Portrait of an Unknown Woman Read Online Free PDF Page B

name. Anyway, do come in properly, Master Hans. You might not believe it, but my family is very eager to meet you. And I can smell dinner on the table.”
                 “Yes,” he said, and met my eye and laughed again. “I must have made a mistake.” He let me guide him forward at last, and Dame Alice sent him to wash his hands and settled him at the table with a barrage of explanations and good-humored apologies and expostulations and platters of steaming roasted food, and there was a lot of bowing and loud talk and the kind of slightly forced good humor that you get among strangers meeting for the first time. I watched her dash off a note to Father telling him the guest we’d been expecting had arrived—and a second unexpected guest into the bargain—and took it to find a boy who could go to town to deliver it. Everyone had packed in, among them Nicholas Kratzer, the astronomer, who had not yet managed to start talking German to his compatriot. By the time I sat down to eat, there was only one chair left—on the same side of the table as John Clement but at the other end. I could hardly see him, let alone talk to him. He had Elizabeth and Margaret on either side, and all I could really see was Elizabeth chattering excitedly enough for all three of them, with pink in her cheeks again. I didn’t hear him say a single word through the meal—but there was plenty of chatter all around, and I couldn’t really catch the drift of what they were talking about. My own vis-à-vis was Master Holbein, on the other side of the table. The German was a restful companion, wolfing down vast quantities of food in silence. But I also caught him doing something other than wiping up sauces at speed with great wedges of bread. Once or twice I looked up and saw him chewing on his bread thoughtfully and giving John Clement long, slow, considering looks. Whatever the odd thought was that he’d had as we walked in through the door, he was still clearly turning it over in his head now.
                

  2
                 After dinner—after the settling and snuggling of the midday nap had begun, after the merciful silence that descended on the house whenever Dame Alice fell asleep—I slipped downstairs and found my cloak and boots.
                 It was what I’d always done at fourteen, on Thursdays. But now I felt my hands patting nervously at my white ermine cap and pushing some stray black hairs back under it. My heart was beating faster than usual. It wasn’t really just like old times. I had no idea what would happen next.
                 John Clement had no bedroom door here from which to emerge, fumbling for his cloak, tripping carelessly against the banisters and cheerfully cursing under his breath. Was he about to come out from somewhere in this unfamiliar house, gangly and grinning, to sweep me off? And where would we walk if he did? Or would he not remember at all? Would I stand here by myself, feeling foolish, until there was nothing to be done but take my cap off again and go back upstairs? It was completely quiet, but something made me look round. From the chapel doorway at the other end of the great hall, in the shadows under the gallery, Elizabeth was watching me. It was her eyes I’d felt in my back.
                 “Woof,” she said, just as she had when we were girls, and retreated into the candlelit darkness. So she remembered. She knew. I could hear her husband William’s nasal voice inside, raised in prayer, until the door closed.
                 I thinned my lips, determined not to be downcast. But suddenly I felt very alone in my cloak in the doorway, hot under its prickly heat. I could, I thought, take a turn round the garden by myself. But I felt unsteadily close to tears at the idea.
                 Then I forgot Elizabeth, because the front door opened from outside. A roaring gust of air and sunshine blew in. And a pair of