Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett

other men arrested with him were forced to parade to mass loaded down with firewood and jeered at by the crowd.
                 Officially, I didn’t know any of this. But there’d been no stopping Will talking while he was in the grip of the new idea, telling us excitedly that it was corrupt to pay to pray for the souls of the dead, because purgatory had never existed except in the minds of money grubbing monks; nonsense to believe in the age-old communion of the faithful, living and dead, joined through time in the body of the church, because faith was a private matter between God and worshipper; and that it was foolish to see divine purpose in the Church of Rome. Forget priests, forget monks; refuse to respect your fathers; break every tie with the past.
                 Will was nothing if not sincere. He’d argued with Father in every corner of the house and garden. And Father was nothing if not gentle back.
                 I’d seen him walking in the garden with Will, an arm around the younger man’s back, a sorrowful look on his face. “Arguing with your husband has got us nowhere,” he’d told Margaret in the end, “so I’ll just stop arguing.”
                 Perhaps it was his prayers for Will’s soul, and his forbearance, that finally persuaded my brother-in-law to stop his flirtation with the forbidden and rediscover his passionate belief in a more familiar form of God (and his passionate admiration of Father into the bargain).
                 “That wasn’t the work of a bigot, now, was it?” John was saying gently. “No one could have been more restrained.” And he was encouraging me to smile, to wipe the fears from my heart. My mouth twitched back at him. It was a relief to remember that moment of sweetness. I almost gave in. But not quite.
                 “But it doesn’t make sense,” I said stubbornly. “How he behaved with Will doesn’t fit in with the other things he’s been doing. In the New Building, where we’re not invited. And in London, and at court. That’s what I don’t understand.”
                 John was towering beside me, with an anxious look on his face again that probably matched the anxious look on mine. I felt disloyal to be snooping through the parts of my father’s public life that he didn’t tell us about at home, but worry about what was happening to him had made me a secret agent in my own home ever since we came to Chelsea. So I kept drawing on his arm, pulling him on through the garden. The only way I could show John what troubled me about the direction Father’s mind was turning—how he was leaving behind the civilized thinking that had created our bookish, loving family; how he was now to be more feared than trusted or obeyed—was to show him what I’d seen.
                 We were walking toward the New Building—Father’s sanctuary from court life: his private chapel, his gallery, his library, his place of contemplation and prayer, the place where he wrote his pamphlets. It had monkish bare walls, a single bench, and a plain desk. He prayed; then he sat at that desk and poured out the filth of his public letters. I couldn’t imagine how he could bring himself to even think some of the words he came up with:
                   Since Luther has written that he already has a prior right to bespatter   and besmirch the royal crown with shit, will we not have the posterior   right to proclaim the beshitted tongue of this practitioner of posterioristics most fit to lick with his anterior the very posterior of a pissing she- mule until he shall have learned more correctly to infer posterior c onclusions from prior premises?
                 I unlocked the door, brought John inside (he seemed taller than ever, hunched inside its austere confines), and closed it, silently pointing out the brown-stained tangle of the scourge swinging from a hook on its inner