The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  The fist-sized, fist-tight pain was familiar enough from my usual monthly bleeding; what was new was its viciousness. And perhaps I should’ve been scared but instead I was awestruck because it was extraordinary in its intensity, it was a creature come to reside in me, impressive in its strength and purpose, vital and kind of beautiful, big and hot and bright as it was. It had work to do and I knew I shouldn’t hinder it; all I had to do, I knew, was breathe, to keep myself alive until it was done. And I didn’t doubt I could do that; I was more than able to do my bit. I had the help of a darkness, too, that was quite different from any I’d ever known: not bearing down on me but bearing me up, making itself my refuge, my lair.

  And so I rocked and breathed, endured and survived while my body ground out its insides. How much time was passing, I had no idea, because there was only ever the coming contraction, and then, when it loosened, the following one on its way. And each and every one of them, I welcomed: braced and ready to ride it forward, Don’t stop, don’t stop.

  At the very edge of my mind, though, was the mess of blood that I imagined to be in the bed: blood printed liberally across the bedclothes, I suspected, florid and indelible. I was going to have to deal with that. And I would, I told myself, I certainly would, but later.

  And something else of which I couldn’t be completely unaware – or, rather, someone: Jane, as persistent a presence in the bed as that blood. Then again, I didn’t have to worry about her, because she was asleep, shut tight into her diligent dreams until her early rise-and-shine. Except that she wasn’t, because just as I’d found myself awake in the darkness, eventually I grew conscious of her watchfulness.

  Not that it touched me: I was way beyond it, bowing back and forth, and anyway, she’d soon be sinking away again, like a child lifted and carried somewhere, suddenly wide-eyed, apparently all-seeing, fleetingly lucid but just as quickly back asleep.

  But then, ‘Elizabeth?’ Whispered, but coming like a call despite our being together in the bed. ‘Elizabeth? What’s wrong?’ A peculiar lightness to it, as if she were in a cart cresting a bridge.

  I managed an unconvincing ‘Nothing.’

  Which earned me a pointed lack of response. What was obvious, though, in the darkness, was her scrutiny, which was the very last thing I wanted. I’d been doing fine. I needed her off my back, I wanted her gone, which would happen soon enough, I knew, because she wasn’t much interested in people and especially not in me.

  I dredged up the energy to give her just a little more, to send her on her way: ‘A pain,’ I said. ‘I get it.’ Sometimes, I meant. Which wasn’t wholly a lie.

  There was a small silence, the very sound of disbelief, before she voiced a sceptical ‘You do?’

  But she’d distracted me and the next fist came before I was prepared; my focus had slipped, I’d lost ground and had to scrabble for a toehold.

  She said, ‘I’m going to get someone,’ a flex of the mattress confirming it.

  ‘No.’ I’d never spoken to her like that before and it gave her pause, during which I heard a humming and realised it was coming from me, and that it was helping. I rode that long hum over the clench and it was quite a find, it was quite possibly the answer, the key, because suddenly this was easy, or almost, or soon would be.

  But Jane was trying again, if less surely: ‘I should get someone.’ Seeking my permission was how it sounded, which struck an odd note.

  She’d shifted – she was sitting up – which had the advantage of putting space between us; I had space, at last, and breathed it in.

  The disadvantage was that from her distance she could better regard me, and I really didn’t want to be a spectacle.

  Her being there beside me was holding me back and dragging me down; I didn’t want to have to take account of her. If she weren’t there, if only she weren’t there, I could do this, I knew I could. I could hum my way right through this pain to the other side.

  Who knew what she thought she was witnessing? But that wasn’t my problem and, anyway, if I could ignore her for long enough, if I could just do that, I was sure she’d give up and go back to sleep.

  Not yet, though, because, ‘What’s happening?’ and loud and clear in this demand for an explanation was her certainty that I had one.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Wrong answer, because, Right, ‘I’m going to get someone.’

  ‘No!’ and for an instant I was so much bigger than the pain, shooting above it to sit squarely back on my heels and confront her, forbid her. ‘No.’

  An admission, though, that this was something: not nothing, but something, and to be kept between us.

  And she got it: I felt it hit her that whatever she went on to do, she was, whether she liked it or not, my secret-keeper.

  She backed down, reluctantly asking, ‘Well, then, do you need anything? Can I do anything?’ and it was softer-voiced, but I didn’t trust to that because it was gentle not from kindness, but stealth: she was still after an explanation, and despite everything I almost laughed because even if I told her, how could she possibly understand?

  Because what did she know of life. Superior as she was, with her velvet-covered, gilt-worked books. And what the fuck was I doing, cooped up like this with her? I should be at home in my own bed and suddenly I felt like screaming and couldn’t even be sure I hadn’t, because why wouldn’t she just go away? The palm of a hand – hers – was pressed to my forehead and I’d have knocked it away if I could, because now she was acting the nursemaid, as if fever was the problem. Fever: that was all she could imagine, fever was all it could be, visited upon poor sweet little innocent me.

  Fever nothing. Fever fucking nothing.

  But then the hand wasn’t there, and its absence had a sting of its own.

  I opened my eyes, and the darkness was undifferentiated – no sign of her. She’d gone somewhere and I strained to catch sound of her return.

  Soon there was the punching of knees into nightdress as she clambered back across the bed, and then on my forehead was no palm but a wad of cool, damp linen, and I trawled the depths of it, drank it down, letting the pain go on a long breath that I hadn’t known I was holding. And only when that cold pad was lifted away, leaving me in the lurch, did I realise I’d been lulled. The pain still burned but somehow I’d drifted from it into a kind of sleep.

  She said something I didn’t catch but I understood she was going to refresh the cloth, and this time I was avid for her return. The pain was more of a scalding now, if still deep and raw and wild. Back came the tingly-cold, fresh-smelling linen which was everything to me and when after a while she shifted, stiffly, I realised I’d been leaning on her – I’d given myself over to her and she’d had to hold me up. I heard myself mutter an apology and similarly she dismissed it. I intended to draw back, to make it easier on her, but then wasn’t sure that I had.

  Just as the pain had had to be reckoned with earlier, now it was the drenched, inflexible mass of padding between my legs: I was going to have to do something about that. Stating an intention might, I hoped, get me started, so I summoned the wherewithal to sound a warning: ‘I need to…’

  … do something.

  I need you to move.

  Which she did, so that although she was still beside me, I was on my own and on my way.

  Slipping through the hangings from the bed into the room came unexpectedly easily, so much so that I slid beyond my feet and down on to the floor. Well, I could crawl. But the blood-slicked nightdress made that difficult and in no time was frozen to me by an icy sweat. I couldn’t manage to ruck it up when I reached the chamberpot, so I rummaged underneath to try to untie the wadding but several times, depleted and sickened, I slumped back on to my haunches, which only made everything worse.

  I didn’t know where to put the soiled padding, nor had I any replacement ready. There were cloths inside my oak chest, but, peculiarly, I couldn’t think where that was and didn’t seem able to raise my head to look around for it. The loosened wadding d
ropped between my knees to the floor with the abandon and stink of dead flesh, to be followed by the protracted slither of a clot. Jane chose that moment to peek through the bed-hangings and recoiled as if wounded.

  Squeamish, I observed, which didn’t surprise me.

  ‘Elizabeth?’ She sounded scared even to say my name. ‘What’s happening? What is this?’

  Practicalities, I told myself, keep to practicalities: nothing else mattered. ‘I need a fresh pad.’

  Before she could stop herself, she’d answered absently, ‘I have some,’ but then, catching herself, ‘I’m going for help.’

  ‘Pad,’ I repeated.

  She came from the bed, her own nightdress dazzling in the room’s night-light, to crouch in front of me, to remonstrate. ‘This … blood,’ but she could barely say it, as if it were an obscenity, ‘all this … blood.’

  Blood is blood, I thought; it just looks bad. And, anyway, the more the merrier, in this case, to flush me clean, not that she knew it. But if only she’d look at me, if she’d look properly at me rather than staring at the mess on the floor, she’d know. Because if I wasn’t worried, then why should she be? She needed to trust to me. ‘I’m fine,’ I said.

  But that did it: she was outraged – ‘Stop saying that!’ – and the whisper came with the force of a roar. ‘This goes on and you’ll be dead by morning.’

  I wasn’t dying, but I was too tired to argue. ‘If I am, I am.’

  The pattern worked in black thread on the bib of her nightdress was of peapods; I’d not noticed them before, but there they were, staring me in the face, elegant elongations like smiles and the regularly spaced peas inside them like good teeth.

  ‘I’m fetching Mrs Partridge.’ Her words were tangled in her throat, as if she were crying. ‘She’ll be a comfort to you.’

  What, and you’re not? I almost said it; I nearly joked, You’ll do, but then, instead, I accused her: ‘You think I’m dying but you wouldn’t get me a priest.’

  ‘You want a priest?’ Guilelessly, ‘Why wouldn’t I get you a priest?’

  I shouldn’t have said it, I’d been harsh to say it, and anyway the truth was ‘I’m not going to die. This is almost over, I think,’ and she could make of that what she would; I didn’t care. I just needed her be useful, to bring that padding for me.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she implored, ‘Elizabeth,’ look at me, and she was so perfect, her parting like a bloodless incision in her scalp. ‘Elizabeth, did someone hurt you?’ Whispered, not in caution, because there was no one to overhear, nor because she didn’t like to voice it, but more, I suspected, because she hated even having to think it.

  I knew exactly what she was asking me; what I didn’t know was how to answer. Because, yes, he’d hurt me, that last time: he definitely had. This was his fault, and nothing would be better than dumping it all on him: all this blood on his hands, where it belonged. My eleventh day hadn’t been safe by his initial reckoning but then he’d said it was, just because he’d wanted it to be.

  I could have told her yes, he’d hurt me, and been done with it. No need, even, perhaps, to bother with the actual word: a dismal little shrug would do, Yes, someone did this to me, but it’s over now, and I don t want to talk about it, I’d like to put it behind me and get on with my life. Evasive, martyred, but ultimately a survivor, facing it down and seeing it through with only my nightdress ruined. Unwittingly, she was offering me the chance to walk away with my reputation intact. She alone had seen me in this state, and for her it would be explained clean away if I said yes. But it wasn’t quite the truth, it wasn’t the whole truth, which she wouldn’t know unless I told her and I had no intention of doing that. How could I? I couldn’t tell her that I’d left my room one night to go to a man – a man asleep behind his closed door – and insist he take me into his bed. I couldn’t tell her that he’d been content with kissing but that for weeks on end I’d badgered him for more, for everything, to which he’d always said, ‘That wouldn’t be right,’ and I’d always laughed because really, honestly, Harry, what was right about any of it?

  Jane wanted to know whatever it was that her books held; but I’d wanted to know what it would be like to have everything of Harry in the way that a wife would. I couldn’t imagine myself as anyone’s wife, try as I might, and I certainly couldn’t be his but I didn’t see why that should deny me. For as long as we stayed at kissing, then something was being kept from me. There was something to experience and I had had to pursue it because I was sixteen and anything else – a turning away, a leaving be – would have been a kind of death.

  If I said yes to Jane, then none of that had happened. But it had, and I’d made sure it did. To say that a man had hurt me – to say only that a man had hurt me – would be a kind of lie and I didn’t want to lie to her so I said, ‘No.’

  And for a moment she said nothing, then, ‘Do you need him?’ Here, now.

  I almost laughed: it was laughable that she thought she could go and find him for me, and laughable to think that I’d ever again want him anywhere near me.

  That, I could answer: ‘No,’ I said, with as much derision as I could muster, which, I hoped, would tell her all she needed to know. ‘But thank you,’ I remembered to say. ‘What I do need is that padding.’

  And this time it worked: off she tripped like an obedient child, to return with a handful of clean, neatly folded cloths. Gesturing at the sodden, reeking wadding, she said, ‘Put that in the chamberpot and we’ll deal with it in the morning.’

  I so badly needed to be back in bed but first she was going to have to leave me so I could secure the clean padding in place. When she’d gone, though, I discovered my hands were useless and what should have been the simplest of tasks was beyond me. I didn’t know I was crying until she was back from the bed and again kneeling with me, handing me a handkerchief. She took the clean cloth from me and I levered myself up on her just enough for her to be able to get to work, folding it around and beneath me, her head inadvertently butting my stomach and one of her rings glancing the inside of my thigh. ‘Come on,’ she said when she’d finished, ‘back to sleep,’ and so we climbed into bed, me first and then her, and I knew nothing more until I woke in the morning.

  I hadn’t expected to feel so bad for so long. Well, I hadn’t expected to feel bad at all beyond that one dreadful night; I’d presumed that, come morning, it would be over, which was in fact true of the worst of it in that the blood-flow was steady and the pain diffused to an ache. The shock came, though, when I tried to stand: my legs at a loss, and my heart lashing out like something cornered and doomed.

  For the next couple of days, shuffling between our two rooms took everything I had. Even sitting or lying down was too much, with daylight carping at me, demanding to be seen, and to shut my eyes only left me wider open to noise, which came at me through the floorboards, closed windows and doors. I lay on the bed, day after day, pitted with the various sounds of the household, of which Twig’s barks were the worst: before, they’d seemed well judged but now were inane and maddeningly, inconceivably, mercilessly unanswered.

  Someone tell him to stop. Can someone, anyone, just get that dog to stop.

  And then of course there was Goose, in our rooms each morning and countless other times during the day: Goose, unable to put down the head of her broom without bashing it on the floor; incapable of pushing it away across the boards without taking it that bit too far and smashing it into the panelling. In my mind, I chased every single one of those broom-strokes of hers in the vain hope that I could somehow snatch it up, stop it short, and by the time she left us each morning I was outraged and exhausted, sending her on her way down the stairs with every conceivable calamity wished on her head.

  It would have been obvious to her that I wasn’t feeling well but, to be fair, all she knew was that I was bleeding. For all she knew, it was a usual monthly bleed, just taken badly, and naturally enough she’d have had scant sympathy because, had she been in my place, she wouldn’t have
been able to lie around.

  The initial bleeding could never have been passed off as anything normal but Jane had destroyed those incriminating cloths, along with my unsalvageable nightdress. That first day, she’d somehow managed to hide them from Goose, which had been no mean feat in itself – presumably she’d packed them sodden and rank down among my clothes, although I didn’t dare ask and didn’t want to think about it – until she’d burned them all on our hearth. The blood that continued to come for the next week or so confounded me: blackened as if cooked, and clot-coiled, tying up any cloth with which I attempted to clean myself.

  Jane and I spoke not a word of any of it, not the awful night itself nor the aftermath. Her only acknowledgement of anything having happened at all was a tiresomely repeated exhortation for me to rest – You need to rest, You should rest – which infuriated me, because what did she think I was doing? What else could I possibly do? And the confidence and calmness with which she said it: that, too, enraged me. As if what had happened to me was something she came across every day. Nurse Jane, I’d think, nastily, although probably nothing she could’ve said to me at that time would have been anything less than maddening, because there she sat, day after day, squeaky-clean and purposeful while I languished, dizzied, draining away into a pad.

  And then one day when she dispensed the usual nugget of wisdom, I countered, ‘Why don’t you rest?’

  Mid-turn of a page, she paused exaggeratedly but expressionlessly: a show of patience, an invitation for me to explain myself. Which, of course, I couldn’t, because it had been a pointless little rejoinder. Backed into a corner of my own making, I whined, ‘You never stop.’ Why, though, would I want her to stop? So that we could talk? We had nothing to say to each other. Not that it had mattered on the night when I’d bled so badly: we hadn’t talked much then, but she’d been company for me in a way that she hadn’t before or, frustratingly, since. She’d managed it then, so why not now? Why were we straight back where we’d started?