Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ