The Lady of Misrule (13 page)

When the door to our room was shut behind us, I demanded of her, ‘Is that true?'

She looked affronted: why else would she have said it? So it was true, then: she had seen the duke. She was rarely at our window but she'd seen him on his way to Mass, which meant she'd been watching for him, she'd known to wait for his capitulation. Something else that look of hers said was:
Who are you to question me?
Well, I was the one with her husband's stare burned on to the back of my eyes. She'd delivered that most hurtful of blows then hadn't so much as glanced back at him. ‘Did you really have to tell him like that?' He hadn't deserved that.

‘Listen,'
she was at least as loud back at me, ‘his father is
despicable. Imagine betraying your most fundamental beliefs for a few more years of life.'

Yes, and imagine telling his son like that.

And, yes, actually, anyway,
since you ask
, I could imagine it, I could imagine perfectly well trading a prayer book for my life.

‘Elizabeth, all this –' she threw an arm wide, encompassing who knew what, but her anger was unmistakable is the duke's fault.'

All that had befallen her. And of course she was right: what did I know? A mere month of her life, I'd known her, and it had felt like a long one, but lived pleasantly enough in here. I knew just about nothing of her life before our time together here in the Tower. Except this: the duke had taken her up, which she hadn't wanted in the first place, and now he'd dumped her, which was even worse.

The duke's recanting got him nowhere: he was to be executed in four days' time. The Queen had left London even before his trial. She'd spent a couple of weeks at the Tower but she could leave whenever she wanted and one mid-August day she'd upped and gone to another of her palaces. Richmond, we heard from Mrs Partridge, which for me had a lovely ring to it: upriver, to Richmond. We hadn't seen her leave. She'd entered with pomp and ceremony but perhaps her greatest luxury now was privacy; she could choose what, if anything, to give of herself to her public and on this occasion she'd chosen to leave via her private gates. All those years of her
every move being subject to scrutiny and objection, but now she could come and go at will and all England had to fall in with her wishes.

Her leaving before the duke's trial was pointed, Jane told me over supper that evening: the duke's fate was to be seen as a matter of justice rather than personal vengeance. But for all its supposed impartiality, in the end the trial hadn't, we'd heard from Goose, been dignified. He'd made a scene, broken down and begged for mercy. I wondered how Jane had felt to hear this bit of Goose-gossip, because she herself had pleaded in his Hall on that day of her barge journey from Chelsea – not for her life, true, but near enough – but he hadn't listened to her, had he.

In the final two days of his father's life, Guildford made no mention of nor even the merest allusion to the pardon that might possibly be on its way from the Queen. All that talk of his abruptly stopped and was so thoroughly gone that the prospect might never even have crossed his mind. No word, either, of the many various injustices or indignities that usually he perceived himself to be suffering. Up on the wall, he kept instead to observations, which were either overly enthusiastic, like those of a little boy (‘That man down there really doesn't know how to handle that horse') or cautious and perplexed, like those of an old man (‘I don't like the look of those clouds'). Where was the Guildford we knew and didn't love? I'd spent a month willing him to shut up, but now I was missing his rants. Rather his rants than her silence.

I was sure he hadn't stopped hoping for the best for his
father. He didn't look as if he'd given up: on the contrary, he had the look of excitedly nursing a hope but sensibly keeping it clear of his wife's scorn. Her impatience with him was all too obvious, probably not least to him. But God only knew what she expected from him, under the circumstances. To him, his father had been a hero, a leader, a man of vision, but in a matter of days he'd be obliterated and Guildford himself would be no one, or less than no one: son of a traitor, his life ahead of him merely to be got through. His wife standing unsympathetic beside him, clearly bored to stupefaction, could only have served to stress how alone he was. Which made two of us.

On the morning of the duke's execution, Jane and I rose sluggishly, in unspoken accord, so that the deed would be done before we were up. As on all other days, breakfast came; Goose persisted in serving it daily even though neither of us ever touched it. We'd both made clear more than once that we didn't want it but all we'd ever got for our pains was a big, loose Goose-shrug to suggest that our wishes on the matter were irrelevant.
You can wish all you like
, said that shrug,
but for as long as the sun rises over the Tower, jam will be decanted into little dishes at dawn.

So, the breakfast tray came in that morning as usual, with the usual niceties observed: linen-wrapped rolls; glaucous jam; eggs with shells so clean as to seem supremely pleased with themselves. The bread would keep for later or find its way to Twig if he was lucky, and the untouched jam could be spooned back into its pot, but what happened every day to
our rapidly cooling eggs? Goose ate them, was my guess, just as she probably made neat work of the bread and jam.

And who could blame her? She needed all the help she could get: she was never at her best, first thing. That particular morning, we were treated to a truncated acknowledgement in place of anything that could accurately be termed a greeting: ‘Ladies …' Blur showed on Goose more than on most people because of her colouring: those red-rimmed eyes got her off to a poor start. Jane was unusually dishevelled for the hour, but that was the extent of her indisposition; her Goose-greeting was as crisp as ever.

So the formalities were observed in our room while, on the other side of the wall and a short walk away, someone lugged a pail of water towards the site of an atrocity, preparing to tackle the sullen cling of blood to wooden boards; blood that had, just an hour beforehand, richly filled a man. While we'd dozed, the duke had presented himself for his own butchering. Ending a lifetime of being respected, consulted and deferred to, he'd knelt for an anonymous beefy bloke whose only recommendation was a sure hand and a hefty swing.

Had that day dawned for the duke in any recognisable way, or had it been a mere weakening of the dark? I'd bet that whatever he'd decided to believe about bread and wine hadn't changed the God to whom he'd prayed during those hours of darkness, nor what he'd said to Him.

Long before Jane and I had emerged from beneath our pretty coverlet, most Londoners had gathered on Tower Hill to witness the killing of the duke and simultaneous confirmation
that England's throne belonged to the eldest child of the old King and his first wife. The mess of the past twenty years – the string of dead and disgraced queens, the wrecking of churches and murdering of men of the cloth – had been a mishap, and all it would take was the love of a good woman for England to be England again.

Something told me, though, that no one really believed it. What had Jane said, that night at dinner with the Partridges?
It's all already happened.
Change was everywhere, and everybody knew it, and the problem for the Queen, it seemed to me, was that a lot of people had never known nothing else. How could those such as Jane and Guildford be returned to the old way of thinking if they'd never actually known it? This queen was a generation too late, it seemed to me; if she wanted to return England to how it had been in the days when her mother was Queen, then she would have to get rid of us all, she'd have to put us all up there on that platform and no number of bucketfuls of the Thames could ever wash all that blood away.

The crowd at the execution that morning would have been its own worst enemy, keeping thousands too distant from what they'd come to see, but still they'd have felt it: the rippling recoil from the thump of the blade. We two girls, half asleep in our bed, felt nothing. One advantage of captivity, then: our heads resting oblivious on pillows while a man on the hill outside was losing his to an axe blade. But however much we acted otherwise, we weren't untouched by what happened on that morning. Jane was a step nearer freedom.
She was no longer allied to the Duke of Northumberland because there was no longer a Duke of Northumberland. It was a big step forward, for her; a big step nearer being a normal girl, or a normal noblegirl, give or take the small matter of Guildford. And I'd soon be on my way home.

After our Christmas kiss, Harry didn't reappear at Shelley Place for weeks, it being the hardest time of year to travel, but in all that time I jumped at every single answering of the door. Whenever he did manage to come, how, I wondered, should I be? I'd never been anyone in particular before: little Lizzie, carelessly unberibboned and always late to the table. Youngest daughter of his oldest friend. But now I was the girl who, in December darkness, had worked her mouth against his.

Incredibly, he arrived on St Valentine's Day. When I came into Hall for supper, there he was, taking his place at the table, and, ‘Lizzie!' he laughed, as if it were a joke, which I supposed in a way it was.

It was Lent, which our household – unlike his – observed, so the evening was subdued, with dutiful servings of Godawful stockfish rissoles, not that Harry let it dampen his mood. He was his usual self, his talk as ever of his house and farm, his sons and staff and tenants, his dogs and horses. All I could think, though, all evening, was how he'd taken hold of my hand when everyone else was indoors having the type
of fun they were expected to have, and under the vigilant stars he'd licked my tongue from my mouth.

If he could be his usual self, then so could I – laughing at his jokes – but surely he knew as well as I did that he couldn't just kiss me like that and walk away. A physical impossibility, was how it felt. There he was, at that table, in the firelight, as a guest of my parents, with our chaplain and our steward, one of my brothers-in-law and one of my uncles, and he was playing to them all but I knew my time would come.

It being Lent, no spiced wine was served after supper, nor anything else that might make a February evening bearable, so, despite the company, bedtime came early. At Shelley Place, Harry slept as we did, alone, with no need of his principal servant in his room. Unguarded, trusting to us.

Well, more fool him.

Up in my own room, undressed and ready for bed, I waited for the house to settle, the brief increase in activity downstairs putting me in mind of how the dogs turned around and around before bedding down. Below me, tables were cleared, folded up, stacked away, and various doors locked, bolted, barred. Then at last was the silence for which I'd been listening: there it was; it, too, holding its breath.

It was into that silence that I would venture. I'd have to be the one to go to him: he couldn't come to me, not least because he didn't know the way to my room.

Closing my door behind me felt like a launching, a giving up of myself to Fate. Never before had I walked through Shelley Place after everyone else had gone to bed, so it was
all new: the listening hard and treading light, the sniping floorboards and fugitive shadows. My nightdress was voluminous around me so that I felt I was flying. Down my staircase I flew, and past the oriel window. I carried no light and had no need of one; I saw myself luminous in that window: I was my own light. Up the stairs, to the gallery; everyone else, all around me, earthbound. All those Lenten-cold bones, everywhere around Shelley Place, huddled into bedclothes. Was that, I wondered, what God wanted of them? I might've believed it, once. And if I knew at the back of my mind that I wasn't flying but falling, I didn't care, because who better to break my fall than Harry.

Hurrying along the gallery, it was as if I were coming free of an old skin, although actually I'd only ever been a good girl, in so far as I'd never been actively bad.

I didn't know what was going to happen in Harry's bed. I didn't even know what I wanted to happen. I'd grown up fearing the indignities of a wedding night, but this was no wedding night. What, though, was it? I didn't know and didn't care, and that was the wonder of it: to be trusting to luck, to have faith in Harry. Nothing bad ever happened when he was around.

Which was all very well, but at the top of his staircase I found a closed door. Ridiculously, I hadn't anticipated that. Intent on leaving my room and finding my way, I hadn't thought as far as his actual bedroom door. Which would, of course, be closed. There's no winning over a closed door, no talking it round; its sole purpose is to stand there asserting its
brute resistance. And so there I stood, brought to a halt, feeling silly, wondering how to get past it.

Knocking, I felt, would be oddly impersonal
(Anyone there?).
Should I call him? Call him what, though? I'd never called him anything, he was a friend of my parents and it hadn't been my place to call him anything. My place had been to laugh at his jokes, answer his dutiful enquiries as to my well-being, and welcome his flattery. Nor could I announce myself, because he always called me Lizzie but no one else did and that included me. So, both of us nameless there in the dark.