Portrait of an Unknown Woman (19 page)

 
          
So when I heard now that people were running from London to get away from a new outbreak—and camping in the village—I went out to help. I couldn’t see the point of cosseting myself at home. There was no danger in Chelsea yet, just a lot of hungry people who needed a roof over their heads. I felt invincible, anyway, floating on a bubble of anticipation and happiness. I didn’t tell John Clement in my daily letters that I was going out to take the new arrivals food, and that Dame Alice and I were arranging with Father’s farm manager to turn over the second barn behind the great field to putting them up and providing more regular supplies of food. It was the month of his election to the college. I’d told him not to even answer my letters until his entrance was secured, so I left out anything that might worry him. He had other things to think about. I wanted him to focus every effort on impressing the college, not on worrying about me.

 
          
When Father returned to Chelsea, immediately after the conclusion of the peace treaty—and before any of the young people, who lingered on in the country, or, in Will and Margaret Roper’s case, in town, staying at Bucklersbury, to my great envy—Dame Alice told him to stop me going to visit the refugees every day.

 
          
“You should be more careful of yourself, Meg,” Father said gently to me, the first time he saw me with my basket heading into Chelsea. But he didn’t put a hand on my shoulder to stop me—the kind of simple gesture of paternal familiarity and concern I’d spent so many years hoping for, and feeling excluded when it never came, especially when he was constantly embracing the grown-up children he’d raised from birth—and he didn’t try very hard to dissuade me. So I carried on. Perhaps, even though the French negotiations had been successful, he had too much on his own mind. The king had asked him personally to intercede in the matter of getting the royal marriage annulled. He hadn’t directly said no, but people outside the family said his ardor for heresy hunting had redoubled. One of the ragged men in the barn told me in a whisper one day that the word was that Father had gone to search the house of Humphrey Monmouth, one of the patrons of the heretic William Tyndale, and found every grate in the house burning merrily with papers he’d been unable to pull out in time. “God help him stop the heretics,” the man muttered, giving me a cagey look. “Look at the trouble they’re bringing down on our heads. Death, disease, the curse of the Lord. God speed him.” It was what he thought I wanted to hear, but I thought the man sounded so insincere that I wondered what God he prayed to himself. There were arrests of Lollards in London and Christian Brethren in Colchester. Still, there were no more prisoners in the gatehouse. And what happened away from Chelsea was coming to seem remote again—a different world, a game that people played by different rules, with little connection to our daily experience; a world as remote as Father’s behavior. If he noticed me at all these days, it was just to chat as politely as if I were a stranger; he was so preoccupied with the letters that I assumed contained arrest lists and death lists that kept arriving for him that his eyes had become glassy with fatigue. And yet I was oddly cheered by his being here.

 
          
The very sight of him in the house most of the time, sitting at the table, or going down the path to his private office early in the morning and at all hours of the night in his endearingly shabby gowns, rather than going away to do business I didn’t understand in unfamiliar, stiff court clothes, was an odd kind of comfort in itself. If you chose to be encouraged by it, his presence, his eyes glowing as we talked at dinner, his manservant tutting over his unshaven jaw and nagging him into a weekly shave and something like respectable dressing, made our household seem more complete, less full of shadows and empty spaces, more like the days before he was at court. I was so full of hope for John’s success that I felt removed from Father’s detachment. I was even almost able to shut out the nag of uneasiness about what actions Father might be taking to stem the tide of heresy.

 
          
There was talk of sweating sickness—and plague, as if one blow from on high wasn’t enough—all over London. Preoccupied as he was, there was a distinctly un-Christian note of hopefulness in Father’s voice on the day he read out a letter to Dame Alice and me over breakfast, informing him that Anne Boleyn herself had gone down with sweating sickness.

(I found that oddly endearing, as was the disappointment I saw in his eyes the next day at the dispatch that she had survived the crisis.) And I was touched when he said he was writing, begging Margaret and Cecily and Elizabeth and their husbands to return to Chelsea; and he was pleased when Master Hans wrote saying he was cutting short the triumphal tour of portrait appointments that had followed his appointment at Greenwich to come back to the safety of our village and finish our picture. I liked Father wanting to gather his family and friends around him; I liked the idea of that warmth still burning deep inside him, even if it only seemed to flicker coldly when it came to his behavior toward me.

 
          
We all wanted them back. We needed what cheer we could get. Even in the early days of what was going to be a hot, desperate summer, the crops in the Chelsea fields lining the lane were failing. The first shoots shriveled. The plants that came up afterward were stunted and deformed in earth so dry it cracked. The cattle were thin and gave scarcely any milk and their cries sounded like cries of pain. Even the leaves on the apple trees were scabbed and gray with mildew.

           
The price of corn doubled in a single week in April. “He says,” Dame Alice hissed, “that the lack of corn and cattle is a sore punishment from God for the spread of heresy.” She rolled her eyes, as if mocking the idea; but I thought she was half convinced or she wouldn’t be repeating it. She hadn’t ever had much time for big talk about God’s punishments, but now everyone was giving way to superstition. We had more than one hundred people being fed in the barn at the farm by then. I went every day to watch their coarse, desperate faces turn down into their bread and bowls of broth, and to ask if there’d been any reports of sickness.

 
          
And that was where I next saw John Clement.

 
          
I was watching a butterfly. It was fluttering gently in a waft of breeze that was cutting through the smell of the bodies clamoring round the cauldron. Two children had retreated with their hunks of bread and bowls to a rough patch of cow parsley and were sitting in the dappled sunlight watching it too—a moment of peace in the cracking, waving heat.

 
          
Then one of them saw me. “Miss,” he began calling, in his dry little voice. “Eh, miss.” He waved frantically with his bread hand. He must have been looking out for me, and now he was tormented by the choice facing him. I could see he didn’t want to lose me and he didn’t want to lose his dinner. His little legs were scrabbling for the ground, trying to stay steady as he slurped down another faceful of broth and eased himself up all at the same time. I hurried over. “My sister’s not well,” he said, finishing the bowl and putting it back in his bag without wiping it, still clinging to his bit of bread. “My mum said to ask, will you come and see her?”

 
          
There hadn’t been any sweating sickness yet here. It was just a fear. We hurried over the rough ground, tripping on clods of earth that hadn’t yet dried up to dust that would get in our eyes. The boy’s mother was part of the encampment in the back of the barn, but she’d taken her little girl out that morning and made a rough blanket shelter for her away from their friends and family, near the hot, buzzing stink of the trench. The child might have been five or six, a ragged blond moppet with red eyes, and when I drew the blanket away, I saw that her breathing was rough.

 
          
“She woke up with a nightmare,” said the skinny, toothless mother
       
hovering over her—who was maybe my age, but was so wizened and gnarled she could as easily have been my mother. “She was screaming blue murder. Said her neck hurt. And she got the shivers. So we brought her out here and wrapped her up warm in the sunshine. She can hardly move.”

 
          
I felt her forehead. The cold spell at the onset of disease was passing—it was raging hot now. I left my hand there for a moment. I could feel her pulse speeding up under my palm. “But it can’t be the sweat, right—because she’s cold, not hot?” the mother was saying, in a nasal, hopeful whine. “You got something in there you can give her, miss?” And I could see her eyes fasten on my basket, with its strips of clean cloth and innocent herbal remedies—nothing that would save anyone from sweating sickness. Nothing could.

 
          
I drew back my hand and showed it to the mother. My palm was wet with rancid sweat. The child was beginning to drip with it now, and groan.

 
          
The mother looked closely at my hand for a few moments before she understood the significance of the sweat glistening on it. Then she pushed it away with a stifled howl, flung herself down next to her little girl, covered the child with clumsy arms, and lay there, rocking her against her breast in her own agony of love, murmuring, “Janey, Janey, don’t worry, love, Janey, we’ll get you well, Janey . . .” and ignoring me.

 
          
For a moment, I panicked. I didn’t know what to do. “Go and fill up every bowl you can find with drinking water, and bring them back here,” I told the scared, embarrassed boy standing mutely at my side watching his mother and sister rock on the ground. It was a way of filling up the empty moment; a way of putting off acknowledging my inability to treat this patient. “She’s going to get thirsty soon.”

 
          
He ran off, barefoot and light with panic. The footsteps that returned, just seconds later, before he could possibly have found water, were heavier—the sound of boots. The shadow falling over me from behind was big, even in the shriveling late-morning sun. When I looked up, over my shoulder, it was straight into the sun. I couldn’t see the man’s eyes. But I’d have known that silhouette anywhere—the long legs, the back tenderly stooped toward me, the beak, the black hair.

 
          
“Meg,” John Clement said. Just one measured word.

 
          
I put a hand over my eyes against the sun and squinted up at him from its shadow. A part of me wanted to know what luck he’d had at the College of Physicians. But it wasn’t the time to ask, and there was nothing to see in his expressionless face, turning now to the woman squatting beside her child. All I could find to focus on was the basket of medicine he was carrying.

 
          
“I’ve come to help,” he said into the buzzing silence. He wasn’t talking to me. He was talking to the woman on the ground. She stopped her panicked crooning, looked at him in a startled way, then accepted what he was saying. Very gently, she laid the child’s head down on her blanket, disengaged herself, and got to her feet. And she stood before him, as mutely accepting as I was of whatever he was going to say.

 
          
“What’s your name?” he asked.

 
          
“Mary,” she stammered.

 
          
“Right, Mary, this is what we’re going to do,” he said briskly. “Janey is going to feel very hot for up to a day. But if she lives, her temperature will have dropped by the morning. So you have to be as strong as you can until then. All right?”

 
          
She nodded.

 
          
“Your boy’s coming back with water for her. That’s important. She’ll be thirsty. Keep her drinking—that’s important too. And it will be hard for her to breathe. You have to prop her up so she’s half sitting; that will make it easier for her. But the most important thing is that you mustn’t let her go to sleep. The time will come when she’ll want to sleep, but it will kill her if you let her. So keep her awake. All right?”

 
          
She nodded again.

 
          
“Have you got a husband?”

 
          
She shook her head. “Dead,” she mouthed. “In Deptford last week.”

 
          
“God rest his soul,” John said. There’d been sweating sickness in Deptford for days. I didn’t know there were runaways from there at our barn. I crossed myself.

 
          
“God rest his soul,” she mouthed back. Her hysterical fit was over.
      
And there was a determined look to her slack mouth as she sat down again by the child and cradled the little head in her lap.

 
          
The round-eyed boy came back with two friends and three leather buckets of water.

 
          
“Right, boys,” John said firmly. “Don’t come back until morning. And keep everyone else away too. It’s your job to make sure people don’t start crowding us out here. Your mum and the two of us will look after Janey. You’re better off keeping the rest of them in the barn. Do you hear?”