Vanora Bennett - Portrait of an Unknown Woman

VANORA BENNETT

To Chris, with love

Many more people than the writer find themselves working on an unfinished book. I am enormously grateful both to Susan Watt and her team at HarperCollins for their wonderful editing, guidance and even a desk to finish the writing, and to my delightful agent Tif Loehnis and all her colleagues at Janklow & Nesbit. I’m no less indebted to my family. My sons Luke and Joe have been extraordinarily patient while I shut myself away to finish my chapters. Their nanny Kari has kept the house going while my parents offered all sorts of moral support. My father-in-law George has turned out to be a superb marketing manager. And I owe more thanks than I can find words for to my husband Chris for all the brilliant story ideas he came up with while reading many early drafts and chapters in whatever spare multi-tasking minutes he could make between legal cases. Most of all, though, I’d like to express my gratitude to Jack Leslau, whose lifetime’s work – the development of a fascinating theory about John Clement’s true identity, based on his study of Holbein’s paintings – was the starting-point for this book.

Plan for FIRST PORTRAIT OF THE MORE FAMILY by Hans Holbein the Younger, painted at Chelsea in 1527-28, destroyed by fire in the 18 thcentury.

PART ONE

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, in a mansion that was only a year old anyway, had cost a king’s fortune in the first place, and scarcely needed any more primping and preening now to look good in the sunshine. From dawn onwards, there were village girls polishing every scrap of wood in the great hall until the table on the dais and the panels on the walls and the wooden screens by the door alike glistened with beeswax. 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 chop-pings from the kitchen, the squawked death agony of birds, and the smell of energetically boiling savouries. We daughters (all, not necessarily by coincidence, in our beribboned, embroidered spring best) were put to work ourselves dusting off the lutes and viols on the shelf and arranging music. And outside, where Dame Alice kept finding herself on her majestic if slightly fretful tour of her troops (casting a watchful eye down the river to check what boats might be heading towards our stairs), there was what seemed to be Chelsea’s entire supply of young boys, enthusiastically pruning back the mulberry tree that 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 it also meant ‘the fool’). Others were shaping the innocent rosemary bushes, or tying back the trees espaliered around the orchard walls like skinny prisoners; their pears and apples and apricots and plums, the fruits of our future summer happiness, still just buds and swellings, vulnerable to a late frost as they took tomorrow’s shape.