Portrait of an Unknown Woman Read online

  What private lusts, and for whose bodies, would make him flail his own skin until he drew blood? It hurt me to think of his poor innocent skin, already chafed and broken by his hair shirt, lashed into worse pus and scabs by that ugly sliver of bloodied leather. It was almost as bad as seeing the prisoners he tortured at the other end of the garden, to imagine him torturing himself, alone, in here.

  He kept his pamphlets and writings in the library, along with the confiscated, banned, and impounded books that he had special dispensation from Bishop Tunstall to read and refute. He had a complete library of heresy here, in his place of prayer, down to William Tyndale’s New Testament in English—one of the few copies that had escaped the bonfire at St. Paul’s. Cardinal Wolsey had thrown the rest into the flames. Watching him were thirty thousand cheering Londoners and my grimly approving father.

  On the desk was last week’s draft of the letter Father had been writing to Erasmus for so long, begging him to get off the fence and denounce Luther. I’d read it before and been chilled by the fury of Father’s phrasing: he wrote that he found all heretics “absolutely loathsome, so much so that unless they regain their senses I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be.”

  Hateful indeed. I shivered. The word brought back the image of Robert Ward, the scared little shoemaker locked up in our garden, praying to die.

  I knew Father was wasting his ink trying to persuade Erasmus. Nothing I’d seen the old man write suggested there was the least chance of him publicly supporting Father in any crusade against the religious reformers.

  He was too busy feeling disappointed, in Luther and Zwingli on one hand, in Father on the other. In everyone who’d once been a humanist but had since become a zealot.

  Erasmus might have taken to calling the most ranting evangelicals “rabble-pleasers,” “mangy men,” and “utterly lacking in sincerity.” But he was no more impressed with the “uncouth, splenetic” style of Father’s written attacks, which he said, “could give Luther lessons in vehemence.”

  I felt for Erasmus—deserted on both sides by the former disciples of the New Learning as they forgot the classics and rushed into their violent religious extremes instead.

  “Look at this,” I heard myself whispering to John, pulling out one offending volume after another and opening them to the worst pages. “And this. And this.” There was still enough January sunshine to read by inside.

  But he screwed up his eyes with a show of reluctance and took them to the desk, by the window, to see properly.

  “Don’t you see, John?” I pressed, and my whisper hissed against the bare plaster. “He’s lost his reason. We could wait forever for him to give us permission to be together. He might never do it. He can’t think about any of us anymore. He’s too obsessed with this. He’s gone mad with hate.”

  I’d been thinking this about Father for so long, while I’d had no one to share it with, that it was a relief to speak my doubt aloud, especially to the man I loved.

  But John was squaring his shoulders and giving me the same kind but unconvinced smile that my smaller self had seen whenever I offered the wrong answer in a lesson. He shook his head.

  “It’s his job,” he said simply, dropping the page of foul-mouthed nonsense about Luther’s posterioristics. “That’s William Ross speaking, not Thomas More.”

  Another neat commonsense blow at my fears; another sign that John knew a lot about Father’s work. I had to admit that Father had been asked by the king—and not chosen himself—to reply to Luther’s writings against the pope. And it was true that he’d been ashamed enough of the crass language, zealotry, and poor reasoning of the writing he was doing in service of king and country that he’d only published it under a pen name. It still made me hot with shame to read those words: William Ross was a bullying bigot, and everyone knew William Ross was Father. Still, if John Clement could separate the two names in his mind, perhaps that meant Father hadn’t compromised himself as disastrously as I’d thought.

  “He’s not imagining the danger of heresy,” John said gently, sensing that he’d found a chink in my armor. “I know that the man you showed me in the gatehouse looked pitiful. But we have to remember that he’s not what he seems. He’s part of the darkness that might envelop Christendom.”

  “How can he be? He’s just a skinny little cobbler from Fleet Street!” I said hotly, on the defensive again.

  “But a skinny little cobbler from Fleet Street can be the darkness,” John answered persuasively. “Or he can to most people. Look, you’re young enough, and lucky enough, to have been brought up in a time of peace and in a sophisticated household where everyone has read about different peoples through the ages having had very different kinds of beliefs and lived in very different kinds of states and still prospered. Your head is full of Greek gods and Roman lawmakers and Eastern men of learning and stars moving in orderly fashion through the heavens. You think civilization is everywhere. So you have a confidence that you don’t even know is unusual. You don’t live with the fear of chaos breaking through and destroying the way we live, which haunts the rest of us. You have no idea how other people feel. Most people feel mortal terror at the idea of the unholy chaos outside, waiting to engulf them. And I don’t just mean the poor and superstitious and unlettered, the people brought up without sucking in Seneca and Boethius and algebra with their mother’s milk. I mean everyone brought up in the shadow of war. Everyone brought up before this rare time of peace and outside the very unusual household you’re lucky enough to come from. I mean everyone older and less lucky than you. I mean people like your father and me.”

  “But you and Father are men of learning! You know everything I know and more!” I cried, full of frustration that he wasn’t following my train of thought.

  “Ah, but we weren’t brought up to it, and that’s the difference,” he said, with a certainty that made me pause. “We grew up in a world where there was nothing but the fear of the darkness. When death was waiting round every corner. When London could be surrounded at any time by an army threatening to string up every man and rape every woman and throw babies onto their sword blades and torch every parish church. When books were rare and locked up inside the monasteries, and our only hope of salvation was the One True Church and the priests who could mediate for us with God. Of course men of my age and your father’s age fell in love with the New Learning and the new freedom to think as soon as we had peace and leisure enough to explore it. But we haven’t forgotten the fear we grew up with. It’s always at the back of our minds. And we can’t feel easy when people take up arms against the church. You can’t expect that of us.”

  He paused, waiting to see the light of acquiescence in my eyes. But I plowed on, even though his assurance was beginning to make me feel I’d only understood part of the problem. “But Father and Erasmus and all the rest of you used to talk about uprooting corruption in the church,” I said plaintively. “And none of you expected to be treated like criminals for it. So why is it so much worse if a few cobblers get together to pray in a leather-tanner’s room?”

  He sighed patiently. “It’s not just a few cobblers or a few prayers anymore, Meg. It’s not a bit of mockery at the table about crooked priests selling indulgences either. It’s gone much further than that. What’s happening now is an assault on God and His church. It’s armies of peasants running wild in the German lands burning down churches and murdering the faithful. It’s rogue monks betraying their oaths of celibacy and marrying the nuns who’ve sworn to be the brides of Christ. It’s the old chaos, the horror you’ve never known, threatening us all. Even if you did understand, it would be hard for you to see the danger from the calm of England, but anyone who’s been in Europe in the past few years and knows the signs can see the darkness looming again all over Christendom. It could happen here. Your father is right to be frightened, and he’s right to fight it. We couldn’t hope for a better general than him to lead us in the war against the heretics—precisely because he is th
e same scholar and gentleman who brought you up. The same good, subtle, generous, wise man. Which is why nothing will make me believe what you’re afraid of— that he could enjoy causing pain. You have to put that idea aside. It makes no sense.”

  His certainty sounded stronger than mine. His loyalty to Father made me feel ashamed. I looked down.

  “It’s simpler than you think, Meg,” he said. “You and I will find happiness together. Neither of us will ever be alone again. But we have to do as he says. We mustn’t distract his attention. He’s fighting his war on many fronts. It’s not just cobblers who are a danger. There’s worse elsewhere. There’s heresy rearing its ugly head everywhere—even at court.”

  He shifted his shoulders, looking around for the door, clearly unwilling to continue trespassing in Father’s private place. And, taking my arm again as we stepped out into the clean light, he told me the secret of the King’s Great Matter. The open secret that was already the talk of the court was that the king wanted to set aside his queen, Catherine, who had not given him a son and marry her young lady-in-waiting. Anne Boleyn, the queen’s rival, was just one of many beauties at a court so full of rose bowers and Canary wine and dancing till dawn and flashes of leg and cleavage and canopied beds with feather pillows that it seemed made for love. But she was also the one lady-in-waiting who refused to recline in any of the rose bowers or feather beds made for love at the court.

  The king, a glittering bubble of gold and bombast who never took no for an answer, found himself being tormented equally by love and by the Book of Leviticus. “If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing . . . they shall be childless,” says Leviticus. And Leviticus was telling the king just what he wanted, now that he wanted to get rid of the queen, because once, long ago, for a few months, the queen was the child bride of the king’s child brother Arthur, who died.

  The queen’s first marriage didn’t need to trouble anyone’s conscience back when it happened, because at that time the pope formally pronounced that the first unconsummated marriage of children hadn’t counted as God’s holy union.

  “But now the king is full of doubts,” John whispered. “Dancing attendance on the scented girl with the pointy chin and the witchy eyes and the fascinating mole on her neck, and wondering if God is punishing him for his sinful marriage by denying him a son.”

  Queen Catherine, devout, learned, Spanish, and in her forties, with powerful friends at court and all round Europe but just one young daughter to show for twenty years in the king’s bed, was worried. Not just by her pretty, witty, elegant rival, but by the clique of ambitious nobodies forming around her, the kind of courtiers known collectively as “a threat.”

  “I was with the court at New Year at Hampton Court, and I saw them together myself,” John said somberly. “They were in a group of maskers. But there was no disguising the king. And no disguising what he felt about the lady in yellow.”

  “But what does the lady in yellow have to do with us?” I asked.

  “Don’t be impatient, Meg,” he said. “This is the point. She’s making your father’s battle against heresy many times more dangerous. She has the king’s ear—and she’s flirting with the heretics too. At a time when the king’s of a mind to be interested in anything that undermines the queen, the Church of Rome, and the pope, she’s poisoning him in the most subversive way imaginable by giving him the new men’s books to read. If her influence grows, who knows how far the heretical thinking might spread? And who knows what chaos we might be plunged into? Peace is an illusion, an agreement between civilized people, and something your father has worked all his life to promote; but it’s the nature of humanity that the beast is always lurking somewhere beneath the surface.”

  The phrases were echoing emptily in my head now. I pleated a fold of my cloak. I didn’t understand. “You’re talking politics,” I said sulkily. “Not ordinary life. Not us being in love and getting married.”

  “But, Meg, politics is life. If you lose peace you lose everything else: love, marriage, children, the lot. You should thank God you’re too young to remember how things were before—in the time of wars,” he answered bleakly. “But anyone a bit older than you will say what I’m saying now. I lost my family in that madness”—he shivered—“and I know there can be nothing worse.”

  Had he? He was old enough to have lost family in the wars, but he’d never talked about it. All I knew for sure was that he’d been taken into a family friend’s household as a boy, after his own father’s death. I’d asked him about his childhood once. He’d just shaken his head and twinkled at me. “Very different from the way I live now” was all he’d said. “I like this way of life a lot better.”

  “The best we can do, in the weeks and months to come”—his voice rolled on now—“is to hope that the king’s fancy turns elsewhere and this crisis passes. And meanwhile, try not to judge your father too harshly. Some of the things he’s doing may look cruel, but it’s up to him to root up the evil spreading over English soil before it starts clinging to the king. The only thing we can do is let him concentrate on doing his job, and wait for the moment to be right for us.”

  He swung me round in front of him, lifted my face, and looked searchingly into my eyes. “Oh, Meg, don’t look so scared. Have faith. It’s going to happen. I’m going to marry you. I only wish,” he added, leaning down and kissing the top of my head very gently, “that it could be today.”

  I stayed very still, looking down, treasuring this moment of quiet togetherness, warmed by the sincerity in his voice and the folds of his cloak flapping in the rising wind, watching the shadows of the anxious clouds scudding through the deepening sky chase across the lawn at my feet. Still hardly able to believe that he could be here, saying he felt about me as I always had about him, still swimming with delight. And feeling half reassured that he didn’t think Father was becoming a vengeful, cruel stranger, though not sure I completely agreed. Still feeling twinges of unease and uncertainty; but willing, more than willing, to do whatever John Clement said, because he said he loved me and because I loved him. “You said,” I whispered, with my face so close to his chest that I could smell the warm man-smell of him, trying to focus on the questions I needed answers to but not sure any more what they were, “that there were things Father wanted you to be able to tell me . . . was that just about the College of Physicians? Or was there something else?”

  He hesitated. For a moment I thought I saw his eyes flicker, as if there was something he wanted to hide. But then he smiled and shook his head. “No. Nothing else,” he said firmly. “Nothing for you to worry about.”

  We huddled together, looking up at the house, knowing it was time to go back. I knew I should feel nothing but joy, but this snatched meeting was so unexpected, and so incomplete, that my pleasure in it was bittersweet too, and tinged with sadness. So what I found myself saying, as we turned back up the path, arm in arm, was “You know, I miss the innocence of before . . . the time when there was nothing more to worry about than putting on a play that made us laugh after supper . . . when there was nothing worse than a weasel in the garden . . . when Father did nothing more dangerous than hearing court cases about ordinary street crimes . . . and when everything he wrote was just a clever game, instead of a war of words . . .”

  “My darling girl, I think what you’re saying is that you miss Utopia,” John quipped, and I thought for a moment that he might be laughing at me. That was the title of Father’s most famous book, written in the summer that John went away, in which a fictional version of my teacher— known in the book as “my boy John Clement”—had been given a minor role. It was the story of a perfect world, as perfect in its way as our own contented past.

  I didn’t feel like laughing back. “Well, I do miss it,” I said defiantly. “Who wouldn’t?”

  But the wind had got into his cloak and was tugging at his beard, and he was very busily fidgeting his accoutrements back into submission.

  “Let’s go,” he
said, as if he hadn’t heard, stepping ahead of me, “before we get blown away.”

  But he had heard, after all, because a few steps later he added, rather bleakly, over his shoulder: “Nostalgia is dangerous. Never look back.”

  Or perhaps I’d imagined the chill, because by the time we got up to the door and stopped to catch our breath, now we were out of the wind, he was smiling again, and his face was as softly radiant as I could have hoped. He smoothed down the hair escaping out of my cap, and touched a finger to my lips.

  We might have lingered for longer on the threshold, glowing with wind and love. But suddenly the sound of two lutes in duet began drifting out into the late afternoon.

  “Listen!” he said, with a music lover’s delight, pushing open the door to hear where the sound was coming from. I didn’t need to rush. I knew exactly what a mangled lute duet signified in our house in Chelsea. Father was home.

  4

  The hall was crowded with new arrivals. But one head stood out among the rest—that great dark lion’s head, with the square jaw and long nose and the piercing eyes that could see the secrets in your soul, the head of the man with the glorious glow about him that fixed every other pair of eyes on him wherever he went. When Father threw back his head and laughed—as he often did—he always transported whatever roomful of watchers he’d gathered around him into a quite unexpected state of pure, joyful merriment. He wasn’t exactly laughing now, as I slipped into the room behind John Clement. He and Dame Alice were sitting on two high-backed chairs, surrounded by a standing crowd of soft-faced admirers with stars in their eyes, and the pair of them were struggling to overcome Father’s tone deafness and make their disobedient lutes obey them.

  Father’s magic worked as powerfully on me as it did on everyone else.