The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  And I knew I’d manage it: somehow I’d be there with everyone else and be glad of it, and not too bad at it. Light-headed, I was game, which was everything, and within minutes I was there, doing my bit, shoulder to shoulder with my fellow-dancers.

  Harry turned up opposite me in the line, as eventually everyone would: taking his place as the dance required, partnering me for that particular move. Harry, in a hallful of people I hardly knew; there he was, being so very much himself, so very ready to give of himself, and there was something close to comical about him – the ale-ruddied cheeks and cowslick hair, the popped buttons – but he was definitely in on the joke, which only made it funnier.

  ‘Hello, Lizzie,’ he said, and that too was funny, to have a greeting voiced as if we were anywhere other than passing each other, flushed and breathless, in a dance. No one ever greeted anyone during a dance; everyone just danced. And what a funny pair we made, too: the big man and the scrap that was me. But a proper pair in that hallful of fair-weather friends, because we’d known each other for my whole life and for a moment, just one moment, as he took my hand, I felt that no one else would ever know me so well. But it was only a moment, gone in a flash and if nothing more had happened later then I’d never have remembered it, I’d have danced on down that line, partner after partner, with Harry long gone as he should’ve been.

  A little later, the music stopped and that year’s lord of misrule came running on to the dais to direct the festivities. I knew the face – he was one of our stablelads – but the face wasn’t what drew the eye. Skipping on to that little stage to cat-calls from the audience who’d voted him there, he was preceded by an absurdly swollen codpiece which spoke of high jinks behind the scenes: a host of stablelads having had a hand, as it were, in its creation.

  Their handiwork had been slapdash, though, and now it was skewiff, the stuffing slipped, not that our puny stablelad seemed bothered. He was keen to display his appendage with swirls of an over-sized cloak which would’ve been loaned by someone twice his size.

  With a particularly vicious swirl, he regaled us: ‘Oh, you lover-ly lot.’ A snarl, but scamp-eyed in the delivery and I recalled him as meek and mild-mannered at the stables, much more so than the other lads, which was probably why they’d voted him up there. The gleam in his eye said he wouldn’t disappoint them: if he really did have to don an outsize codpiece and whip up a crowd, then he’d not be doing it by halves. ‘You lover-ly lot down there.’ The dais elevated him all of a hand’s breadth above us, the advantage of which was lost by his diminutive stature. ‘Call that dancing, do you?’ He was deriding us as he was supposed to do: we dancers who’d halted dutifully to become his audience. ‘All that lover-ly little neat-stepping of yours,’ and he took a couple of niggardly, prancing steps which had the codpiece bouncing horribly and of course we all laughed. ‘Well, you know what?’ He stood tall, as much as he could. ‘Life’s been too kind to you.’ At this, the laughter turned slightly guarded, although the deal was that we should give ourselves over for goading, that we should lay ourselves open to it, and anyway there was safety for us in numbers. I hoped those who’d volunteered him had his interests at heart, because I saw now that he was a little unsteady on his feet; I hoped he knew his limits. ‘You don’t neeeed to enjoy yourselves, do you.’ He lunged accusingly and the crowd, as one, drew back, but then he was swirling again, working himself up to being a spectacle for us, and letting us off the hook. ‘Because every day’s a party, for you, isn’t it. Not just for you…’ he seemed unsure how to name us, ‘finer people,’ said, though, with no detectable rancour, ‘but all of you,’ he crooned it to the roof before snatching it down into a playful sneer, ‘with your oh-so-lover-ly indoor lives.’ A flamboyant swirl of the cloak almost unbalanced him. ‘But you know what? You wanna be outside with the real men.’ His relish of the word ‘real’ garnered him a roar of approval: he was playing to those friends of his, now, and specifically addressed them: ‘Work hard, play hard, eh, lads?’ and to the rest of us, ‘Out in the stables there’s a lot of …’ he paused for effect, ‘horsing around.’

  Everyone obliged with the predictable collective groan, at which he giggled, losing his composure before changing tack and calling ringingly through the room, ‘But who’s going to be my lady of misrule, eh?’ Arms flung wide, codpiece on its way to his knees. ‘Where’s my lady? What’s the point of being a lord if I don’t have a lady?’ and suddenly his eyes were on mine simply because I was nearest, at the front, just because that was where I’d been when the music had stopped, and how hadn’t I seen it coming? Why hadn’t I realised how exposed I was, there? Why hadn’t I stepped back to lose myself in the crowd?

  ‘You,’ he implored me.

  Instinct had me take a backwards step, by chance into Harry – I knew it was him from his laughter in my hair, wine-scented – and he put a hand on my shoulder, possibly just to stop me from treading on his toes but it was enough, it was all that was needed to claim me from the Lord of Misrule.

  Later that evening, on a dash outside to the jakes, I was sufficiently stoked on indoor warmth to be able to take a moment on the way back to appreciate the sky, which held most of a moon amid a pack of stars. The midwinter sourness was gratifyingly bracing and I left the courtyard for the rose garden. Just a minute more, I decided, but then I glimpsed a figure ahead, sitting on a wall, and the figure turned and it was Harry. Harry, here in the dark. Harry, who was never to be found anywhere but in the thick of things.

  ‘Fresh air,’ he offered in explanation when I approached, although I hadn’t actually asked and if fresh air was all he’d wanted, he could’ve kept to the steps by the door. So, I checked, asked if he was all right, and he said he was.

  Not cold?

  No, ‘But you are,’ and there was no denying that, my breath seething with shivers.

  Nodding towards the house, he gave me his blessing: ‘Off you go.’

  But Shelley Place, across the garden from us like a giant lantern, was suddenly not where I wanted to be. And anyway I balked at being ordered; I’d go in my own time. Which perhaps he detected, because then he got to his feet, saying, ‘You’re right, it is cold,’ and although he had my interests at heart, it rankled; I was quite able to look after myself. I didn’t need saving from myself. But then he made me smile by adding, ‘Back to the fun,’ making clear that he regarded it as anything but. He was right: it was unconvincing, that fun in there. Good-natured and well intentioned, definitely, but I’d had enough of it. I’d had what I wanted of it and there were so many people who were better at that kind of thing than I was. But we were already in step on our way back, even though we didn’t believe in it. We were going back indoors because we had to, and perhaps in recognition of that, we were holding hands: a conciliatory gesture. Who had taken whose hand first, I hadn’t noticed, but it didn’t matter because they were a good fit, our hands, and the warmth was welcome. There we were, walking along with our linked hands swinging between us as if this were something we regularly did, although in truth no one had held my hand since before I could remember.

  And just as we were reaching the door, just as we were about to step into the light of the bracketed torch to be reclaimed by Christmas, just as we needed to release each other, I stopped but didn’t let go. Perhaps I wanted a little more of what we’d had – the easy companionship, the sly solidarity – and possibly I’d have been satisfied with a smile, an acknowledgement of what we’d shared; but halted, Harry turned, surprised and quizzical and unbalanced, and then it was not just our hands that were together but our mouths.

  I’d never been kissed before, and how extraordinary it was, how much mouth he had; it was all I could do to stand there and take it. His tongue, tentative though its touches were to mine, seemed to reach right into me, and so the whole of me was held there, hanging from our joined mouths. There was nothing precarious about it, though: I’d never felt so certain about anything in my life. And all the time my heart hollered, and how exhilarat
ing to ignore its clamorous warning, to let it ring on and on regardless, and to go ahead anyway and do just as I wanted.

  But suddenly his mouth was off mine, leaving it wet and cold, and he breathed something like a bashful laugh, saying, ‘We should go back inside.’

  We, was what I heard of it. And should: how sceptically it was said. My life was all about what I should and shouldn’t do and here at last was someone who understood them for the risible words they were.

  And better still, and whoever would’ve guessed it: that someone was Harry, ever-obliging Harry, everyone’s favourite. Well, I knew a thing or two about Harry, now, that no one else did. And no one but he knew the first thing about me.

  II

  The Queen was in the Tower but nothing had changed. If we hadn’t seen her arrive, we wouldn’t have known she was there. We’d had the very best view of her that afternoon, but in the following days and then weeks, despite her living just a stone’s throw from us, there was nothing more, not a glimpse. She was there, though. They were both there, she and Jane, either side of the Tower, in a peculiar kind of balance: victor and vanquished. Jane wouldn’t be in the Partridges’ house if it weren’t for the Queen, but neither, it seemed to me, would the Queen be quite the victor she was if there had never been a pretender. The jubilation jamming the streets on the day I’d run hand in hand with Henry Fitzalan, and, two weeks later, the elation hovering over the green like its own little Heaven: for all that, I suspected, the Queen had Jane to thank.

  What, I wondered, would Jane – or, more accurately, her father-in-law and his cronies – have done with Lady Mary, as she’d been, had England gone their way? Would they – could they – have left her be? She’d given Council so much grief for so long – more a bargepole in its side than a thorn – but those battles had always been about her freedom to worship as she wished. But if her second cousin had been successfully elevated over her to the throne? Would she have kept to skirmishes over altars and priests? Eldest daughter of the old King and his first, true queen, she was at least as importantly a niece of the Holy Roman Empire: not only rightful, but dangerously closely related to all the right people. True, Spain had made no move before, but back then no one – not even England’s vastly powerful adversary – had quibbled over her half-brother’s right to rule. With the boy-King dead, though, would the Holy Roman Emperor really have sat back to watch his niece passed over in favour of some English Protestant pipsqueak second cousin? The Lady Mary would’ve been trouble for Jane’s regime and might well have ended up in Jane’s place at the Partridges’, but, I suspected, facing a far worse fate.

  As it was, though, she was safely installed in the Tower’s royal apartment, from where all kings and queens go to their coronations. Or, in the case of two of the old King’s unfortunate queens, to the scaffold. Well, where queens go from, then, be it for good or bad. Good, though, in this case, and so much so that there was no rush, no date for the coronation. This queen could afford to bide her time; the crown was hers for the taking at her leisure and anyway, August had turned too hot to risk crowds in London.

  The heat had taken us all by surprise, steaming into the sky one afternoon and setting up camp to make London its dominion. We suffered particularly badly at the Partridges’, the house, hard against the Tower’s west wall, absorbing every last touch of the slow-setting sun. Opening the windows only seemed to let more heat in. Keeping them shut, though, didn’t spare us the flies.

  By mid-August, Jane and I were shrinking from each new day, not even dressing but just changing nightshirts in the morning for fresh ones. Jane looked harried and flushed, so utterly unlike herself that sometimes, despite the misery of it, I’d want to laugh. Any foray of mine beyond our room had me wearing a kirtle, but only a kirtle and as loosely as possible. I still did the runs to and from the kitchen, although they’d become anything but runs. It would have been unfair, I felt, to have expected Goose to step in just because the going had got tough: no fair-weather tray fetcher, me. But I didn’t hang around the kitchen doorway, and the sweat-slathered cook and his boy didn’t have the energy to talk much to me about their dishes nor even properly to acknowledge me. Which was a blessing, really, seeing as I was in their company in nothing but in a slack kirtle. In turn, shamefully, Jane and I couldn’t face eating much of what they strove to provide for us.

  Until it turned cooler, Jane was refusing to go outside to meet Guildford. I wondered if the Queen was braving her garden, and if her blossom-white sister with her golden hair, wherever she was, was retaining her radiance. In my fevered memory, Shelley Place had become a palace of shade – the draughty old hall, the scrubbed-bare dairy-house, the slimy cobbles of a kitchen courtyard that never got the sun. I longed for it so hard that the very marrow of my bones was leaching homeward. Not that the Tilneys, huffing and puffing as I knew they would be, appreciated what they had. They should try this, I’d think – being in the basin of the Thames, cupped inside walls opened to a tight, white sky.

  The moat stank. Or something did, sliding into our room and sticking close, yet keeping just the far side of identifiable so that we could never be sure it wasn’t we ourselves who were at fault, that there wasn’t something we should’ve washed or discarded, something of ours for which a pit should’ve been dug. In truth, all that was hanging around us was the tang of fresh linen and the faint animal scent of our hair which we’d left loose.

  The nights were harder even than the days to bear, because of the confounding of the anticipation of relief, the persecutory edge to the heat, the redoubling of its efforts, You thought you could escape me, did you? We tried lying on top of the bed-clothes but I couldn’t sleep exposed so went back under while Jane didn’t, which only made matters worse, the linen around me like a winding-sheet. All day every day, we were witnessing the naked greed of flies, their galling sense of entitlement, but at night came the turn of the fleas left to us by that bastard cat. The heat had them jumping for joy and winkling into our folds so that we woke every morning rubied with bites. Despite taking the heat much worse than we did, Goose was on our side against those fleas and it was just a shame they couldn’t be scared to death. While we sat around dabbing our bites disconsolately with lavender water and honey, she bashed her broom everywhere and swabbed the floorboards with verjuice.

  Her appetite for gossip blissfully undiminished, though, she told us that Edward Courtenay, who’d done so much of his growing up inside these walls, was already gone: skedaddled, she said, as soon as he could, and who could blame him, and good luck to him. The Queen hadn’t only raised him from his knees but had restored him to the earldom of Devon, which meant that he had riches coming his way and could get credit extended to him, not least by the Queen herself. She couldn’t do enough, according to Goose, for the boy who’d been shut in for as long as she’d been shut out. Rumour had it, she added, that he was spending hundreds of pounds on clothes. No longer kicking around with an incarcerated bishop, he was off into town and keen to look the part.

  Dressed to the nines, Goose told us, he’d headed across the river to Southwark, where he’d made himself amply at home. Arching an eyebrow, she specified with relish, ‘In houses of ill-repute.’ Voiced in that accent of hers, there was something of the goose-honk in ‘repute’. ‘And fair enough,’ she said, ‘because he’s a lad with a lot of catching up to do. But first things first: it’s horses he should be learning to ride.’

  Jane said, ‘But if he’s sticking to Southwark, he doesn’t need a horse, does he.’

  Goose continued, ‘Everyone knows what he’s up to’ –

  Well, everyone but Jane.

  – ‘but there they were, only a week ago, saying he’d be the ideal husband for the Queen. Now they know better, even if the poor lady herself doesn’t. Everyone knows what he’s up to, except the Queen herself.’ Then came that gappy smile of hers at the very idea of the pair of them: the pious lady and the popinjay.

  In the face of Goose’s glee, Jane made something
of turning back to her book. Whatever she felt about the Queen, she didn’t feel it appropriate, it seemed, to make fun of her. Or for Goose to do so, anyway.

  Guildford had much the same story when, on the first of the cooler days, Jane gave in and went up on to the wall to walk with him. It was still hot up there; the herb garden would have been a better choice. None of us actually walked, or even stood; all four of us sat heavily on the hot flagstones, below the jeering gulls, in as much shade as the parapet could offer. How I would’ve loved sight of the river inside its skin of glare. Guildford seemed to have his own source of stories, a Goose-equivalent. ‘No one’s impressed,’ he said several times of Edward Courtenay’s alleged vanity, but for someone so keen to stress just how unimpressed he was, he couldn’t stop going on about it. Don’t push it, I thought, because that was more or less how he was regarded by his own wife.

  ‘… and,’ he said at one point, ‘he’s gadding off south of the river—’

  ‘In houses of ill repute,’ I interjected in Goose’s accent, or as close as I could get, just for the sheer pleasure of it.

  Guildford looked startled, as well he might because I’d never before breathed a word in his presence. I was about to explain myself – So says Goose – and detected that Jane was ready to do the same but then neither of us did because it was too hot to bother, and in a moment Guildford looked away, let it go.