‘Elizabeth,’ Mrs Partridge touched my hand, as if to return me to my senses, ‘you’ll be going too.’
‘Oh, yes, of course,’ as if I’d just remembered, but in truth I was thinking, Will I? And how far? How far would I be going with Jane? And into what? Was it a room, a normal room, with benches and tables? Or was it more like the throne room that I’d once seen?
And Jane was saying to me, ‘I can’t walk in boots,’ and sounding definite about it, but what on earth did she mean, cant walk in boots? I countered with ‘Well, you can’t walk in little velvet slippers, can you. It’s November and it’s half an hour.’ Then it struck me and I put my bright idea to the Partridges: ‘Can’t she ride?’
The silence implied I’d said something wrong.
Then, gently, Mr Partridge said, ‘Walk is what we’ve been told.’ And to Jane, ‘You, your husband, and the archbishop.’
Which was when Jane turned to me and explained, ‘Like penitents,’ and finally, belatedly, I understood that it was important that the walk was a walk. A long walk, no less, for everyone to see. The walking was as important as the judgement, or even more so, seeing as the verdict, whichever way it went, was neither here nor there. The real work of the trial was to have Jane and her husband and the archbishop paraded past everyone in London.
Jane was asking the Partridges, ‘Who will try us?’
Mr Partridge’s set of his jaw, defensive, pretended that the choice of whoever was to be in charge was nothing much, was all in a day’s treason-trialling: ‘The Lord Mayor and the Duke of Norfolk.’
This did get a response from Jane: a despairing, sceptical exhalation, at which the Partridges both looked shamed.
But again, I had to ask, ‘What?’
Matter-of-fact, Jane told me, ‘Traditionalists. Papists.’
‘Yes, but,’ Mrs Partridge was animated, ‘we’ve been told to make very clear that your case has to be heard; this is your opportunity to be heard. Whatever can be said in your favour, the Queen wants it said.’
‘Oh, I bet she does,’ Jane responded, ‘because that’ll make it so much easier. Poor little me, horribly misled. But,’ she relaxed back in her chair as if this were her last word on it, ‘they should find me guilty as charged.’
*
‘We’ve a date for the trial,’ were Guildford’s first words to me when I next saw him. I hadn’t expected him to be gloomy at the news; he’d always been sanguine on the subject: it was, he’d always said, something to be endured before he could move on into his future, inglorious though that might well be.
We were sitting on the Lord Lieutenant’s front step and he was fussing Twig, who’d come along with me, but there was something assiduous in his fondling of the dog’s ears, just as there was in his refusal to meet my eye. ‘And a place, too,’ he added.
He smelled a bit: too long since a wash, or the last wash hadn’t been thorough enough.
‘It’s low,’ he said, ‘it’s really low, to have us paraded through the streets like that.’
This was similar to Jane’s talk of penitents, but penitents, I felt, were demonstrating contrition whereas to be paraded was to be turned over to a crowd.
Twig was intent on his touch, taking the utmost he could from it.
‘You saw what they did to my father.’ They: the crowd, the onlookers who’d lined the way into London; presumably he was referring to the egg-throwing. ‘And he was riding, so they actually had to put a bit of effort into it. Whereas we’re just going to be offered up to them.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t know why she doesn’t just have done with it and stick us in the stocks.’
‘You’re not your father,’ I reminded him.
But he misunderstood. ‘Exactly,’ and now he did look at me but his eyes were unseeing, his focus inwards. ‘My father could walk through anything. Nothing ever put him off. He could rise above anything. He was never cowed. If he believed in something, he’d see it through. But,’ and his voice splintered, which had me catch my breath, ‘you know me: I can’t, I just can’t,’ and suddenly his eyes had a sheen of tears.
‘You’ll be fine,’ I said, quickly, with a confidence I didn’t have, because it scared me to see him like that. He had to be fine, he just did, because what was the alternative? I can’t: what would that entail? My stomach lurched at the thought of him out there in the London streets, with everything going wrong for him.
‘I’m hopeless at crowds,’ he said. ‘I hate being in front of people.’
I knew I should hear him out and offer comfort, but instead I distracted him with a change of subject: ‘What will you plead?’
‘Guilty,’ and there was no hesitation, he was back on sure ground. ‘It’s pointless to turn it into a fight; we lost that fight back in July.’ He was stroking Twig’s bony head with his thumb, as if working something into or beneath the fur. ‘We need to hold up our hands’ – which, for an instant, he actually did – ‘and get our wrists slapped, then we get out of there, get it behind us.’
I kept him talking: ‘And you think you will?’ We had to keep talking: this was how it should be, this was how it was best between us.
‘Well, yes, me and Jane, yes, because we don’t matter: we’re just kids who got pushed through the wrong door into the wrong room.’
The throne room, presumably.
‘But the archbishop, no, I don’t think so.’ He turned circumspect. ‘She blames him for the last twenty years.’ The ruining of her mother, the wrecking of the Church. ‘She’ll want him to recant long and loud enough for everyone in England to hear it, but I doubt even that’ll save him.’ And then suddenly he was up, sending Twig scampering shy of him. ‘The problem is, I get nervous when I’m in front of people and then I get angry and then’ – his hands raised again but this time in helplessness – ‘I make an idiot of myself.’
Well, yes, that I’d seen, but not for a while and I’d assumed we were beyond all that, Guildford, I had the urge to say, to plead, Guildford, a calling him back, the Guildford I’d come to know in recent weeks.
‘And when I get nervous, I get cramps, and it’s a long walk, all that way in front of all those people, and if I start to get cramps, what am I going to do? Where am I going to go?’
But I didn’t know, did I? Why was he asking me? ‘I don’t know,’ I said, alarmed by the pitch of my own voice and the scalding of tears at the back of my nose. Goose was coming out of the house and I was pretty sure there was something I needed to ask her about our laundry. ‘I don’t know,’ I said again as I got up, giddied, and it was unfair of him to ask me, he shouldn’t ask me because what did I know about any of this? About treason trials and pretenders and public parading and abject disgrace. What could I possibly know about caring what happened to some noble-born pretty-boy?
Come the morning of the trial, it was clear that Jane saw herself, not as any child who’d been pushed through a wrong door with Guildford, but as someone standing shoulder to shoulder with the archbishop, even if he was being kept at a distance by a handful of guards. That was him, I guessed, behind us in the gatehouse: that slight, black-clad, heavily bearded figure. Of Guildford, there was no sign: he was late.
It was atrociously early, hours before dawn; I was steeped in sleep and insensible with cold, and lacked the presence of mind to be able to utter a single word, but Jane’s silence, like that of the distant archbishop’s, was different from mine, was eloquent. The pair of them hadn’t spoken, but in the hubbub, amid the self-important men who were organising our departure, their affinity was striking. Held apart though they were, it was obvious that they were drawing strength from each other’s presence.
For four months I’d lived hard by the Thames, but this was the first time I’d seen it since I’d been helped off the wherry in July. Not that I could see anything much of it now, other than the patchy, fractured gleam of torchlight on its surface. I sensed it, though, racing against itself, bullying its way between the banks, king of its own world of fish and fish-guzzling bir
ds and flotsam. All around us were men who knew enough to be able to ride it, but still it had them in its grip: there was plenty of raucous phlegm-clearing, the ejecting of sodden river air from throats. The faces, tightened against the chill, I didn’t recognise. They’d come from somewhere specifically for the job of transporting such important prisoners to trial. They seemed to know what they were doing, and were a lot livelier than I was, but they didn’t seem any happier.
How I envied Guildford even those few more minutes of indoor warmth. Just detectable on the air were the first breaths of the earliest morning fires; perhaps one of them was his. We’d had no fire. Goose had been entrusted with rousing us and had made no bones about how onerous a duty it was. She’d come banging in with the single command, ‘Up!’ then banged back out again with force enough to extinguish our night-light. She’d have had us both summarily executed, I reckoned, if it could’ve gained her an hour longer in bed; or minutes even. Had she been even half equipped, she’d have probably done it herself.
As ever, I’d been slower than Jane to get up, I’d been no use to her, and she’d largely dressed herself in the dark, occasionally issuing the briefest of instructions, ‘Pin this.’
She’d been dressed before I’d even begun struggling into my kirtle. I was still only half fastened into my gown, hoping it would hold if I didn’t move too fast.
All that rush, only for us to have to stand for ages in the freezing cold on the riverside steps, before at long last came the first lumbering barge, butting the bottom step, the oarsmen slacking off, their formation frayed, disintegrating, oars drawn in.
And that was when Guildford arrived, dashing through the gatehouse but then keeping coming, in a run of rapid steps beyond where he probably should’ve stopped, and several strides past his own halted guards into the midst of ours. His breath freighted with breakfast ale, he demanded of me, ‘Why did you let her do this?’
What?
Jane was quick: ‘Guildford.’
Her. Jane. He’d said her, but he was shouting at me. Let her do this. But do what? One of our guards muscled in, trying to bar his way, but Guildford just stepped around him and although I drew back he was still coming for me: ‘Why,’ he yelled, ‘did you let her dress like this?’
Like what? What was it to do with me how she dressed? To my horror, everyone was looking at me – all those men, their raw faces – and who could blame them?: Lord Guildford broken free from his guards to tear a strip off his wife’s attendant.
Jane was livid. ‘Guildford, how dare you!’
But dress like what?
He was back at her, ‘No, how dare you. Because have you any idea how this looks?’ This: a hand flung down the length of her.
‘This’ she blazed back at him, ‘is who I am,’ and there couldn’t have been a person in the whole of the Tower precinct who didn’t hear it, and her hands, too, both of them, and much more so, made an extravagant, sweeping gesture: This, here, me.
He whirled back to me. ‘Look!’
And I did. I was, I really was looking, but I still had no idea what it was that I was supposed to be seeing. She looked to me as she always looked, and anyway, anyway, what had that got to do with me? Why was he taking it out on me? It was too early in the morning, I couldn’t stand it, I was too near tears and shaking so much I feared I’d be sick and where was William? Shouldn’t William be doing something to stop this? ‘What?’ I screamed back as best I could, taking Jane’s example, and who cared who looked. I wouldn’t have him shout at me and especially not when I didn’t even know what I’d done wrong.
But he wasn’t cowed: ‘Look at her! Dressed like a Protestant martyr!’
He turned back to her: ‘How is this going to help us? How is this going to help us walk out of here and get on with our lives? You, dressed like the fucking archbishop.’
Did he just say that?
And now I could see it: black, yes. But she always wore black. Even her hood, though, I saw now – even the jewels on its band were black. Pieces of jet. She’d gone to considerable trouble to dress entirely in black.
She was scathing: ‘I don’t pretend, Guildford, not for anyone.’
He kept up the volume: ‘No one’s asking you to pretend! No one’s ever asked you to pretend, but if you could just for once think of someone other than yourself, because how do you think this looks?’
She was icy. ‘I imagine it looks as if I read the Bible in English,’ and she proffered a book, which until then I’d failed to notice, but there it was, on a golden chain, a girdle, around her middle. ‘Which I do. As everyone should.’
At that, though, the heart went out of him, and he turned away from us both. ‘You know what?’ He sounded hopeless. ‘You’re no use to anyone if you’re dead.’
She’d rolled her eyes at that, and she rolled them again, minutes later, when an axeman stumbled through the gatehouse. My own eyes must’ve widened before she told me he was just for show. ‘Holds his blade away from us when we’re innocent,’ she said, demonstrating with a deft switch of her hand, ‘and turns it towards us when we’re guilty.’
When. Not if.
And had she not enlightened me, I should have guessed anyway because he was no actual executioner – unless executioners are tubby, wheezy, put-upon little men. Her contempt for him hadn’t been misplaced, because he failed even in his ceremonial role. Standing in the barge, that axe was too much for him, cumbersome in his grip so that the blade rarely had any recognisable orientation.
Neither was the crowd anything to be feared. We disembarked, not to an ugly crowd as Guildford had dreaded, but rather, to judge from the expressions on the faces, a largely uncomprehending one. A long way from forgiving and forgetting his outburst though I was, I hoped Guildford could see, as I did, that the crowd bore him no malice. Not many people looked as if they knew who it was that had been landed among them to be humiliated. And perhaps that was understandable, because ours had been a topsy-turvy world not merely lately but for a long time: the six queens, the boy-king, the banished half-sister, the rapacious duke, the girl-pretender and the victorious, pious spinster. This, whatever it was, this parade, was just one more turn. People gawped, but anyone being escorted through the streets would be a source of curiosity, and as far as I could tell, they didn’t distinguish between Jane and me, two well-dressed girls as we were. Their stares were as much for me as they were for Jane, if not more so because I was wearing the brighter dress. Finer distinctions as to who we were or why we were there seemed to be beyond those Londoners and however much I resented their mistakenly directed attention, however much I might have liked to have put them straight, there was nothing I could do about it.
Jane’s Bible-reading was most likely lost on them, too. A pretty little Latin-written book of hours, they’d be thinking if they were thinking anything of it at all: prayers and psalms, beautifully illuminated for the succour of a lady; a jewel box of incomprehensible words. Walking ahead of me, she appeared properly absorbed in its pages, and maybe she was; Guildford might have been wrong to suggest that her ostentatious reading was a performance. It looked real enough to me. She read for much of every day and perhaps she wasn’t going to allow a treason trial to distract her. Our processional pace could only have helped: ideal for reading, if not quite so conducive to the simpler act of getting anywhere. Behind a phalanx of guards, we tottered on consciously foreshortened steps, which made for a literal dragging out of our journey. I could have walked more than twice as fast, even four months out of practice as I was, and a brisker pace would have helped see off the chill that dogged us.
The morning was unremittingly grey, from the sky right down to the ground. No rain, but only because the air was already saturated. Jane’s cloak, in front of me, was damp-spangled and I itched to run a fingertip down the length of it, draw a channel in it. The bottom of her gown would be less picturesque, because with each step she was hauling the dead weight of it behind her through the London mud and muck. I could’ve
retrieved it, lifted it clear, but then what? A long walk lay ahead of us and I couldn’t possibly lug it all that way.
I was tired, cold, and still unsettled by the motion of the barge. For all London’s tall, timbered houses and halls, for all its spired stone churches and walled gardens, this city, I felt, was nothing against the river which lay at the foot of it. London was cobbled together on its bank and barely tolerated. As we progressed further from the water, I never lost the sense of the Thames at our backs with the feigned indifference of a predator. It might suddenly rise up and into the streets after us, I felt, and wash our grave little procession away.
Something else I couldn’t shake off was Guildford’s fury. Rather than walking away from it, I seemed to be driving it deeper into my bones with each and every step: I was rattled, literally; I was in bits. But although I’d hated what he’d done, yelling at me, more than anything I was perplexed by it: the gusto with which he’d gone for me, not caring who witnessed it. He was scared, of course, and probably tired – I doubted he’d slept much – and therefore perhaps not quite in his right mind. But still.
When we reached Guildhall, Jane and I were ushered straight ahead into a chamber. Guildford and the archbishop either had their own anterooms or shared one. Ours was a room for nothing but waiting: the hearth clean-swept, the walls lime-washed. A pair of guards stood in the doorway, affecting not to look at us but with nothing else to take their interest, which left them with a blankness which in other circumstances might have been comical.
The only furniture was a bench, on which Jane sat down with a sigh, the bible shutting in her lap, and she closed her eyes, either to rest or to pray. There was nothing in the room for her to eat or drink despite the long morning she’d had, and the afternoon wasn’t going to be a picnic. I wasn’t bothered for myself, sickened as I was by the barge, but I was thinking of her, which was my job, my purpose, it was why I was there. No offer of sustenance looked to be forthcoming, so I was going to have to pursue it. With whom, though? Those deliberately gormless guards? The younger – taller, leaner – of the two was dramatically cold-eyed, intent on acting the big man. Well, let him; I couldn’t be bothered with him. His considerably rounder colleague, though, reminded me of our stable manager back home at Shelley Place, which was how I knew his eyes would crinkle when he smiled. We weren’t going to get as far as a smile, I knew, but still, he was my man. He could stare all he liked but I could see he was a push-over. He’d pitched up in the wrong job and that was something we had in common. ‘Lady Jane should have something to eat and drink,’ I said to him, and then he was flummoxed and contrite as I’d known he would be, even though Jane had roused herself to contradict me, claiming she was fine.
The Lady of Misrule Page 18