Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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       PART ONE

       1

      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 СКАЧАТЬ