The Lady of Misrule (2 page)

‘Lord Arundel,' the man replied, but barely, as if it were entirely by-the-by who'd given the order, as if it could be on anyone's orders:
Anyone's but yours.

To which the boy said, ‘Fucking turncoats. All of you. Fucking cowards.'

Judging from the lack of response from the two men, they'd heard all this before.

As if she'd not heard it at all, Jane said, ‘Shall we go?' and then, to her husband, with a smile, ‘I'll be fine, thank you, Guildford, don't you worry.'

Don't you worry your pretty little head.
He didn't like it, but he was quick, recovering in an instant and changing tack: ‘Jane—'

An entreaty, which struck us all: every one of us stopped sharp and stared at the pair of them. Now that he had our attention, he didn't seem to know what to do with it. His hand hovered and I could see he wanted to touch her cheek but didn't quite dare. That pleasant, patient demeanour of hers was somehow forbidding. She was facing him down, I saw, in her own peculiar way, and – perhaps not quite so stupid after all – he backed down, withdrew his hand. ‘Till soon, then,' was all he could say.

She nodded and took us with her to the door.

Back down those stairs, then, the Lady Lieutenant and me, but now with a deposed queen in our keeping. We were on our way, I supposed, to join all the other ladies and girls, and
I could sink happily back to being no one in particular. Down that staircase trooped the three of us, into that exultation of bells, and I wondered what the girl made of the din. She'd know why they were ringing but, shut away in here, she couldn't possibly guess at the glee out there on the streets. England was proclaiming loud and clear and at length how very glad it was to be rid of her, but all she showed us was that faintly cheerful, freckle-sparkled look of hers.

Stepping ahead of me from the stairwell, the bottom of her gown spilled over the cobbles and it occurred to me that perhaps I was supposed to pick it up and carry it for her. I had no idea of any duties I might have; nobody had yet said anything to me about duties. Possibly her captors themselves didn't know how to treat a pretender-queen. Then and there, I made a snap decision, emboldened by the riotous bells: I wouldn't do it, I wouldn't take up her train. Why should I? She was no queen and never had been.

Our friends the Fitzalans had told us that when she'd come to the Tower, two weeks back, her mother had been the one to oblige. Up the riverside steps they'd come from their barge, the Duchess of Suffolk grappling with taffeta. ‘Her own mother': a roomful of scandalised Fitzalans had wondered aloud how that could that ever be right. Because even if the Greys had been the heirs to the throne, even if the cousin duchess was closer in blood to the King than his two supposedly bastard half-sisters – even if that could possibly have been true – then why hadn't it been the duchess herself swanning up those steps on her way to the throne? Why her
daughter? The Fitzalans had asked it merely to express their disapproval. Like everyone else in England, they knew the answer: because it was the daughter who was married to the baby Dudley, and this was all his father's doing.

The father, the Duke of Northumberland, had ruled for the boy-King for years and wasn't about to give up and go home just because the boy-King was dying. He'd stayed beside the sickbed until that poor boy had accepted his helping hand in signing the throne over, not to the rightful heir, his half-sister, the middle-aged daughter of the long-ago Spanish Queen, but to his cousin's daughter, English rose and kindred spirit Lady Jane Grey, or Lady Jane Dudley as – conveniently for the duke – she'd only recently become. Watching her emerge ahead of me from the stairwell into the sunshine, it struck me that however bad this situation was for her, it was also freedom from the Duke of Northumberland: there was that, surely, to say for it.

We were retracing my steps, as if to make our way back to Lion's Gate and onwards into Petty Wales and the city, but once we were clear of the maze of courtyards and into the inner bailey, the Lady Lieutenant led us instead towards a house built hard against the wall, a house that would've belonged better on the other side of it: a three-storey, jettied townhouse, quince-hued around its timbers, incongruous among the old stone towers. It even had, beside the front door, its own little herb garden.

‘Mr Partridge's house,' she said. ‘Gentleman-gaoler. There's a Mrs Partridge, too.'

Indicating the neighbouring tower, she told Jane, ‘That's where your husband's going to be,' adding hastily, ‘Good rooms, too, those,'
don't worry.
‘Just better, we thought, for you girls to be here.'

Making it up as they went along, probably: I imagined a meeting last night, someone's anxious question,
Where shall we hold the Queen?
and someone else's rapid reminder,
She's not the Queen.

Girls
, the Lady Lieutenant had called us: Lady Jane was just a girl now, like me.

Girls, both of us, together, in need of a home for a while and this, it seemed, was to be it.

My heart contracted as we walked into the shadow of the house where we'd be living until the new Queen was crowned and the pretend one could be released.

It was an unlikely prison, but that was what it was.

‘Nice house,' the Lady Lieutenant mused.

But small. Where was everyone else? The Lady Lieutenant honoured its tenants with a knock, which failed to elicit a response. Not someone to be fazed by a locked door, she selected a key from the jangle at her waist. ‘I'd have liked this house for myself, rather than our big old place,' she confided. ‘Ours is too close to the river: damp and draughty,' at which she gave a comical shudder, but this chumminess was rather late in the day and we stood there in silence, we two girls, on that threshold. ‘Still …' she finished as she disappeared ahead of us into the house, by which she probably meant it no longer mattered.

Directly inside the doorway was a staircase, up which we followed her to the top where she opened an unlocked door, releasing into the stairwell a scent of floorboards, of prolonged unoccupancy. As we shuffled in, the long-undisturbed air shifted and rearranged itself around us. The room seemed wary, doing its painful best for us: a chair angled artfully at the fireplace, a jug of roses dead-centre on the table. On one wall was a hanging too big for the space, bunched at one end on its rail although its subjects were unimpeded in their little drama: Susanna and the elders, Susanna conveniently already having done her naked bathing and well wrapped up as she always was by the time the tapestry makers got to her and, unbeknown to her, the repugnant elders lurking behind her on a hiding to nothing.

‘Well, make yourself at home,' said the Lady Lieutenant in the sceptical, resigned tone with which, at the door, she'd muttered that one word,
Still
… ‘I'm off to get your boxes brought up.'

Or, just as likely, to pack her own.

No switch of a key in the lock, just retreating steps doled out stair by stair until there was silence. If this was it – if there really was nowhere else but the room we were standing in, and a bedroom behind the internal door – then there could only be the two of us who would be living here. Alone together for the first time, we were too close for comfort. I went to the window, and Lady Jane opened the bedroom door, ostensibly in exploration but probably as desperate as I was for a snatch of solitude. What had I got myself into?
How could I have been so stupid as to get myself shut up like this? What had I been thinking, last night, when I'd volunteered? It had seemed a good idea at the time. And it wasn't as if I was doing much else. There I'd been, newly arrived to stay at the Fitzalans', when word had come home from the earl that a girl was needed. No doubt he'd have expected one of his own daughters to volunteer but it had been me who'd raised my hand,
I'll do it.

Hearing the door drop home against its jamb, I turned around to the room, which came back at me with a blank stare of its own, but down in a corner was something – alive, dark, fast – and my heart cannoned into my breastbone before I understood I was seeing a cat. It froze, mirroring me: the pair of us in a stand-off. I must've exclaimed because suddenly Jane was back in the doorway, alarmed: ‘What?' I slid her gaze with mine to the animal, which glanced between us, affronted, and took a single, exaggerated backwards step. ‘I can't breathe,' I gabbled as if my breath were already gone, ‘if there's a cat in the room.'

She snapped into practicality: ‘Well, you're in the right place, because I can't stand them,' and in a couple of strides she was at the main door, throwing it wide and ordering the cat on its way. It was an impressive performance for someone so small and, had it been directed at me, I'd have been falling over myself to oblige. But the cat, being a cat, feigned confusion and terror, shrinking and cringing, and only when I'd resigned myself to a merry dance did it surprise me by knowing what was good for it and streaking for the stairs.

There we stood, Jane and I, looking into that gaping, unguarded doorway: both of us, I think, embarrassed to be complicit in her captivity. If she ran, though, she'd only get as far as a gatehouse, which was where the guards were. And, even if she could possibly get past those guards, then where? There was no one, now, who would have her. She closed the door, saying decisively, ‘We don't have to have that in here.'

We did have to be in here – or
she
did – but we needn't submit to further indignities. There were limits.

‘Thank you,' I said.

‘Oh –' she shrugged it off ‘– my little sister's the same,' and went to open the window. ‘With my other sister,' she said, easing up the catch, ‘it's horses,' and turning back around to me, she raised her sketchy eyebrows:
Imagine!

‘Why don't you like them?' I asked her. ‘Cats,' I clarified,
not your sisters.

‘Devious,' pronouncing it as if it were the final word on the subject.

With the window open came the banging of those bells.

‘What's your name?' she asked me, and for an instant the devil in me almost had me claim my cousin's identity, Cat, but of course I stuck to the truth: ‘Elizabeth.'

‘Well, Elizabeth,' and she presented her back to me, ‘would you help me out of this?' She raised her arms a little, offering herself up for unpinning. ‘I hate the thing, and it's hot in here.'

‘The thing' was made of such heavy damask that the pins were in it up to their necks. I wondered whose dress this once
might have been: a dress fit for a queen, but it couldn't have been made for this one because there wouldn't have been time. Just because the Duke of Northumberland had wanted his daughter-in-law on the throne hadn't necessarily meant that it would happen. He'd had his work cut out for him, and right up until the last moment. Only a month or so back, according to the Fitzalans, he'd been playing safe with big smiles and fine wines for the King's Catholic half-sister whenever she had come visiting. No, this dress had once been someone else's, some dead queen's, then rustled up for this pretend one in haste from the Queen's Wardrobe. Perhaps it had belonged to the tiny queen of the old King, Katherine Howard, Queen for a year when I was a girl, because I remembered it being said that she'd had a new dress for every day she was on the throne. Afterwards, they must have been packed away somewhere.

I asked whether we shouldn't we go through to the bedroom for her unpinning but she was nonplussed, happy for us to stay where we were, and similarly when I reminded her that her other clothes hadn't yet been delivered, she was cheerfully unconcerned: she could sit in her kirtle, she said; who was to see her? Well, no one, if we didn't count me. How I'd have loved to ask the same of her, for her to unpin me from my gown – the room was so stuffy and I'd had such a long day – but one of us needed to stay respectable to open the door when her chests were delivered and supper served. She asked me where my own boxes were, and when I said they were still in Suffolk, she exclaimed but I said no more,
avoided telling her how my mother and I had travelled light and fast, incognito, to flee the fighting that everyone had feared was about to start there. As it had happened, we needn't have worried, because when it came to it, there'd been no fighting anywhere: no one had fought in Jane's name.

‘This dress isn't mine,' I said, ‘it's borrowed.'

‘From?' She was merely making conversation, I knew, but still she'd have to have an answer.

‘Mary Fitzalan.'

‘Mary!' – but the pleasure of recognition dropped into an uncomfortable silence, because if her own cousin was lending clothes to her captor, then surely there was no one left for her.

When she was free of the gown, she took off her hood and then there she was, kirtle-simple and bare-headed, so that – disconcertingly – it could've been me in that room who was the ex-queen.

An hour or so later, the first chest of hers was delivered but she was less than pleased to find it held no books. ‘I don't need clothes,' she complained, raking through the contents, as if the very notion were absurd, as if no one ever needed clothes, ‘I need my books. Where are my books?'

What books? And how would I know? What was I, her personal librarian?

‘Elizabeth, I need my books,' as if it were me who was denying her.

‘I'll ask.' What more could I say?

‘Ask whom?' She paced as if caged; caged, bizarrely, in a kirtle, in swathes of silk.

She had a point, though: no one had told me what to do – where to go, to whom, how and when – if we needed anything. And, ridiculously, I hadn't asked. ‘Someone'll bring supper,' I improvised, ‘and then we can ask.'

Which earned me a sharp sigh.

But, honestly, I wondered, what could she possibly need, before then, with any books? And anyway, who was she to be demanding? She was a prisoner.