Portrait of an Unknown Woman (40 page)

 
          
I saw her only as she heard my step and whisked round, a polite hostess’s smile on her face—clearly ready to show some new lawyer to the ewery or the privies or find him a glass of something. It was too late to escape. But when I saw her look of concern, when she drew me into the window seat in a plump, capable embrace, I suddenly didn’t want to escape anyway. I didn’t even mind when I felt silent tears coursing down my cheeks again. Suddenly there was nothing I wanted more than to have a kindly adult take care of me.

 
          
“Hsssh, there, there,” she murmured, stroking my back. “What’s upset you so? Here, give me the baby. And dry your eyes on this . . .”

 
          
I hiccuped into her embroidered handkerchief. “Is it the baby?” she was saying now, looking into my face, then his. But he was sleeping so angelically, and there were still dribbles of milk coming out of his mouth, proof that he was eating, that she shook her head in her own answer to her question and looked more searchingly at me. “It’s not like you to cry. What is it?”

 
          
“I’ve been trying to talk to Father,” I said, sniffling helplessly. “But it all went wrong. We had a row . . .”

 
          
She was nodding and patting my hand. I thought I glimpsed understanding on her face. “And you’ve been getting on so well,” she said sympathetically. But she didn’t ask what the row had been about. She’d never criticize Father to any of us behind his back, however much she cheerfully upbraided him in front of everyone. She believed in loyalty.

 
          
But I had to try one more time to discuss this with her. I didn’t know what else to do. “They’ve ordered a burning,” I blurted out, and saw her face tighten (though I knew as I watched her that my news wasn’t news to her). “And Father says it’s right. He’d never have done that before, would he? There’s something new in him, something cruel, coming out. You must think so?”

 
          
She began shaking her head, but perhaps that was more just puzzlement than anything else. Someone as commonsensical as the Dame wouldn’t welcome ambiguity. “Well,” she said eventually, and that pause before she answered reassured me that she was anxious too. “I don’t understand the rights and wrongs of it myself. I’m no statesman. I suppose people have to be punished if they do wrong. But it doesn’t seem right; I can see why you’re so upset. He had that new bishop here the other day, you know—Stokesley—and they couldn’t talk about anything else all through dinner. Heretics, heretics, danger, danger. And every time Stokesley said ‘danger’ he stabbed his lark pie again with his knife. By the time he came to eat it, it was cut to shreds on his plate. I can’t say I liked the look of him much. Mean little eyes. Sunken cheeks. And I didn’t like the way he shouted at the servants when one of them knocked something over on him either. The man’s a bully. I could see he enjoyed other people’s fear. And Ellen told me later that he actually boasts about the name they’ve given him in the taverns—
the hammer of heretics
. But you know how your father is with his friends. He won’t hear a word said against the man. So what can I do?”

 
          
She lifted her shoulders helplessly, then patted my hand again. “You’re not the only one who’s worried, you know,” she went on, looking out of the window again. “William Dauncey’s just turned up to see him too. I could see he was going to try and talk some sense into him as well.”

 
          
I looked up, startled. I wouldn’t have thought Will Dauncey would ever criticize his patron. He was too pragmatic, too knowing about what sheltered him. But Alice didn’t notice my surprise. In her own way, she was hunting for reasons to be cheerful.

           
“Still,” she added, trying to look as comfortable as usual, “if your father’s wrong about this, we can be sure it won’t take him long to realize. He’s not the man to do things without thinking them through carefully. You know that. And he’s the one who has the king’s ear, when it comes down to it. Not Stokesley.”

 
          
By the time she’d folded me into my cloak, wrapping it carefully around the baby, and embraced me more tenderly than usual, and waved me out of the door into the garden and down to the riverbank, I’d begun to feel, if not calm, at least less alone.

 
          
But any composure I might have gained was stripped away again when, crunching through the frosty grass on the way to the landing stage, I saw the two shapes standing, lost in conversation, just behind the mulberry tree.

 
          
The wind was blowing; I couldn’t hear every word. But I could imagine the way Will Dauncey’s pale, boiled-gooseberry eyes would be fixed on Father when I heard the first snatch of his thin voice, with the exasperation carefully removed: “. . . all I’m saying is that this isn’t necessarily what the king would want.” It was only then that I saw Father’s face through the branches. It was as set and angry as it had been earlier, with his lips pursed tight, and they only pursed tighter as Will’s voice went on: “. . . wants a chancellor who does his bidding . . . not a crusader . . .” and
 
“. . . he doesn’t really care about theology except where it concerns himself . . .” and “. . . he’s fond of you, of course, but a king’s favor doesn’t last forever . . .” and “. . . not lust, good statecraft; he needs an heir . . . England needs a prince,” and finally, “. . . steady on.”

 
          
Father’s eyes were staring into the distance. His wasn’t the face of a man heeding advice. It wasn’t the face of a man who believed his most important duty was to serve a king thinking more about how to get himself an heir than how to save the church. I thought it was the face of a fanatic.

 
          
I watched the oars enter the water and the neat spray at the end of every stroke as they came out again. I stared at the bits of driftwood and the bobbing rubbish floating past us in the gloom.

 
          
My heart was colder than the city streets with their shiver of snow coming. My head was full of the cold, biting, angry things I’d said; and the cold, independent things I might now do to make sure I knew what was going on and couldn’t be taken for a fool any longer.

 
          
When Mad Davy popped out of the shadows, moving toward me with his eyes full of curiosity, I wanted to run. But I stayed. I met his eye. I nodded back at him, slowly, consideringly, the same way he was assessing me.

 
          
We each knew things the other wanted to know, even if neither of us quite knew how to begin finding out.

 
          
“I’ll come and find you tomorrow,” I said finally. I was aware of the alley he scuttled down, after he’d nodded briefly back at me, with his sackful of potions clinking behind him. And then I opened the service door of the Old Barge, locked out the darkness beyond with a single slam of oak and iron, and stepped, with relief, back into the warm light of my own inner courtyard, where a brazier was burning. John’s steaming horse, Moll, was being given a blanket and a bucket of water and stripped of her leather and iron harness and led back into her stable. I almost ran inside.

 
          
John found me in the parlor, alone, staring at the cruel eyes in Father’s portrait. He was carrying the baby, rocking him back and forth as he walked.

 
          
“The nurse put him to bed, but no one heard him crying,” he said mildly.

 
          
“Father has ordered a burning,” I said.

 
          
There was a silence. “There, there, my lovely,” John murmured into the quiet, but not to me, to the baby. He made him a nest of furs on the floor and laid him carefully down. The look of infinite happy trust that passed between them pained me. There was no place for happiness right now. I looked away.

 
          
“He’s not hungry. He can’t be. I fed him upstairs,” I said sullenly, with too much on my mind to be able to bear anyone making demands of my body too. “John, did you hear what I said? I said, Father’s ordered a burning!”

 
          
“I know,” he said, straightening up. He was keeping his voice light. “Everyone’s talking about it. I heard from Dr. Butts.”

 
          
“But he can’t!”

 
          
John turned to me, very gently, with the kind of grave concern he might show if I were bereaved and he were comforting me. But all he said as he sat down next to me was “Shh, Meg. You’ll upset the baby.”

 
          
I folded my arms over my chest. “My father, the humanist, is going to burn a man at the stake.”

 
          
“Well, he must think it’s necessary, Meg,” John said, still in the same voice.

 
          
“What do you mean necessary?” I ground out.

 
          
“He’s the lord chancellor, Meg. Who am I to stand in his way?”

 
          
“He might listen to you. You could stop him.”

 
          
“I’m not a statesman. I don’t want to do or say or think anything that might endanger us.”

 
          
“That makes you a coward.”

 
          
“Maybe,” he said, looking down at the baby, giving no sign that the insult had dented his composure. “But the only thing that matters to me is our family. If I’ve learned anything in life, it’s not to risk what you love.”

 
          
“I’ve just seen Will Dauncey try to talk to Father. He wasn’t scared. Why are you?”

 
          
“Because I’m not a child like you and Will,” he answered unflappably. “Because I remember how when you live under a weak king you live with fear. Because your father is the wisest adviser of a young king who’s managed to make England strong and safe for the Tudors, and I trust him to keep things that way. If Thomas More says something is a danger to the land, I’m not going to question his judgment.”

 
          
He laughed without amusement. “When old King Henry was still alive, we were invaded every year or two by armies fitted out by the Scots, or the Burgundians, or the French. Always with some lad as a figurehead, shouting that the Tudors were usurpers, claiming to be the rightful king come to claim back the throne. Most of them claiming to be me, oddly enough. But it didn’t matter who they really were, because the magic of royalty is all in what people think you are. If their armies had been good enough, and they’d convinced enough people to follow them, any of those boys might have got lucky. I know I’ve told you all this before, but try and think what that felt like, Meg: not just for me, but for anyone. It might help you to understand.”

 
          
I was silenced, though still bursting with my private anger. His quiet sincerity reminded me of one of his long-ago improvisations to our Richard III story. It came flooding back now, his voice with the same bleak tone, murmuring: “These matters are kings’ games, as if it were stage players, and for the most part played upon scaffolds. In which poor men b
e but lookers-on, and those that be wise will meddle no further. For they that sometime step up and play with them, when they cannot play their parts, only disorder the play and do themselves no good.”

 
          
“You mean, ‘those that be wise will meddle no further . . . ,’ ” I said, half questioningly.

 
          
“Exactly.” He nodded, as if I’d agreed with him, and squeezed my hands.

 
          
“You mean, ‘let’s pretend it’s not happening,’ ” I said dully.

 
          
He flinched. But he nodded. And then, with the baby blowing bubbles by the crackling fire, he tried to win me round to his way of thinking by telling me how he learned his reality.

           
“I used to be as wild as fire,” he said, staring into the fire. “A reckless boy burning with the certainty that my every wish would come true if I only did enough to make it happen. A risk taker. When we lost everything we’d been brought up to expect, and suddenly became just two boys being bundled away to the countryside to survive as best we could, I was more angry than I thought it was possible to be. Puffed up with poison and rage. A little snake stuck in a box, but waiting to strike when they opened the lid.

 
          
Edward took it differently. He collapsed. He wept. He got ill. He prayed. I see why now. He was older. He was probably cleverer. He knew how lucky we were just to be alive. So he turned to God. But I couldn’t see that then. I just couldn’t understand how my big brother—the only family I had left—could cave in to Uncle Richard. I was mad with the idea that we’d been cheated. From under the bedcovers, I was dying to plot his return, crazy for revenge. I was ten, remember. My voice hadn’t even broken. It was madness. And anyway, there wasn’t even any point climbing out of the window at night to begin trying if he wasn’t interested. He was the king, after all, not me. And he wouldn’t listen. I could have killed him 
from frustration. I nearly did. They kept pulling me off him, shaking the life half out of him, in some miserable stone corridor in some castle somewhere. He wouldn’t even fight back.