Portrait of an Unknown Woman (29 page)

 
          
He said, “No, no, no, that was just the story. Tyrrell was a good man. One of the best.”

 
          
And she said, “If it was a story you made up, why did you repay a man who’d done you service by giving him such an infamous part?”

 
          
And his eyes shifted down to his feet, and he scuffed them as he considered his response.

 
          
“Look,” he said anxiously, after a long pause, not wanting to remember Tyrrell’s big hands clapping him on the back and his hearty voice instructing the boys at swordplay. “I didn’t choose the story. It arose out of need. By the time your father came into this Sir James Tyrrell was dead and gone. It couldn’t hurt him. But I never felt good about it.”

 
          
She nodded reluctantly. He could see now that she believed him, however hostile she seemed. It gave him fresh strength.

 
          
“When Henry Tudor came to power he married my sister Elizabeth. It was a way of signaling publicly that Lancastrians and Yorkists had ended their war. But first he had to make her legitimate again. It was the only way for the marriage to have its proper symbolic value: a true York princess marrying the conqueror from the house of Lancaster. But you see Henry’s dilemma: as soon as he repealed
Titulus Regius
, the statute by which Richard had declared all my father’s children illegitimate and taken the throne, then my brother Edward would become the rightful king. And although there were plenty of rumors by then that we’d been killed, Edward was alive.

 
          
“Any king from my family would have killed us without a second thought if it suited them. The Yorks were always short on scruples. But Henry was a different sort. Calculating and greedy and mean-spirited, as people always said, but cautious too. Not a really evil bone in his body. And he was scared of the women: his mother; my mother. They saved us.

 
          
My mother got the bishop of Ely back on the job to talk to his mother.

 
          
John Morton had been made archbishop of Canterbury by then, and he was practically running the country; but he still remembered he’d been a Yorkist in the old days; my father’s man. The deal he worked out was that Henry could marry Elizabeth; but we had to be kept safe and given new lives, appropriate for men of noble birth. So he changed our names and took us into his household.

 
          
“It wasn’t that risky. We looked different by then; we’d gone away as little boys in wartime and we came back as young men with beards after half the young men of good birth in the land had been slaughtered. It was a new world. And it was a new household; he was just building his palace at Lambeth; new people were coming together. The Guildford family was happy for Edward to be counted as one of their sons; Archbishop Morton couldn’t find me a new family who’d give me their name—Tyrrell balked at that—so he just made my name up. Morton laughed about it; his view was that even if someone who didn’t know our blood did notice that we looked like Plantagenets, they wouldn’t make anything of it—there were so many royal bastards, after all. Our immediate family knew, but no one would talk; they were happy with the power they’d managed to hang on to through Elizabeth’s marriage.
 
Sir James Tyrrell was made constable of
 
Guisnes and moved to France. My mother wasn’t a discreet woman, but after a year or two she fell out with Henry and shut herself up in the abbey at Bermondsey. So I imagine all those nuns from noble families at places like Bermondsey and the Minories knew a lot about us. But no one living in the world wanted to remember the past. People wanted different things after the war was over: what they wanted to talk about was trade and diplomatic alliances and the New Learning. It was as if England became another country once the rulers of the land had stopped devouring one another. No one wanted to go back to the war.” He stopped wistfully. “So we spent half the year with Morton, showing our new faces to the world; and the rest at Gipping. We started again . . .”

           
There was light through the window now, and he could hear footsteps on the path.

 
          
“I met your father at Lambeth Palace, through John Morton,” he said, listening to them coming closer. “After we got away from London, Edward only ever wanted to bury himself in the country: to hunt and pray and hide. But I wanted to see the world. The truth was that I hadn’t given up the idea that we could somehow take back the throne—even if Edward didn’t want to. But I couldn’t tell them that. So I told them I wanted to experience the 
New Learning and find a different kind of future, and when I was sixteen or so Morton let me leave England for the university at Louvain. My aunt Margaret was the Duchess of Burgundy; we knew I’d be safe near her (and I thought she might help me take back the throne—she always hated the Tudors).

           
I stayed at Lambeth Palace for a couple of days before I took ship. Your father was there. He was just a clever page boy in those days, but Morton kept saying he was marked out for greatness. He was an astute man, Morton. ‘When I’m gone,’ he always said, ‘I hope you’ll be guided by young More.’ ” The footsteps stopped outside the door. “And I always have been,”

 
          
John Clement said, loudly enough for More to hear as he pushed it open and stepped inside.

 
          
Sir Thomas was blue jawed, with black smudges under his eyes and yesterday’s linen—in the rumpled physical disarray he so often scarcely noticed when he was away from the display of public life. But the threatening expression of the night had gone. Now he had the composure of a man who’d been in prayer for hours.

 
          
“So have you told her?” More said sternly. “I’m sorry if I was abrupt last night; but you must understand how important this is for us all.”

 
          
John Clement found he’d stood up straight, moving away from the table and away from Meg without even noticing. He was nodding with his usual almost reverential respect. “About Edward. Yes,” he said. His eyes were on More. But as More turned to his adopted daughter, he also became aware of Meg’s head rising and falling in an automaton’s nod.

 
          
More strode over to Meg, who was still perched on the tabletop, hunching into it like a bird that has fluffed itself up on its branch ready to sleep, holding on tight with her hands.
 
“Do you understand, Meg?” he said, very kindly, and Meg swayed toward him, as if hoping for a comforting arm around her shoulders. But More perched beside her instead, side 
by side, taking John Clement’s place. “Do you understand the life you’d be choosing by making this marriage?”

 
          
She moved her head, but so indistinctly now that John Clement couldn’t tell whether she intended the movement to signify yes or no. Her eyes were as wide as saucers. There was no expression in them.

 
          
John Clement could see the love More felt for her in the comforting way he was stroking one of his own hands with the other; but he also knew Meg, so close beside her father, was unaware of that movement. He looked away, trying not to see this small sign of his patron’s difficulty in communicating love. It wasn’t his place to criticize; he was devoted to this man.

 
          
“The problem wouldn’t just be the secret in his past, always living a fragile version of the truth, and always living with the risk of discovery,” Sir Thomas was saying to Meg, in the softest, tenderest voice imaginable. “Difficult though that’s been at times, we’ve managed. And the situation’s been stable for years—peace and security; Edward in the countryside; 
John a remote younger brother. But it’s not stable now. There’s new danger on all sides. There’s sickness spreading through the land, and the curse of heresy, and people whispering in the streets about God’s retribution on the Tudor dynasty. Calling them usurpers; picking at old wounds. And the king so desperate to end his marriage to the queen, with or without the pope’s permission, that I fear he could easily be corrupted by the heretics gathering around the Lady Anne. If he is—if he does turn toward heresy”—he paused for 
dramatic emphasis, a public speaker’s trick, looking deep into Meg’s eyes—“then every Catholic king in Christendom will be looking for the man who could unseat him. The Tudor kings have brought with them a peace and prosperity that England has never known before; it’s been my duty and my pleasure to help preserve their reign in whatever modest ways I can. But they rule by right of conquest, not blood. If England divided along religious lines and the existence of a legitimate Plantagenet prince became known, Catholics from all over Europe would flock to support him against Henry Tudor. Until yesterday that would not have concerned you directly—it would have been Edward who interested them. But now poor Edward is dead,” and he crossed himself. “God rest his soul. And the last Plantagenet prince left is John.”

 
          
John stepped forward, making inarticulate protesting noises in his throat. Sir Thomas waved him superbly aside. “I know, I know, John; it’s the last thing you’d want. Your one aim is to avoid being pulled into statecraft and the intrigues of kings; I know. But secrets get told. However lucky we’ve been all these years, enough people still know this secret that it might yet come out. And, if it did, you’d have more than the Catholic kings of Europe to worry about. There’d be the king of England too. Henry isn’t the timid man his father was. I always say that if my head could win him a castle, it would be off my shoulders tomorrow. But if he thought you represented a threat to his throne, yours would be off tonight.”

 
          
John stepped back, nodding his head miserably at the undeniable truth of what Sir Thomas was saying. The statesman hardly saw; he was still looking searchingly at the girl beside him; and she was still looking away. Her hands were still clamped to the tabletop, but two fingers had been plucking at a fold of her skirt so hard that she’d made a stiff pleat in 
the yellow material.

 
          
“Do you understand, Meg?” Sir Thomas said, his voice dropping to just above a whisper. “I’ve wanted this for years. This is the match I’d always have chosen for you. I couldn’t have been happier when I first saw the friendship between you deepen. But the time wasn’t yet right for it back then. I knew he’d been an impetuous hothead when he was young,

always spoiling for a fight. I wasn’t sure, even once he came to us, that he’d settle down permanently into the new life I’d sketched out for him. And I didn’t want to marry you to a man who might go back someday to jockeying for political power, especially with so many religious troubles suddenly threatening to pull Christendom apart. I wouldn’t have wanted to 
put you in that danger. Anyway, if he were a prince of England, his high degree would rule him out as a husband for you—his blood would be too exalted for city people like us. He’d been John Clement since before you were born; and he’d been the teacher of my children for a good four or five years. But I still wasn’t sure of him. However sober he seemed to have become most of the time, there’d still be flashes of something else every now and then. Something dangerous. And before I could let you marry, I needed to be sure he’d want to go on being plain John Clement forever.”

 
          
Sir Thomas paused. “And then there was the night after Ammonius died,” he said. Very quietly. Very neutrally. Looking down. But the measured words still brought a sweat to John Clement’s brow and made his guts churn hot with shame. “Only John could really tell you what happened that night, if he remembers. All I know is that he was dragged before me by the night constables after starting a brawl in a tavern on Cheapside. They’d recognized him as the tutor to our house; and anyway, I was the magistrate; they’d naturally have brought him to me. He was dead drunk. They said he’d attacked two men. Tipped their jug of Spanish red over their heads, so their clothes looked as though they were drenched in blood; then followed up that assault by bashing their heads together. And then drawn a knife on them. It took half a dozen men to wrestle him to his knees and disarm him, and they all looked as though they’d been dipped in a barrel of wine by the time they’d done it.

 
          
When I asked him why, he wouldn’t say. Just snarled something about having been insulted. ‘If I’d had my sword,’ he said—slurred—‘I’d have run those bastards through.’ And that’s what the constables said he’d been yelling in the tavern too.”

 
          
More paused to see if Meg responded. “Which was obviously a dangerous thing for a tutor to a London lawyer’s house to be yelling in a tavern,” he went on calmly, when she didn’t. “Because it’s one thing for a man in a tavern to pull out a knife, but it’s quite another for him to be raving about carrying a nobleman’s sword.”

 
          
John Clement was still shaking his head, as if denying the story; but the voice went pitilessly on.

 
          
“That’s why I took him away abroad with me that summer,” More was saying. “And that’s why I wouldn’t let him come back to you until he’d been properly tested by time. He wasn’t safe. I was always frightened that there’d be another of those moments of violent rage, and that it might destroy him. Or you.