Read Online Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett - Free Book Online

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 anymore, 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 wild 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, it would be hard for you to see the danger from the calm of England, but anyone who’s been in Europe in the past few years and knows the signs can see the darkness looming again all over Christendom. It could happen here. Your 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. The open secret that was already the talk of the court was that the king wanted to set aside his queen, Catherine, who had not  given him a son and marry her young lady-in-waiting. Anne Boleyn, the queen’s rival, was just one of many beauties 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 seemed made for love. But she was also the one lady-in-waiting who refused to recline in any of the rose bowers or feather beds made for love at the court.
                 The king, a glittering bubble of gold and bombast who never took no for an answer, found himself 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 was telling the king just what he wanted, now that he wanted to get rid 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 didn’t need to trouble anyone’s conscience back when it happened, because at that time 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,” John whispered. “Dancing attendance on the scented girl with the pointy chin and the witchy eyes and the fascinating mole on her neck, and