Portrait of an Unknown Woman (38 page)

 
          
There was a whimper from the corner of the room. I felt my way toward Tommy, picked him up, and sat down with him at the chair by the fire. For a moment there was nothing in my mind but the innocence of his hands kneading my breast, and his little body squirming with concentration as he rhythmically drew milk from inside me. When my thoughts came back, they were calmer too. Mixed up with the darkness were memories like flickers of light: Father sitting in this chair laughing as the hungry baby sucked at the braiding on his jacket; Father tiptoeing in with a bunch of violets on the last day of my lying-in; Father hugging me and the baby; Father sitting by the bed after he’d stopped for a drink at St. Botolph’s Wharf, chuckling over the mouth on the alewife who he swore could talk without ever drawing breath. And with the memories came hope. That man, whose gentleness I’d come to know so much better since my marriage, just couldn’t know irrational fury. There wasn’t a malicious bone in his body. He couldn’t have ordered a man shut up in a metal embrace that tightened around him until his bones broke unless there was a compelling reason. What I had to do was find out what the reason was.

 
          
The old me, the person who hadn’t believed trust or happiness were possible, would have been down in the parlor we’d given Father by now, snooping silently through the papers he left on the desk, looking for evidence. I considered that idea for a second but banished it before I lay Tommy back down in his crib, full and sleepy with milk dribbling out of his mouth. I got back into bed and snuggled myself into John’s heavy arms, ready to sleep as well, now that I’d decided what to do. I was going to choose happiness, as John wanted. But not the way he wanted me to, by choosing ignorance. My new happiness wasn’t something to be preserved by being cowardly. I was going to have the courage to ask Father the truth, and the trust to believe the answer he gave me.

           
I took Tommy to Chelsea in the morning, just the two of us.

 
          
Mad Davy was waiting for me in the street, ignoring the iron in the wind. As soon as he caught sight of me he pulled himself away from the wall where he was lolling, staring at passersby, with a great idiot’s smile plastered all over his rough face, as if yesterday had never happened. He was a short, stout man with bandy legs, no teeth, and greasy mousy hair

going gray, who lived with his white-haired widow mother in some thieves’alley nearby. There was no reason for him to have attached himself to the apothecaries rather than any other market. I’d never seen anyone actually buy the murky-colored bottles and powders stinking of rotten egg that he arranged on bits of wall and windowsills. But he was always around, and it was impossible not to enjoy his half-crazed gossip and opinions, one outrageous indiscretion after another belted out into the crowd. He always knew the street talk first. The herbalists liked the old big-mouth.

 
          
Even if he scared me a little, so did I.

 
          
When he got up to me now, the fool’s smile left his face. “You did what you could,” he murmured, for once not speaking at a volume that the whole street could hear. He nodded sagely. “I told them you would. I knew you were a good woman.” He touched his orange cap to me, and I saw his hands too were blistered and bleeding.

 
          
I didn’t know what to say. Part of me wanted to slide past and rush
     
down to the river and the bustle of boats. If I had to talk to anyone about the women, it was Father, and no one else would do. But another part of me wanted to know what Davy knew. I made an effort to breathe quietly.

 
          
I was trying to work out what questions I could ask. But he got in first—again in that quiet voice, not unfriendly, but with the theatrical acting left out.

 
          
“Things have been getting worse since they got rid of old Wolf-see,” he said, searching my face with his eyes. Then, without warning, he said: “They say your father tortures people in his garden at Chelsea.”

 
          
“No,” I said hurriedly, feeling the blood drain from my face, trying not to remember the western gatehouse. I didn’t want this madman disturbing my composure. I had to ask Father myself before I could revisit those old doubts.

 
          
He nodded quietly, as if confirming something to himself that had nothing to do with my gabbled words. Then, moving so close that I could smell the egg and piss and beer on him, he hissed: “They say there’s going to be a burning.”

 
          
My mouth opened. How could I have expected that, when there had only been half a dozen burnings in a century? I stared back, lifting my shoulders helplessly and feeling Tommy shift in my arms. “I don’t know,” I said soundlessly. And I fled down the side of the street.

 
          
Father was in the great hall. It was his new experiment—transferring the court from Lincoln’s Inn Hall to home so he could get through the cases faster. They said it amused the king to hear that Father had inherited a backlog of more than nine hundred legal matters from Wolsey’s time but had already cleared more than half of them. The great table was covered in green baize and piles of books and papers, with four chairs against the side nearest the wall in which three barristers in their striped uniform flanked Father. One was reading out a declaration to him. The room was full of strangers and whispers. It felt as though I was watching the cozily professional scene through a pane of glass. Father smiled as the lawyer finished, and said something I didn’t hear. But everyone nearby laughed.

 
          
“I feed them in Master Hans’s parlor,” Dame Alice said proudly at my elbow as I looked in from the doorway at the unfamiliar tableau. “It’s quite a to-do, I can tell you.” She took me into the smaller room so I could see the table under which I’d once hidden Master Hans’s drawings set out with platters of beef and baskets of bread and tankards and bottles ready for midday. “I just tell them to help themselves when they’re through,” she said, rocking the baby in her arms with a grandmother’s calm gestures.

 
          
“They’re a hungry lot, lawyers. You wouldn’t believe the amount of meat they get through in a day.” She caught my eye, then raised hers to the heavens in the kind of mock exasperation that showed she was loving every minute of her new life.

 
          
Dame Alice hurried me on to her parlor. “We’ll eat in here today, though,” she said, “a proper hot dinner. Your father’s got a guest today. He’s only just arrived. Sir James Bainham; do you remember him?”

 
          
I did, vaguely. A lawyer from Middle Temple with a daughter Margaret’s and my age; we’d played together when we were very young, though I couldn’t remember her name. I thought he’d retired; I remembered thin graying hair and a thin anxious laugh. He’d walked around Chelsea village once, with John, at the height of the sweating sickness, looking at the 
scale of the problem; trying to determine what he could do to help. A good man (though I also remembered Father raising his eyebrows when word reached us last year that Bainham had remarried, mostly because his bride was the widow of the heretic Simon Fish, who’d become notorious after publishing a raging pamphlet claiming purgatory did not exist and accusing the priests of lining their own pockets by taking money from the gullible to pray for the souls of the dead). But my heart sank at the thought of Bainham being here now. Even though I was surrounded by all the cheerful apparent normality of life at Father’s house, I was almost sick with the urgency of my mission. If we were to pass Father’s one free hour chatting politely to a guest, how could I ask the questions I needed answers to?

 
          
Sir James was standing next to the chair where Dame Alice did her tapestry—the frame was up, and the basket was open, and skeins of bright silks were arranged neatly on the small table she worked at. In this cozy, feminine retreat, he was the same anxious wraith I remembered, with a thin back bent over into an accommodating question mark. If anything,

he looked still more ill at ease, with furrows across his forehead. I could have sworn there was a lurch of relief from fear on his face when he saw both of us walk in, cradling a baby. But perhaps rabbity twitches were just in his nature.

 
          
“A joy,” he said with bloodless courtesy, “to have the opportunity to see you, Mistress Meg. Grown so beautiful. And blessed with a bonny baby already.”

 
          
He fell silent and lowered his nervous head over Tommy. It seemed to me that he didn’t really want to talk to me any more than I wanted to talk to him today. Tommy smiled delightedly back at him and stretched out a fat little arm to grab at the long, thin nose jerking so near his hands. Trying not to look alarmed, Sir James shuffled back. The man definitely had a tic. His hands were clasped together, almost as if he knew to make an effort to stop them moving, but he couldn’t keep his face still.

 
          
I was just beginning to wonder in earnest what was the matter with him when I heard Father walk in behind me. I turned, hopeful despite all the turmoil of feelings inside me that his presence would lighten the room, as it always did. But I was aware as I drank in Father’s face—unusually somber, but lightening up in a copy of delight at the sight of me—of Sir James just shuffling and tightening his face still further, as if to hide away his true feelings.

 
          
“Meg!” Father exclaimed, striding decisively forward. “What an unexpected pleasure,” and he put one warm arm around me and Tommy.

 
          
He turned to Sir James, and I sensed something amiss in the look that passed between these two old colleagues. “It’s not often I get visits from my grandson out here in the sticks, Sir James,” Father went on. “Perhaps you and I could do our business a little later?”

 
          
I was relieved that Father seemed to have read my mind and understood my wish for privacy. Sir James nodded hastily and bowed again. He was, I noticed, still half in his cloak; he looked almost as though he had half a mind to scuttle away for good. “Dame Alice will take you to the room where we’re serving a very humble dinner for the lawyers,” Father said, and smiled a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “I hope it will be adequate.”

 
          
Dame Alice knew an order when she heard one and led the awkward guest away.

 
          
Father turned his gaze back on me. I could see tired lines on his face, but his expression was so tender that I thought I must have mistaken the chill I imagined I’d seen in it while he was talking to poor Sir James.

 
          
“Meg, have dinner with me,” he said, stepping forward and taking Tommy from my arms, with the new ease that had developed between us since my marriage. “It would be good to see you properly, away from the crowd.”

 
          
“Yes,” I said, as nervous as Sir James now, feeling my face muscles tighten with tension under his hand. I hadn’t thought out how to proceed.

 
          
“Father, I wanted to ask you . . .” I hesitated.

 
         
He nodded, all affectionate attention, rocking the baby. I ached with longing for him to find the words to banish my fears, so I could give him the same look back.

 
          
“A man was brought to my house yesterday for treatment,” I said, trying for a lawyer’s calm, choosing my words as carefully as I could. “We got him inside, but he died. I think he’d been tortured. When I asked why, the people who brought him said I should ask you.”

 
          
He only sighed and stepped back, still rocking. “Meg, Meg,” he said, with a hint of reproach creeping into his face. “These are ugly times we’re living in, if a daughter can think it’s right to question her father’s actions.”

 
          
I felt cold inside. I must have misunderstood. Could he truly be admitting responsibility? “First Will, then you,” he went sorrowfully on. “Though he saw sense in the end. But I wondered then, and I wonder even more now: do you children have any idea at all what it is you’re sympathizing with?”

 
          
“Well, what?” I snapped, almost surprised by the sudden hot anger driving my mind and my mouth before my heart had accepted what I was hearing. “And why shouldn’t I question what I see, when we’ve always been so proud of the gentleness of your justice, and suddenly there’s a man—a boy, almost—bleeding and dying under my hands, and they say 
you’re to blame?”

 
          
He didn’t respond to the hardness in my voice. His stayed reasonable.

 
          
“This isn’t the same as sentencing some baker who’s been cheating on his weights, or a pair of ruffians brought in for making a rumpus in a tavern,” he said, and I thought there was a pleading look in his eyes. “Surely you must see that, Meg. It’s one thing to be gentle with a crook who’ll chip away at the rules a bit if you don’t show him you’re watching. But it’s quite another to stand meekly by and let the kind of evil take hold that will sweep away all the rules and the laws we live by. I can’t make little jokes with heretics and bind them over. They’re not the pitiful boys you seem to be taking them for. They are the darkness. They want to snuff out the light we’ve always lived by. If we don’t destroy them first, they’ll destroy the church we’ve lived in for fifteen hundred years. We have no choice.”