Portrait of an Unknown Woman (39 page)

 
          
He paused. I think he wanted me to back down and agree with him, admit I’d been a foolish child. But I couldn’t, however convincing his mellifluous voice seemed, however sincere he sounded. I couldn’t apportion evil as neatly and completely in the camp of his enemies as he was doing.

 
          
I’d seen the blood trickling out of that boy’s body.

 
          
“Have you ordered a burning?” I asked. It still seemed impossible. It must just be Davy’s raving. In the inexplicably cruel old days, members of a half-crazed sect called the Lollards had been burned at the stake for daring to translate the Bible into English. But surely that was just part of the savagery of the past?

 
          
He sighed, and shook his head, and for a last wonderful moment I thought he might yet say no. But he went on shaking his head, in rhythm with the rocking motion of his arms, and gradually I understood that all he meant was a regretful yes.

 
          
“It’s none of my doing,” he said.

 
          
“So it’s true,” I replied, and my cheeks stained red. He ignored my interruption.

 
          
“A priest,” he went on smoothly, still rocking, “a man called Thomas Hitton. He was seized in the fields near Gravesend by some men who thought he might have stolen the linen that had gone missing from a hedge. They found hidden pockets in his coat full of letters to the heretics overseas. One of them was to William Tyndale.”

 
          
Tyndale was a shadow, a bogeyman: Father’s worst enemy. A renegade priest who’d gone over to the other side. There were no pictures of him.

 
          
He lived in hiding on the Continent, invisible to English spies and agents provocateurs. But the Bibles and prayers he translated into English kept coming, hidden in butts and barrels and packages and parcels unloaded in quiet seaside coves or right under Father’s nose at the Steelyard.

 
          
“The archbishop of Canterbury interrogated Hitton,” Father went on, and the harshness Master Hans had once painted into an image of his face was etched deep into the real face before me now. “He was handed over to the secular authorities at the beginning of the week. He’ll be executed at Maidstone on the twenty-third of February. Hitton’s only excuse was ‘the mass should never be said.’ He’s a priest, but he’s an abomination of a priest.”

 
          
Father was smiling, though it was a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, still visibly refusing to engage with my anger. “I was not personally involved in this decision,” he said. “But I’d have made the same judgment if I had been. Anyone who believes that peasants without a scrap of learning to their names should have the right to rage at the priests and impudently claim to be able to determine God’s meaning for themselves is destroying the church we live in. Not just the Christendom of today, but the sacred continuum that joins everyone alive now with every Christian from St. Augustine onward who has believed what we believe and worshipped as we worship. Take that away, defile the body of Christ on earth . . . lose the beauty of Latin, the common language that unifies all believers . . . and you’re left with nothing but the ranting and babbling of lunatics.
Anarchos.
”

 
          
He was so persuasive. Against my will I found myself imagining Davy lolloping at the door of St. Stephen’s, waving his unicorn’s horn and yelling his crazy street-man’s sales talk. Did I really want to leave the company of genius and worship what I felt must be the confused God of lunatics like Davy? I turned away to hide my moment of weakness, feeling unwanted tears come to my eyes, trying to master myself by staring out the window. But I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. As soon as I could control my voice, I muttered: “I thought you were a humanist. Not a torturer.”

 
          
My gibe made him angry at last. He followed me across the room and, with one hand, pulled me roughly round. From close up, his face was flushed. Words were pouring out of his mouth. “Stop being a fool! Just think for a moment what we’re talking about!” he shouted, as hotly as I had. “Hitton’s evil—the devil’s stinking martyr!” There was disgust curling his lips. There were prickles of sweat breaking out on him. There were flecks of spit landing on my face. “The man is so possessed by the spirit of lying that it’s taking his wretched soul straight from the short fire to the fire everlasting! He deserves his damnation!”

 
          
He stopped. Looked at me, as if he was only just remembering where he was.
 
Breathed carefully out through whitened nostrils to calm himself.

 
          
Wiped the moisture from his brow. He was beginning again to look like the kindly man I’d grown up with, but the image of the venomous stranger who’d been standing before me a moment earlier was seared on my mind.

 
          
I caught him reading the half-scared, half-repelled expression on my face, understanding it, and taking a step toward me to comfort me. But I retreated again.

 
          
In the silence, Tommy began to whimper. We both spoke at once.

 
          
“I didn’t mean to shout,” he said.

 
          
“Give me my baby,” I said.

 
          
I stepped forward across the chasm that had opened between us, snatched Tommy from his arms, and withdrew to the window again, looking down so I couldn’t see the stubble on his chin or meet his eyes. He didn’t resist. I could feel Father hovering behind me, but it was beyond me to say any more.

 
          
“Tommy’s very dear to me,” he said, hesitantly now, through the shrill crying. “You all are.” But I kept my back turned.

 
          
“Meg,” he pleaded. I rocked Tommy faster, making little love faces at him, shutting Father out.

           
But I couldn’t stop his voice. “What does being a humanist mean to you anyway?” I heard. “What are you accusing me of? All I and the friends of my youth ever wanted to do was to reconcile the church, as we found it, with the learning of the classical scholars we were discovering. Our dream was to strip out the cobwebs that had gathered in the corners. Clean away the dross that had gathered over the centuries.

 
          
One of the ways to do that was to stop the friars who got fat on other people’s labor, and the priests who could hardly read the Bible, and the traders in false relics. Of course it was. There were abuses. But our aim was only ever to restore the church to purity, so we could worship more intelligently. Not to destroy it.”

 
          
I didn’t want to hear. He sounded as measured and moderate as ever.

 
          
If I listened, I was in danger of being persuaded. But none of the words, which the obedient daughter in me wanted to believe, were part of the same world as the trickles of blood coming out of that young man’s body.

 
          
Nor did they fit with the look I’d surprised on his face just now, or the shouting, or the gloating words “He deserves his damnation.” So I went on rocking Tommy, rhythmically, back and forth, so I didn’t have to think—as much to comfort myself as him.

 
          
“Meg,” he said, trying to call me back into a conversation. “You and I have had the good fortune to be part of a unique circle of men of distinction, men who know how to explore ideas with subtlety and intelligence, but also with respect and humility. Men who know when to stop. That’s not a freedom that can be vouchsafed to just anyone. You can’t put God in the hands of the mob.”

 
          
I stopped rocking, though I kept my back turned. Tommy wasn’t crying, just nuzzling against me. I stroked his head and murmured at him.

 
          
“He’s a beautiful child,” Father’s voice said. I sneaked a glance up at him from under my eyelashes. He was pressing his hands so tightly together that his knuckles had gone white. “Do you ever think . . .” he began, then paused, marshaling another thought. “Don’t you ever think, Meg, of the danger all this might expose him to? Doesn’t that make you hate the heretics, if nothing else does?”

 
          
I didn’t mean to speak, and I did manage not to turn back to face him; but I found myself saying, “What do you mean?” over my shoulder, and the voice I heard come out of my throat was hoarse and frightened.

 
          
“You must know the king is wavering. He’s in such a fury with the pope over the annulment that he’s of a mind to read the books that woman gives him. What if he threw his lot in with the Lutherans?”

 
          
“Well, what?” I said, turning to face him. He was lowering his voice now, trying to make me draw closer, certain at last that he’d got my attention.

 
          
“What Catholic king in Europe could be happy about that?” he answered, holding my gaze hypnotically. “It’s taken long enough as it is for the Tudors to win acceptance abroad as the rightful rulers of England. It took this Henry, in his golden days, to stop a generation of talk that they were a family of usurpers, and to stop the endless upheaval of pretenders and invasions and threats from abroad. But his magic’s worn off, now that he can’t get an heir; every court in Europe is full of mischief makers whispering that God’s against him. If he turned Lutheran, the first thing his enemies would go looking for would be a Catholic king to replace him.

 
          
We’d all go back to living in fear of what foreign fleets might be landing on a remote beach somewhere. And you’d have to live with something worse: the fear that some ambassador, sooner or later, would sniff John out of hiding; that if they hit on him as a Plantagenet survivor, Tommy could get caught up in the struggle too.”

 
          
He stopped. Looked at me. Found my face immobile. Pushed for a response. “Don’t you see?”

 
          
“Don’t . . . ,” I said quietly, and he leaned forward, with the hope of reconciliation written all over his face. I saw it fade as I went on, grinding out the words one by cold, furious, determined one. “Just—don’t—ever—try—to—convince—me—that—you’re—doing—all—this—
for—me.”

 
        
He looked anguished. “That’s not what I meant,” he pleaded. “Meg? ”

 
          
But whatever he read on my face now, before I wrapped my body tighter around Tommy and said, into the baby’s shawl, “He’s hungry,” was enough to make Father admit defeat.

 
          
I heard his footsteps move away toward the door. “I’ll leave you to feed him,” he said. “I’ll eat with the lawyers.”

           
My eyes were red and my cheeks blotchy by the time I let myself out of the parlor, cradling Tommy, who’d fallen blissfully asleep after his feed. I wanted to leave the house without speaking to anyone else, to creep away and be alone with my thoughts. When I saw John Wood scurrying down the corridor I hid under the stairs for a moment until I heard his footsteps retreating above me. His arms were full of two of the grand new velvet robes Father had had sewn for his new office, spilling over the servant’s brown-flecked hands like dark foam. Their weight bent his skinny old back right over—but his fingers were stroking at the lavish fur trimming with love, and his face was full of such pure joy at Father’s new sartorial 
splendor that I was briefly, painfully, happy for him.

 
          
It was harder than I’d thought to slip away unobserved from a house now so full of the servants of a man of Father’s new stature. Before I’d had a chance to dart out from under the stairs, another door opened, and a stream of lawyers in striped robes trooped back toward the great hall, only a few feet away, in a hubbub of chat. I drew back again, hugging the sweetly sleeping child to myself, feeling my heart race with dread at the possibility that I might come face-to-face with Father again.

 
          
I didn’t, but from my shadowy hiding place under the treads I heard his voice. It was as urbane as ever. “I’ll join you in ten minutes, gentlemen,” he was saying from round the corner, and I heard the outside door shut quietly and two sets of footfalls fade into the gusty garden.

 
          
I waited a moment more until all the doors had shut and silence had fallen and my heartbeat had slowed to something like normal before I took my courage in my hands and tiptoed out into the cold light, making for the door.

 
          
But I practically walked into the arms of Dame Alice. She’d gone on standing between the closed doors of the parlor and the hall after everyone else had gone to their appointed rooms, looking out of the window; an unusual moment of contemplation for someone so busy.