Portrait of an Unknown Woman (50 page)

 
          
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 being 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.

 
          
Father was staring at me as if dumbfounded.

 
          
There was a long silence.

 
          
Then he cleared his throat and said, very quietly, “Is this true, John?”

 
          
John raised a stricken face from my shoulder. There were tears on his cheeks. He was being unmasked as a deceiver without having realized he was one. He was trying to form words; none came.

 
          
Father waited a moment or two more, watching him, letting the truth sink in.

 
          
“I see,” he said, surprisingly gently. He put a hand on John’s shoulder, patted it, a gesture of comfort. “My dear John.”

 
          
He turned to me. His face was inscrutable. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “You’ve set me free. If I have no duty to king or family, I can follow my own heart at last.” And then he was gone, into the dusk in the street, leaving me alone in the parlor with the husband whose secret I’d betrayed.

 
          
I heard about what followed in Chelsea from Dame Alice, two days later.

 
          
Father passed a restless night. The next morning, he said enigmatically over breakfast that if a man saw the things he should set his hand to sustaining decay through his fault and falling to ruin under him, then he should leave those things, draw himself aside, and serve God.

 
         
“The next I saw of him was when he came back from town in the afternoon,” she said, shaking her head in bewilderment, her cheerful voice unusually hushed. “I was just leaving church when he walked in. He’d been to the king and resigned, but he didn’t know how to break the news.

 
          
He’s spent so much of his life in public, playing a role, that he’s never really worked out how to be straightforward with his family, has he? So he didn’t tell me straight, just made one of his jokes. He had his cap in his hand and he bowed at me and said: ‘May it please your ladyship to come forth now my lord is gone.’ I guessed right away, of course,” and she broke 
into a reluctant chuckle at the last part of her story. “I’ve been around long enough to know he starts in with the jokes when he’s in trouble. I would have guessed even if Henry Pattinson hadn’t been there, and hadn’t understood too, and wasn’t dancing round in the aisle cackling, ‘Chancellor More is chancellor no more,’ like the fool he is.”

 
          
John and I were summoned to Chelsea with the rest of the family on the second day. The king, it turned out, had responded to Father’s returning the seal of office with a formal little speech granting Father the right to spend the rest of his life preparing his soul in the service of God. That’s what Father had said he wanted. But Henry made his displeasure felt. There were no rewards for Father’s years of service. He left York Place empty-handed. We were called to the house in Chelsea for the practical purpose of reorganizing the family finances.

           
John had spent two nights away from my bed, praying at St. Stephen’s by day, forgetting to come home to eat, slipping away from me with an animal’s quiet pain in his eyes without talking.

 
          
I’d spent those long hours eaten up with remorse and horror at myself.

 
          
I’d betrayed my husband’s secret, ripped apart his life, and for what? A cheap revenge on someone else. Now I was forced to stop and look at myself; I didn’t like what I saw. Was I less cruel than Father? Less stupidly unthinking than John? I didn’t think so. I was vengeful and intolerant; a monster.

           
“I’d do anything to unsay what I said,” I wept, scrabbling at his door. “Anything. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I love you.”

 
          
All my apologies and entreaties and contrition failed to touch John.

 
          
“It’s all right,” he kept saying, though he stayed on the other side of the door. “I should have seen myself how important it was to tell him. I should have thought. It would have come out sooner or later. Don’t torment yourself.”

 
          
He was kind, so much kinder than me, even in despair. But he didn’t mean it was all right. His voice was shattered. I could hear he was heartbroken.

 
          
There’d been no answer either to my frantic note to Father, in which I’d found nothing better to say than “Father, I’m sorry, you’re right, I didn’t understand, I’m a foolish girl, please forgive me.”

           
None of the others knew about the row at my house. The first person I saw when we got out of the boat at Chelsea, after a silent hour on the water, was Will Roper, Margaret’s husband, blond, red-eyed, floppy-haired, with tension lines on his pretty young face. He linked arms with both John and me as we walked up from the landing stage, a compromise between the poise he was trying to learn as a member of Parliament and his old puppyish ways. I didn’t mind. His presence filled the empty, shamed space between me and John.

 
          
“He’s going to talk to us all at dinner. You must be very understanding,” Will whispered—everyone was whispering, we discovered when we reached the house, and everyone talking only about “him,” without bothering with Father’s name—“he’s being so brave. But he’s taking it hard. He’s even been talking about becoming a martyr; saying it would make him so happy if he could see that his wife and children would encourage 
him to die in a good cause that he would run merrily toward his death.”

 
          
He shook his head, a sensible old head on young shoulders. “I can understand why he’d take it that way, of course,” he added doubtfully.

 
          
They were all there at the table (except Elizabeth, of course; she was far away in Shropshire with her children, but William Dauncey, who’d been at Parliament, was at the end of the table with his face as foolish and chinless and his eyes as bright and watchful as I remembered). They all had reddish eyes and strained expressions.

           
Even Cecily didn’t giggle; she just held tightly on to Giles Heron’s hand. And when young John—married to pretty Anne now but still living at home, since the times had been 
too troubled for Father to turn his head to carving out a career for his son—thought no one was looking, he kept putting a hand to his forehead to massage away his pain. I was briefly touched to see Anne, at his side, noticing his gesture and delving into her skirts to pull out a little cloth pouch for him—the vervain I’d taught her to treat him with. But there was no cheer among us. So John and I blended in; there was no need to explain our difficult silences.

 
          
My heart was wrung by the way Father looked, sitting between Margaret and Dame Alice at the head of the table—going through the motions of being as full of charm and attention as ever. I’d been so angry with him for so long that I’d forgotten his admirable strength, the reserves of dignity and grace in public that he’d naturally draw on in dark times. He was nodding courteously to Margaret and asking her for stories about her children; he was passing food to Dame Alice before the page boys had time to reach for it. It was only when he raised his face to us that I could see the weariness of his expression and the emptiness in his eyes. At least, I thought, clutching at whatever comfort I could, he hadn’t flinched away from me in the way I’d secretly feared.

 
          
Instead he stood up and came toward us both. “Welcome,” he said graciously, smiling warmly, taking us to our places. “My dear children. Thank you both for coming today.” Then he helped me settle on my seat and murmured, “Thank you for your note; you didn’t need to write it. You helped me take a decision I should probably have taken before. Sometimes it just takes one nudge more to understand the best way forward. I appreciate your honesty.”

 
          
I felt his arm linger on my back as he turned to John and helped him tuck his long legs under the table. I heard another murmur in John’s ear, and when I looked round I saw that a few quiet words had been enough to make him too feel his guilt was absolved. Father went quietly back to his place. When, a moment later, a hand stretched under the table to take mine, I squeezed it back and, for the first time in two days, found John’s eyes on mine with a light in them that might, I hoped, mean forgiveness.

 
          
The food was simple, even plainer than usual. There was no wine, just small beer and water, and no more than three or four dishes set at our table. Father cleared his throat to get our attention—it was easy enough, since everyone was giving him furtive glances the whole time and the table was all but silent—and, after saying grace, said, as simply as he knew how, 
into our silence, “I think you all know that I’ve made a decision which means my income will no longer be what it was. I’ve gathered all my children together today—I consider all of you my children—to ask your advice about how we can go on living and being together.”

 
          
I hadn’t thought about money for a moment, but it was true; we all received allowances from Father, and both the Wills spent half their week living at Chelsea. None of us knew how to respond. I looked at Margaret and saw her looking sidelong at Will Dauncey, who was looking at Will Roper, who was looking at John.

           
Dame Alice, who I noticed was wearing a plain dark dress with none of the opulence she usually favored, was fidgeting with a piece of bread. Father looked around at our mournful faces with such a tender expression that it made me wonder, for a second, if he 
wasn’t genuinely secretly relieved at his change in circumstances.