The Lady of Misrule (28 page)

Groggily, Jane queried, ‘An army's gone west?'

‘Yesterday.' Never one for details, she was bored already. ‘Trouble down west.' Stepping back to appraise Susanna, she straightened her on her rail, yanked her into shape. ‘But isn't there always.'

Goose was our only source of information, with her partly comprehensible tales of dead dogs, snowballs and permanently agitated West Country-men, but then within days we
didn't even have her because she too fell ill. She had seemed so robust, that Susanna-drubbing morning, but our illness had washed through those raw, open seams of her nose and eyes and she went down hard with it. We wouldn't see her again until she returned from a month's recuperation with her sister, for whom it had no doubt been a considerable surprise to see her back again so soon.

Mrs Dunch was the one to bring us word – brief and barely audible – of Goose's indisposition, and that was pretty much her last word on anything. From then on, we were on our own.

Mrs Partridge's two sisters were due to arrive in mid-January to help prepare and then accompany her into her confinement. Two older sisters, she told us she had: Sarah and Lucy, who had families of their own. Mrs Partridge was the baby of her family then, just as I was, but whereas she spoke of her sisters with awe, and I made sure to look suitably impressed, life as a younger sister was, in my experience, one of put-downs and hand-me-downs. But her sisters didn't have to be like mine, I supposed. There was a good chance they'd be like Mrs Partridge – Mrs Partridge writ large – although I found that unimaginable: a houseful of Mrs Partridges, so much self-effacement in a single household, like a trick done with mirrors.

You'll like them, Mrs Partridge assured me on more than several occasions, which only raised my suspicions, and once she went so far as to describe them as ‘fun', which, to my mind, boded even less well. Then, one afternoon, the
stairwell echoed the self-importance of men proving themselves happy to help, and the scraping of boxes in passing against doorframes. The sisters, I guessed, were moving in. But when the boxes had been manhandled inside and the men were gone to make themselves useful elsewhere, the house didn't return to its usual peaceful state. Those sisters downstairs, I discovered, were given to explosive laughter. I took a tip from Jane: I couldn't close my ears but I could close my eyes, and I kept them closed for most of that afternoon.

That evening, returning our tray to the kitchen, I bumped into one of the sisters as she came barrelling into the passage from the parlour. She made a show of being startled, exclaiming and slapping a hand to her heart. In the shadowy stairwell, I couldn't discern much beyond her being big, but in a different way from Mrs Partridge. Substantial, this sister: well built. She'd carried with her into the passageway the intriguing scents of her journey: a haze of horse and varied woodsmokes.

I began mumbling apologies despite my not having been at fault, but then the other sister was there, the door flying open and her demanding, ‘Who's
this?'

Which of course her sister didn't know, so I had to be the one to answer: ‘I'm—' Starting again, more to the point: ‘I stay upstairs with Lady Jane.'

At that, they closed in on me, cornered me: more alien fragrances, of a darker ale, a sweeter flower-water. ‘Oh, of
course
you do.' The first sister placed a hand on my arm to claim me,
saying unnecessarily to the other, ‘She's the girl who's upstairs,' prompting, ‘
You
know,' even as that sister was confiding, ‘Oh, Ellen's told us all about you.'

Really? Ellen, Mrs Partridge. Whatever it was that she'd told them, it seemed to have gone down well enough.

The second sister asked, ‘What's she
like?
Missy up there,' which almost had me laugh.

‘She's …' but what, really, could I say? How to convey Missy-up-there? Casting around, I looked down on the tray in my hands, the littering of dishes that had barely been touched. ‘She's not hungry.'

And they laughed.

They introduced themselves – Lucy, Sarah – and when in turn I said my own name, they chorused, ‘We know,' and that too, somehow, was funny.

‘Can you escape?' Lucy indicated the parlour door. ‘Can you come in for a drink? Is that allowed?' Implying that if it wasn't, then perhaps we shouldn't let it unduly trouble us. Well, I was willing to give it a go. I said I'd be pleased to, just as soon as I'd been to the kitchen.

Off I went, heart beating high and bright, blood singing in my ears. They weren't so bad, those sisters, it seemed to me; perhaps it wouldn't be so hard after all to have them in the house and why had I assumed it would be? Why had I assumed the worst? Dumping the plates with minimal ceremony (‘That was lovely, thank you'), I sped off back to my new friends. Well, no, Jane first, of course. To make my excuses. Not that she'd care.

My uncharacteristically speedy descent of the stairs had Twig alerted, so that when it was me and not a stranger who opened the parlour door, he cringed, mortified at his mistake. His being there, sprawled on the hearth, implied that the cat wasn't, which was an excellent start. Mrs Partridge made an effort to rise for me, or at least to sit forward in a kind of welcome, but the more freckled of the sisters – Lucy – lunged, to shove her back on to her cushions – ‘Will you rest!' – at which Mrs Partridge looked bashful but pleased.

‘Isn't she dreadful?' crowed Lucy. ‘Never takes a moment's rest.'

‘Oh, she's impossible,' said Sarah, and to Mrs Partridge herself, ‘What are you? Impossible, that's what.'

‘Yes, but
were
here, now,' Lucy was all raised eyebrows, ‘to make sure she doesn't dare ever move.'

To me, Mrs Partridge raised her own eyebrows, while Sarah, heaving herself from her own pile of cushions towards a jug of something and a fascinating array of sweets, wanted to know from me, ‘What can I get you?'

And that was how it was, every evening that week. Gratifyingly, even thrillingly, if I hadn't presented myself in the parlour by what they deemed a suitable hour, which arrived earlier every day, one or other sister would bustle into the stairwell and yell up, ‘Liz-beth?'

At which, Jane would look expectantly across at me:
Off you go.

You bet I will.

Jane wouldn't have wanted to join us, even if she'd been
allowed. Guildford would've, though. If Jane was Missy-up-there, then what, I wondered, would Guildford be?
Him-over-there,
perhaps. Or
Dukey
, or
Dukey-boy
, I imagined they might call him;
Little Lord Whatnot.
I could almost hear it; we were always, I felt, on the brink of a mention of him and I couldn't help but listen for it, be ready for it, ready to take it up and chance my luck. They'd love him, I knew – well, as long as he was behaving himself, which, given the chance of company and drink and sweets, I knew he would.

But even Mr Partridge rarely looked in on our parlour evenings, and in his notably frequent absences the sisters treated Twig as the man of the house. He'd never had it so good: they spoiled him rotten, having him swoon and drool.

‘Oh, you're a mad dog, aren't you, Twigster?' one or other sister would cajole and flatter. ‘Twiggle Partridge, what are you? A mad dog, is what you are. A roaring beast. A wolf. Oh and it's such hard work being a wolf, isn't it …'

They plied him with titbits, against which Mrs Partridge would occasionally voice caution (‘Lucy, I don't think—' ‘Sarah, I'm not sure that—') but which only, apparently, showed her as the fusspot – the killjoy – she was.

Whenever Mr Partridge did brave our company – ‘Nate', the sisters called him, eschewing the ‘Nathaniel' favoured by his wife – he was pint-sized in comparison to them, and easy game. Affectionately, they pushed and pulled him about: ‘Look at you! That girl you've got doing your laundry? Give me those shirts, I'll sort you out.'

What a good job, I felt, that Goose was away. They spoke
with similar derision of their own husbands, unaccountably called, as far as I was able to distinguish, Dip and Ted-man. Ted-man was an idiot, Dip a dimwit – and they revelled in the chaos they imagined they'd left behind. The profusion of children confused me – certainly there was a Poppy-Beth, a Mims, a Pom – although their mothers' complaints about them were the same (‘But
does
she listen?
Does
she?'). None of it seemed to matter, though: Ted-man being a ‘lazy b' or Betsy-Mop's back-chat. On the contrary, their shortcomings were to be celebrated, their households were happy riots. I wondered whether they might need any help, back home: could I possibly be of any service? Why, I despaired, had I never learned to be of any use to anyone?

They were suitably sympathetic to my plight. Once, when Lucy remarked how miserable it must be for me up in the room, Sarah probed, ‘Just Bible-reading, is it, that she does up there, all the time?'

‘Most of the time, yes,' and it was such a relief to have it acknowledged for the strain that it was that I turned tearful.

Sarah saw it, ‘Oh, you poor darling!' but Lucy said, ‘Listen, you do a marvellous job up there, with her – you know that? Ellen says you've been terrific with that little miss up there. And it can't have been easy, all this time. She doesn't know how lucky she is, getting everything her own way.'

At that, I felt the faintest stirring of a defence. ‘We get on all right,' I said. ‘It was hard at first but it's a bit better now.'

Sarah asked, ‘Do you have sisters near your age back home, sweetie?' and when I said no, Lucy said, ‘That must be
very lonely for you,' and then it came, what I'd been longing for: ‘You should stay on here, when we've gone. We can't stay for ever, but …'

‘She'll need help,' Sarah finished.
Mrs Partridge
, ‘She'll need company.'

And, yes, this was such a little household: what lady of any substance lived like this? I didn't dare breathe, let alone look up, but I could hear Mrs Partridge murmuring in agreement.

‘Because,' Lucy blared over her, ‘you're going to be free of your duties up there, soon. Can't be much longer now.'

‘Unless,' teased Sarah, ‘you've got some young man waiting for you,' and I burned as she grabbed my wrist, her rings more than a match for my bones. ‘Promise me,' she said, ‘that you'll think long and hard think before you hand yourself over to any man. Promise me you'll do that.'

Yes, I told myself: look her in the eye and do it, say it. And I did.
And believe it.
All that was odd about it was how easy it was. There I was, at that fireside, for all the world a girl with an unblemished life ahead of her.

Abruptly, a week later, the good times were over, when Mrs Partridge withdrew with her sisters into her room. No unmarried ladies allowed. I'd assumed that particular rule applied to the actual labour, but that didn't seem to be their view and who was I to question it. If they wanted me enough, I decided, they'd make an exception, and so I lived in hope but no word came.

Unmarried meant virginal: everyone knew it, if no one ever actually dared say it. Jane, married, could've gone into
that room with Mrs Partridge and her sisters if she'd wanted, if they'd wanted her, if she had been permitted to go anywhere other than her own room. Jane could have gone into that room, despite being almost certainly unqualified to do so. Whereas me, if only they'd known: I could've taken my place in there with honour.

Shut out, left alone, I fell prey to fears for Mrs Partridge.
Ellen.
Well, and for the baby, although in truth I couldn't quite imagine the baby. All too precarious, it seemed, now: too much to hope for, that the birthing of that baby would go well. I reminded myself that her sisters – like mine – had managed the seemingly impossible physical event time and time again and not only had they lived to tell the tale but so too had their countless children, the Billy-bobs and Kitty-kats. But possibly there had been others who hadn't, and certainly my own sisters had each had a baby who'd died. And anyway, Mrs Partridge was nothing like her hulking, hardened sisters. But for anyone, what a horror to have to endure; for anybody, the rending of the soft core, the most tender part. I'd recall the pain when I'd passed whatever I'd passed, which, really, had only been blood. A baby? It was an unbearable prospect and sometimes, thinking of it, I had to pace to quell my panic.

Once, Jane asked me, ‘What's the matter with you?'

‘Nothing,' I said, which had her return to her book with something of a flourish,
Have it your way.
‘It's Mrs Partridge,' I hurried; but the best I could do was, ‘I'm worried,' and then her infuriating sigh had me snap, ‘And don't say it.'

She frowned, puzzled. ‘Say what?'

‘That I should have faith in God.'

She didn't flinch. ‘I wasn't going to,' she replied, matter-of-fact. ‘Because having faith in God doesn't stop something being scary, does it.'

IV

 

 

O
ne morning less than a week after Mrs Partridge's retreat into confinement there was a commotion above us, probably coming from up on the wall behind the house. Grinding, scraping: some heavy objects being shifted would've been my guess. Something was happening up there, but so what? Maybe this was normal: some routine early-February Tower activity. And anyway, we took anything, pretty much, those days: guilty verdicts of no consequence, snowball wars between schoolboys and foreign dignitaries. Whatever was going on up on the wall, we barely registered it; and didn't so much as remark on it.

Or not until the first gunshot, which brought us to our senses because there's no ignoring a gun-blast, distant though this one was. The thud of it – ungracious and truncated, no preamble, no niceties – bounced our gazes into each other's. Twig, below us in the house, had fewer qualms about sounding his dismay. Curiosity took me from the fireside to the window and although Jane didn't move her eyes followed me and she was the one of us to speak: ‘What was that?'