Portrait of an Unknown Woman. Vanora Bennett

the summer that John went away, in which a fictional version of my teacher – known in the book as ‘my boy John Clement’ – had been given a minor role. It was the story of a perfect world, as perfect in its way as our own contented past.

      I didn’t feel like laughing back. ‘Well, I do miss it,’ I said defiantly. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

      But the wind had got into his cloak, and was tugging at his beard, and he was very busily fidgeting his accoutrements back into submission.

      ‘Let’s go,’ he said, as if he hadn’t heard, stepping ahead of me, ‘before we get blown away.’

      But he had heard, after all, because a few steps later he added, rather bleakly, over his shoulder: ‘Nostalgia is dangerous. Never look back.’

      Or perhaps I’d imagined the chill, because by the time we got up to the door and stopped to catch our breath, now we were out of the wind, he was smiling again, and his face was as softly radiant as I could have hoped. He smoothed down the hair escaping out of my cap, and touched a finger to my lips.

      We might have lingered for longer on the threshold, glowing with wind and love. But suddenly the sound of two lutes in duet began drifting out into the late afternoon: invisible fingers plucking, hesitantly and very slowly, at a bittersweet popular air.

      ‘Listen!’ he said, with a music-lover’s delight, pushing open the door to hear where the sound was coming from. I didn’t need to rush. I knew exactly what a mangled lute duet signified in our house in Chelsea. Father was home.

       4

      The hall was crowded with new arrivals. But one head stood out among the rest – that great dark lion’s head, with the square jaw and long nose and the piercing eyes that could see the secrets in your soul, the head of the man with the glorious glow about him that fixed every other pair of eyes on him wherever he went. When Father threw back his head and laughed – as he often did – he always transported whatever roomful of watchers he’d gathered around him into a quite unexpected state of pure, joyful merriment. He wasn’t exactly laughing now, as I slipped into the room behind John Clement. He and Dame Alice were sitting on two high-backed chairs, surrounded by a standing crowd of soft-faced admirers with stars in their eyes, and the pair of them were struggling to make their disobedient lutes obey them (he’s always been tone deaf, but he loves the idea of playing duets with his wife). But there was a smile playing on his wide mouth as he tried to force his fingers to be nimble on their strings. He knew his limitations. He was ready to see the lute duets, like so much else, as the beginning of a joke about human frailty.

      His magic worked as powerfully on me as it did on everyone else. Glancing around past all the usual family faces and the stolid features of Master Hans, I saw he’d brought the Rastells and the Heywoods home with him, and John Harris, his bow-backed confidential clerk, and Henry Pattinson, his fool, fat and shambling behind them, and in the shadows John a Wood, his personal servant, who was probably tutting adoringly in his corner over the state of the master’s muddy old shoes, sticking out beneath his robe, and plotting one of the sartorial improvements that Father loves to resist. The sight of Father emptied my mind of all my rebellious thoughts. With him here, the household was complete. The dusky room was lit up with more than candles. The warmth came from more than just the fire blazing in the grate. Like everyone else, I was ready to forget everything and just revel in the effortless happiness that came from enjoying watching him enjoying himself.

      Until, that is, I sensed a shiver run down the back of the man in front of me. From where I was standing, I couldn’t 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,