Portrait of an Unknown Woman (42 page)

 
          
I’d spent more than ten years by then at the university in Louvain—I was fortunate that Burgundy was a place of learning, even back when Aunt Margaret married the duke, so much so that my uncouth family of English fighting men thought of the court there as a kind of miracle, and called it Camelot. So I’d been lucky enough to have fallen into the world of books. I had an adult life. Studies. A passion to pursue. I didn’t need my past. I had friends in the world of learning who didn’t care where they came from, who gave themselves new names to mark their break with their past. Who even knows that Erasmus started life as Gerrit Gerritszoon? When More offered me his help, I suddenly realized that that was enough for me; that I truly wanted to be Johannes Clemens—John the Kind—and a new man in a new world.

 
          
So I was happy to give up the Plantagenet dream. Now that I realized that the myth I’d grown up with of monarchs being anointed by God was just a cover for all the lies of the unscrupulous—one king a bigamist, one a successful usurper, one queen a bastard—it didn’t mean anything to me anyway. All those kings and queens had cheated God and their people 
just as much as the Flanders street boys who wandered the courts of Europe, calling themselves Richard, Duke of York. And however much I’d hated my family’s unscrupulousness, at that moment, when I realized that after their destruction I’d gone on behaving in a way that was just as hateful myself—and when I saw that what I wanted most was a personal connection in the world—I was ready to try what he suggested. So I became ‘More’s boy.’

 
          
It worked. He did it—he and Erasmus in Burgundy. It took them till the old king died. But they succeeded in persuading the new King Henry that I believed in the Tudor monarchy, had no interest in politics, and would never be a threat. And they gave me a new life in England. I’d destroyed what was left of my family; but they even gave me a new family.

 
          
Themselves. You.”

 
          
“So you see, Meg,” John went on, drawing a gentle finger over my mouth, “there’s no criticism of your father’s ideas that I could decently make. He’s a subtle man. He knows how to work with unlikely allies and solve impossible problems. He’s a natural politician and a champion of peace, and anyone who’s lived through the turmoil I have can’t help but value that. I don’t pretend to understand how his mind works. But his existence is a guarantee that we can spend our lives living and loving each other, our child, our work. We should be grateful. Let’s leave the affairs of state to him.”

 
          
Tommy stirred on the floor. I looked down at him, then up at my poor, bruised, beloved husband, with his eyes full of the suffering that I could see had bruised his spirit, and of hope that I would see his kind of reason.

 
          
And my heart swelled with an adult’s protectiveness of their shared helplessness. I stroked his arm. “Oh, poor you, poor you . . . It’s a miracle that you’ve come through so much,” I whispered wonderingly, “and I do see now what you mean about Father, I do.” And I did appreciate better why he’d choose to rely utterly on Father, even if I didn’t want to promise that I’d do the same myself.

 
          
“I’ll get Tommy,” I said, and we sat for a while in front of the fire, me cradling Tommy, John cradling me, and when I stole a look up at my husband I saw a beatific expression of perfect peace on his lean face. The story he’d just told me was too extraordinary to take in all at once, but I could see I didn’t need to do anything dramatic by way of acknowledgment. He’d become so modest in his demands on life that all he needed 
was this moment of quiet, loving togetherness.

 
          
“This is how I imagine us, always, Meg,” he said softly, with his eyes full of love. “Peacefully giving Caesar his due, and God his, and being happy.”

 
          
How lucky my own life suddenly seemed. How easy. How small. With my head still spinning as I assimilated the details of his past, I turned and kissed him chastely on the lips, then lowered my lips to the baby’s head, covered in black silk strands, smelling of milkiness.

 
          
“Dr. Butts is all taken up with saving the Bible men, you know,” John went on, musing, trusting, with a furrow to his brow. “He hangs around Anne Boleyn’s chambers, taking messages to the book smugglers. I spend half my days covering for him. And I worry for him. Of course, I don’t think what he’s doing makes him evil. I can see how intelligent and good he is with my own eyes. But I don’t think he’s wise; he doesn’t seem to realize there’s no point in needlessly seeking out trouble. He can do far more good with medicine than by messing around with the Bible men. It would be folly for him to get himself caught.”

 
          
I murmured something gentle—“I see” or “It would”—and rocked the baby. I made my body soft and pliant in his arms, but I was already starting to fret over some of the things he’d been telling me. John was pledging public allegiance to Father—but at the same time omitting to tell him how Dr. Butts’s mind was turning in private (which would have been natural if he’d been as outraged as I was by Father’s bloodthirsty mania for religious purity, but sat oddly with the total trust in him that John was professing). And, when I thought back over his story, this wasn’t the first time he’d told Father, his protector, less than the whole truth. Was it?

 
          
“John,” I said carefully, not sure if I’d understood that past omission right. “Did you never think of telling Father—or Erasmus—that you’d found out you were illegitimate?”

 
          
I couldn’t see his face, but I felt him lean down and kiss the top of my head. “Whatever for?” he said, as peacefully as if he were talking about the weather. “By then, none of it seemed to matter anymore. The history Morton had already started rewriting made it irrelevant. I’d been John Clement for years.”

 
          
He touched my shoulders to make me half turn my head and the baby’s in my arms, and touched my nose with a gentle finger. He was perfectly relaxed; there was a glassy innocence in his eyes. “And it didn’t make any practical difference,” he went on. “I still needed More’s and Erasmus’s protection, because I’d still have been at risk if anyone had found out my previous name. Royalty is about appearances. There’s precious little reality in it. What would matter to a crowd looking for a Plantagenet king wouldn’t be whatever I said my sister had told me on her deathbed, with no witnesses. All they’d care about is who they perceived me to be.”

 
          
I got up, hugging the baby, nodding as if I’d understood. It seemed blindingly obvious to me that Father should have been told; that he’d feel betrayed if he ever found out. But if John couldn’t see that, perhaps it wasn’t for me to start trying to explain. For now, there was too much else to think about.

 
          
He stood up too and drew the pair of us into another hug. “Besides, I couldn’t have. It wasn’t my secret to tell. It was Elizabeth’s. And I couldn’t dishonor her memory,” he added simply. I could hear he believed completely in what he was saying.

 
          
We walked upstairs together, the three of us, a muddle of arms and legs and tenderness and half embraces, one within the other. My head felt just as muddled, with one great cloud of worries about Father and the burning partly displaced by this other confidence. Tussling inside of me, between my raging against Father, which I couldn’t share with John, was at the same time an uneasy protectiveness of the man who’d done so much to help my husband, but had, as I saw it, been deceived by John’s economy with the truth.

 
          
Perhaps that was how John survived change, I mused, putting Tommy gently down in his rocker—by learning to keep all the different truths in his life locked away in separate compartments.

 
          
But it was only after the candles were out and we were lying in the darkness, watching the fire die down, that the confusion gripping my mind coalesced into words. Suddenly it was simple. I knew the question I wanted to ask.

 
          
I sat bolt upright with the shock of it, and I could feel John startle beside me.

 
          
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked.

 
          
I heard the beginning of a soothing bass rumble from the rumple of sheets below. But I disregarded it and plunged on.

 
          
“I’ve spent two years coming to terms with the idea that you’d once been a prince. That if your life had turned out differently you might have been king,” I said. “Can you imagine how hard it was to learn to believe that? And now you suddenly say that what you told me before wasn’t true . . .”

 
          
John sat up too and put his arms round me in the darkness. “Meg, listen,” he whispered, and his voice was full of love, but it didn’t touch me anymore. Suddenly everything I’d learned in that long day came rushing blackly back at me, like freezing Thames floodwater, two separate polluted streams of it coming together as they hit me and swept away the trust which I’d made the foundation of my married life. I’d had faith in John; I’d had faith in Father. But I’d been wrong on both counts. I was shivering.

 
          
“Meg, listen,” he muttered again, and the arms drew me in tighter to his shadow embrace, but I kept my arms wrapped tight about my knees, braced against the softness of him. “You know everything now . . .”

 
          
“You should have told me the whole thing at once,” I said tightly. “Back then.”

 
          
And there was sadness in his voice when he answered: “I can see that now. I can see it would be a shock. I’m sorry. But when you shut old secrets away in your mind forever, and know there’s no one you’ll ever be able to trust with them, in a way you almost forget them yourself. When all that was happening, I never expected to get so close to anyone that one day I’d be able to tell them about it. I got used to living with loneliness a long time ago. And it takes time to unlearn the habits of loneliness, you know; to remember to bring to light the pieces of the past you’ve buried. To learn to trust. But I have told you now; told you things I’ve never told anyone. It’s a sign of how close we are that I can. So don’t be offended. Forgive me. Please.”

 
          
Hugging my knees even tighter, I said, without forgiveness, “You’re always saying we shouldn’t have secrets. You say it every day, like a prayer. But you have so many of your own it makes me dizzy. And how can I be sure—now—how many more you’ve got? If you’ve forgotten this one for this long, what else might you suddenly confess to tomorrow, or the next day? Who might I be trying to believe you are by next week?”

 
          
“Oh, Meg . . .” he whispered, stroking my unresponsive arms, “I don’t want you to think I have feet of clay . . . the last thing I wanted was to hurt you . . . you must see that . . . don’t sound so cold . . . say you forgive me.”

 
          
I shook my head in the darkness. I needed time to think. “Not yet,” I muttered. “I’m probably just shocked. Let me let it all sink in a bit.”

 
          
“Say you still love me.”

 
          
“I do still love you . . . ,” I whispered; and he accepted the words as a truce, the best that could be expected in the circumstances, and drew me back down on the pillows next to him, and kissed me before his breathing quietened into sleep.

           
“. . . whoever you are,” I muttered, completing the sentence once I knew he wouldn’t hear.

 
          
My mind was racing with flickering, confused images of John, all with the familiar features I knew but animated by personalities I didn’t, as if he’d been possessed by one shifting spirit after another throughout his past: my husband embracing dying queens, fighting rough strangers, placing crowns on his head and grimacing under the weight. And taking crowns off his head and sauntering away, whistling. What was he dreaming of now, this man I thought I’d known, lying there so innocently beside me?

 
          
Perhaps I just couldn’t cope with so much confusion. Unexpectedly I found the memory of Hans Holbein’s square, sensible face coming into my mind. I clung to it with the relief that a drowning man would feel seizing a piece of driftwood. Hans Holbein might be crude, but at least he wasn’t scared of the truth. He’d had the integrity to paint Father as he 
saw him, with those cruel eyes looking sideways out of the frame above the fire in our parlor. That intentness of mind was exactly what John lacked. Feeling nostalgic, I let myself wonder whether Master Hans would ever come back now, from his faraway German home, to draw in the lutes and viols he’d sketched as possible improvements to our picture; to take Dame Alice off her weary knees and paint her reclining in the chair she wanted. It seemed unlikely, but I wished he would. I wished he were here to discuss all the things I was discovering now. He was the most straightforward person I’d ever met, and the only one of my contemporaries whom I could imagine trying honestly to make sense of the way the world was turning upside down.