Portrait of an Unknown Woman (2 page)

 
          
Despite his long, athletic body with its muscles and quick reflexes, there was nothing in John Clement that signaled any wish to fight. He had a natural authority that commanded our respect, but he was also very patient with us, and always ready to listen. He wasn’t like the other adults we knew because he was shy about talking of himself. He read a lot; he studied Greek in his room; but he was modest and especially quiet around the great minds who came to Father’s table.

 
          
It was a different story when John was alone with us. He was so good at playing with words that we children hardly noticed we were also learning Latin and Greek, rhetoric and grammar.

 
          
Of all the games, the one he played best was history. Our serious rhetoric essons—we studied rhetoric and grammar for several years before moving on to the higher arts of music and astronomy—were drawn from the history games we played together. He took snippets of street stories about the long-gone English wars and embroidered them into daring tales.

 
          
We would put whatever had struck us most in our own lives into the story. One day, when I was still young and letting my mind wander to the strawberries ripening in the garden, I even put my gluttonous wish into the play. I made the wicked King Richard III pause before some villainous act and tell the bishop of Ely: “My Lord, you have very good strawberries at y
our garden in Holborn. I require you to let us have a mess of them.” It made everyone laugh. Father came into the classroom and helped us write the episode down
exertationis gratia
—for the sake of practice. One day, he said, he’d write a proper history of Richard III and publish it, and it would be based on our games. And there was a dish of strawberries on our table for dinner that day.

 
          
But it wasn’t all laughter and strawberries. There was always something sad about John Clement too: a sense of loss, a softness that I missed in the bright, brittle Mores.

 
          
He found me alone in my room one rainy Thursday, crying over the little box of things I’d brought with me from Norfolk. My father’s signet ring: I was remembering it on his little finger—a great sausage of a finger. And a prayer book that had belonged to my mother, who died when I was born, but who my father had told me looked just like me—dark and longlegged and long-nosed and creamy-skinned, with a serious demeanor but the hope of mischief always in her eyes. I didn’t remember much about my real father (except the official fact that he was a knight). But I still felt the warmth of him. He was a bear-hugger with a red face and a shock of dark hair. And when he had you inside one of his embraces, half stifled but happy, you knew he’d always keep you safe.

 
          
Nothing prepared me for the morning his hunting companions brought him back on the back of his horse. He’d broken his neck at a jump—a foolish sort of death. No one comforted me. You’re not really a child anymore at nine. I dressed myself for his funeral and dropped my own handful of soil on his coffin, and began several years of quiet life in corridors: first at home, watchful, eavesdropping on the lawyers and relatives as they made plans for me; picking things up, magpie fashion, storing away my few memories and what tokens of my parents I could before I was sent away to be watchful in other people’s corridors and then in London. My mother had known Thomas More long ago, in London, before her marriage. It was a whim on his part—a kindly whim—to take me. But he wanted me to think of him as my father from now on. He told me that, with a sweet look on his face, when I turned up at the Old Barge.

 
          
Of course I knew nothing back then about how famous this man’s mind had become all over Europe. And I had no clue that, because of my proximity to him, I too would now be moving in the kind of exalted intellectual circles where you could find a man of genius in every room in the house, with one or two to spare on a good day. Or that we girls—I was to h
ave several new “sisters”—would be trained up to be Christendom’s only women of genius. All I noticed on that first day was that the stranger I was to call “Father” had a gentle face: kindly, with its dark features full of life and light. I warmed to him at once, to the face and the smile, Thomas More’s compact body and the sense he gives everyone that only their wellbeing is important to him. Even if this stranger never quite replaced the memory of my real father, Thomas More’s presence was comforting and flattering enough that the country child I still was then found herself eagerly trying out the word “Father” as she looked at him, full of a hope she was too young to understand.

 
          
Life with the Mores had turned out to be many kinds of joy I could never have imagined at the age of nine; and now I couldn’t think of living any other way or being anyone except a bit player in this familiar company of mighty intellects. But the reality of my relationship with Father had never lived up to those first hopes. He was kind, proper, and distant.

 
          
There were no embraces, no comforting, no special moments. He kept me at arm’s length. He saved his hugs and horseplay for his own children—Margaret, Cecily, Elizabeth, and John.

 
          
He saved his cheerful banter for their stepmother, Alice, who came to him a widow eight years older than him, with her own estates and her own strong commonsensical views on life, just a year before I came to the house. Father’s foreign houseguests found the new Mistress More harder going than the soft-spoken first wife. If you went along the upstairs corridor late at night and listened to what Erasmus and Andrew Ammonius were whispering in Greek, you’d always be sure to hear the words
hag
and
hook-nosed harpy
somewhere in the conversation. But More wasn’t as delicate a flower as his learned foreign friends. He gave as good as he got from the Dame (we children all called her that, half jokingly—the name seemed to suit her). He joshed back like a real Londoner, enjoyed her plain cooking and ribald talk, and after his attempts to interest her in Latin had failed, he had some success in making her at least learn music. Father’s new marriage seemed to suit something robust and down-to-earth in him,
 
even if it coincided with—and perhaps caused—the end of some of his

humanist friendships. In many ways it suited me and the other wards they adopted too, since no one could have been kinder or run a more welcoming home than Dame Alice. But no one treated me like a beloved child.

 
          
For the first few years I found it hard to make friends with my new stepmother and sisters and brothers and at night I would wake up with jaws
        
aching from not crying. Eventually they put me in a room by myself because I ground my teeth in my sleep. I’d have given almost anything for someone to act as though I was special. Until John, with his big frame and his floppy dark hair, appeared, when I was too lost in my feelings to stop, and stood in front of me with his own eyes filling with tears, just like mine. “I understand how you feel, little Meg,” he said softly, understanding everything with so few words that my shame gave way to wonder. “I lost my own father when I was a boy. I’m an orphan like you.” And he hugged me, and let me scrabble into the dark forgetfulness of his arms and sob my heart out. Afterward he found a handkerchief for my eyes and took me on his walk.

 
          
“Come on,” he said lightly—looking even a bit naughty and conspiratorial—as we slipped out of the front door while everyone else was sleeping off their midday meal. “Don’t let’s wake everyone up.” It must have been when I was thirteen or fourteen; early in the year; cold, in that London way, with a fierce drizzle beating into our faces. Even so, when we started down Walbrook (paved over by then, already, but our house on the corner had been called the Old Barge since the days when it really had been a brook, and boats had come up it from the Thames), the street stank. Naturally, since the pissing conduit was only a few yards away. Equally naturally, neither of us much wanted to walk in that stink.

 
          
“Tell me . . . ,” John Clement began, with a furrow up his forehead. I thought he might have been about to ask me about my real father, but I could also see that my grown-up tutor didn’t know how to continue or what comfort to give. I didn’t want to encourage him to try; it was too private to talk about. So it may have been me who, making a rare decision on behalf of someone else, pulled John Clement the other way, out of the odors of Walbrook and into sweet-smelling Bucklersbury Street and the shadow of St. Stephen’s Walbrook—where the paving stones were newer and smoother and the smells were gentler and we were more sheltered from the fitful rain.

 
          
Some of the apothecaries and herbalists on Bucklersbury had shops, with scales in the window and herbs and spices and preserves on shelves behind. We were followed the length of the street by a mad beggar with rolling eyes, yelling comically, “Unicorn’s horn! Unicorn’s horn!” which made John Clement laugh and give the man a coin to go away; which only made the man, who said he was called Davy, follow us closer and louder than ever. It wasn’t the unicorn’s horn that John bought me in the end, or the dragon-water or treacle of the more respectable traders, or the dried alligator hanging in the shop under the sign of the harp. It was a little bottle, painted sweetly with flowers, from an old countrywoman who had 
set up her stall on a wall away from the main rush.

 
          
“Good day, mistress,” he said courteously to her, “I’m looking for heartsease,” and the wrinkled old white head nodded wisely at us both with a flash of pale eyes.

 
          
“Washes away your sorrows . . . raises your spirits,” she said knowingly. “Add it to a glass of wine. Twice a day, morning and evening, six drops.”

 
          
He presented it to me with an adult’s flourish—“for sorrow,” he said lightly, and his favorite motto, “Never look back; tomorrow brings new joys”—but he didn’t quite meet my eyes. It was as if this grown man, my teacher, had suddenly become just a little bit shy.

 
          
I kept the heartsease in its pretty bottle. (I couldn’t bear to drink it. But it did its job even so.) It was only the first of my presents from walks in Bucklersbury, because we returned on many walks. That was just the beginning of our joint fascination with the secrets of the street. It wasn’t
 
just those two herbalists—Mad Davy with his unicorns’ horns, pigs’ trotters and tall stories, or old Nan with her pretty colored potions. They were my first favorites, but there was a whole crowd of other odd fish packed into Bucklersbury.
      
 

             Alchemists and barbers and surgeons and tooth pullers, scientists and frauds and soothsayers. As the weeks and months went by, we got to know every wise man and eccentric in the place.

 
          
It was always on a Thursday, every week. It was our secret. I would put on my cape after dinner and wait for him by the door. (“You’re like a dog, waiting so faithfully, grinning,” Elizabeth said when she saw me there once; even at eight she had her sharp tongue. “You make me want to kick you.” And she gave me a mean little smile. But I didn’t care what she said.) And every Thursday he’d give me something else for the medicine chest I was building up. When I was fifteen and Father asked John Clement to accompany him abroad for the summer and work as his secretary— on Father’s first diplomatic mission to Calais and Bruges, a gesture of trust as Father moved into the king’s circle—John bought me a bigger present to remind me of our walks: a pair of scales to weigh the medicine I’d go on buying for myself and that I’d tell him about at harvesttime.

 
          
But John didn’t come back to us at the end of the summer. Father came back alone. He had no explanation for me about what had become of John—as if he had never noticed the friendship developing between the two of us—just a bland phrase addressed to everyone present at his first dinner at the family table. “John needs to broaden his horizons,” he said. “I’ve helped him get some teaching at Oxford. There aren’t many people there who know Greek.”

 
          
The looks Father gave me were as kindly as ever, the encouragement he gave to my studies just as heartwarming. But I knew he was more at ease with talk of philosophy and public expressions of goodwill than with private feelings, and I found that I wasn’t brave enough to take him aside and venture into the personal. I couldn’t find the courage to ask for more information about why John had vanished without a word. I retreated into my books and watchfulness again. But for all the sadness that went with that second loss, I found the strength in the end to take it philosophically and see some good had come of it. My friendship with John had been interrupted, but my fascination with herbs and healing continued. For the awkward, learned, but slightly shy girl I’d become—hesitating over how to or even whether to expose myself by expressing an emotion—the ability to treat those near me for the small ailments of everyday life was, if nothing else, a release: not just my form of excellence, my small spark of
 
genius in the great fire of mental energy generated by the More household, but, perhaps more important, my way of showing love.