Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ was Father. Still, if John Clement could separate the two names in his mind, perhaps that meant Father hadn’t compromised himself as disastrously as I’d thought.

      ‘He’s not imagining the danger of heresy,’ John said gently, sensing that he’d found a chink in my armour. ‘I know that the man you showed me in the gatehouse looked pitiful. But we have to remember that he’s not what he seems. He’s part of the darkness that might envelop Christendom.’

      ‘How can he be? He’s just a skinny little cobbler from Fleet Street!’ I said hotly, on the defensive again.

      ‘But a skinny little cobbler from Fleet Street can be the darkness,’ John answered persuasively. ‘Or he can to most people. Look, you’re young enough, and lucky enough, to have been brought up in a time of peace and in a sophisticated household where everyone has read about different peoples through the ages having had very different kinds of beliefs and lived in very different kinds of states and still prospered. Your head is full of Greek gods and Roman lawmakers and Eastern men of learning and stars moving in orderly fashion through the heavens. You think civilisation is everywhere. So you have a confidence that you don’t even know is unusual. You don’t live with the fear of chaos breaking through and destroying the way we live that haunts the rest of us. You have no idea how other people feel. Most people feel mortal terror at the idea of the unholy chaos outside, waiting to engulf them. And I don’t just mean the poor and superstitious and unlettered, the people brought up without sucking in Seneca and Boethius and algebra with their mother’s milk. I mean everyone brought up in the shadow of war. Everyone brought up before this rare time of peace and outside the very unusual household you’re lucky enough to come from. I mean everyone older and less lucky than you. I mean people like your father and me.’

      ‘But you and Father are men of learning! You know everything I know and more!’ I cried, full of frustration that he wasn’t following my train of thought.

      ‘Ah, but we weren’t brought up to it, and that’s the difference,’ he said, with a certainty that made me pause. ‘We grew up in a world where there was nothing but the fear of the darkness. When death was waiting round every corner. When London could be surrounded at any time by an army threatening to string up every man and rape every woman and throw babies onto their sword blades and torch every parish church. When books were rare and locked up inside the monasteries, and our only hope of salvation was the One True Church and the priests who could mediate for us with God. Of course men of my age and your father’s age fell in love with the new learning and the new freedom to think as soon as we had peace and leisure enough to explore it. But we haven’t forgotten the fear we grew up with. It’s always at the back of our minds. And we can’t feel easy when people take up arms against the Church. You can’t expect that of us.’

      He paused, waiting to see the light of acquiescence in my eyes. But I ploughed on, even though his assurance was beginning to make me feel I’d only understood part of the problem. ‘But Father and Erasmus and all the rest of you used to talk about uprooting corruption in the Church,’ I said plaintively. ‘And none of you expected to be treated like criminals for it. So why is it so much worse if a few cobblers get together to pray in a leather-tanner’s room?’

      He sighed patiently. ‘It’s not just a few cobblers or a few prayers any more, Meg. It’s not a bit of mockery at the table about crooked priests selling indulgences either. It’s gone much further than that. What’s happening now is an assault on God and His Church. It’s armies of peasants running amok in the German lands burning down churches and murdering the faithful. It’s rogue monks betraying their oaths of celibacy and marrying the nuns who’ve sworn to be the brides of Christ. It’s the old chaos, the horror you’ve never known, threatening us all. Even if you did understand, it would be hard for you to see the danger from the calm of England, but anyone who’s been in Europe in the past few years and knows the signs can see the darkness looming again all over Christendom. It could happen here. Your father is right to be frightened, and he’s right to fight it. We couldn’t hope for a better general than him to lead us in the war against the heretics – precisely because he is the same scholar and gentleman who brought you up. The same good, subtle, generous, wise man. Which is why nothing will make me believe what you’re afraid of – that he could enjoy causing pain. You have to put that idea aside. It makes no sense.’

      His certainty sounded stronger than mine. His loyalty to Father made me feel ashamed. I looked down.

      ‘It’s simpler than you think, Meg,’ he said. ‘You and I will find happiness together. Neither of us will ever be alone again. But we have to do as he says. We mustn’t distract his attention. He’s fighting his war on many fronts. It’s not just cobblers who are a danger. There’s worse elsewhere. There’s heresy rearing its ugly head everywhere – even at court.’

      He shifted his shoulders, looking around for the door, clearly unwilling to continue trespassing in Father’s private place. And, taking my arm again as we stepped out into the clean light, he told me the secret of the King’s Great Matter.

      Henry VIII, in love with a lady-in-waiting. Henry VIII, in love with a lady-in-waiting at a court so full of rose bowers and Canary wine and dancing till dawn and flashes of leg and cleavage and canopied beds with feather pillows that it seems made for love. Henry VIII, so in love with the one lady-in-waiting who refuses to recline in any of the rose bowers or feather beds at the court made for love that he wants to get rid of his Queen and marry again.

      The King is a glittering bubble of gold and bombast. He never takes no for an answer. He is being tormented equally by love and by the Book of Leviticus. ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless,’ says Leviticus. And Leviticus is telling the King just what he wants to hear, now that he wants to be shot of the Queen, because once, long ago, for a few months, the Queen was the child bride of the King’s child brother Arthur, who died.

      The Queen’s first marriage has only begun troubling the King’s conscience since he has begun to want a second marriage for himself. It didn’t need to trouble anyone’s conscience back when it happened, because back then the Pope formally pronounced that the first unconsummated marriage of children hadn’t counted as God’s holy union. But now the King is full of doubts. As he dances attendance on the scented girl with the pointy chin and the witchy eyes and the fascinating mole on her neck, he’s also wondering: is God punishing him for his sinful marriage by denying him a son?

      Queen Catherine; devout, learned, Spanish, and in her forties, with powerful friends at court and all round Europe but just one young daughter to show for twenty years in the King’s bed. And worried.

      And a clique of ambitious nobodies forming around her rival: pretty, witty, elegant Anne Boleyn. The kind of courtiers known collectively as a ‘threat’. They’re throwing her together with the King; parting the tapestries with a wink and a glitter of excitement.

      ‘I was with the court at New Year at Hampton Court, and I saw them together myself,’ John said sombrely. ‘They were in a group of maskers. But there was no disguising the King. And no disguising what he felt about the lady in yellow.’

      ‘But what does the lady in yellow have to do with us?’ I asked.

      ‘Don’t be impatient, Meg,’ he said. ‘This is the point. The lady in yellow is making your father’s battle against heresy many times СКАЧАТЬ