Portrait of an Unknown Woman Read online

  Portrait of an Unknown Woman

  Vanora Bennett

  HarperCollins Publishers (2006)

  To Chris, with love

  C o n t e n t s

  Part One

  Thomas More, His Father, and His Household

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Part Two

  Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling

  8

  9

  Part Three

  Noli Me Tangere

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  Part Four

  After the Ambassadors

  17

  18

  19

  20

  A u t h o r ’ s N o t e

  A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s

  B i b l i o g r a p h y

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  Part One

  Thomas More, His Father, and His Household

  1

  The house was turned upside down and inside out on the day the painter was to arrive. It was obvious to the meanest intelligence that everyone was in a high state of excitement about the picture the German was to make of us. If anyone had asked me, I would have said vanity comes in strange guises. But no one did. We weren’t admitting to being so worldly. We were a godly household, and we never forgot our virtuous modesty.

  The excuse for all the bustle was that it was the first day of spring—or at least the first January day with a hint of warmth in the air—a chance to scrub and shake and plump and scrape at every surface, visible and invisible, on a mansion that was only a year old, had cost a king’s fortune, and scarcely needed any more primping and preening to look good in the sunshine. From dawn onward, there were village girls polishing every scrap of wood in the great hall. More girls upstairs were turning over feather pillows and patting quilts and brushing off tapestries and letting in fresh air and strewing pomanders and lavender in chests. The hay was changed in the privies. The fireplaces were scraped clean and laid with aromatic apple logs. By the time we came back from matins, with the sun still not high in the sky, there were already clankings and choppings from the kitchen, the squawking death agony of birds, and the smell of boiling savories. We daughters (all, not necessarily by coincidence, in our beribboned, embroidered spring best) were put to work dusting off the lutes and viols on the shelf and arranging music. And outside, where our stepmother, Dame Alice, kept finding herself on her majestic if slightly fretful tour of her troops (casting a watchful eye up the river to check what boats might be heading toward our stairs), there was what seemed to be Chelsea’s entire supply of young boys, pruning back the mulberry tree. The mulberry tree had been Father’s first flourish as a landowner—its Latin name, Morus, is what he called himself in Latin too (and he was self-deprecating enough to think it funny that Morus also meant “the fool”).

  It was the garden that kept drawing everyone outside, and the ribbon of river you could see from Father’s favorite part of the garden, the raised area that gave the best possible view of London—the rooftops and the smoke and the church spires—which used to be our home until, by the grace of our king, Henry VIII, we got quite so rich and powerful, and which Father, almost as much as I, couldn’t bear to pass a day without seeing.

  First Margaret and her husband, Will Roper, came out. The oldest of the More children and my adopted sister, Margaret was twenty-two, a bit more than a year younger than me; but they were already so long settled in their shared happiness that they’d forgotten what it was to be alone. Then Cecily with her new husband, Giles Heron, and Elizabeth with hers, William Dauncey, all four younger than me, Elizabeth only eighteen, and all smirking with the secret pleasure of newlyweds, not to mention the more obvious pleasure of those who had had the good fortune to make advantageous marriages. Then Grandfather, old Sir John More, puffed up and dignified in a fur-trimmed cape. And young John, the youngest of the four More children, shivering in his undershirt, so busy peering upriver that he started absentmindedly pulling leaves off a rosebush and scrunching them into tiny folds until Dame Alice materialized next to him, scolded him roundly for being destructive, and sent him off to wrap up more warmly against the river breezes. Then Anne Cresacre, another ward like me, managing, in her irritating way, to look artlessly pretty as she arranged her fifteen-year-old self and a piece of embroidery. In my view there was no need for all of her humming and smiling. With all the money and estates she’d been left by her parents, Father would have John marry her the day she came of age.

  Of all his wards, it was only me he seemed to have forgotten to marry off, but then I was several years too old to marry his only son. Anne Cresacre didn’t need to try half so hard. Especially since you could see from the doggy way John looked at her that he’d been in love with her all his life.

  The sun came out on young John’s face as he came back, better dressed now for the gusty weather, and he screwed up his eyes against the harshness of the light. And suddenly the peevish ill temper that had been with me through a winter of other people’s celebrations—a joint wedding for Cecily and Elizabeth and their husbands, followed by Christmas celebrations for our whole newly extended family—seemed to pass, and I felt a pang of sympathy for John. “Have you got your headache again?” I asked him in a whisper. He nodded, trying like me not to draw attention. His head ached all the time; his eyes weren’t strong enough for the studying that made up so much of our time, and he was always anxious that he wasn’t going to perform well enough to please Father or impress pretty Anne. I put a hand through his arm and drew him away down the path to where we’d planted the vervain the previous spring. We both knew it helped with his headaches, but the clump that had survived was still woody and wintry. “There’s some dried stuff in the pantry,” I whispered.

  “I’ll make you a garland when we get back to the house, and you can lie down with it for a while after dinner.” He didn’t say anything, but I could sense his gratitude from the way he squeezed my hand.

  Father was the only one who wasn’t here. He was away somewhere, as he always was since we’d moved to Chelsea. Court affairs; the king’s business. I lost count of what and where. But I had heard him promise Dame Alice when he set off that he’d be back as soon as the painter arrived. And I happened to see that in the morning she’d laid out some of his grandest clothes—the glistening fur-lined black cape, the doublet with the long, gathered sleeves of lustrous velvet attached that were long enough to hide the hands whose coarseness secretly embarrassed him. He liked to believe he just wanted his portrait painted to return likenesses of himself to his learned friends in Europe, who were always sending him their pictures. But being painted in those clothes spoke of something more. Even in him, worldly vanity couldn’t quite be extinguished.

  And so our eyes devoured the river in anticipation of displaying ourselves to Hans Holbein, the young painter sent to us from Basel by Erasmus—a living token of the old scholar’s continuing affection for our family.

  Except me. Even if I was staring upriver as longingly as anyone else, I certainly wasn’t looking for any German painter. No, I was waiting for someone else. And even if it was a secret, childish kind of waiting—even though I had no real reason to believe my dream was about to come true—it didn’t lessen the intensity with which I found myself staring at each passing boat. I was looking for a face from the past. My hope for the future. The man I’ve always loved.

  John Clement came to live with us when I was nine, not long after my parents died and I was
sent from Norfolk to be brought up in Thomas More’s family in London. He had been teaching Latin and Greek at the school that Father’s friend John Colet had set up in St. Paul’s churchyard, and Father and Erasmus and all the other friends of those days—Linacre

  and Grocyn and the rest—had made their passion.

  They were all enthusiasm and experiment back then, all Father’s learned friends. When the new king, Henry VIII, was crowned, and the streets of London were hung with cloth of gold for the coronation, they somehow got it into their heads that a new golden age was beginning in which everyone would speak Greek and study astronomy and cleanse the church of its medieval filth. Erasmus once told me that the letter his patron Lord Mountjoy sent him, telling him to come to England at once, was half-crazy with happiness and hope about the new king Henry. “The heavens laugh; the earth rejoices; all is milk and honey,” it said.

  That milk and honey would surely have curdled if only they’d known that within ten years one of Erasmus’s European disciples, Brother Martin of Wittenberg, would have pushed their notion of religious reform so far that peasants all over the German lands had started burning churches and denouncing the pope. That Father would have responded by giving up his belief in reforming church corruption, taken court office instead, got rich, and been transformed into the fiercest defender of the Catholic faith against the radical new reformers he now called heretics—a “change of heart” so dramatic that we didn’t dare discuss or even mention it. That King Henry would stay golden but get portly and extravagant in his prime, and that even though he’d taken to dallying with every pretty girl at court, and had fathered more than one bastard, the king’s marriage to Catherine of Aragon had not, in nearly twenty years, been blessed with a male heir.

  Erasmus, the only one to preserve the memory of those hopes, would leave our house and go back to Europe, where he’d spend his old age wearily mocking his greatest English friend for becoming a “total courtier.”

  When John arrived we were still living in London. His chambers were up at the top of the old-fashioned stone house, which had so many creaking wooden floors and dark little corridors and hidden chambers that it could easily have been a ship, so it was natural that its name was the Old Barge. He lived at the other end of the corridor from our rooms, next to Erasmus and Andrew Ammonius. If we were playing in the corridor, we had to tiptoe past the grown-up end, shuffling our toes through the rushes, so as not to disturb them while they were thinking.

  John Clement was big and tall—a gentle giant with an eagle’s nose and long patrician features and a dark, saturnine aspect that could easily have lent itself to looking bad-tempered if he hadn’t always worn a weary, kind, rather noble look instead. He had black hair and pale blue eyes with the sky in them. He was Father’s age, though taller, with broad warrior shoulders. You could guess at his physical energy—he strode off down the paving stones of Walbrook or Bucklersbury every afternoon, instead of sleeping after dinner, and he taught us our Latin and Greek letters by pinning them to the archery target in the garden and letting us shoot them through with arrows. We were city children, being raised in a mercantile elite of burghers and aldermen, who only kept bows and arrows gathering dust on a hook because they were obliged to by law, and would never need to raise a sword, so that was our only experience of the aristocratic arts of war. We loved it. Dame Alice raised her eyebrows at John Clement’s preference, but Father just laughed. “Let them try everything, wife,” he said. “Why ever not?”

  Despite his long, athletic body with its muscles and quick reflexes, there was nothing in John Clement that signaled any wish to fight. He had a natural authority that commanded our respect, but he was also very patient with us, and always ready to listen. He wasn’t like the other adults we knew because he was shy about talking of himself. He read a lot; he studied Greek in his room; but he was modest and especially quiet around the great minds who came to Father’s table.

  It was a different story when John was alone with us. He was so good at playing with words that we children hardly noticed we were also learning Latin and Greek, rhetoric and grammar.

  Of all the games, the one he played best was history. Our serious rhetoric essons—we studied rhetoric and grammar for several years before moving on to the higher arts of music and astronomy—were drawn from the history games we played together. He took snippets of street stories about the long-gone English wars and embroidered them into daring tales.

  We would put whatever had struck us most in our own lives into the story. One day, when I was still young and letting my mind wander to the strawberries ripening in the garden, I even put my gluttonous wish into the play. I made the wicked King Richard III pause before some villainous act and tell the bishop of Ely: “My Lord, you have very good strawberries at your garden in Holborn. I require you to let us have a mess of them.” It made everyone laugh. Father came into the classroom and helped us write the episode down exertationis gratia—for the sake of practice. One day, he said, he’d write a proper history of Richard III and publish it, and it would be based on our games. And there was a dish of strawberries on our table for dinner that day.

  But it wasn’t all laughter and strawberries. There was always something sad about John Clement too: a sense of loss, a softness that I missed in the bright, brittle Mores.

  He found me alone in my room one rainy Thursday, crying over the little box of things I’d brought with me from Norfolk. My father’s signet ring: I was remembering it on his little finger—a great sausage of a finger. And a prayer book that had belonged to my mother, who died when I was born, but who my father had told me looked just like me—dark and longlegged and long-nosed and creamy-skinned, with a serious demeanor but the hope of mischief always in her eyes. I didn’t remember much about my real father (except the official fact that he was a knight). But I still felt the warmth of him. He was a bear-hugger with a red face and a shock of dark hair. And when he had you inside one of his embraces, half stifled but happy, you knew he’d always keep you safe.

  Nothing prepared me for the morning his hunting companions brought him back on the back of his horse. He’d broken his neck at a jump—a foolish sort of death. No one comforted me. You’re not really a child anymore at nine. I dressed myself for his funeral and dropped my own handful of soil on his coffin, and began several years of quiet life in corridors: first at home, watchful, eavesdropping on the lawyers and relatives as they made plans for me; picking things up, magpie fashion, storing away my few memories and what tokens of my parents I could before I was sent away to be watchful in other people’s corridors and then in London. My mother had known Thomas More long ago, in London, before her marriage. It was a whim on his part—a kindly whim—to take me. But he wanted me to think of him as my father from now on. He told me that, with a sweet look on his face, when I turned up at the Old Barge.

  Of course I knew nothing back then about how famous this man’s mind had become all over Europe. And I had no clue that, because of my proximity to him, I too would now be moving in the kind of exalted intellectual circles where you could find a man of genius in every room in the house, with one or two to spare on a good day. Or that we girls—I was to have several new “sisters”—would be trained up to be Christendom’s only women of genius. All I noticed on that first day was that the stranger I was to call “Father” had a gentle face: kindly, with its dark features full of life and light. I warmed to him at once, to the face and the smile, Thomas More’s compact body and the sense he gives everyone that only their wellbeing is important to him. Even if this stranger never quite replaced the memory of my real father, Thomas More’s presence was comforting and flattering enough that the country child I still was then found herself eagerly trying out the word “Father” as she looked at him, full of a hope she was too young to understand.

  Life with the Mores had turned out to be many kinds of joy I could never have imagined at the age of nine; and now I couldn’t think of living any other way or being anyone
except a bit player in this familiar company of mighty intellects. But the reality of my relationship with Father had never lived up to those first hopes. He was kind, proper, and distant.

  There were no embraces, no comforting, no special moments. He kept me at arm’s length. He saved his hugs and horseplay for his own children—Margaret, Cecily, Elizabeth, and John.

  He saved his cheerful banter for their stepmother, Alice, who came to him a widow eight years older than him, with her own estates and her own strong commonsensical views on life, just a year before I came to the house. Father’s foreign houseguests found the new Mistress More harder going than the soft-spoken first wife. If you went along the upstairs corridor late at night and listened to what Erasmus and Andrew Ammonius were whispering in Greek, you’d always be sure to hear the words hag and hook-nosed harpy somewhere in the conversation. But More wasn’t as delicate a flower as his learned foreign friends. He gave as good as he got from the Dame (we children all called her that, half jokingly—the name seemed to suit her). He joshed back like a real Londoner, enjoyed her plain cooking and ribald talk, and after his attempts to interest her in Latin had failed, he had some success in making her at least learn music. Father’s new marriage seemed to suit something robust and down-to-earth in him, even if it coincided with—and perhaps caused—the end of some of his

  humanist friendships. In many ways it suited me and the other wards they adopted too, since no one could have been kinder or run a more welcoming home than Dame Alice. But no one treated me like a beloved child.

  For the first few years I found it hard to make friends with my new stepmother and sisters and brothers and at night I would wake up with jaws aching from not crying. Eventually they put me in a room by myself because I ground my teeth in my sleep. I’d have given almost anything for someone to act as though I was special. Until John, with his big frame and his floppy dark hair, appeared, when I was too lost in my feelings to stop, and stood in front of me with his own eyes filling with tears, just like mine. “I understand how you feel, little Meg,” he said softly, understanding everything with so few words that my shame gave way to wonder. “I lost my own father when I was a boy. I’m an orphan like you.” And he hugged me, and let me scrabble into the dark forgetfulness of his arms and sob my heart out. Afterward he found a handkerchief for my eyes and took me on his walk.