Free Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett Page A

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.
                 “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. John was smiling, 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.
                 It happened at night, as Father, a page boy in hose and fur-trimmed doublet, was 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. I could imagine that boy, tired after the daytime rituals of the house school, and the evening rituals of serving at table in the great hall, and already longing to join the other page boys snuffling on their straw mattresses in the dormitory. But I knew he’d have been mindful too of the lessons of the books of courtesy and nurture, so he was also remembering not to lean against the wall, and to bow when he was spoken to, and to answer softly and cheerfully. (I knew Father had been so naturally skilled at all these arts of gentility that he’d become a favorite with his canny master, who’d taken to boasting publicly at table that “this boy waiting on you now, whoever shall live to see it, will prove a marvelous man.”) So when the archbishop told him to take the tray of wine and meat and bread he’d brought up from the kitchens into the audience chamber next door—a public room of polished oak, never used at this hour—he stifled his fatigue and obeyed with the best grace he could.
                 “And when I got there I saw two young men—tall, but only slightly older than me,” Father said. “Their clothes were muddy and they had swords propped against their boxes. They’d been traveling. I could see they were tired. And I thought they looked angry with each other.”
                Try as he might, Father said, he couldn’t imagine who these surprise guests were. He’d never seen them at the school. He’d never seen them among the pages serving in the great hall. Besides, they were too old to be page boys.