Portrait of an Unknown Woman (26 page)

 
          
“We will go to chapel tonight,” Father said, pushing aside a platter of untouched food, “for a funeral. Sir Edward Guildford, who has died of the sweating sickness, will be buried among us. God rest his soul.”

 
          
Eyes rose, furtive signals passed from one bewildered diner to another.

 
          
I saw Will Roper and Margaret (up, but still with a sickbed shawl around her thin shoulders) raise eyebrows at each other. Was this an explanation?

 
          
Even they, who clearly knew who Sir Edward Guildford was, had no idea why he would be buried in our family chapel. It was unheard of. Father offered no further information. The two foreigners gave up any pretense of politeness and stared in frank curiosity from one pinched face to the next.

 
          
Dame Alice kept her nose firmly down and stared at her food.

 
          
We put on black cloaks over the clothes we were wearing and walked by torchlight to the village. Margaret went, despite her weakness, with Will holding her arm. Dame Alice walked with Master Nicholas. Fifty yards ahead, Father led the way with John, who’d slipped out of the house to join us when we set off but was so wrapped in his outer garment that you could hardly guess at his face. He’d walked straight past me. He hadn’t spoken to a soul. His shoulders were shaking.

 
          
And that left me, slipping as far back as I could to avoid the humiliation of even seeing those shoulders, bringing up the rear with Master Hans. “I don’t understand anything,” he whispered plaintively. “What is this funeral?”

 
          
I shook my head to indicate that I didn’t understand either, but kept my eyes ahead. I felt, by turns, numb, hot with a monstrous embarrassment, and sick, as though I’d eaten splinters of glass and was slowly shredding inside. I was having too much trouble controlling my own emotions to have anything to say to anyone else. I didn’t want him to insist on talking to me.

 
          
“Is the funeral why you are unhappy?” he persisted with his usual embarrassing frankness, still whispering but at larger-than-life volume.

 
          
I shook my head again. Despite myself, I was touched by his concern. But the last thing I wanted was to have to answer an interrogation whispered at full pitch just behind the rest of my family. If I spoke, I’d weep, and I would do anything to avoid the humiliation of weeping.

 
          
“No one understands about the funeral,” I whispered back through set lips.

 
          
The event became still more numbingly unreal when we reached the chapel. Not just our priest, robed in black; not just the coffin of a stranger ringed by candles to greet us; not just the door of the family vault Father had had prepared for us, open to take in someone none of us had known in a mist of frankincense and damp. But there were people already kneeling in prayer by the time we walked in. All men. All tall. All in black cloaks. And all strangers. They’d come from the city, clearly, because there were horses outside, stamping and blowing and dusty from the London road. Pages with brightly colored legs and wrists sticking out under the muffle of cloaks—which meant boys in livery—were murmuring at the horses. And an armed escort in the shadows beyond, quiet, but unable to avoid clinking or stop light falling on the polished metal they were wearing about themselves.

 
          
One by one, seeing Father and John, the strangers got up and approached them through the fog of scented candlelight. One by one they huddled together. Heads leaned forward to whisper. Black-clad arms touched John’s shoulders. His head bowed lower.

 
          
It was only after the heavy footsteps of the procession, and after the priest had begun to declaim “
De profundis . . .
” (Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my prayer), that I felt another tweak at my arm.

 
          
“Look,” hissed Master Hans, eyes staring so wide open that they looked as though they might pop out of his square face. His arm hadn’t moved, but he’d raised the first finger of his right hand. It was poking insistently toward the strangers.

 
          
One of the black hoods had fallen back. For a moment, before a hand pulled it forward again, the face of the man inside it—the man standing next to John—was revealed. A big slab of a face, reddish and lardy, with tiny sharp eyes; and hair and a beard the hot stinking ginger of a fox. I knew that face from the day last winter when he’d come to Chelsea to walk in the garden with Father, his “old friend,” and discuss the vexed question of his marriage. I would never forget the sight of Father’s set, threatened expression at that meaty arm weighing down his shoulders and periodically clapping him on the back.

           
“Did you see?” Master Hans whispered now, and even his whisper was hushed by the sheer shock of recognition. “Isn’t that the king?”

 
          
He was sharper than I expected. But, however little I understood of what was happening, I suspected he shouldn’t know if the king was here.

 
          
Tapping reserves of family loyalty I didn’t guess I had, I summoned up the strength to give him a deceptively reassuring smile and shake my head with all the certainty I could muster.

           
“But,” he whispered again, “I’m sure it is. I saw him at Greenwich. No one else looks like that.”

           
I ignored him.

 
          
I escaped Master Hans as soon as the service was over. I was preparing to get away from him before the priest intoned his last Latin words,
If
 
thou, Lord, wilt keep record of our iniquities, Master, who has strength to
bear it?
 
And I was already flitting down the path while, in the vestry, the priest and his servers were still chanting Kyrie Eleison as they disrobed; before the troop of horsemen cantering off back to London with their torches were out of sight.

 
          
John must have rushed off alone, lost in his private grief. The only black figure ahead of me in the darkness, carrying a torch, was Father.

 
          
The rest of them, hesitant, murmuring among themselves, were streaming out of the chapel behind us.

 
          
I rushed forward to catch Father, tripping over pebbles and roots in my urgency, feeling brambles and branches whip against me in the darkness, with the tears I wouldn’t shed rising dangerously inside me. I caught his arm again; nearly clawed at it.

           
“Meg, sweetheart,” he said gently; but was it the deadly gentleness of a man who has forbidden a suitor to marry his daughter? I hardly dared to ask, but I couldn’t not ask.

 
          
“Please,” I panted, trying but failing to keep my voice steady. “I know it’s bad timing . . . I know you have your mind on this funeral . . . but I must know. I’ve waited all my life. I don’t understand . . .” I saw his face tighten against me. “He told me he’d ask you,” I rushed on. “Today. This afternoon. But then . . . all this . . .” To my horror, I found myself gulping wetly. He began to walk faster. “I must know, Father—are you going to let me marry John?”

 
          
It was out. I half expected Father to shake me off and walk off into the darkness, leaving me without an answer. The thought brought the shameful tears out onto my face.

 
          
But he didn’t. He was astonished by my question. So astonished that he stopped dead and moved the torch closer to my face. He peered at me for a long moment and wiped the wetness gently off one cheek with his free hand, and looked at the tears on his finger, as if doubting his senses.

 
          
Then he put the hand to his own forehead, as if nursing a splitting headache.

 
          
When he finally spoke, his reply didn’t make anything any clearer.

 
          
“He’s asked you to marry him now—now, of all times?” Father said incredulously. He seemed to be talking as much to himself as to me. “Without even telling you about Guildford?” And he suddenly looked angrier than I’d ever seen him. His face darkened into the kind of cold, set fury I could imagine a heretic seeing in the torture chamber. And he took me roughly by the hand and dragged me toward the New Building without saying another word.

 
          
The door was open. A candle was lit inside. John Clement was hunched in the chair, with his cloak ruffled around him and his arms wrapped around his chest and head, as lost to the outside world as a sleeping bird.

 
          
He must have heard our two pairs of hurried footsteps, but he didn’t even look up when Father tugged me inside. It was only Father’s voice that roused him, with the cold clarity of a knife at the throat. It was only when he started speaking that I realized it was John whom Father was angry with, and not me.

 
          
“John,” Father snapped. “Meg tells me you’ve proposed marriage. But I told her you could only do so after you’d told her the whole truth—and you haven’t told her anything. There are some confidences you have to share. If nothing else, you have to tell her about Guildford. I’ll be back when you’ve had time to talk.”

 
          
Then he walked out. At the sound of the latch clicking, John Clement finally raised his eyes to meet mine.

 
          
Sometimes flesh-and-blood people
can seem less real than shadows.

 
          
John Clement blinked, but for a while he scarcely recognized the face of the young woman standing before him. He was in another time; a child again, playing knucklebones with his older brother Edward, listening to the grown-ups quarreling on the other side of the door.

 
          
Different voices over the years, but always about some treachery, some battle. His father: bellows of rage, followed by the banging of fists on tables or the rumble of furniture overturned. His mother: the cold whipping tones, the hot screams of anger. And the uncles. Uncle Richard, with the cautiousness of the runt of the litter, dark and dour, always biting at k
nuckle or lip. Uncle George, with the fading prettiness of a willful boy gone monstrously wrong: his every attempt at menace, intimidation, bribery, and double-cross discovered, his treachery unmasked, and only his temper left intact. And the grandmothers: one with a voice like grating metal; the other’s a honeyed, manipulative whine, at least until she was crossed and turned venomous as a snake.

 
          
And the quiet look in his older brother’s eyes. He’d never meant for the bitterness to creep into his feeling for Edward, who’d been with him through it all. Or for them to grow up, after the men of their father’s generation self-destructed, to shout and bang fists and wave weapons at each other in their turn, like yet more murderous fools—as if all the rage that they’d endured for all their years together had been a poisonous inheritance. The silence of what he’d thought would be a brief journey to the Continent turned into a lifetime of unspeaking resentment, a chasm that couldn’t be bridged even when, years later, he admitted that Edward might have had the right idea all along, and that it was worth making sacrifices for a quiet life.

 
          
The bitter irony was that Edward had wanted to bury the past and start a quiet new life. John Clement remembered with self-loathing that he himself—who now, as an adult, had learned enough to do anything to avoid conflict—had been the hothead then. He’d been the one who was hot for justice, vengeance, retribution. He’d been the one who thought Edward a coward for giving in—and, unforgivably, told him so. The quarrel had been all of his own making.

 
          
And now Edward was dead, and there would be no last chance to make something more positive of his family legacy. And no one to remember it with. Just a memory of a room at Lambeth Palace, after Archbishop Morton had gone to bed in the room next door, and the hurt in Edward’s eyes as he’d turned his back to go to sleep; and his own last word, in the arrogant tones he’d favored in those young days, echoing between the beds: “Coward.” When he’d woken up in the morning, Edward had gone.

 
          
And now he was here, drowning in the blackness of it, and he was alone.