Portrait of an Unknown Woman

‘Meg,’ he said, with well-bred restraint but no great gratitude. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I thought …’ I began. ‘I thought I heard someone being sick. I thought Elizabeth might need some help.’

He smiled. Perhaps it was just the way his features were arranged, but I couldn’t help thinking his expression patronising. ‘Everything’s quite all right,’ he said with visible patience. ‘There’s nothing for you to worry about. So run back to bed …’

I could almost hear the unspoken ‘like a good girl’ on his supercilious lips.

‘Oh,’ I said, feeling crestfallen, looking for information on his face and finding nothing he wanted to tell me. ‘Well, if you need anything … I have a chestful of remedies in my room …’

‘Thank you,’ he said, with finality. ‘We’ll be sure to come to you if we need anything. Don’t get cold out here.’

And, very gently, he closed the door on me.

Elizabeth didn’t come downstairs for breakfast. William was one of the party that walked through the darkness to the village for Mass at seven – but his wife wasn’t. He offered no explanations. Father, in a surplice, was acting as altar-server this morning, following the priest to the altar step as the Office and Kyries and censing and Gloria in Excelsis began. That gave me the freedom to sneak a look at William while we stood in the family chapel (whose twin pillars were still covered with the scaffolding that would soon be used to carve Father’s symbols on the stone). His hair was slicked neatly back and, bar a little extra pinkness about the eyes, he was as expressionless as ever. Even when the bells rang out, and the candles and torches were lit in the heavy scented air, and the priest lifted the sacrament above his head – displaying the wafer that the common people believe to be a magical talisman which can heal sickness and cure blindness, as well as a holy sign, Christ’s body and blood returned to earth – and everyone else’s faces filled with joyful adoration, William only had his usual slight smirk as he knelt. He was a cold fish, I thought, taking less trouble than usual to pretend I didn’t dislike him. He seemed a good match on paper. His father was a senior official in the royal treasury. But his conversation always seemed so limited, and his personality so stultifying and self-satisfied, that I knew I’d never enjoy his company. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering what pretty, witty Elizabeth could possibly have seen in him (apart from a way of pleasing Father by marrying a colleague’s son). Bubbling as I was with my own happiness, I surprised myself by feeling a stab of pity for her.

She was alone when I sneaked into her room after Mass. She’d tidied herself up a bit and was flopping back in a chair by the fire. But her face seemed drained of blood and she barely acknowledged my presence. The rank chamber pot was still beside her, covered with a flecked cloth.

I could see she didn’t want me there. But she was too weak to resist when I felt her pulse and temperature (clammy but cool). And gradually the expertise in my hands took the edge off her reluctance to speak. She relaxed, at least enough to say: ‘It must have been something I ate.’

I nodded. It was up to her how she explained her sickness.

‘Let me bring you some ginger tea,’ I suggested. ‘It will soothe you. And do you think you could keep any food down yet?’

She grimaced. A hand crept to her stomach. She shook her head.

‘I’m going to bring my medicine chest in here and brew up your tea for you in front of the fire,’ I said brightly. ‘And keep you company while you drink it.’

My chest contained everything. Remedies against fever and ague, chills and chilblains, toothache and heartache. Jars full of memories of Bucklersbury. Knives and pans, and a pestle and mortar, and John Clement’s balance to weigh out the powders I made. And a single ginger root, withering in its jar: expensive, but a more potent relief for nausea than anything else I knew, even slippery elm or chamomile leaves. I began scraping slivers into my little pan, loving the calmness of this quiet ritual and the sureness of my hand on the exotic spice from a faraway land, aware of both myself and my sister being lulled by it as much as by the rushes of sparks and slowly collapsing logs in front of us.

Grateful that she was too sick to mention John Clement, and enjoying the quiet warmth between us, I began softly telling her about the medicinal properties of ginger: that it makes the human body sweat, that the King himself has recommended it as a remedy against plague, that a compress of it applied to the face or chest will clear an excess of phlegm, and, most important, that it’s a guaranteed cure for griping.

As I set the pan full of water on the hook above the fire, Elizabeth began to stir and sit up straighter and look into my treasure-trove. ‘You have so many jars in there,’ she said faintly. ‘However do you remember what’s in them all? Don’t you ever muddle up, say …’ she pulled out two jars at random, ‘this one, and this one?’

I shook my head, sure of my mastery of the subject. ‘Never. Too dangerous,’ I said, and then I saw she’d picked up black haw and pennyroyal, and laughed. ‘Especially with the two you’ve picked,’ I added, taking advantage of the chance she was flatteringly giving me to show off a little. ‘The one in your left hand is to ward off miscarriages. But the other one brings on women’s bleeding. It’s what village women use to wish away unwanted pregnancies. Pennyroyal oil. Not a mistake you’d want to make.’

She put the jars back in the chest with a little show of horror. But she smiled too.

‘Ugh. And what else do you have … love potions?’ she asked, trying to be light.

I shook my head again. ‘You have to ask the village witch for those,’ I said, just as lightly, then looked more closely at her. Beyond her sickness, there was something unusual in her eyes. If I didn’t know her so well, I’d have said it was something like the desperation of a trapped animal. ‘You don’t need a love potion, anyway,’ I added, with as much comforting warmth in my voice as I could muster, ‘you’re a newlywed bride with a brilliant young husband.’

The trapped-animal look was there again, stronger than ever – a hot dark shock of fear behind her eyes.

‘… Yes … though sometimes,’ she hesitantly began to frame a thought she’d clearly not imagined putting into words before, ‘I wonder about William … what kind of husband he will be. What kind of father. We know so little about the people we marry, after all …’

Then she stopped. Took control of herself. Shut the trapped animal back in its cage and smiled at me in the coquettish social way I normally expected from her. ‘Look, Meg,’ she said. ‘The water’s boiling.’

She was right. And suddenly the air was filled not just with regrets and untold secrets but with the spicy smell of hot ginger.

Ginger was in the air all morning. It was a day for medicine.

When I slipped downstairs an hour later, after covering the sleeping Elizabeth with a quilt, I found Margaret Roper sitting alone in the parlour, looking out of the window. There was a viol and a sheet of music on the table beside her. But I hadn’t heard her playing.

‘I smelled ginger tea,’ she said as gently as ever. She’d always been my favourite of the sisters – the nearest to my own age, and the one I’d most often shared rooms and beds with; the quiet good girl who’d always been sensitive with other people’s feelings and who was now, despite all that quietness, gaining a reputation (enthusiastically fostered by Father) as England’s most learned woman. ‘I guessed you were looking after Elizabeth. How is she feeling?’

‘A bit queasy,’ I said noncommittally. It was for Elizabeth to explain her sickness. ‘But she’s sleeping now.’

Margaret’s eyes were shining. ‘Will you make me some ginger tea too, Meg?’ She smiled and paused, picking her words carefully before tremulously taking me into her confidence: ‘For the same reason?’

Her dark bony face was so radiant that I couldn’t stop my own face breaking out into a grin. ‘Margaret! You’re going to have a baby!’ I cried, and held out my arms.

We were still brewing up the second pan of ginger tea, murmuring excitedly together, when Cecily put her head around the door, sniffing. ‘That smells wonderful,’ she said into our sudden silence, and I was already beginning to recognise the soft, knowing smile in her eyes. ‘I’ve been so sick this morning … is there enough for me too?’

All three young matrons excused themselves from dinner at midday. But everyone in the house knew that Margaret and Cecily had announced themselves pregnant. Father, back from a long session closeted with Master Hans, being sketched and sitting perfectly still, was the last to hear. Looking as radiantly happy as they had, he offered a special thanksgiving prayer for them and their unborn children – his first grandchildren. He even broke with his usual water-only rule and drank a little wine with his pleased, pink-faced sons-in-law Will and Giles. Only William Dauncey was not there to join the toast. He was upstairs, like a dutiful husband, with his sick wife.

I waited for him to come downstairs before checking on Elizabeth again in the afternoon. She was lying on top of the bed, awake now, with some colour back in her face. But sad.

‘I’ve been making ginger tea all day,’ I said brightly. ‘Have you heard? Margaret and Cecily are both pregnant. They’re feeling so sick they won’t touch anything else.’

She looked up, straight into my eyes.

‘So you know,’ she said flatly. ‘So am I.’

‘We’ll have three October babies then!’ I said, trying to pretend surprise.

‘Yes,’ she said. Even more flatly. Then she shook herself. ‘I do feel ill,’ she said piteously. ‘Will you make me more tea?’

I pulled the counterpane up to her chin and tucked it round her.

‘You stay warm,’ I said. ‘It won’t take a minute.’

She was quiet while I grated and boiled my infusion. I thought she might be dropping off. So I was surprised to hear her tired voice mumble, even more piteously, from behind my back: ‘Was it you John Clement came to see yesterday?’

I paused, considering how best to reply. But, by the time I finally turned round, with the steaming drink ready to take to her bedside and a soothingly fact-free answer ready on my lips, she’d fallen asleep.

6 (#uc5ddf376-f561-5d1b-97d9-d2eb00e0b316)

‘So it will be a fruitful family portrait,’ opined Master Holbein, as he led me into the little parlour that had been turned into his studio. It had a friendly, cluttered air. There was an easel (with the first sketches for Father’s solo portrait, made yesterday, still on it) and piles of cloths and props. At a table under the window he had the makings of his colours: almost as many jars and powders and oils and pestles and mortars and pans as I kept in my medicine chest. I felt instantly at ease.

I laughed. ‘Yes … So many babies! You’ll have to paint us quickly, before the house turns into a nursery.’ And then I blushed, almost before I’d had time to catch my mind, or perhaps my body, flashing off into its private dream of my own belly rounding beneath me, and the pride I could imagine in the familiar, elegant man’s hands touching the swelling and feeling proprietorially for the kicks and somersaults of a life to come. I touched my cheeks, trying to will the mental picture away, but not quite able to bring a self-possessed chill back to my expression.

He grunted. Looking at me without quite seeing me, reducing me to lines and blocks of colour in his head, ignoring my flaming cheeks, arranging me in his mind in a way that still disconcerted me. Gesturing me to the chair.

‘Oh,’ I asked, full of curiosity, ‘but may I see Father’s picture before I sit?’

His face closed. He shook his head and moved his body against the stretched frame behind him, covered with a cloth, as if to protect it from me. ‘Not yet,’ he said. ‘It’s not ready.’

‘But when you start to paint?’ I persisted.