Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ