The Lady of Misrule (25 page)

The morning was unremittingly grey, from the sky right down to the ground. No rain, but only because the air was already saturated. Jane's cloak, in front of me, was damp-spangled and I itched to run a fingertip down the length of it, draw a channel in it. The bottom of her gown would be less picturesque, because with each step she was hauling the dead weight of it behind her through the London mud and muck. I could've retrieved it, lifted it clear, but then what? A long walk lay ahead of us and I couldn't possibly lug it all that way.

I was tired, cold, and still unsettled by the motion of the barge. For all London's tall, timbered houses and halls, for all its spired stone churches and walled gardens, this city, I felt, was nothing against the river which lay at the foot of it. London was cobbled together on its bank and barely tolerated. As we progressed further from the water, I never lost the sense of the Thames at our backs with the feigned indifference of a predator. It might suddenly rise up and into the streets after us, I felt, and wash our grave little procession away.

Something else I couldn't shake off was Guildford's fury. Rather than walking away from it, I seemed to be driving it deeper into my bones with each and every step: I was rattled,
literally; I was in bits. But although I'd hated what he'd done, yelling at me, more than anything I was perplexed by it: the gusto with which he'd gone for me, not caring who witnessed it. He was scared, of course, and probably tired – I doubted he'd slept much – and therefore perhaps not quite in his right mind. But still.

When we reached Guildhall, Jane and I were ushered straight ahead into a chamber. Guildford and the archbishop either had their own anterooms or shared one. Ours was a room for nothing but waiting: the hearth clean-swept, the walls lime-washed. A pair of guards stood in the doorway, affecting not to look at us but with nothing else to take their interest, which left them with a blankness which in other circumstances might have been comical.

The only furniture was a bench, on which Jane sat down with a sigh, the bible shutting in her lap, and she closed her eyes, either to rest or to pray. There was nothing in the room for her to eat or drink despite the long morning she'd had, and the afternoon wasn't going to be a picnic. I wasn't bothered for myself, sickened as I was by the barge, but I was thinking of her, which was my job, my purpose, it was why I was there. No offer of sustenance looked to be forthcoming, so I was going to have to pursue it. With whom, though? Those deliberately gormless guards? The younger – taller, leaner – of the two was dramatically cold-eyed, intent on acting the big man. Well, let him; I couldn't be bothered with him. His considerably rounder colleague, though, reminded me of our stable manager back home at Shelley Place, which was how I knew
his eyes would crinkle when he smiled. We weren't going to get as far as a smile, I knew, but still, he was my man. He could stare all he liked but I could see he was a push-over. He'd pitched up in the wrong job and that was something we had in common. ‘Lady Jane should have something to eat and drink,' I said to him, and then he was flummoxed and contrite as I'd known he would be, even though Jane had roused herself to contradict me, claiming she was fine.

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
some
thing.'

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 own 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.