Portrait of an Unknown Woman (24 page)

 
          
I felt confident enough by now to try to argue. “But, Father,” I said, holding his gaze, “our family portrait was never going to be a religious picture, and even if you don’t like the way it’s come out you can’t hold Master Hans solely responsible. Don’t you remember? It was you who encouraged him to paint it the way he did. You spent most of an evening plotting it out with him. You made us all rehearse our positions in the hall; you roared with laughter at the thought of putting a fool at the heart of the family. It was your idea as much as his.”

 
          
There was a small silence. He looked down. Then he sighed again, put a weary hand to his forehead, smoothed away what might have been a pain under the lined olive skin, and looked back at me, meeting the challenge in my eyes with a nod of recognition.

 
          
“You go straight to the heart of things, Meg,” he said ruefully. “And you’re more right than you know. I’m to blame for more than I like to recognize. I
have
encouraged freethinking and experiment in my time—perhaps too much. Change for its own sake seemed so exciting in the golden years, when we were young and everything looked fresh and innocent. And now when I hear these innocent shouts of ‘Me! Me!’—let alone when I see the destruction being perpetrated by those who are really doing the devil’s work—I often wonder how far I’m to blame in the eyes of God for having enjoyed all that tinkering and altering. How far my own idle curiosity has been responsible for opening Pandora’s box and letting so much evil fly out into the world . . .”

 
          
His eyes were full of anguish now, so much so that I felt mine filling with compassionate tears too. I couldn’t find the words to banish his cares, but I did find the courage I had never had before to put a hand out and touch his fingers—an inarticulate gesture of comfort, but one I hoped he would understand.

 
          
His skin was dry and cool. He didn’t draw his hand away from mine, didn’t take his eyes away from mine, and I was heartened to see some of the pain in his dark gaze fade away.
  
“The world changes, that’s all,” I found myself muttering. “Not through any one man’s fault . . . Not be
    
cause of any one man’s actions. You can’t turn back time . . . don’t blame yourself. Nothing is your fault.”

 
          
He went on looking at my face, and slowly the blurry look of pain left him and something of the familiar quizzical amusement with which he usually met the world came back into his expression.

 
          
“I see you’re a child of the new world too, Meg,” he said in a more everyday voice. “And I know”—he lifted a hand to stop me pointing out the obvious—“it’s the education I’ve given you that has made you that way. I can see you think I’m just an old man being old-fashioned. And perhaps I am. Perhaps I am.”

 
          
He gave the beginning of a hesitant smile. And I was suddenly, radiantly certain of something else. It would be impossible for this man to commit any kind of cruel act. John must be right; I’d leaped hastily to what must have been the wrong conclusions and needlessly tormented myself for months with the fear that darkness had crept into Father’s soul, simply because I didn’t know his reasons for bringing a prisoner home to our gatehouse. But now that we were talking from the heart, just the two of us, it seemed blindingly obvious to me that Father was simply too reasonable to turn fanatic. I was struck dumb by the force of the relief that the revelation brought.

           
How long had we been standing like this? I wondered—on the edges of the same pool of candlelight, with the figures from the devotional picture looking down at us, gazing at each other almost like lovers.

 
          
“Will you pray with me, Meg?” he asked, very gently, detaching his arm from my hand. “Give thanks for Margaret’s salvation?”

 
          
There was a lump in my throat. I nodded, and we dropped awkwardly to our knees. Keeping my eyes turned away from the scourge hanging be hind the door, I prayed, like him, that we could all believe the same things and be at peace with one another and God. As my mouth formed the Latin words that believers like us had spoken for a thousand years and more, I let my mind dwell nostalgically on Father’s childhood London: a city that was still a prayer in stone and wood to God’s goodness, in which even walking the tracery of lanes leading out from St. Paul’s, with their holy names, Ave Maria and Paternoster, had been an act of worship. I couldn’t help but believe Master Hans’s family portrait was also God’s work, worship in a new shape, worship for our richer times. But I was honored to have been invited to share Father’s private vision of God—his search for the lost innocence of childhood. It felt like one more proof that God was smiling on me and making my life come right. Even if this encounter between the two of us wasn’t quite the embrace I used to dream of, it was the closest my adopted father had ever let me come to him.

 
          
“What would Father say?” I whispered, watching almost drunkenly in the dapples of sunlight as John stretched my arm out straight and traced a line down it, very slowly, with a single finger. I shivered with pleasure and half closed my eyes, following the touch as it moved toward wrist and palm.

 
          
“He knows,” John murmured back as his finger reached the end of its journey, and he raised my hand to his lips. Gently he kissed the little mound of flesh between thumb and forefinger, pushing it slowly open with his tongue and nipping softly at the thin web of skin under it with his teeth. Then he stopped, and glimmered with laughter. “Of course. And you know he knows, Meg.”

 
          
The funny thing was that I did. Everything had become so simple when we’d woken up the next morning. In the midday heat on the way home from the village, where no one new had fallen sick, in the shady copse he’d led me into and where I’d unquestioningly followed, sleepily enjoying the sound of insects buzzing tipsily and the sight of sun glittering on the golden river water, it was getting simpler all the time. I nodded as if I understood. I felt I did.

 
          
John covered my hand, still tingling from being kissed, with his, and guided it down to rest on his hip. I felt his other hand slide around my waist and move down. As if we were dancing, as if our bodies knew the steps to take next, I found we were turning toward each other and my body was leaning back against a tree trunk while his pressed up against me so close that I could feel his heartbeat, very fast, as fast as mine under my rumpled cloak. From very close, I could see his eyes on mine and the little half-smile on his lips as he whispered, between breaths, “He might horsewhip me if he saw me now . . . true. But this is the point. He married off everyone else. But he saved you for me. And he knows why I’m here now. To claim you.”

 
          
His words were part of it—the relief of the idea that I hadn’t been forgotten by my family as Father arranged marriage after marriage; that there had been a quiet purpose to it all. The heat of the sun on my arms was part of it too. But if I found myself turned into a trickling sweetness of honey it was also because of the feel of him against my skin, all hard muscle and flesh surging forward, kissing my neck.

 
          
I had no idea, I thought hours afterward, drawing the crumpled clothes around my sticky nakedness with a sense of wonderment. No idea.

 
          
I snuggled closer inside his heavy, sleepy arms, full of memories that were all sensation and no words, just happiness. There were rough black hairs on his chest and a line of black hair leading down his flat torso. He had pale skin and more dark hair on the big bones and lean muscle of his arms and legs. He stirred and half opened his eyes to look at me, lifted a hand to raise my chin and smiled as he put his lips to mine. Then he ran his hand down my body, following it with his eye, circled my breast and laughed very softly, with the same wonderment I was feeling. “Beautiful,” he said sleepily. “Mine.” And his arms enfolded me again.

 
          
I woke to find him raised on one elbow, looking at me, and the happiness inside me welled up at the tenderness of his smile.

 
          
“So ours will be a marriage of doctors,” he said. He seemed not to be aware that he was still naked; not to feel the light breeze ruffling his hair.

 
          
Suddenly self-conscious, I looked down and started fumbling for my shift. I didn’t just feel naked; I realized I’d been dishonest not to have told him about the way I’d tended to Margaret, yet I was still embarrassed to mention willow-bark tea to someone of his high learning and have him laugh off my remedy as an old wives’tale, and I also thought I might, in his place, feel discountenanced that an untrained girl had saved a life which his science might not have rescued. Which was unfair; the disease took some and spared others; it was the will of God and not necessarily anything to do with the simple tea I’d made Margaret. And no one could have been braver than John in risking his own life and health to treat the diseased strangers from the Deptford slums.

           
Rushing awkwardly into my linen, getting lost in sleeves, buttons, and laces, I was wondering what to do, when I heard his voice say:

 
          
“So tell me, what did you give her?”

 
          
And there was nothing in it but interest.

 
          
“Your father said you gave her a draft . . .” he went on, and now I looked up and saw kindness in his eyes—the look I remembered from the schoolroom, when he wanted to draw some discovery from me. “I’m listening,” he said, and I knew he truly was. And suddenly I also knew he wouldn’t laugh at me.

 
          
I answered, still a little awkwardly, “Well . . . while I was waiting for you to get word . . . I gave her willow bark. Something one of the women on Bucklersbury told me about long ago. It’s supposed to cool the blood. It’s worked before for me, and I was desperate. I thought it might help . . . But I think we were just lucky.” My voice trailed away.

 
          
He smiled, but without mockery. He was genuinely intrigued by the idea, and I thought he looked impressed. There was so little selfish pride in John, I thought, in a happy muddle of love for his simplicity and relief that he didn’t seem to feel threatened by my having tried a remedy he hadn’t thought of and which had, miraculously, worked. I thought his modesty might have come from being of an age to have grown up in the aftermath of the wars; he’d probably been shaped by the suffering of back then in ways that we prosperous children of peacetime couldn’t even imagine. “Willow bark, eh,” he murmured. “Well, you have healing hands and good instincts. I wonder if that’s something I should talk to Dr. Butts about, now I’m going to be working with him. We could try using it more; start trying to understand how it helps. Would you mind, Meg?”

 
          
I shook my head. I was blushing, but with pleasure now and not just out of shame at my nakedness. I’d be so proud if my homespun remedies could somehow help his medical career. More bravely, I said, “I was relieved she survived her crisis before you needed to cut her. I’m scared of bleeding people.”

 
          
And instead of frowning at my small medical heresy, he nodded thoughtfully. “Yes,” he said. “I sometimes wonder about whether these things work too.”

 
          
He noticed my bashfulness now. I think to put me at ease, he also began to stretch for a shirt and shake it out before putting arms into sleeves. But he went on looking happy and comfortable.

 
          
“John,” I said, taking courage from the easy intimacy of the moment to ask the question I’d never dared ask. “If we’re going to marry now, shouldn’t you tell me about your family? I don’t know anything about where you’re from and who your people are. You sprang up from nowhere as our tutor . . . fully formed . . .”

 
          
Not that it really mattered, I supposed. So many people that we knew were men from nowhere, rising from the ruins of wars that had wiped out half the aristocracy, destroyed fortunes, and caused chaos throughout the land. Cardinal Wolsey was the son of a butcher; his secretary, Thomas Cromwell, the son of a blacksmith. Father’s grandfather had been a baker.

 
          
John had always been part of our circle, and that had been enough; but if we were to be united before God, surely I should know something about whatever sisters and brothers, parents and shires, he’d hailed from?

 
          
He looked vaguely round, with the shirt flapping over on his taut chest. I could smell him on me; I breathed in and savored the memory of our closeness as he began to tie up the ribbons. “I’ll have a lifetime to tell you my stories, so I won’t rush them all out now,” he said, and I could see him choosing his words. “I lost my family young. You know that my father died. And then I had a good stepfather, but I lost him suddenly too. After that I went to live with my aunt, in Burgundy, until she died,” he went on, with a faraway look in his eye. “That’s when I studied at the university at Louvain. And then I traveled. I went everywhere when I was young, looking for a way to”—he paused—“find part of my family again. Looking for people who remembered me after the wars. You don’t know the half of it. It wasn’t just the Low Countries. I’ve been up and down the kingdom in my time, and beyond. I’ve been to Ireland. I’ve been to Scotland. But nothing came of it. The only kin I have left is a brother, and we didn’t ever get on well . . .” There was wistfulness on his face now. “He’s in London, oddly enough. One of the things I wanted to do when I came back was to renew our relationship. But coldnesses creeps in. Gaps develop that can never be bridged.”