Portrait of an Unknown Woman (5 page)

 
          
At ease was absolutely the opposite of how I was feeling at this moment; but the wonder of this joyful embarrassment I’d been stricken with
 
stopped me from laughing at the idea. I couldn’t quite believe he was feeling so at ease with me either. He couldn’t meet my eye even more than I could his. But hugging that secret knowledge to myself only made me happier.

 
          
He was matching his long, athletic stride to my shorter one. We were so close I could almost feel the muscles in his legs brushing against my skirt. I was half turned toward him, against the wind, my arm hovering weightless and nervous above his, trying not to melt into the warmth we made together. But, all down the side of my body that was next to his, I couldn’t help but feel the line and life of him, and rejoice in silence at the loveliness of it.

 
          
“I could walk like this forever, with you,” he said, almost whispering.

 
          
I made a small sound back; I didn’t know what to say, because I couldn’t say “I’ve been waiting for years for you to come back, and if I died now I would die happy just to have seen you again,” but it didn’t matter. Because I’d just caught him snatching one of the same glances at me that I’d been secretly throwing at him, and a new soft little explosion of happiness was happening inside me.

 
          
He laughed. “But it is cold,” he added. We were down by the river already, with a bank of snowdrops coming up behind us under the oak tree
   
and a fierce glitter on the water, and the wind was coming at us hard and fast, snatching at his foreign-looking black beret.
 
“Shall we sit down somewhere, out of the wind? In one of the gatehouses—maybe this one right here?”

 
          
I didn’t understand the surge of feeling sweeping me along. All I knew was that there was nothing I wanted more than to be alone with him, somewhere warm and still, so that I might at last be brave enough to look into his face and we could talk forever. I started to nod my head, feeling my body slide closer to his. Then I realized what he was pointing at: the westernmost of the two gatehouses. The place I never go.

 
          
“No,” I snapped, surprising even myself with the sharpness of my tone. “We can’t go in there,” I added, feeling his surprise and making an effort to keep my voice calm. “Father’s started keeping . . . things . . . in that gatehouse. Come away. I can’t tell you about that yet.”

 
          
Urgently I pulled at his arm, aware with another part of my mind of the closeness of his chest as he laughingly surrendered and let me manoeuvre him away. It was three hundred yards upriver to the second gatehouse.

 
          
“But this other gatehouse is all right, is it?” he asked breathlessly, catching up and sliding his arm around my waist now as we walked toward it. I could feel it across my back. Fingers on my hip bone, moving. “What does he keep in here?”

 
          
What he kept here was his pets: a fox, a weasel, a ferret, a monkey, all on chains; rabbits in a wooden hutch; and a dovecote of fluttering white birds on the roof. Erasmus used to watch Father’s doves with me, out in the gardens at Bucklersbury, long ago. “They have their kindnesses and feuds, as well as we,” he wrote afterward.

 
          
It was peaceful in the eastern gatehouse. We pushed open the door and smelled straw and feed and wood—calm country smells. We sat down on a bench, side by side, with his arm still round my back, and listened to the wind on the water.

 
          
With his free hand, John Clement loosened his cloak and turned to
       
gaze down at me. The arm behind me was bringing me round to face him, a process my body seemed, independently of my brain, to be joyfully helping. There was a little smile playing on his lips. He lowered his head and nudged his nose against mine. His eyes were cast down still, but his lips were so close now that he only had to whisper. “So, grown-up Mistress Meg Giggs, what shall we talk about?” He smiled wider, and his smile filled my whole field of vision. “I hear that while I’ve been away becoming a doctor you’ve been becoming one too.” His fingers were exploring my side, his arm was drawing me closer. “And I want to know all about that. 
But first, I want to say”—he paused again—“how beautiful you’ve grown,” and he looked straight into my eyes at last.

 
          
And then, somehow, we were kissing, and I was so dizzy with longing that I found myself clinging to him, aware of the ribbons on his foreign-
 
made jacket sleeves and the cloak, which barely muffled the pounding of his heart. I felt his hands shake and the heat of my blood. With a sigh, we came apart, and sat, rumpled and flushed, looking at each other from under our eyelashes, and laughing at our own shared confusion. “Oh, Meg,” John whispered. “Now I know I’ve really come home at last. You’ve always been home to me.”

 
          
Which was just about exactly what I had wanted to hear him say ever since he went away, almost half my life ago. And just about exactly what I had begun to think that neither he nor any other man ever would say to me while I passed my empty spinsterish days buried alive in the countryside, watching all the others get fat with happiness, and became more isolated and eccentric and embittered by the day. So almost all of me wanted to believe the wonderful words I was hearing now. But I couldn’t stop myself also hearing another voice. It was Elizabeth’s, and it was taunting “He’s been back in London since last summer” and “Father got him the job.”

 
          
I looked up at him, hesitating over how best to put my difficult question, with prickles of frustration in advance at trying to believe the answer could only be simple and honest, and at the same time feeling almost dizzy with the desire to slide back into his arms and lose myself in another kiss.

 
          
“So tell me . . . ,” I began, feeling my way into a new kind of uncharted territory. I couldn’t bring myself to say “You’ve been back in London for six months, just one hour’s boat ride away, and never sent word; you went off abroad ten years ago; you never once wrote—and you expect me to believe you’ve treasured your walks with the little girl from all those years ago so much that you’ve always thought of me as your home?” So I started as gently as I knew how: “What has it been like being the king’s server for all these months?”

 
          
He met my eyes now with a different kind of look, a little wary. Then he nodded once or twice, as if he’d answered some mysterious question of his own, and kissed me chastely, a brush of lips on lips.

 
          
“Well, it’s a sinecure; a place at court while I set myself up properly; your father’s kindness to me for old times’ sake,” he said. “But I know what you’re really asking. You think I should have done something better than just turn up out of the blue to see you after so long. You’re asking for explanations.”

 
          
I nodded, relieved that he’d grasped my thoughts. He paused again.

 
          
He was thinking hard. I became aware of the rabbits scratching around in their straw.

 
          
“Listen, Meg,” he said at last. “I can’t give you enough explanations to satisfy you completely. Not yet. But you have to trust me. The first time I asked your father if I could marry you was nearly ten years ago, when he took me abroad for the summer.” I held my breath. I hadn’t expected to hear that. My heart started beating even faster, so fast that I had to make a conscious resolve to keep my face studiedly turned down toward my knees so he couldn’t see my shock. “But your father said no,” he went on.

 
          
“He said I had to settle myself in the world before I could think of marrying you. He told me that if I’d got so interested in herbalism I should go and turn myself into a learned and rational physician—qualify as a doctor on the Continent—and bring something new to the New Learning in England. Well, I have. And I came back to England with you in my heart.

I swear I did. The first thing I wanted to do when I got to London was to come to you.”

 
          
He sighed. “But the problem was that your father still said no,” he said.

 
          
I couldn’t stop myself looking up now. He must have seen a flash in my eyes. “Why?” I said, and I could hear my voice—which I’d thought would come out breathless with a happiness I’d never even imagined might be mine—sounding hard and vengeful instead.

 
         
“There are things he wants me to be able to tell you,” he said. He stopped again. Looked down again. Took a big breath, as if making a decision, and went on. “He says I have to become a member of the College of Physicians first,” he continued, and there was anxiety in his voice. “Not just a member, but one of the elect. I’m doing everything I can. I’m talking to Dr. Butts, the king’s physician. It’s not easy; I’ve been away for years; I have to prove myself as a good physician to someone I’ve never worked with. But your father won’t be swayed. He says I have to be able to tell you I’ve succeeded in my work.”

 
          
It was the More household attitude: everyone must bow to the things of the mind. Usually I shared it. I reveled in my knowledge of things no ordinary woman knew, and most men didn’t either. But now, when the picture of a life of ordinary domestic happiness seemed both tantalizingly within reach and impossibly out of reach, Father’s strict intellectual requirements of John Clement suddenly seemed unnatural and harsh.

 
          
“I shouldn’t be here now, to be honest; I promised him I’d stay away. But when I met Elizabeth”—he looked down and scuffed the straw with a boot—“and started thinking about how close you were here, just down the river, and I knew your father was away at court, and it was about to be Thursday—well, you’ll have to put it down to a lover’s impulse: I just couldn’t resist coming to take you out for a walk.”

 
          
I didn’t know what to say. His words and my feelings were going round and round, somehow failing to blend, leaving me speechless. I tried to control my spasm of anger with Father and concentrate on the happiness of being with the man I loved at last. He was looking searchingly at me.

 
          
“Say you believe me,” he said.

 
          
“Say you love me,” I heard myself say. With self-loathing, I heard myself sounding petulant. Like a child not understanding a story but wanting a happy ending.

 
          
“Oh, I love you all right,” he whispered. “I’ve always loved you, whoever you were—the little orphan crying over your lost past, the bright eyed child storing up everything the apothecaries could show you, the girl who couldn’t stop asking difficult questions, the beauty you’ve turned into now,” and he stroked my black hair, exposed now, with my white cap gathering straw on the floor. “And I always will love you. We’re two of a kind. And even though I’m twice your age, and not quite settled in life even in my dotage—if you’re willing to have me, nothing will stop me from coming back to ask your father for your hand. Again and again. Until the time is right. Don’t you ever doubt that.” And he folded me back into his arms so that his cloak covered us both, and moved his face over mine.

 
          
“Stop,” I said breathlessly, almost unable to pull back but with a new, more urgent question suddenly bursting through my head. “Tell me one thing. Why are you letting Father just give you orders like this? You’ve known him for years. You know he loves a good argument. Can’t you at least try and talk him round?”

 
          
I couldn’t bear what I saw next. His face fell, and the lover’s antennae I had just discovered felt him moving away somewhere very distant.

 
          
A defeated look came over John’s face. “I owe it to him to do as he asks,” he said, very quietly. “I can’t even begin to go into all he’s done for me over the years. It sounds odd to say this, since he and I are much the same age, but he’s been like a wise father to me for most of my life. I can’t start defying him now.”

 
          
“John,” I said, with a new resolve in my voice, groping inside my head for a way of showing him how things were for us these days. “Let me show you Father’s new life.”

 
          
And this time it was my hand on the door, pushing it open into a roar of fresh wind and sunshine, and my strong young arm guiding this man with the troubled eyes out of our darkness.

 
          
Listen,” I whispered
,
 
and tiptoed to the very edge of the western gatehouse window, beckoning John forward.