Portrait of an Unknown Woman (59 page)

 
          
But then Master Hans’s face clouded with the returning memory of how things actually were nowadays.

 
          
“I would like to,” he said, but a little too carefully, “very much.”

 
          
He didn’t offer a date. Father didn’t ask. But I felt him shrink back into himself, wounded.

 
          
So, slightly surprising myself, I took charge. “You and I can work out a date between ourselves,” I said to Master Hans. “We don’t want to bother Father with details. We can write to each other. You probably have a lot of commissions, but maybe toward the end of the summer . . .”

           
He was still looking torn: wistful, but faintly alarmed too. And then it occurred to me that he might not want to be seen going to Chelsea, or for that matter to my house, in the middle of town, where everyone saw everything and the walls had ears. I should be sensitive to that.

           
“Maybe we could all go and stay with the Ropers? Margaret lives in Eltham now, near the palace,” I added, on a burst of inspiration. “It’s beautiful. Well Hall, it’s called. She’s making a wonderful Kentish garden. You’d love it.”

 
          
I’d been right. He’d been scared. But he wanted to see us. His face cleared. He beamed, and I was aware of Father’s shoulders relaxing.

           
“Yes. Eltham. We’ll write,” Master Hans promised, and he leaned forward, almost as if he were going to start clapping me energetically on the shoulder. “I’ll make a fortnight to do it. I’ll enjoy it.”

 
          
It was only after we’d left and Father had turned downhill toward the river and I was slipping back home with my hood up that I saw, with my mind’s eye, the other memento mori that Master Hans had also built into his picture: one so simple and elegant that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it straightaway, and one that represented the biggest homage to Father of all. Those strong diagonal lines radiating from the eye-level point at the right of the picture, downward to the skull and upward to the crucifix, met at the picture’s rightmost edge: in the purple-brown velvet coat of the French bishop. All those portents of doom connected with religious discord and political disharmony came back to the same point.

           
A mulberry-colored gown with a mulberry pattern. Morus; Father’s favorite pun on his own name. Holbein hadn’t forgotten us, even if he was trying to build a future in the other camp, with the people who had tomorrow in their grasp. What his picture was saying, over and over again, was: Remember More.

 
          
He didn’t see Father primarily as the burner of Protestants he’d briefly become, the man I’d hated. Master Hans’s vision was bigger and more generous. His picture was mourning the vanishing world of intellectual tolerance that Father had once been part of. Master Hans, for all his long absence and silence, was our true friend.

 
          
I was so uplifted by the way things had turned out that it was easy to tell John about the meeting and the picture. Decorously, tactful as ever, he asked no awkward questions about how I’d made contact with Master Hans in the first place. “I’m pleased it made your father happy,” he said, when I’d got my bubbly story out, and there was a hint of real pleasure in his sky blue eyes at the sudden lightheartedness in me.

           
John loved Father.

 
          
And he loved it when I could overcome all my ambivalence about the man who had raised me and be happy with him, enough that he could forgive, or ignore, the way I must have kept him out of my secret plan to put the two other men together again. I might not have been so generous, I thought with a pang. I’d overlooked that easygoing generosity at the heart of him for so long, once I’d started to feel uncomfortable with his anything-for-a-quiet-life lack of energy and ambition, his reluctance to question the things in life I felt were wrong. But now everything suddenly seemed simpler. We only needed a flash of joy to fill our lives with sunlight. The moment of ease we shared that day might have been fleeting, but it seemed to mark a change for the better.

           
John pulled me to him in the bed that night, running his hands through my dark hair and over my breasts and murmuring how he’d missed me. I responded with a kiss and felt my body begin to tingle. When, what seemed like hours later, we drew apart, I could see starlight reflected in his eyes; when he kissed me and muttered “my love,” I whispered back, “I love you,” and meant it enough to make all the anxious silences and chills and hesitations of the 
last year vanish as if they’d never been.

           
It felt like at least the beginning of a new beginning. It felt as though he really might trust me again, however badly I’d betrayed him to Father. I slept soundly that night for the 
first time I could remember.

 
          
By the time we set off for dinner at Chelsea the next evening, I’d al
       
ready written to Margaret and Master Hans about when we might go to Well Hall. I was suddenly full of good cheer, with enough energy to join Tommy in a sliding race round the stone flags of our corridor until we both fell over screaming with relieved laughter.

           
The right time would be September, I thought: when the weather began to turn; when this summer of waiting was coming to an end. A trip to Eltham would be something to take Father’s mind off the time he was dreading most: the day when the royal baby that the new queen was carrying would be born and, with the first cry of a new prince to continue the Tudor dynasty, the king would have won the mad gamble on which he’d staked the future of
 
Christendom. And Father’s last hope that the false marriage and everything that had gone with it could somehow be undone would finally crumble to dust.

 
          
We have to learn to live with that future, I found myself thinking. If we expect less, we won’t be disappointed. We can do that. Perhaps even Father can.

 
          
Dame Alice bustled us into supper, old-fashioned style, with servants at the lower table and us sitting above them in the great hall in Chelsea.

 
          
I’d got so used to dining in our more intimate way, in the parlor, without eyes on us, that I didn’t like eating communally anymore. I’d learned to love privacy. But it was good to feel her embrace and see her twinkling eyes and merry, undaunted face.

 
          
There was no sign of Father yet. Just young John and Anne, Cecily and Giles, showing signs of the wispy tension that usually hung about us all these days: bitten fingernails; rictus smiles. Poor John: with no hope of advancement in a political career of his own, he was still living here as a child, even though he’d turned twenty and had a wife. But he was doing his stoical best to keep busy. Father was creating work for him. He’d got him translating bits of continental writing reaffirming the unity of the Catholic Church and restating the importance of the Eucharist in sacramental life.

           
The Rastells were going to publish it. No one liked to point out that they’d have to do a very thorough editing job on John’s imperfect translation; he looked stressed enough without being teased. Now that my own mood had lifted, I was more aware than usual of the rest of the family’s raised shoulders and forced cheerfulness as they waited for Father.

           
“He’s writing, still,” Dame Alice said mock-crossly to the younger generation, trying to dissipate the anxiety. “It’s all this fuss about the book. He’s been writing defenses for weeks. But the man’s got to eat. I’ll send for him.”

 
          
But he appeared before she could. And, even if he had been writing one of his many detailed letters to Cromwell’s men, explaining why his latest antiheresy outpouring, published at Easter, hadn’t actually been a veiled attack on the new direction of government policy, more tolerant toward heresy, there was no sign of it on his face.

           
His smile cheered everyone in the room and lifted their mood, just as it always had. “Welcome,” he said simply. “Shall we eat?”

 
          
But something wasn’t right about him. Meeting Master Hans hadn’t worked quite the same magic on him that it had on me. Once we were at table, he opened his Bible to choose a text to read to us in his usual way.

 
          
The book fell open, apparently by itself, at the Psalms. He glanced down.

 
          
Stopped. “So be it,” he said, and lowered his head to it. And something in his eyes made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

 
          
 
“Posuisti tenebras et facta est nox in ipsa pertransibunt omnes bestiae
 
silvae.
Catuli leonum rugientes ut rapiant et quaerant a Deo escam sibi,”
he read, almost in a whisper, so that the silence about him deepened and everyone drew forward to hear better. (“Thou hast, good Lord, set the darkness and made the night. And in the night walk all the beasts of the woods: the whelps of the lions roaring and calling unto God for their meat.”)

 
          
Dame Alice, who was usually slow to follow Latin, had no trouble with these verses. I got the feeling she’d heard them many times before.

 
          
Perhaps this was what he read for comfort when he woke screaming from his nightmares. Or perhaps this was the stuff of his nightmares. There was a sick look about her as she leaned forward to do one of her comical scolding routines: “Come, husband! That’s enough of your gloom! You’ll curdle the cream!”

 
          
From very far away, I saw the others frozen into their polite smiles; not wanting to say a word out of place; desperate not to do the wrong thing.

 
          
We could all see something was amiss. Under the table, I felt John squeeze my hand.

 
          
That’s when we heard the knock at the front door. First one, then a whole volley: so loud and insistent that they sounded like blows from an iron fist. They were almost louder than the race of my heartbeat.

           
I saw Anne Cresacre’s big round eyes widen until she looked like a terrified owl, and wondered through the drumming in my chest if I was wearing the same foolish expression.

 
          
One of the servants rushed to answer. We could hear his scurrying footsteps behind the arras; the creak and shriek of the bolts and bars; then more solid men’s footsteps coming back behind him.

 
          
The two newcomers who stepped stolidly through the door were strangers; men in cloaks.

 
          
“Sir Thomas,” one of them said in ringing tones, moving forward, feeling in his pouch for a document.

 
          
Father rose to his feet. A true man of public service, he’d somehow managed to put a politely welcoming smile back on his face. The rest of us stayed crouched, frozen in our chairs.

 
          
The man completed his stride across the room and up to the dais. He held out a sealed document. “From His Majesty,” he said, still too loudly.

 
          
Father took it but didn’t open it, and the inquiring look he gave his interlocutor was full of challenge.

 
          
“It says that you’re required to present yourself to the royal commissioners,” the man said, and, when Father didn’t respond, added, as sternly as if he were reading a death sentence: “at once.”

 
          
It was the book, I thought, with a terrible resignation gripping my heart; Father’s last challenge against the new political order; one blow too many in his lonely war. Cromwell wasn’t going to forgive him. It was the beginning of the end.

 
          
Very slowly, Father bowed his head. He still had a little smile playing on his face. Through the fear paralyzing me, I found myself thinking how I hated that perpetual little smile, which masked whatever he was really feeling and hid him from us. Very slowly, he got up.

 
          
Dame Alice rose to her feet too, returning to life as she stepped out of our immobile tableau of terror. There was nothing like a smile on her face: just utter determination.

 
          
“Wait,” she said, with breathtaking calm, addressing the man and the other one skulking behind him below the dais among the servants. “Sit down, both of you. I’ll need to prepare some things for my husband to take. Let us give you something to eat and drink while you wait.”