Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

he knew enough to know 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 painfully 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 bride-ale 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 the newly man-height boy. ‘Have you got your headache again?’ I asked him in a whisper. He nodded, trying like me not to draw anyone’s attention to my question. 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, which only made it worse. I put a hand through his skinny 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 against his bony ribs.

      One moment of kindness reassured him; and it was enough to add honey to my view of everything too. When Dame Alice came back from her own spontaneous little stroll in the garden, rejoining the crowd gathered as if by chance and staring towards the spire of St Paul’s, I was touched to see our stepmother – Father’s second wife, who’d married him just before I’d come to the house, and looked after his four children and the wards he’d taken on, as sensibly and lovingly as if they’d been her own – had been quietly taking trouble with her hair. She always laughed robustly but she didn’t like it when Father teased her about the size of her nose. Her great beauty was her beautiful broad forehead, and now she’d brushed her hair – with its stray streaks of grey blackened with the elderberry potion she liked me to make for her – back off it to show the unlined, luminous skin at its best.

      Father’s teasing could be cruel. Even Anne Cresacre, who had nerves of steel, wept with frustration over the box he gave her for her fifteenth birthday. She thought it would contain the pearl necklace she’d been asking for for so long. But it turned out there was nothing in it but a string of peas. ‘We must not look to go to Heaven at our pleasure or on feather beds,’ was his only comment, along with that quizzical, birdlike look from far away that reminded you he wore a hair shirt under his robes and wouldn’t drink anything but water. At least she had enough presence of mind to overcome her disappointment and say to him at dinner, as prettily as ever, ‘That is so good a lesson that I’ll never forget it,’ and win one of those sudden golden smiles of his that always made you forget your fury and be ready to do anything for him again. So that time it came out all right, and anyway Anne Cresacre could look after herself. But I thought he should be kinder to his own wife.

      Dame Alice could do what she liked to her hair on this day, anyway. Father was the only one who wasn’t here. He was away somewhere, like he always was since we’d moved to Chelsea. Court affairs; the King’s business. I lost count of what and where. Even when he reappeared, looking tired, with the new gold spurs that he didn’t really know what to do with clinking uselessly against a horse’s muddy sides, and we all rushed out to see him, he just shut himself away in the private place he’d built in the garden – his New Building, his monk’s cell – and prayed, and scourged himself, and fasted. We hardly knew him any more. But I had heard him promise Dame Alice when he last set off that he’d be back as soon as the painter arrived. And I happened to see that morning that 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. I could almost feel the pull of everyone’s waiting and wishing. Longing to display ourselves to Hans Holbein, the young man sent to us from Basel by Erasmus – a living token of the old scholar’s continuing affection for us, long after he stopped living with us and went back to his books abroad – in memory of the good old days when Father’s friends were men of the mind, instead of the spare-faced bishops whose company he’d come to prefer these days. In those times ideas were still games, and the worst argument you could imagine was Father’s with Erasmus over what he should call the book he was writing about an imaginary nowhere land (which had ended up being as much of a best-seller as any of Erasmus’ works). We were longing to show ourselves as the accomplished, educated graduates of an experimental family school that Erasmus had always, in his almost embarrassingly flattering and charming way, praised to the heavens all around Europe as Plato’s Academy in its modern image. And longing to be back, at least on canvas, in a time when we were all together.

      Except me. Even if I was staring upriver as longingly as anyone else, I certainly wasn’t looking for any German craftsman bobbing up and down in the distance with a pile of travel-stained boxes and bags bouncing around next to him. He’d be along soon enough. Why wouldn’t he, after all, with his way to make in the world, a recommendation in his pocket, and the chance to make his reputation by painting our famous faces? 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 and the face I so wanted to see was truly about to appear before me – it didn’t lessen the intensity with which I found myself staring at each passing boat. I was looking for my teacher 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. John Clement 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 was crowned, and the streets of London were hung with cloth of gold for the coronation – a sure sign that there’d be no more of the old King Henry’s meanness – 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 mediaeval filth and laugh all day long and live happily ever after. Erasmus once told me that the letter his patron Lord Mountjoy sent him, telling him to come to England at once and sending him five pounds for his travel expenses, 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.

      It would surely have curdled all that milk and honey they were swimming in back then if only they’d known how quickly everything would go wrong. That within ten years their playful shared mockery of the bad old ways the old Church had got into would have turned into the deadly battle over religion that we were living through now. That one of Erasmus’ 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 and declaring war on both their spiritual and temporal rulers. 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 – an about-face so dramatic that we didn’t dare discuss or even mention it. That Erasmus, the only one to preserve the memory of those hopes that we’d all entered a more civilised age of debate and tolerance when the new king came to the throne, would leave our house and go back to Europe, from where he’d spend his old age wearily mocking his greatest English friend for becoming a ‘total courtier’ and wondering at the evil real-life form his gentle dreams had taken.

      But even back then, the happy humanist throng couldn’t just