Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ – 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

      ‘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 СКАЧАТЬ