The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  Her being fine or not was beside the point; the point was that she should be offered something, and I made very sure to sound incredulous at the blatant neglect of common courtesy: ‘She needs something.’

  The kindly, cuddly man muttered nervously about a buttery and stepped aside, clearing the way for me, but Jane renewed her protest: ‘Really, I don’t want anything.’

  No, but you’ll damn well have it.

  ‘Well, I can’t go, can I,’ I complained to the guard. I couldn’t leave her alone in here with two men.

  Both men, now, looked concerned. ‘But,’ said the younger one, ‘it’s just—’ and he gestured, down there. From the doorway, I peered into the passageway.

  ‘Just—’ he said again. Down there.

  It was further away than he’d implied, though, and around a corner, and despite my being quick, I came back to an empty room: a vacated bench, no guards, no one. Vanished, all three of them, as if they were playing a trick on me.

  There I stood in that doorway, stupidly, with a trencher and cup, casting around for clues as to where they’d taken her. She was taking her place somewhere in front of all the peers of the realm. Those noblemen would be filing into a room, shuffling on to benches, scrunching their toes inside their boots against the chill of the flagstones and dreaming of a speedy return to their suites at court or their London residences, to a fulsome fire and a bird pie. Jane would have to stand for those men, all of whom had been happy to kneel at her feet during the days when she was Queen. Their doing of this particular duty today was earning them the privilege of never having to think of her again. Only if asked would they ever remember her: The Grey girl? Oh, the Grey girl! Odd little thing she was, terribly serious about it all. As they’d tell it, in the years to come, a mistake had been made but mistakes happen and they’re for learning from, and anyway it had all been over in the blink of an eye and no harm done. I knew exactly how she’d be standing there for them: that straight little back of hers. I knew that back, I realised, bone by bone. And what I wanted more than anything in the world was to be standing right there behind her.

  Jane being judged guilty of treason brought just the one practical change to our daily lives. Mr Partridge received an order that she and Guildford were to be confined, for the time being, to their respective rooms. This, he intimated, was the full extent of the Queen’s censure: just for a while, Jane and Guildford were obliged to be proper prisoners. He was suitably grave and apologetic when breaking the news to Jane but he’d have been under no illusion that his charge would much miss either standing around in the November drear or consorting with her husband.

  Myself, I barely took it in; we were only an hour or so back after a very long day, and, having at last had something to eat, I was desperate for bed. I could have lain on the floor then and there, and given in to oblivion. I ached from the only recently assuaged chill and hunger, and the barge still held me in its sway. All I felt when Mr Partridge told us that we’d not see Guildford for a while was that I’d been expecting it, I’d known it was coming. So be it. Honeymoon’s over, as Guildford himself had said. The Queen was settling to the proper business of ruling, and Jane and Guildford were to begin the proper business of being her prisoners. And anyway, I still stung at his lashing out at me. If I felt anything, that first night after the trial, it was relief, because, with no Guildford to deal with, there was less to think about, and I was always in favour of that.

  In the following days, I had a more pressing concern, because something was seriously amiss with Jane. No fault of the verdict itself, surely, because by her own account, if for reasons I didn’t understand, it was what she’d wanted, and indeed on the return journey it had been all too clear from her high-held head and the shine of her eyes that she took it as a victory. And of course she knew it made no difference to her prospects: she’d be released just as soon as the Queen and her advisers decided it was safe to do so, which would be when she was forgotten. Judging from the faces we’d walked past in London, that wasn’t too far off.

  If anything, the trial and its predictable verdict should have been liberating for her, because everything that needed to be done had been done and she’d got through it. She’d publicly done her penance, been paraded through London in disgrace, pleaded her guilt before every last peer of the realm, and received due judgement. It was done. She was, in all but actual fact, free to go.

  Yet the trial seemed to have depleted her beyond any physical weariness. She did as she’d always done, every day – the reading, praying, stitching – but whereas before she’d been absorbed, now there was an emptiness to it.

  I’d been wrong to think that whenever she’d had her head in a book or over her embroidery, she’d been ignoring me. I realised now that she’d always had half an eye on me, or if not so much as half, then at least a sliver. She’d always been heeding my presence, if, admittedly, with a degree of antagonism. But even if that indifference of hers had held a mild antipathy, I found I missed it. And however much I told myself that her withdrawal had nothing to do with me, I didn’t always manage to stop myself from meeting it with an abruptness of my own, from retaliating with snappiness, a kind of See how you like it, which was pointless because, as I knew, she didn’t see it at all.

  I imagined the mood would pass; I supposed she’d pick up. A few days of rest – a week perhaps – would be enough for her to regain her composure, I felt, and get back to being Jane, busy at her books and sometimes tackling her sewing.

  In the meantime came interminable days of coaxing the fire and fussing with wicks as the late-autumn wind thrummed in the chimney and Susanna’s luscious garden drooped, stupefied by the weight of its own swollen blooms. Often, I’d look across at the White Tower, its vast walls and sheer windows. Inside there, incredibly, was someone I’d spent time with on most days, whose company I’d sought, but now never saw at all. During those weeks, his absence from my daily life was a purely physical sensation, like water in my ears. And as if there was water in my ears, I lived my days hampered and hindered.

  For that month, life was just the four panelled walls and Susanna in full flush, eternally trusting, and Jane’s little bags that were only ever incrementally more completed and in any case belonged to an unimaginable world, not just one in which there were fey wisps of honeysuckle or perky pinks but one in which people were well enough disposed to one another to give gifts.

  We were near the end, was what I suspected: those December days would probably be among our last. The Tower was almost done with us. There we were, down at the bottom of the year when the only daylight came from darkness turning over in its sleep, and soon we’d simply slip from this room into another. Shelley Place, for me, and I might as well be there as anywhere. What difference did it make which fireside I sat at and whose hems I stitched? My only hope was that Christmas was over before I got there: Christmas, with its forced jollity and Harry even more drunk than usual.

  But if I wanted to stay at the Partridges’ until after Christmas, I was keen to go before the end of January, when Mrs Partridge’s confinement would begin, because if I was lonely now, I’d suffer worse when she shut herself away. Perhaps she knew it and was making up in advance for lost time, although it was at least as likely that she was worried by Jane’s poor spirits, but whatever her reasons, she came several times a day to see us and stayed longer, often bringing her own needlework. She was sewing items for the baby, and I wished I could have joined her in her endeavours, but frankly, anything I could’ve produced would’ve been an insult. And I’d almost certainly left it too late, I realised, to ask my parents’ steward to bring something in for her. The weather was probably too bad, now, for him to travel. I hadn’t even thought to ask him for a box of dates which I could have given her for New Year.

  Unlike we girls, she was on good form, with the early, tiring days of her pregnancy behind her but the debilitating heaviness yet to come. One day, though, she told me, ‘Look,’ and the object of curiosity was her o
wn hand, the back of it offered up for my inspection, its fingers splayed. Look, as if there were something to see of the knuckles, which were nothing compared to mine. ‘No ring,’ she prompted, and so it was indeed an absence that I was supposed to see, but her cheery tone suggested it hadn’t been lost. ‘Took some doing,’ she said appreciatively, flexing her fingers at the memory in a kind of wince, but then, seeing my bafflement, ‘to get it off.’ Which left me none the wiser, so she had to enlighten me: ‘I’m swelling,’ and she sounded surprised at how much I didn’t know. ‘It happens,’ she said, happily enough, ‘when you’re carrying a baby.’

  Does it? Hands, as well as bellies? And her acceptance of it – of her physical distortion – stunned me at least as much the fact of it.

  Whenever I waved her off down our stairs, I felt as if I were doing an impression of a cheerful enough girl, when in truth exhaustion was clanging in my skull and the chambers of my heart, making a relentless, blaring, obliterating silence.

  Not only was Mrs Partridge making sure to spend time in our room, but most evenings she invited us down to dine. And surprisingly, given her lassitude, Jane usually accepted. It was easier, I found, to be on their territory and in wider company, if only wider in that it held Mr Partridge and Twig, although Goose’s ostensibly servile presence was disconcerting: Goose, keeping to the background and not speaking unless spoken to. Jane, too, was muted, but always polite and at least minimally attentive. The Partridges were scrupulous in avoiding contentious subjects, Mrs Partridge dutifully progressing through topics so safe that I suspected she’d spent time beforehand compiling a list: family, extended and even including pets; food and weather; Christmas traditions.

  But then one evening, when perhaps we’d grown complacent, Jane evidently felt she’d paid her dues and decided it was time to raise something of importance, something that, according to Goose, was currently preoccupying the whole country.

  ‘So,’ she said, breaking into her bread roll, ‘the Spanish marriage is going to happen.’

  Mr Partridge put down his knife, taking time to decide how to pitch it. ‘As far as we understand it, yes,’ holding too much eye contact with Jane and discovering too late for comfort that she was more than a match for him. ‘There are, as far as we know, negotiations under way.’

  I wondered at Jane’s true feeling about it. Like just about everyone else in England, she wouldn’t want a Spaniard on the throne, but the marriage, as a bolstering of the Queen’s position, would move her closer to freedom.

  ‘Negotiations,’ chipped in Mrs Partridge, ‘to limit his influence.’

  ‘But what about when she dies?’ Seemingly oblivious to everyone else’s instinctive recoil, Jane rewrapped what remained of her roll to keep it warm. ‘Is her husband simply going to pack up his trunk and go back to Spain? Leave England to the Protestant half-sister? “Thanks for having me and it was nice while it lasted”?’

  Mr Partridge looked helplessly to his wife.

  But Mrs Partridge rose to it: ‘What else can she do, though?’ she anguished, ‘because she has to marry, doesn’t she. She has to. She needs an heir. But when she marries, she becomes a wife, and a wife—’ She despaired, because we knew the rest, it didn’t need saying: A wife is subordinate to her husband.

  And not any old husband: this particular husband just happened to be the heir to the Holy Roman Empire. I recalled the day I’d come to the Tower, the thousands of Londoners dancing in the streets. Had no one foreseen this? What on earth had we been thinking would happen?

  Mr Partridge gloved his wife’s ringless hand with his own in a gesture of comfort but also restraint. ‘I don’t think we can talk about this here.’ He was addressing not only Jane but the room as a whole, including Goose. ‘There’s a lot of work going on in the background; the best brains in England are engaged on the problem and I doubt we can throw any better light on it.’

  Goose hadn’t been so measured; for her, best brains didn’t come into it. The Spaniards would soon be here, she’d told us while banging her broom around our room as if to drive them off. ‘And along with that prince,’ she’d said, ‘come thousands of others,’ starting, she said, with his staff and their own servants, but then there’d be wives and children swarming off the ships, and, she claimed, every Spaniard had several wives each, which had Jane rouse herself sufficiently to counter that we didn’t know that. Goose roared, ‘But what do we know about them? Except they think they know it all. But all they know is what their Pope-worshipping priests tell them.’ And then she’d called them ignorant and bloodthirsty, and said England would end up like everywhere else in the world, beneath their boots. ‘And let me tell you this,’ she finished, ‘they veil their women,’ her parting words being, ‘No one will ever put a veil on me.’

  To the closing door, Jane murmured, ‘How about a gag?’

  Looking for the smallest smile, though, even of the most rueful kind, I was hoping for too much. What I got instead was ‘She didn’t mention how Spaniards don’t just burn people for being Protestant, but for not being good enough Catholics.’ She raised her eyebrows. ‘So, you’ll want to be careful, with your on-off Mass attendance.’ And now she did smile, but unpleasantly. ‘Because they’ll sniff you out.’

  Every day when I returned the lunch tray to the kitchen, I took my cloak and braved outdoors for a breath of fresh air; and so fresh was it that I never needed much more than a breath. Head down, I’d scurry around the inner bailey; should anyone have looked, all they’d have seen was a hooded cloak, while for me the view seldom stretched beyond the toes of my boots.

  But one of those lifeless mid-December days, I glanced up and there on the wall behind the Partridges’ house was a lone figure, shrouded in a cloak and facing away in the direction of the city. Guildford was supposed to be confined to his room but that was definitely a Guildford-dawdle up there, Guildford-dejection against that leaden sky, and despite everything I nearly laughed aloud to see it.

  When he turned, he seemed as struck by the sight of me as I had been by him, and then the very slightest inclination of his head spoke loud and clear, Look. Duly following the direction of that nod, I saw at a distance a guard; Guildford was being supervised, if laxly. No sign of William but a guard instead, and I, too, stood there stealthily still to confirm that I understood we couldn’t be seen to have spotted each other. Then he began strolling, with a well feigned casualness; it was quite a performance, enacted for the guard, of going nowhere in particular. He meandered to the end of that section of walkway, up to one of the intermittent, low partition walls, over which, with incomparable languor, he leaned.

  He could’ve clambered over it, had he wished, and I watched the guard consider the possibility but reject it because there was no way it could be done without clamour, and, anyway, where would it take him? To a further staircase, which only went down, as did they all, into the inner bailey. Should Guildford try it, he’d simply be back where he’d started.

  I understood what I was being shown. If I were to crouch on the far side of that partition wall, in the lee of it, I’d be hidden at quite a remove from the guard, but Guildford and I would be close enough to be able to talk.

  I didn’t give it a second thought, not least because there wasn’t time, and when I emerged from the top of the staircase into the doorway there he was, across that expanse of stone and behind that wall, waiting for me with a wan smile. He’d had a haircut and the sight of the newly exposed, pallid skin snatched at my heart, or perhaps it was just the cutting itself, something having been done to him when I’d not known.

  He raised one hand minimally and lowered it, Get down, and yes, of course, I needed to stay unspotted by that guard, had to keep below that interrogative line of sight. Giving him a look – he’d have expected nothing less – I squatted, gathering what I could of my cloak and gown off the filthy flagstones into my lap, then began the shuffle towards the wall, fearful for the state of my clothing and trusting him to avert his gaze, not merely to
keep me covered but to preserve my dignity.

  Reaching the wall, I huddled back against it, facing the way I’d come. He’d have to talk over my head and I’d have to talk to the doorway; we’d be disembodied voices, carefully low. But, still, we’d be talking. I’d never been so happy to crouch on a wet, cold floor. It was as if there’d never been anything difficult between us, as if I’d never got up and walked away from him when he’d needed me and he’d never shouted at me in front of everyone on the riverside steps.

  He murmured, ‘I’ve not been well,’ because he knew I’d be wondering. ‘Nothing bad, but they say I need some air.’ Then, ‘How’s my wife?’ because he had to ask. After all, that was what we did, that was what we were there for, both of us, in our different ways: to look after his wife, whether she liked it or not.

  I had to think, before I decided, ‘Garnering her strength, planning her strategy.’ An optimistic view, but the one I’d favour until I knew otherwise.