Portrait of an Unknown Woman by Vanora Bennett Page A

side. The scourge was another new manifestation of Father’s conscience: his protection against the bodily lusts that kept him from becoming a  priest himself long ago; the weapon he turned on himself in his bigger war against instinct and unreason.
                 What private lusts, and for whose bodies, would make him flail his own skin until he drew blood? It hurt me to think of his poor innocent skin, already chafed and broken by his hair shirt, lashed into worse pus and scabs by that ugly sliver of bloodied leather. It was almost as bad as seeing the prisoners he tortured at the other end of the garden, to imagine  him torturing himself, alone, in here.
                 He kept his pamphlets and writings in the library, along with the confiscated, banned, and impounded books that he had special dispensation from Bishop Tunstall to read and refute. He had a complete library of heresy here, in his place of prayer, down to William Tyndale’s New Testament in English—one of the few copies that had escaped the bonfire at St. Paul’s. Cardinal Wolsey had thrown the rest into the flames. Watching him were thirty thousand cheering Londoners and my grimly approving father.
                 On the desk was last week’s draft of the letter Father had been writing to Erasmus for so long, begging him to get off the fence and denounce Luther. I’d read it before and been chilled by the fury of Father’s phrasing: he wrote that he found all heretics “absolutely loathsome, so much so that unless they regain their senses I want to be as hateful to them as anyone can possibly be.”
                 Hateful indeed. I shivered. The word brought back the image of Robert Ward, the scared little shoemaker locked up in our garden, praying to die.
                 I knew Father was wasting his ink trying to persuade Erasmus. Nothing I’d seen the old man write suggested there was the least chance of him publicly supporting Father in any crusade against the religious reformers.
                 He was too busy feeling disappointed, in Luther and Zwingli on one hand, in Father on the other. In everyone who’d once been a humanist but had since become a zealot.
                 Erasmus might have taken to calling the most ranting evangelicals “rabble-pleasers,” “mangy men,” and “utterly lacking in sincerity.” But he was no more impressed with the “uncouth, splenetic” style of Father’s written attacks, which he said, “could give Luther lessons in vehemence.”
                 I felt for Erasmus—deserted on both sides by the former disciples of the New Learning as they forgot the classics and rushed into their violent religious extremes instead.
                 “Look at this,” I heard myself whispering to John, pulling out one offending volume after another and opening them to the worst pages. “And this. And this.” There was still enough January sunshine to read by inside.
                 But he screwed up his eyes with a show of reluctance and took them to the desk, by the window, to see properly.
                 “Don’t you see, John?” I pressed, and my whisper hissed against the bare plaster. “He’s lost his reason. We could wait forever for him to give us permission to be together. He might never do it. He can’t think about any of us anymore. He’s too obsessed with this. He’s gone mad with hate.”
                 I’d been thinking this about Father for so long, while I’d had no one to share it with, that it was a relief to speak my doubt aloud, especially to the man I loved.
                 But John was squaring his shoulders and giving me the same kind but unconvinced smile that my smaller self had seen whenever I offered the wrong answer in a lesson. He shook his head.
                 “It’s his job,” he said simply, dropping the page of foul-mouthed nonsense