Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  “I can clean him,” I whispered at the women, hushed by a brutality I could only guess at. My expression had already extinguished the last flicker of hope in their eyes. “I can make him comfortable . . . give him poppy oil. But shouldn’t we call the priest?”

  They flurried. Looked around, looked at each other. Looked trapped. Shook their heads. Moved protectively toward each other, then toward him. Stood shielding him from me, as though I’d suddenly become part of their problem.

  “I’ll clean him up a bit, then,” I whispered, into the harshness of their breathing, trying to give them relief. And I fetched a pail of the horse’s drinking water myself from the nearest stable. His bay head turned my way over the stall; gentle curiosity in his soft eyes, breath coming in white clouds, like mine. By the time I came back in with the bucket, slopping puddles on the floor, the women were at their man’s side, their backs shutting me out again, muttering at him. They shied away from me as I approached and went silent. But I heard the last word. “Amen.”

  My hands were shaking as I approached that ruined, gargling body. I didn’t want to make things worse; I was frankly scared to touch these injuries. But before I could touch the corner of my cloth to his face, his mouth and slits of eyes opened. A word or two came out—or at least a sound or two that might have been words if his mouth hadn’t been so bashed about.

  The women started back toward him; we all stared; and he shivered into stillness, with bubbles of sticky blood coming from ears and mouth. The white puffs that had been rising into the air from his face stopped.

  “He’s gone, then,” the younger woman said. A flat voice, unexpectedly loud. She looked around, vaguely threatening, defying me to silence or contradict her. And when I nodded agreement, she stepped awkwardly toward him, then stretched her hand forward to touch his bloody forehead. Her palm was almost as torn and blistered and bleeding from the weight she’d been carrying as the dead man’s face. She touched at the puffed-up eye slits as if she could somehow shut them properly and dignify the face into a semblance of sleep. The older woman went to the body too and leaned down to kiss his forehead. “My Mark,” she said, then straightened up. No tears. She was probably his mother.

  “Do you know . . . ,” I whispered, chilled to the bone by this death and the suppressed anger in these women’s grief, “. . . what happened?”

  The younger woman looked back at me with something like pity on her face, or maybe contempt. “Don’t you?” she said. “Don’t you, missus?”

  I shook my head, but I could see she was suspicious of my answer. “You should come round where we live, then,” she went on, as loudly and brutally as she dared. “We get a lot of it our way.” Then she looked harder at me; something changed in her. She laughed—more of a bark. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said. “He met the Scavenger’s Daughter, didn’t he?” When I still didn’t respond, except with bewilderment, she shrugged, turned away, and muttered. “Ask your father. He knows.”

  Her tone made me prickle; but I thought perhaps she was blaming me for not being able to save her brother’s or husband’s life. So I put a hand on the mother’s shoulder instead, and felt it shivering. “We could have him buried here?” I asked, and the older woman shook her head, unable to speak, clearly trying to choke down her grief for now, but dead against the notion of burial at St. Stephen’s.

  “I could pay?” Another shake of the head. “Or I could have him brought back to your home today?” She nodded for a second, then shook her head. They hadn’t wanted a priest, I remembered. No last rites, so they wouldn’t want a Catholic burial either.

  Their story was slowly coming together in my mind. They must be heretics. He must have been tortured and thrown out on the street. He might have been tortured into betraying his family. It probably wasn’t safe for them to be home. The mother didn’t know where to go.

  “We’ll take him with us,” she said at last, squaring up to the burden with a determined straightening of the shoulders.

  There was no point in arguing with her. She knew the risks she was facing. There was just one thing I could do. “You need your hands bound up before you try,” I said firmly. “You can’t carry anything with your hands like that.”

  And before they could protest I was off, half running across the courtyard, sliding over the kitchen flagstones, hardly seeing the nurse peacefully rocking little Tommy by the fire, trying not to imagine the blackness in my gut if someone brought him back to my door in that state; rushing into the larder to saw off two hunks of cheese, grabbing at two small loaves and stuffing the cheese inside, finding cloth to wrap them, a bottle of small beer, and more cleanly laundered cloths to tend their wounds. I hardly had enough hand space free by the time I got to the medicine room to pick up the soothing ointment I used for wounds. I was scared the women would just go.

  But they were waiting, staring at their lost son or brother or whatever he was to them, with those same ghostlike faces, wrapping the blankets around him again in a shroud, as if he needed warmth where he’d gone. They let me bathe their hands and rub ointment in and tie the wounds up with strips of cloth until their sores disappeared under clean warm strips of white. They watched as I tied the food bundle up with a knotted handle that would go over a shoulder. The older woman even looked me in the eye. “He said you were a good-hearted woman,” she muttered. “He said it would be all right to come to you. Even the way things are. Didn’t he, love?”

  The younger one didn’t answer or look at me, but just went to the dead man’s head and lifted the plank underneath, testing the strength in her bandaged hands. “Come on, Mum,” she said. The older woman took the bundle of food from me, turned her back on the corpse and her daughter, and picked up her end of the plank. I didn’t think she’d have the strength to go far. Yet she nodded at me before she strained it up into the air, and they trudged out of the door, wincing and banging against the frame.

  “God bless,” she puffed. Or did I imagine it?

  The red and gold and savory smells of the kitchen were still there when I got back inside, as if the chilly episode outside had never happened. But it was the warm calm that now seemed unreal. Trying to banish the memory of those two women staggering away to find a quiet place to bury their man, I took Tommy from the nurse and held him very tight, touching his nose to mine, watching his sleeping face change as he dreamed, and running through all the prayers I knew to keep him safe.

  “Oh Meg,” John cried out. “Oh Meg.” And he slipped off my body and kissed my nose in the same reverent way I’d kissed Tommy’s in the kitchen, and cupped my face in his hands.

  I’d forgotten that moment of distance I’d felt from him. I’d missed him for the entire two days he’d been away with Dr. Butts; longed to get him back to tell him about what had happened here. “Essex” was all he’d said when he’d ridden into the courtyard, muddy and alone, and I’d asked where they’d been. He’d been quieter than usual, lost in his own thoughts.

  He didn’t even say whom they’d been treating. And I was so preoccupied with how to raise the question of the dead man and his family that I didn’t pursue the subject.

  For a second now I lost myself in the beauty of his eyes crinkling in pleasure as the pale blue of them glinted out at me in that deep contented smile. I moved my hands up from his buttocks and along his back, rejoicing in the strong, lean muscles of arms and shoulders I felt under my palm, so I could stroke the elegant line of eyebrow and cheekbone and jaw.

  But the shadow wouldn’t leave me. I had to ask. I pulled myself up on one elbow.

  “John,” I began.

  “Mmm?” I heard back, a noise tinged with the hope of laughter. He thought I was about to tell him something charming Tommy had done; then perhaps he’d tell me something Dr. Butts had said at the college and then we’d chuckle together. “I’m listening,” he encouraged.

  “What’s the Scavenger’s Daughter?” I said, almost fearfully.

  There was a different quality to hi
s attention now. He lifted himself up on an elbow too, and although the second arm was draped over my waist, hugging me to him, his gaze had sharpened. “Whatever put that into your mind?” he asked back. He often answered a question with a question—and his voice was light, but without laughter.

  “Oh.” I paused. “Just something I heard on the street.”

  He looked harder at me, and shook his head. “Meg,” he chided, and I felt as though I were back in the schoolroom, “no secrets.”

  So I told him the whole story. When I’d finished, he crossed himself.

  “I wish that hadn’t happened to you,” he said, with an edge in his voice. “I want to keep you innocent of all these horrors. If it comes to that, I don’t much want to know about them myself.” He shivered.

  “So what is the Scavenger’s Daughter?” I persisted.

  “A device made for Leonard Skeffington, at the Tower.” He stopped again. “For interrogations.”

  I waited. He didn’t want to go on. His eyes had the haunted look I’d only seen on the one night he talked about his secret past; since then he’d been John Clement again, laughing off all my attempts to find out about his past.

  “You know, Meg, I find this incredibly difficult to talk about,” he said tightly. “The very idea of torture sickens me.”

  “But I need to know; I saw the man’s body,” I insisted. Hearing myself sound shrill and urgent, I disliked my voice but was still determined to understand.

  He sighed reluctantly, not looking at me. “All right, then. It’s a metal frame with holes for arms and legs. If you tighten the screws in the frame when someone is locked into it, it compresses their limbs and chest. Eventually the bones break.” His voice had become clipped and scientific.

  “For heretics?” I said, equally clipped. They’d been dragging them in from everywhere in the past few weeks, doing their best to destroy the literary underground, and burning every copy they could get their hands on of the new heresies by Simon Fish and William Tyndale. No one believed the king was the prime mover in the latest suppression. There was a different story doing the rounds about him. People were saying he’d read Tyndale’s latest banned book, which Anne Boleyn had given him, and begun to see the point of the rogue priest’s thinking. Henry might not have time for Tyndale’s belief that the Church of Rome was evil and should be dismantled, but the word was that he’d warmed, at least, to the man’s notion that the clergy should have no place in politics. I didn’t know the truth of that. But it was unnerving hearing the rumors. It was unnerving being confronted by the prisoners too. The one I’d seen had been riding facing his horse’s tail, with the texts he’d been caught with pinned to his jerkin, as if he were a living book of heresy. He was trying feebly to raise bound hands to protect his head from the dung balls and rotten fruit the Cheapside street boys were throwing at him as his horse was led to St. Paul’s Cross. The street was full of ash and stories of arrests.

  “Mostly.” He was looking away still. “Are you tired?” he asked. “Shall we sleep?” And without waiting for an answer he snuffed out the candle.

  In the comfort of the darkness, though, he put his arms around me and hugged me close into his chest. I could hear how fast his heart was beating.

  I stroked his arm, as if he were a horse needing gentling; and he murmured, “Promise me something, Meg.”

  “Anything,” I whispered back, lulled again by the smell and feel of love. “Of course.”

  “Don’t go looking for trouble,” he said. Then he gained speed and intensity. “I’ve been thinking a lot about this in the past couple of days because I found myself looking for trouble too. You don’t know where I’ve been, do you? Well, I have to tell you. Dr. Butts was called to Cardinal Wolsey in Essex, and he wanted me to go with him. He’s grateful to Wolsey; Butts has a lot of friends among the new men, and he says Wolsey was always more moderate with them than your father’s likely to be in the future. I felt I couldn’t say no. I owed it to him. And poor old Wolsey is dying, you know; I can’t see that he’ll even make it to London to stand trial.

  But it didn’t take long for me to realize it had been a mistake for me to go.

  I owe as much loyalty to More as to Butts, and I don’t want to make an enemy of your father. All the way there and back I was thinking how mad it was to run the risk of being there just to avoid offending Butts. I’ve been kicking myself for being so foolhardy. I’ve got you and Tommy to think of now. I’m not some impetuous boy anymore. All I want is to keep out of trouble and enjoy my family. You should be doing that too. Leave life’s ugliness at the door. Let’s choose to be happy inside. Please. Don’t court danger.”

  I murmured what might be taken for a yes and went on stroking him till his breathing eased into sleep. I was momentarily distracted from my troubles by his story—surprised to feel a twinge of respect for Dr. Butts for having followed his heart and visited his old patron, even though the cardinal had fallen from favor; touched too by the workings of John’s conscience. But I didn’t know whether I would do as he said if anyone else came knocking at my door. I didn’t know whether I would be able to turn away someone who needed help.

  I couldn’t sleep. For some reason the most obvious thing of all had only occurred to me once John was tossing and turning under the blankets: the woman had said, “Ask your father. He knows.”

  Father and John Stokesley, the new bishop of London, were leading the new antiheresy campaign. He was spending his days rushing very publicly through the backlog of legal cases Wolsey had left for the Star Chamber and Chancery, and his evenings grumbling wryly over supper at home in Chelsea or with us in London about the mess he’d found the legal affairs of the land in. That was the man we saw: the smiling charmer; the lord chancellor impressing the king with his speed and grasp of his duties.

  But he was doing something else too, now that he had all the power of the lord chancellorship in his hands (something that might or might not also impress the king, depending on how far you believed the talk that the king was reading Tyndale and enjoying it): Father was pushing as hard as he could to shut down the banned-book trade once and for all.

  I’d got so complacent in my domesticity that I’d failed to put together all the stray bits of information I’d accrued going about my humdrum daily business. But now they were falling ominously into place, reminding me unpleasantly of my old worries about Father’s outpourings of furious pamphlets against his religious enemies, of his willingness to go home after a long day’s work and spend his nights writing frenzied denunciations of heresy signed with other men’s names. I’d chosen to believe that Father had been doing no more than carrying out the king’s wishes; that the hatred in his writing had been a diplomatic position. But had I been naïve? It was Father who’d written the new index of banned books that meant instant jail; he’d ordered all those in a position of responsibility to turn in anyone suspicious; the agents out in the docks and drinking dens, listening, were his. It might—it must—be his own fury being translated into the breaking of young men’s bones. I lay very still, feeling the peace of the warm darkness all around me being corroded by the black bile seeping back into my gut. The woman was blaming Father, and she was right. Whether or not he was personally breaking men’s bodies wasn’t the point anymore. The point was that he, or one of his subordinates, must have ordered the man I’d seen die that morning to be tortured. Whoever’s hand had turned the screw, Father was still responsible. Wolsey had gone. The king was wavering. It was Father who was giving the orders.

  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.