Читать книгу Portrait of an Unknown Woman - Vanora Bennett - Страница 10

6

‘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.’