Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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