Portrait of an Unknown Woman (44 page)

 
          
The churchmen would say I’ve lost my faith. But I say this. Scripture has become more delicious to me than honey or the honeycomb, because in it I learn that all my torments, all my fasting, all my vigils, all the redemption of masses and pardons, being done without trust in Christ, who alone can save his people from their sins, these, I say, I learned to be nothing but a headlong rush away from the truth.” There were more quiet sobs of relief, and more wet cheeks, as he stepped up to kiss the book in Davy’s hand.

 
          
Beyond a bit of banter in the street while I was buying something from a street trader, or a chat with one of the maids at home, I’d never have talked to people like these in the usual run of my life. Watching their faces light up with exaltation now, I realized I probably hadn’t even thought of them as knowing how to talk other than in the cheeky chat of traders.

 
          
Except when I was treating their wounds and ailments, that is; then I remembered that if you pricked the poor, they bled just like the next man.

 
          
But I certainly hadn’t expected this depth of emotion, this passion for truth. I felt humbled by it.

 
          
They knew when to stop. When the only candle had burned down to its mark, they wrapped the books up and hid them behind the logs again and filed out, as quiet as they’d come, into the courtyard and off in their different directions.

           
“Will you take me home, Davy?” I asked, sitting on my bench, quiet with my impressions.

 
          
“I haven’t told you answers to the questions you asked,” he said as we slipped out into the alley. “Showing you this was the best I could do.”

 
          
I nodded. “It was a good answer,” I said, at peace with his new sane self now.

 
          
“You go up to the top, and left and left again into Walbrook. Best I don’t go with you,” he said. He shouldered his bag. “I’ve got business to do. Unicorn’s horn business.” And he winked at me, then grinned crazily and danced off down the dirty little street, every inch the cheerful madman again.

 
          
He knocked at the door later the same day. The maid told me. “The swiveleyed loony came,” she said, with a contemptuous giggle. “Mr. Unicorn’s Horn. He tried to sell me some medicine. And he took a penny off me for delivering you this from the Steelyard.”

 
          
There was a letter. It had the Steelyard stamp on the wax (they said all the banned books were smuggled into England by the Germans). It was from Hans Holbein in Basel. I gasped when I made out the author’s name from the signature and the awkward handwriting in stilted French. After my rebellious moment of nostalgia for Master Hans last night, and the 
strange revelations of Davy’s Bible meeting, the little letter felt like a sign from God. When I said his name under my breath I found myself remembering the intent locking of his eyes on mine before he walked away across the lawn for the last time, the hypnotic honesty of his gaze.

 
          
But the feeling didn’t last. There was nothing much in Master Hans’s letter—just a few clumsy phrases on the page, a reminder of the crudeness of the real man who’d sat in our house for so many months, stuffing bread and meat into his mouth so fast it hardly touched his cheeks before being swallowed into that capacious gut, and who belched behind his hands at the end of every gargantuan act of self-indulgence.

 
          
“
Dear mistress Meg
,” Master Hans wrote: “
Please forgive me for not writing in English. I have forgotten too many
 
words; French is easier. Master Erasmus asks me to offer my congratulations on the birth of your baby son and ask after your health and after
the health of your husband. Master Erasmus likes the picture of your
family. He is writing to your father to tell him as much. I am trying to
settle back into Basel and get to know my family. It is a Protestant city
now! I will go soon and paint Master Erasmus again in his new town.

 
          
Please write back soon—I would be very happy to take news of you to him then.”

 
          
I nodded to myself, feeling my tongue click impatiently against my teeth, remembering with a rush of ordinary everyday disappointment the chaotic way he’d left his pictures and thoughts and impulses scattered untidily on tabletops or imposed on the people he decided to like, as well as with a hot burst of embarrassment at the memory of pulling away from his kiss. I shook my head resignedly and put the letter away in my apron. Maybe I’d keep it.

 
          
I’d been fond of him, after all. But there was no point in building my memory of this man into the image of someone who would have understood my life now, or been able to help. It would be childish to make a saint of him. I didn’t think I would be replying. I’d have to find my salvation for myself.

 
          
The salvation I found came from secrets. My own secrets, not theirs. New secrets, hugged tight inside, my defense against what else I might find out about my closest relatives. As winter turned into spring, summer to winter, I took to dissembling as hard as any of them. The first private act of my quiet rebellion was to go back to Mad Davy’s conventicle, to worship the hunted God of the Bible men.

 
          
It was surprisingly easy. John seemed relieved when I went back to meeting him at the door of the house in the afternoons with a brittle smile, asking everyday questions about his work, and didn’t mention his revelations again. And Father seemed relieved that there were no more scenes like the one over Hitton’s burning, though my acquiescence came at a 
price. I avoided Chelsea, except in big family groups, and I limited my brittle chats with Father to reports of black-haired, pink-cheeked Tommy’s progress at eating and walking and, eventually, his first attempts at talking. Father kept his distance too; there were no more affectionate arms round my shoulders, no more kisses when we parted, just that cold watchfulness of eyes. It was as if we were all walking on ice. So no one asked any difficult questions.

 
          
I left Tommy with a maid for an hour on some afternoons and slipped out. I sat at the back of Davy’s cellar room and listened to the Bible readings, and the confessions, and the tears of joy. I didn’t have to say anything. He hardly talked to me either, though I knew from the glitter in his eyes that my very presence was a secret triumph for him.

 
          
If he’d ever found out, Father would have taken my presence in Davy’s cellar as an act of vindictiveness against him (and perhaps it was, though I preferred to think of it as a protest against his cruelty). And John would have thought me unforgivably reckless. I felt guilty myself to be running such risks when I had a child to live for. But I couldn’t stop.

 
          
Part of me genuinely wanted to share the Bible men’s simple act of worship. I wanted to hear that our lives were based on faith and hope and love. I wanted to be called to repent of my sins and to hear that the congregation—us, in that little cellar, and not the great men of the church—was truly Christ’s body on earth. I left feeling uplifted, purified, a human being loved by a kindly God.

 
          
But I also knew, deep down, that even if I’d stopped going to mass myself—the sonorous sounds of Latin and the solemnity of plainsong that I’d grown up loving now seemed tinged with cruelty—I’d never truly find my own God here. I couldn’t believe in the ragings of Luther any more than in the fury of my father. Part of me knew that what I really wanted from those cellar meetings was just to be inspired by the willingness of so many fishwives and market women and tanners and weavers to endanger their lives for a taste of the truth. I wanted to believe that their passionate act of rebellion against what they believed to be the age-old lies of the church was the same as the rebellion I was mounting against the lies I’d discovered in my life; but I knew in my heart they were different.

 
          
So it seemed as if God was pushing me into the secret that came next; beginning with a timid touch on my robe as I left Davy’s house. I heard the muttered female voice even before I turned to see whose it was, very quietly repeating Davy’s words from the cellar, as if they were a secret code binding us together: “God is like love or the wind, beyond our comprehension, infinite enough to bear being worshipped in an infinite number of ways, merciful enough not to care whether people pray to him in church or under a hedgerow, in Latin or English or Greek, crying or laughing.”

           
I looked into her eyes. It was the mother of the dead youth. I still didn’t know her name.

 
          
She still had the lines and pouches of bereavement, but her eyes had regained a little of the shrewdness that must once have given her face charm. “I’ve been wanting to ask you for ages, missus—why do you come?” she inquired, in an ordinary, if hushed, voice, as if we were old friends. “I know who you are. So what are you getting yourself into with us?”

 
          
Something of the hurt I felt at what sounded like an attack on my honesty must have shown on my face.

           
“Oh, I don’t mean what you think I mean,” she said hastily. “I’m not saying you’re spying.” And she put a kindly, ragged arm through mine. “I know you’re a good girl,” she confided. “You must have your reasons for being here. Only I’ve got my own grown-up children”—and the shadow on her face for a moment reminded me that one of those children had been Mark; but then she smiled determinedly, she wasn’t here to talk about that—“and I 
know they get all sorts of ideas in their heads. You wouldn’t believe the trouble some of them will go to to make their parents angry. And so I’ve been looking at you and wondering whether you’re the same. Whether you’re really here because of Our Father, or just because of
your
father, if you know what I mean.”

 
          
We both laughed (her at her own witticism; me partly shocked at her impudence, and partly, reluctantly, at the truth of what she was saying). In midlaugh, she pointed a bony finger at my hand, which, when I looked down, I saw was dropping back down my body. I hadn’t even been aware of moving it. “See, you crossed yourself,” she said. “You do, sometimes; that’s the kind of thing I’ve been noticing inside. You’re not really one of us, are you?”

 
          
I grinned sheepishly. She was sharp. “You might be right,” I said. “I hadn’t thought . . .”

 
          
“Do yourself a favor, then. Stop coming. Keep yourself out of trouble; keep your child safe,” she went briskly on. “Got to look out for your family.”

           
Then she gave me a beady, questioning look. “Mind you, there
is
something else you could do for us,” she said. I nodded. I liked her. I could see now that she’d been working round to this question all along; but I thought it was safe to trust her.

 
          
“Look after our sick,” she said swiftly, striking her deal. “You’ve got healing hands. I could show you where. I could take you to them. That’s something that would actually do us some good.”

 
          
And so I became the secret nurse of London’s heretics. Instead of slipping out to Davy’s cellar in the afternoons, I started slipping out to St. Paul’s yard to meet my new friend (her name was Kate, I found out, though she was cautious enough not to tell me very much more), and off into the tenements and back alleys of London, to dose the ailing in their damp 
rooms with oil of cloves and herb poultices and sometimes, for the lonely, nothing more than a pipkin of hearty soup and a joke or two.

 
          
John didn’t know who my patients were these days. But now that we started finding ourselves side by side in the parlor again at night, taking turns to grind up our roots or spices with pestle and mortar, I could see he was pleased I was beginning to find activities to fill my life again.

 
          
We’d gone on playing at being happy together through all those months: discussing the detail of his day over meals, watching little Tommy grow. But, for now, we’d stopped being man and wife. I’d taken to sleeping with the child in between us and complaining of headaches and backaches whenever he tried to touch me. Even if he looked just the man he’d 
been before, and went on behaving just as he always had, I felt uncertain of him; I didn’t want to lay myself open to loving him in the way I had until recently, the kind of love that would make me vulnerable if there were more shocks and secrets in store. But he just looked resigned at my excuses and hugged me to him like a child to its father.