Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett Page A

perhaps to calm me and keep me still. Catching my eye every now and then—interrupting the train of thought in which Margaret Roper rushed merrily into my arms to congratulate both me and John, and Cecily laughed at the sight of my uncharacteristically girlish confusion, and young John More looked as surprised as he was by everything—but usually staring at the paper or at some part of me in his odd, impersonal craftsman’s way. And I listened from my pink cloud of happiness, from very high up and far away.
                 He was talking about fathers first: platitudes about how much they teach you and how they love you. Then, matter-of-factly, he also told me about his own father’s death: how relieved his wife had been not to have to send money out of their tiny budget to keep the old man afloat any   more; how hard it had been to get his father’s painting paraphernalia out of the Antonite monks at Issenheim who’d been the old journeyman’s last employers. “I had to write to the burgomaster for two years before it was settled,” he said. “Elsbeth would never have let it drop.”
                 He told me about the sketch he’d spent yesterday making. He’d already pierced the main outlines of Father’s sketched face and neck with tiny pinpricks, two or three to an inch. Next, when he’d done with me for the day, he would prepare the surface he would do the final painting on; then pin up the sketch on it—a map of Father’s face, a ghost of the reality he’d seen so briefly. He’d blow and smear charcoal dust through the tiny holes in the paper. That would give him the perfectly drawn outline of a face on his final canvas. That was when he’d show me.
                 And then he went quiet, and forgot me, and started to concentrate.
                 Sitting in silence left me all the time in the world to mull over the disquieting conversation I’d had yesterday with Dame Alice, when, as I hunted in her kitchen for more pipkins for the brewing of ginger tea, she’d materialized out of a pantry with a mess of capons’ brains for the next dinner in her big raw hands, encased in a gray-white pastry coffin ready for cooking. She had her usual entourage of boy servants behind her, loaded down with two headless capon corpses, bags of sugar, baskets of oranges, and jars of cloves, mace, and cinnamon, and she was about to supervise the business of collecting knives and pots for the scaldings and boilings and stewings that would give us another celebration meal. Having guests, especially one as appreciative of a hearty meat dish as Master Hans, gave her the opportunity she was always looking for to show off her culinary skills. She was always saying Father didn’t properly enjoy her cooking: he only ever took a little from whatever dish was nearest to him (though we all knew he had a furtive taste for her mess of eggs and cream). She was clearly planning to cook up a storm for Master Hans and looking forward to her afternoon.
                 But when she saw me near the spit, hesitating over two of the little copper pipkins hanging up around the fire that she had so carefully scoured with sand before Master Hans’s arrival (not that she’d expected him to go near the kitchen—it had just been an excuse to use up some of her vast resources of practical energy), she sent the boys off to the storeroom again for nutmeg. For all her lack of Latin and frank scorn of book learning, she had an innate sensitivity to other people’s moods, and she must have seen the yearning for a moment’s privacy on my face. So even though she looked curious to see me in the kitchen, she asked no prying questions, just said kindly, “Take the smaller one if you want to make one of your potions. I use the big one for cream.” And waited.
                 I was embarrassed for a moment. Naturally I didn’t want to tell her I was making ginger tea for all three of her More