Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  “It’s all right,” he said calmly, and he began to pry free the blood-soaked leeches and bind up the wounds with my clean cloths. “Don’t worry. Just keep singing to her. She can hear you.”

  We cleaned her as best we could and turned her on her back again, with her mother propping her up and cradling her and a blanket over her nakedness. She was breathing better now—still noisily, but without panic—though she was still wringing wet and deadly pale.

  “Meg,” John said. “Come out. Take a rest. Stretch your legs. Save your strength.”

  I scrambled out, drenched myself and streaked with dirt and blood. It was almost surprising to see the familiar sight of the barn and the cauldron and the people cowering in the doorway. I hadn’t thought of any of them for so many hours. “We’ll bleed her again at sundown,” he said calmly. He looked hopeful.

  “I’m out of cloths,” I said. I couldn’t think beyond simple details.

  He put an arm under mine. He had courage enough for two of us. I felt some of his practical strength surging back into me.

  “Don’t worry. I’ve sent a woman to the stream to wash the first lot out. They’ll be dry in no time in this sun.”

  I walked up the lane in a daze. I’d already turned to come back, feeling the afternoon air freshen my mind, when I heard the wailing begin—the desperate, animal sound that meant Janey was dead.

  I ran back. They were still in the same position—the child cradled in her mother’s arms. But now it was the mother shrieking, “No . . . no . . . no!” as if the air was being sucked out of her lungs, and shaking the motionless little body, as if to will life back into it. And John was sitting behind the mother, embracing her in the same way she was embracing the dead girl. I made as if to join them; but it was him she’d warmed to and obeyed from the start, not me. He shook his head at me. “Find the boy,” he mouthed.

  I nodded. I went toward the crowd at the barn door, realizing exhaustedly that I didn’t even know his name.

  I didn’t have to. He was waiting, empty-eyed, standing alone. The other boys were scared to go near him. Falteringly, he stepped toward me. I had some idea of what he was about to feel.

  “Your mother needs you,” I said, as gently as I knew how. “I’m sorry.”

  We walked toward the house together in the last light. There were men behind us digging at the edge of the churchyard. I ached with fatigue and failure, though not enough to weaken my confused sense of wonder at being alive so close to death or my admiration for John’s valiant efforts to save that small stranger’s life. I was too tired to turn my attention to the specific reason that had brought John back. I was just glad he was there.

  “There was nothing else we could have done,” I said, trying to comfort him.

  He shook his head. “However much I’ve learned since Ammonius died, it wasn’t enough,” he said. “It’s never enough, what we know. Half of those people could be dead in days.”

  His voice was so bitter that I turned to stare. He was angry with himself for not saving that child. I’d never seen him angry before. But he was deep in his own thoughts. He didn’t notice.

  “And the rest of them will be calling it the curse of the Tudors. The hand of God, punishing the usurpers. As usual,” he said, perhaps to himself, much farther up the lane. His voice was bitterly contemptuous. “The same old superstitious claptrap. If only they remembered how much worse things were before.”

  “Father’s calling it an act of God too,” I said, panting slightly as I half trotted along beside him, trying to keep pace with his furious stride. “But he says it’s a divine punishment for heresy.”

  “I doubt that poor girl was to blame for either thing,” he snapped, and relapsed into angry silence. Feeling his defeat.

  It was many more steps before I found breath to speak again.

  “Are you coming to the house with me?” The thought seemed surprising. There’d been no prior agreement. We’d just both started walking that way. It felt the natural thing to do. But my question jogged him back into the present.

  “Yes,” he said, and he turned his face toward me with the beginning of a smile. “Your father invited me. The court is leaving Greenwich. London is so full of disease that the king is frightened. Your father thought I could be useful here, since Chelsea is getting so full of displaced people. He thought it would be helpful to have one of the elect of the College of Physicians on the spot.” The phrase was no sooner off his lips than he began to scowl again.

  “Though it didn’t do that child much good to be treated by one of the elect,” he said, and redoubled his speed, as if to punish himself further.

  But I pulled at his arm until he stopped, and stared until he was forced to meet my astonished gaze. “You’ve done it?” I mouthed, feeling the world spin around. “You’ve actually got in? And he’s said you can come to us?”

  He stopped scowling. Suddenly he smiled with almost unbearable sweetness and the sky came back into his eyes and he looked straight at me. “Yes. I have. I set out here this morning so proud,” he said, in a softer voice. “I couldn’t wait to tell you what a great doctor I’d become—truly worthy of you.” He grimaced and shrugged, but his rage had passed; there was just wistfulness on his face now. “Well, it seems I’m not such a great doctor as all that after all. But yes, I’ve passed the test your father set.”

  And he put two trembling hands on my shoulders and his face softened into something like love. “So if you still want me, Meg, I’m yours.”

  There were so many ways I’d imagined responding to this news. But there was no place on this day, when the disease had touched us, for excesses of joy. I nodded my head, still filthy and aware of the stigmata of death on us both, but comforted by his seriousness. “Yes,” I said quietly. “I want you. Let’s go home.”

  “Ah—a new arrival,” Father said calmly when John walked through the door behind me, as if there were nothing odd about the sudden appearance of this guest at the house. He didn’t seem to have noticed our sweaty, dusty clothes either. “Welcome back, John.”

  I stared at him, wondering at the complex thought process that must lie behind that calm welcome, wondering whether he guessed that I knew the deal he’d struck with John, wondering whether he’d think it necessary to mention it to me, and if so when, but he was too busy embracing his visitor to meet my eye. I stared at Dame Alice too, who was bustling around in the background, supervising a pair of maids carrying a bundle of linen upstairs and not really concentrating on us. “You’ll need more things for the east bedroom now too,” she was saying to them, very matter-of-factly. “And put a bowl of water in there too.” She didn’t have time to look at me either, but she wasn’t the same quality of blank-faced diplomat as Father, and I guessed from the quietly pleased look in her eye that John’s arrival wasn’t as much of a surprise to her as it had been to me.

  “There will be supper in about an hour,” she said, “or are you hungry now, John? I could get something cold brought out to you if you’re famished from your journey?”

  John shook his head, unable to think of food after what we’d spent the afternoon doing. “Are there other guests?” I asked, wondering why the maids were carrying around so much linen and water. She smiled more broadly, waving the maids away. “Master Hans has sent word he’ll be here within a day, and Will has just arrived with Margaret from London,” she told me happily.

  “We’ve been at the barn,” John was saying to Father, not paying attention to our domestic chitchat. “I met Meg there. And I’m afraid there’s bad news.”

  Dame Alice stopped talking. I saw her take in my dusty, stained appearance for the first time. Father and she both stepped closer.

  “A child died this afternoon,” John went on. “Suddenly.”

  “A runaway from Deptford,” I added. “A girl of five or six.”

  Even now there was no real surprise. But I saw dread etch its acid lines on both parents’ watching faces. There was a long silence while they consid
ered what it might mean for us that the disease laying waste to London had reached this quiet country place. Then they both spoke at once, with the kind of simplicity that made you forget every trick they’d ever played with your heart, and love them.

  “God rest her soul,” Father said. “Was it the sweat?” But he knew the answer.

  “Are they burying her straightaway?” asked Dame Alice—the practical question of someone worrying about the spread of disease. “Are there others with her?”

  At a hushed supper, at which we all felt as close as friends, Father offered prayers for deliverance and we echoed his thoughts with amens. There is no safety but God’s will, he said. John and Will had nothing good to tell us about how things were in the city—the streets half deserted, the shops and taverns boarded up, the apothecaries’ market full of desperate people.

  And Father prayed for Elizabeth and William and Cecily and Giles, all still far away in their new homes. “How I want everyone to be safe; I wanted you all to be safe here with us,” he said. “But there’s no point anymore in begging them to come here. All we can do is commend them to God and pray for everyone to be spared. We are helpless before God.

  “You must stay for as long as you want to and need to,” Father added, in a more everyday voice, and his gesture included John, who had sat down next to me, on the other side of Margaret, and was paying equal amounts of quiet attention to listening to Father’s every word and filling my platter and looking at me. Quiet, long looks. And I was looking back at him in the same way, and whenever I passed him dishes of this or that—Dame Alice’s lark pie, I noticed, catching sight of one from what seemed very far away—our hands found themselves brushing against each other.

  “John,” Father went on. “I’m glad you’re here. You’ll be needed. And I’m glad you’ll have Meg to help you.”

  John caught my eye again now and held my gaze for a second longer than necessary. Modestly, blushing at the nakedness of his look, I lowered my face.

  We walked in the garden after supper. It was hot, and there was no wind. The night sky was dizzy with stars and the air was full of the sticky scent of the first roses and we could hear the rush of the river in front. It was drunkenly, impossibly beautiful. Behind us, though, we knew there’d be the distant fires of the village if we turned to look. And, invisible now, the small grave of the small girl; and the weeping of the mother; and the terror of the young boy; and the hostility of the others in the barn, with the cloud of disease on them.

  None of it stopped the fire inside me: the slow melting, the agonizingly private memories of pain all muddled up with the possibilities of pleasure, the way I felt the strong arm around my waist with every inch of my being.

  “We shouldn’t be out here so late,” I said, trying to sound firm.

  He sighed. I couldn’t see his face, so high above mine, so close—just the angle of a firm chin, just the tightening of his fingers against my waist and the instinctive knowledge that he was as near as I was to nudging my mouth against his and losing himself in a kiss under the swimming stars.

  “You’re right,” he said. “We need to be back there early in the morning. We should get some sleep.”

  He stepped back. I shivered. But I had only a fraction of a second in which to feel that sadness of his body leaving mine before he’d taken me back into his arms, unresisting, with the quietest of laughs, that even wrapped up inside his embrace I could only guess at having heard.

  “Well, in a minute, maybe,” he whispered, and I could just see the way one side of his mouth was curling up in half a smile. “I can’t leave just yet.” And he bent his head another inch toward me and covered my lips with his as my hands crept unbidden into his hair and pulled his head closer still.

  The gravediggers were at work again on the edge of the churchyard. Four of them, two in the pit, three or four feet down, with piles of fresh earth thrown up by its sides. They were sweating already from the rhythm of their work, although the air was still fresh, and they had kerchiefs knotted on their heads against the morning sun. The hole they were digging was bigger this time.

  John stopped by them, a question on his face.

  Their leader shook his head. “Just in case,” he said, and crossed himself.

  We walked faster.

  The barn was empty. Boys were dragging logs down to the other end of the five-acre field, where the fire and the cauldron had been moved.

  The hungry were sitting down there, in the shade of the hedgerow. Even from the barn we could hear their buzzing, as angry as swarming bees.

  Outside the barn, by the stinking trench with its buzzing insects, the only people left were the mother from Deptford and her boy. He must have brought more water up from the stream by himself. Two leather buckets nearly as big as he was caught the sun in flashes. He was as pale as ever, standing helplessly to one side with his thin little arms trembling in the light. He looked as though he might have been standing there all night. But she was red-eyed and wild-haired, with horror on her face, squatting on the ground underneath her blanket roof, wrapping herself in scraps of blankets, then pulling them off, half mad with grief and fear. She saw us and her eyes lit up as she flung herself toward us. “You got to help my boy,” she implored. “Those bloody bastards won’t let him near. They gone down there. They took his bowl off him. How’s he going to eat?”

  “Calm down,” John said, and he lay her down under the biggest blanket and began to wipe at her with one of my cloths. It wasn’t just grief and fear that were driving her mad. The sweat was beginning to come. “We’ll see to it.”

  I left him, and the boy, and the woman. I walked down to the cauldron, with its greasy bubble of vegetables and a pigeon carcass bobbing around on top. I was aware of my feet treading heavily on nettle and burdock and cow parsley and buttercup. I was aware of the hiss of hostile looks. Roger the miller stepped forward from behind the cauldron when I reached the little knot of people.

  “Give me a bowl of soup, Roger,” I said evenly.

  “Send ’em away, miss,” he answered, showing his last two black teeth. “They’ve brought death with them. We want them out of here.”

  “The soup,” I said. “Now.”

  He shook his head. His big meaty hands were playing a strangling game with the rope knotted round his waist.

  “She’s sick already,” I said. “She’s in no state to be moved.”

  He crossed himself. But he shook his head again.

  I stepped forward and took the bowl I’d seen on the ground by him. “Don’t question the will of God,” I said angrily. He looked unsettled.

  I filled the bowl from the cauldron myself. He didn’t stop me. “I’ll take the boy with me when I leave,” I added, and turned my back on him. I didn’t think the mother would live.

  The boy never ate the soup. His mother was already in the throes of the sweat by the time I got back. I put the bowl down on the ground. John was cutting her shift away. I nearly said, Don’t bleed her, but I stopped myself: what was my basic schooling in herbal remedies, after all, compared with his years of study and his confidence with his patients? She didn’t complain. Didn’t cry out. Didn’t shy away from the blade that was taking the black blood out of her. Fainted, as she was supposed to. But she didn’t come round either. Mary from Deptford was dead within half an hour of our arrival. The boy went on standing there, not moving, looking down in bewilderment at the brown-stained blankets as John and I got up with the stink of finality on us. He only came up to my waist.

  I left John to arrange for the woman to be buried. It wouldn’t take long, since they’d already dug the grave before she got sick. They’d be glad to tip her in and cover her up. They’d feel safer now she was gone.

  I didn’t discuss what would come next with John either. I just took the boy’s hand and began to lead him back up the lane. I didn’t know what to do with him. I couldn’t bring him to the house. I couldn’t turn him loose.

  Scarcely aware myself of where I wa
s going, I found myself standing by the river with the unresisting child, then opening the door of the western gatehouse. The irons had gone, but there was still a scrap of blanket on the floor.

  “You can lie down on that,” I said, hearing my voice sound more rough than kind. He stood, staring. “You’ll be safe here,” I added, rummaging in my bag. There wasn’t much in it: the clean rags I’d brought out for today, the bottle of willow-bark infusion I always carried, and a piece of bread.

  “I’m going to get you some water,” I said. “There’s bread for you here. And I’m going to give you some medicine.”

  I fetched in the gardener’s pail of water, sweating myself from the heat.

  The child’s stare was unnerving. “Sit down,” I said. “Drink this.” And I held out the bottle. He didn’t want to take it at first, but I put his hands on it and guided it to his mouth. And he drank it down. “Now lie down,” I said. “Cover yourself with this blanket, and keep as still as you can. I’ll come back this evening.”

  He was still staring blankly as I pushed the door shut. Outside, I arranged the chain over the door so it looked locked. And I strode off—not wanting to berate myself for not knowing enough to save the sick, but full of an angry vigor that I put down to pity—back toward the house.

  I couldn’t eat. But I went in for the midday meal anyway. It was time. It was a kind of relief to do what was expected of you in civilized society—an antidote against the void that had opened up beneath my feet during the day. Margaret saw me first. “Where’s John?” she asked. I shook my head, beyond words. She understood without needing to be told that something bad had happened; she put an arm around my shoulders.