Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ the Pope, she’s poisoning him in the most subversive way imaginable by giving him the new men’s books to read.

      ‘If her influence grows, who knows how far the heretical thinking might spread? And who knows what chaos we might be plunged into? Peace is an illusion, an agreement between civilised people, and something your father has worked all his life to promote; but it’s the nature of humanity that the beast is always lurking somewhere beneath the surface.’

      The phrases were echoing emptily in my head now. I pleated a fold of my cloak. I didn’t understand. ‘You’re talking politics,’ I said sulkily. ‘Not ordinary life. Not us being in love and getting married.’

      ‘But Meg, politics is life. If you lose peace you lose everything else: love, marriage, children, the lot. You should thank God you’re too young to remember how things were before – in the time of wars,’ he answered bleakly. ‘But anyone a bit older than you will say what I’m saying now. I lost my family in that madness’ – he shivered – ‘and I know there can be nothing worse.’

      Had he? He was old enough to have lost family in the wars, but he’d never talked about it. All I knew for sure was that he’d been taken into a family friend’s household as a boy, after his own father’s death. I’d asked him about his childhood once. He’d just shaken his head and twinkled at me. ‘Very different from the way I live now,’ was all he’d said. ‘I like this way of life a lot better.’

      ‘The best we can do, in the weeks and months to come,’ his voice rolled on now, ‘is to hope that the King’s fancy turns elsewhere and this crisis passes. And meanwhile, try not to judge your father too harshly. Some of the things he’s doing may look cruel, but it’s up to him to root up the evil spreading over English soil before it starts clinging to the King. The only thing we can do is let him concentrate on doing his job, and wait for the moment to be right for us.’

      He swung me round in front of him like a doll, lifted my face, and looked searchingly into my eyes. ‘Oh Meg, don’t look so scared. Have faith. It’s going to happen. I’m going to marry you. I only wish,’ he added, leaning down and kissing the top of my head, very gently, ‘that it could be today.’

      I stayed very still, looking down, treasuring this moment of quiet togetherness, warmed by the sincerity in his voice and the folds of his cloak flapping in the rising wind, watching the shadow of the anxious clouds scudding through the deepening sky chase across the lawn at my feet. Still hardly able to believe that he could be here, saying he felt about me as I always had about him, still swimming with delight. And feeling half-reassured that he didn’t think Father was becoming a vengeful, sadistic stranger, though not sure I completely agreed. Still feeling twinges of unease and uncertainty; but willing, more than willing, to do whatever John Clement said, because he said he loved me and because I loved him.

      ‘You said,’ I whispered, with my face so close to his chest that I could smell the warm man-smell of him, trying to focus on the questions I needed answers to but not sure any more what they were, ‘that there were things Father wanted you to be able to tell me … was that just about the College of Physicians? Or was there something else?’

      He hesitated. For a moment I thought I saw his eyes flicker, as if there was something he wanted to hide. But then he smiled and shook his head. ‘No. Nothing else,’ he said firmly. ‘Nothing for you to worry about.’

      We huddled together, looking up at the house, knowing it was time to go back. I knew I should feel nothing but joy, but this snatched meeting was so unexpected, and so incomplete, that my pleasure in it was bittersweet too, and tinged with sadness. So what I found myself saying, as we turned back up the path, arm in arm, was, ‘You know, I miss the innocence of before … the time when there was nothing more to worry about than putting on a play that made us laugh after supper … when there was nothing worse than a weasel in the garden … when Father did nothing more dangerous than hearing court cases about ordinary street crimes … and when everything he wrote was just a clever game, instead of a war of words …’

      ‘My darling girl, I think what you’re saying is that you miss Utopia,’ John quipped, and I thought for a moment that he might be laughing at me. That was the title of Father’s most famous book, written in the summer that John went away, in which a fictional version of my teacher – known in the book as ‘my boy John Clement’ – had been given a minor role. It was the story of a perfect world, as perfect in its way as our own contented past.

      I didn’t feel like laughing back. ‘Well, I do miss it,’ I said defiantly. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

      But the wind had got into his cloak, and was tugging at his beard, and he was very busily fidgeting his accoutrements back into submission.

      ‘Let’s go,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard, stepping ahead of me, ‘before we get blown away.’

      But he had heard, after all, because a few steps later he added, rather bleakly, over his shoulder: ‘Nostalgia is dangerous. Never look back.’

      Or perhaps I’d imagined the chill, because by the time we got up to the door and stopped to catch our breath, now we were out of the wind, he was smiling again, and his face was as softly radiant as I could have hoped. He smoothed down the hair escaping out of my cap, and touched a finger to my lips.

      We might have lingered for longer on the threshold, glowing with wind and love. But suddenly the sound of two lutes in duet began drifting out into the late afternoon: invisible fingers plucking, hesitantly and very slowly, at a bittersweet popular air.

      ‘Listen!’ he said, with a music-lover’s delight, pushing open the door to hear where the sound was coming from. I didn’t need to rush. I knew exactly what a mangled lute duet signified in our house in Chelsea. Father was home.

       4

      The hall was crowded with new arrivals. But one head stood out among the rest – that great dark lion’s head, with the square jaw and long nose and the piercing eyes that could see the secrets in your soul, the head of the man with the glorious glow about him that fixed every other pair of eyes on him wherever he went. When Father threw back his head and laughed – as he often did – he always transported whatever roomful of watchers he’d gathered around him into a quite unexpected state of pure, joyful merriment. He wasn’t exactly laughing now, as I slipped into the room behind John Clement. He and Dame Alice were sitting on two high-backed chairs, surrounded by a standing crowd of soft-faced admirers with stars in their eyes, and the pair of them were struggling to make their disobedient lutes obey them (he’s always been tone deaf, but he loves the idea of playing duets with his wife). But there was a smile playing on his wide mouth as he tried to force his fingers to be nimble on their strings. He knew his limitations. He was ready to see the lute duets, like so much else, as the beginning of a joke about human frailty.

      His magic worked as powerfully on me as it did on everyone else. Glancing around past all the usual family faces and the stolid features of Master Hans, I saw he’d brought the Rastells and the Heywoods home with him, and John Harris, his bow-backed confidential clerk, and Henry Pattinson, his fool, fat and shambling behind them, and in the shadows John a Wood, his personal servant, who was probably tutting adoringly in his corner over the state of the master’s muddy old shoes, sticking out beneath his robe, and plotting one of the sartorial improvements that Father loves to resist. The sight of Father emptied my mind of all my rebellious thoughts. With him here, the household was complete. The dusky room was lit up with more than candles. The warmth came from more than just the fire blazing in the grate. Like everyone else, I was ready to forget everything and just revel in the effortless happiness that came from enjoying watching him enjoying himself.

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