Portrait of an Unknown Woman (8 page)

 
          
“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.

 
          
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.

 
          
Glancing around past all the usual family faces and the stolid features of Master Hans, I saw he’d brought the Rastells and the Heywoods home with him, and John Harris, his bow-backed confidential clerk, and Henry Pattinson, his fool, fat and shambling behind them, and in the shadows John Wood, his personal servant, who was probably tutting adoringly in his corner over the state of the master’s muddy old shoes, sticking out beneath his robe. The sight of Father emptied my mind of all my rebellious thoughts. With him here, the household was complete. The dusky room was lit up with more than candles. The warmth came from more than just the fire blazing in the grate. Like everyone else, I was ready to forget everything and just revel in the effortless happiness that came from enjoying watching him enjoying himself.

 
          
Until, that is, I sensed a shiver run down the back of the man in front of me. From where I was standing, I couldn’t see John’s expression. But, with sudden protective anxiety, I became aware of Father glancing up from the frets under his left hand and, for the first time, taking in the bearded face of his uninvited guest.

 
          
Father didn’t miss a beat. With his hand still moving on the fingerboard, he held John’s gaze for a moment, inclined his head in the merest sketch of a courtly bow, and murmured, in his softest voice, “John.” The
 
smile stayed on his lips. Then he turned his eyes down, back to his difficult music.

           
It had been no more than a greeting. But I felt John flinch, as if he’d been hit. He was shifting uneasily on his feet now, glancing back at the door, clearly longing to be off.

 
          
After the music finally dissolved into applause, Father got up with the lute still in his hand. I was certain he was about to make his way toward us. I stepped aside, stealing a glance up at John’s face and reading the pale signs of guilt on it.

 
          
Yet Father didn’t part the crowd of acolytes to approach John. He had too much of a sense of occasion. He was turning now to the delighted Master Hans, and apologizing for the poor musical entertainment—“But I assure you something better will follow,” he was saying, and John Rastell, my uncle the printer, and his son-in-law John Heywood were visibly quivering with secret knowledge of what that would be—and within minutes we were being organized into the impromptu performance of a play, and transported back into the carefree atmosphere of a family evening in the old days.

 
          
“Let’s do
The Play Called the Four PP
!” young John More, excited and puppyish, was calling out. John Heywood’s play, written long after John Clement went away, had been a family favorite for years—a satire on the trade in false relics by mendacious traveling monks. Young John was waving his goblet of Canary wine, and his grin was almost splitting the child’s face, which now seemed far too small for his ever-growing body. “We could use this as the wedding cup of Adam and Eve! . . . And this”—he picked up a trinket box, loving the joke—“as the great toe of the Trinity!” But the older Johns shushed him. They’d clearly agreed in advance what we’d be acting—and opted for no religion—because it was only a matter of moments before everyone was dressing up instead for
The Twelve Merry Jests of Widow Edith
, with Dame Alice assigned, with her usual good-tempered resignation, to play the starring role of the bawdy old fraud who debauches our family servants. “If this is a punishment for all my shrewishness,” she said, and twinkled, “I should learn to keep quiet in future”; then, twinkling even harder and tapping Father on the shoulder in the middle of his mock-henpecked look: “Just my little joke, husband.”

 
          
It was only when the shuffling and scene setting was in full swing, and all the other Johns were fully occupied elsewhere, that Father finally approached my John.

 
          
“John,” Father said, opening his arms, dazzling the taller man with his smile. “What a surprise to see you here. Welcome to our poor new home,” and he embraced his bewildered protégé before slowly moving back, patting him gently on the back, to include me in his smile.

 
          
“John Clement,” he said to me, with a hint of mockery in his voice as he pronounced that name, “has always been a man of surprises. Ever since the time we first met. Do you remember our first meeting, John?”

 
          
And a current of something I couldn’t define ran between them. John was smiling, but I sensed he was hanging intently on Father’s every word.

 
          
So was I. I knew so little about John’s past that any new light Father could shed on who my enigmatic intended had been before he came to live with us would be well worth having.

 
          
“It was in Archbishop Morton’s house, Meg, when I was just a boy—maybe twelve years old. You’ve heard all about Archbishop Morton, I know: my first master, and one of the greatest men it’s ever been my privilege to serve. A man whose great experience of the world made him both politic and wise. God rest his soul.” I was being drawn closer, into the magic circle. His voice—the mellifluous tool of his lawyer’s trade—was dropping now, drawing us into his story.

 
          
It happened at night, as Father, a page boy in hose and fur-trimmed doublet, was turning back the sheets and fluffing up the pillows late at night for the archbishop, who’d also been lord chancellor to the old king, in his sanctum in the redbrick western tower of Lambeth Palace. I could imagine that boy, tired after the daytime rituals of the house school, and the evening rituals of serving at table in the great hall, and already longing to join the other page boys snuffling on their straw mattresses in the dormitory. But I knew he’d have been mindful too of the lessons of the books of courtesy and nurture, so he was also remembering not to lean against the wall, and to bow when he was spoken to, and to answer softly and cheerfully. (I knew Father had been so naturally skilled at all these arts of gentility that he’d become a favorite with his canny master, who’d taken to boasting publicly at table that “this boy waiting on you now, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvelous man.”) So when the archbishop told him to take the tray of wine and meat and bread he’d brought up from the kitchens into the audience chamber next door—a public room of polished oak, never used at this hour—he stifled his fatigue and obeyed with the best grace he could.

 
          
“And when I got there I saw two young men—tall, but only slightly older than me,” Father said. “Their clothes were muddy and they had swords propped against their boxes. They’d been traveling. I could see they were tired. And I thought they looked angry with each other.”

           
Try as he might, Father said, he couldn’t imagine who these surprise guests were. He’d never seen them at the school. He’d never seen them among the pages serving in the great hall. Besides, they were too old to be page boys. They already had the close-cropped hair of adulthood. And former page boys didn’t suddenly show up to pay their respects in the middle of the night. In any case, their manners seemed too high-handed to have been learned in the archbishop’s courtly home.

           
“Wine,” the older youth, who must have been seventeen or eighteen, said imperiously to More. The page boy bowed and poured out the wine.

           
“Wine,” said the younger youth, who was black-haired with fierce eyes, clearly annoyed that there was only one goblet and pointing toward his own feet, as though young More were a dog to be brought to heel.