Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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?’

      It was an overcast morning. The light was softer than usual. With a soft light in her eyes, she’d been telling Hans Holbein a long-ago story about Sir Thomas’s wit: about how he’d met a fraud of a Franciscan monk in Coventry who’d told him that getting to Heaven was easy if you only relied on the Virgin Mary. All you had to do was say the rosary every day (and pop a penny into the Franciscan’s purse every time you recited the psalterium beatae virginis). ‘Ridiculum,’ Sir Thomas said matter-of-factly, even after the monk brought out all his books ‘proving’ that Mary’s intervention had worked miracles on many occasions. Finally, with a lawyer’s respect for logical argument, he silenced the monk with the reasonable argument that it was unlikely that Heaven would come so cheap.

      Hans Holbein had roared with appreciative laughter. ‘That sounds the kind of thing a friend of Erasmus’ would say,’ he chortled. It was also the kind of thing that he might say, or Kratzer, if either of them had the presence of mind to get the phrases off their lips with More’s panache. But he also noted her nostalgic look, and the fleeting sadness on her face as she quietly said ‘yes’. They both knew that this wasn’t how the Sir Thomas of today, the defender of the Church at all costs, would behave.

      He didn’t understand why, but something about the complicity of that moment meant that he instinctively nodded assent when she next asked to see the picture.

      ‘I am not usually shy about my work. But this one I am having problems with,’ he said, dancing a little jig of unease in front of the covered picture. ‘I have seen your father, and talked to him, and I know he is an intelligent, good, gentle man who loves to laugh. Only the other day I was laughing to hear his judgement in court when your Dame Alice adopted a street dog, and a beggar woman took her to court saying the dog was hers; and Sir Thomas ruled that Dame Alice must buy the dog; and everyone was happy, the kind of justice I can understand, ha ha! But my picture is too serious. And nothing I do will put laughter into the face of the man I’m drawing.’