Portrait of an Unknown Woman (60 page)

 
          
The man who’d addressed Father—clearly the leader—paused for a moment. Father nodded at him. He nodded at Dame Alice.

 
          
“We’ll eat in the kitchen,” he said, and gestured at the servant who’d brought him in to show him the way.

 
          
There was dead silence in the hall as we listened to them clattering away. Just eyes moving from their fixed position staring at plates to snatch looks at the next person up or at Father, still standing with that absent smile on his lips, or at Dame Alice, looking fiercely round, as if willing everyone to stay calm in the face of catastrophe; just breath, carefully controlled, in and out, to stop the moments passing too fast into a future none of us could bear to enter.

 
          
Except for the sound of sobbing, which I heard from behind heartbeats and breath: a little whinny of hysteria, then a helpless, hopeless keening on a single treble note. I looked around for the source of the noise, but all I saw were blank faces staring back at me.

 
          
It seemed an age before I realized that the noises were coming out of my own chest, as if independently of my will. That it was my cheeks that were wet with tears I couldn’t stop flowing out of my wide-open eyes.

 
          
That everyone was staring at me because I was the only person in the entire room to display signs of grief.

 
          
“Meg,” Father said, and all the eyes turned to him.
The smile had
gone. There was a kind of softness in his eyes that I didn’t understand. There was a kind of hardness too. “My dear girl. Stop crying.”

 
          
I looked at him, made an effort to master my body’s rebellion, hiccuped, and fell silent. I felt John drop my hand, reach for a cloth, and turn to me to wipe the tears, very gently, from my cheeks.

 
          
“Meg. All of you,” Father said, and the silence deepened. He stood taller. “You mustn’t give way to fear. These are hard times for our household. You never know when you’ll need every ounce of courage you possess.” He paused. He was struggling within himself, finding it hard to say what was to come next.

 
          
“But it isn’t now,” he went on, still uncannily calm, but with strain visible on his powerful features. “That wasn’t real. It was just a rehearsal. Those men didn’t come from the king. I got them from John Rastell. They’re actors.”

 
          
Into the sudden buzz and movement at the servants’ table, Dame Alice turned furiously to her husband. Then everyone spoke at once. Everyone except me, that is. Now it was my turn to be frozen with shock.

 
          
“You mean—you haven’t been arrested?” I heard young John boom breathlessly.

 
          
“You hired actors?” Cecily yelped.

 
          
“You scared her,” I heard from next to me. My John’s voice, but a monotone whose murderous fury was utterly unfamiliar. “For nothing.”

 
          
Then there was a dark rush of air at my side, and too astonished to take breath, I became aware of John flying toward Father with a dangerous, wild-eyed look about him that I’d never seen before, drawing back a fist and hissing, “I’ll take that smile off your face!” and smashing him full in the jaw.

           
There was a dull thud. Father reeled on the dais, clutching at his face, spitting out blood. A tooth landed near his feet.

           
John stepped back too, holding his fist in his other hand, looking down in what seemed to be surprise at the blood on his own split knuckles.

 
          
Silence followed. Father recovered his composure first. Still holding a hand to his face, but with no apparent anger, he said through thickened lips to John: “So there’s still a touch of the wild boy in you after all.”

 
          
John just went on standing there, not responding, watching his own hands.

 
          
“Well, you deserved it!” Dame Alice squawked, suddenly finding her voice, and her outraged tones gave the rest of us a chance to take breath and move our frozen limbs again. “You scared us all half out of our wits! Don’t you dare tell me this is just one of your jokes!”

 
          
“Shh, wife,” he said, half soothing, half warning, making a visible effort to put down the hand that had been cradling his mashed jaw and turning slowly toward her instead, putting an arm round her stiff waist and a kiss on her red, angry cheek in front of everyone.

           
In horrible fascination, I stared at the bloody kiss mark on her face and his puffy, distended mouth going blue on one side. He took no more notice of his injury, but I thought he was almost relieved by the outbreak of rage on all sides; it was an easier emotion for him to manage than the grief that had threatened to overwhelm us before. He was performing now, before a courtroom of his own making, carrying us all along on the tide of our feelings toward the point he wanted us to understand.

           
“It wasn’t a joke. As I said, it was a rehearsal.

 
          
Some of you find it easy to put out of your minds how precarious our position here is,” he went on, and he included Dame Alice in the stern look he flashed around the room. “There’s nothing to joke about in what might become of us. We really are walking through the woods in God’s darkness. The sounds we hear on all sides really are lions roaring for their meat. Our ordeal might begin at any moment. You need to be prepared for the worst. We need to be ready to meet our fate with dignity.”

 
          
He was pale and set. There was no joking in his tone. And when his eyes turned to me and John, who was still standing up and looking stunned, they were almost accusing.

 
          
“I don’t want to see tears if it happens. I don’t want brawling. I want dignity. I want us all to take comfort from the knowledge that God will provide.” Then he softened, and sliding his body around John, came to stand by me. “Don’t unman me, Meg,” he said, more gently. “Will you promise?”

 
          
I nodded, so full of emotions I couldn’t name that I was incapable of words.

 
          
“Amen to that,” he said. “Thank you.”

 
          
Then he bowed and walked down the hall past the servants. “Thank you all for sharing supper with me,” he said from the doorway, with a strange return to everyday courtesy, “now I have work to do. If you’ll excuse me.”

 
          
No one knew what to say after he’d gone. Through the window, I could see his candle bobbing away toward the New Building. Our food was untouched on the table. But none of us had any appetite for meat.

 
          
“Well!” said Dame Alice. Even she was at a loss for words. She looked round at the goggle-eyed servants. “Finish your meal,” she said kindly to them, then turned to us. “Will you join me in the parlor, children?”

 
          
It was a relief to be away from all the eyes and the hubbub of excited conversation that broke out as soon as we walked away from the table.

           
John put an arm round me in the corridor and squeezed me comfortingly. “Well, at least we both disgraced ourselves!” he whispered, and although he spoke with a hint of humor I could still see a glint in his eye and tension in his muscles as he strode along—my first indication of the long-suppressed fighting instinct that I’d never quite believed so gentle a man could have. “You were quite right to cry. But let’s calm down now.”

 
          
I sniffed, partly comforted, and tried smiling back as I trotted along a bit faster, trying to keep pace with his seven-league strides. “Thank you for standing up for me . . . no one’s ever done anything like that for me before . . . does your hand hurt?” I asked, feeling an ache of proud tenderness for my defender.

           
But he didn’t care about his hand. He was still lit up with the force of his attack. “Not yet. It might later,” he said, baring his teeth in an unfamiliar, dashing, glittering buccaneer’s grin.

 
          
“Well, that was just the end!” I heard Dame Alice say as we reached the peace of the parlor, where a fire was burning, and everyone began settling in chairs and on cushions and muttering to one another in an odd mood, somewhere between excitement and panic. “I’d never have thought he could be so cruel! I declare the man’s taking leave of his senses at 
last!”

 
          
“I’m not so sure about that,” John said, striding over to stand next to her, beside the fire, jumping with newfound energy. And there was so much quiet authority in his voice now that every other voice in the room fell silent as we turned to him for an explanation. “I’ve got an idea about why he did it. But first”—he looked kindly down at Dame Alice, fuming in her chair—“tell me, do you know what the dreams he’s been having are about?”

 
          
She looked relieved to be asked. She’d been saying Father had been sleeping badly for weeks; but none of us had shown interest in knowing more until now. “It’s terrible,” she said frankly, and I noticed the blue rings under her eyes. “I don’t know what to do with him. He screams in his sleep. And he wakes up with his eyes staring open and the bed drenched in sweat. Sometimes he tells me things before he’s properly awake. Horrible things. About torturers. Sometimes he’s been on the rack. Sometimes they’re coming at him with knives to disembowel him. Sometimes he’s staring as they tear his heart out of his body and wave it in front of him. But as soon as daylight comes he won’t talk about it. He just pretends it never happened.

 
          
“I blame that Elizabeth Barton,” she went on. “The nun. The Maid of Kent. You know: the miracle woman. He’s been like this ever since he went to visit her. He spent a whole day alone with her. Praying. And he wouldn’t say afterward what they talked about. Just that she said that when the devil came to her he fluttered around her like a bird. But that’s 
when it all started. She’s been here twice since, trying to get to him. I showed her the door, of course. I wasn’t having her in my house, stirring him up with her talk. But he’s still having the dreams.”

 
          
Cecily and I exchanged glances. We thought the Holy Maid of Kent was a troublemaker and a rabble-rouser and probably a fraud. I had no idea what could have impelled Father to meet her.

           
It was many steps further down the road toward Catholic mysticism than I’d imagined him going—a long way toward what we’d been brought up to despise as superstition. I looked away from Cecily, not wanting to reveal my mind through my eyes, but I was aware of her furtively crossing herself.

 
         
Dame Alice wanted John to go on. “So why do you think he did it? The . . . thing . . . tonight with actors?” she prompted, and I could see her fury with Father had softened while she was describing his nightmares, though she still had the light of battle flickering in her eye. “You said you had an idea.”

 
          
“Because he wanted to show us he’s afraid, but he couldn’t find the words to tell us,” John said simply. “He’s an old-fashioned man at heart. He grew up in a time when people lived in the public eye all the time, and they each had their public role to play, and they did it perfectly. The only time you ever saw people wail and beat their breasts and display their feelings was on the stage. The mummers’ plays and all the holy days of pageants and disguisings and misrule were the only good excuse there used to be for a bit of riot and upheaval—the only chance for people to go wild.

 
          
So what I think is that—now he’s lost his own public role, and been left alone with his thoughts, and he’s trapped with all these terrors he doesn’t know how to discuss—he took refuge in the only way he knew to show us his feelings. He got in the mummers.”

 
          
Everyone was staring at John with dumbfounded expressions. Except the Dame. She was nodding, as if it made perfect sense to her. She and John were from the age of mummers too.

 
          
“You’re saying,” she said, and her face had softened, “that what he was doing out there was putting on a kind of mystery play for us of what’s in his heart." 

 
          
We’d never heard her so poetical.

           
“Yes,” John said, with a conviction that no one would gainsay. He was too obviously right. “I shouldn’t have hit him. I thought he was being cruel. But he must just be desperate.”

 
          
I saw tears gather in Cecily’s eyes and the dawning of sympathy on every other face. “That’s a clever idea,” Giles Heron murmured, and his well-modulated politician’s voice vibrated with respect for John. “I’d never have thought it out for myself.”