Portrait of an Unknown Woman (27 page)

 
          
Meg was staring at him in the candlelight. And there was such fear on her face that he felt a flicker of pity. Enough, anyway, to try and focus on the present. To remember that he was a man well advanced in age, and that in the long life he’d lived since he and his brother played knucklebones in every drafty castle in England she’d been part of his dreams for years.

 
          
“Meg,” he said, struggling with words, surprised at first to hear how easily her name came to his lips, then leaning on it for support. “He was my brother.”

 
          
He saw her draw breath. Saw her eyebrows come together as she puzzled over what he’d said. Then she relaxed. He could see her begin to believe that she understood. The fear went out of her. He could see her confidence return.

 
          
She stepped quickly forward and took him in her arms, and hugged him like a child. He let himself relax into the comfort of her embrace, trying not to allow his mind to take him even a few minutes forward in time, dreading what was to follow. On the edge of his mind was a recent memory of the yielding of buttocks in his hands and the fierceness of her dark b
lue gaze as he pinned her under him in the woods. But he couldn’t bear to linger on that moment, when all his present hopes had seemed finally to have triumphed over all his past despair. The surge in his heart was cut off almost instantly by the darkness closing back in on him. He had to tell her everything now. But if he told her everything, she’d know. And if she knew, she might leave. The fear of her leaving took his breath away.

 
          
“I’m sorry,” she was murmuring, stroking his head. “I’m sorry. Your brother.” He wished he could see her face, but it was above him and he didn’t dare look up. He could hear the secret relief she was trying to keep out of her compassionate voice, and feel her sense that she’d penetrated a mystery and could hope, after all, for happiness for herself; and he didn’t w
ant to jolt her out of that moment of certainty. “That’s the brother you were talking about, isn’t it? The one you couldn’t mend your quarrel with,” she added softly, with her hand coming to rest on his head. He nodded.

 
          
“You did everything you could . . . Don’t reproach yourself . . . I know it wasn’t your fault.” Then she remembered. Shook herself. He felt her pull back a fraction.

 
          
“But,” she said, puzzled again, “is that what Father was insisting you tell me?”

 
          
He couldn’t speak. She took his answer for assent. “Well, you haven’t done anything wrong,” she went on, and now he heard the beginning of indignation on his behalf. “What was he so angry about?”

 
          
He pulled away. Shook himself. Took control. He stood up, towering over her, put an arm around her shoulders and drew her very gently toward him so they were both half leaning, half sitting on the tabletop. “I don’t know how to tell you,” he whispered.

 
          
She looked at him with unbearable trust. “We don’t need to have any secrets from each other anymore, do we?” she said—a murmur—and there was the ghost of a smile on her face.

 
          
I don’t want to have any secrets from you, he implored silently; but my life has been so long compared to yours and there are so many layers of old secrets to be explained.

 
          
She put a hand on his on the table and interlaced her fingers with his.

 
          
She was still looking at him. Her gaze was becoming uncomfortable. He shifted his eyes sideways. Then he looked down at her hand and took a deep breath.

 
          
“Your father is right. There is one more thing I have to tell you,” he said, louder, through the deafening beats of his heart. “If I’m to be truly honest.

 
          
“But I don’t want it to make any difference to us,” he added, feeling the words come now—the eloquence of despair, a gift that silvered his tongue. “He wants me to tell you about my past. But I want to say first that what unites you and me is that we’ve chosen what to make of our lives. It’s our present and our future that matter, together, not what each of us has l
eft behind in the past. We both had dark beginnings.”

 
          
She nodded. Embarrassed, but still trusting, encouraging him to continue.

 
          
“Look,” he began. “Do you remember the game I taught you and the other children . . . about the princes in the Tower? The beginning of your father’s book?”

 
          
“The princes who were killed by Richard.” She took up the familiar schoolroom theme, trying to make him smile with the same nostalgia she felt for the game. “Wrathful, forward Richard. Kissing when he thought to kill.”

 
          
No; that wasn’t the right way. He didn’t know how to start. It had been too long since he’d had to explain himself. Hardly anyone still alive knew; and those who did didn’t need telling. Perhaps he should start somewhere else.

 
          
“My brother’s name was Edward,” he said dully.

 
          
“Yes,” she said, with a mystified expression. “I know. Sir Edward Guildford.”

 
          
“Did you wonder why he didn’t have the same family name as me?” he added.

 
          
She shrugged. She didn’t see why he was asking her. “Because your mother married twice?” she said, with a touch of impatience.

 
          
“No,” he replied, going faster now, looking down. “It wasn’t his name. It wasn’t the family name he grew up with.”

 
          
He could feel her look sharpen. “So was he Edward Clement?” she asked, as if trying to establish a clear diagnosis.

 
          
“No,” he said, and he shut his eyes and pushed out the words. “Plantagenet. He was Edward Plantagenet.”

 
          
Everything stopped except the blood drumming in his ears. The room was still and close. He could feel beads of sweat break out on his brow, but she hardly seemed to be drawing breath.

 
          
When he finally raised his eyes to hers in the candlelight she was staring back at him with her mouth open.

 
          
“The prince in the Tower?” she mouthed.

 
          
Miserably, he nodded.

 
          
“Then who were you?” She gaped; her voice had vanished.

 
          
“Richard,” he said. “When I was a boy they called me the Duke of
      
York.”

           
I thought he’d gone mad—that grief had unhinged his mind. Or I thought it was a wild story dreamed up on the spur of the moment to save him from telling me something worse. Or perhaps I thought a little of both things. Or perhaps I just didn’t know what to think at all. My head was spinning.

 
          
But one thing I could see straightaway was that saying those names had relieved him in some way. He got up from his perch on the edge of the table and turned to face me. He was standing taller than usual, as if he’d shed a burden. And the eyes fixed on my face were almost defiant—with a “believe what you choose” look mixed up with the imploring “believe 
me.”

 
          
“But they disappeared,” I stammered. My body had gone completely still, like a rabbit frozen in a dog’s mouth. But my voice was beginning to come back; and it was coming back shrill and accusing. “They were killed forty years ago. It was the game. It was our rhetoric lessons. That’s what you taught us.”

 
          
Through the window I could hear night creatures rustling in the dark garden; far away, the unearthly scream of a vixen. My head was full of classroom memories; of his voice, calling us to our books, opening up the world to us. If the game was a lie, then everything else in the calm landscape of learning where I’d found meaning might also be full of treachery and traps. If the game was a lie, then the man standing in front of me was a stranger.

 
          
The new John nodded his head. “Yes, the game,” he said, regretful but not really sorry, as if the game were nothing more than a necessary deceit; a tactic for survival. A detail, perhaps even an amusing detail, in a much bigger story. Which perhaps it was for him. “I thought you might ask about that. That was your father’s idea when I came back to England and he took me in—a way of protecting me. He worked out the outline of the story and told me to teach it to the children at St. Paul’s. When I came to your house, I taught it to all of you too. It was supposed to be a way to spread the story that Edward and I were dead. So it would go down the generations and become history. But it went further than we expected, and faster. He’s a clever man, your father, but even he never realized you children would make such a good story of it.”

 
          
He laughed mirthlessly. “He’s always been proud of his children’s accomplishments. But never more so than of the aplomb with which they—you—killed off two little princes.”

 
          
I could imagine that. I could imagine the quiet smile on Father’s face as one of his games became reality. The secret satisfaction he would have got as we trustingly repeated and embroidered what we were learning as the truth. But I couldn’t join in John’s bark of laughter; couldn’t appreciate the cleverness of the idea. I couldn’t breathe. The idea that I might have been so manipulated in one of those games for almost all my life, by the people I loved most, was growing in my chest, like a pig-bladder ball inflating and crushing every organ in my body. If that was a lie, how many other lies might I unwittingly have accepted? My hands were clenched tight on the tabletop. I opened my mouth and sucked in a long gasp of air.

 
          
“That’s not the end of your father’s wit,” John Clement added, sounding almost proud. “Once we’d ‘killed off’ Richard of York with the game, he finished the job of turning me into a new person by writing
Utopia
. Do you remember? It was the summer he took me abroad. He put me into it—‘my boy John Clement’—standing in the square in Antwerp and 
listening with him and Pieter Gillis to Raphael Hythlodaeus tell his tall tales. We’ve all read it; we all know it’s full of jokes. Utopia: no place; on the banks of the No-water river; run by Governor No-People. But the best joke was what it did for me. Did you ever wonder why he called me ‘my boy’ in it? It was far more than a turn of phrase. It was salvation. It wouldn’t fool anyone who actually met me; no one who looks at the gray in my hair could think I’m a boy, or even that I could have been one thirteen years ago when it came out. But until I came back to England last year I led a quiet life; I hardly knew anyone outside the universities; I didn’t give many people a chance to see my real age. The book was hugely popular all over Europe. Thousands of people have read it. ‘John Clement’ is only a mention in the book. No one who reads it notices my name particularly. But if they hear it somewhere else later, the memory it triggers is that I’m far younger than I really am—and far too young to be Richard of York. Especially if they read one of the European editions, which even have a picture of me as a long-haired fifteen-year-old.
Utopia
was a stroke of genius. It made me safe as No-Prince.”

 
          
Now I remembered Master Hans’s question in the studio. That must be the picture he’d drawn. The boy Clement. I pulled my mind back from my memory of that conversation—Master Hans’s innocent puzzlement, my innocent certainty—to the John Clement standing in front of me, with that pleading look that was inviting me to admire Father’s subtle mind.

 
          
“If this is true . . . ,” I began, summoning up all the self-control I possessed to unclamp my hands. Seeing they were blue-white and cold despite the heat of the night. “If you really were Prince Richard.” Seeing him nod, anxiously. Feeling my arms, as if full of a life of their own, slowly wrap themselves round my bursting chest and hug my shoulders; feeling my chin fall till my crossed arms supported it and I was curled in on myself like a baby, hugging myself to try and maintain contact with reality, drawing deep breaths. “Then what really happened?”

 
          
John Clement paused, gathering his thoughts. He couldn’t remember proper sequences of events; just threat and fear. It was all threat and fear back in those days. No one had expected his father to die so suddenly. It brought out the schemer and the hater in every one of them. It was Uncle Richard against his mother and her scheming parvenu relatives. And the first game was to control Edward. Uncle Richard was away in the north on 9 April, when everything changed. As the Duke of Gloucester, he governed the north from his 
home in Middleham. Edward had been sent back to his own home at Ludlow Castle after Christmas with his mother’s sharp-eyed brother Anthony. Earl Rivers.