Portrait of an Unknown Woman (33 page)

 
         
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 table 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.

 
          
She held the baby while I washed. By the time John brought Father back from mass, I was clean and smelling of roses and milk in the new white-embroidered nightgown she’d made for me.

 
          
John sat on the bed with his arms around me; Margaret pulled a stool up for Father beside us. Every head turned toward the baby, murmuring and marveling. And I lay back against my husband’s arm, feeling the baby’s body lying against my breast and glowing at the simplicity of a life where everyone who mattered most to me could be enclosed in a single room, where I could have weeks more lying here with little Tommy before I’d need to walk across the street and be churched and go back to normal life.

 
          
It was Margaret who broke the spell. “Listen!” she said suddenly, and went to the window with a look of great surprise on her face. We all looked up, a little startled to hear her talk above her usual soft semiwhisper. She pulled at the window.

 
          
“Don’t,” John said sharply, “no cold breezes.”

 
          
But she took no notice. “What are they saying?” she said, just as sharply. “Did you hear?” and she turned back from our uncomprehending faces and struggled with the catch until the urgency on her face infected John too, and he got up and opened it for her, just a few inches, to keep the harshness of outside at bay.

 
          
And then his face changed too as he listened to the hubbub coming in with the chilly air. As I hugged little Tommy closer to me to keep him warm, I saw astonishment dawn on John’s dark, even features—astonishment mixed with consternation. And Father leapt up to pace toward the window, so I couldn’t see his face, just his dark head in its velvet cap. He was listening intently. I saw his body go tight.

 
          
I must have been the last to distinguish the words coming up from the street outside, though I could hear from the start that they weren’t the usual come-and-buy cries of the apothecaries’ market.

           
“Yes of course it’s true!” I made out in Mad Davy’s cracked falsetto. “The scarlet carbuncle’s been burst!”

 
          
Hubbub; cheers mixed with jeers. I thought I heard the strange words “Wolf-see” caterwauled in the background. “I swear to Almighty God!”