Portrait of an Unknown Woman (32 page)

           
“Don’t you wonder,” I asked, feeling breathless at the strangeness of the idea and blushing at my own boldness in mentioning it, “whether—if you . . . we . . . have a son—you’ll one day look at his face and think ‘This boy should have been the king of England?’ ”

 
          
He only sighed. He waited for a moment, and I thought I could see a thousand thoughts chase across the face of a man who might himself, perhaps, if fate had turned out differently, have been a king, living a life I couldn’t share. But when he did finally answer, his face had none of the shadow of wistfulness I thought I might have detected; just a slight smile.

 
          
“No,” he said firmly. “I’ll be happy to think: ‘This boy is Meg’s and mine; and Thomas More’s grandson.’ ” And he kissed me on the lips, as if to stop me saying any more.

 
          
He quietly put aside the sorrow he must still have felt for his brother too, although for a few days he would sometimes appear with red eyes.

 
          
But that morning he retreated to his room, saying he wanted to sleep and pray a little, but blowing me a kiss as he walked away down the path. “We have the rest of our lives; shall we observe the proprieties for the next few weeks?” he murmured, and there was a ghost of the old laughter in his eyes as he said the words.

 
          
I stayed a few more minutes in the sunshine, feeling the welcome heat on my shoulders cleansing away all the terrors of the night. When I walked into the shadow of the house, with my eyes still full of dazzle, it took me a moment to make out the waiting shape of Father looming up before me.

 
          
“I said yes,” I said, with as much of the lawyerly restraint I’d always known he expected of those close to him as I could muster. Nothing prepared me for what followed: the rush of air from his mouth; arms wrapping me close to his chest in an unfamiliar hug; bristles on my cheek; tears on his.

           
“I’m so happy for you . . . for him,” Father was whispering, “for all of us.”

           
I tightened my own arms around him by way of reply, almost more overwhelmed by this unusual gesture than by being promised in marriage. I couldn’t remember Father ever hugging me before.

 
          
In the warmth of that embrace, I was briefly ashamed. How could I have been so suspicious? Everything seemed suddenly clear now: Father was a good man, and I could trust him and trust John’s trust in him. It was almost as though I’d recovered from a sickness I hadn’t known I was suffering from: an excess of melancholy that had unsettled my mind, making me as “solitary, fearful, envious, covetous, and dark of color” as the medical books said, or a bout of hysteria, the rising of the womb that makes women mad. What else could have stopped me seeing from the start that Father’s scourge and hair shirt were nothing more sinister than proofs of an austere form of devotion? The furious, filth-spattered writings whose dark energy had so frightened me were, just as John said, no more than an official point of view, written under a pen name because they didn’t show Father’s own mind. And the cobbler who’d been beaten so brutally back into the ways of God had, must have, simply fallen victim to a violent jailer before Father took him away to contemplate the error of his ways in the peace and solitude of our garden. My mind shied away from the stocks and the ropes that were also part of my memory of that little prison in the western gatehouse. I couldn’t quite explain them, any more than I could quite forget them. But they hadn’t been as constraining as I’d imagined.

 
          
After all, the man had escaped, hadn’t he?

 
          
So my doubts became part of my past. From then on, I only knew tranquillity, a sunlit state in which it was impossible to believe I had ever been the tormented young spinster who could have kissed a painter under a mulberry tree at dawn. Without knowing how it had happened, I now found myself inhabiting a place where happiness could be expected.

           
Everyone we met seemed to be pleased for us and to enjoy helping us. The tears that I’d always felt somewhere inside, waiting to burst out through guarded, dry, watchful eyes, drained away.

 
          
“I always wanted this for you,” Dame Alice said over the ruins of supper, her face transformed by her smile, and she folded me into a capacious embrace. I saw her wink merrily at Father over my shoulder. (Father, with his arm round John’s back, dwarfed by my future husband, looked different too; his face showed no signs of the night’s powerful emotions, yet seemed softer somehow, as though his efforts to look as lightly amused as ever weren’t quite working. But perhaps it was just the candlelight.)

           
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?”