Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

father is right to be frightened, and he’s right to fight it. We couldn’t hope for a better general than him to lead us in the war against the heretics – precisely because he is the same scholar and gentleman who brought you up. The same good, subtle, generous, wise man. Which is why nothing will make me believe what you’re afraid of – that he could enjoy causing pain. You have to put that idea aside. It makes no sense.’

      His certainty sounded stronger than mine. His loyalty to Father made me feel ashamed. I looked down.

      ‘It’s simpler than you think, Meg,’ he said. ‘You and I will find happiness together. Neither of us will ever be alone again. But we have to do as he says. We mustn’t distract his attention. He’s fighting his war on many fronts. It’s not just cobblers who are a danger. There’s worse elsewhere. There’s heresy rearing its ugly head everywhere – even at court.’

      He shifted his shoulders, looking around for the door, clearly unwilling to continue trespassing in Father’s private place. And, taking my arm again as we stepped out into the clean light, he told me the secret of the King’s Great Matter.

      Henry VIII, in love with a lady-in-waiting. Henry VIII, in love with a lady-in-waiting at a court so full of rose bowers and Canary wine and dancing till dawn and flashes of leg and cleavage and canopied beds with feather pillows that it seems made for love. Henry VIII, so in love with the one lady-in-waiting who refuses to recline in any of the rose bowers or feather beds at the court made for love that he wants to get rid of his Queen and marry again.

      The King is a glittering bubble of gold and bombast. He never takes no for an answer. He is being tormented equally by love and by the Book of Leviticus. ‘If a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing … they shall be childless,’ says Leviticus. And Leviticus is telling the King just what he wants to hear, now that he wants to be shot of the Queen, because once, long ago, for a few months, the Queen was the child bride of the King’s child brother Arthur, who died.

      The Queen’s first marriage has only begun troubling the King’s conscience since he has begun to want a second marriage for himself. It didn’t need to trouble anyone’s conscience back when it happened, because back then the Pope formally pronounced that the first unconsummated marriage of children hadn’t counted as God’s holy union. But now the King is full of doubts. As he dances attendance on the scented girl with the pointy chin and the witchy eyes and the fascinating mole on her neck, he’s also wondering: is God punishing him for his sinful marriage by denying him a son?

      Queen Catherine; devout, learned, Spanish, and in her forties, with powerful friends at court and all round Europe but just one young daughter to show for twenty years in the King’s bed. And worried.

      And a clique of ambitious nobodies forming around her rival: pretty, witty, elegant Anne Boleyn. The kind of courtiers known collectively as a ‘threat’. They’re throwing her together with the King; parting the tapestries with a wink and a glitter of excitement.

      ‘I was with the court at New Year at Hampton Court, and I saw them together myself,’ John said sombrely. ‘They were in a group of maskers. But there was no disguising the King. And no disguising what he felt about the lady in yellow.’

      ‘But what does the lady in yellow have to do with us?’ I asked.

      ‘Don’t be impatient, Meg,’ he said. ‘This is the point. The lady in yellow is making your father’s battle against heresy many times more dangerous. She has the King’s ear – and she’s flirting with the heretics too. At a time when the King’s of a mind to be interested in anything that undermines the Queen, the Church of Rome and 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