, with a music-lover’s delight, pushing open the door to hear where the sound was coming from. I didn’t need to rush. I knew exactly what a mangled lute duet signified in our house in Chelsea. Father was home.
4 (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)
The hall was crowded with new arrivals. But one head stood out among the rest – that great dark lion’s head, with the square jaw and long nose and the piercing eyes that could see the secrets in your soul, the head of the man with the glorious glow about him that fixed every other pair of eyes on him wherever he went. When Father threw back his head and laughed – as he often did – he always transported whatever roomful of watchers he’d gathered around him into a quite unexpected state of pure, joyful merriment. He wasn’t exactly laughing now, as I slipped into the room behind John Clement. He and Dame Alice were sitting on two high-backed chairs, surrounded by a standing crowd of soft-faced admirers with stars in their eyes, and the pair of them were struggling to make their disobedient lutes obey them (he’s always been tone deaf, but he loves the idea of playing duets with his wife). But there was a smile playing on his wide mouth as he tried to force his fingers to be nimble on their strings. He knew his limitations. He was ready to see the lute duets, like so much else, as the beginning of a joke about human frailty.
His magic worked as powerfully on me as it did on everyone else. Glancing around past all the usual family faces and the stolid features of Master Hans, I saw he’d brought the Rastells and the Heywoods home with him, and John Harris, his bow-backed confidential clerk, and Henry Pattinson, his fool, fat and shambling behind them, and in the shadows John a Wood, his personal servant, who was probably tutting adoringly in his corner over the state of the master’s muddy old shoes, sticking out beneath his robe, and plotting one of the sartorial improvements that Father loves to resist. The sight of Father emptied my mind of all my rebellious thoughts. With him here, the household was complete. The dusky room was lit up with more than candles. The warmth came from more than just the fire blazing in the grate. Like everyone else, I was ready to forget everything and just revel in the effortless happiness that came from enjoying watching him enjoying himself.
Until, that is, I sensed a shiver run down the back of the man in front of me. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see John’s expression. But, with sudden protective anxiety, I became aware of Father glancing up from the frets under his left hand and, for the first time, taking in the bearded face of his uninvited guest.
Father didn’t miss a beat. With his hand still moving on the fingerboard, he held John’s gaze for a moment, inclined his head in the merest sketch of a courtly bow, and murmured, in his softest voice, ‘John.’ The smile stayed on his lips.
Then he turned his eyes down, back to his difficult music.
It had been no more than a greeting. But I felt John flinch as if it had been a whiplash. He was shifting uneasily on his feet now, glancing back at the door, clearly longing to be off.
After the music finally dissolved into applause, Father got up with the lute still in his hand. I was certain he was about to make his way towards us. I stepped aside, stealing a glance up at John’s face and reading the pale signs of guilt on it.
Yet Father didn’t part the crowd of acolytes to approach John. He had too much of a sense of occasion. He was turning now to the delighted Master Hans, and apologising for the poor musical entertainment – ‘But I assure you something better will follow,’ he was saying, and John Rastell, my uncle the printer, and his son-in-law John Heywood, were visibly quivering with secret knowledge of what that would be – and within minutes we were being organised into the impromptu performance of a play, and transported back into the carefree atmosphere of a family evening in the old days.
‘Let’s do The Play called the four PP!’ young John More, excited and puppyish, was calling out. John Heywood’s play, written long after John Clement went away, had been a family favourite for years – a satire on the trade in false relics by mendacious travelling monks. Young John was waving his goblet of Canary wine, and his grin was almost splitting the child’s face, which now seemed far too small for his ever-growing body. ‘We could use this as the wedding cup of Adam and Eve! … And this’, he picked up a trinket box, loving the joke, ‘as the great toe of the Trinity!’ But the older Johns shushed him. They’d clearly agreed in advance what we’d be acting – and opted for no religion – because it was only a matter of moments before everyone was dressing up instead for The Twelve Merry Jests of Widow Edith, with Dame Alice assigned, with her usual good-tempered resignation, to play the starring role of the bawdy old fraud who debauches our family servants. ‘If this is a punishment for all my shrewishness,’ she said, and twinkled, ‘I should learn to keep quiet in future,’; then, twinkling even harder and tapping Father on the shoulder in the middle of his mock-henpecked look: ‘Just my little joke, husband.’
It was only when the shuffling and scene-setting was in full swing, and all the other Johns were fully occupied elsewhere, that Father finally approached my John. Who was still standing, looking ill at ease, while everyone else bumped busily past him.
‘John,’ Father said, opening his arms, dazzling the taller man with his smile. ‘What a surprise to see you here. Welcome to our poor new home,’ and he embraced his bewildered protégé before slowly moving back, patting him gently on the back, to include me in his smile.
‘John Clement,’ he said to me, with a hint of mockery in his voice as he pronounced that name, ‘has always been a man of surprises. Ever since the time we first met. Do you remember our first meeting, John?’
And a current of something I couldn’t define ran between them – what seemed a sense of threat masked by smiles – though perhaps I imagined it. John was smiling back, but I sensed he was hanging intently on Father’s every word. So was I. I knew so little about John’s past that any new light Father could shed on who my enigmatic intended had been before he came to live with us would be well worth having.
‘It was in Archbishop Morton’s house, Meg, when I was just a boy – maybe twelve years old. You’ve heard all about Archbishop Morton, I know: my first master, and one of the greatest men it’s ever been my privilege to serve. A man whose great experience of the world made him both politic and wise. God rest his soul.’ I was being drawn closer, into the magic circle. His voice – the mellifluous tool of his lawyer’s trade – was dropping now, drawing us into his story.
Father, a pageboy in hose and fur-trimmed doublet, turning back the sheets and fluffing up the pillows late at night for the Archbishop, who’d also been Lord Chancellor to the old King, in his sanctum in the redbrick western tower of Lambeth Palace. Father was a boy tired after the daytime rituals of the house school, and the evening rituals of serving at table in the great hall, and already longing to join the other pageboys snuffling on their straw mattresses in the dormitory. But he was mindful too of the lessons of the books of courtesy and nurture, so he was also remembering not to lean against the wall, or cough, or spit, and to bow when he was spoken to, and to answer softly and cheerfully. (The boy More was so naturally skilled at all these arts of gentility that he’d become a favourite with his canny master, who’d taken to boasting publicly at table that ‘This boy waiting on you now, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.’) So when the Archbishop told him to take the tray of wine and meat and bread he’d brought up from the kitchens into the audience chamber next door – a public room of polished oak, never used at this hour – he stifled his fatigue and obeyed with the best grace he could.
And there in the audience room were two young men – coltish youths only slightly older than young More, with long limbs and travel-stained clothes, and swords propped against their boxes, drooping tiredly on the polished benches. With something watchful about the way they looked at him as he entered with the tray. And something angry about the way they looked at each other.
Try as he might, young More couldn’t imagine who these surprise guests were. He’d never seen them at the school. He’d never seen them among the pages serving in the great hall. Besides, they were too old to be pageboys. They already had the close-cropped hair of adulthood. And former pageboys didn’t suddenly show up to pay their respects in the middle of the night. In any case, their manners seemed too high-handed to have been learned in the Archbishop’s courtly home. ‘Wine,’ the older youth, who must have been seventeen or eighteen, said imperiously. Young More bowed and poured out the wine. ‘Wine,’ said the younger boy, who was black-haired with fierce eyes, clearly annoyed that there was only one goblet and pointing towards his own feet as though young More were a dog to be brought to heel.
But the boy More was not afraid of these headstrong youths. He just laughed politely.
‘Two drinkers, but only one vessel,’ he said, keeping his countenance as the books taught. ‘A problem I can quickly solve by running back to the kitchens for another goblet.’
And then an interruption – a great gale of laughter from the candlelit doorway, where they’d all forgotten that Morton, in his long linen nightshirt, was still watching them.
‘Bravo, young Thomas,’ he said richly. ‘Your poise puts everyone else here to shame. This one,’ and he pointed at the younger youth, who was now looking ashamed at being caught out in the uncouth business of bullying a child, ‘has clearly forgotten to live up to his name.’
And the black-haired wild boy stared awkwardly at his feet.
‘Tell the child your name, John,’ Morton said. ‘Let him in on the joke.’
‘Johannes,’ the youth said. He hesitated, in the manner of someone who might not really speak Latin. ‘Johannes Clemens.’
Johnny the Kind. Archbishop Morton catching young More’s eye, giving him permission to laugh. The small More joining in his master’s unkind mirth at the difference between the tall black-haired boy’s lovely name and unlovely behaviour. The older youth also beginning to guffaw. And, finally, John Clement himself – somewhat to More’s surprise – losing his sullen look, clapping the young More on the back, and, with more grace than the pageboy would have expected, joining in the laughter at his own expense.
‘… I liked that in him. We’ve been the best of friends since,’ Father ended, superbly relaxed. He was talking to me rather than to John, but I felt John also gradually relax as the story drew to its close, in a way that made me wonder if he’d perhaps been dreading a different ending – one that might discredit him in some way. ‘But I see you’re still a man of impulse, John. Turning up without warning.’ Father winked affably at me, encouraging me to laugh a little at the embarrassed figure between us. ‘Still reserving your right to surprise.’
‘So where had you come from that night?’ I asked the mute John, curious to see further into this glimpse of his past. ‘And where were you going?’
‘Oh,’ Father said smoothly, answering for John. ‘Well, that was so soon after the wars that things everywhere were still in confusion. John and his brother had been brought up by family friends after their own father died. But it was time for John to go to university. So he was stopping in London on his way abroad, to Louvain, where he was about to become the man of learning – the kindhearted man of learning’ – he chuckled again – ‘that everyone in our family has always loved so dearly.’
And now Elizabeth was joining our circle, breaking the conversation. ‘Won’t you play one of the servants, John?’ she was asking sweetly, and, before the pink-faced John could answer, wrapping him gently in a rough servant’s cloak and shepherding him away to join in the revels. He looked back at Father, as if asking a question; and Father, as if answering, nodded what might be permission for him to stay and play.
Left alone with me, Father turned a kindly gaze on my face. ‘You see how it is, Meg,’ he said. ‘I made a promise to the Archbishop long ago to keep an eye on John Clement. And I always will. I may always need to. He’s someone who’s endured a lot of losses in his life; and sometimes suffering leaves its mark on a man’s soul. With a man like that you have to take things slowly and carefully – and make sure there are no hidden depths you haven’t plumbed. But you’re a wise young woman. I’m sure you understand that …’
He held my gaze a moment longer than necessary. I didn’t know exactly what he meant, though the gentleness on his face now reminded me of the gentleness with which he’d treated Will Roper’s heresy. But I thought Father might be giving me a warning.
‘We had a good talk this afternoon,’ I said, masking my resentment behind a diplomatic smile of my own. Father was a fine one to talk about hidden depths, if he’d been secretly negotiating with John Clement for years about the conditions under which John might marry me, without ever giving me a hint of what was on his mind. ‘I was glad to see him after so long. I was glad to find out everything he told me.’
And I was pleased to see Father look more closely still at me, carefully now, with what seemed to be a question in his eyes. I held his gaze. It was he who turned his eyes away. ‘Good,’ he said, but without certainty; and he moved off into the crowd to attend to his guests.
And so the rest of the entertainment, with all its applause and rumbustious punch lines and flamboyance and laughter, was reduced for me to a watchfulness of eyes. John Clement’s eyes, avoiding mine and Elizabeth’s and Father’s alike. Elizabeth’s eyes, searching my face and John Clement’s with something I couldn’t read in her expression. Father’s eyes, coming thoughtfully to rest every now and then on John Clement. And, of course, Master Hans’s eyes, giving us all the same long, careful, considering looks I’d seen him direct John Clement’s way over dinner. A gaze that mapped the line of the back and the line of the heart at the same time. Which made me uncomfortable when I caught him staring for a slow moment at my hands moving in my lap. But which I then realised, with relief, probably signified nothing more than his artist’s pre-occupation with how best to paint us.
John Clement didn’t stay late. I saw him slip up to Father as soon as the play was over, while the costumes were still going back into their chests and the servants were setting out the supper, ready to make his excuses and go. I moved closer, wanting to hear but not to interrupt. But Father gestured me into the circle.
‘John tells me he has to leave now,’ Father said, with equal measures of warmth and splendid finality. ‘It’s been a joy that he’s found the time to let us welcome him here so soon after his return to London. And we’ll look forward to seeing him again here very soon, won’t we, Meg?’ He paused, and gave John another glance I didn’t understand, before adding: ‘As soon as he has had time to find his feet again in this country, after so long away. As soon as he wins election to the College of Physicians.’
I took John out to the doorway to help him into his cloak. Out in the half-darkness, with none of the other eyes on us any more, was the first time I dared look up and meet his eyes at last. And he looked straight back at me for the first time in what seemed like hours, with all the sweetness and love on his face that I could have hoped for, and with a hint of what looked like relief too.
‘You see, Meg,’ he said reassuringly, with one hand on the doorknob. ‘It’s as I said. We just have to wait a while. Doctor Butts promises that I’ll be put up for election this spring – it seems a long time, but it won’t be forever – and then everything will come right for us.’ And I felt his other arm move round my waist in farewell. ‘I’ll write,’ he murmured, opening the door and letting in the night wind. ‘I’ll be back. Soon. I promise you.’
And then he was nothing but a black figure on the black of the garden, flapping away down the path towards the water, leaving me confused but as hopeful as the silliest of serving girls that I was about to live happily ever after.
Elizabeth sidled up and looked sideways at me as soon as I slipped back in.
‘Master Hans has been making sheep’s eyes at you all evening,’ she said, with one of her brittle little laughs. ‘I think you’ve made a conquest.’
I might have been embarrassed. It was just the kind of needling observation Elizabeth was too good at for anyone else’s comfort. But luckily Master Hans wasn’t making sheep’s eyes at me now. He was sitting at the table, glowing in the warmth of Father’s undivided attention, which, as it always did with everyone, was making him feel confident and expansive. He had a miniature copy of the portrait of Erasmus that he had taken to Archbishop Warham propped on the table, and a sketch of the answering portrait of the Archbishop’s cavernous old features that he was planning to take back to Erasmus in Basel – he’d clearly struck lucky in his first two weeks in England to have got that commission (but then Warham, one of Father’s bishop friends, had always been a kindly old soul, and even if he hadn’t been it was fast becoming derigueur to repay the gift of one of Erasmus’ portraits in kind). Now he was talking enthusiastically in his accented English about how to do our family painting. I could see Holbein was a good salesman. There was already talk of two separate pictures – a portrait of Father by himself, to send to the other humanists around Europe, as well as the group picture for our hall that the German had originally been asked to make – and he was showing Father a completed picture too, a noli-me-tangere with a virtuous Christ shying away from a voluptuous Mary Magdalene, which I could see had struck a chord with Father and was about to bring the painter another easy sale. I sat quietly down near them to listen.
‘There was a fresco I saw at Mantua,’ Holbein was saying, so carried away by his idea that he was beginning to move saltcellars and knives around on the table to illustrate it. ‘I can’t get it out of my head … The Duke and his dearest love, his wife, facing each other sideways-on near the middle of the canvas … the family all around… someone leaning forward from the left for instructions…’ He paused gleefully, visibly expecting to be praised for his cleverness. ‘And, right at the centre, looking straight out of the picture,’ he said, then burst out laughing at his own joke, ‘the Duke’s dwarf!’
It was a slightly shocking idea. There was a moment’s silence when we all looked at Father, waiting to see how he would react. He paused for a second too. Then his face opened in helpless laughter – the kind of generous approval that made people everywhere love him. ‘The fool at the heart of the family! That’s a marvellous idea!’ he snorted; and, without having been aware before of any tensions in his face, we could see all the worries of the court being wiped from it now, and we all began laughing too, in relief and sympathy and soft, adoring love.
‘Let’s see how it would look,’ Father said, still grinning mischievously, and with his mind full of the idea. ‘Henry!’ And he beckoned out the fat simpleton from the corner. ‘We have our own king of fools here, as you see,’ he told Master Hans, and in a flash of enlightenment I saw in Henry Pattinson, the ginger fool whom Father so loved, a grotesque parody of the big features of golden King Henry himself, and wondered if that was why Father kept him; and wondered, if that were so, at the daring in Father’s apparently disingenuous remark (and whether Master Hans had had it in mind all along to put our Henry the Fool at the heart of our family).
Before we knew it, we were in position, with Master Hans, masterful now, walking us to the places he’d given us in his mind’s eye. Henry Pattinson staring, blank and baffled as ever, straight towards the artist. Father and his daughter Margaret Roper facing each other slantways (I was impressed at Master Hans’s quick understanding of who Father’s great love was). Me next to Elizabeth, and leaning over Grandfather to whisper into his deaf ear. Everyone else either arranged around us or watching and clapping us on.
And then, in the middle of the hubbub, Elizabeth whispered, ‘Where’s John Clement?’
‘Gone,’ I whispered back.
‘What, without even saying goodbye?’ she said, louder, and she turned her head so sharply round to look at me that she broke the composition of the group. Master Hans looked up, warning us with his eyes not to step out of line.
‘He had to leave,’ I muttered, frozen in my artificial position, looking down at Grandfather’s velvet-wrapped old knees.
‘Stay still,’ Master Hans called to us.
She looked back at him. ‘I’m sorry, Master Hans,’ she said, in a small voice. ‘I’m afraid I’m not feeling very well. I think I’ll have to go to my room.’
And she detached herself from the group and left the room, followed, after a moment’s indecision, by the bobbing Adam’s apple of her husband. She did look pale.
We might have stopped then. But Father quickly filled the gap. He was too fascinated by the painter’s imagining to countenance the group breaking up. The two men were revelling in the speed with which they’d come to an intellectual understanding, laughing together and catching each other’s eyes as they saw the picture take shape. ‘John,’ Father called with a smile (knowing there were enough Johns in the room to stand in for multiple defectors), ‘will you take Elizabeth’s place?’ And so the actors didn’t disperse until after Holbein, who had magicked a scrap of chalk and a slate out of the old leather bag he kept with him, had finished a lightning sketch of how we would stand in our picture – a representation of the perfect humanist family that would be new in itself, as playful and forward-looking as any of the new learning, a far cry from the stiff old depictions of pious artists’ patrons as saints with which rich men still liked to fill their chapels. And the party carried on until late in the evening, when, a moment after Father excused himself to write business letters and slipped away to the New Building, the light suddenly seemed to go out of the room, and all the guests remembered how tired they were and went to bed.
It was only late at night, when I was lying in bed (unable to sleep with excitement, my heart bursting at the memory of all that had happened that day and with all the plans I was making for my future with John), that I heard Elizabeth retching behind the closed door of her room, and the scrape of a chamber pot, and William’s nasal whispering. I couldn’t hear his words, but his tone was the mix of reassuring and nervous you’d expect from any father-to-be. It began to dawn on me what the reason for her sudden discomfort might have been.
5 (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)
‘Elizabeth,’ I whispered. ‘Elizabeth. Are you all right?’
It was still dark. Just before four in the morning, long before first light, but long after I’d heard Father’s footsteps tiptoeing down the corridor to begin his early shift of work and prayer in the New Building. In a few minutes the household would begin to stir.
It was hours since I’d sprung awake again and lain warm under the counterpane up to my frosty nose, waking up to joy and quietly loving the cold, creaking silence in which I could hug my secret to myself. But the miserable sounds coming from Elizabeth’s room hadn’t stopped. They were still going on now.
So I put a shawl over my shoulders and slipped out to the corridor, to pat at her door and see if I could help. I was the one with the medicine chest and the knowledge.
She wouldn’t answer.
I shivered. I could hear the fires being laid downstairs.
Eventually footsteps did pad up to the other side of the door. I breathed out in relief.
But it wasn’t Elizabeth’s head that poked out. It was William’s – tousled, drawn and more pink-eyed than ever from lack of sleep.
‘Meg,’ he said, with well-bred restraint but no great gratitude. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I thought …’ I began. ‘I thought I heard someone being sick. I thought Elizabeth might need some help.’
He smiled. Perhaps it was just the way his features were arranged, but I couldn’t help thinking his expression patronising. ‘Everything’s quite all right,’ he said with visible patience. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about. So run back to bed …’
I could almost hear the unspoken ‘like a good girl’ on his supercilious lips.
‘Oh,’ I said, feeling crestfallen, looking for information on his face and finding nothing he wanted to tell me. ‘Well, if you need anything … I have a chestful of remedies in my room …’
‘Thank you,’ he said, with finality. ‘We’ll be sure to come to you if we need anything. Don’t get cold out here.’
And, very gently, he closed the door on me.
Elizabeth didn’t come downstairs for breakfast. William was one of the party that walked through the darkness to the village for Mass at seven – but his wife wasn’t. He offered no explanations. Father, in a surplice, was acting as altar-server this morning, following the priest to the altar step as the Office and Kyries and censing and Gloria in Excelsis began. That gave me the freedom to sneak a look at William while we stood in the family chapel (whose twin pillars were still covered with the scaffolding that would soon be used to carve Father’s symbols on the stone). His hair was slicked neatly back and, bar a little extra pinkness about the eyes, he was as expressionless as ever. Even when the bells rang out, and the candles and torches were lit in the heavy scented air, and the priest lifted the sacrament above his head – displaying the wafer that the common people believe to be a magical talisman which can heal sickness and cure blindness, as well as a holy sign, Christ’s body and blood returned to earth – and everyone else’s faces filled with joyful adoration, William only had his usual slight smirk as he knelt. He was a cold fish, I thought, taking less trouble than usual to pretend I didn’t dislike him. He seemed a good match on paper. His father was a senior official in the royal treasury. But his conversation always seemed so limited, and his personality so stultifying and self-satisfied, that I knew I’d never enjoy his company. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering what pretty, witty Elizabeth could possibly have seen in him (apart from a way of pleasing Father by marrying a colleague’s son). Bubbling as I was with my own happiness, I surprised myself by feeling a stab of pity for her.
She was alone when I sneaked into her room after Mass. She’d tidied herself up a bit and was flopping back in a chair by the fire. But her face seemed drained of blood and she barely acknowledged my presence. The rank chamber pot was still beside her, covered with a flecked cloth.
I could see she didn’t want me there. But she was too weak to resist when I felt her pulse and temperature (clammy but cool). And gradually the expertise in my hands took the edge off her reluctance to speak. She relaxed, at least enough to say: ‘It must have been something I ate.’
I nodded. It was up to her how she explained her sickness.
‘Let me bring you some ginger tea,’ I suggested. ‘It will soothe you. And do you think you could keep any food down yet?’
She grimaced. A hand crept to her stomach. She shook her head.
‘I’m going to bring my medicine chest in here and brew up your tea for you in front of the fire,’ I said brightly. ‘And keep you company while you drink it.’
My chest contained everything. Remedies against fever and ague, chills and chilblains, toothache and heartache. Jars full of memories of Bucklersbury. Knives and pans, and a pestle and mortar, and John Clement’s balance to weigh out the powders I made. And a single ginger root, withering in its jar: expensive, but a more potent relief for nausea than anything else I knew, even slippery elm or chamomile leaves. I began scraping slivers into my little pan, loving the calmness of this quiet ritual and the sureness of my hand on the exotic spice from a faraway land, aware of both myself and my sister being lulled by it as much as by the rushes of sparks and slowly collapsing logs in front of us.
Grateful that she was too sick to mention John Clement, and enjoying the quiet warmth between us, I began softly telling her about the medicinal properties of ginger: that it makes the human body sweat, that the King himself has recommended it as a remedy against plague, that a compress of it applied to the face or chest will clear an excess of phlegm, and, most important, that it’s a guaranteed cure for griping.
As I set the pan full of water on the hook above the fire, Elizabeth began to stir and sit up straighter and look into my treasure-trove. ‘You have so many jars in there,’ she said faintly. ‘However do you remember what’s in them all? Don’t you ever muddle up, say …’ she pulled out two jars at random, ‘this one, and this one?’
I shook my head, sure of my mastery of the subject. ‘Never. Too dangerous,’ I said, and then I saw she’d picked up black haw and pennyroyal, and laughed. ‘Especially with the two you’ve picked,’ I added, taking advantage of the chance she was flatteringly giving me to show off a little. ‘The one in your left hand is to ward off miscarriages. But the other one brings on women’s bleeding. It’s what village women use to wish away unwanted pregnancies. Pennyroyal oil. Not a mistake you’d want to make.’
She put the jars back in the chest with a little show of horror. But she smiled too.
‘Ugh. And what else do you have … love potions?’ she asked, trying to be light.
I shook my head again. ‘You have to ask the village witch for those,’ I said, just as lightly, then looked more closely at her. Beyond her sickness, there was something unusual in her eyes. If I didn’t know her so well, I’d have said it was something like the desperation of a trapped animal. ‘You don’t need a love potion, anyway,’ I added, with as much comforting warmth in my voice as I could muster, ‘you’re a newlywed bride with a brilliant young husband.’
The trapped-animal look was there again, stronger than ever – a hot dark shock of fear behind her eyes.
‘… Yes … though sometimes,’ she hesitantly began to frame a thought she’d clearly not imagined putting into words before, ‘I wonder about William … what kind of husband he will be. What kind of father. We know so little about the people we marry, after all …’
Then she stopped. Took control of herself. Shut the trapped animal back in its cage and smiled at me in the coquettish social way I normally expected from her. ‘Look, Meg,’ she said. ‘The water’s boiling.’
She was right. And suddenly the air was filled not just with regrets and untold secrets but with the spicy smell of hot ginger.
Ginger was in the air all morning. It was a day for medicine.
When I slipped downstairs an hour later, after covering the sleeping Elizabeth with a quilt, I found Margaret Roper sitting alone in the parlour, looking out of the window. There was a viol and a sheet of music on the table beside her. But I hadn’t heard her playing.
‘I smelled ginger tea,’ she said as gently as ever. She’d always been my favourite of the sisters – the nearest to my own age, and the one I’d most often shared rooms and beds with; the quiet good girl who’d always been sensitive with other people’s feelings and who was now, despite all that quietness, gaining a reputation (enthusiastically fostered by Father) as England’s most learned woman. ‘I guessed you were looking after Elizabeth. How is she feeling?’
‘A bit queasy,’ I said noncommittally. It was for Elizabeth to explain her sickness. ‘But she’s sleeping now.’
Margaret’s eyes were shining. ‘Will you make me some ginger tea too, Meg?’ She smiled and paused, picking her words carefully before tremulously taking me into her confidence: ‘For the same reason?’
Her dark bony face was so radiant that I couldn’t stop my own face breaking out into a grin. ‘Margaret! You’re going to have a baby!’ I cried, and held out my arms.
We were still brewing up the second pan of ginger tea, murmuring excitedly together, when Cecily put her head around the door, sniffing. ‘That smells wonderful,’ she said into our sudden silence, and I was already beginning to recognise the soft, knowing smile in her eyes. ‘I’ve been so sick this morning … is there enough for me too?’
All three young matrons excused themselves from dinner at midday. But everyone in the house knew that Margaret and Cecily had announced themselves pregnant. Father, back from a long session closeted with Master Hans, being sketched and sitting perfectly still, was the last to hear. Looking as radiantly happy as they had, he offered a special thanksgiving prayer for them and their unborn children – his first grandchildren. He even broke with his usual water-only rule and drank a little wine with his pleased, pink-faced sons-in-law Will and Giles. Only William Dauncey was not there to join the toast. He was upstairs, like a dutiful husband, with his sick wife.
I waited for him to come downstairs before checking on Elizabeth again in the afternoon. She was lying on top of the bed, awake now, with some colour back in her face. But sad.
‘I’ve been making ginger tea all day,’ I said brightly. ‘Have you heard? Margaret and Cecily are both pregnant. They’re feeling so sick they won’t touch anything else.’
She looked up, straight into my eyes.
‘So you know,’ she said flatly. ‘So am I.’
‘We’ll have three October babies then!’ I said, trying to pretend surprise.
‘Yes,’ she said. Even more flatly. Then she shook herself. ‘I do feel ill,’ she said piteously. ‘Will you make me more tea?’
I pulled the counterpane up to her chin and tucked it round her.
‘You stay warm,’ I said. ‘It won’t take a minute.’
She was quiet while I grated and boiled my infusion. I thought she might be dropping off. So I was surprised to hear her tired voice mumble, even more piteously, from behind my back: ‘Was it you John Clement came to see yesterday?’
I paused, considering how best to reply. But, by the time I finally turned round, with the steaming drink ready to take to her bedside and a soothingly fact-free answer ready on my lips, she’d fallen asleep.
6 (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)
‘So it will be a fruitful family portrait,’ opined Master Holbein, as he led me into the little parlour that had been turned into his studio. It had a friendly, cluttered air. There was an easel (with the first sketches for Father’s solo portrait, made yesterday, still on it) and piles of cloths and props. At a table under the window he had the makings of his colours: almost as many jars and powders and oils and pestles and mortars and pans as I kept in my medicine chest. I felt instantly at ease.
I laughed. ‘Yes … So many babies! You’ll have to paint us quickly, before the house turns into a nursery.’ And then I blushed, almost before I’d had time to catch my mind, or perhaps my body, flashing off into its private dream of my own belly rounding beneath me, and the pride I could imagine in the familiar, elegant man’s hands touching the swelling and feeling proprietorially for the kicks and somersaults of a life to come. I touched my cheeks, trying to will the mental picture away, but not quite able to bring a self-possessed chill back to my expression.
He grunted. Looking at me without quite seeing me, reducing me to lines and blocks of colour in his head, ignoring my flaming cheeks, arranging me in his mind in a way that still disconcerted me. Gesturing me to the chair.
‘Oh,’ I asked, full of curiosity, ‘but may I see Father’s picture before I sit?’
His face closed. He shook his head and moved his body against the stretched frame behind him, covered with a cloth, as if to protect it from me. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘It’s not ready.’
‘But when you start to paint?’ I persisted.
A little surprised, he looked differently at me. Suddenly focusing on my face. Then he nodded and shook his head, both at the same time. ‘Yes,’ he said simply. ‘Later. This is only a first sketch. I want to get it right first. I hope this will be an important picture for my future. You understand.’
I did. And I didn’t mind his frankness. He’d only had a day to capture Father’s likeness. Father had already gone back to court. Master Hans would have more time for the rest of us, since we weren’t going anywhere. But it was getting Father’s face right that would bring in commissions for him.
I sat, sometimes aching with stillness and tormented by tiny itches and sometimes lulled by my own inactivity, but always with a tiny, yearning part of me imagining that the footsteps approaching the door might be not those of whichever servant or sibling happened to be passing on whatever mundane errand, but those of John Clement, come back, long before time, to announce to everyone in the house that he was claiming me as his bride. Master Hans talked. Stolidly; perhaps to calm me and keep me still. Catching my eye every now and then – interrupting the train of thought in which Margaret Roper rushed merrily into my arms to congratulate both me and John, and Cecily laughed at the sight of my uncharacteristically girlish confusion, and young John More looked as surprised as he was by everything – but usually staring at the paper or at some part of me in his odd, impersonal craftsman’s way. And I listened from my pink cloud of happiness, from very high up and far away.
He was talking about fathers first: platitudes about how much they teach you and how they love you. Then, matter-of-factly, he also told me about his own father’s death: how relieved his wife had been not to have to send money out of their tiny budget to keep the old man afloat any more; how hard it had been to get his father’s painting materials out of the Antonite brothers at Issenheim who’d been the old journeyman’s last employer. ‘I had to write to the burgomaster for two years before it was settled,’ he said; ‘Elsbeth would never have let it drop.’
He told me about the sketch he’d spent yesterday making. He’d already pierced the main outlines of Father’s sketched face and neck with tiny pinpricks, two or three to an inch. Next, when he’d done with me for the day, he would prepare the surface he would do the final painting on; then pin up the sketch on it – a map of Father’s face, a ghost of the reality he’d seen so briefly. He’d blow and smear charcoal dust through the tiny holes in the paper. That would give him the perfectly drawn outline of a face on his final canvas. That was when he’d show me.
And then he went quiet, and forgot me, and started to concentrate.
Sitting in silence left me all the time in the world to mull over the disquieting conversation I’d had yesterday with Dame Alice, when, as I hunted in her kitchen kingdom for more pipkins for the brewing of ginger tea, she’d materialised out of a pantry with a mess of capons’ brains for the next dinner in her big raw hands, encased in a grey-white pastry coffin ready for cooking. She had her usual entourage of boy servants behind her, loaded down with two headless capon corpses, bags of sugar, baskets of oranges, and jars of cloves, mace and cinnamon, and she was about to supervise the business of collecting knives and pots for the scaldings and boilings and stewings that would give us another celebration meal. Having guests, especially one as appreciative of a hearty meat dish as Master Hans, gave her the opportunity she was always looking for to show off her culinary skills. She was always saying Father didn’t properly enjoy her cooking: he only ever took a little from whatever dish was nearest to him (though we all knew he had a furtive taste for her mess of eggs and cream). She was clearly planning to cook up a storm for Master Hans, and looking forward to her afternoon. But when she saw me near the spit, hesitating over two of the little copper pipkins hanging up around the fire that she had so carefully scoured with sand before Master Hans’s arrival (not that she’d expected him to go near the kitchen – it had just been an excuse to use up some of her vast resources of practical energy), she sent the boys off to the storeroom again for nutmeg. For all her lack of Latin and frank scorn of book-learning, she had an innate sensitivity to other people’s moods, and she must have seen the yearning for a moment’s privacy on my face. So even though she looked curious to see me in the kitchen, she asked no prying questions, just said kindly, ‘Take the smaller one if you want to make one of your potions. I use the big one for cream.’ And waited.
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.
Surprised by himself, Hans Holbein paused to think. He was remembering the hundreds of sketches of faces and bodies he and Prosy had done in their father’s studio; not a money-making venture, just a technical exercise, back in the days when capturing a likeness was still considered not as an art form in itself but just a lowly artisan’s trick. And he was remembering glamorous Uncle Hans, coming back from his years in Venice full of the new humanist learning and new ideas about painting faces so realistically that you saw the inner truth in them – God in every human feature. Uncle Hans brought the southern ways home and made his fortune making portraits of the great and good from the Pope to Jakob Fugger, Ausburg’s richest merchant. He’d been the young Hans Holbein’s biggest hero. But the younger artist was also remembering the new reasons for denouncing painting. He was remembering how Prosy had stopped painting altogether a few years back, because – as he liked to say, in his irritatingly dogmatic way, thumping his fist on the tavern table – he wouldn’t provide any more ‘idolatrous’ images of the saints’ faces for the churches. What tipped Prosy over the edge was being jailed after he’d publicly abused the clergy for mass superstition, and being forced to apologise to them. Prosy wasn’t the only one to react so violently and self-destructively; artists everywhere were giving up their paintbrushes to purify the Church. That was what they kept telling people, anyway. But Hans had no time for this sort of thinking. Prosy shouldn’t have gone out on the rampage after too many hours in the tavern. He certainly shouldn’t have gone yelling at priests with his red face and his uncouth voice and his unemployed layabout friends. Prosy, who didn’t quite have the talent to get the commissions, who’d always struggled with money, and who’d always resented their father for pushing him, as the smarter younger brother, was just the type to fall back on the ‘art is idolatry’ argument now. In Hans’s opinion, all those ex-artists now denouncing art in the name of religious purity were just losers who couldn’t get commissions any more and needed excuses to explain their failure.
‘I think,’ he said slowly, searching for words, becoming fully serious as he engaged with the odd English girl’s question. ‘I think that Erasmus was right to start having his portraits painted, and engraved, and sold. I felt honoured to make likenesses of him. I don’t believe it is right to renounce the world when God has put us in it and our presence here is part of His holy design. You can see God in a human face. And, if God delights in His creation, and in the beauty and talents of the people He put on this earth, why shouldn’t we?’
He was a little embarrassed by his own unexpected eloquence. But he was strangely pleased, too, to see it rewarded when she nodded, slowly and approvingly, and thought over what he said. So he told her about getting to know Erasmus while painting his portrait. Three times in the last ten years. ‘If I look that good perhaps I should take a wife,’ Erasmus said mockingly when he saw the sycophantic first picture; but he went on commissioning more. Then she grinned and threw back her head, and he liked the spark in her eye. It made Hans Holbein think she might even understand something of how becoming so engrossed in form and colour that he didn’t notice time passing or hunger in his belly was his passion, his act of worship.
All she said, in a gentler voice, was, ‘I’d love to see more of your work one day.’
That was enough to send him rushing awkwardly to the side of the room, where his sketchbooks and copies of the printed books illustrated by his engravings were piled up, to bring her the drawings and copies he kept of the work he was most proud of. He was surprised to find his hands shaking slightly as he reached for them.
Somehow his copies of the three pictures of Magdalena came to the top of the pile. Not just the Madonna that Jakob Mayer had ordered, but also the very first picture, from the early days, when she was Venus, soft-eyed, smiling gently and gesturing alluringly out of the page; and even his revenge portrait, painted in the evenings of those bitter days when he was working on the Madonna painting. Also smiling – but with a flintier tinge to her expression – and holding out her hand again, but this time as if for money. It was the first time he’d looked at this work without being catapulted back into all the emotions of the past. Now he just felt exposed, and anxious about how Meg Giggs would react. But if she noticed any of the feelings he’d filled the three pictures with, she had the restraint not to comment. It was the Virgin of Mercy picture that she stopped at.
‘How beautifully you’ve painted her,’ she said neutrally; but it was Hans Holbein’s daring innovation in design – the humanist conceit that the Baby Jesus, rather than the Virgin, was blessing and protecting the family with his pudgy, outstretched arm – that caught her attention. ‘I like that composition,’ she added, with assurance. She admired the rich scarlets and crimsons of sashes and legs. And she praised the background which Uncle Hans had taught his nephew to paint in the Italian style, glowing with earthly life: a luminous sky-blue colour, broken by sunlit branches and oak leaves.
It was only when she reached for the next picture – his tiny copy of the mural of Christ in his tomb – that he began to feel uneasy for more down-to-earth reasons. As she looked with a mixture of fascination and horror at his depiction of a putrefying corpse in a claustrophobic box of a coffin, with its face and the spear wound in its side going blue and its dead eyes staring open, Hans Holbein suddenly remembered Kratzer’s warning about not letting himself be drawn into philosophical conversations with these people or revealing his less conventional beliefs. If anything spoke of the reformist belief that religion must be stripped back to nothing but the private relationship between Christ and man – forgetting the whole edifice of the Church which had come between them for so long – this picture, which had shocked even some of the free-thinking humanists, was it. It was so clearly that of a man, not a manifestation of God. Hastily, he put a hand on the portfolio cover, ready to shut it. But her hand was already there, holding it open. Lost in contemplation, she didn’t even notice his hand appearing next to hers. But he did, and was so startled by his own effrontery at having so nearly touched her that he pulled his own hand back as if he’d been burned.
She turned her gaze back up at him, unaware of his confusion.
‘You are a wonderful painter, Master Hans,’ she said warmly. ‘I didn’t expect you to be such a master.’
If she noticed his dampness and quickness of breath now, she would probably think it just a reaction to her compliment. He smiled awkwardly, and, noticing that her hand had moved, reached for the portfolio cover. He was almost sweating with worry, with more and more memories of what he kept in this folder stabbing back into his mind. The next work down was one of the Dance of Death engravings. And somewhere in the pile was his engraving of the front page of Luther’s New Testament (Eleutherius, the Free Man, as Brother Martin had been called while he’d still been part of the humanist brotherhood). It would most definitely be dangerous for the Mores to have any inkling that he’d had anything to do with that.
Reaching over her arm – and noticing, even in the middle of his panic attack, how long her slim fingers were, and finding that only made his heart beat faster still – he finally snapped the cover shut.
‘Oh – but can’t I see the rest?’ she asked, and dimpled up at him.
‘Another time,’ he said, forcing a genial smile back on his face and gesturing as firmly as he could towards his easel. ‘But first we must work.’
He was surprised when they were called for the midday meal. The morning had flashed by, and he’d hardly put more than a few lines of a sketch together. Hans Holbein was ushering Meg Giggs out of the door and towards the great hall when he saw Nicholas Kratzer standing in the shadows, watching him, with a sardonic grin on his bony face.
As Meg took off up the stairs with long, tomboyish strides (‘I must tidy myself up!’ she said, flashing a backwards smile), Kratzer caught up with him.
‘You’re smitten,’ Kratzer challenged.
Hans Holbein shook his head and looked down at his feet. He liked Kratzer, and thought they would almost certainly become friends while they were both living in this house. But there were things he wasn’t willing to share. There was something absurd about an artisan who’d painted house fronts having his heart turned over by a young lady so impossibly out of his reach. He didn’t want to look a fool. He didn’t want to feel a fool.
‘No,’ he said stolidly, not meeting Kratzer’s eye. ‘Just doing my job.’
I tidied out my medicine chest that night.
I couldn’t see where I’d put the pennyroyal oil.
It was the excuse I’d been waiting for to write my first letter to John Clement: asking for him to shop for a replacement in Bucklersbury Street, for old times’ sake. He’d surely send a reply with the gift. I spent a while wondering whether to mention Dame Alice’s evasiveness when I’d tried to ask her about Father, and finally decided not to. I didn’t want him to think I was doubting his faith in Father. And then I lost myself, spreading the handwritten sheets over the table, making my writing as elegant as I knew how, in a long account of the portrait-painting and of some, though not all, of Master Hans’s previous paintings, and his stories about his father, and his nerves about painting my father, and the endless brewing of ginger tea in recent days, and the three pregnancies, and the walk I’d gone on by myself to the river when I’d finished with Master Hans that morning, to look at the brisk waves on the shingle with young John and Anne Cresacre (whom I’d been more used to taking out walking back in the days when they’d spent their hours of freedom innocently climbing trees and playing tag on the lawns), trying not to notice the way their arms crept so hungrily around each other’s waist whenever my gaze was politely averted. (My willingness to avert my gaze so politely, so often, had made me their favourite chaperone in recent days.) Though I didn’t write this but hugged myself indulgently in the knowledge of it as I sealed the letter, I’d found it easy enough to look away. Encouraged by their breathlessness and flushed cheeks and sparkling eyes locked on each other, I’d felt myself becoming almost as much of a happy child as my companions. However hard I tried, I hadn’t been able to stop myself from seeing, in every boat coming towards us from London, a host of imaginary John Clements, with long legs and elegant backs hunched against the wind, each of them with sky-blue eyes fastened longingly on me as the water brought us closer and closer together.
But even while I was losing myself happily in the rose-petal commonplaces that every lover thinks are unique, I did go on wondering where the little jar of pennyroyal had gone. And, as the house settled into night, that took the edge off my joy. Gradually all the other worries that buzzed round my head like gnats, but which I’d briefly stopped noticing, became louder and more insistent too, and my vision of John Clement’s eyes, looking at me with love, faded into uneasy recollections of the man in the garden, Father writing in the New Building, and Master Hans’s artwork.
One way or another, I couldn’t sleep. My mind was racing. My body was full of unspent energy. I needed to do something. So I went downstairs. I waited till Master Nicholas had shut himself and Master Hans inside his room, and listened outside the door until I heard them unstopper the bottle Master Hans had brought. Once they began to clink glasses and laugh, I tiptoed back downstairs towards the studio. I couldn’t get the Christ corpse out of my head. I wanted to see the pictures he hadn’t wanted to show me.
It didn’t take more than a peep to show what a simpleton the man was. An engraving of the Pope – surrounded by devils, waving a Papal bull – leapt to my eyes. And right under it was an engraved frontispiece for the New Testament in German. I didn’t know the German words, but anyone could understand what ‘Das Neuw Testametrecht’ must mean. And the date was 1523, so it must be Luther’s work. The discovery was so explosive that it took me a while to notice that Master Hans’s drawings of St Peter and St Paul, on either side of the text, were extraordinarily beautiful and finely executed. They didn’t look any more the work of the devil than Will Roper had sounded during his flirtation with heresy. But that didn’t mean that Father – if he was becoming the persecutor I feared – would hold back if he found out what kind of work his painter had been doing before he appeared in Chelsea. Part of me wished that Hans Holbein and I could talk freely about what kind of God he believed in. I’d never knowingly talked to one of the new men (Will Roper in his Lutheran phase didn’t count – he was just a sweet, silly boy having a rebellion) and I wanted to hear for myself what God looked like if you believed whatever it was that the heretics believed. But another part of me was grateful that neither he nor I had tried. It was too frightening. I shut the portfolio cover as hastily as Master Hans had earlier on in the day.
After all the punishment the German merchants at the Steelyard had taken for smuggling their heretical books into London, Master Hans was playing with fire. Literally. It was obvious to me that he’d brought his past work only to show potential clients in the hope of attracting new commissions. But that proved he had no idea of the danger he would face if anyone saw these pictures. If our jolly, open-faced painter was to survive here in these watchful times, he was going to need saving from himself.
Without quite knowing why I was taking it on myself to help – except that I liked his bluff ways – I pushed the portfolio under a table and piled his sketchbooks on top of it to make it harder for anyone else to have an unauthorised snoop. I found a skull and put it on top of the heap. I draped the table with one of Master Hans’s scraps of cloth so nothing was visible. Then, wishing I could see my way upstairs without my candle, which marked me out to any observer who might want to come and ask what I was doing, I vanished upstairs.
It was only when I’d reached the solitude of my room, with my heart beating faster than usual, that I wished I’d sneaked a look at Master Hans’s portrait of Father so I could tell John about it in my letter. But it was too late now. Knowing what I knew, I wasn’t about to go back downstairs.
‘I was surprised you didn’t come out of your room last night. So much noise,’ Master Hans said. His eyes, slightly puffy after what must have been a late night with Master Nicholas, were fixed on his drawing of me. He didn’t appear to have noticed that his pictures had been stowed under the table.
‘Noise?’ I asked.
‘Your sister falling down the stairs,’ he said, and I could feel him watching me. ‘Perhaps she had too much drink. That is not good, with a baby on the way.’
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I said, feeling a new kind of unease. I must have been too wrapped up in my letter-writing, or asleep. ‘Do you mean Elizabeth?’ She hadn’t come to breakfast.
Master Hans nodded. And suddenly I had a nasty idea about where the pennyroyal might have gone. I needed to get it back. What I hadn’t told Elizabeth was that pennyroyal didn’t just bring on abortion; it was a dangerous poison that could cause internal bleeding and would kill a mother as easily as an unborn child.
The painter must have seen a hint of my alarm and tried to offer reassurance. ‘She hurt her ankle, but I helped her up to her room. She fell as I came out of Kratzer’s room – right from the top step. But I think she will be all right.’
‘Poor Elizabeth,’ I said, trying to sound light and natural. ‘I didn’t hear a thing. I must have been fast asleep. Will you excuse me for a few minutes, Master Hans? I think I’ll just run up now and check to see if she’s all right.’
She was asleep, sprawled on her bed. She was breathing as lightly and naturally as I’d been trying to sound. I didn’t try and wake her. But I did fish around under her bed. The bottle was hidden there. She must have stolen it. I breathed out in relief when I saw it was still full. I put it back in my medicine chest, locked it carefully, and took the key back downstairs with me.
‘She’s fine, Master Hans,’ I said, as I settled myself back into my pose.
He furrowed his brow. He wasn’t ready to drop the subject. ‘I think she is worried, to be going up and down corridors in the night and falling down stairs,’ he said a little dogmatically. ‘So, I know she is married and happy to be a mother. But this is an accident that often happens to a woman who is unhappy to find she will have a child.’
For someone who was so blissfully unaware of danger to himself, I thought with new respect, he was acute enough at observing other people’s feelings.
‘Sometimes it is difficult for sisters to talk to sisters, brothers to brothers,’ he went on. Then he did his big belly laugh. ‘Now, my brother is impossible to talk reason to! But perhaps you will talk and make sure she is all right.’
‘I’ll definitely have a chat with her when she wakes up,’ I said, impressed by the kindness of his heart. ‘But she’s happy. You don’t need to worry.’
I only wished I believed it.
* * *
Mary, the cook, was back from market. Two serving boys were unpacking packages and baskets and scurrying off with them towards the kitchen. I noticed her through the glass when Master Hans and I came out of the studio; and I saw Elizabeth, coming out to take the weak sunshine, called to her side. Mary delved into the big bag she had propped on the seat beside her and pulled out two letters and a bottle. Her big raw arms pushed both of them under Elizabeth’s nose. I saw Elizabeth take both and look at them. Then I saw her pick up the bottle and give it a long stare. Then she put it back down, and, with very visible composure, took just one of the letters and walked slowly back inside. She was shielding her eyes against the sun, but she saw me as she pushed the outside door quietly shut.
‘Mary has something for you from town,’ she said, looking down.
And she continued her slow path towards the stairs.
Only when her back was turned to me, and I was already stepping blinking into the daylight to collect my letter, did it cross my mind that the last sound that had come from Elizabeth might have been a stifled sob.
‘Love letter for you, too, Miss Meg,’ Mary said hoarsely as soon as she saw me. She had a ribald sense of humour: all letters were love letters to her. ‘And a love potion to go with it, I don’t doubt.’ She cackled.
It was a jar of pennyroyal oil. Forgetting everything else, I reached for the letter that went with it and, just managing to restrain myself for long enough to put a few paces between myself and Mary as I turned towards the garden’s main avenue, tore it open. ‘My darling Meg,’ began the short note, in the spiky writing I remembered so well:
I can hardly convey my happiness: first at the joy of our meeting, with all its promise for the future, then the pleasure of receiving your note. Here is the gift you were asking for. You will see from the speed of my reply that I went straight to Bucklersbury to buy it. The first person I saw there was Mad Davy – still alive, though with precious few teeth these days, and a lot more wrinkles. As soon as he knew I was shopping for you, he sent his fondest respects and tried to sell me a piece of unicorn’s horn to bring you eternal youth. I told him you were looking enchantingly beautiful, and were the picture of youth, and he’d do better to keep it for himself. He insisted he’d only lost his teeth because he got into a brawl. I didn’t like to ask how he’d mislaid his hair.
I laughed out loud, with sunshine pouring into my soul, and turned a corner as I turned over the page, so no one’s prying eyes could see my blushes and probably foolish smiles.
It was a while before I came in, with the letter carefully tucked inside my dress. While I was still dazzled in the house’s darkness, I hid it in my room, in my medicine chest, locked away with the new jar of pennyroyal. I could hear voices in Elizabeth’s room: at least one voice, hers, raised in the querulous tones that were becoming characteristic of her.
I didn’t like to interfere. I still felt uncomfortable when I remembered William’s barely polite refusal of my first attempt to help. But he wasn’t there; he was in London; and, when I looked in the corridor, I saw her door was open. So I plucked up my courage and put my head inside. Slightly to my surprise, it was Master Hans who was with her. Sitting at a chair by the bed where she was reclining; with a little posy of snowdrops from near the front door beginning to wilt from the heat of his forgetful bear-hands. He must have picked a few flowers and trotted straight off after her. He was leaning forward and murmuring something comforting. Her eyes were red-rimmed; but she was already composed enough to smile at me with dignity.
‘Oh Meg,’ she said brightly. ‘Could you possibly find a little vase? Look what Master Hans has brought me. Aren’t they lovely?’
‘I am telling Mistress Elizabeth,’ he said, with a touch of embarrassment on his broad features, as he brazened out my gaze, ‘how to have a baby is the most beautiful thing anyone can ever hope for. A miracle in everyday life. And how lucky she is to have this joy ahead.’
He blushed slightly. Surprised at his forceful enthusiasm, I asked: ‘I didn’t know you had a family, Master Hans?’ A little unwillingly, as if he didn’t want to discuss this with me, he nodded. ‘In Basel?’ I went on, and he looked down and nodded again.
‘Tell me again – tell Meg – what it was like when you first looked at little Philip,’ Elizabeth interrupted, and even if she didn’t really want to look at me there was a hint of pretty pink back in her cheeks, and her eyes were fixing his and drawing him back into the conversation I’d interrupted. ‘When the midwife held him out to you …’
‘She said he was the spitting image of his father … and I couldn’t believe that this tiny bundle of white could be a person at all. And then I looked into his eyes, and he was staring at me so curiously, from big blue eyes, wide open and watching everything, and blowing kisses and bubbles out of his tiny mouth. And I saw his little hands were the same shape as my big German bear’s paws, ha ha!’ said Master Hans, warming up to his theme again. His eyes were sparkling with memory. ‘That’s when I knew what love was.’
‘That’s beautiful,’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘And what about your wife – did she feel the same way?’
And they were off on a long conversation about childbirth, and prayer, and the shortness of pain, and what happens to women’s hearts after they see the child they’ve carried for so many months for the first time. They didn’t need me, and I couldn’t join in – I didn’t know the feelings they were talking about. But I was pleased to see Elizabeth beginning to look reassured. Perhaps she’d just been scared, in these last days, of the heaviness of pregnancy or the pain of childbirth, or fearful of leaving her own childhood behind. Whatever it was, Master Hans must have guessed. It was unorthodox to come visiting her in her room; but he was clearly doing her good.
Quietly, I took the sagging snowdrops out of his hand. I arranged them in a little glass by Elizabeth’s bed. And I moved the letter on her bedside table to make way for the glass. As I did so, I recognised the spiky writing I’d loved for so long. John’s writing. Stifling my sudden indrawn breath, I folded it into my hand.
Murmuring an excuse, I left the room. I needn’t have bothered excusing myself. Master Hans’s head followed me for a moment, but Elizabeth hardly noticed me go, so deep was she in this earthy new kind of talk.
I had no qualms about opening the letter. There was too much I didn’t know about John Clement to pass up any opportunity of knowing more. There was no doubt in my mind, no morality, just crystal clarity of purpose. But this note was short and formal. Shorter than the one he’d written me. ‘My dear Elizabeth,’ it said:
I write to congratulate you. I hear that you and William are to have a child in the autumn. You will remember from the classroom that my favourite advice has always been: look forward, not back. Your husband is a good man with an excellent career ahead of him; I wish you both every happiness in your family life.
By the time I’d got this far, my conscience had caught up with my hands. I didn’t usually think twice about inspecting any correspondence that might relate to me; life is too uncertain not to look after yourself any way you can. But this was a harmless expression of formal good wishes, a private matter not intended for me. Feeling awkward at the contrast between my own cold-hearted prying and the warmth being shown by Master Hans, a stranger in our midst, I slipped back in, plumped up Elizabeth’s pillows, rearranged her quilt, and contrived to drop the letter back on the floor by her bed. She’d think it had simply fallen down; she’d never guess I’d looked it over. Then I went away properly, secretly relieved to leave the two of them to their conversation, which had turned to full-blooded midwives’ anecdotes about waters breaking and forceps that I didn’t much like the sound of – but which the usually fastidious Elizabeth seemed to be finding fascinating. If I’d been a different person – less self-contained, less able to reason – I might even have felt a little jealous that she was so effectively managing to monopolise the attention of my new friend the painter. But I’d never been the jealous type. I was pleased she was finding comfort in his gory stories, even if I didn’t really want to stay and listen.
So I went back out to the garden to find a patch of sunlight far from the gatehouse where I could close my mind to everything but the warmth on my back and the drifting clouds of blossom all around, and sit and murmur ‘he loves me not, he loves me’ as I pulled the petals off daisies, like a lovelorn milkmaid, and read my own letter over and over again until I knew it by heart.
* * *
Hans Holbein felt almost unbearably sorry for the pitiful little scrap of femininity huddled up in the bed, hating her life. He hadn’t completely understood all the words in her wounded outpouring: ‘It was me who found John Clement and brought him here – and he as good as ignored me when he got here, and just talked to Meg, and went away without so much as a word. They all do that: talk philosophy to clever Meg Giggs and Greek to intellectual Margaret Roper. No one here has time to waste on an ordinary girl – someone with nothing better to recommend her than a pretty face. And now he’s sent the kind of pompous little note a stranger might write. As if he hardly knows me. As if I’m nothing to him …’ But Hans Holbein had understood the sense of what she was saying; he knew she was feeling something like the howling pain he’d felt with Magdalena. And when she bit her lip, and tears started out of her eyes, and she began to furtively dash them away, he wanted to give her a big comforting hug and tell her any sensible man should love her for her lovely eyes and her heart-shaped face. But he couldn’t tell her that. Who was he to tell a client’s daughter things like that? It was her husband’s job. But it wasn’t difficult to see Elizabeth was in love with the wrong man. And who should rightly comfort a married woman crying because a man not her husband was being too distant with her (and not distant enough with her witty, bookish sister) – even Hans Holbein, with his respect for truth, couldn’t tell. He was too fascinated himself by Meg Giggs’s awkward movements, blazing eyes and odd ideas to fail to understand if other men also fell under her spell.
Personally, he couldn’t see the attraction of John Clement. The older man he’d shared a wherry with down the river might have chiselled, fine, noble features and a handsome athlete’s body. He might speak Greek and know medicine. But his pale, kind eyes didn’t have any of the fierce glitter of intelligence that you could see in More’s eyes, or Erasmus’, or, for that matter, young Meg’s. You could see at once that his mind wasn’t of the same calibre as those of the people around him. He gave the impression, too, that he’d fought hard battles in his past and learned what failure was. If Hans Holbein had been feeling more objective, he’d have admitted more easily to a grudging respect for a man who he also felt had probably learned to accept his defeats gracefully and find a different kind of victory in adapting to new circumstances. But Holbein had taken against the other man, with a rivalrous male prickle of muscle and brawn. He wasn’t about to give John Clement the benefit of any doubt. The man was a loser, he’d decided; it would be better for both women if they could see it too.
But it wouldn’t help Elizabeth to tell her his opinion of John Clement. The one thing about women that he knew for sure was the fierce, devoted way they fell in love with their babies. The kindest thing he could do for Elizabeth was to hold out that hope to her – that a happiness she couldn’t yet imagine was waiting around the corner. Over the next few days, he made it his business to walk in the garden every afternoon with Elizabeth. He found her birds’ eggs and pretty pebbles. He sketched her little newborn cherubs. And – stifling his guilt about Elsbeth alone in Basel with two children to feed and his baby growing in her belly – he talked about the joys of bringing life into the world.
It was a relief to do this small good deed every day, because Hans Holbein was worrying about his work. His picture of Sir Thomas wasn’t coming out the way he’d imagined when Erasmus had first talked to him about the man who was the witty, humble, perfect model of humanist friendship. Hans Holbein was beginning to wish he hadn’t got drunk two nights in a row with Nicholas Kratzer, and heard from him the frightened stories the Germans of the Steelyard had been telling about his employer ever since he’d smashed his way into their London enclave at the head of a troop of men at arms. The merchants were sitting innocently down to dinner in their hall at Cousin Lane, next to their river mooring with its wooden crane, hungry after offloading all the day’s import of grain and wax and linen safely into their storehouses, when a scowling Thomas More, with dark shadows about the chin and surrounded by a bristle of swords, burst in on them, hunting for heretics. ‘I have been sent by the Cardinal. Partly because one of you has been clipping coins; but also because we have reliable news that many of you possess books by Martin Luther. You are known to be importing these books. You are known to be causing grave error in the Christian faith among His Majesty’s subjects.’ He arrested three of the merchants and had his men drag them off into the night. He had a list of the rest drawn up by dawn. The next morning he was back, watching, narrow-eyed, thin-lipped, as his heavies searched rooms and slashed into boxes. Eight more Germans were forced off to Cardinal Wolsey that day to be rebuked.
It was a mistake to know about that. It was even more of a mistake to know that Kratzer, whose wit and humour had earned him not only Sir Thomas’s patronage here but even that of Cardinal Wolsey, might rely on having powerful English admirers promoting his work, and also freely admitted to enjoying Sir Thomas’s company and the sharpness of his mind when they talked, but at the same time secretly considered himself among the freest of freethinkers. The astronomer boasted (true, only in a whisper, and in the safety of German; a patron respected all over Christendom was a patron worth keeping, even if he hadn’t been so confusingly likeable as More was from the safety of his own household) of having written to Hans Holbein’s hero, Albrecht Dürer, to congratulate him on Nuremberg turning ‘all evangelical’ and to wish him God’s grace to persevere in the reformed belief. Because all that secret knowledge – and the open knowledge that Sir Thomas suspected the German merchants skulking uneasily around the Steelyard of being the main conduit for the smuggling of heresy into England – was coming out in his picture. And the face looking back at him from the easel now was the face of the persecutor: with red-rimmed eyes, a narrow mouth and grasping hands.
Even the composition wouldn’t come right. He’d meant to put a memento mori in the corner. But his usual prop – the skull he often used for the purpose of warning his sitters and viewers against worldly vanity – had somehow gone missing in his mess. Someone must have tidied it away somewhere, or he’d buried it under an avalanche of books or boots. He’d never been good at keeping track of things. He had no idea where in London to go to lay hands on a human skull – except to the Steelyard, where at least he could understand what was said to him without difficulty. But he also knew it would be worse than impolitic to go near the Steelyard.
He couldn’t shake off the worry. It nagged at him while Meg sat for him every morning. He fretted secretly during his afternoon walks. He obsessed through the evenings over the painting that wouldn’t come right.
And when he wasn’t worrying about More’s picture, he was worrying over what Meg Giggs felt about Clement. Meg glowed with secretive radiance. And he’d noticed that she had started slipping outside to the cart to see the cook every morning, to ask for messages from town. If he only knew her better, he’d be better able to tell whether her sparkling eyes meant she was in love. But he couldn’t see into her heart; she was as unreadable as a dazzle of sun on water.
He didn’t dare ask directly. He was afraid of the anger that any forwardness might spark in Meg’s eyes. He sensed that she wasn’t someone who would take well to being interrogated. But, as her portrait began to take shape, Hans Holbein found himself fishing cautiously for information.
‘Do you know,’ he said, with his back to her, mixing paint, ‘that I published John Clement’s likeness more than ten years ago, back in Basel?’
‘You said something about it once,’ she replied, ready to be engaged; with a sinking heart he noted her quickening interest as soon as Clement’s name came up.
‘Well, it wasn’t really his likeness, as it turns out,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Your father has explained everything to me now. But I thought it was at the time. You see, I drew the frontispiece for a Basel edition of Utopia.’
Now he had her attention.
Holbein had spent his first day in Chelsea wondering whether this (old) John Clement had anything to do with the (young) John Clement whose picture he’d drawn, on Erasmus’ instruction, ten years before, when Utopia had just come out. More’s book had sold so well that Johannes Froben wanted some of the action; Erasmus had arranged for a new edition and got More’s permission to republish. The mischievous story was ironically framed by an account of how a sailor with a liking for tall tales described Utopia – the perfect society – to More himself, his real-life friend Pieter Gillis of Antwerp and the character whom the author called ‘puer meus’: John Clement.
‘So naturally I drew a boy. With long hair. Fifteen years old at most. I’ve got it here somewhere,’ Hans Holbein said now, gesturing helplessly around the worsening chaos of paints and pictures and props behind him, wondering for a moment at Meg Giggs’s sudden, secretive flash of a grin. ‘And then I got here and saw the real John Clement. And he’s not so young – he could be my father! So I was embarrassed. I realised I’d done a bad job. And I thought your father would sack me on the spot for being a bad painter, ha ha!’
Meg was smiling more gently now, seeing and hearing his professional discomfiture. ‘But Master Hans,’ she said softly, ‘it was only a turn of phrase. Father just meant that John Clement was his protégé – not that he was really a young boy. John Clement was working as his secretary on a mission to the Low Countries while Father wrote Utopia. But you weren’t to know that. You were quite right to illustrate the words “puer meus” with a picture of a boy. No one would fault you for that.’
It was a kindly meant answer, and he felt warmly towards her for it, even if it didn’t answer his unspoken question about what she thought of John Clement.
‘Yes,’ he said, persisting a little more, ‘that is what your father told me when I asked. He was very kind. But I still felt uncomfortable. I was so sure that Erasmus had told me to draw a boy …’
But she didn’t respond in a way Hans Holbein could understand. She just settled deeper into her chair, perfectly still in her pose, and began to dream of something private with a blissful smile on her face.
‘You’re glowing, Meg,’ Margaret Roper said. ‘It must be all those walks you’ve been going on. You’ve caught the sun. You look radiant.’
Margaret looked to Cecily, next to her on the bed, for confirmation, but Cecily only laughed weakly. ‘It’s probably just that you’ve spent the past week looking at me in this bed all day and I’m still all sick and green. Anyone would look radiant by comparison,’ she said to Margaret.
I was perched on the side of the bed. I was giving them another dose of ginger tea. It had become a habit. Then Cecily began to look curiously at me. She wasn’t as quick-witted as Margaret, or as kind, but now the idea had been suggested to her she was letting her imagination get to work.
‘It’s true, though,’ she said mischievously. ‘She’s right. You’ve lost that tight-lipped look you’ve had all winter. And now I come to think of it you haven’t flared your nostrils at me once in days either …’ She twinkled.
I stared. ‘What do you mean, flared my nostrils?’ I said with a hint of sharpness, suspecting mockery.
They looked at each other and began to giggle helplessly, two little dark heads lying on the bed like puppies and shaking with mirth.
‘… but you’re doing it again now,’ Cecily said. ‘Look.’ And she pulled a haughty face, with her nose in the air and her lips pursed together and her nostrils flared so wide that the tip of her nose went white. ‘You always do it when you’re cross,’ she said, relaxing her face back into a giggle. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘You did it every time we tried to introduce you to anyone at any of the wedding parties,’ Margaret confirmed. ‘One handsome young potential husband after another, frozen by your deadly looks. Don’t you remember?’
I was shaking my head in amazement. I recognised the expression Cecily was imitating as my own, all right, but I’d had no idea it looked so angry and so forbidding from the outside. And all I remembered of the endless winter parties was being fobbed off with one dull young man after another – the wallflowers no one in their right mind would want to talk to – and politely making my excuses to avoid spending more time than necessary with the spottiest, most unpreposessing stopgaps. It had never occurred to me that Margaret and Cecily were trying to find me a husband from among their new cousins-in-law. It took a pained moment or two of struggling with my pride before I could bring myself to react. But then I found myself grinning and screwing my face up in rueful acknowledgement. ‘Do I really do that all the time? And did I really scare off all the husbands?’ I asked, joining in their giggles. ‘Oh dear.’
‘We were in despair,’ Margaret said, and her laughter was tinged with relief.
‘Ready to give up on you.’
‘You were so fierce …’
‘… that Giles started calling you the Ice Queen …’
‘… till Will stopped him.’
‘… But then you bit Will’s head off for introducing you to his cousin Thomas …’
‘… so he stopped sticking up for you …’
I’d slipped down onto the bed with them now. I was holding my sides. We were groaning and snorting with laughter.
Then Cecily rolled onto her tummy and took some deep breaths. ‘Ooh, I must stop,’ she said, between bursts of giggles, ‘all this laughing is making me feel sick again.’ She breathed herself back into seriousness again and propped her head onto her hands and gave me an inquisitive look. ‘So what’s changed?’ she asked. ‘You can tell us, Meg. What’s put you in a good mood again?’ She paused before adding, melodramatically: ‘Perhaps you are … In Love?’
It was such an innocent, relaxed moment that I almost let down my guard and blurted out a serious ‘yes’. For the first time, perhaps ever, I could imagine confiding in my nearly sisters. But they were still in the grip of the giggles, and Cecily’s question had been too much for them. Before I got a chance to say anything, they’d both subsided back against the pillows, and were rocking each other again in helpless, painful glee. I wasn’t sure whether I was pleased or not that I’d been saved from the indiscretion I’d been about to commit.
* * *
‘How’s Father’s picture coming along?’ Meg asked, at the end of her fourth sitting. ‘Will you show it to me soon?’
It was an overcast morning. The light was softer than usual. With a soft light in her eyes, she’d been telling Hans Holbein a long-ago story about Sir Thomas’s wit: about how he’d met a fraud of a Franciscan monk in Coventry who’d told him that getting to Heaven was easy if you only relied on the Virgin Mary. All you had to do was say the rosary every day (and pop a penny into the Franciscan’s purse every time you recited the psalterium beatae virginis). ‘Ridiculum,’ Sir Thomas said matter-of-factly, even after the monk brought out all his books ‘proving’ that Mary’s intervention had worked miracles on many occasions. Finally, with a lawyer’s respect for logical argument, he silenced the monk with the reasonable argument that it was unlikely that Heaven would come so cheap.
Hans Holbein had roared with appreciative laughter. ‘That sounds the kind of thing a friend of Erasmus’ would say,’ he chortled. It was also the kind of thing that he might say, or Kratzer, if either of them had the presence of mind to get the phrases off their lips with More’s panache. But he also noted her nostalgic look, and the fleeting sadness on her face as she quietly said ‘yes’. They both knew that this wasn’t how the Sir Thomas of today, the defender of the Church at all costs, would behave.
He didn’t understand why, but something about the complicity of that moment meant that he instinctively nodded assent when she next asked to see the picture.
‘I am not usually shy about my work. But this one I am having problems with,’ he said, dancing a little jig of unease in front of the covered picture. ‘I have seen your father, and talked to him, and I know he is an intelligent, good, gentle man who loves to laugh. Only the other day I was laughing to hear his judgement in court when your Dame Alice adopted a street dog, and a beggar woman took her to court saying the dog was hers; and Sir Thomas ruled that Dame Alice must buy the dog; and everyone was happy, the kind of justice I can understand, ha ha! But my picture is too serious. And nothing I do will put laughter into the face of the man I’m drawing.’
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