“All you need is a really ringing endorsement,” Erasmus was adding, and the gray eyes had a mischievous glint in them now. He edged toward Holbein on unsteady legs. “May I see your work?” he added inconsequentially, dodging round the easel.
Before Holbein could stop him, the old man was staring straight at the picture. He nodded and picked up a silverpoint pencil. “Something like this,” he added, and grinned, and leaned down to write at the bottom of the canvas.
Holbein nearly snatched the pencil out of his hand. No one had ever dared do this to his work. But he stopped himself. It was Erasmus, after all, defacing his own likeness. So, in an agony of resentful indecision, Holbein restrained himself and peered round Erasmus’s shoulder to see what he was doing.
There were four lines of Latin under the drawing. Holbein drew in his breath as he made out the agonizingly difficult writing: “Pallas Apellaeam nuper mirata tabellam . . .” His eyes widened.
What Erasmus had written was: “Pallas, recently admiring this Apellean picture, says that the library must keep it forever. Holbein shows his Daedalus-like art to the Muses, just as the great Erasmus shows a wealth of the highest intellect.”
He was still holding his breath. He called me Apelles, he thought. He called me Apelles. He made an effort to let air out of his chest.
“Will you really write that?” he asked, hardly daring to believe his luck. “On the picture? About me?”
“Will you prove me right?” Erasmus asked, and twinkled merrily back at him. “Will you go back to London?”
16
Events moved fast after Bainham’s execution. As April drew to a close, Father’s enemies closed in for their own kill.
We were silently at war at home too, in that tumultuous month. When I looked at John’s face now I could no longer see the beauty that had once pulled me into his arms. I recoiled in horror at even the memory of that—of having loved his sweetness, his softness, his sadness. It made my gut churn almost as much as the horror I felt for Father’s descent into active evil. All I saw in John’s features now was glassy-eyed, sinful stupidity; a cowardice and passivity that amounted to acquiescence in Father’s sin.
So I refused to look.
He went on sleeping elsewhere. I didn’t ask where. I stopped eating with him, avoiding dinner and supper and taking trays in my bed in the morning with the excuse that I was unwell (not entirely a lie; I was racked by the cramps in my stomach as the pennyroyal took effect and the untimely blood that might, in other circumstances, have made a baby came drenching out of me). I stalked out to church every morning with Tommy trotting sleepily beside me, avoiding any room where I heard footsteps, in case they might be John’s, to pay my respects to my God.
Later, once I’d settled Tommy with his nurse and his toys in the kitchen or the garden, I’d stalk out again alone, with my basket on my arm, to meet the gray-faced yet oddly comforting Kate and start our day’s perambulations among the rooms and tenements of her Bible brethren. It might have seemed odd to anyone else but Kate, the only person who knew of it, but it was the most honest compromise I could come up with while my head was still whirling with the horror of all I now knew. I’d find a clearer way later, perhaps; confide in one of my family, except that Margaret was away at Esher and there was no one else who would do.
Guidance will come, I muttered.
God will provide.
Meanwhile, my mixture of Latin worship and pastoral care for the church’s enemies was the best I could do.
Visiting the brethren meant I knew every rumor in London. Tiny George, the old man in the blanket cloak who’d said at my first meeting at Davy’s that Scripture had become sweeter to him than honeycomb, and to whom I made a point of dropping off a little dish of honey whenever I could, was a mine of information. George lived in an attic above his married daughter’s rooms at the cathedral end of Cheapside, and spent most of his days hanging around St. Paul’s churchyard, listening to street gossip, when he wasn’t slipping up to Greenwich to hear the furious theological debates that sermons at the Chapel Royal were becoming.
I didn’t think George knew any more of my name than “Mistress Meg,” even now, but he’d long ago stopped being scared of me. When he wasn’t praying, he liked nothing better than a long chat about the latest events. I was interested to see, now we were dropping in on him regularly to change the poultices on his leg ulcer, that he seemed to have stopped being scared of anything. I was always catching his rheumy eyes dancing with mischief and a hope I’d never imagined seeing on a Bible man’s face.
It was through George I found out that Father was losing his battle against Thomas Cromwell—the rival royal servant who, unlike Thomas More, was willing to do whatever it took, even if that meant abandoning the Church of Rome, to marry the king to Anne Boleyn.
The story George whispered to us, pulling eagerly at our bread and honey on a glorious May morning, was this: a man Father had interrogated as a heretic—one of Cromwell’s men—had escaped abroad and was publicly denouncing Father as a torturer. Father realized he couldn’t work with Cromwell anymore. The rivalry between them was too open. He tried to resign. The king wouldn’t let Father go. Thomas More was too famous to be allowed to show public lack of confidence in royal policy.
But Cromwell was out to get him. Cromwell was too clever to attack Father directly; instead, he was pushing the king to abolish the ecclesiastical courts where Father’s friends, the bishops who supported Queen Catherine, dispensed Catholic justice. If Henry did that, and took all legal powers in the land for himself, he’d be able to push through his divorce. Almost more important for Father was that if there were no more ecclesiastical courts, there could be no more burnings. The bishops would no longer be able to make arrests for heresy, and Father’s entire career as chancellor and prosecutor of heresy would be undermined.
“Cromwell will have beaten bloody More fair and square,” as George put it, licking his fingers happily to get the last of the honey off, “and we’ll be safe forever.”
Hope was making the brethren as bold as hungry ravens, and fear was having the same effect on their opponents. At Greenwich the next Sunday, in front of the king, a preacher spoke openly in favor of the royal remarriage. That so infuriated the next preacher, Henry Elstow, that he lost his temper in the pulpit, making George and his daughter and all the others crammed inside gasp uneasily and crane their necks to see how the king would respond.
‘You’re trying to establish the royal succession through adultery,’ Elstow yelled. ‘And you’re betraying the king to eternal perdition by doing so!’
“You could have heard a pin drop,” George recalled pleasurably. “The king didn’t move a muscle. But the Earl of Essex was sitting next to him, and he got up and yelled back: ‘You shameless friar! Hold your tongue or you’ll be sewn up in a sack and thrown into the Thames!’
Elstow didn’t turn a hair. ‘Keep your threats for other courtiers,’ he said. ‘They don’t scare us friars. We know we can get to heaven by water as easily as by land.’ Bold as brass, he was.”
“Well I never,” Kate murmured, wrapping up yesterday’s poultice and dropping it into the basket. “They’re properly rattled, aren’t they?”
Davy woke us one May morning with a scream. “Even the king hates them! Even the king thinks they’re more Roman than English!” he was bawling, and the traders eddying around him were bawling raucously back.
I rushed to my window. John’s head pushed out of the next window at the same time, tousled and half asleep, ready to yell something cross and pithy to the unruly street people about keeping their noise down. Then he realized what Davy must be saying.
“What are you talking about, Davy?” he yelled down.
“The king’s order, Dr. John,” came Davy’s insolent, cracked voice. “He’s told the bishops to give up their independent courts. It’s good-bye to the princes of the church. And no more burnings. About bloody time too.”
John scratched his head a
nd nodded it two or three times. “I see,” he said, smiling in a good imitation of calm. “Well, don’t do that with your cap too often or you’ll drop it in the sewer.”
But there was no smile on his face when he walked into my room, unbidden, just dread without words. I felt it too. It was enough to suspend the hostilities between us. We stumbled into our clothes and rushed downstairs.
We walked out of the house together in a daze and wandered down Cheapside and to St. Paul’s Cross.
There wasn’t a priest anywhere to be seen, but there were people pouring into taverns all along Cheapside and down Ludgate Hill, laughing and joking and shouting for joy and drinking. “Do you know what Anne Boleyn’s had embroidered on her linen?” I heard one market woman squawk cheerfully. “ ‘It’s going to happen whether you like it or not.’ She’s a clever little fortune-hunter all right.”
Davy saw me pass as we left the house and touched his cap ironically.
He had a beer in his hand.
John didn’t go to Dr. Butts. I didn’t go out with Kate. We stayed at home.
We sat in the garden, consumed with our separate anxieties, in what passed for companionship. We watched Tommy play under the apple blossoms and thought our two sets of parallel thoughts. At midday, after we’d watched him eat but not been able to manage much ourselves, a note was delivered from Father saying he would call later, on his way home to Chelsea.
While John went to his parlor and pretended to read, I spent a few hours in the kitchen, feeling unreal, supervising the preparation of supper. Happy summer food. Yesterday’s bird and leg of ham. Fresh greens. A dish of soft buttery egg. White soup with almonds. Junket. And I went out and bought Tommy a jumble from somewhere in the fizzing crowd.
He liked the hard, curly dough and the dusting of seeds. He was enjoying himself on what must, to him, genuinely seem a holiday.
It would be the first time I would see Father since James Bainham’s burning.
I’d spent the sunlight hours feeling stabs of pity for him finding himself in today’s impossible position; I’d been imagining him coming broken to the house, asking humbly for advice; I’d imagined myself pleading, with warm tears in my eyes, for him to resign, and him softly agreeing and taking me in the embrace of a true father. I’d been surprised at the warmth that these mental pictures brought unbidden to my heart.
But when Father turned up, his smile seemed as big and warm and all-embracing as ever, and his gestures as confident.
His apparent confidence lit us up as his man took his outer robe and John poured drinks—water for Father, wine for us—and led us into the garden. I couldn’t see what was in his heart. I was secretly relieved when, as soon as we were alone, the smile switched off.
“This is a terrible business,” John said sympathetically, putting an arm on Father’s back as I hung sullenly behind, watching.
Father nodded. He said nothing. He walked on, with John’s hand resting on him, looking straight ahead.
“Our Saviour says that the children of darkness are more politic in their way than are the children of light,” he said, in a quiet voice from which all emotion had been stripped out. “That’s how it seems to me now.”
“The court is full of traitors,” he added with more obvious bitterness. “And Convocation is full of fools. I’ve never seen so many bishops so negligent of their duty. I took this job thinking I could advance the affairs of Christendom. But now . . .” He paused, then seemed to lose heart. “But now.” And he stopped.
He composed himself and turned back toward the house, pacing himself so that John’s hand, which he hadn’t seemed to notice, nevertheless stayed lightly on his shoulder. But he didn’t even glance at either of us. I thought he might be struggling to make his voice stay even.
“I feel myself growing old.”
He wasn’t asking for a response from either of us, so we didn’t give one. We ate in silence. I felt every pair of servants’ eyes curiously on Father.
“Delicious,” he said mechanically, praising the bird and the ham. But he didn’t touch the meat on his plate.
John waited until we’d shut the parlor door on the eyes and ears before saying, with his face full of almost unbearable compassion, “You know we’ll support you whatever you decide to do.”
My lips tightened. I didn’t agree. There was only one thing I wanted Father to do, even if his defeat today meant he could no longer burn heretics, and that was to resign.
“There is still so much to do,” Father said. There was a gleam in his eye again, a gleam I hated. I could see he was going to ignore failure and stay on.
“You should resign,” I said into the silence, surprising myself almost as much as the other two. They turned to face me, with eyes wide open.
“You’ve done enough, Father. Your conscience should be telling you that.”
John stepped half in front of me, flashing me a warning look. But Father stepped round him to look me in the eye.
“Meg,” he said, with a hint of reproof, and the smile that didn’t reach his eyes touched his lips. “What do you know about politics?”
I said, stubbornly, ignoring my racing heart: “I don’t. I just know about burnings.”
John gasped. “Meg hasn’t been well,” he said hastily to Father.
“Yes. It made me ill to watch James Bainham die,” I snapped back, suddenly shaking with feeling I hadn’t managed to suppress. I felt my cheeks flush. I stepped forward to confront them.
They were wary now. Seeing me with new eyes, as the aggressor, the initiator. Their fear scared me. But I liked it too.
It was interesting seeing what they did next. John was still there, but it was as though he faded backward into the shadows while Father stepped forward. His jaw was out. He put his hands on his hips, mirroring my gesture. I wasn’t of his blood; it must have been the years we’d spent living together, but I could have sworn that the angry man in front of me looked, at this moment, uncannily like me. He was certainly as ready as I was to give fight.
“He had to die,” Father shot out. “He was spreading filth that would damn other people to hellfire.”
“It wouldn’t!” I shot back. “It was his own business what he believed! It’s you who’s risking hellfire by mistaking yourself for God!”
We stared into each other’s eyes at last. Father’s were slightly bloodshot. Neither of us moved. There was nowhere for us to move to.
“They jeered you when he said he was at the stake because of you,” I said. “Londoners. Your people. They’re coming to hate you.”
I was aware of John in the shadows making soft, helpless gestures with his hands, but there were only two people in this fight.
“And I don’t need to know much about politics to know that the king will come to hate you too. If he doesn’t already,” I rushed on. My heart was racing. My tongue was on fire. “You’re trying to stop him doing what he wants. You’ve stopped being his loyal servant. It was you who always said that the wrath of the king means death.” In the midst of my rage, I heard the pleading note come into my voice. “I don’t want you to die. You should resign while you’ve still got time.”
“The king doesn’t want me to go,” he said, with dull hostility. “I’ve tried.”
There was something in his voice for an instant that sounded like tiredness. But then I saw him straighten his back and assume his burden again. “And that’s as well,” he added stoutly. “Because I believe it’s God’s will for me to stay. Not just to fight heresy. Because of the other matter. Because of John.”
It was the last straw. My moment of weakness passed. I exploded.
“You really think it’s all up to you, don’t you?” I sneered. “You think you can save everyone. You think you and Morton have already saved England from a Plantagenet usurper and created an honest new dynasty that God would smile on. And now you don’t just think you can save England again by stopping the king turning to what you call heresy; you even think you can save John from b
eing forced into a kinghood he doesn’t want. You think you have all the secrets of state in your hands, don’t you? But do you know what? You’re wrong.”
I could feel John’s hands pawing the air hopelessly and heard his voice murmur “Meg,” as if he wanted to stop me. But I didn’t waste a glance on him.
I had Father’s attention now. He was staring at me.
“You’ve never told him, have you, John?” I said. I was almost laughing with the pleasure of proving Father’s ignorance. My voice was like a whip, flailing at them both. “You’ve never told him that you know you’re illegitimate. He’s never realized he’s been propping up an illusion all these years. And you’re so”—and I hissed out the next word, “stupid,” with every scrap of pent-up fury in my body—“that you never even realized how much it mattered.”
“Meg . . . ,” John muttered, coming forward and trying to wrap me into himself in the kind of embrace that would stop me from talking. But I stretched my head out from his warning arms and went on talking insistently at Father.
“Yes. He’s illegitimate, Father. He was a bastard all along. He’s known for years. He told me. He’s never had any right to any throne, nor did his brothers and sisters. Their father really was a bigamist; Richard Plantagenet wasn’t a usurper. Your whole strategy has been built on a mistake. And that means your Archbishop Morton married Henry Tudor to a Plantagenet bastard, not a princess. And this king is as full of bastard blood as John is.
You’ve been so proud of all the secrets you control; but you haven’t ever known as much as you think. You haven’t saved anyone from anything.
You’ve just been juggling two lots of bastards and wondering why God keeps cursing the land that’s ruled by one of them. You’re not God or His agent. Just a man. As full of human frailty as the rest. And you’ve failed.”
I stopped. Paused for triumphant breath. Became aware that John had long ago stopped trying to silence my flow of words and had buried his head in my shoulder instead. Became aware of the hotness of my face. Became aware of the magnitude of the secret I’d given away. Felt a new flush, hotter still, pass over my face and throat and shoulders, and wondered if it might be the start of shame.
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