Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

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СКАЧАТЬ see John’s expression. But, with sudden protective anxiety, I became aware of Father glancing up from the frets under his left hand and, for the first time, taking in the bearded face of his uninvited guest.

      Father didn’t miss a beat. With his hand still moving on the fingerboard, he held John’s gaze for a moment, inclined his head in the merest sketch of a courtly bow, and murmured, in his softest voice, ‘John.’ The smile stayed on his lips.

      Then he turned his eyes down, back to his difficult music.

      It had been no more than a greeting. But I felt John flinch as if it had been a whiplash. He was shifting uneasily on his feet now, glancing back at the door, clearly longing to be off.

      After the music finally dissolved into applause, Father got up with the lute still in his hand. I was certain he was about to make his way towards us. I stepped aside, stealing a glance up at John’s face and reading the pale signs of guilt on it.

      Yet Father didn’t part the crowd of acolytes to approach John. He had too much of a sense of occasion. He was turning now to the delighted Master Hans, and apologising for the poor musical entertainment – ‘But I assure you something better will follow,’ he was saying, and John Rastell, my uncle the printer, and his son-in-law John Heywood, were visibly quivering with secret knowledge of what that would be – and within minutes we were being organised into the impromptu performance of a play, and transported back into the carefree atmosphere of a family evening in the old days.

      ‘Let’s do The Play called the four PP!’ young John More, excited and puppyish, was calling out. John Heywood’s play, written long after John Clement went away, had been a family favourite for years – a satire on the trade in false relics by mendacious travelling monks. Young John was waving his goblet of Canary wine, and his grin was almost splitting the child’s face, which now seemed far too small for his ever-growing body. ‘We could use this as the wedding cup of Adam and Eve! … And this’, he picked up a trinket box, loving the joke, ‘as the great toe of the Trinity!’ But the older Johns shushed him. They’d clearly agreed in advance what we’d be acting – and opted for no religion – because it was only a matter of moments before everyone was dressing up instead for The Twelve Merry Jests of Widow Edith, with Dame Alice assigned, with her usual good-tempered resignation, to play the starring role of the bawdy old fraud who debauches our family servants. ‘If this is a punishment for all my shrewishness,’ she said, and twinkled, ‘I should learn to keep quiet in future,’; then, twinkling even harder and tapping Father on the shoulder in the middle of his mock-henpecked look: ‘Just my little joke, husband.’

      It was only when the shuffling and scene-setting was in full swing, and all the other Johns were fully occupied elsewhere, that Father finally approached my John. Who was still standing, looking ill at ease, while everyone else bumped busily past him.

      ‘John,’ Father said, opening his arms, dazzling the taller man with his smile. ‘What a surprise to see you here. Welcome to our poor new home,’ and he embraced his bewildered protégé before slowly moving back, patting him gently on the back, to include me in his smile.

      ‘John Clement,’ he said to me, with a hint of mockery in his voice as he pronounced that name, ‘has always been a man of surprises. Ever since the time we first met. Do you remember our first meeting, John?’

      And a current of something I couldn’t define ran between them – what seemed a sense of threat masked by smiles – though perhaps I imagined it. John was smiling back, but I sensed he was hanging intently on Father’s every word. So was I. I knew so little about John’s past that any new light Father could shed on who my enigmatic intended had been before he came to live with us would be well worth having.

      ‘It was in Archbishop Morton’s house, Meg, when I was just a boy – maybe twelve years old. You’ve heard all about Archbishop Morton, I know: my first master, and one of the greatest men it’s ever been my privilege to serve. A man whose great experience of the world made him both politic and wise. God rest his soul.’ I was being drawn closer, into the magic circle. His voice – the mellifluous tool of his lawyer’s trade – was dropping now, drawing us into his story.

      Father, a pageboy in hose and fur-trimmed doublet, turning back the sheets and fluffing up the pillows late at night for the Archbishop, who’d also been Lord Chancellor to the old King, in his sanctum in the redbrick western tower of Lambeth Palace. Father was a boy tired after the daytime rituals of the house school, and the evening rituals of serving at table in the great hall, and already longing to join the other pageboys snuffling on their straw mattresses in the dormitory. But he was mindful too of the lessons of the books of courtesy and nurture, so he was also remembering not to lean against the wall, or cough, or spit, and to bow when he was spoken to, and to answer softly and cheerfully. (The boy More was so naturally skilled at all these arts of gentility that he’d become a favourite with his canny master, who’d taken to boasting publicly at table that ‘This boy waiting on you now, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvellous man.’) So when the Archbishop told him to take the tray of wine and meat and bread he’d brought up from the kitchens into the audience chamber next door – a public room of polished oak, never used at this hour – he stifled his fatigue and obeyed with the best grace he could.

      And there in the audience room were two young men – coltish youths only slightly older than young More, with long limbs and travel-stained clothes, and swords propped against their boxes, drooping tiredly on the polished benches. With something watchful about the way they looked at him as he entered with the tray. And something angry about the way they looked at each other.

      Try as he might, young More couldn’t imagine who these surprise guests were. He’d never seen them at the school. He’d never seen them among the pages serving in the great hall. Besides, they were too old to be pageboys. They already had the close-cropped hair of adulthood. And former pageboys didn’t suddenly show up to pay their respects in the middle of the night. In any case, their manners seemed too high-handed to have been learned in the Archbishop’s courtly home. ‘Wine,’ the older youth, who must have been seventeen or eighteen, said imperiously. Young More bowed and poured out the wine. ‘Wine,’ said the younger boy, who was black-haired with fierce eyes, clearly annoyed that there was only one goblet and pointing towards his own feet as though young More were a dog to be brought to heel.

      But the boy More was not afraid of these headstrong youths. He just laughed politely.

      ‘Two drinkers, but only one vessel,’ he said, keeping his countenance as the books taught. ‘A problem I can quickly solve by running back to the kitchens for another goblet.’

      And then an interruption – a great gale of laughter from the candlelit doorway, where they’d all forgotten that Morton, in his long linen nightshirt, was still watching them.

      ‘Bravo, young Thomas,’ he said richly. ‘Your poise puts everyone else here to shame. This one,’ and he pointed at the younger youth, who was now looking ashamed at being caught out in the uncouth business of bullying a child, ‘has clearly forgotten to live up to his name.’

      And the black-haired wild boy stared awkwardly at his feet.

      ‘Tell the child your name, John,’ Morton said. ‘Let him in on the joke.’

      ‘Johannes,’ the youth said. He hesitated, in the manner of someone who might not really speak Latin. ‘Johannes Clemens.’

      Johnny the Kind. Archbishop Morton catching young More’s eye, giving him permission to laugh. The small More joining in his master’s unkind mirth at the difference between the tall black-haired boy’s lovely name and unlovely behaviour. The older youth also beginning to guffaw. And, finally, John Clement СКАЧАТЬ