When Hans brings the finished portrait to Austin Friars he feels
shy of it. He remembers when Walter would say, look me in the
face, boy, when you tell me a lie.
He looks at the picture’s lower edge, and allows his gaze to
creep upwards. A quill, scissors, papers, his seal in a little bag,
and a heavy volume, bound in blackish green: the leather tooled
in gold, the pages gilt-edged. Hans had asked to see his Bible,
rejected it as too plain, too thumbed. He had scoured the house
and found the finest volume he owned on the desk of Thomas
Avery. It is the monk Pacioli’s work, the book on how to keep
your books, sent to him by his kind friends in Venice.
He sees his painted hand, resting on the desk before him,
holding a paper in a loose fist. It is uncanny, as if he had been
pulled apart, to look at himself in sections, digit by digit. Hans
has made his skin smooth as the skin of a courtesan, but the
motion he has captured, that folding of the fingers, is as sure as
that of a slaughterman’s when he picks up the killing knife. He is
wearing the cardinal’s turquoise.
He had a turquoise ring of his own, one time, which Liz gave to
him when Gregory was born. It was a ring in the shape of a heart.
He raises his eyes, to his own face. It does not much improve
on the Easter egg which Jo painted. Hans had penned him in a little space, pushing a heavy table to fasten him in. He had time
to think, while Hans drew him, and his thoughts took him far
off, to another country. You cannot trace those thoughts behind
his eyes.
He had asked to be painted in his garden. Hans said, the very
notion makes me sweat. Can we keep it simple, yes?
He wears his winter clothes. Inside them, he seems made of a
more impermeable substance than most men, more compacted.
He could well be wearing armour. He foresees the day when he
might have to. There are men in this realm and abroad (not only
in Yorkshire now) who would stab him as soon as look at him.
I doubt, he thinks, they can hack through to the heart. The
king had said, what are you made of?
He smiles. There is no trace of a smile on the face of his
painted self.
‘Right.’ He sweeps into the next room. ‘You can come and see it.’
They crowd in, jostling. There is a short, appraising silence. It
lengthens. Alice says, ‘He has made you look rather stout, Uncle.
More than he need.’
Richard says, ‘As Leonardo has demonstrated to us, a curved
surface better deflects the impact of cannon balls.’
‘I don’t think you look like that,’ Helen Barre says. ‘I see that
your features are true enough. But that is not the expression on
your face.’
Rafe says, ‘No, Helen, he saves it for men.’
Thomas Avery says, ‘The Emperor’s man is here, can he come
in and have a look?’
‘He is welcome, as always.’
Chapuys prances in. He positions himself before the painting;
he skips forward; he leaps back. He is wearing marten furs over
silks. ‘Dear God,’ Johane says behind her hand, ‘he looks like a
dancing monkey.’
‘Oh no, I fear not,’ Eustache says. ‘Oh, no, no, no, no, no.
Your Protestant painter has missed the mark this time. For one never thinks of you alone, Cremuel, but in company, studying
the faces of other people, as if you yourself mean to paint them.
You make other men think, not “what does he look like?” but
“what do I look like?”’ He whisks away, then swings around, as
if to catch the likeness in the act of moving. ‘Still. Looking at
that, one would be loath to cross you. To that extent, I think
Hans has achieved his aim.’
When Gregory comes home from Canterbury, he takes him in
alone to see the painting, still in his riding coat, muddy from the
road; he wants to hear his son’s opinion, before the rest of the
household get to him. He says, ‘Your lady mother always said
she didn’t pick me for my looks. I was surprised, when the
picture came, to find I was vain. I thought of myself as I was
when I left Italy, twenty years ago. Before you were born.’
Gregory stands at his shoulder. His eyes rest on the portrait.
He doesn’t speak.
He is conscious that his son is taller than he is: not that it takes
much. He steps sideways, though only in his mind, to see his boy
with a painter’s eye: a boy with fine white skin and hazel eyes, a
slender angel of the second rank in a fresco dappled with damp,
in some hill town far from here. He thinks of him as a page in a
forest riding across vellum, dark curls crisp under a narrow band
of gold; whereas the young men about him every day, the young
men of Austin Friars, are muscled like fighting dogs, hair
cropped to stubble, eyes sharp as sword points. He thinks,
Gregory is all he should be. He is everything I have a right to
hope for: his openness, his gentleness, the reserve and consideration with which he holds back his thoughts till he has framed
them. He feels such tenderness for him he thinks he might cry.
He turns to the painting. ‘I fear Mark was right.’
‘Who is Mark?’
‘A silly little boy who runs after George Boleyn. I once heard
him say I looked like a murderer.’
Gregory says, ‘Did you not know?’