Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

bodily lusts that kept him from becoming a priest himself long ago; the weapon he turned on himself in his bigger war against instinct and unreason.

      What private lusts, and for whose bodies, would made him flail his own skin until he drew blood? It hurt me to think of his poor innocent skin, already chafed and broken by his hair shirt, lashed into worse pus and scab by that ugly sliver of bloodied leather. It was almost as bad as seeing the tortured prisoners at the other end of the garden, to imagine him torturing himself, alone, in here.

      He kept his pamphlets and writings in the library, along with the confiscated, banned and impounded books that he had special dispensation from Bishop Tunstall to read and refute. He had a complete library of heresy here, in his place of prayer, down to William Tyndale’s New Testament in English – one of the few copies that had escaped the bonfire at St Paul’s. Cardinal Wolsey had thrown the rest into the flames. Watching him were 30,000 cheering Londoners and my grimly approving father.

      On the desk was last week’s draft of the letter Father had been writing to Erasmus for so long, begging him to get off the fence and denounce Luther. I’d read it before, and been chilled by the fury of Father’s phrasing: he wrote that he found all heretics ‘absolutely loathsome, so much so that unless they regain their senses I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be’.

      Hateful indeed. I shivered. The word brought back the image of Robert Ward, the scared little shoemaker locked up in our garden, praying to die.

      I knew Father was wasting his ink trying to persuade Erasmus. Nothing I’d seen the old man write suggested there was the least chance of him publicly supporting Father in any crusade against the religious reformers. He was too busy feeling disappointed, in Luther and Zwingli on one hand, in Father on the other. In everyone who’d once been a humanist but had since become a zealot.

      Erasmus might have taken to calling the most ranting evangelicals ‘rabble-pleasers’, ‘mangy men’, and ‘utterly lacking in sincerity’. But he was no more impressed with the ‘uncouth, splenetic’ style of Father’s written attacks, which he said, ‘could give Luther lessons in vehemence’.

      I felt for Erasmus. Deserted on both sides by the former disciples of the new learning as they forgot the classics and rushed into their violent religious extremes instead. Sitting in Basel, looking forlornly round for intellectual playmates who might still enjoy Greek writings and Arabic geometry, or revel in moderation, mockery, learning, laughter, inquiry, beauty, truth and all the rest of the last generation’s forgotten dream. The same dream that Father brought all of us up to be a living illustration of; the same dream that Master Hans would tomorrow start illustrating us as illustrating. A charming public image coming into existence of a private reality in danger of fading away.

      ‘Look at this,’ I heard myself whispering to John, pulling out one offending volume after another and opening them to the worst pages. ‘And this. And this.’ There was still enough January sunshine to read by inside. But he screwed up his eyes with a show of reluctance and took them to the desk, by the window, to see properly.

      ‘Don’t you see, John?’ I pressed, and my whisper hissed against the bare plaster. ‘He’s lost his reason. We could wait forever for him to give us permission to be together. He might never do it. He can’t think about any of us any more. He’s too obsessed with this. He’s gone mad with hate.’

      I’d been thinking this about Father for so long, while I’d had no one to share it with, that it was a relief to speak my doubt aloud, especially to the man I loved.

      But John was squaring his shoulders, and giving me the same kind but unconvinced smile that my smaller self had seen whenever I offered the wrong answer in a lesson. He shook his head.

      ‘It’s his job,’ he said simply, dropping the page of foulmouthed nonsense about Luther’s posterioristics. ‘That’s William Ross speaking, not Thomas More.’

      Another neat commonsense blow at my fears; another sign that John knew a lot about Father’s work. I had to admit that Father had been asked by the King – and not chosen himself – to reply to Luther’s writings against the Pope. And it was true that he’d been ashamed enough of the crass language, zealotry and poor reasoning of the writing he was doing in service of King and country that he’d only published it under a pen name. It still made me hot with shame to read those words: William Ross was a bullying bigot, and everyone knew William Ross 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,