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 p
eople 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.”
He paused. I think he wanted me to back down and agree with him, admit I’d been a foolish child. But I couldn’t, however convincing his mellifluous voice seemed, however sincere he sounded. I couldn’t apportion evil as neatly and completely in the camp of his enemies as he was doing.
I’d seen the blood trickling out of that boy’s body.
“Have you ordered a burning?” I asked. It still seemed impossible. It must just be Davy’s raving. In the inexplicably cruel old days, members of a half-crazed sect called the Lollards had been burned at the stake for daring to translate the Bible into English. But surely that was just part of the savagery of the past?
He sighed, and shook his head, and for a last wonderful moment I thought he might yet say no. But he went on shaking his head, in rhythm with the rocking motion of his arms, and gradually I understood that all he meant was a regretful yes.
“It’s none of my doing,” he said.
“So it’s true,” I replied, and my cheeks stained red. He ignored my interruption.
“A priest,” he went on smoothly, still rocking, “a man called Thomas Hitton. He was seized in the fields near Gravesend by some men who thought he might have stolen the linen that had gone missing from a hedge. They found hidden pockets in his coat full of letters to the heretics overseas. One of them was to William Tyndale.”
Tyndale was a shadow, a bogeyman: Father’s worst enemy. A renegade priest who’d gone over to the other side. There were no pictures of him.
He lived in hiding on the Continent, invisible to English spies and agents provocateurs. But the Bibles and prayers he translated into English kept coming, hidden in butts and barrels and packages and parcels unloaded in quiet seaside coves or right under Father’s nose at the Steelyard.
“The archbishop of Canterbury interrogated Hitton,” Father went on, and the harshness Master Hans had once painted into an image of his face was etched deep into the real face before me now. “He was handed over to the secular authorities at the beginning of the week. He’ll be executed at Maidstone on the twenty-third of February. Hitton’s only excuse was ‘the mass should never be said.’ He’s a priest, but he’s an abomination of a priest.”
Father was smiling, though it was a smile that didn’t reach his eyes, still visibly refusing to engage with my anger. “I was not personally involved in this decision,” he said. “But I’d have made the same judgment if I had been. Anyone who believes that peasants without a scrap of learning to their names should have the right to rage at the priests and impudently claim to be able to determine God’s meaning for themselves is destroying the church we live in. Not just the Christendom of today, but the sacred continuum that joins everyone alive now with every Christian from St. Augustine onward who has believed what we believe and worshipped as we worship. Take that away, defile the body of Christ on earth . . . lose the beauty of Latin, the common language that unifies all believers . . . and you’re left with nothing but the ranting and babbling of lunatics. Anarchos. ”
He was so persuasive. Against my will I found myself imagining Davy lolloping at the door of St. Stephen’s, waving his unicorn’s horn and yelling his crazy street-man’s sales talk. Did I really want to leave the company of genius and worship what I felt must be the confused God of lunatics like Davy? I turned away to hide my moment of weakness, feeling unwanted tears come to my eyes, trying to master myself by staring out the window. But I wasn’t ready to admit defeat. As soon as I could control my voice, I muttered: “I thought you were a humanist. Not a torturer.”
My gibe made him angry at last. He followed me across the room and, with one hand, pulled me roughly round. From close up, his face was flushed. Words were pouring out of his mouth. “Stop being a fool! Just think for a moment what we’re talking about!” he shouted, as hotly as I had. “Hitton’s evil—the devil’s stinking martyr!” There was disgust curling his lips. There were prickles of sweat breaking out on him. There were flecks of spit landing on my face. “The man is so possessed by the spirit of lying that it’s taking his wretched soul straight from the short fire to the fire everlasting! He deserves his damnation!”
He stopped. Looked at me, as if he was only just remembering where he was. Breathed carefully out through whitened nostrils to calm himself.
Wiped the moisture from his brow. He was beginning again to look like the kindly man I’d grown up with, but the image of the venomous stranger who’d been standing before me a moment earlier was seared on my mind.
I caught him reading the half-scared, half-repelled expression on my face, understanding it, and taking a step toward me to comfort me. But I retreated again.
In the silence, Tommy began to whimper. We both spoke at once.
“I didn’t mean to shout,” he said.
“Give me my baby,” I said.
I stepped forward across the chasm that had opened between us, snatched Tommy from his arms, and withdrew to the window again, looking down so I couldn’t see the stubble on his chin or meet his eyes. He didn’t resist. I could feel Father hovering behind me, but it was beyond me to say any more.
“Tommy’s very dear to me,” he said, hesitantly now, through the shrill crying. “You all are.” But I kept my back turned.
“Meg,” he pleaded. I rocked Tommy faster, making little love faces at him, shutting Father out.
But I couldn’t stop his voice. “What does being a humanist mean to you anyway?” I heard. “What are you accusing me of? All I and the friends of my youth ever wanted to do was to reconcile the church, as we found it, with the learning of the classical scholars we were discovering. Our dream was to strip out the cobwebs that had gathered in the corners. Clean away the dross that had gathered over the centuries.
One of the ways to do that was to stop the friars who got fat on other people’s labor, and the priests who could hardly read the Bible, and the traders in false relics. Of course it was. There were abuses. But our aim was only ever to restore the church to purity, so we could worship more intelligently. Not to destroy it.”
I didn’t want to hear. He sounded as measured and moderate as ever.
If I listened, I was in danger of being persuaded. But none of the words, which the obedient daughter in me
wanted to believe, were part of the same world as the trickles of blood coming out of that young man’s body.
Nor did they fit with the look I’d surprised on his face just now, or the shouting, or the gloating words “He deserves his damnation.” So I went on rocking Tommy, rhythmically, back and forth, so I didn’t have to think—as much to comfort myself as him.
“Meg,” he said, trying to call me back into a conversation. “You and I have had the good fortune to be part of a unique circle of men of distinction, men who know how to explore ideas with subtlety and intelligence, but also with respect and humility. Men who know when to stop. That’s not a freedom that can be vouchsafed to just anyone. You can’t put God in the hands of the mob.”
I stopped rocking, though I kept my back turned. Tommy wasn’t crying, just nuzzling against me. I stroked his head and murmured at him.
“He’s a beautiful child,” Father’s voice said. I sneaked a glance up at him from under my eyelashes. He was pressing his hands so tightly together that his knuckles had gone white. “Do you ever think . . .” he began, then paused, marshaling another thought. “Don’t you ever think, Meg, of the danger all this might expose him to? Doesn’t that make you hate the heretics, if nothing else does?”
I didn’t mean to speak, and I did manage not to turn back to face him; but I found myself saying, “What do you mean?” over my shoulder, and the voice I heard come out of my throat was hoarse and frightened.
“You must know the king is wavering. He’s in such a fury with the pope over the annulment that he’s of a mind to read the books that woman gives him. What if he threw his lot in with the Lutherans?”
Portrait of an Unknown Woman Page 26
