Portrait of an Unknown Woman

by Vanora Bennett

  I’d known all along, I thought dully, looking at the pitch barrel and the chains and the waiting logs.

  “Who?” I asked.

  He gave me a curious look. “Bainham,” he said, as if I should have known. “Sir James Bainham. Your family friend.”

  I looked down. I remembered Sir James last year, standing so ill at ease, waiting for Father in the parlor, trying to think of words of praise to say about my baby. I remembered Father’s hard smile. For a split second I panicked, thinking there must be a mistake; but I knew really that there wasn’t. It was all perfectly clear. There was nothing I could say or think now to soften the pain. Looking at my feet, being buffeted and kicked by legs busily pushing for a better view, I nodded. Of course.

  Bainham came without a confessor, just a cartload of men-at-arms holding a chain around his middle. He was stripped to the waist, with white scars and red stripes down his back. His face was downturned so I couldn’t see his expression. But I could see his skin was gray. The cart shrieked to a halt. The sergeants of the guard had to push and yell to get the crowd to give way.

  “Shame,” yelled a woman’s voice, and there was a low rumble of jeers and hisses as the men brought him to the stake.

  “Dr. Simons was too scared to come with him,” I heard a fat man in front of me say, and spit. “Couldn’t convert him. Not going to risk a cobblestone in the head either. Bloody cowardly scavengers, the lot of them.”

  So it would be an ugly crowd. They said a mob could turn violent watching a popular man being killed.

  Sir James put his arms round the wooden post. He stood on the pitch barrel. He watched the men build up the logs again. There was no fight in him. He was composed. He was ready to die. We were close and I could see his mouth begin to open. The spring wind caught some of his words and blew them away, but not the first.

  There was a deathly hush when he raised his voice to a bellow to announce: “I come here accused and condemned for a heretic—Sir Thomas More being my accuser and my judge.”

  My head was pounding with red shame. He was going to speak his mind before dying. “Lawful . . . for every man and woman to have God’s book in their mother tongue . . .” He was going defiantly on, his voice coming in and out of my ears. There was a ragged cheer. “Bishop of Rome . . . Antichrist . . .”—a more rousing cheer—“no such thing as purgatory; our souls go straight to heaven and rest with Jesus Christ forever.”

  Applause. Catcalls.

  I looked up and saw with a flash of fear that he seemed to be looking straight at me. He nodded. Our eyes locked. His were calm. I tried to breathe shallowly to compose myself. I didn’t want to faint like some girl at a dance when he was dying with so much stoicism.

  Another voice in the crowd, picking a fight; someone yelling the official truth in sharp London tones from beside Sir James. “You’re lying, heretic! You’re denying the blessed sacrament of the altar!” I didn’t know whose voice it was, but it was answered with a rumbling jeer.

  Davy muttered, “Master Pave, the town clerk. Scared out of his wits. Doesn’t believe what he’s saying himself.”

  “I’m not denying the sacrament,” Sir James shouted, with a last barrister’s flourish. “I just dispute your idolatry. What makes you think that Christ, God, and man could dwell in a piece of bread?” He raised his voice. “The bread is not Christ. Christ’s body is not chewed with teeth. The bread is just bread.”

  Laughter. Banging. Appreciative foot stamping. Cheers.

  “Set fire to him and burn him,” Pave’s voice came hastily back, and the flame moved its wobbly way along the trail of gunpowder.

  Bainham looked down at it. He was grayer than ever now, a sickly dead color even before the fire began to cook him. He raised his eyes and hands to heaven and said to Pave: “God forgive you and show you more mercy than you show to me.” And then he looked at me again through the crowd, or I thought he did. “The Lord forgive Sir Thomas More! And pray for me, all good people,” he said, and the fire burst into bright flower around him.

  The crowd pressed forward around me, murmuring, and I lost sight of the flames. I felt Davy’s arm strong against my back, holding my arm.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said—a shout, but it came out a whisper against the pandemonium all around—and started pushing me, fainting and nauseated, against the human tide.

  My face was wet.

  “Keep walking,” he said, pulling my hood over my head. “And keep your head covered. People know you.”

  When we were back on Cheapside, he said quietly, “Did you really not know?” and looked into my eyes and saw the truth.

  “God rest his soul,” he said, without crossing himself. “Shall I tell you?” Taking my silence as an invitation, he began.

  Father had James Bainham arrested at his chambers at Middle Temple soon after he married Fish’s widow. He was accused of denying transubstantiation and of saying that a Turk, a Jew, or a Saracen who trusted God and kept His laws was a good Christian. He was taken to Father’s house— which must have been when I met him, waiting. Father tried to persuade him to recant. When he failed to make Bainham name other heretics at Middle Temple, he had the lawyer tied to the black mulberry tree in the garden and whipped, then sent to the Tower to be racked. Father went to the torture sessions in the Tower. They lamed Bainham, but they still couldn’t make him talk.

  They got him through his wife in the end. When she denied that Bainham kept Tyndale testaments at home, she was sent to the Fleet herself.

  He couldn’t bear the idea of her being imprisoned on his account. So he denied his faith and accepted the shame of survival and let himself be taken to the bishop of London to beg pardon for heresy, to persuade them to let her out.

  “He used to come to us, you know,” Davy said, walking, watching my face with sly sideways glances. “Sometimes. Like you did. I used to wonder if you’d meet one day. But, after all that, he stopped. And then he came back one more time after all, a couple of months ago. Without his wife. With his head bowed and burning with shame at his cowardice before God. He wept and he asked us to forgive him for what he’d done and he said he took on his shoulders the heavy burden of the cross.”

  Davy shook his head. “I didn’t see it myself, but they say he went back to church a week later. At St. Augustine’s. He stood up in his pew and waved his Tyndale Bible and confessed to the terrified congregation that he’d denied his God to save his life. It was a death sentence in itself to be holding up an English Bible. But he made doubly sure he couldn’t be saved by weeping some more and begging for forgiveness for the cowardice that had made him pretend to return to the church. He said he had to come back to the truth now, or the Word of God would damn him body and soul at the Day of Judgment. And then he went home and wrote a letter to the bishop of London telling him what he’d done. They couldn’t do anything but burn him after that.”

  I felt his eyes on me. I kept mine forward and tried to compose my face. I was trying with everything. Trying not to let myself think of Sir James’s flesh cooking on the spit. Trying not to remember him walking kindly through Chelsea village with John, looking for ways he could help the refugees from the sweating sickness, or his vague, lost air in the parlor as he complimented me on Tommy’s looks. Trying even harder not to recall Father’s face or voice.

  With a different part of my shocked mind, which scarcely seemed to be functioning except to keep me walking forward and listening, but at the same time was also racing between questions, I was feeling my first prickle of suspicion about what Mad Davy had wanted of me and Sir James and any of the other inquirers after truth he might have drawn into his cellar and showed the word of God. Was he pleased Sir James had chosen this death? Was he pushing his flock to seek martyrdom—or at least those of us whose high rank would cause public scandal? Did he want blood, in his way, as much as Father?

  “And then?” I said.

  And then, Davy told me, Bishop Stokesley and Father interrogated Bainham, a
nd Bainham carried on with his slow suicide. He said there were no dead saints and no point in praying to them. He said the Scriptures had been hidden from the people for eight hundred years because the church had stolen the Bible from them. He went out of his way to be defiant. He told them there were two churches today—the church of Christ militant, which could not be wrong, and Father and Stokesley’s church, the church of the Antichrist, which could only be wrong.

  When I reached home, I fled indoors and rushed to my room, and brought Tommy asleep from his crib to my bed. What have I brought you into, I whispered, agonized at his vulnerability; what horrors? I curled the two of us up under the quilt and tried to calm the tremors through my whole being with the softness of his rose-flushed skin and the smoothness of his arms. But every soft touch of him only reminded me of the weakness of human flesh, its infinite capacity to be burned and broken by the cruelty of men acting in accordance with what they thought to be the Word of God.

  When that didn’t work, and my stomach carried on churning and my blood pounding in my temples and my arms and legs shaking, I found myself rising again as the bell rang for vespers and wrapping Tommy up before heading out to St. Stephen’s over the road. I was lonelier than ever before, with a chilly sense that there would never be anyone I could talk to about this. Dame Alice, Margaret—my witnessing of this horror would separate me from their innocence forever. I had a sinking feeling that John might have deliberately been trying to stop me from going out just so I wouldn’t find out about the day’s burning; but whether or not that suspicion was justified, I knew in advance he wouldn’t want to hear what I’d seen. I could go and seek comfort in Mad Davy’s conventicle, but now that I’d begun to fear that Davy was looking for me to display public support for his beliefs, and to hell with the consequences, that idea too filled me with a new kind of horror. I needed to be alive to keep my child safe, if the world was to divide into warring factions of men who hated. There was just me and the sleeping child in my arms; no one else to trust.

  Except God. My own God; the true God, who couldn’t be blamed for the brutality of men to one another. The God who could help Tommy, when he grew older, find a way to stay peacefully in the light. Suddenly all I wanted was to share with my son the embrace of that innocent God, whose faith and love I’d denied myself for too long.

  Tommy stirred in my arms but didn’t wake as we slipped into the warm darkness, among the other worshippers, into air heavy with incense. The Bible pictures glowed in the candlelight.

  There was a muttering of people at the back and a murmuring of Latin from the robed men with their backs to us at the front, carrying out the beloved ritual of worship that St. Augustine might have recognized, the thread that linked me and my child back to every believing brother and sister in history, right back to the passion of Christ himself. It didn’t concern me in the slightest if there were people praying, in their own way, in their own words, in rooms or fields or streets near me. Let them talk to God however they knew best. For me, though, God’s home was here. And when I began to murmur the familiar words, “Credo in unum Deum, Patrem omnipotentem, factorem coeli et terrae, visibilium omnium, et invisibilium,” I found my heart taking hope—an abstract hope, with no application I could see in my life outside this building, but a hope nevertheless—that there could be joy in the world again. “Deum de Deo, lumen de lumine, Deum verum de Deo vero. Genitum, non factum, consubstantialem Patri: per quem omnia facta sunt,” I whispered. And when the sacring bell rang, and every pair of eyes turned joyfully up to stare at the host being held above the priest’s head—the manifestation of God on earth—I didn’t care that perhaps half of the worshippers just thought they were warding off blindness or sudden death for today. I loved the cries of happiness and the kisses and the beggars rushing off into the street full of elation, slamming the door. This was what I’d always known—the sweetness and the solemnity of God in words I’d always loved. Like the rest of the faithful, I was filled with a blissful reverence for the ancient and familiar and awe-inspiring words that I didn’t fully understand. I didn’t have to understand. I only had to believe.

  That reverence, that hope against hope, stayed with me as I let us back into the house. Tommy was beginning to rub his fists in his eyes, as if he’d soon wake up.

  The nurse took Tommy from me with a secretive smile. “You come with me, young man,” she murmured at his sleeping head, grinning to herself. There was another little smile on the manservant’s face as he followed them into the kitchen.

  John was standing by the window of our bedchamber, freshened up after his day away, waiting. I stopped in the doorway and stared at him. I didn’t know he’d be back so soon. The bed was strewn with spring flowers. There was a bath steaming by the fire. It was scented with lavender oil. There were petals floating in it. There were white embroidered linens on the bed. There was a hopeful smile on his face.

  “It’s my surprise,” he said, with the intimate voice that suggested he thought we would share a bath and make love again and fall asleep with our arms and legs wound around each other in a clean, springlike perfection of white lace.

  The cloud of reverence in which I’d come to the house evaporated in a sizzle of rage.

  It was unbearable, when the streets were full of smoke and ashes and the smell of human flesh—a burning John couldn’t but know of. So was the knowing smirk on the nurse’s face, and the knowledge that the servants had been creeping up here for hours with pails of water, trying not to clank, trying not to give away the secret that the master was about to come and take his obedient wife, chortling to themselves in the kitchen now at the idea of him spread-eagled over me on the bed, pumping away at me, while just down the road people were dragging James Bainham’s roasted body away and sweeping up the charred faggots blowing in the wind by St. Bartholomew’s.

  “I didn’t ask for this,” I said numbly. “It’s a waste. I don’t want to wash. I’m too tired.” I walked back toward the door. When I was already out of the room and at the top of the stairs, I said, “I watched the burning, you know.”

  His face bleached. His mouth formed the words “you went?” but no sound came out. I stood on the top stair, watching him watching me; watching his mind assimilate my news. The silence went on so long I couldn’t imagine it ending.

  Suddenly there was a rush of dark air between us and he was holding me as if I were a child, folding me against him, raining anxious kisses on top of the head I kept stubbornly turned down. “You poor girl. You poor girl,” he was murmuring over and over again, as if all I needed were comforting from him to make it all right, as if I had a grazed knee. There was something hypnotic about it. It was only when he whispered, in an agonized, helpless way, “I’m so sorry. It must have been horrible. And I so didn’t want you to know; I so didn’t want you to be distressed,” that I found the strength to pull away.

  “What’s distressing is having had the truth kept from me,” I said coldly, disentangling myself, stepping back, meeting his eye. I didn’t want his compassion. He heard what was on my mind at last: an accusation. I had the feeling he’d known all along I would feel like this. He looked down.

  “I needed to know,” I pursued. “You should have said.”

  He stood before me, spreading his arms out wide in a gesture of bewilderment. “How could I?” he said pleadingly, keeping his eyes on my face but not quite meeting my eyes. “You’ve been so frail . . . and you were just beginning to become your old self again . . . we were just beginning . . .” He stopped, took breath, tried again; but he was looking disheartened now.

  “What could I have said? What would have been the good of encouraging you to torment yourself?”

  “Because there’s no point in living a lie,” I snapped. “Because it was someone we knew being chained up and set fire to. Because before they lit the flames he said he was dying because of Father.”

  He looked appalled. He crossed himself. He dropped his hands so they hung limply by his sides. There
was another silence.

  “He walked through Chelsea with you,” I said cruelly, trying to shock a response out of him now, aware of my voice rising but not even caring anymore if the servants heard. “Don’t you remember? He believed the same things Dr. Butts does. That was his crime. That was what Father has had him killed for. You know that. So how can you just pretend nothing has happened? How can you come home and order a bath?”

  He hushed me then; swished me back inside the bedroom; shut the door. “Listen to me,” he said, suddenly firm. “Hear me out at least. We’ve talked about this before and you know how I feel. I don’t believe in letting all the horrors of the world outside into our private life. I don’t know today what to say or even think about the burning. Or about your father, if it comes to that. But I don’t have to. I’m a doctor. I’m a man with a wife and son whom I love and want to cherish forever. That’s all I need to know.

  That’s why I’m back now: because I want to show you my love, because I want to be with you and shut away the cruelty of the world outside. Nothing else matters if we have each other. If we can make each other happy.”

  He was looking almost as though he believed I might agree—beginning to dart little pleading glances almost at my eyes. I didn’t let him finish.

  “We can’t,” I said. “Not without the truth.” And then I walked out of the room, and down the stairs, and back into the garden to watch the sun set.

  There was no point in arguing anymore. I could say “But don’t you see?” until I lost my voice; the point was that he wouldn’t see. It no longer seemed a problem that John’s past had been a tangle of discarded identities and that I couldn’t really know who any of them had been, or whether he had more secrets to reveal. The problem was that all those people with John’s face were fool enough to think you could wash away the evil of a person being burned to death with a lavender bath.

  Still, I half thought he’d follow me. But he didn’t. The bathwater was cold by the time I tiptoed back upstairs. A tray of syllabub and wine was untouched outside the bedroom door, and there was no sign of John. He must have gone to sleep in another room.