Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett

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 an answer ready on my lips, she’d fallen asleep.
     

             6
                 So it will be a fruitful family portrait,” opined Master Holbein as he led me into the little parlor 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 colors: 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 John’s familiar, elegant 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 color 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.
                 A little surprised, he looked differently at me. Suddenly focusing on my face. Then he nodded and shook his head, both at the same time.
                 “Yes,” he said simply. “Later. This is only a first sketch. I want to get it right first. I hope this will be an important picture for my future. You understand.”
                 I did. And I didn’t mind his frankness. He’d only had a day to capture Father’s likeness. Father had already shot off back to court. Master Hans would have more time for the rest of us, since we weren’t going anywhere. But it was getting Father’s face right that would bring in commissions for him.
                 I sat, sometimes aching with stillness and tormented by tiny itches and sometimes lulled by my own inactivity, but always with a tiny, yearning part of me imagining that the footsteps approaching the door might be not those of whichever servant or sibling happened to be passing, on whatever mundane errand, but those of John Clement, come back, long before time, to announce to everyone in the house that he was claiming me as his bride.   Master Hans talked. Stolidly;