She asked, ‘Are you sick? Do you need anything?’ but this dutiful placing of herself at my disposal only further riled me.
‘No!’ I was so sick of being the patient.
‘Elizabeth,’ she came over all indulgent, ‘listen: I don’t stop because I don’t have the time. Because we’re being ruled by a queen,’ and this was gently related, in the manner of a bedtime story, ‘who’s about to hand England over to the Pope.’
Oh, that again: about as original as a bedtime story, and as boring. And as untrue, was my suspicion. And anyway, I should’ve asked, and would have if I’d had the strength: what did it matter if the Queen wanted to take us back to Rome? For all the fuss Jane made of thinking everything through, it seemed to me that she was overlooking something very simple: England had been fine for all the hundreds and hundreds of years before The Book of Common Prayer. If someone had to be head of the Church, then why not the Pope? King, queen, president, pope: all much of a muchness, as far as I could see, or certainly as far as I could see on that particular dismal day. How had it been any better, I wondered, when we’d had the boy-King, and all the men of the Council – not least her father-in-law – making up his mind for him?
But I said none of that and instead asked her, ‘And how are you doing anything about it?’
‘You’re just like Guildford,’ she said, pleasantly, and before I could knock that right back at her – I am absolutely nothing like Guildford – ‘Books are our only chance, because they can’t be silenced.’
‘They can be burned,’ I objected, ‘and a lot easier than people can.’
‘A copy can be burned.’ There was something of a self-satisfied stretch in her sitting back in her chair. ‘Or a whole pile of copies. But they are copies, and there are always more. Someone’s always made a copy, and someone else is already copying that one.’
She was so sure of herself. ‘Ideas are indestructible. Word spreads. You can, if you need to, get a book across a border beneath your skirts.’
Yes, and I bet she dreamed of doing exactly that. I bit down an urge to lunge at her, knock her off that chair of hers, because did she really not see? I said, ‘They’re just words. Books and ideas are just words’
She shook her head, her throat a flurry of pearl-wink. ‘Words make ideas, and ideas change everything. Priests insist you believe what they tell you and nothing else, but books let you find out for yourself.’
So very sure of herself.
‘Yes, but books just tell you other things,’ I said. ‘They’re still telling you what to think, it’s still men – just different men – telling you what to think.’
For some reason, she almost smiled at that. ‘Yes, but some men have your interests at heart more than others do, and if you read books, you can choose who to listen to.’
Some of those men, I thought, are dead, a lot of them are dead, and quite why that mattered, I couldn’t say. But it did matter, or at that precise moment it did. I said, ‘It’s all just words.’
‘Yes, well, the alternative,’ she said calmly, definitively, returning to the book that was open in front of her, ‘is silence.’
On coronation day, I woke to the absence of Goose, which had an immensity all of its own. Usually, her thumping around – either on the stairs or already inside our room – would be what woke me. Lying there in the surprising silence, I wondered how early she’d had to leave in the hope of a good place at a roadside. And why I was surprised that she’d gone at all. I mean, she was only human. Something to tell the grandchildren.
And I knew the Partridges had gone, so her ministrations weren’t required.
No Goose meant no breakfast: although when I said so to Jane, she said, ‘She’s probably out there now with that tray, foisting it on to the good people of London.’ I got myself to our door, opened it, leaned over the stairs: not only no Partridges or even Twig, as far as I could ascertain, but crucially no aroma of baking bread or roasting meat. ‘No lunch, either,’ I reported back. My kitchen friends too, then, were gone, and who could blame them? Rumour had it that the water fountains in the city would be running with wine. We’d have to help ourselves, which, as long as I could get myself down there, wasn’t too dismaying a prospect because I’d spent a fair bit of time on the kitchen threshold during the past couple of months and even without knowing what it was that I’d be looking for, I quite fancied a root-around in there.
That was for later, though; for the time being, I slouched as usual in the window. This particular October day was dank and cloud-stuffed, not fit for a queen. Not fit for anyone or anything, really, and indeed there was nobody about. Absolutely nobody. It dawned on me that this was something I’d never seen: a complete and utter absence of people in the inner bailey. Intrigued, I began to look harder: kneeling up on the window seat and craning to check from corner to corner. But no: no one. The Tower, deserted. No doubt there’d be guards on the main gates, but here the only sign of life was a solitary, lapdog-sized raven.
When had everyone gone? Had they all left at once, when the gates were opened at dawn, or – enticed by tales of wine fountains – had they been slipping away earlier? Leaving perhaps during the night, with a nod and a wink and a handful of coins to a porter. I stayed alert at the window, because it was like an optical illusion, and, like an optical illusion, would somehow, sooner or later, I felt, give itself away. But time moved on – perhaps a quarter of an hour – and still I’d seen no one. I felt as if I’d chanced upon something that I shouldn’t have: the Tower of London, vacated and defenceless. Not that it looked in the least compromised; it stared back at me, unabashed, bare-faced. Bedraggled, maybe, but it was hardly as if it hadn’t seen rain before, which anyway didn’t really touch it, just coursing off its hefty cobbles. It wasn’t as if it hadn’t seen queens before, either, and of plenty of kinds. This one, though, this new one, there’d never before been a queen like her and perhaps that was why her fortress now lay empty. She had no one to fear; her own subjects had put her on her throne. Her people had been ordered to accept one queen but had simply shut the town gates all over England and declared for another. And of course, because after everything that England had had to endure in the years since my birth – the queen-mad King, the power-crazed duke – who could possibly object to being ruled by a staid, rock-steady, sweet-tempered lady?
So now everyone from Goose to Princess Elizabeth was lining up to celebrate her procession to Westminster. England was a different country and perhaps that was it, now, for the Tower; from now on, maybe it didn’t really even have to be the Tower any more but could retire to become nothing more than a monarch’s riverside retreat. When people in the future would say of it that it used to be a fortress, those who were younger would be incredulous: Fortress?
Because why would London ever have needed a fortress?
The emptiness of the bailey lay there below me like an expanse of virgin snow but in very little time they would return and it would be back to normal, nothing special. I needed to get down there while I could. Now was my chance, my one and only chance after so long spent watching everyone else down there, to walk entirely alone right through the centre of the Tower of London. England was busy crowning its queen and I was in the eye of the storm. I could walk out there into the middle of the green and stand there; claim it, just briefly: me, alone, at the heart of the kingdom. Something to tell the grandchildren indeed.
Then I thought of Jane, sitting behind me at the table, and why not her, too? Why not the pair of us, together? She was allowed outside as long as I kept her in view, and there was nowhere down there for her to hide. And she was just a girl, she was just like me; she was no one, or not any more, and certainly no danger to the Queen.
I didn’t quite know how to put it. ‘Look,’ and I heard the wonder in my voice, but she didn’t look – or rather she did, but barely, minimally and uncomprehendingly. She glanced across the room at me, whereas I wanted her to look at the window.
‘Down there.’
>
No, not at the window but through it. There she was, though, staring at the greenish glass. I was getting nowhere, so I had to tell her: ‘There’s no one around, down there; no one, not a soul, they’ve all gone.’ Still nothing, so I said, ‘We could go down there.’
Nothing.
‘And … walk around.’ Realising, even as I said it, how unexciting that sounded.
And then she did ask, ‘What for?’ and it was genuine, the question, I could hear that, and I understood why she had to ask, but also it pained me that she didn’t somehow just know.
I was alone, in the end, when I stood on the threshold. Apprehensive, too, because for somewhere with so many towers, stairs, roofs and chimneys, a proliferation of gates and porches and passageways, there was also so much nothingness, around which the wind hurled itself. This was a place to make or break a queen, and if it was for now in a doleful slumber, it was nevertheless malign, like a dragon, and those cobbles stretching ahead of me were like spines crammed into the ground.
I wanted to go home, and wished I had a home to go to.
Press on, I urged myself. Nearly there. I’d been to the far side of the inner bailey plenty of times, but always with Mrs Partridge – she’d undertaken a kind of smuggling of me, which had had a certain deliciousness to it, and we’d kept to the edges, moving speedily and unobtrusively among the men, our eyes down, making every pretence of being on business and getting away with it. Other times, I’d stood in that fussy herb garden, mired in ankle-high, tiny-flowered plants; and sometimes I’d been far above it all, up on the wall, confined to a strip of walkway, but on each and every one of those occasions I’d been in attendance or, latterly, on someone’s errand. Always, before, I’d been minding my place.
When I stepped from the doorstep, the wind rushed at me, merciless and only a squeak the dry side of a downpour. I’d imagined the cobbles would bear me up, bounce me along, but they seemed determined to floor me, hobbling me, brutal on my insteps. Do it, I urged myself. Head up. Walk. You can do it. Eyes up, look around, take it in. Here you are, this is yours.
But who was I kidding? I was nothing, inside those vast walls, no more than the rats I glimpsed sometimes whipping along the gutters No, I was less than a rat, worse than that, because I was ridiculous: my skirts buffeting around my shins, my breathing still clumsy after the blood loss.
The hush over the whole place bore down on me, booming between the towers and echoing inside my ribs, and I’d never felt so alone. I could die here, I thought: this was a place you could die.
But just then a fresh gust caught and somehow lifted the edges of me so that inside I snapped tight into a single tough strand and suddenly there I was, all that I ever had been and ever would be, and I knew myself right down to the blood and the bone and the breath that were singing there loud and clear and wild in the wind.
III
Not long after the coronation, I came through from the bedroom one morning to find Jane reading something which evidently didn’t please her. She was drawn tall in the chair, affronted by whatever it was and subjecting it to unfavourable inspection. It wasn’t a book but a single leaf of paper, which she folded and slapped back down on to the table, her hand pressed to it as if to keep it down.
She never folded any of her own writing, or not that I’d ever seen. Was that a letter that she had, there? How on earth would a letter have found its way in here? She glanced up and caught me nosing.
‘I need to talk with Guildford,’ she said, as ever giving nothing away. ‘Arrange that for me, would you, please.’
Well, that was a first. Clearly something was wrong. Could it be a letter? Not bearing good news, obviously. Something family-related? I dithered by the door in case she wanted to tell me but of course she didn’t.
I took the request to Mrs Partridge, who didn’t question it nor even look surprised, but asked me where Jane would like them to meet. I didn’t know, because I hadn’t thought to ask.
‘Because it’s raining,’ she said.
I was barely up and knew nothing, so far, of the day.
The doorway, then, we decided – the jetty would provide a modicum of shelter – and she went to dispatch word to Guildford via her own husband while I returned back upstairs to find Jane already fastening her cloak.
On his way across the inner bailey towards us, Guildford looked dazed, which, given the rush and the rain, was understandable. William seemed to have developed a limp. Guildford nodded first to me – no doubt dreadful-looking me – before turning his attention to his wife on an intake of breath, preparing to launch into the appropriate courtesies, but she was already demanding, ‘Have you heard?’
The content of the letter was about to be revealed.
He knew nothing of any letter though, and turned wary. ‘Heard?’ He was probably worried that he was in trouble with her, which was certainly how it looked, although that was nothing new. He took his place beneath the jetty, standing alongside her, and so there we all were, all four of us, shoulder to shoulder and backs to the house, staring into the tipping rain.
‘Five days,’ Jane complained. ‘It’s taken her just five days to repeal everything. Five days into her reign and that’s the last seven years’ work destroyed,’ and then she broke away, stomping nowhere in particular, just out into the rain, leaving Guildford and me next to each other but with her absence between us. ‘Everything,’ she regaled Guildford, ‘everything he did, gone.’ He: the King, the boy-King, her great friend, her supposed soulmate. Which was all very well but she should come beneath the jetty, I thought, or her cloak would get soaked and our room would smell of wet dog. ‘Can you believe it? And how exactly will that work? Priests can’t now be married – so what are the married ones going to do?’ She glared at him as if it was his fault. ‘Unmarry? Is that what she wants?’
I appreciated that it was going to be awkward for those priests, and their wives and children, but I’d been thinking that someone had died. Letting go a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, I began thinking of lunch. I was enjoying my food again and charmerchande was my hope for today, it would be ideal on a day like this and the Partridges’ cook did it so well.
Jane whirled back into her place in our line, looking accusingly into the distance.
Guildford sounded casual: ‘She won’t last.’
My thoughts of lunch skidded to a halt, and even Jane was taken aback, truly so, turning to him but rearing back so that I feared for my toes and almost copped a faceful of hood. Treason: treason even to make mention of the monarch’s death, let alone predict it as he seemed to have done, although of course he was already indicted, so perhaps he was thinking that a little more wouldn’t harm. I tried and failed to catch his eye, to see what he was up to. Was he trying to shock? Or impress?
On the far side of him, William coughed, so it seemed to be him with whom Guildford took issue when he said, ‘Oh, but come on, the chances are she won’t.’ Either he didn’t care who heard him or he considered himself among friends. ‘She’s always been ill, always had everything wrong with her, and she’s old—’
‘She’s not old,’ Jane spoke up. She was missing the point, though, surely, because if the Queen had done what Jane had said she’d done in a mere five days, then time was hardly of the essence. ‘And she’s not even that ill, it’s just chills, headaches, toothache. She could still have a child.’
I was with Guildford on that: I couldn’t imagine it of the lady I’d seen below us on the green.
‘Yes,’ Jane insisted, ‘yes, she could.’
‘Well, I for one don’t think she’ll get that far.’ He almost sounded bored. ‘I think we’ll end up with the princess.’
He was probably right. If the Queen were to die with no heir, then the throne would almost certainly pass to her half-sister, because who else was there? And having vaunted her own legitimacy, it would be difficult for the Queen to disallow her half-sister’s. Not impossible, perhaps, given their different mothers, but difficult. S
he was her father’s daughter, in her subjects’ eyes, and that was why she was Queen. Well, the other sister was also her father’s daughter, and he’d left them equal under the terms of his will.
Jane said, ‘The princess is no better.’
There was an incredulous pause from her husband before he reminded her, ‘She’s Protestant.’ How, in their eyes, could the princess not be better?
Jane was unmoved. ‘Not enough of one.’
He could barely bring himself to say, ‘I don’t think we’re in a position to be choosers.’
But as if she hadn’t heard him, Jane said: ‘The princess only ever has her own interests at heart.’
Guildford said, ‘Well, perhaps this isn’t very noble of me, but at the moment, with us where we are, as long as those interest of hers coincide with my own, I don’t think I care.’
And fair enough, I thought, but she still wasn’t having it. ‘This is a girl who is contemplating marrying Edward Courtenay.’
‘No,’ he corrected her patiently, ‘that’s the Queen.’
‘No,’ she was straight back at him, ‘not now. Now it’s Elizabeth.’ She folded her arms, hard. ‘That’s what my sources say, and they’re reliable.’ So, she had sources. But of course she did. Who was it that had delivered that letter, and how? ‘There’s no substance to that girl. She doesn’t know her own mind.’
Guildford was struggling now, I sensed, to maintain his air of lofty amusement. ‘She won’t marry Courtenay, she’s just throwing people off the scent. And if you don’t mind me saying,’ and he did say it gently, ‘it’s been quite a while since you spent any time with her.’
She shook her head, emphatic. ‘She’s not going to save this country. You’ve seen her: toadying to her sister. She’ll never stand up and say what she believes in. She cares too much about saving her own skin.’
The Lady of Misrule Page 15