The kitchen boy was quick to hide his surprise that I didn’t know. ‘Wyatt’s men.’
My heart was thwacking against my ribs. I had no idea who Wyatt was, but whoever he was, he had men. Something else I knew, with excruciating clarity: we’d been sleeping, Jane and I; dreaming, for days, or even weeks, while all around us everyone else had taken cover, and it was breathtaking, my sense of being far beyond shelter and laid wide open. The kitchen boy was so close to me that I could see flecks in his irises but he was across a divide, on the safe side, because he was informed, he knew what he needed to know. Help me, I wanted to say: we were adrift, Jane and I, the pair of us up there in our little room. Take us in, I thought, although of course we were already in.
The kitchen boy said, ‘There’s thousands of them,’ Wyatt’s men, but there was nothing alarmist in it. It was accepting, almost, the way he’d said it.
Thousands: I tried and failed to picture them. How long had this – whatever it was – been going on? Bewitched: Jane and I, sleeping enchanted. Another blast heralded more dog-hysteria and I almost screamed, Someone shut those dogs up! Did all those men have guns? ‘Where?’ I asked the kitchen boy.
‘Southwark.’
Oh, yes, Southwark: he’d said. For a heartbeat, I couldn’t think, and then I remembered it was across the river. Directly opposite. But the drawbridge, he’d said, was up. ‘What do they want?’
‘The Queen.’
Yes, of course, the Queen, because who else? They wanted the Queen to join them: those thousands of Wyatt’s men, clamouring for the Queen to come and lead them, because hadn’t I seen it just six months before? The Queen riding triumphantly to her people. But even as I was thinking it, the kitchen boy said, ‘Wyatt’s calling for her surrender.’ As if in battle. As if the Queen too were an army, all by herself, against them. Which was when I realised I’d got it wrong. Whoever they were, they weren’t calling for her to lead them. No, instead they were coming for her.
Another crack of the sky and I couldn’t stand it; it had to stop. And why were they doing it? She wasn’t even here. Would the drawbridge hold? Could they come across in boats? But, anyway, why would they? She’s not here!
The kitchen boy told me: ‘They’re … anyone. Everyone. Just … Englishmen.’
Englishmen, which meant, as he’d said, anyone, everyone, but also, I knew, this was about the marriage to the Spaniard. The marriage of our half-Spanish queen to the Spanish heir. The handing over of England to Spain. This was it: England saying no. And hadn’t Goose warned us? She’ll have to listen. Well, this was certainly loud enough.
‘But she’s not here,’ I protested, then checked, ‘Is she?’ because evidently I didn’t know much.
He shook his head. ‘Whitehall.’
‘Then why—?’
He shrugged. ‘It’s the Tower.’ The heart of the kingdom. The Tower was where she’d come as victor, six months ago, when Jane had surrendered. It had been so simple, back then: Jane tipping the coins from her purse and her father taking down her canopy. That had been the end of it. Usurper escorted off the throne and order restored. Righting that wrong had been a mere matter of walking a pretender across a green.
But now this queen, too, was being told to surrender – this rightful queen, the one we’d all taken to be rightful – and where would that leave us? I didn’t understand, I didn’t follow, because if Jane’s vanquisher were vanquished … Well, would both of them be held here?
In a rush, I asked him, as if he’d know: ‘What’ll happen?’
‘They’ve turned the guns,’ was all he said.
So that was what we’d heard earlier, then, above us.
‘Not firing them, though,’ he added. ‘Those aren’t ours,’ the guns that were blasting. ‘No cannonfire, says the Queen, because of the people over there.’ In Southwark. ‘Homes. Children.’
Only when I was halfway back up the stairs did it dawn on me that I had no idea of what to tell Jane. Thousands of men were coming for the Queen, but what about Jane? She was their enemy’s enemy. She was in the fortress that they wanted to take, but as its prisoner.
She, though, knew exactly what to make of it. As soon as I’d regurgitated the bare bones, she concluded, ‘This is in favour of the princess.’
I’d forgotten about the princess. The princess, radiant on the occasion of her half-sister’s victory. Could that princess possibly step past her frumpy half-sister to the throne, even with thousands of men to help her on her way?
‘Who are they, though,’ Jane wondered, ‘these men,’ these pro-princess men.
I quoted the kitchen boy, ‘There’s thousands of them.’
‘Yes, but whose are they?’
‘Wyatt’s,’ whoever he was.
She considered. ‘And?’
And what?
‘Who else?’
Who else? She wanted more? No one else had been mentioned. Why would there be anyone else?
Several more booms, a run of them, had us halt before she resumed: ‘What do you think we should do?’
We had to do something, this was to be got through and how should we do that?
But, well, how difficult could it be? We were in the Tower. We couldn’t be safer, and anyway none of this was to do with us. We were going to have to hear it, have to have our ears boxed, have an uncomfortable time of it for as long as it lasted, but even if by remotest chance the gates did end up being opened for Wyatt and his men, then so what? She was their enemy’s enemy: surely they’d just set her free.
‘Where’s Mr Partridge?’ and that, too, she was right to ask, seeing as she was his charge and she was in the middle of a battle, although I couldn’t see what he could do for us and he had his wife to worry about. As far as I understood it, his non-appearance told us all we needed to know: if he wasn’t here, then he wasn’t worried.
And so we resolved to stay put, as if we had any choice in the matter, and the decision, such as it was, had us feeling all the better for having made it. We were staying put: from then onwards, that was what we were busy doing, sitting it out, and it was a relief to be doing something even if it was nothing at all. While everyone else lay low, we two sat to attention, doing our best, doing our bit, as if our vigilance alone were sufficient to repel the attack. And it did feel oddly strenuous, that bearing up of ours; it demanded a certain stance of us, and despite my barely moving a muscle, the blood was rushing in my veins. The gunfire was sporadic throughout the morning but whenever it came, we were ready for it, we were no longer rattled by it. Twig, though, succumbed every time, and his cacophony, so much closer and angrier than those desultory, lofty blasts, was hard to bear.
What mattered was that it was coming no closer, and of course it wasn’t because there were walls, there was a river, a drawbridge. The Tower was unbreachable and anyway the Queen wasn’t in it. And a queen doesn’t surrender, not a proper queen, a real one, as this one was, however many men demand it and however noisily. A queen rules and eventually those men would remember it and give up and go home.
During the long hours of that peculiar morning, I’d think often of Mrs Partridge, of how unfair that for the brief time that she tried to shut out the world, it had come banging at her window. And of course I thought of Guildford: I couldn’t help but do that. He was having to endure each blast as we did; and so, for once, I knew exactly what he was doing. What I didn’t know was what he made of it. Not so little now, are they, your ‘little people’, now that they have guns.
At the usual time, I headed downstairs to fetch lunch – because if that was odd, it would’ve been odder not to. I didn’t know what – who – I’d find in the kitchen, but they were there, the cook and his boy, although with none of their characteristic ease. Perfunctory preparations, that lunchtime, and no smiles. No reference, either, to what was happening outside. Like us, up in our room, they were refusing to give it credence. Nor did the boy acknowledge our earlier exchange, for which I was grateful. That looked likely to stay o
ur little secret: me, flailing in the front doorway, under fire.
Back upstairs, when there came a renewed onslaught, Jane put down her spoon and declared, ‘This is ridiculous.’
That we were picking our way through lunch while under siege? That England was rising against its own crowned queen? I took the chance to say what I was thinking: ‘If they get the princess on the throne, you’ll go free.’
But that, she dismissed out of hand. ‘Makes no difference who’s Queen. I’m the Queen’s prisoner; I’d just be Elizabeth’s instead.’
Oh, come on! ‘What would she want with you?’
‘No queen, whoever she is, leaves a pretender at large.’ She retrieved her spoon. ‘And anyway, you don’t know Elizabeth.’
That again.
‘Mary’s muddly.’ Raising the spoon to her lips, she said, ‘I’m safer with Mary.’
There was no sign of the cook or his boy when I returned our tray; the kitchen hummed their absence. Back in our room, I asked Jane, ‘D’you think Guildford’s still over there?’ Because the White Tower was head and shoulders above all others, the rough-cut jewel in this vast, rough-hewn crown. The easiest target.
She didn’t look up. ‘Well, where else would he be?’
Well, I don’t know, do I, which was why I was asking. ‘Perhaps we should—’
‘What?’ and now she did look up, very much so.
I didn’t know, but try, perhaps, somehow, to go and see if he was still there? It seemed to me that, in the peculiar circumstances, it might just well be possible for us to do that.
‘Elizabeth.’ She was staring at me.
‘What?’
‘No.’
Not even with what was going on? The way she’d said it, that one word, No: what it said was that Guildford was too much for us, hard work, a liability. To be avoided. And, yes, I could understand why she’d feel like that, but shouldn’t she give him another chance? If she did, she might find he wasn’t so bad. And, anyway, everything was changing, fast, and this was no time nor place for grudges. Bygones might just have to be bygones, whether she liked it or not.
But, ‘No,’ she decreed, and I had the clear sense that at least for now there was nothing I was going to be able to do about it.
The green had a deserted look to it; discarded, even, as if dumped when everyone had run for cover. But mid-afternoon, from the doorway beneath our window nudged a presence which took me a moment to see as a cloaked head and shoulders. Someone. I’d seen no one outside all day, but now here was someone leaving the house. I knelt up for a better view. There were more cloaked figures, a huddle, a knot becoming discernible as a trio. Dark-dyed cloth unfolded unevenly across the threshold, each individual holding back for another to take the lead and all three of them cowering not only from potential gunfire but also from sleet.
And then from inside all that heavy cloth came a flash of white. A nightdress? Was that Mrs Partridge, down there, being moved from her sanctuary? Yes: Mrs Partridge and her sisters, hounded from their lair, befuddled and wind-harried, tripping over cloak hems, their conferring and recoiling meaning they inched caterpillar-style across the green. There Mrs Partridge was, struggling in her nightdress through a gale in the vicinity of gunfire, and my heart clenched to see it.
I was in too much of a rush to be able to answer when Jane asked where I was going, and although at the foot of the stairs I ran into a muddle of men and boxes and heaps of bedding, I was quickly past them. Stepping through the doorway was like leaping into cold water. The wind rose up to smack me in the eyes but I pursued the blurred figures, only to find that when I drew alongside them, hooded and huddled as they were, I couldn’t get their attention. My breath had been snatched by the cold and all I could do was grab the nearest one. The touch to her arm had Sarah turn to me but not only was there no welcome in her eyes, there was no recognition either. Before I could explain myself, offer my help, Lucy too had turned, and her face was stark and pinched by the wind as she yelled at me to ‘Get back indoors.’ In between the sisters was the cloak-coddled figure I knew to be Mrs Partridge, picking her way through the mud, her hands full of her skirts, her head down and face obscured by her hood, intent on getting herself and her unborn baby to refuge. If I just held on, if I could just hold on, she’d look up – catch her breath, get her bearings – and she’d see me, know I was there and take me in.
But she didn’t, and step by step she still didn’t, and then by default I was doing as Lucy had insisted. One step back, then another, and soon I was alone in that courtyard as they moved off and the only place for me to go was back.
But it was nothing, I told myself as I climbed the stairs: Lucy’s ferocity had come from the stresses and strains of the awful circumstances and I knew much better than to take it to heart. And, anyway, it had been for my benefit because here I was, safe and sound, back inside, and only shaking so horribly because I was cold.
*
Odder even than going to the kitchen for lunch was heading there again at suppertime, but I wanted to discover who was still in the house. All day long, no one had been up to our room and from the time I’d seen Mrs Partridge and her sisters leaving, there’d been no sound of Twig.
The air beyond our door had an ashy sourness to it, and darkness reared up the staircase. If I’d been hoping against hope that the kitchen might be back in use, that was increasingly hard to envisage as I went downstairs, and when I reached the end of the passageway, the room gaped: nobody, no fire nor lights. If the kitchen was abandoned then so too, I reckoned, was the rest of the house. Most likely, everyone had followed Mrs Partridge’s example and retreated deeper into the Tower.
My little light was tremulous in that cavern and my nose so cold that it seeped. There’d been no gunfire for a couple of hours and I willed the peace to hold for as long as I was alone in there. What I heard instead, though, were footsteps, the light scratching of soles across stone, and I half sobbed with relief when into the doorway came Sarah, although I hadn’t forgotten our earlier encounter. Her light, borne before her, like a pulsing heart, cast the rest of her cadaverous in its shadow. My standing there, motionless, in the sickly lit darkness seemed to give her a fright but she was quick to recover and go about her business, and of course she did, because it was far too cold for any hanging around.
She hadn’t said a word, so I pitched in, grave but hopeful: ‘How’s Mrs Partridge?’
‘Tired.’ She turned her back to me, became busy at one of the benches.
Tired, yes, of course, after the upheaval.
As she carved slices from something – I couldn’t see what – she said, ‘This is terrible for her, in her condition,’ and I heard that she was livid. ‘You really wouldn’t think it so much to ask: a couple of weeks’ rest before the baby.’
I was quick to agree.
‘But there are people,’ she hissed over the rasping of the blade, ‘who don’t stop to think about anyone else. People who are so caught up in their own—’ But here she halted, as if it were offensive to name.
Who were these people who didn’t stop to think? The men in Southwark? I hadn’t even known they existed until the kitchen boy had told me, so why did I feel that Sarah was blaming me for their insurrection?
‘People who are so very sure they know what’s best for the rest of us,’ and then she did turn to me, the knife sleek and honed at her side. ‘Because most of us would’ve given it a chance, this Spanish marriage; it’s not perfect, but what is?’ She glared at me as if I might have an actual answer. And, indeed, whatever it was that was so wrong between us, my standing meekly mute certainly wasn’t helping put it right. Pathetically, all I could come up with was ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’
That, though, was a red rag to a bull. ‘You’ll be pleased to tell your Lady Jane,’ she seethed, ‘that Nate says no one’s mustering. They’re giving up, in the city. When Wyatt gets to the gate tomorrow, they’ll just open it and in he’ll come.’
And swee
ping up a laden tray, she was gone back through the doorway.
I suffered a whiplash of tears, because what on earth did she mean by pleased to tell your Lady Jane? Then came a flash of fury because how dare she, that cow, how fucking dare she presume and pronounce on us like that.
Storming back into our room, I blared, ‘What if people think it’s for you? What if people think Wyatt wants you?’
Jane, though, wasn’t troubled for an instant. ‘Oh, no one wants me.’ She seemed cheerful. ‘I’ve already lost, remember. I’m the kiss of death.’
And so impressed was I by her breezy confidence that I forgot what I’d actually asked: What if people think it’s for you?
The firing stopped not long after dusk and the silence lay everywhere like snowfall. No bells, even, I realised after some time: the clocks hadn’t been wound. Should we, I wondered, go to bed? Would we sleep? We did, and it was waking that came as the surprise, as if we’d forgotten the existence of mornings.
We were woken by the sound of Goose, but of course it couldn’t be Goose because she was at her sister’s. But that, in our room, was definitely Goose. I shifted on my pillow to look at Jane and found her staring back at me. ‘And to think,’ she breathed sleepily, ‘that it was Wyatt we were fearing.’
I got up and went through. Goose was seeing to the fire. ‘Sorry I’m late,’ she trilled, obviously not sorry at all; on the contrary, hugely pleased with herself.
I crept towards her as if I still didn’t quite know what, up close, I’d find. ‘How did you get here?’
She flapped a hand behind her. ‘Stairs, door, the usual.’
‘Goose,’ I stressed, ‘we’re under siege.’
‘Lady Lip,’ she answered back, rising, and striking her hands down her apron, ‘you’re behind the times.’ With evident pleasure, she said, ‘I’ve just walked from my sister’s, all through fair-ol’-London-town and right through Lion Gate.’
It was inconceivable. ‘Just now?’
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