Vanora Bennett - Portrait of an Unknown Woman

John stepped back quickly from the window and I came with him. He looked sick. He hurried twenty steps away with me trotting behind before he paused for me.

‘A heretic?’ he asked in a whisper.

I nodded. ‘This one’s called Robert Ward. He was a shoemaker on Fleet Street until last week. They arrested him as part of a conventicle praying in the leather-tanner’s rooms upstairs. He has six children.’

‘Why has your father brought him to your home?’ I thought there was pity in the hush of his voice, too, and it gave me strength. ‘What’s wrong with a prison?’

‘There’ve been half a dozen of them in the past few months. Father doesn’t tell us anything about them, not even that they’re here. But he told the gardener who feeds them that he just wants to talk them out of evil. I happened to overhear –’ I felt my cheeks redden, though John let my blush pass and didn’t ask how I happened to overhear a conversation so obviously not intended for me and how long it had taken to pick the mulberry twigs out of my hair afterwards ‘– him saying he’d brought them home to interrogate “for their own safe-keeping”.’

‘Well,’ John said, stopping and looking straight into my eyes, visibly trying to follow my thoughts, searching for an explanation to hold on to, ‘perhaps he’s right to do that. Someone’s clearly been beating that man up. He probably is safer here.’

There was something comforting about hearing him say those sensible words. I liked the searching way he looked at me, really listening to my concern, trying to get to the bottom of what was on my mind. But it was too easy to cling to the belief he was offering. I hesitated, then plunged on. ‘But what if …?’ I didn’t know how to end that sentence. I tried again. ‘He’s been here for days. If he looks that way now, when was he beaten up?’

John looked even more closely at me. ‘I’m listening, Meg,’ he said seriously. ‘Are you saying you think it’s your father who’s been beating him?’

‘I don’t know,’ I confessed miserably. The darkest of the thoughts I’d been having seemed impossible now that he’d voiced my suspicion in that familiar, sensible voice – but not quite impossible enough. ‘But sometimes I think it’s possible. So many other things have changed that you don’t know about.’

The sun was a deceptive mellow gold, but the lawn our feet was thudding against was turning hard as iron and John’s breath was freezing to white.

There was more to show. He was shaking his head, looking too unsettled to hear everything at once, as I pulled him forward again. He certainly knew that Father had been at war with heretics ever since Brother Martin had declared war on Church corruption ten years ago and plunged Europe into upheaval. But he might easily not know how far Father’s personal war against evil had taken him: that, as well as his liveried life at court as the King’s most urbane servant – not just a royal counsellor and attendant, in and out of the King’s chambers, but Speaker of the House of Commons in the last parliament, and, since last year, with a knighthood and the chancellorship of the Duchy of Lancaster among his privileges as well – Sir Thomas More now spent large parts of every day trying to stop up every crack through which heresy might seep into England.

It wasn’t the Father we saw at home who’d become a persecutor of men. The man who ate and laughed and talked with us, only less often than before, was the same sunny wit we’d always known. I’d only become aware by accident – by stumbling on his victims – that he seemed to have become someone else too. A frightening stranger with a face turned towards the shadows.

The prisoners I’d been spying on in the gatehouse were the small fry caught in the net of Father’s surveillance and entrapment in the gutters of London; the victims of his agents’ creeping among the leather-sellers and the drapers and fishmongers of the city, hunting down evil in the shape of little men grappling with their consciences in back rooms, before bringing out broken prisoners with piles of logs on their backs as a symbol of the eternal fires they would have faced if they hadn’t recanted.

I didn’t understand the high politics of it. I couldn’t see how the whole spiritual and temporal edifice of the Church of Rome could be threatened by these terrified tradesmen. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for them.

Still, I knew that these humble men weren’t the only ones Father was investigating. There were others in his sights who were far closer in their outlook and beliefs to the way we used to be. The men he was going for hardest these days, people were saying, were the bright young scholars at the universities, who he said were ‘newfangly minded’ and ‘prone to new fantasies’ and might corrupt the very sources of faith, like little Cuthbert Bilney, arrested after preaching a seditious sermon in London, or the six Cambridge students imprisoned in the fish cellar of their college for keeping heretical books. Perhaps these men of learning were genuinely a danger. But it chilled me to think that Father’s new position in the world might be turning him into a defender of the worst as well as the best traditions of the Catholic Church, part of the sequence of foolish friars and grim clerks arguing about the number of angels you could fit on a pinhead whom Erasmus and he had once poked so much fun at.

‘Of course I want to believe he’s being kind,’ I went on, breathless even though we’d stopped walking. ‘That he’s getting these men out of prison because they’re in danger there. That he’s trying to give them time, that he’s reasoning with them and persuading them to recant, and saving their souls. But what if it’s worse than that? What if it is him bloodying these men’s faces out here where no one can see? What if he’s worse than a “total courtier” these days,’ – and I took a deep breath – ‘what if he’s started enjoying torturing people?’

John shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said stoutly. He stopped again and put reassuring arms around me. ‘I can see why that idea would worry you, Meg, but you must see how fanciful it is.’ Then, perhaps sensing that I wasn’t relaxing and giving up my fancy as easily as he’d expected, he added: ‘For instance, look how easy he went on young Roper. There are people who’d say that shows he’s too soft for his job.’

I almost laughed with the shock of that thought from another, less worried part of my mind. I had no idea how John Clement had heard about Will Roper’s brief love affair with Lutheranism a few months back. I didn’t think anyone outside our family knew anything about how Will, just qualified as a barrister, had been hauled before Cardinal Wolsey for attending a heretical prayer meeting with some of the German merchants in London. It was all thanks to Father that Margaret’s husband was sent home with nothing worse than a reprimand, when the other men arrested with him were forced to parade to Mass loaded down with firewood and jeered at by the crowd.

Officially, I didn’t know any of this. But there’d been no stopping Will talking while he was in the grip of the new idea, telling us excitedly that it was corrupt to pay to pray for the souls of the dead, because Purgatory had never existed except in the minds of money-grubbing monks; nonsense to believe in the age-old communion of the faithful, living and dead, joined through time in the body of the Church, because faith was a private matter between God and worshipper; and that it was foolish to see divine purpose in the Church of Rome. Forget priests, forget monks; refuse to respect your fathers; break every tie with the past.

Will was nothing if not sincere. He’d argued with Father in every corner of the house and garden. And Father was nothing if not gentle back. I’d seen him walking in the garden with Will, an arm around the younger man’s back, a sorrowful look on his face. ‘Arguing with your husband has got us nowhere,’ he’d told Margaret in the end, ‘so I’ll just stop arguing.’ Perhaps it was his prayers for Will’s soul, and his forbearance, that finally persuaded my brother-in-law to stop his flirtation with the forbidden and rediscover his passionate belief in a more familiar form of God (and his passionate admiration of Father into the bargain).