Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  One of the black hoods had fallen back. For a moment, before a hand pulled it forward again, the face of the man inside it—the man standing next to John—was revealed. A big slab of a face, reddish and lardy, with tiny sharp eyes; and hair and a beard the hot stinking ginger of a fox. I knew that face from the day last winter when he’d come to Chelsea to walk in the garden with Father, his “old friend,” and discuss the vexed question of his marriage. I would never forget the sight of Father’s set, threatened expression at that meaty arm weighing down his shoulders and periodically clapping him on the back.

  “Did you see?” Master Hans whispered now, and even his whisper was hushed by the sheer shock of recognition. “Isn’t that the king?”

  He was sharper than I expected. But, however little I understood of what was happening, I suspected he shouldn’t know if the king was here.

  Tapping reserves of family loyalty I didn’t guess I had, I summoned up the strength to give him a deceptively reassuring smile and shake my head with all the certainty I could muster.

  “But,” he whispered again, “I’m sure it is. I saw him at Greenwich. No one else looks like that.”

  I ignored him.

  I escaped Master Hans as soon as the service was over. I was preparing to get away from him before the priest intoned his last Latin words, If thou, Lord, wilt keep record of our iniquities, Master, who has strength to bear it? And I was already flitting down the path while, in the vestry, the priest and his servers were still chanting Kyrie Eleison as they disrobed; before the troop of horsemen cantering off back to London with their torches were out of sight.

  John must have rushed off alone, lost in his private grief. The only black figure ahead of me in the darkness, carrying a torch, was Father.

  The rest of them, hesitant, murmuring among themselves, were streaming out of the chapel behind us.

  I rushed forward to catch Father, tripping over pebbles and roots in my urgency, feeling brambles and branches whip against me in the darkness, with the tears I wouldn’t shed rising dangerously inside me. I caught his arm again; nearly clawed at it.

  “Meg, sweetheart,” he said gently; but was it the deadly gentleness of a man who has forbidden a suitor to marry his daughter? I hardly dared to ask, but I couldn’t not ask.

  “Please,” I panted, trying but failing to keep my voice steady. “I know it’s bad timing . . . I know you have your mind on this funeral . . . but I must know. I’ve waited all my life. I don’t understand . . .” I saw his face tighten against me. “He told me he’d ask you,” I rushed on. “Today. This afternoon. But then . . . all this . . .” To my horror, I found myself gulping wetly. He began to walk faster. “I must know, Father—are you going to let me marry John?”

  It was out. I half expected Father to shake me off and walk off into the darkness, leaving me without an answer. The thought brought the shameful tears out onto my face.

  But he didn’t. He was astonished by my question. So astonished that he stopped dead and moved the torch closer to my face. He peered at me for a long moment and wiped the wetness gently off one cheek with his free hand, and looked at the tears on his finger, as if doubting his senses.

  Then he put the hand to his own forehead, as if nursing a splitting headache.

  When he finally spoke, his reply didn’t make anything any clearer.

  “He’s asked you to marry him now—now, of all times?” Father said incredulously. He seemed to be talking as much to himself as to me. “Without even telling you about Guildford?” And he suddenly looked angrier than I’d ever seen him. His face darkened into the kind of cold, set fury I could imagine a heretic seeing in the torture chamber. And he took me roughly by the hand and dragged me toward the New Building without saying another word.

  The door was open. A candle was lit inside. John Clement was hunched in the chair, with his cloak ruffled around him and his arms wrapped around his chest and head, as lost to the outside world as a sleeping bird.

  He must have heard our two pairs of hurried footsteps, but he didn’t even look up when Father tugged me inside. It was only Father’s voice that roused him, with the cold clarity of a knife at the throat. It was only when he started speaking that I realized it was John whom Father was angry with, and not me.

  “John,” Father snapped. “Meg tells me you’ve proposed marriage. But I told her you could only do so after you’d told her the whole truth—and you haven’t told her anything. There are some confidences you have to share. If nothing else, you have to tell her about Guildford. I’ll be back when you’ve had time to talk.”

  Then he walked out. At the sound of the latch clicking, John Clement finally raised his eyes to meet mine.

  Part Two

  Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling

  8

  Sometimes flesh-and-blood people can seem less real than shadows.

  John Clement blinked, but for a while he scarcely recognized the face of the young woman standing before him. He was in another time; a child again, playing knucklebones with his older brother Edward, listening to the grown-ups quarreling on the other side of the door.

  Different voices over the years, but always about some treachery, some battle. His father: bellows of rage, followed by the banging of fists on tables or the rumble of furniture overturned. His mother: the cold whipping tones, the hot screams of anger. And the uncles. Uncle Richard, with the cautiousness of the runt of the litter, dark and dour, always biting at knuckle or lip. Uncle George, with the fading prettiness of a willful boy gone monstrously wrong: his every attempt at menace, intimidation, bribery, and double-cross discovered, his treachery unmasked, and only his temper left intact. And the grandmothers: one with a voice like grating metal; the other’s a honeyed, manipulative whine, at least until she was crossed and turned venomous as a snake.

  And the quiet look in his older brother’s eyes. He’d never meant for the bitterness to creep into his feeling for Edward, who’d been with him through it all. Or for them to grow up, after the men of their father’s generation self-destructed, to shout and bang fists and wave weapons at each other in their turn, like yet more murderous fools—as if all the rage that they’d endured for all their years together had been a poisonous inheritance. The silence of what he’d thought would be a brief journey to the Continent turned into a lifetime of unspeaking resentment, a chasm that couldn’t be bridged even when, years later, he admitted that Edward might have had the right idea all along, and that it was worth making sacrifices for a quiet life.

  The bitter irony was that Edward had wanted to bury the past and start a quiet new life. John Clement remembered with self-loathing that he himself—who now, as an adult, had learned enough to do anything to avoid conflict—had been the hothead then. He’d been the one who was hot for justice, vengeance, retribution. He’d been the one who thought Edward a coward for giving in—and, unforgivably, told him so. The quarrel had been all of his own making.

  And now Edward was dead, and there would be no last chance to make something more positive of his family legacy. And no one to remember it with. Just a memory of a room at Lambeth Palace, after Archbishop Morton had gone to bed in the room next door, and the hurt in Edward’s eyes as he’d turned his back to go to sleep; and his own last word, in the arrogant tones he’d favored in those young days, echoing between the beds: “Coward.” When he’d woken up in the morning, Edward had gone.

  And now he was here, drowning in the blackness of it, and he was alone.

  Meg was staring at him in the candlelight. And there was such fear on her face that he felt a flicker of pity. Enough, anyway, to try and focus on the present. To remember that he was a man well advanced in age, and that in the long life he’d lived since he and his brother played knucklebones in every drafty castle in England she’d been part of his dreams for years.

  “Meg,” he said, struggling with words, surprised at first to hear how easily her name came to his lips, then leaning on it for support. “He was my brother.”


  He saw her draw breath. Saw her eyebrows come together as she puzzled over what he’d said. Then she relaxed. He could see her begin to believe that she understood. The fear went out of her. He could see her confidence return.

  She stepped quickly forward and took him in her arms, and hugged him like a child. He let himself relax into the comfort of her embrace, trying not to allow his mind to take him even a few minutes forward in time, dreading what was to follow. On the edge of his mind was a recent memory of the yielding of buttocks in his hands and the fierceness of her dark blue gaze as he pinned her under him in the woods. But he couldn’t bear to linger on that moment, when all his present hopes had seemed finally to have triumphed over all his past despair. The surge in his heart was cut off almost instantly by the darkness closing back in on him. He had to tell her everything now. But if he told her everything, she’d know. And if she knew, she might leave. The fear of her leaving took his breath away.

  “I’m sorry,” she was murmuring, stroking his head. “I’m sorry. Your brother.” He wished he could see her face, but it was above him and he didn’t dare look up. He could hear the secret relief she was trying to keep out of her compassionate voice, and feel her sense that she’d penetrated a mystery and could hope, after all, for happiness for herself; and he didn’t want to jolt her out of that moment of certainty. “That’s the brother you were talking about, isn’t it? The one you couldn’t mend your quarrel with,” she added softly, with her hand coming to rest on his head. He nodded.

  “You did everything you could . . . Don’t reproach yourself . . . I know it wasn’t your fault.” Then she remembered. Shook herself. He felt her pull back a fraction.

  “But,” she said, puzzled again, “is that what Father was insisting you tell me?”

  He couldn’t speak. She took his answer for assent. “Well, you haven’t done anything wrong,” she went on, and now he heard the beginning of indignation on his behalf. “What was he so angry about?”

  He pulled away. Shook himself. Took control. He stood up, towering over her, put an arm around her shoulders and drew her very gently toward him so they were both half leaning, half sitting on the tabletop. “I don’t know how to tell you,” he whispered.

  She looked at him with unbearable trust. “We don’t need to have any secrets from each other anymore, do we?” she said—a murmur—and there was the ghost of a smile on her face.

  I don’t want to have any secrets from you, he implored silently; but my life has been so long compared to yours and there are so many layers of old secrets to be explained.

  She put a hand on his on the table and interlaced her fingers with his.

  She was still looking at him. Her gaze was becoming uncomfortable. He shifted his eyes sideways. Then he looked down at her hand and took a deep breath.

  “Your father is right. There is one more thing I have to tell you,” he said, louder, through the deafening beats of his heart. “If I’m to be truly honest.

  “But I don’t want it to make any difference to us,” he added, feeling the words come now—the eloquence of despair, a gift that silvered his tongue. “He wants me to tell you about my past. But I want to say first that what unites you and me is that we’ve chosen what to make of our lives. It’s our present and our future that matter, together, not what each of us has left behind in the past. We both had dark beginnings.”

  She nodded. Embarrassed, but still trusting, encouraging him to continue.

  “Look,” he began. “Do you remember the game I taught you and the other children . . . about the princes in the Tower? The beginning of your father’s book?”

  “The princes who were killed by Richard.” She took up the familiar schoolroom theme, trying to make him smile with the same nostalgia she felt for the game. “Wrathful, forward Richard. Kissing when he thought to kill.”

  No; that wasn’t the right way. He didn’t know how to start. It had been too long since he’d had to explain himself. Hardly anyone still alive knew; and those who did didn’t need telling. Perhaps he should start somewhere else.

  “My brother’s name was Edward,” he said dully.

  “Yes,” she said, with a mystified expression. “I know. Sir Edward Guildford.”

  “Did you wonder why he didn’t have the same family name as me?” he added.

  She shrugged. She didn’t see why he was asking her. “Because your mother married twice?” she said, with a touch of impatience.

  “No,” he replied, going faster now, looking down. “It wasn’t his name. It wasn’t the family name he grew up with.”

  He could feel her look sharpen. “So was he Edward Clement?” she asked, as if trying to establish a clear diagnosis.

  “No,” he said, and he shut his eyes and pushed out the words. “Plantagenet. He was Edward Plantagenet.”

  Everything stopped except the blood drumming in his ears. The room was still and close. He could feel beads of sweat break out on his brow, but she hardly seemed to be drawing breath.

  When he finally raised his eyes to hers in the candlelight she was staring back at him with her mouth open.

  “The prince in the Tower?” she mouthed.

  Miserably, he nodded.

  “Then who were you?” She gaped; her voice had vanished.

  “Richard,” he said. “When I was a boy they called me the Duke of York.”

  I thought he’d gone mad—that grief had unhinged his mind. Or I thought it was a wild story dreamed up on the spur of the moment to save him from telling me something worse. Or perhaps I thought a little of both things. Or perhaps I just didn’t know what to think at all. My head was spinning.

  But one thing I could see straightaway was that saying those names had relieved him in some way. He got up from his perch on the edge of the table and turned to face me. He was standing taller than usual, as if he’d shed a burden. And the eyes fixed on my face were almost defiant—with a “believe what you choose” look mixed up with the imploring “believe me.”

  “But they disappeared,” I stammered. My body had gone completely still, like a rabbit frozen in a dog’s mouth. But my voice was beginning to come back; and it was coming back shrill and accusing. “They were killed forty years ago. It was the game. It was our rhetoric lessons. That’s what you taught us.”

  Through the window I could hear night creatures rustling in the dark garden; far away, the unearthly scream of a vixen. My head was full of classroom memories; of his voice, calling us to our books, opening up the world to us. If the game was a lie, then everything else in the calm landscape of learning where I’d found meaning might also be full of treachery and traps. If the game was a lie, then the man standing in front of me was a stranger.

  The new John nodded his head. “Yes, the game,” he said, regretful but not really sorry, as if the game were nothing more than a necessary deceit; a tactic for survival. A detail, perhaps even an amusing detail, in a much bigger story. Which perhaps it was for him. “I thought you might ask about that. That was your father’s idea when I came back to England and he took me in—a way of protecting me. He worked out the outline of the story and told me to teach it to the children at St. Paul’s. When I came to your house, I taught it to all of you too. It was supposed to be a way to spread the story that Edward and I were dead. So it would go down the generations and become history. But it went further than we expected, and faster. He’s a clever man, your father, but even he never realized you children would make such a good story of it.”

  He laughed mirthlessly. “He’s always been proud of his children’s accomplishments. But never more so than of the aplomb with which they—you—killed off two little princes.”

  I could imagine that. I could imagine the quiet smile on Father’s face as one of his games became reality. The secret satisfaction he would have got as we trustingly repeated and embroidered what we were learning as the truth. But I couldn’t join in John’s bark of laughter; couldn’t appreciate the cleverness of the idea. I couldn�
�t breathe. The idea that I might have been so manipulated in one of those games for almost all my life, by the people I loved most, was growing in my chest, like a pig-bladder ball inflating and crushing every organ in my body. If that was a lie, how many other lies might I unwittingly have accepted? My hands were clenched tight on the tabletop. I opened my mouth and sucked in a long gasp of air.

  “That’s not the end of your father’s wit,” John Clement added, sounding almost proud. “Once we’d ‘killed off’ Richard of York with the game, he finished the job of turning me into a new person by writing Utopia. Do you remember? It was the summer he took me abroad. He put me into it—‘my boy John Clement’—standing in the square in Antwerp and listening with him and Pieter Gillis to Raphael Hythlodaeus tell his tall tales. We’ve all read it; we all know it’s full of jokes. Utopia: no place; on the banks of the No-water river; run by Governor No-People. But the best joke was what it did for me. Did you ever wonder why he called me ‘my boy’ in it? It was far more than a turn of phrase. It was salvation. It wouldn’t fool anyone who actually met me; no one who looks at the gray in my hair could think I’m a boy, or even that I could have been one thirteen years ago when it came out. But until I came back to England last year I led a quiet life; I hardly knew anyone outside the universities; I didn’t give many people a chance to see my real age. The book was hugely popular all over Europe. Thousands of people have read it. ‘John Clement’ is only a mention in the book. No one who reads it notices my name particularly. But if they hear it somewhere else later, the memory it triggers is that I’m far younger than I really am—and far too young to be Richard of York. Especially if they read one of the European editions, which even have a picture of me as a long-haired fifteen-year-old. Utopia was a stroke of genius. It made me safe as No-Prince.”

  Now I remembered Master Hans’s question in the studio. That must be the picture he’d drawn. The boy Clement. I pulled my mind back from my memory of that conversation—Master Hans’s innocent puzzlement, my innocent certainty—to the John Clement standing in front of me, with that pleading look that was inviting me to admire Father’s subtle mind.