John stared into the fire. There were tears on his cheeks. He’d almost forgotten me. He was talking to himself. “So my thrashing around lost me my mother too. And it lost her everything,” he murmured.
I squeezed his hand. Suddenly he looked properly at me—a flash of blue. He laughed, but a bad laugh, full of self-hatred, full of pain. “And do you know what?” he went on. “It was all for nothing. My whole one-boy rebellion. My whole willingness to turn on my family for the sake of an idea. It turned out to be a joke—a joke on me.”
“What do you mean?” I whispered.
“They didn’t let my mother go to her funeral, but I saw Elizabeth before she died. When I heard her baby had been born dead, and that she was weakening too, I came running back from Burgundy. I got a travel pass in my groom’s name, took his clothes, and just rode off. I was lucky—I heard fast. She was my sister and the queen of England and people talked about her in Burgundy. My aunt kept tabs on everything. And I was a man by then—twenty-nine—and just about wise enough to listen when my heart said ‘Be with your sister at her end.’ But it was the same old recklessness too. I was homesick. I wanted to be where the air smelled of life, and people spoke English in the streets. I did it just because I could. I still craved that head-rush of danger.”
“What?” I quavered. But John wouldn’t be prompted. He was in his past.
“I bribed a man to take a note . . . I got myself taken in . . . she was in the State Apartments at the Tower . . . and she was very pale on her bed, with her red hair turning gray and wrinkles and bruises around her eyes, and her body bloated and coarsened, so I might never have known her as the girl I’d last seen in the sanctuary at Westminster nearly twenty years before, except that when she saw me and smiled she suddenly looked young. Her face had been like my father’s—beautiful and fleshy and sensual, with fat little laughing rosebud lips—and that’s how it became again.
And then she half sat up in the bed and said, ‘Richard . . . I never imagined you’d come like this . . . God has brought you,’ with the most transforming look on her face, like a ray of light. There was something on her mind that made her hands flutter and her face twitch. She called a woman to bring her a box, her writing materials. She said, ‘There’s something I’ve got to show you before I die.’ She stroked my face. ‘I never thought I’d see you again,’ she said. ‘Not like this. Not in peace.’ I had no idea my appearance at her side would bring her such joy. And when they brought the box she sent everyone away and had me pull out the parchment she wanted.
She didn’t have the strength to do it herself. ‘Look, Richard,’ she said.
Weakly. Eagerly.
It was an old document. It took my eyes a few seconds to adjust to the faded writing in the bad light. But once I began to follow what was on the page, I felt a rush of blood to the head. I was so dizzy I was grateful I wasn’t standing. I couldn’t have stayed on my feet.
It was a letter she’d written me years before, in Henry’s first years as king, during the uprisings. She’d never known from one day to the next whether one of those invading armies on one of those beaches might not turn out to have me at its head. However much Henry had sworn that Uncle Richard must have had me and Edward murdered, she’d never quite known if he was telling her the truth. They didn’t trust each other. She’d never known, either, whether she’d have wanted me to be alive, because if I was, and I came back to claim the throne, then what would become of her children? So she’d written to me as a kind of private defense, in case that ever happened—a letter she’d never have shown her husband. It was her
appeal to deflect the wrath of a vengeful returning brother. An appeal to my better judgment.
What she’d written about was something that had happened many years before, before we were even born. Her letter said she’d seen proof that our father had already contracted one secret marriage before he’d secretly married our mother. That’s what Uncle Richard had accused him of, when he deposed Edward and me; but I’d always assumed Uncle Richard had made it up. But what Elizabeth said was that Uncle Richard had been telling the truth. She’d actually seen the record: an agreement, binding in law, to marry Lady Eleanor Butler. Dated 1462, years before my parents married. Drawn up and signed by Robert Stillingfleet and the affianced couple. The written proof Bishop Stillingfleet had sworn to Parliament never existed. But then, by the time he talked about it, there was no one left to contradict him. The Lady Eleanor had died in the convent she’d been put into years before—Father must have got tired of her as soon as he’d had her, and moved on to some other pretty copper-haired war widow whose virtue was easier, and he must have got scared that the Lady Eleanor might try to make him honor his empty promise. And anyway, Stillingfleet had let the contract be burned.”
John turned back to me and the present. His eyes were still shocked now. “I couldn’t stop staring at the paper,” he whispered. “I said, ‘But, Elizabeth . . . this means . . . this means . . .’ I was stammering like an idiot . . . and she said yes, more calmly than me, but she’d had years longer to think about what it meant. ‘It means Father wasn’t free to marry Mother when he did. It means he was a bigamist and we are a family of bastards, just as Uncle Richard said.’
‘How did you see it?’ I said.
‘Stillingfleet brought it to Mother.’ She laughed—our family laugh, a last little wolf-howl of defiance at fate. ‘After Father died. He told her she should pray for guidance from God; he must have half believed it would make her give up her children’s right to the throne. He can’t have known Mother very well. Naturally she burned it. I watched her. I didn’t try to stop her. I didn’t try to stop Henry relegitimizing me when he’d won the wars, either. Why would I? I was fed up with being a helpless girl in a war.
I wanted to be queen of England. We all knew Henry had almost no real claim to the throne; he needed me to be royal so my blood would legitimize him; he’d never have married a bastard.’
‘Why are you telling me now?’ I said.
‘Because I know you’re the only one left who dreams of the old days. Edward’s safe. Everyone else is dead. I kept it to give to you, because, if you didn’t know the truth, you might go on thinking you had a claim to the throne. You might harm my boy. And I dread that happening. My children aren’t like we were—not so hard; they were born in kinder times.
My boy Arthur would have been a king to be proud of; a king of Camelot. But now he’s dead’—she didn’t flinch; she was made of stern stuff—‘and there’s just little Harry. Nine years old. As headstrong as Father ever was, but he’s just a child. I don’t want you to hurt him. I want you to keep him safe. Will you promise, Richard? And will you pray with me for God to bless Harry’s reign?’
I promised. And we prayed. And when she wanted to sleep—she didn’t have much strength left—I kissed her and left with the letter in my pocket.
I hardly noticed where I was on the way out. Everything that had sustained me since I was a child was falling away from me. It was as if I were dropping into an abyss, with nothing to catch a fingerhold on and save myself. In one moment I’d stopped being a king-in-waiting and been turned back into a man like any other—except that, because of everything I’d done, I was alone in the world.
I wanted to stay; Elizabeth was my last family; but of course I couldn’t.
I wanted to go to Edward and beg his pardon; but I didn’t know where to begin to find him, and I was scared to try. I wanted to be back in Burgundy, but I could never tell Aunt Margaret what I knew. I didn’t know what to do.
So I ended up in some tavern near Walbrook, drinking myself silly in my cloak in a corner, and when it got late enough and I was fuddled and despairing enough, I got the letter out and set fire to it at the table. Before I knew where I was, before it had even burned right up, two big broken-nosed thugs who’d been sitting at the next table had me down on the floor. They said I looked suspicious. They were yelling that I’d been burning a Lollard tract. They could
n’t read, but they were pawing over the last scraps of the letter in my tankard, screeching, ‘A blasphemer, eh?’ until I began to laugh at the sheer absurdity of it all and said to the biggest one, ‘Call the justice, then, you thieving thug.’ That sobered us all up. They kept my purse but they did march me round to the justice’s house with my black eye and broken nose. He only lived round the corner.
Your father was still very young then and building up his practice. Dealing with street drunks was the kind of case he did. I didn’t recognize him when he came into the stable they’d put me in. When I’d first seen him at Morton’s, he’d just been a boy. A page. But he recognized me straightaway. He got me out. He sent away the troublemakers. He even lent me the money to get back to Burgundy. And he talked to me. He brought me in here, into this parlor, and we sat up half the night talking in front of this fire. He was curious about me. Morton had charged him with following my fate and helping me if he could. And Erasmus (I knew Erasmus from Burgundy; he was in my aunt’s lover’s household) had told me all about him—the rising young humanist lawyer. And he’s an easy man to talk to. So I poured my troubled heart out to this stranger. Obviously I couldn’t tell him my sister’s dying secret, you’re the first person I’ve ever told, but I told him a lot of the other things I’d been realizing over my beers in the tavern. That I was homesick. That I was English, not Burgundian, and couldn’t live all my life in a foreign land. That I’d become more pragmatic and knew neither I nor Edward would now come to the throne.
That I wanted to live quietly and mend my ties with my brother. That I’d do anything to come back here.
He listened and listened, and nodded and nodded. And he sent me back to Burgundy, but he promised to play his part in bringing me back to England. The deal was—I should put my fate in his hands and promise never to meddle in affairs of state. Take no risks, and have no expectations, beyond the kind of personal happiness I would be unlikely to know otherwise.
I’d spent more than ten years by then at the university in Louvain—I was fortunate that Burgundy was a place of learning, even back when Aunt Margaret married the duke, so much so that my uncouth family of English fighting men thought of the court there as a kind of miracle, and called it Camelot. So I’d been lucky enough to have fallen into the world of books. I had an adult life. Studies. A passion to pursue. I didn’t need my past. I had friends in the world of learning who didn’t care where they came from, who gave themselves new names to mark their break with their past. Who even knows that Erasmus started life as Gerrit Gerritszoon? When More offered me his help, I suddenly realized that that was enough for me; that I truly wanted to be Johannes Clemens—John the Kind—and a new man in a new world.
So I was happy to give up the Plantagenet dream. Now that I realized that the myth I’d grown up with of monarchs being anointed by God was just a cover for all the lies of the unscrupulous—one king a bigamist, one a successful usurper, one queen a bastard—it didn’t mean anything to me anyway. All those kings and queens had cheated God and their people just as much as the Flanders street boys who wandered the courts of Europe, calling themselves Richard, Duke of York. And however much I’d hated my family’s unscrupulousness, at that moment, when I realized that after their destruction I’d gone on behaving in a way that was just as hateful myself—and when I saw that what I wanted most was a personal connection in the world—I was ready to try what he suggested. So I became ‘More’s boy.’
It worked. He did it—he and Erasmus in Burgundy. It took them till the old king died. But they succeeded in persuading the new King Henry that I believed in the Tudor monarchy, had no interest in politics, and would never be a threat. And they gave me a new life in England. I’d destroyed what was left of my family; but they even gave me a new family.
Themselves. You.”
“So you see, Meg,” John went on, drawing a gentle finger over my mouth, “there’s no criticism of your father’s ideas that I could decently make. He’s a subtle man. He knows how to work with unlikely allies and solve impossible problems. He’s a natural politician and a champion of peace, and anyone who’s lived through the turmoil I have can’t help but value that. I don’t pretend to understand how his mind works. But his existence is a guarantee that we can spend our lives living and loving each other, our child, our work. We should be grateful. Let’s leave the affairs of state to him.”
Tommy stirred on the floor. I looked down at him, then up at my poor, bruised, beloved husband, with his eyes full of the suffering that I could see had bruised his spirit, and of hope that I would see his kind of reason.
And my heart swelled with an adult’s protectiveness of their shared helplessness. I stroked his arm. “Oh, poor you, poor you . . . It’s a miracle that you’ve come through so much,” I whispered wonderingly, “and I do see now what you mean about Father, I do.” And I did appreciate better why he’d choose to rely utterly on Father, even if I didn’t want to promise that I’d do the same myself.
“I’ll get Tommy,” I said, and we sat for a while in front of the fire, me cradling Tommy, John cradling me, and when I stole a look up at my husband I saw a beatific expression of perfect peace on his lean face. The story he’d just told me was too extraordinary to take in all at once, but I could see I didn’t need to do anything dramatic by way of acknowledgment. He’d become so modest in his demands on life that all he needed was this moment of quiet, loving togetherness.
“This is how I imagine us, always, Meg,” he said softly, with his eyes full of love. “Peacefully giving Caesar his due, and God his, and being happy.”
How lucky my own life suddenly seemed. How easy. How small. With my head still spinning as I assimilated the details of his past, I turned and kissed him chastely on the lips, then lowered my lips to the baby’s head, covered in black silk strands, smelling of milkiness.
“Dr. Butts is all taken up with saving the Bible men, you know,” John went on, musing, trusting, with a furrow to his brow. “He hangs around Anne Boleyn’s chambers, taking messages to the book smugglers. I spend half my days covering for him. And I worry for him. Of course, I don’t think what he’s doing makes him evil. I can see how intelligent and good he is with my own eyes. But I don’t think he’s wise; he doesn’t seem to realize there’s no point in needlessly seeking out trouble. He can do far more good with medicine than by messing around with the Bible men. It would be folly for him to get himself caught.”
I murmured something gentle—“I see” or “It would”—and rocked the baby. I made my body soft and pliant in his arms, but I was already starting to fret over some of the things he’d been telling me. John was pledging public allegiance to Father—but at the same time omitting to tell him how Dr. Butts’s mind was turning in private (which would have been natural if he’d been as outraged as I was by Father’s bloodthirsty mania for religious purity, but sat oddly with the total trust in him that John was professing). And, when I thought back over his story, this wasn’t the first time he’d told Father, his protector, less than the whole truth. Was it?
“John,” I said carefully, not sure if I’d understood that past omission right. “Did you never think of telling Father—or Erasmus—that you’d found out you were illegitimate?”
I couldn’t see his face, but I felt him lean down and kiss the top of my head. “Whatever for?” he said, as peacefully as if he were talking about the weather. “By then, none of it seemed to matter anymore. The history Morton had already started rewriting made it irrelevant. I’d been John Clement for years.”
He touched my shoulders to make me half turn my head and the baby’s in my arms, and touched my nose with a gentle finger. He was perfectly relaxed; there was a glassy innocence in his eyes. “And it didn’t make any practical difference,” he went on. “I still needed More’s and Erasmus’s protection, because I’d still have been at risk if anyone had found out my previous name. Royalty is about appearances. There’s precious little reality in it. What would matter to a crowd loo
king for a Plantagenet king wouldn’t be whatever I said my sister had told me on her deathbed, with no witnesses. All they’d care about is who they perceived me to be.”
I got up, hugging the baby, nodding as if I’d understood. It seemed blindingly obvious to me that Father should have been told; that he’d feel betrayed if he ever found out. But if John couldn’t see that, perhaps it wasn’t for me to start trying to explain. For now, there was too much else to think about.
He stood up too and drew the pair of us into another hug. “Besides, I couldn’t have. It wasn’t my secret to tell. It was Elizabeth’s. And I couldn’t dishonor her memory,” he added simply. I could hear he believed completely in what he was saying.
We walked upstairs together, the three of us, a muddle of arms and legs and tenderness and half embraces, one within the other. My head felt just as muddled, with one great cloud of worries about Father and the burning partly displaced by this other confidence. Tussling inside of me, between my raging against Father, which I couldn’t share with John, was at the same time an uneasy protectiveness of the man who’d done so much to help my husband, but had, as I saw it, been deceived by John’s economy with the truth.
Perhaps that was how John survived change, I mused, putting Tommy gently down in his rocker—by learning to keep all the different truths in his life locked away in separate compartments.
But it was only after the candles were out and we were lying in the darkness, watching the fire die down, that the confusion gripping my mind coalesced into words. Suddenly it was simple. I knew the question I wanted to ask.
I sat bolt upright with the shock of it, and I could feel John startle beside me.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” I asked.
I heard the beginning of a soothing bass rumble from the rumple of sheets below. But I disregarded it and plunged on.
Portrait of an Unknown Woman Page 28
