‘And you?’
Well, that was harder to answer. I’d been getting through the days; the days had kept on coming and I’d been getting through them. How was I? I just was. ‘Not bad. But you?’ Because he’d said he’d been ill. Nothing too bad, he’d said, but still.
No reply.
‘Guildford?’
‘Yes, fine, just …’
‘Just what?’
‘Thinking all the time about what we’re going to do – where we’re going to go – when we get out of here.’
He and Jane: how they would live their married life. I said nothing because there was nothing I could say to that; I was no part of that, and anyway I had problems of my own.
High above us, the birds seemed to be skating across the sky as if it were sheet ice.
He said, ‘I’m thinking we’ll have to go abroad,’ and, ‘I can speak to some people for you, if you like, to see what—’
‘No,’ and I only just remembered to add, ‘thank you.’ My life was nothing like his and Jane’s. A word in an ear, a helping hand, a leg-up: none of those figured in my future. I didn’t live in that kind of world. That wasn’t how it was ever going to be, for me.
‘Oh, well, then,’ he was offended, ‘back into your old life, for you.’
But he knew nothing of my life, never had and never would. Once he and I left the Tower, our paths would never cross. It hurt to be hunkered on the balls of my feet, and I shifted, hedging cramp.
‘Back to your Suffolk people,’ and he sounded as if he were the one being left behind. ‘Nice Catholic girl that you are.’
I hadn’t come up here for one of his scenes. ‘Stop it, Guildford.’
‘And life’ll go on for you as it always has. You’ll get married to some nice Catholic boy—’
‘Stop it, Guildford,’ I’m warning you.
‘–and have nice Catholic children. He’s probably waiting for you even now, isn’t he, whoever he is.’
‘Guildford …’ I twisted to look up at him, to look him in the eye, but he wouldn’t have it, staring away over my head so that all I got was a view of his nostrils and some icy, spitting rain on my upturned face.
He said, ‘You’ll have done them proud, your people. You’ve more than done your bit, haven’t you, by being here. I imagine they’ll welcome you back with some fanfare.’
‘I can’t go back,’ I said and, in the instant it was voiced, I knew it to be true, and what a relief it was. ‘I won’t be going back.’
Back to a house that so often had Harry in it. Harry, who was quite possibly so stupid as to expect us to resume where we’d left off. Coming to the Tower, I’d been walking away from Harry: I saw it now. That was what I’d done when I’d raised my hand at the Fitzalans’: I’d got myself clear of Harry. Why had I ever believed him when he’d said my eleventh day was safe? But I hadn’t, had I. Why, then, had I let him go ahead? I hadn’t. I’d tried to stop him but he’d gone ahead regardless.
Guildford did now glance down at me, if pointedly and infuriatingly expressionless. ‘Well, no, come to think of it, because why would you go back? Because you’re quite a prize, now, aren’t you, after this? You can have your pick of nice Catholic boys.’
‘Guildford,’ I seethed, ‘you know nothing about me.’
‘To be fair,’ he shot back, ‘you don’t tell me much.’
‘Why would I?’ and for a whisper, it came perilously close to a wail. ‘You’re going off and I’ll never see you again.’
He hissed, ‘You know I have to do that. You know I do.’
We were going round in circles. I was sick of it, and so tired, and gave up, sinking back against the wall and drawing myself in. It was horrible up there; my mother’s favoured threat was ‘You’ll feel the flat of my hand,’ and what I was being subjected to, up there on that wall, was the flat of the wind’s hand.
‘What I’m saying,’ he spoke with exaggerated patience, ‘is that you should come with us.’
What on earth did that mean?
Suddenly frantic, he said, ‘Elizabeth, please come with me,’ the words catching in his throat, which had my own tighten.
But how could I? What did he mean? ‘How can I? I can’t, can I.’
‘Well, in that case,’ he was stung, ‘you’ll just have to go back, won’t you.’
‘No.’ He wasn’t going to send me back on my way like that. ‘Listen’ because he should know, ‘I had an affair, back home.’ You do not know me. You like to think you do but you don’t. Had it been an affair? No, worse than that and, worse still, with my father’s best friend, and of course there was even worse but he didn’t need to know that, about what had happened as a result and how I’d nearly bled to death one night in the presence of his wife. He wasn’t going to know any of that. My heart was intent on flushing me out but I was refusing to go along with it, folding my arms to hold firm, a lump in my throat and my nails in my palms. All he needed to know was the truth of me as far as I understood it, which was that I was not some nice Suffolk girl on my way back into some nice Suffolk life.
I was sure he’d sloped off, leaving me crouching there, but then came ‘He was married?’ His tone, cool: the word ‘affair’, I supposed, having led him to that conclusion.
‘No, not really,’ and at least there was the relief of being able to say that.
He was quick to deride it, though, sighing exasperatedly.
Did he think I was an idiot? ‘No, really not really. Separated. Years ago. She’s –’ how to explain? ‘– off with someone else.’ That was the long and the short of it. That would do.
From a distance came ‘Lord Guildford.’ Its time: the guard.
‘But, still,’ said Guildford, ‘you can’t marry him.’ Stating the obvious, but, I felt, with a notable lack of generosity.
And anyway he’d misunderstood: ‘I don’t want to.’
‘But you did.’ Not letting me off the hook.
‘No—’ but I faltered, could merely reiterate, ‘No.’ Perhaps yes, if I was absolutely honest, I’d thought of it once or twice but only because I’d had no other prospects and, anyway, show me the girl who could do what I’d done in that clock cupboard and not occasionally wonder if something more respectable might come of it. But also I hadn’t, and that too was just as true. A likely story, I knew – that I had and I hadn’t – but it struck me as the truth of it. I just couldn’t explain it any better.
‘But you loved him,’ and this came with a startling lack of selfconsciousness, the word ‘loved’. As if love – that kind of love – were for Guildford unquestionably real.
‘No,’ and I knew that as the truth, now, even if in a way I wished it were otherwise because then at least what I’d done in the clock cupboard would have been more understandable. ‘I think I thought I did, sometimes, but I didn’t.’
‘There’s a difference?’ Amused, almost, was how he sounded, and not really questioning me so much as picking me up on a point. And he had one, I could see it; he did definitely have a point. I could see what he meant: I think I thought I did–
I could see that it was funny, if you stopped to think about it.
There’s a difference ?
Not really a question, but it occurred to me that I might just have an answer. Well, didn’t I?
But I couldn’t quite think, or not fast enough because there was the guard again, ‘Lord Guildford, sir,’ his patience dwindled, observing the formalities but barely, brusquely. And footsteps: just-doing-my-job footsteps but coming none the less, to fetch Guildford. Above me, behind me, Guildford was being taken away, and I heard the intake of breath on which he turned to try to placate that guard, fend him off, I’m coming, I’m coming, and leave me undiscovered to make my own way back. There’s a difference? Didn’t I have the answer to that? Shouldn’t I tell him? But turning around, I caught the last of him, a blur of wool sheened with damp and a flash of stitch-heavy silks, leaving nothing above me except the sky.
I came reeling do
wn the stairs, that day, unsure quite what had and hadn’t been said, and, stopping to catch my breath in the dank stairwell, I began to lose heart. The words themselves, I kept close – come with me – but the tone had flown on that merciless wind. Barely sheltered by that ancient doorway, I felt dreadfully alone. What had I been thinking, scrabbling up there to whisper with Guildford? Was I going to spend my life in hidey-holes with married noblemen? After everything that had happened to me, did I really know no better? Stop it, I told myself, you need to stop it, it’s nothing, it’s hidey-holes and whispers and that’s all it is. Its nothing and you need to stop it.
I’d been in no mood for Goose hot-footing it up the stairs behind me on my way back to the room and regaling us before she was even through the doorway. ‘Those New Year presents?’ This was for Jane, maker of New Year presents as she was. ‘Got someone to deliver them for you? You’re going nowhere while there’s dead dogs being chucked around.’
Jane merely closed her eyes, admirably composed in the face of such an extraordinary claim, but I was unable to be quite so big about it. ‘Dead dogs?’ Chucked around?
And so Goose told us, as she was clearly bursting to do. The previous day, she said, at the close of Parliament, a dead dog had been thrown into the Queen’s Great Watching Chamber, its fur shaved into a tonsure. I wished I hadn’t asked. That poor dog, mutilated in death into a mock-monk: everything that it had been in life reduced to a hideous gesture, a pitiless, gruesome thud on the Queen’s marble tiles.
‘We won’t take this Spanish marriage,’ Goose trilled, ‘and she’s going to have to listen to us. Just because everyone wanted her on the throne doesn’t mean she can do whatever she chooses.’
Except that she was Queen, I thought, so actually she probably could.
Goose seemed to have been right, though, that Jane was going nowhere. As we edged daily closer to Christmas, no word came of her imminent release nor even of her being allowed, should she wish, to leave her room. Nor was Guildford outside again, that I saw. Not that I was looking.
A week before Christmas came a letter; Mr Partridge jovially dropping it off for Jane as if this were something he did every day, all part of the service, before turning busily on his heel and leaving her to it. Her family, I presumed: they’d written to her – had been permitted to write – because it was Christmas; there had been a relaxing of the rules, the turning of a blind eye. Jane’s expression quickened at the sight of the handwriting: the writer was definitely someone from whom she was pleased to hear. And how nice for her, was all I thought as I returned my attention to our sullen fire – the colder the mornings, the meaner Goose was with firewood – but when I’d got as far as I could with it and straightened up, I saw how Jane was struck. The letter – whomever it was from – had delivered her a body blow, yet still she was sitting there, reading it, taking it. She sat there undefended, letting it befall her.
Then, suddenly, before I had a chance to do or say anything, she laid the letter on the table and stood, although it was more a recoiling, as if wounded.
‘Jane?’
She glanced at me as if she’d forgotten I was there and I saw that she meant to respond, or perhaps even thought she had, but the impetus had already deserted her and she retreated to the window, sitting there as if put.
I stood adrift, poker in hand.
‘Dr Harding—’ She gestured at the letter. ‘He was our chaplain when I was growing up,’ and her eyes came to mine when she said, with feeling, ‘A sweet man.’ It took her a moment to be able to tell me, ‘He’s recanted,’ and then I felt something of it, too, the betrayal and the loss. Her own childhood chaplain. ‘He thinks I should, too.’ Hence the letter, she meant, but it was said with none of the contempt I would’ve expected.
I had no idea what to say; what could I possibly offer that would be any comfort?
‘Is it easy for me, do you think?’ She frowned; she was thinking. ‘Is it easy for me, in here, to stick to my guns? Because how would it be, to be out there all alone with the whole of England turning the other way?’
I hadn’t thought of it like that; I’d considered her to be the one, shut in here, who was all alone.
‘He writes as if he believes it, but you can’t believe something you know to be untrue, can you?’
And fleetingly it was him for whom I felt.
‘He does know.’ She spoke slowly, as if she needed to spell it for herself. ‘Or he did know,’ and she was wide-eyed, wondering, ‘and you can’t unknow, can you?’
I wanted to say I was sorry, but it would be so inadequate that I didn’t, and just stood there, uselessly, poker absurdly in hand.
‘He was the one who taught me,’ she said. ‘And all the learning I’ve done since …’ A quick shake of her head. ‘Well, you can do all the learning you like, you can dress it up in all the theology you like, but when I was six he walked me up to a rood screen and had me touch it, and he said, “Here, see? Wood.’”
Carefully, I laid the poker back down on the hearth.
‘ “Wood, is all it is. Just wood. Carved and painted and gilded, all very beautiful, so much work gone into it but still,” he said, “it’s wood, it’s a barrier there to keep you on this side of it. And on the other side,” he said, ‘are the priests, dressed to the nines and swigging the wine and keeping God to themselves.” ’
I sat down on the stool.
She said, ‘I don’t remember whose chapel it was – some family we were visiting, might even have been the Fitzalans – but at the foot of the screen were all these …’ and she was entranced to recall them, ‘these dolls, really.’
She smiled at me as if she felt I might’ve liked the dolls.
‘The prettiest little faces. Bright blue eyes, upturned noses, red lips. Dr Harding asked me, “Who’s this one, do you know?” And I did, because we might not have had saints in our chapel but we knew people who did and anyway you can never stop servants talking about saints, can you? So I said to him, “That’s Saint Barbara, holding her tower. And that’s Saint Ursula, with her ship, and there’s Saint Catherine with her wheel.” I knew them all; there must’ve been twelve. And he said to me, “Aren’t they lovely? All lined up with their bits and bobs and smiling away at us. But why are they here?” That, I didn’t know, but I took a guess: “So we can learn from them.’”
I knew what she was going to say.
‘And he asked me, “What do we learn from them?” and I said, “How to love God,” and he said, “But you already know how to do that, don’t you?” I said I did and he said, “You don’t need these saints to show you. You don’t need their lightning and fireworks. You have to love God every minute of every ordinary day, and, in a way, that’s harder to do.” And he said to me, “All you need is this,” ’ at which she placed a hand to her heart, ‘ “and this,” ’ fingertips to her forehead, ‘ “and the Bible.” Dr Harding said to me, “These ladies are nowhere in the Bible. They’re just stories, but we don’t need stories because in the Bible we have the truth.” ’
She sighed. ‘But now he’s gone back on all that. Priests do matter, he’s saying. And statues.’ She said, ‘I wonder where they put them, the Fitzalans or whoever they were: I wonder if they still have those little lady-saints.’ She looked at me. ‘Did you see them, when you were there?’
No, I said, I hadn’t.
In the direction of the window, she said, ‘They’ve made a liar of a good man, is what they’ve done, and how can that be what they want?’ Turning back to me, she wondered, ‘Can that be something that anyone would really ever want?’ She stood. ‘What’s happened to him, Elizabeth? How did they do it? Get him to write that to me like that. Is he scared? Is he confused?’ Then she resolved, ‘I’m going to write to him. I won’t abandon him to them. He’s written to me and I’m going to write back to him.’
Day after day, she wrote that letter to Dr Harding. I’d never have imagined there could be so much to say; sometimes I wondered if she was coming up with h
er own version of the Bible. Whenever she wasn’t actually composing that letter, she was reading for it, leafing through several books in succession, scrutinising certain pages and leaving volumes open all around her as she worked. During that time, she was all bitten lip and blotted fingers, her neck and shoulders stiff, and I was so relieved to see her restored to herself that I didn’t mind that she rarely had a word to spare for me.
The letter-writing occupied her right up until the first day of Christmas and then even took the day itself, which, when we got to it, seemed to me as good a way as any to spend it. During those last days of Advent and on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, we declined invitation after invitation from the anxious and dutiful Partridges. Or I did, because that was my job. She was ill, was our excuse, and I wanted to keep her company, which, surprisingly, turned out to be the truth. She needed me, I told them. I had to remind her time and time again, ‘You’re ill.’ Because although the business of keeping the Partridges at bay fell to me, I needed her help. The sound of anyone on the stairs was her cue to sit forlornly at the fireside or rush through to lie on the bed. ‘You’re ill, remember? Too ill even for Christmas. And you need me. But you’re not ill enough to need a doctor.’ I hated worrying the Partridges and did my best to pitch it so as to spare them as much as I could. It was tricky, it kept me on my toes.
Not that the Partridges themselves could come up in person to check on us. Mrs Partridge, in her condition, couldn’t risk catching whatever was supposed to be ailing Jane, and nor should Mr Partridge be in any position to pass it on to her. So, no Partridges for us, for a whole week, not even on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day – for which they sent up various thoughtful treats – by which time mercifully we were also free of Goose and her rampant scepticism because she was allowed off to her sister’s for the season.
Goose’s replacement, lugubrious old Mrs Dunch, was the one relaying those frequent enquiries from the Partridges but she was relatively easy to placate and send back on her way. She seemed to believe anything we said, unlike Goose.
The Lady of Misrule Page 20