Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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

      ‘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?’ СКАЧАТЬ