He thinks of his daughter Anne following him upstairs, her stocky little form wobbling, her fat hands reaching out. He says, ‘My daughters are dead.’
‘I am informed.’
By Vaughan, of course. What more has he told her? And what less? He says, ‘How is this possible?’
‘Secrets can be kept.’
‘Evidently.’ In his experience, secrets do not keep. Perhaps that flat watery country is less leaky than this.
She says, ‘It was my mother’s wish that after you left Antwerp you should not be troubled. When I would ask her, “Where is my father?” she would say, “Gone over the sea.” When I was a little child I thought you were one of those men who sails to the new-found lands, and brings back treasure.’
He turns his back to give himself a moment to arrange his face. He looks at the tapestry as if he had never seen it before: as if he were taxed to unpick it and reweave it. It is usual to show Sheba gazing at Solomon. Hans, for instance, has made a picture in which the monarch wears the face and garments of our own king, and the onlooker sees the back of Sheba’s head. But Anselma looks you frankly in the face; she has turned away from the Israelite, as if behind her smile lies boredom.
She says, ‘You are thinking, I am not much like my mother.’
More like me, poor girl. ‘You are aware that until this moment I did not know you lived?’
‘I have shocked you. I am sorry.’
‘You must allow me time to understand it … Your mother bore you after I crossed the sea, and said not a word to me?’
‘That was her resolve.’
‘But why did she not write, when she knew her condition? Why bear it alone? Of course,’ he sighs, ‘you cannot answer that. Such matters are not discussed with children, are they? But I would have come back. I would have married her. Tell her –’
‘My mother is dead. A cold on her chest this winter.’
In the pause he consults his heart: it registers nothing, except the trace of the pen that, in the Book of Life, lightly inks a fate. It is the fate of a woman he knew in another country. And she not young, either.
His daughter says, ‘My mother always spoke well of you. Though she did not speak of you much. She said, Jenneke, I do not want him to regard you as a mistake he must pay for; he was a young man far from home, and I a widow, and both of us wanted company. But as you say, a child never hears the whole of these matters, and that is why I have come to find out for myself what manner of man you are. Are you glad to see me?’
‘I am amazed,’ he says. ‘How could I have a daughter and not know it? When she was carrying you, how did she hide you?’
She shrugs. ‘As women do. She went away. She made a journey. I was born in another town.’
‘And she married the banker.’
‘Yes, it was a good chance for her. He was a kind man and made her no reproach, but he had sons from his first wife, he had no need of an Englishman’s daughter. I stayed with the nuns, who were good to me. Then my mother took me to Stephen Vaughan. Teach her English, she said, against the day.’
Against the day when the secret comes out. ‘How could Stephen know and say nothing?’ Each word she speaks seems to deepen his bewilderment. Though he has heard, of course, of cases like this. Men like him, who have been travellers; men like him who are not celibate saints: one day they are going about their lawful occasions and there is a knock on the door, and ‘Guess who?’ It was a joke with the cardinal, who claimed he had spawned bastards everywhere: whenever some squat rascal heaved into view, he would say, ‘Look, Thomas, one of yours.’
No joke now. He says, ‘You know Stephen Vaughan is here in London?’
‘He will scold me,’ she says. ‘He intended to pick his good time and tell you himself. He said, Cromwell rises in the world, he has the ear of the king; he defends the gospel, he protects our sisters and brothers, and we should not carry fuel to the flames. He said, no name is too bad for his enemies to smear him – and if they know about you, Jenneke, they will call him a whoremaster too.’
‘True,’ he says.
‘But then he said, you do not want to be a nun, Jenneke, nuns are finished; so it is time you were wed. And your husband will need to know who you are, or we can make but a poor bargain – you are a bastard, but you are not just any bastard. We must sound out my lord your father, we must prepare him. But then this trouble broke out. And I did not want to wait any longer.’
When he held out his hands to her, she had not risen to take them; she had kept her seat and kept her countenance, and he admires her for it. He searches for Anselma in her but can only find himself. He thinks, why did you not come early? Time was when I was a different sort of man. Time was, I would bound into my own house and run upstairs singing. Even last year I was different, before I met Wolsey’s daughter: before she cut me to the quick, and the wound healed and scarred.
He asks, ‘Your mother had more children? With the banker?’
