Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  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.

  “You’re more fragile than you seem, little Meg,” he’d whisper; and I was partly reassured to know he still felt guilty at having deceived me and was hoping to win me back gradually, through gentleness.

  Now, as we weighed and measured and compared the symptoms of my poor and his rich patients, consulting his books for ideas or discussing whether oil of scorpions really could help against headaches, that shared enthusiasm began to deepen our relationship again from the grim banality of the winter.

  I started staying downstairs again when Dr. Butts dropped by too, and I surprised myself by beginning to feel almost fond of the old man, for all his snobbish talk about expensive medicines for the rich, for all my hunch that he wasn’t the great doctor he liked to think. It was the stories John had told me about him protecting protégés with Lutheran sympathies and visiting Wolsey that had first won my heart. He was brave, after his fashion. I was coming to appreciate his kindness too. I liked it when Dr. Butts came sniffing at my mixtures, offering advice that was always kindly meant and sometimes helpful; and John would look relieved when I thanked him prettily for it.

  I was doing my best to emulate Margaret’s genius for finding contentment in life as I found it. She’d made me feel it was foolish to worry over whether John’s mind was second best. I was trying to conquer that feeling, just as I was trying to find ways to rebuild trust with John. Even if it felt imperfect now, I kept reminding myself, adding a pinch of something else into my medicine, that all my dreams had come true. I had the husband I’d wanted and the home I’d wanted, and Tommy too, who illuminated my life in a way I’d never even dreamed possible. Surely I could learn to live with the ways in which reality differed from the dream. Surely we could find a compromise.

  If I still felt secretly impatient that John and Dr. Butts weren’t working on any big scientific theories, beyond the correspondence with the foreign scholar that had arisen out of my idea, I tried to stifle it. How would Margaret have found contentment here? I wondered; and I was pleased with myself when I hit on the notion that it might help them, and me, if I suggested more thoughts for them to feed into their correspondence with Vesalius.

  Dr. Butts’s pale eyes lit up with excitement, and he began rubbing his hands under his beard on the night I said casually, “Why don’t you ask him to look into how much human anatomy Galen really knew?”

  And John laughed in astonished delight, as if I’d hit on an important secret (although in fact it was commonplace that the Galenic theories handed down to us were all based on experiments with pigs, not people).

  I went on: “It might be less than we think.”

  “You’re an iconoclast, Meg,” John said, and with a generous laugh, “but you’re quite right. Why didn’t we think of that ourselves?”

  As I began to feel more comfortable again in my marriage, I found myself able to appreciate the easy, humorous way John behaved around his new mentor. I surprised them one evening roaring over a story about a servant at the College of Physicians, Eddie, who’d told them a long story when he’d been taken on, about the wife who’d died at Worcester two years before, and his bitter prayers at her grave, but who’d been caught out in his lie when the supposedly dead wife had come looking for him just after they’d given him permission to marry again. There was something touching about the way they both turned to me as soon as they saw me, eager to share their story with me; the way each capped the other’s phrases and both enjoyed the other’s jokes.

  “And then he said, ‘Well, if she’s alive I’m a lucky man, because she’s a good woman,’ ” Butts chortled.

  “And Butts told him: ‘Well, you’re not such a good man if you’re about to take another wife. Didn’t you tell me she was dead?’ ” John picked up.

  “But Eddie kept his wits about him. He didn’t bat an eyelid at that, just said, deadpan, ‘Well, that’s what they told me in Worcester.’ That made Butts cross. ‘So you admit you were lying when you told us both that you were at her grave yourself?’ he said.

  “And do you know what he said then?” Butts spluttered, and they both started snorting at the memory: “ ‘Well, of course I was there—but I was much too upset to look inside.’ ”

  On other nights, we were alone. As if he’d never stopped, John gently went back to filling those evenings with the stories he and Dr. Butts heard every day about the court’s cliques and plots and counterplots. The queen’s men were Father’s friends—the Duke of Norfolk, the Imperial Ambassador Chapuys, Bishop Fisher, Bishop Stokesley—ardent Catholics to a man, but their power was on the wane. The growing ranks of Father’s enemies included almost everyone around Anne Boleyn, whose beauty and power grew by the day, although the matter of the king’s divorce was still stalled. John laughed noncommittally when he said that Anne Boleyn had told one of Queen Catherine’s Spanish ladies that she

  wished all Spaniards were in the sea, that she didn’t care a fig for the queen and would rather see her hang than acknowledge her as her mistress. The most important of the lady’s emerging circle of supporters was an outsider at court: Thomas Cromwell, a self-made man, a blacksmith’s son from Putney who, before he entered Cardinal Wolsey’s service, had been a mercenary in Italy and a wool stapler in England and married an heiress. He had survived Wolsey’s arrest and death and somehow dug himself in as an influential member of the king’s council, although he didn’t yet have any formal titles showing the extent of his power. His sympathies were with the Bible men, like Anne Boleyn’s; he was the kind of man who wouldn’t think twice about helping the king get out from under the pope’s control if it would help move the king’s marriage forward (and advance his own career). “He has fierce little hawk’s eyes,” John said, looking anxious. “But he’s a subtle man. A manipulator. A politician to rival your father. And he’s out for your father’s job.”

  Finally, on a fresh April evening when there was birdsong on the air again, I began to feel I’d distanced myself too much from my husband through my secrets and my discontents—that I’d made myself the deceiver, while he, for all the secrets of his past, was offering nothing but innocent love. John and I walked under the budding apple trees together and he brought in a clump of primroses to scatter on our bed. When
he pressed himself to me I murmured, “I’m tired,” but my heart wasn’t in it anymore; we’d been estranged for too long, I thought, finally embracing him back. It was time to make peace.

  Afterward he murmured “Thank you,” and when he got up in the morning he spent longer than usual fussing around my side, tucking the quilts around me and kissing my head with a concerned look on his face. “Stay inside, my love,” he whispered. “You’re so tired these days. And you’ve got so thin. Take a rest. Get your strength back.”

  I almost did. But some instinct—some distrust of that concerned look on his face—told me not to stay at home. A thud in my heart told me I’d be missing something if I did. So once he’d gone and Tommy was tottering around in the kitchen with the nurse, I dressed and went out into the street. Which is where I found Davy, waiting to show me evil set loose in the streets of London.

  14

  The street was empty. It was as if there was a holiday. There were no apothecaries out today—just Davy, sitting in the church doorway with his bottles.

  “You’ve come,” he said as I came out, as if we’d agreed to meet. “Let’s go.”

  We walked. There was a lift of life in the air and people crowding down Cheapside all in the same direction. The crowd thickened below St. Paul’s as we turned north toward the steeple of St. Bartholomew’s Church and the hospital. I didn’t like to break the spell: the sunlight, the smell of spring.

  “Where are we going?” I asked in the end. He didn’t answer. It was a stupid question anyway. I could see we were heading for Smithfield.

  The crowd was getting solid now. We had to use elbows to jostle through the burghers and errand boys. A stake was set up in the place of execution. There were a lot of horsemen about, clanking their spurs, and the bench for the gentry was packed. We stayed with the common people.