Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ people’s conversation. That’s how I found out that his first Greek lecture was the best attended in the whole history of the university. It’s also how I discovered, a year or so later, that he’d gone travelling again – the kind of travelling that men in the More family’s circle of people of genius did. He’d gone to Italy – Padua and Siena – to study medicine. He’d learned his Greek when he’d attended another university abroad, long ago, even before he started teaching; I thought in the Low Countries, though he’d never said much about it. Perhaps he just felt now that there was nothing to draw him back to London. No family. No close friends. He probably thought I was just a child in need of kindness, and forgot me.

      We had plenty of other tutors after that, and we crammed our heads with so much geometry and Greek and astronomy and Latin and prayer and virginal practice that we started being trotted out in front of all and sundry as an example of the new learning. There was nothing private about our lives, even if once we moved to Chelsea we were far from court. We were always on display. Father took to publishing every scrap of work we produced: all those daily letters we were supposed to write him through our schooldays, practising verse composition and disputation, translating our every thought from Latin to Greek to English and back again, were much less private than we realised. He sent the best ones slyly off to Erasmus, complaining that our handwriting was terrible, and waited for Erasmus to profess himself ‘amazed’ by our wit and style – which of course Erasmus kindly did. And even the letters Father sent us – Latin letters to the ‘schola’, talking about how deep and tender his love was for all of us, how often he took us in his arms, how he fed us cake and pears, how he dressed us in silken garments and all the rest of it – got published too, and polished up and improved long after the event.

      Yes, by the time the idea came up of getting our family portrait painted, Father had really got into the habit of dining out on stories of our brilliance. He loved to tell people that there was no reason why women’s brains, even if they were poorer spiritual soil than men’s, couldn’t produce wonderful plants if they were properly tended and planted; or to boast that he was so soft-hearted a parent that he’d only ever beaten his children with peacock feathers. In fact, we’d set such a fashion that the Eliots and the Parrs also started copying Father’s teaching methods. Little Katharine and William Parr were at risk of becoming as clever as us if they didn’t watch themselves. Father had even got interested enough in my modest medical expertise – it was more than just herbal remedies by the time I grew up; of course I’d also started taking a look at some of the Galen and Hippocrates that I imagined John Clement to have been studying in Italy – to be begging the others to read more medical texts too.

      Still, none of the tutors we had after John Clement had ever become my special friend. Nor did anyone seem to have remembered to look for a husband for me through all the alliance-making of the past few months, which had taken up so much of Father’s time and effort on everyone else’s behalf. That had left me all the time in the world to feel nostalgic about John Clement, who I still believed had loved me most, once, however impossible it now seemed given that all we’d heard about him for years was the occasional mention in a letter from Basel or Bruges from one of the learned friends who didn’t come to the house any more.

      Until yesterday. (It seemed incredible that it had been just a day, and here I was with my heart in my mouth already waiting for a sighting of him.)

      Yesterday, when Elizabeth suddenly leaned forward at the end of dinner. It was a casual day; Dame Alice didn’t bother so much about Bible readings when Father wasn’t there, and Elizabeth’s strangle-voiced new husband William had left the table to write letters. She gave me a meaningful look down her straight nose, and said, quietly, so only I could hear, ‘I saw John Clement in London.’

      I practically choked on my posset. But I kept my face composed.

      ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘He’s in Italy, studying for his MD. Isn’t he?’

      ‘Not any more,’ she said.

      Elizabeth was one of those women I would never be: not a thinker, but small, neat and with alluring manners; catlike in the sense that she always landed on her feet and made it look effortless. She was the prettiest of the More daughters and the worldliest. She reeled in William Dauncey, with his Adam’s apple and substantial income, on the basis of one evening at a court function and some demure-looking flirting; she got Father to place him in a sinecure job in the Duchy of Lancaster office right after their marriage and she was already fishing for better placements for him. I’d known from the first moment I saw her, when we were children, that we would never be close. I didn’t like to think it was just envy of her milky skin and blankly beautiful features that made me imagine her as the kind of person who’d always get her own way, and who would be as spiteful as a scratching kitten if she didn’t. I preferred to think that I’d spotted a deep-seated mean-spiritedness in her that I knew I could never love. And now it flashed through my mind that her meanness might just stop her talking if she saw me wanting desperately to know what she had to say.

      Still, I couldn’t resist trying. Casually, very casually, I asked: ‘How interesting. What’s he doing now?’

      ‘He’s a server in the King’s household for the moment. He’s been back in London since he qualified last summer.’ She paused. She always knew the details of people’s positions. ‘He says Father got him the job.’

      We both let Father’s omission in telling us that important fact pass, and our shared silence drew us closer. Some things were best left unsaid. There had been a lot of eloquent pauses in our household since we moved to Chelsea.

      ‘He was at a dinner Father sent us to last month, right after the wedding. Part of this plan to get William and Giles seats in the next parliament.’ (I tried, not completely successfully, to still the twinge of envy that this casual mention of her wifely plans set in motion inside me.) ‘We were in the Duke’s chambers and Father was called away suddenly to read something for the King before we even went in to dinner,’ she paused again, looking at her golden ring, ‘and then John Clement turned up. I nearly died of shock …’ She stopped and looked out of the window. There was sunlight beating down on us. ‘It’s hotter than you’d expect for the time of year, isn’t it?’ she went on, even though the inside of the room, bare of decoration still because there’d been no time to commission drapes and pictures yet (hence the Holbein portrait idea) was actually draughty and rather cold. ‘He looks older,’ she said, and there was something a bit wistful in her face. She twisted the wedding ring on her finger. ‘I saw quite a bit of him after that, actually.’

      She’d been back for three days. Father had sent her and Cecily home on Sunday evening, earlier than they’d expected, to help prepare for the painter’s arrival. I’d hardly seen her. She’d kept to her room and her prayers and whatever whispered conversations young married women might have among themselves, but she hadn’t sought me out. Why had she held on to this piece of information for so long? And why was she telling me now? I could sense that, in her devious way, she was probing for some reaction from me. Not knowing what reaction she could be looking for made me feel uneasy, and stubbornly unwilling to give an inch.

      ‘He’s not going to become a “total courtier” too, is he?’ I asked. Eyes firmly down on my own ring-free hands. Erasmus’ nickname for Father when he first saw him on the King’s business had stuck. I laughed a tinkling girlish laugh, which sounded forced to my ears. Elizabeth didn’t seem to hear its falseness, but she wasn’t in a mood to laugh. She was looking gentler than usual, playing absentmindedly with her spoon in the ruins of the dish of beef that (with more than her usual birdlike appetite) she had demolished. She just smiled.

      ‘I don’t think so – he can dance, though, did you know? – but he says he wants to practise medicine soon. He’s trying to join the College of Physicians.’

      ‘And СКАЧАТЬ