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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 corpse out of my head. I wanted to see the pictures he hadn’t wanted to show me.
It didn’t take more than a peep to show what a simpleton the man was. An engraving of the Pope – surrounded by devils, waving a Papal bull – leapt to my eyes. And right under it was an engraved frontispiece for the New Testament in German. I didn’t know the German words, but anyone could understand what ‘Das Neuw Testametrecht’ must mean. And the date was 1523, so it must be Luther’s work. The discovery was so explosive that it took me a while to notice that Master Hans’s drawings of St Peter and St Paul, on either side of the text, were extraordinarily beautiful and finely executed. They didn’t look any more the work of the devil than Will Roper had sounded during his flirtation with heresy. But that didn’t mean that Father – if he was becoming the persecutor I feared – would hold back if he found out what kind of work his painter had been doing before he appeared in Chelsea. Part of me wished that Hans Holbein and I could talk freely about what kind of God he believed in. I’d never knowingly talked to one of the new men (Will Roper in his Lutheran phase didn’t count – he was just a sweet, silly boy having a rebellion) and I wanted to hear for myself what God looked like if you believed whatever it was that the heretics believed. But another part of me was grateful that neither he nor I had tried. It was too frightening. I shut the portfolio cover as hastily as Master Hans had earlier on in the day.
After all the punishment the German merchants at the Steelyard had taken for smuggling their heretical books into London, Master Hans was playing with fire. Literally. It was obvious to me that he’d brought his past work only to show potential clients in the hope of attracting new commissions. But that proved he had no idea of the danger he would face if anyone saw these pictures. If our jolly, open-faced painter was to survive here in these watchful times, he was going to need saving from himself.
Without quite knowing why I was taking it on myself to help – except that I liked his bluff ways – I pushed the portfolio under a table and piled his sketchbooks on top of it to make it harder for anyone else to have an unauthorised snoop. I found a skull and put it on top of the heap. I draped the table with one of Master Hans’s scraps of cloth so nothing was visible. Then, wishing I could see my way upstairs without my candle, which marked me out to any observer who might want to come and ask what I was doing, I vanished upstairs.
It was only when I’d reached the solitude of my room, with my heart beating faster than usual, that I wished I’d sneaked a look at Master Hans’s portrait of Father so I could tell John about it in my letter. But it was too late now. Knowing what I knew, I wasn’t about to go back downstairs.
‘I was surprised you didn’t come out of your room last night. So much noise,’ Master Hans said. His eyes, slightly puffy after what must have been a late night with Master Nicholas, were fixed on his drawing of me. He didn’t appear to have noticed that his pictures had been stowed under the table.
‘Noise?’ I asked.
‘Your sister falling down the stairs,’ he said, and I could feel him watching me. ‘Perhaps she had too much drink. That is not good, with a baby on the way.’
‘I didn’t hear anything,’ I said, feeling a new kind of unease. I must have been too wrapped up in my letter-writing, or asleep. ‘Do you mean Elizabeth?’ She hadn’t come to breakfast.
Master Hans nodded. And suddenly I had a nasty idea about where the pennyroyal might have gone. I needed to get it back. What I hadn’t told Elizabeth was that pennyroyal didn’t just bring on abortion; it was a dangerous poison that could cause internal bleeding and would kill a mother as easily as an unborn child.
The painter must have seen a hint of my alarm and tried to offer reassurance. ‘She hurt her ankle, but I helped her up to her room. She fell as I came out of Kratzer’s room – right from the top step. But I think she will be all right.’
‘Poor Elizabeth,’ I said, trying to sound light and natural. ‘I didn’t hear a thing. I must have been fast asleep. Will you excuse me for a few minutes, Master Hans? I think I’ll just run up now and check to see if she’s all right.’
She was asleep, sprawled on her bed. She was breathing as lightly and naturally as I’d been trying to sound. I didn’t try and wake her. But I did fish around under her bed. The bottle was hidden there. She must have stolen it. I breathed out in relief when I saw it was still full. I put it back in my medicine chest, locked it carefully, and took the key back downstairs with me.
‘She’s fine, Master Hans,’ I said, as I settled myself back into my pose.
He furrowed his brow. He wasn’t ready to drop the subject. ‘I think she is worried, to be going up and down corridors in the night and falling down stairs,’ he said a little dogmatically. ‘So, I know she is married and happy to be a mother. But this is an accident that often happens to a woman who is unhappy to find she will have a child.’
For someone who was so blissfully unaware of danger to himself, I thought with new respect, he was acute enough at observing other people’s feelings.
‘Sometimes it is difficult for sisters to talk to sisters, brothers to brothers,’ he went on. Then he did his big belly laugh. ‘Now, my brother is impossible to talk reason to! But perhaps you will talk and make sure she is all right.’
‘I’ll definitely have a chat with her when she wakes up,’ I said, impressed by the kindness of his heart. ‘But she’s happy. You don’t need to worry.’
I only wished I believed it.
* * *
Mary, the cook, was back from market. Two serving boys were unpacking packages and baskets and scurrying off with them towards the kitchen. I noticed her through the glass when Master Hans and I came out of the studio; and I saw Elizabeth, coming out to take the weak sunshine, called to her side. Mary delved into the big bag she had propped on the seat beside her and pulled out two letters and a bottle. Her big raw arms pushed both of them under Elizabeth’s nose. I saw Elizabeth take both and look at them. Then I saw her pick up the bottle and give it a long stare. Then she put it back down, and, with very visible composure, took just one of the letters and walked slowly back inside. She was shielding her eyes against the sun, but she saw me as she pushed the outside door quietly shut.
‘Mary has something for you from town,’ she said, looking down.
And she continued her slow path towards the stairs.
Only when her back was turned to me, and I was already stepping blinking into the daylight to collect my letter, did it cross my mind that the last sound that had come from Elizabeth might have been a stifled sob.
‘Love letter for you, too, Miss Meg,’ Mary said hoarsely as soon as she saw me. She had a ribald sense of humour: all letters were love letters to her. ‘And a love potion to go with it, I don’t doubt.’ She cackled.
It was a jar of pennyroyal oil. Forgetting everything else, I reached for the letter that went with it and, just managing to restrain myself for long enough to put a few paces between myself and Mary as I turned towards the garden’s main avenue, tore it open. ‘My darling Meg,’ began the short note, in the spiky writing I remembered so well:
I can hardly convey my happiness: first at the joy of our meeting, with all its promise for the future, then the pleasure of receiving your note. Here is the gift you were asking for. You will see from the speed of my reply that I went straight to Bucklersbury to buy it. The first person I saw there was Mad Davy – still alive, though with precious few teeth these days, and a lot more wrinkles. As soon as he knew I was shopping for you, he sent his fondest respects and tried to sell me a piece of unicorn’s horn to bring you eternal youth. I told him you were looking enchantingly beautiful, and were the picture of youth, and he’d do better to keep it for himself. He insisted he’d only lost his teeth because he got into a brawl. I didn’t like to ask how he’d mislaid his hair.
I laughed out loud, with sunshine pouring into my soul, and turned a corner as I turned over the page, so no one’s prying eyes could see my blushes and probably foolish smiles.
It was a while before I came in, with the letter carefully tucked inside my dress. While I was still dazzled in the house’s darkness, I hid it in my room, in my medicine chest, locked away with the new jar of pennyroyal. I could hear voices in Elizabeth’s room: at least one voice, hers, raised in the querulous tones that were becoming characteristic of her.
I didn’t like to interfere. I still felt uncomfortable when I remembered William’s barely polite refusal of my first attempt to help. But he wasn’t there; he was in London; and, when I looked in the corridor, I saw her door was open. So I plucked up my courage and put my head inside. Slightly to my surprise, it was Master Hans who was with her. Sitting at a chair by the bed where she was reclining; with a little posy of snowdrops from near the front door beginning to wilt from the heat of his forgetful bear-hands. He must have picked a few flowers and trotted straight off after her. He was leaning forward and murmuring something comforting. Her eyes were red-rimmed; but she was already composed enough to smile at me with dignity.
‘Oh Meg,’ she said brightly. ‘Could you possibly find a little vase? Look what Master Hans has brought me. Aren’t they lovely?’
‘I am telling Mistress Elizabeth,’ he said, with a touch of embarrassment on his broad features, as he brazened out my gaze, ‘how to have a baby is the most beautiful thing anyone can ever hope for. A miracle in everyday life. And how lucky she is to have this joy ahead.’
He blushed slightly. Surprised at his forceful enthusiasm, I asked: ‘I didn’t know you had a family, Master Hans?’ A little unwillingly, as if he didn’t want to discuss this with me, he nodded. ‘In Basel?’ I went on, and he looked down and nodded again.
‘Tell me again – tell Meg – what it was like when you first looked at little Philip,’ Elizabeth interrupted, and even if she didn’t really want to look at me there was a hint of pretty pink back in her cheeks, and her eyes were fixing his and drawing him back into the conversation I’d interrupted. ‘When the midwife held him out to you …’
‘She said he was the spitting image of his father … and I couldn’t believe that this tiny bundle of white could be a person at all. And then I looked into his eyes, and he was staring at me so curiously, from big blue eyes, wide open and watching everything, and blowing kisses and bubbles out of his tiny mouth. And I saw his little hands were the same shape as my big German bear’s paws, ha ha!’ said Master Hans, warming up to his theme again. His eyes were sparkling with memory. ‘That’s when I knew what love was.’
‘That’s beautiful,’ Elizabeth whispered. ‘And what about your wife – did she feel the same way?’
And they were off on a long conversation about childbirth, and prayer, and the shortness of pain, and what happens to women’s hearts after they see the child they’ve carried for so many months for the first time. They didn’t need me, and I couldn’t join in – I didn’t know the feelings they were talking about. But I was pleased to see Elizabeth beginning to look reassured. Perhaps she’d just been scared, in these last days, of the heaviness of pregnancy or the pain of childbirth, or fearful of leaving her own childhood behind. Whatever it was, Master Hans must have guessed. It was unorthodox to come visiting her in her room; but he was clearly doing her good.
Quietly, I took the sagging snowdrops out of his hand. I arranged them in a little glass by Elizabeth’s bed. And I moved the letter on her bedside table to make way for the glass. As I did so, I recognised the spiky writing I’d loved for so long. John’s writing. Stifling my sudden indrawn breath, I folded it into my hand.
Murmuring an excuse, I left the room. I needn’t have bothered excusing myself. Master Hans’s head followed me for a moment, but Elizabeth hardly noticed me go, so deep was she in this earthy new kind of talk.
I had no qualms about opening the letter. There was too much I didn’t know about John Clement to pass up any opportunity of knowing more. There was no doubt in my mind, no morality, just crystal clarity of purpose. But this note was short and formal. Shorter than the one he’d written me. ‘My dear Elizabeth,’ it said:
I write to congratulate you. I hear that you and William are to have a child in the autumn. You will remember from the classroom that my favourite advice has always been: look forward, not back. Your husband is a good man with an excellent career ahead of him; I wish you both every happiness in your family life.
By the time I’d got this far, my conscience had caught up with my hands. I didn’t usually think twice about inspecting any correspondence that might relate to me; life is too uncertain not to look after yourself any way you can. But this was a harmless expression of formal good wishes, a private matter not intended for me. Feeling awkward at the contrast between my own cold-hearted prying and the warmth being shown by Master Hans, a stranger in our midst, I slipped back in, plumped up Elizabeth’s pillows, rearranged her quilt, and contrived to drop the letter back on the floor by her bed. She’d think it had simply fallen down; she’d never guess I’d looked it over. Then I went away properly, secretly relieved to leave the two of them to their conversation, which had turned to full-blooded midwives’ anecdotes about waters breaking and forceps that I didn’t much like the sound of – but which the usually fastidious Elizabeth seemed to be finding fascinating. If I’d been a different person – less self-contained, less able to reason – I might even have felt a little jealous that she was so effectively managing to monopolise the attention of my new friend the painter. But I’d never been the jealous type. I was pleased she was finding comfort in his gory stories, even if I didn’t really want to stay and listen.
So I went back out to the garden to find a patch of sunlight far from the gatehouse where I could close my mind to everything but the warmth on my back and the drifting clouds of blossom all around, and sit and murmur ‘he loves me not, he loves me’ as I pulled the petals off daisies, like a lovelorn milkmaid, and read my own letter over and over again until I knew it by heart.
* * *
Hans Holbein felt almost unbearably sorry for the pitiful little scrap of femininity huddled up in the bed, hating her life. He hadn’t completely understood all the words in her wounded outpouring: ‘It was me who found John Clement and brought him here – and he as good as ignored me when he got here, and just talked to Meg, and went away without so much as a word. They all do that: talk philosophy to clever Meg Giggs and Greek to intellectual Margaret Roper. No one here has time to waste on an ordinary girl – someone with nothing better to recommend her than a pretty face. And now he’s sent the kind of pompous little note a stranger might write. As if he hardly knows me. As if I’m nothing to him …’ But Hans Holbein had understood the sense of what she was saying; he knew she was feeling something like the howling pain he’d felt with Magdalena. And when she bit her lip, and tears started out of her eyes, and she began to furtively dash them away, he wanted to give her a big comforting hug and tell her any sensible man should love her for her lovely eyes and her heart-shaped face. But he couldn’t tell her that. Who was he to tell a client’s daughter things like that? It was her husband’s job. But it wasn’t difficult to see Elizabeth was in love with the wrong man. And who should rightly comfort a married woman crying because a man not her husband was being too distant with her (and not distant enough with her witty, bookish sister) – even Hans Holbein, with his respect for truth, couldn’t tell. He was too fascinated himself by Meg Giggs’s awkward movements, blazing eyes and odd ideas to fail to understand if other men also fell under her spell.
Personally, he couldn’t see the attraction of John Clement. The older man he’d shared a wherry with down the river might have chiselled, fine, noble features and a handsome athlete’s body. He might speak Greek and know medicine. But his pale, kind eyes didn’t have any of the fierce glitter of intelligence that you could see in More’s eyes, or Erasmus’, or, for that matter, young Meg’s. You could see at once that his mind wasn’t of the same calibre as those of the people around him. He gave the impression, too, that he’d fought hard battles in his past and learned what failure was. If Hans Holbein had been feeling more objective, he’d have admitted more easily to a grudging respect for a man who he also felt had probably learned to accept his defeats gracefully and find a different kind of victory in adapting to new circumstances. But Holbein had taken against the other man, with a rivalrous male prickle of muscle and brawn. He wasn’t about to give John Clement the benefit of any doubt. The man was a loser, he’d decided; it would be better for both women if they could see it too.
But it wouldn’t help Elizabeth to tell her his opinion of John Clement. The one thing about women that he knew for sure was the fierce, devoted way they fell in love with their babies. The kindest thing he could do for Elizabeth was to hold out that hope to her – that a happiness she couldn’t yet imagine was waiting around the corner. Over the next few days, he made it his business to walk in the garden every afternoon with Elizabeth. He found her birds’ eggs and pretty pebbles. He sketched her little newborn cherubs. And – stifling his guilt about Elsbeth alone in Basel with two children to feed and his baby growing in her belly – he talked about the joys of bringing life into the world.
It was a relief to do this small good deed every day, because Hans Holbein was worrying about his work. His picture of Sir Thomas wasn’t coming out the way he’d imagined when Erasmus had first talked to him about the man who was the witty, humble, perfect model of humanist friendship. Hans Holbein was beginning to wish he hadn’t got drunk two nights in a row with Nicholas Kratzer, and heard from him the frightened stories the Germans of the Steelyard had been telling about his employer ever since he’d smashed his way into their London enclave at the head of a troop of men at arms. The merchants were sitting innocently down to dinner in their hall at Cousin Lane, next to their river mooring with its wooden crane, hungry after offloading all the day’s import of grain and wax and linen safely into their storehouses, when a scowling Thomas More, with dark shadows about the chin and surrounded by a bristle of swords, burst in on them, hunting for heretics. ‘I have been sent by the Cardinal. Partly because one of you has been clipping coins; but also because we have reliable news that many of you possess books by Martin Luther. You are known to be importing these books. You are known to be causing grave error in the Christian faith among His Majesty’s subjects.’ He arrested three of the merchants and had his men drag them off into the night. He had a list of the rest drawn up by dawn. The next morning he was back, watching, narrow-eyed, thin-lipped, as his heavies searched rooms and slashed into boxes. Eight more Germans were forced off to Cardinal Wolsey that day to be rebuked.
It was a mistake to know about that. It was even more of a mistake to know that Kratzer, whose wit and humour had earned him not only Sir Thomas’s patronage here but even that of Cardinal Wolsey, might rely on having powerful English admirers promoting his work, and also freely admitted to enjoying Sir Thomas’s company and the sharpness of his mind when they talked, but at the same time secretly considered himself among the freest of freethinkers. The astronomer boasted (true, only in a whisper, and in the safety of German; a patron respected all over Christendom was a patron worth keeping, even if he hadn’t been so confusingly likeable as More was from the safety of his own household) of having written to Hans Holbein’s hero, Albrecht Dürer, to congratulate him on Nuremberg turning ‘all evangelical’ and to wish him God’s grace to persevere in the reformed belief. Because all that secret knowledge – and the open knowledge that Sir Thomas suspected the German merchants skulking uneasily around the Steelyard of being the main conduit for the smuggling of heresy into England – was coming out in his picture. And the face looking back at him from the easel now was the face of the persecutor: with red-rimmed eyes, a narrow mouth and grasping hands.
Even the composition wouldn’t come right. He’d meant to put a memento mori in the corner. But his usual prop – the skull he often used for the purpose of warning his sitters and viewers against worldly vanity – had somehow gone missing in his mess. Someone must have tidied it away somewhere, or he’d buried it under an avalanche of books or boots. He’d never been good at keeping track of things. He had no idea where in London to go to lay hands on a human skull – except to the Steelyard, where at least he could understand what was said to him without difficulty. But he also knew it would be worse than impolitic to go near the Steelyard.
He couldn’t shake off the worry. It nagged at him while Meg sat for him every morning. He fretted secretly during his afternoon walks. He obsessed through the evenings over the painting that wouldn’t come right.
And when he wasn’t worrying about More’s picture, he was worrying over what Meg Giggs felt about Clement. Meg glowed with secretive radiance. And he’d noticed that she had started slipping outside to the cart to see the cook every morning, to ask for messages from town. If he only knew her better, he’d be better able to tell whether her sparkling eyes meant she was in love. But he couldn’t see into her heart; she was as unreadable as a dazzle of sun on water.
He didn’t dare ask directly. He was afraid of the anger that any forwardness might spark in Meg’s eyes. He sensed that she wasn’t someone who would take well to being interrogated. But, as her portrait began to take shape, Hans Holbein found himself fishing cautiously for information.
‘Do you know,’ he said, with his back to her, mixing paint, ‘that I published John Clement’s likeness more than ten years ago, back in Basel?’
‘You said something about it once,’ she replied, ready to be engaged; with a sinking heart he noted her quickening interest as soon as Clement’s name came up.
‘Well, it wasn’t really his likeness, as it turns out,’ he said awkwardly. ‘Your father has explained everything to me now. But I thought it was at the time. You see, I drew the frontispiece for a Basel edition of Utopia.’
Now he had her attention.
Holbein had spent his first day in Chelsea wondering whether this (old) John Clement had anything to do with the (young) John Clement whose picture he’d drawn, on Erasmus’ instruction, ten years before, when Utopia had just come out. More’s book had sold so well that Johannes Froben wanted some of the action; Erasmus had arranged for a new edition and got More’s permission to republish. The mischievous story was ironically framed by an account of how a sailor with a liking for tall tales described Utopia – the perfect society – to More himself, his real-life friend Pieter Gillis of Antwerp and the character whom the author called ‘puer meus’: John Clement.
‘So naturally I drew a boy. With long hair. Fifteen years old at most. I’ve got it here somewhere,’ Hans Holbein said now, gesturing helplessly around the worsening chaos of paints and pictures and props behind him, wondering for a moment at Meg Giggs’s sudden, secretive flash of a grin. ‘And then I got here and saw the real John Clement. And he’s not so young – he could be my father! So I was embarrassed. I realised I’d done a bad job. And I thought your father would sack me on the spot for being a bad painter, ha ha!’
Meg was smiling more gently now, seeing and hearing his professional discomfiture. ‘But Master Hans,’ she said softly, ‘it was only a turn of phrase. Father just meant that John Clement was his protégé – not that he was really a young boy. John Clement was working as his secretary on a mission to the Low Countries while Father wrote Utopia. But you weren’t to know that. You were quite right to illustrate the words “puer meus” with a picture of a boy. No one would fault you for that.’
It was a kindly meant answer, and he felt warmly towards her for it, even if it didn’t answer his unspoken question about what she thought of John Clement.
‘Yes,’ he said, persisting a little more, ‘that is what your father told me when I asked. He was very kind. But I still felt uncomfortable. I was so sure that Erasmus had told me to draw a boy …’
But she didn’t respond in a way Hans Holbein could understand. She just settled deeper into her chair, perfectly still in her pose, and began to dream of something private with a blissful smile on her face.
‘You’re glowing, Meg,’ Margaret Roper said. ‘It must be all those walks you’ve been going on. You’ve caught the sun. You look radiant.’
Margaret looked to Cecily, next to her on the bed, for confirmation, but Cecily only laughed weakly. ‘It’s probably just that you’ve spent the past week looking at me in this bed all day and I’m still all sick and green. Anyone would look radiant by comparison,’ she said to Margaret.
I was perched on the side of the bed. I was giving them another dose of ginger tea. It had become a habit. Then Cecily began to look curiously at me. She wasn’t as quick-witted as Margaret, or as kind, but now the idea had been suggested to her she was letting her imagination get to work.
‘It’s true, though,’ she said mischievously. ‘She’s right. You’ve lost that tight-lipped look you’ve had all winter. And now I come to think of it you haven’t flared your nostrils at me once in days either …’ She twinkled.
I stared. ‘What do you mean, flared my nostrils?’ I said with a hint of sharpness, suspecting mockery.
They looked at each other and began to giggle helplessly, two little dark heads lying on the bed like puppies and shaking with mirth.
‘… but you’re doing it again now,’ Cecily said. ‘Look.’ And she pulled a haughty face, with her nose in the air and her lips pursed together and her nostrils flared so wide that the tip of her nose went white. ‘You always do it when you’re cross,’ she said, relaxing her face back into a giggle. ‘Didn’t you know?’
‘You did it every time we tried to introduce you to anyone at any of the wedding parties,’ Margaret confirmed. ‘One handsome young potential husband after another, frozen by your deadly looks. Don’t you remember?’
I was shaking my head in amazement. I recognised the expression Cecily was imitating as my own, all right, but I’d had no idea it looked so angry and so forbidding from the outside. And all I remembered of the endless winter parties was being fobbed off with one dull young man after another – the wallflowers no one in their right mind would want to talk to – and politely making my excuses to avoid spending more time than necessary with the spottiest, most unpreposessing stopgaps. It had never occurred to me that Margaret and Cecily were trying to find me a husband from among their new cousins-in-law. It took a pained moment or two of struggling with my pride before I could bring myself to react. But then I found myself grinning and screwing my face up in rueful acknowledgement. ‘Do I really do that all the time? And did I really scare off all the husbands?’ I asked, joining in their giggles. ‘Oh dear.’
‘We were in despair,’ Margaret said, and her laughter was tinged with relief.
‘Ready to give up on you.’
‘You were so fierce …’
‘… that Giles started calling you the Ice Queen …’
‘… till Will stopped him.’
‘… But then you bit Will’s head off for introducing you to his cousin Thomas …’
‘… so he stopped sticking up for you …’
I’d slipped down onto the bed with them now. I was holding my sides. We were groaning and snorting with laughter.
Then Cecily rolled onto her tummy and took some deep breaths. ‘Ooh, I must stop,’ she said, between bursts of giggles, ‘all this laughing is making me feel sick again.’ She breathed herself back into seriousness again and propped her head onto her hands and gave me an inquisitive look. ‘So what’s changed?’ she asked. ‘You can tell us, Meg. What’s put you in a good mood again?’ She paused before adding, melodramatically: ‘Perhaps you are … In Love?’
It was such an innocent, relaxed moment that I almost let down my guard and blurted out a serious ‘yes’. For the first time, perhaps ever, I could imagine confiding in my nearly sisters. But they were still in the grip of the giggles, and Cecily’s question had been too much for them. Before I got a chance to say anything, they’d both subsided back against the pillows, and were rocking each other again in helpless, painful glee. I wasn’t sure whether I was pleased or not that I’d been saved from the indiscretion I’d been about to commit.
* * *
‘How’s Father’s picture coming along?’ Meg asked, at the end of her fourth sitting. ‘Will you show it to me soon?’
