Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  John pulled me to him in the bed that night, running his hands through my dark hair and over my breasts and murmuring how he’d missed me. I responded with a kiss and felt my body begin to tingle. When, what seemed like hours later, we drew apart, I could see starlight reflected in his eyes; when he kissed me and muttered “my love,” I whispered back, “I love you,” and meant it enough to make all the anxious silences and chills and hesitations of the last year vanish as if they’d never been.

  It felt like at least the beginning of a new beginning. It felt as though he really might trust me again, however badly I’d betrayed him to Father. I slept soundly that night for the first time I could remember.

  By the time we set off for dinner at Chelsea the next evening, I’d al ready written to Margaret and Master Hans about when we might go to Well Hall. I was suddenly full of good cheer, with enough energy to join Tommy in a sliding race round the stone flags of our corridor until we both fell over screaming with relieved laughter.

  The right time would be September, I thought: when the weather began to turn; when this summer of waiting was coming to an end. A trip to Eltham would be something to take Father’s mind off the time he was dreading most: the day when the royal baby that the new queen was carrying would be born and, with the first cry of a new prince to continue the Tudor dynasty, the king would have won the mad gamble on which he’d staked the future of Christendom. And Father’s last hope that the false marriage and everything that had gone with it could somehow be undone would finally crumble to dust.

  We have to learn to live with that future, I found myself thinking. If we expect less, we won’t be disappointed. We can do that. Perhaps even Father can.

  Dame Alice bustled us into supper, old-fashioned style, with servants at the lower table and us sitting above them in the great hall in Chelsea.

  I’d got so used to dining in our more intimate way, in the parlor, without eyes on us, that I didn’t like eating communally anymore. I’d learned to love privacy. But it was good to feel her embrace and see her twinkling eyes and merry, undaunted face.

  There was no sign of Father yet. Just young John and Anne, Cecily and Giles, showing signs of the wispy tension that usually hung about us all these days: bitten fingernails; rictus smiles. Poor John: with no hope of advancement in a political career of his own, he was still living here as a child, even though he’d turned twenty and had a wife. But he was doing his stoical best to keep busy. Father was creating work for him. He’d got him translating bits of continental writing reaffirming the unity of the Catholic Church and restating the importance of the Eucharist in sacramental life.

  The Rastells were going to publish it. No one liked to point out that they’d have to do a very thorough editing job on John’s imperfect translation; he looked stressed enough without being teased. Now that my own mood had lifted, I was more aware than usual of the rest of the family’s raised shoulders and forced cheerfulness as they waited for Father.

  “He’s writing, still,” Dame Alice said mock-crossly to the younger generation, trying to dissipate the anxiety. “It’s all this fuss about the book. He’s been writing defenses for weeks. But the man’s got to eat. I’ll send for him.”

  But he appeared before she could. And, even if he had been writing one of his many detailed letters to Cromwell’s men, explaining why his latest antiheresy outpouring, published at Easter, hadn’t actually been a veiled attack on the new direction of government policy, more tolerant toward heresy, there was no sign of it on his face.

  His smile cheered everyone in the room and lifted their mood, just as it always had. “Welcome,” he said simply. “Shall we eat?”

  But something wasn’t right about him. Meeting Master Hans hadn’t worked quite the same magic on him that it had on me. Once we were at table, he opened his Bible to choose a text to read to us in his usual way.

  The book fell open, apparently by itself, at the Psalms. He glanced down.

  Stopped. “So be it,” he said, and lowered his head to it. And something in his eyes made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

  “Posuisti tenebras et facta est nox in ipsa pertransibunt omnes bestiae silvae. Catuli leonum rugientes ut rapiant et quaerant a Deo escam sibi,” he read, almost in a whisper, so that the silence about him deepened and everyone drew forward to hear better. (“Thou hast, good Lord, set the darkness and made the night. And in the night walk all the beasts of the woods: the whelps of the lions roaring and calling unto God for their meat.”)

  Dame Alice, who was usually slow to follow Latin, had no trouble with these verses. I got the feeling she’d heard them many times before.

  Perhaps this was what he read for comfort when he woke screaming from his nightmares. Or perhaps this was the stuff of his nightmares. There was a sick look about her as she leaned forward to do one of her comical scolding routines: “Come, husband! That’s enough of your gloom! You’ll curdle the cream!”

  From very far away, I saw the others frozen into their polite smiles; not wanting to say a word out of place; desperate not to do the wrong thing.

  We could all see something was amiss. Under the table, I felt John squeeze my hand.

  That’s when we heard the knock at the front door. First one, then a whole volley: so loud and insistent that they sounded like blows from an iron fist. They were almost louder than the race of my heartbeat.

  I saw Anne Cresacre’s big round eyes widen until she looked like a terrified owl, and wondered through the drumming in my chest if I was wearing the same foolish expression.

  One of the servants rushed to answer. We could hear his scurrying footsteps behind the arras; the creak and shriek of the bolts and bars; then more solid men’s footsteps coming back behind him.

  The two newcomers who stepped stolidly through the door were strangers; men in cloaks.

  “Sir Thomas,” one of them said in ringing tones, moving forward, feeling in his pouch for a document.

  Father rose to his feet. A true man of public service, he’d somehow managed to put a politely welcoming smile back on his face. The rest of us stayed crouched, frozen in our chairs.

  The man completed his stride across the room and up to the dais. He held out a sealed document. “From His Majesty,” he said, still too loudly.

  Father took it but didn’t open it, and the inquiring look he gave his interlocutor was full of challenge.

  “It says that you’re required to present yourself to the royal commissioners,” the man said, and, when Father didn’t respond, added, as sternly as if he were reading a death sentence: “at once.”

  It was the book, I thought, with a terrible resignation gripping my heart; Father’s last challenge against the new political order; one blow too many in his lonely war. Cromwell wasn’t going to forgive him. It was the beginning of the end.

  Very slowly, Father bowed his head. He still had a little smile playing on his face. Through the fear paralyzing me, I found myself thinking how I hated that perpetual little smile, which masked whatever he was really feeling and hid him from us. Very slowly, he got up.

  Dame Alice rose to her feet too, returning to life as she stepped out of our immobile tableau of terror. There was nothing like a smile on her face: just utter determination.

  “Wait,” she said, with breathtaking calm, addressing the man and the other one skulking behind him below the dais among the servants. “Sit down, both of you. I’ll need to prepare some things for my husband to take. Let us give you something to eat and drink while you wait.”

  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 dren
ched 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.”