Dame Alice didn’t appear to notice John’s bemused air behind his quiet smile, his dark clothes, or the black rings under my eyes. She was off, romping back to the practical side of life, which gave her pleasure. “There’s going to be a lot of organizing,” she added affectionately. “Linens. Cooking pots. Cutlery. A housekeeper. Maids. And tapestries. Yes, we’ll have to do something about tapestries. It’s a freezing old barn after all; completely impractical, as I always said; you’ll spend all your days worrying about how to stop up all the drafts.”
“Where?” I said, stupid with happiness.
She peered at me, then at Father, looking at his feet now, with the small smile of a magician who’s performed a good trick on his face. “Husband,” she said in mock indignation. “You amaze me. Can you really not have told them?”
She turned back to me, shaking her head. “The Old Barge, of course,” she said, as if it had been obvious all along. “Your father thought that’s where you’d want to live once you were married. It’s your wedding gift.”
And when John and I both turned on Father, with a mixture of joy and disbelief, he had nothing to say, for once. Instead he folded us both into another of the clumsy new embraces that seemed to signify we’d all entered the happily-ever-after phase of our lives.
We married quietly, on a September morning with golden late-summer light pouring over us, exchanging rings at the door of Chelsea church.
The Ropers and Herons and Rastells were there, as well as Father and Dame Alice, two of the More girls and their husbands, young John More and Anne Cresacre (now betrothed themselves), and old Sir John, using a stick but propping himself as fiercely upright as ever, kissing us as we stepped away from the church and wishing us well for the future with his usual fierce stare. Elizabeth was unwell; she sent her regrets. I hardly noticed. We took the boat into town for the wedding meal afterward in John’s and my home-to-be, organized by Mary, our cook, and Dame Alice.
I watched the wild Surrey shore recede with each fall of the oar and rejoiced at the river water fouling up as we got closer to the landing stage and the jagged city skyline opened up to embrace us, and almost laughed as we picked our way over cobbles to where we’d spend our first night in our new house.
I was a little dizzy from the importance of the day, the heat, the tightness of my lacing, the lack of food, and the journey. John squeezed my shoulder and we exchanged glances before gazing up at the rambling stone facades on the corner of Bucklersbury and Walbrook, full of joy at the sight of that familiar alignment of tall windows and red-and-ocher bricks and high chimneys opposite the church with the ancient scars of tidemarks on its walls, the home of almost all our shared memories.
It was afternoon by then, and to Londoners who lived there every day the street must have seemed quiet. But our newly countrified ears could still hear the hubbub of the river from one direction and Cheapside from the other. To London eyes the people hurrying by in drab worsteds or brightly colored leggings and liveries would probably have seemed just the dregs of a busy morning’s marketing; but to my eyes they seemed a crowd.
And when Mad Davy, who it seemed was still selling nonsense remedies made of newt’s eye to the gullible, popped out from the alleyway beside St. Stephen’s Walbrook and yelled, drunk and half mocking, “It’s little Miss Meg back again! Welcome back, missus! Well done, Master Johnny!” and doffed his cap to me—before John stepped forward with a dark warning on his face and Father gave him a look stern enough to send the old fraud dashing back into his smelly hole, still yelling from behind the alley walls, “God bless!”—I felt as though the city itself had acknowledged my return with a knowing, cheery wink. Father and John were still chuckling together over Mad Davy’s outburst—“ ‘Master Johnny’ indeed!” Father said, laughing, shaking his head—as we clustered in the ewery to wash the traces of river grime from our hands before beginning the feast Dame Alice had set out for us in the hall.
And I still had Mad Davy’s cries ringing in my ears as John began spearing slices of swan and pork and chitterlings and slivers of apple and quince puddings to lay before me, and the toasting got going. That cracked voice seemed more real than this dreamlike feast surrounded by people wishing me and the love of my life an eternity of happiness together.
Yet it was all real, I began to see in the months that followed, just as it was real that whenever John half closed his pale, unreadable eyes and ran a finger down my arm or back, making me shiver with desire and turn my face up to him to be kissed, we could lock the bedroom door and melt into each other’s bodies and know that the only outsider who would notice would be the secretly smiling maid in the morning. I could still hardly believe it as I gathered in the sweet apples from the garden and watched the leaves go gold and hung the parlor with a copy of Father’s portrait, which Dame Alice had given us, and the map of the world that the Ropers had had made for us, and, with some doubt, the picture of me in the garden that Master Hans had worked on so quietly before leaving England. (I needn’t have worried: “That’s beautiful” was all John said innocently when he saw it. “Master Hans is a talented man.”)
The parlor became home too for our measuring pans for medicine and the three hundred books that John had amassed over the years. I set up a loom and made ribbons; I ground corn in the kitchen and picked at the lute and embroidered baby smocks. We’d become a part of the world. It seemed too good to be true.
John’s work at the College and with Dr. Butts, the king’s chief physician, gave our days and nights their perfect, regular shape. His days were spent away with the learned men of medicine, talking, reading, experimenting, treating the illnesses of the greatest men in the land.
He’d become as devoted to Dr. Butts—an absentminded old thing, who dribbled food down his front, scarcely noticed anything he couldn’t cut up or push medicine into, and spent his nights sitting up reading treatises by candlelight—as he’d ever been to Father. I thought he found Dr. Butts’s very lack of sophistication reassuring. As he said, the one thing he’d learned from his past was that he didn’t need to strive to live in the king’s smile—or risk being lost in the king’s frown. And there was no danger this doctor would ever attract the king’s close friendship, causing the kind of unnerving changes in our lives that the More household had experienced when royal recognition came Father’s way. Dr. Butts could never be a courtier.
Compared with the men of the mind who’d always gathered around Father, Dr. Butts just struck me as eccentric and woolly-minded and a bit of a show-off. But I suspended my disbelief because there was so much about medicine I didn’t know, and because John, whose medical knowledge was so complete after all those years of foreign universities, told me he admired Dr. Butts’s mind. “There’s nothing great about my mind, Meg,” he told me modestly. “I’m never going to have an idea so startlingly original that it will set men talking for years. I know my limitations: I’m a follower, not a leader. Still, I love working with these mighty intellects. Your father. Dr. Butts. It’s like warming yourself at a fire bigger than you could ever build for yourself.”
I thought he was being too modest. And I felt proud when I heard that he and Dr. Butts had begun corresponding with Andreas Vesalius, a Flemish student at Padua, and with Berengario da Carpi, the author of a commentary on human anatomy that they’d just read together, to explore the shortcomings of Galenic medicine. “It was your success in treating Margaret’s sweating sickness without draining off the bad humors in her that gave me the idea of writing to them,” John said generously. “It fascinated Butts. If you were a man, you’d probably be a far better doctor than I’ll ever be. You’ve got a real nose for truth. The fact that you’re a woman is probably a great loss to science. But”—he buried his face in my hair—“I don’t think I mind. Do you?”
He walked out of the house every morning in his dark cloak, after matins and a browse through his books and breakfast, kissing me on the lips and—if he timed it so that the maid had left the breakfast tabl
e and no one was looking—sometimes also down over throat and breasts or squatting down to run his mouth reverentially up over foot, ankle, calf, and the beginning of thigh, surprising me, laughing gently at my parted lips and flushed cheeks, and whispering teasingly, “Till tonight, my darling—wait for me,” and slipping away into the freshness of another day. All our talking was at night, in the quiet, by firelight or candlelight, with the ruins of laundered linen around us and bodies languid with satisfied love.
He was more quietly irreverent than I’d expected; readier to tell stories that had a note of mockery in them that made me smile. When I asked him about how Father was faring at court, he grinned and told me about the astronomy lessons Father had recently been inveigled into giving the eager king. “He sits up half the night on the roof at the moment, showing Henry how to find Mars and Venus. If you ask him about it, he likes to look modest and suggest that it’s all a bit of a chore. But you can see how pleased he is, secretly, that the king has noticed Thomas More offering a far higher class of assistance than Cardinal Wolsey. He’s taking to scheming for favor, as if he’d been born to it. My diagnosis: court sickness. However independent they seem, they all get it in the end.”
Not that our talking was much about anything but our quiet togetherness. He’d gone back to meeting any questions I asked about the past with “Never look back, Mistress Clement,” and a finger placed gently on my lips. And I was so lost in the contentment of those months that I didn’t try too hard to probe.
His reticence didn’t change even on the night he came home in the frosty dark at Candlemas to find me in the parlor, looking at Master Hans’s stern portrait of Father in red sleeves, with a handkerchief twisted in my hands and tears on my face.
“What is it?” he said from the doorway, before I’d even heard him, with the kind of alarm in his voice that twisted my heart; and he rushed to wrap me in his arms. “What is it, Meg?” and he pushed my face back to look into his eyes.
“I think we’re going to have a baby,” I sniveled, surprised myself by the sadness that had come on me, like a memory, at the same time as swollen breasts and fatigue and the strange hungry sickness that had me retching all day at the smell of food but longing to eat to settle my stomach too.
He hugged me tighter, but not so tight that I couldn’t see his face light up, as full of burning spring as St. Stephen’s doorway, which we could see through the window was full of candles. “I’m so happy,” he began, and I could hear the joy in his voice.
“But I can’t even imagine what it will look like,” I wailed, interrupting whatever he’d been going to say, full of my own woeful fancy. “I don’t remember what my own family looked like, I never knew yours, and when it’s born”—I crossed myself to ward off ill fortune—“if all goes well . . . I won’t even know who it looks like.”
“Shhh,” he murmured. Patted my stomach proudly. “Calm down,” he muttered, and I could see him thinking, Shh.
He made me ginger tea from the root at the bottom of the medicine chest, shaving it himself, pouring hot water on it and letting it infuse in a pewter mug. I was still sniffling but I took it, moved at the humility of his gesture, dabbing at my eyes again. He took away the handkerchief and kissed away the tears from under my eyes himself. “Now stop that,” he said very kindly, when he’d made me laugh a little despite myself. “No more tears. I’m going to tell you who our baby might take after.”
He lowered himself to the Turkish rug and sat leaning gently against my knee. He looked up at me, as encouraging as if he were sweet-talking a beloved child out of a tantrum, and raised one finger. “Our baby will be dark . . . and blue-eyed, like both of us,” he said. “He’ll have your pretty straight nose,” and the raised finger traced a line down the bridge of my nose. “And your creamy skin,” and he touched my cheek. “And your rosy lips,” and he touched my mouth.
“And he’ll have my long legs . . . and quick reflexes . . . and instinct for finding happiness with a good woman,” he whispered, twinkling up at me as he added, “but he won’t ask as many questions as his mother. He’ll be handsome and good and wise and happy, and it’ll be no thanks to anyone but you and me.” He tipped my face down toward his. “Remember?” he whispered, and laughed, and this time I laughed back, reassured, wanting to let my lonely fearfulness pass and share his mood. “It’s tomorrow that counts. Yesterday’s gone. Don’t fret about it.”
So we didn’t. I stopped trying to find out more. And all through that spring and summer we lived apart from reality in our own joy. We paid no attention the day the poor devout queen went on her knees in the divorce court and swore, in her Spanish-accented voice, that she had come to the king’s bed a virgin all those years before, or to the stories of the look of disgust on the king’s face as he publicly pushed her away. We took no notice when the proceedings petered out because of the papal envoy’s excuses. We didn’t turn a hair when a mob of market women marched off to the riverside house in London where Anne Boleyn was staying, hoping to do the “bloody French whore” some serious mischief, marching straight past our window to their encounter with the constables. We were hardly
aware of the stories of priests emptying their own churches of religious images to pre-empt the heretical vandals who might otherwise be doing it for them, or of parishioners mockingly sticking pins in statues they’d once revered to see if the statues would bleed, or of the parishes of All Hallows Honey Lane, St. Benet Gracechurch, St. Leonard Milkchurch, and St. Magnus taking their priests to the Star Chamber for illegally charging too much for holy offices.
We just slept and woke and laughed and made love and felt the baby grow and kick inside me until it seemed that our perfect happiness might really last forever. It was only after he was born that I got the first inkling that, after all, it might not.
It was a luminous autumn afternoon, with laughter in the small, brisk, pale gray clouds chasing across the skies outside. I’d had a fire lit in my bedroom. I could hear people talking in the street outside, but they were vague and muffled; I didn’t have the energy to focus on whatever they might be shouting at one another. I was sitting half up in my bed, hardly aware of the aches all through me, propped on one elbow, watching the tiny smooth face wrapped in white strain inside the curve of my arm and somehow ease himself closer to me without appearing to move, until he was snugly, miraculously, snuggling up against my breast and stomach.
We’d spent a night and a day like this, little Tommy and I, sleeping curled up together and waking and staring at each other in the blankness of wonder. When he opened his eyes they were huge and dark blue and full of intensity. When I saw his miniature fingers wrapping round my huge thumb, or his tiny head with its smooth dark fluff nudging against my breast, I felt my eyes open just as dark blue and intense. He had my eyes, the midwife said. He had John’s nose, though she politely forbore to mention that—a tiny, perfect, aquiline hook; John’s great beak in elegant miniature. It looked beautiful on his tiny face: incongruous, but proud. It took my breath away to see it. And he had his father’s generous mouth, darkish skin, and long, rangy limbs.
“Oh, he’ll be a handsome boy, this one,” the midwife said, winking at me with the shared joy of a successful birth.
The whole household was happy. I’d heard snatches of song from the kitchens that morning; and now, with the clank of water being heated for my bath in preparation to receive my husband, I could hear bursts of whispers so cheerful that they sounded as if everyone around me was on holiday.
There were tiptoes and giggles on the stairs outside. A familiar female voice downstairs whispered, “Shh,” and then, trying to stifle love and sound stern, “don’t, Tommy.” An alarmed burst of birdsong came from the great cage in the parlor, and a clear, piping toddler’s voice cried, “Tweet tweet! Birdies! Tweet tweet!”
When the two maids opened the door softly, to see whether I was awake before pulling the empty bath to its place by the fire, Margaret Roper peeped her head round too. She had little
Jane in her arms and her Tommy at her ankles, small and thunderous, as if he’d been dragged away from a great pleasure downstairs, and she was laughing. “Your chaffinches are in mortal danger,” she said merrily, ruffling her son’s hair, then came quietly to the bed and sat down beside me to stare at the baby. He looked like a doll compared to Jane, who had seemed a miniature until today but whose black curls framed what now looked like a giant face.
The baby blew bubbles and clutched at the finger Margaret put to his hand. “Look, Tommy,” she said peacefully to her little boy, who’d come to the bedside behind her and was staring at the newcomer with as much fascination as if a toy had moved. “It’s your new cousin. Another Tommy. Look, darling. Say hello.” And, as big Tommy reached forward to hold little Tommy’s hand and looked surprised at the baby’s grip, Margaret dimpled at him in pleasure, then slid her one free arm around me in a sideways embrace and kissed me.
“You look well,” she said gently. “Cheeks full of roses. Have you slept? How do you feel?”
I grimaced, half joking. “They say it was an easy birth,” I laughed weakly, trying to make light of it, knowing from my first rough attempts to arrange myself when they brought me water and a glass and put fresh sheets on the bed that I had dark bruises under my eyes and must still be a sight that would frighten children. No one seemed to mind, though.
There were only bright eyes and acceptance wherever I looked. “So who am I to argue?”
She nodded knowingly. “Thank God it wasn’t worse,” she said, and I had a sudden shock of understanding about what the agonizing two and three-day labors her tiny thin frame had endured with both her children might have felt like. I hugged her back, fiercely. “Thank you,” I whispered, full of half-disbelieving gratitude at so much unconditional love coming my way.
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