The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘Well, make yourself at home,’ said the Lady Lieutenant in the sceptical, resigned tone with which, at the door, she’d muttered that one word, Still … ‘I’m off to get your boxes brought up.’

  Or, just as likely, to pack her own.

  No switch of a key in the lock, just retreating steps doled out stair by stair until there was silence. If this was it – if there really was nowhere else but the room we were standing in, and a bedroom behind the internal door – then there could only be the two of us who would be living here. Alone together for the first time, we were too close for comfort. I went to the window, and Lady Jane opened the bedroom door, ostensibly in exploration but probably as desperate as I was for a snatch of solitude. What had I got myself into? How could I have been so stupid as to get myself shut up like this? What had I been thinking, last night, when I’d volunteered? It had seemed a good idea at the time. And it wasn’t as if I was doing much else. There I’d been, newly arrived to stay at the Fitzalans’, when word had come home from the earl that a girl was needed. No doubt he’d have expected one of his own daughters to volunteer but it had been me who’d raised my hand, I’ll do it.

  Hearing the door drop home against its jamb, I turned around to the room, which came back at me with a blank stare of its own, but down in a corner was something – alive, dark, fast – and my heart cannoned into my breastbone before I understood I was seeing a cat. It froze, mirroring me: the pair of us in a stand-off. I must’ve exclaimed because suddenly Jane was back in the doorway, alarmed: ‘What?’ I slid her gaze with mine to the animal, which glanced between us, affronted, and took a single, exaggerated backwards step. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I gabbled as if my breath were already gone, ‘if there’s a cat in the room.’

  She snapped into practicality: ‘Well, you’re in the right place, because I can’t stand them,’ and in a couple of strides she was at the main door, throwing it wide and ordering the cat on its way. It was an impressive performance for someone so small and, had it been directed at me, I’d have been falling over myself to oblige. But the cat, being a cat, feigned confusion and terror, shrinking and cringing, and only when I’d resigned myself to a merry dance did it surprise me by knowing what was good for it and streaking for the stairs.

  There we stood, Jane and I, looking into that gaping, unguarded doorway: both of us, I think, embarrassed to be complicit in her captivity. If she ran, though, she’d only get as far as a gatehouse, which was where the guards were. And, even if she could possibly get past those guards, then where? There was no one, now, who would have her. She closed the door, saying decisively, ‘We don’t have to have that in here.’

  We did have to be in here – or she did – but we needn’t submit to further indignities. There were limits.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh –’ she shrugged it off ‘– my little sister’s the same,’ and went to open the window. ‘With my other sister,’ she said, easing up the catch, ‘it’s horses,’ and turning back around to me, she raised her sketchy eyebrows: Imagine!

  ‘Why don’t you like them?’ I asked her. ‘Cats,’ I clarified, not your sisters.

  ‘Devious,’ pronouncing it as if it were the final word on the subject.

  With the window open came the banging of those bells.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she asked me, and for an instant the devil in me almost had me claim my cousin’s identity, Cat, but of course I stuck to the truth: ‘Elizabeth.’

  ‘Well, Elizabeth,’ and she presented her back to me, ‘would you help me out of this?’ She raised her arms a little, offering herself up for unpinning. ‘I hate the thing, and it’s hot in here.’

  ‘The thing’ was made of such heavy damask that the pins were in it up to their necks. I wondered whose dress this once might have been: a dress fit for a queen, but it couldn’t have been made for this one because there wouldn’t have been time. Just because the Duke of Northumberland had wanted his daughter-in-law on the throne hadn’t necessarily meant that it would happen. He’d had his work cut out for him, and right up until the last moment. Only a month or so back, according to the Fitzalans, he’d been playing safe with big smiles and fine wines for the King’s Catholic half-sister whenever she had come visiting. No, this dress had once been someone else’s, some dead queen’s, then rustled up for this pretend one in haste from the Queen’s Wardrobe. Perhaps it had belonged to the tiny queen of the old King, Katherine Howard, Queen for a year when I was a girl, because I remembered it being said that she’d had a new dress for every day she was on the throne. Afterwards, they must have been packed away somewhere.

  I asked whether we shouldn’t we go through to the bedroom for her unpinning but she was nonplussed, happy for us to stay where we were, and similarly when I reminded her that her other clothes hadn’t yet been delivered, she was cheerfully unconcerned: she could sit in her kirtle, she said; who was to see her? Well, no one, if we didn’t count me. How I’d have loved to ask the same of her, for her to unpin me from my gown – the room was so stuffy and I’d had such a long day – but one of us needed to stay respectable to open the door when her chests were delivered and supper served. She asked me where my own boxes were, and when I said they were still in Suffolk, she exclaimed but I said no more, avoided telling her how my mother and I had travelled light and fast, incognito, to flee the fighting that everyone had feared was about to start there. As it had happened, we needn’t have worried, because when it came to it, there’d been no fighting anywhere: no one had fought in Jane’s name.

  ‘This dress isn’t mine,’ I said, ‘it’s borrowed.’

  ‘From?’ She was merely making conversation, I knew, but still she’d have to have an answer.

  ‘Mary Fitzalan.’

  ‘Mary!’ – but the pleasure of recognition dropped into an uncomfortable silence, because if her own cousin was lending clothes to her captor, then surely there was no one left for her.

  When she was free of the gown, she took off her hood and then there she was, kirtle-simple and bare-headed, so that – disconcertingly – it could’ve been me in that room who was the ex-queen.

  An hour or so later, the first chest of hers was delivered but she was less than pleased to find it held no books. ‘I don’t need clothes,’ she complained, raking through the contents, as if the very notion were absurd, as if no one ever needed clothes, ‘I need my books. Where are my books?’

  What books? And how would I know? What was I, her personal librarian?

  ‘Elizabeth, I need my books,’ as if it were me who was denying her.

  ‘I’ll ask.’ What more could I say?

  ‘Ask whom?’ She paced as if caged; caged, bizarrely, in a kirtle, in swathes of silk.

  She had a point, though: no one had told me what to do – where to go, to whom, how and when – if we needed anything. And, ridiculously, I hadn’t asked. ‘Someone’ll bring supper,’ I improvised, ‘and then we can ask.’

  Which earned me a sharp sigh.

  But, honestly, I wondered, what could she possibly need, before then, with any books? And anyway, who was she to be demanding? She was a prisoner.

  There was an impressive jut to that little chin of hers. ‘They said I could have my books.’

  ‘And I’m sure you shall,’ if you just wait.

  She turned her back on me. Well, so be it. Two can play at that game. I withdrew to the window seat.

  Then, from her, ‘You don’t read, I suppose.’

  ‘I can read,’ I countered. And write. Not with any ease, true, but I could manage shopping lists and household accounts, or I could have a stab at them, I could make myself understood, and wasn’t that enough?

  She came to the window. How I wished those bells would stop; the air itself whooshed and boomed so that I felt a bit sick, as if I too were swinging. Together, we looked out over the courtyard. ‘What do you do, then,’ she asked, ‘to pass your time?’

  Your time, I noted, not the time: I was someone who had t
ime to pass. But time passes anyway, is what I’d always found. If I made myself scarce, it passed. I shrugged: ‘Whatever needs doing.’ The truth was that I made a point of spending my time trying to get out of whatever needed doing because I only ever seemed to do it wrong. I’d be safe here, then, it occurred to me: there was nothing here that needed doing. In that sense, I supposed, I’d made a good move.

  There was another sigh from her – heavy, this one – but beyond which, I hoped, I heard something else. ‘Supper,’ I announced, in anticipation.

  ‘You can have mine.’

  ‘You have to eat’ – although why should I care if she starved herself? Why should I feel sorry for her? The worst that would happen to her was that she’d spend a couple of weeks in this room before gliding off to a life in a big house with a pretty-boy.

  Whatever I’d heard, though, it wasn’t supper; we ended up waiting a while longer for that, but at least by then she’d asked me to help her dress again. When eventually we did dine, she was in Protestant black. And there was me in all that finery, which I could hardly help because it wasn’t actually mine and anyway, if she’d looked beneath the table she’d have seen my boots. Did she really think God looked approvingly on her for her sartorial self-denial? Not that it was anything of the kind, if you looked closely, because for all that it was black, that dress of hers was sumptuous.

  And it was all a pose anyway because, however much she might want to pretend otherwise, we were both Edwardians: his reign was all we’d properly known, which, for all our apparent differences, made us first and foremost Edwardians. Having that oh-so-Protestant ex-Queen across the table pushed me into a Catholic corner, which was unfair because although we Tilneys certainly weren’t reformists, we weren’t anything much else either: we just were; we were what we’d always been, doing pretty much as we’d always done, if – admittedly – a little more cautiously. It was the same for everyone else we knew. There’d been changes – of course there had, lots of them – but we’d dealt with them one by one as they’d come along: some we’d taken on; others we’d adapted or circumvented. We’d mixed and matched and muddled our way through the reforms, just as everyone else had. Protestant or Catholic, reformist or traditional: just about everybody I knew was a bit of both. We supposedly traditionally minded Tilneys kept close company with some who called themselves reformists. Harry, for one, although he’d changed his tune a few days ago when push came to shove. And Harry was a case in point because it was only ever happenstance in the first place that had made him back the reforms when my father, his neighbour, his best friend, resisted them. A different priest for Harry when he was growing up and then a different wife, back when he’d had a wife. The point was that nothing was simple, and during the past few difficult days there had been plenty of so-called Protestants rallying behind the Catholic Lady Mary, for various reasons, and many so-called Catholics better disposed towards the primly black-clad girl who was sitting across the table from me.

  When the chambergirl returned to clear away our supper, the Partridges came up the stairs with her but waited politely in our doorway for Jane to act the hostess and invite them inside, whereupon they settled together on the window seat like good children. Mrs Partridge looked about the same age as my sisters – in her twenties – but there the similarity ended, because even in repose her moon-face bore the trace of a smile: it seemed to have been cast that way. Bemused and shy, she might’ve been the one of us in the room who was reliant on good will. Her husband was older and smaller, with a lopsided smile and something off-kilter, too, about the eyes (different colours? a scarred iris?). He looked as if he’d dashed in the general direction of his clothes and kept running. If his wife brought to mind a bowlful of freshly picked apples, he was a windfall.

  They’d come to welcome us but also to talk over various practical arrangements (meals, linen, exercise), and their emphasis was firmly on flexibility. Listening to them, it was possible to forget that Lady Jane was a prisoner. They were good company, and in return Jane was perfectly pleasant, more so than she’d been to me all afternoon, but then, understandably I supposed, I’d be the one to bear the brunt. When they left, unease balled in my stomach and I had to remind myself that it was in their house that I was living, not hers. I was living with those nice Partridges at least as much as I was living with Lady Jane Grey: that, I told myself, was how I was going to have to think of it.

  They left us with a whole evening to spend in each other’s company, but luckily they’d located the missing books, so Jane was busy. And me? Bone-tired, I curled up on the window seat to breathe the evening air and watch daylight pale away, lamplight claiming the corners and doorways. I spotted Mr Partridge venturing from the house with a hound and returning a quarter of an hour or so later. The bell-tolling beyond the walls petered out until it was its absence, instead, that made itself felt.

  I suspected we were both putting off going to bed. We might’ve managed a tentative accord for the evening – her at the table with her books and me at the window with the view – but our other room was uncharted territory. It felt odd, too, somehow, to be deciding our own bedtime, extinguishing our own candles: I felt as if we should ask permission of someone. Eventually, though, I could put it off no longer, and declared I was turning in.

  ‘Me too.’ She closed her book and stood, ready, which had me despairing that I hadn’t gone earlier to use the chamberpot – I’d missed my chance, now, of some privacy. My light, as I followed her through the bedroom doorway, struck the bed’s coverlet, the silk-depicted, ruby-fruited vines. ‘Isn’t that beautiful!’ I wondered if it was Mrs Partridge’s own work.

  ‘There’s no truckle,’ was all Jane said: no second, little bed to pull from beneath the main one for me. She must’ve ascertained it when she’d first looked in, back in the afternoon. We’d have to sleep together in the big bed. Well, at least we were both small.

  First, though, we were going to have to undress each other. And how, I wondered, should we go about that? Because if I started with her, as presumably an attendant should do, then she’d be undressed while I was still clothed and that didn’t seem right. Come to think of it, though, she’d been stripped down to her kirtle earlier, at her own request. So when she’d removed her headdress and the string of pearls that was her girdle, I offered – ‘Shall I?’ – and, yes, immediately she turned her back to me, her row of pins, and there I was, undressing a queen for bed, or an ex-queen, and thinking of Harry – Look at me, Harry, undressing a queen – because that was something he hadn’t ever done. One up on Harry, then. Then again, one up on just about everybody.

  When I was finished and had lifted away her gown and her kirtle, she pulled her shift up over her head with a dismaying lack of self-consciousness, reaching for her nightdress but unhurriedly, not attempting to hide anything. But, then, really, what was there to hide? We were both the same, underneath.

  Then it was my turn. At home, I’d have roped in my mother to unpin me, or her chamberlady, or any of the other girl-servants: I’d call down from my room for help or waylay someone somewhere and stand still in a stairwell or passageway while the pins were extracted. But here I had an ex-queen at my disposal and in the event she proved satisfyingly deft, sheen slipping around on her hair as she bent this way and that, the better to tackle the task.

  Having finished with me, she went blithely to the chamberpot, which was when I made sure to disappear briefly into a flurry of linen: shift off and nightdress on. I decided I’d have to forgo the chamberpot: I’d hold on, if I could, until morning. And if I couldn’t, if I woke during the night, I’d be very quiet about it. She combed her hair, then prayed beside the bed. I only ever prayed in chapel, and only because it was expected of me. As she knelt there, I busied myself folding and stowing away our various garments. What confidence, it seemed to me, to think God would listen to her here, in her own room. But then maybe He would, because what did I know.

  She got into bed in the same manner I’d seen h
er do everything else that day – brisk, resolute, no equivocation or trepidation – and thus she had the choice of sides. She left me to close the shutters, too, and light the night-light, draw the hangings, do the proper work of the attendant that I now was. It was when I was dealing with the shutters that I noticed a lit window in the neighbouring tower and almost said so–Look! Your husband – but then didn’t because perhaps it would’ve been improper for me to remark on it when she hadn’t.

  I climbed into bed. She smelled of almonds.

  ‘Do you snore?’ she asked.

  I said I didn’t know.

  ‘Well, if no one’s ever said, then you probably don’t, do you.’

  I had to explain that no one would’ve told me because there was no one to know: I didn’t share a bedroom with anyone. ‘I’m the youngest’: my sisters grown up and gone before I was ever in any bed with them.

  ‘Well, you’re lucky,’ she said. ‘My littlest sister coughs, and the other one talks in her sleep.’

  Which had me curious: ‘What does she say?’

  She had to think about that. ‘Oh, nothing really.’ She cast around: “‘Put it in the bucket.” That kind of thing.’

  And I laughed, because how was that a ‘kind of thing’?

  ‘Mind you,’ she said drily, ‘she doesn’t say anything much more meaningful when she’s awake.’

  When she said nothing more, I asked, ‘And what do you do?’

  She turned to me, uncomprehending.