Portrait of an Unknown Woman (45 page)

           
“You’re more fragile than you seem, little Meg,” he’d whisper; and I was partly reassured to know he still felt guilty at having deceived me and was hoping to win me back gradually, through gentleness.

 
          
Now, as we weighed and measured and compared the symptoms of my poor and his rich patients, consulting his books for ideas or discussing whether oil of scorpions really could help against headaches, that shared enthusiasm began to deepen our relationship again from the grim banality of the winter.

 
          
I started staying downstairs again when Dr. Butts dropped by too, and I surprised myself by beginning to feel almost fond of the old man, for all his snobbish talk about expensive medicines for the rich, for all my hunch that he wasn’t the great doctor he liked to think. It was the stories John had told me about him protecting protégés with Lutheran sympathies and visiting Wolsey that had first won my heart. He was brave, after his fashion. I was coming to appreciate his kindness too. I liked it when Dr. Butts came sniffing at my mixtures, offering advice that was always kindly meant and sometimes helpful; and John would look relieved when I thanked him prettily for it.

 
          
I was doing my best to emulate Margaret’s genius for finding contentment in life as I found it. She’d made me feel it was foolish to worry over whether John’s mind was second best. I was trying to conquer that feeling, just as I was trying to find ways to rebuild trust with John. Even if it felt imperfect now, I kept reminding myself, adding a pinch of something else 
into my medicine, that all my dreams had come true. I had the husband I’d wanted and the home I’d wanted, and Tommy too, who illuminated my life in a way I’d never even dreamed possible. Surely I could learn to live with the ways in which reality differed from the dream. Surely we could find a compromise.

 
          
If I still felt secretly impatient that John and Dr. Butts weren’t working on any big scientific theories, beyond the correspondence with the foreign scholar that had arisen out of my idea, I tried to stifle it. How would Margaret have found contentment here? I wondered; and I was pleased with myself when I hit on the notion that it might help them, and me, if I suggested more thoughts for them to feed into their correspondence with Vesalius.

           
Dr. Butts’s pale eyes lit up with excitement, and he began rubbing his hands under his beard on the night I said casually, “Why don’t you ask him to look into how much human anatomy Galen really knew?”

 
          
And John laughed in astonished delight, as if I’d hit on an important secret (although in fact it was commonplace that the Galenic theories handed down to us were all based on experiments with pigs, not people).

 
          
I went on: “It might be less than we think.”

 
          
“You’re an iconoclast, Meg,” John said, and with a generous laugh, “but you’re quite right. Why didn’t we think of that ourselves?”

 
          
As I began to feel more comfortable again in my marriage, I found myself able to appreciate the easy, humorous way John behaved around his new mentor. I surprised them one evening roaring over a story about a servant at the College of Physicians, Eddie, who’d told them a long story when he’d been taken on, about the wife who’d died at Worcester two 
years before, and his bitter prayers at her grave, but who’d been caught out in his lie when the supposedly dead wife had come looking for him just after they’d given him permission to marry again. There was something touching about the way they both turned to me as soon as they saw me, eager to share their story with me; the way each capped the other’s phrases and both enjoyed the other’s jokes.

 
          
“And then he said, ‘Well, if she’s alive I’m a lucky man, because she’s a good woman,’ ” Butts chortled.

 
          
“And Butts told him: ‘Well, you’re not such a good man if you’re about to take another wife. Didn’t you tell me she was dead?’ ” John picked up.

 
          
“But Eddie kept his wits about him. He didn’t bat an eyelid at that, just said, deadpan, ‘Well, that’s what they told me in Worcester.’ That made Butts cross. ‘So you admit you were lying when you told us both that you were at her grave yourself?’ he said.

 
          
“And do you know what he said then?” Butts spluttered, and they both started snorting at the memory: “ ‘Well, of course I was there—but I was much too upset to look inside.’ ”

 
          
On other nights, we were alone. As if he’d never stopped, John gently went back to filling those evenings with the stories he and Dr. Butts heard every day about the court’s cliques and plots and counterplots. The queen’s men were Father’s friends—the Duke of Norfolk, the Imperial Ambassador Chapuys, Bishop Fisher, Bishop Stokesley—ardent Catholics to a man, but their power was on the wane. The growing ranks of Father’s enemies included almost everyone around Anne Boleyn, whose beauty and power grew by the day, although the matter of the king’s divorce was still stalled. John laughed noncommittally when he said that Anne Boleyn had told one of Queen Catherine’s Spanish ladies that she

wished all Spaniards were in the sea, that she didn’t care a fig for the queen and would rather see her hang than acknowledge her as her mistress. The most important of the lady’s emerging circle of supporters was an outsider at court: Thomas Cromwell, a self-made man, a blacksmith’s son from Putney who, before he entered Cardinal Wolsey’s service, had been a mercenary in Italy and a wool stapler in England and married an heiress. He had survived Wolsey’s arrest and death and somehow dug himself in as an influential member of the king’s council, although he didn’t yet have any formal titles showing the extent of his power.
           
His sympathies were with the Bible men, like Anne Boleyn’s; he was the kind of man who wouldn’t think twice about helping the king get out from under the pope’s control if it would help move the king’s marriage forward (and advance his own career). “He has fierce little hawk’s eyes,” John said, looking anxious. “But he’s a subtle man. A manipulator. A politician to rival your father. And he’s out for your father’s job.”

 
          
Finally, on a fresh April evening when there was birdsong on the air again, I began to feel I’d distanced myself too much from my husband through my secrets and my discontents—that I’d made myself the deceiver, while he, for all the secrets of his past, was offering nothing but innocent love. John and I walked under the budding apple trees together 
and he brought in a clump of primroses to scatter on our bed. When he pressed himself to me I murmured, “I’m tired,” but my heart wasn’t in it anymore; we’d been estranged for too long, I thought, finally embracing him back. It was time to make peace.

           
Afterward he murmured “Thank you,” and when he got up in the morning he spent longer than usual fussing around my side, tucking the quilts around me and kissing my head 
with a concerned look on his face. “Stay inside, my love,” he whispered. “You’re so tired these days. And you’ve got so thin. Take a rest. Get your strength back.”

 
          
I almost did. But some instinct—some distrust of that concerned look on his face—told me not to stay at home. A thud in my heart told me I’d be missing something if I did. So once he’d gone and Tommy was tottering around in the kitchen with the nurse, I dressed and went out into the street. Which is where I found Davy, waiting to show me evil set loose in the streets of London.

 
          
The street was empty.
 
It was as if there was a holiday. There were no apothecaries out today—just Davy, sitting in the church doorway with his bottles.

 
          
“You’ve come,” he said as I came out, as if we’d agreed to meet. “Let’s go.”

 
          
We walked. There was a lift of life in the air and people crowding down Cheapside all in the same direction. The crowd thickened below St. Paul’s as we turned north toward the steeple of St. Bartholomew’s Church and the hospital. I didn’t like to break the spell: the sunlight, the smell of spring.

 
          
“Where are we going?” I asked in the end. He didn’t answer. It was a stupid question anyway. I could see we were heading for Smithfield.

 
          
The crowd was getting solid now. We had to use elbows to jostle through the burghers and errand boys. A stake was set up in the place of execution. There were a lot of horsemen about, clanking their spurs, and the bench for the gentry was packed. We stayed with the common people.

 
          
I’d known all along, I thought dully, looking at the pitch barrel and the chains and the waiting logs.

           
“Who?” I asked.

 
          
He gave me a curious look. “Bainham,” he said, as if I should have known. “Sir James Bainham. Your family friend.”

 
          
I looked down. I remembered Sir James last year, standing so ill at ease, waiting for Father in the parlor, trying to think of words of praise to say about my baby. I remembered Father’s hard smile. For a split second I panicked, thinking there must be a mistake; but I knew really that there wasn’t. It was all perfectly clear. There was nothing I could say or think now to soften the pain. Looking at my feet, being buffeted and kicked by legs busily pushing for a better view, I nodded. Of course.

 
          
Bainham came without a confessor, just a cartload of men-at-arms holding a chain around his middle. He was stripped to the waist, with white scars and red stripes down his back. His face was downturned so I couldn’t see his expression. But I could see his skin was gray. The cart shrieked to a halt. The sergeants of the guard had to push and yell to get the crowd to give way.

 
          
“Shame,” yelled a woman’s voice, and there was a low rumble of jeers and hisses as the men brought him to the stake.

 
          
“Dr. Simons was too scared to come with him,” I heard a fat man in front of me say, and spit. “Couldn’t convert him. Not going to risk a cobblestone in the head either. Bloody cowardly scavengers, the lot of them.”

 
          
So it would be an ugly crowd. They said a mob could turn violent watching a popular man being killed.

 
          
Sir James put his arms round the wooden post. He stood on the pitch barrel. He watched the men build up the logs again. There was no fight in him. He was composed. He was ready to die. We were close and I could see his mouth begin to open. The spring wind caught some of his words and blew them away, but not the first.

           
There was a deathly hush when he raised his voice to a bellow to announce: “I come here accused and condemned for a heretic—Sir Thomas More being my accuser and my judge.”

 
          
My head was pounding with red shame. He was going to speak his mind before dying.
 
“Lawful . . . for every man and woman to have God’s book in their mother tongue . . .” He was going defiantly on, his voice coming in and out of my ears. There was a ragged cheer. “Bishop of Rome . . . Antichrist . . .”—a more rousing cheer—“no such thing as purgatory; our souls go straight to heaven and rest with Jesus Christ forever.”

 
          
Applause. Catcalls.

 
          
I looked up and saw with a flash of fear that he seemed to be looking straight at me. He nodded. Our eyes locked. His were calm. I tried to breathe shallowly to compose myself. I didn’t want to faint like some girl at a dance when he was dying with so much stoicism.

 
          
Another voice in the crowd, picking a fight; someone yelling the official truth in sharp London tones from beside Sir James. “You’re lying, heretic! You’re denying the blessed sacrament of the altar!” I didn’t know whose voice it was, but it was answered with a rumbling jeer.

 
          
Davy muttered, “Master Pave, the town clerk. Scared out of his wits. Doesn’t believe what he’s saying himself.”

 
          
“I’m not denying the sacrament,” Sir James shouted, with a last barrister’s flourish. “I just dispute your idolatry. What makes you think that Christ, God, and man could dwell in a piece of bread?” He raised his voice. “The bread is not Christ. Christ’s body is not chewed with teeth. The bread is just bread.”

 
          
Laughter. Banging. Appreciative foot stamping. Cheers.

           
“Set fire to him and burn him,” Pave’s voice came hastily back, and the flame moved 
its wobbly way along the trail of gunpowder.