The Lady of Misrule (3 page)

There was an impressive jut to that little chin of hers. ‘They
said
I could have my books.'

‘And I'm sure you shall,'
if you just wait.

She turned her back on me. Well, so be it. Two can play at that game. I withdrew to the window seat.

Then, from her, ‘
You
don't read, I suppose.'

‘I
can
read,' I countered.
And
write. Not with any ease, true, but I could manage shopping lists and household accounts, or I could have a stab at them, I could make myself understood, and wasn't that enough?

She came to the window. How I wished those bells would stop; the air itself whooshed and boomed so that I felt a bit sick, as if I too were swinging. Together, we looked out over the courtyard. ‘What do you do, then,' she asked, ‘to pass your time?'

Your
time, I noted, not
the
time: I was someone who had time to pass. But time passes anyway, is what I'd always found. If I made myself scarce, it passed. I shrugged:
‘Whatever needs doing.' The truth was that I made a point of spending my time trying to get out of whatever needed doing because I only ever seemed to do it wrong. I'd be safe here, then, it occurred to me: there was nothing here that needed doing. In that sense, I supposed, I'd made a good move.

There was another sigh from her – heavy, this one – but beyond which, I hoped, I heard something else. ‘Supper,' I announced, in anticipation.

‘You can have mine.'

‘You have to eat' – although why should I care if she starved herself? Why should I feel sorry for her? The worst that would happen to her was that she'd spend a couple of weeks in this room before gliding off to a life in a big house with a pretty-boy.

Whatever I'd heard, though, it wasn't supper; we ended up waiting a while longer for that, but at least by then she'd asked me to help her dress again. When eventually we did dine, she was in Protestant black. And there was me in all that finery, which I could hardly help because it wasn't actually mine and anyway, if she'd looked beneath the table she'd have seen my boots. Did she really think God looked approvingly on her for her sartorial self-denial? Not that it was anything of the kind, if you looked closely, because for all that it was black, that dress of hers was sumptuous.

And it was all a pose anyway because, however much she might want to pretend otherwise, we were both Edwardians: his reign was all we'd properly known, which, for all our apparent differences, made us first and foremost Edwardians.
Having that oh-so-Protestant ex-Queen across the table pushed me into a Catholic corner, which was unfair because although we Tilneys certainly weren't reformists, we weren't anything much else either: we just
were;
we were what we'd always been, doing pretty much as we'd always done, if – admittedly – a little more cautiously. It was the same for everyone else we knew. There'd been changes – of course there had, lots of them – but we'd dealt with them one by one as they'd come along: some we'd taken on; others we'd adapted or circumvented. We'd mixed and matched and muddled our way through the reforms, just as everyone else had. Protestant or Catholic, reformist or traditional: just about everybody I knew was a bit of both. We supposedly traditionally minded Tilneys kept close company with some who called themselves reformists. Harry, for one, although he'd changed his tune a few days ago when push came to shove. And Harry was a case in point because it was only ever happenstance in the first place that had made him back the reforms when my father, his neighbour, his best friend, resisted them. A different priest for Harry when he was growing up and then a different wife, back when he'd had a wife. The point was that nothing was simple, and during the past few difficult days there had been plenty of so-called Protestants rallying behind the Catholic Lady Mary, for various reasons, and many so-called Catholics better disposed towards the primly black-clad girl who was sitting across the table from me.

When the chambergirl returned to clear away our supper,
the Partridges came up the stairs with her but waited politely in our doorway for Jane to act the hostess and invite them inside, whereupon they settled together on the window seat like good children. Mrs Partridge looked about the same age as my sisters – in her twenties – but there the similarity ended, because even in repose her moon-face bore the trace of a smile: it seemed to have been cast that way. Bemused and shy, she might've been the one of us in the room who was reliant on good will. Her husband was older and smaller, with a lopsided smile and something off-kilter, too, about the eyes (different colours? a scarred iris?). He looked as if he'd dashed in the general direction of his clothes and kept running. If his wife brought to mind a bowlful of freshly picked apples, he was a windfall.

They'd come to welcome us but also to talk over various practical arrangements (meals, linen, exercise), and their emphasis was firmly on flexibility. Listening to them, it was possible to forget that Lady Jane was a prisoner. They were good company, and in return Jane was perfectly pleasant, more so than she'd been to me all afternoon, but then, understandably I supposed, I'd be the one to bear the brunt. When they left, unease balled in my stomach and I had to remind myself that it was in their house that I was living, not hers. I was living with those nice Partridges at least as much as I was living with Lady Jane Grey: that, I told myself, was how I was going to have to think of it.

They left us with a whole evening to spend in each other's company, but luckily they'd located the missing books, so
Jane was busy. And me? Bone-tired, I curled up on the window seat to breathe the evening air and watch daylight pale away, lamplight claiming the corners and doorways. I spotted Mr Partridge venturing from the house with a hound and returning a quarter of an hour or so later. The bell-tolling beyond the walls petered out until it was its absence, instead, that made itself felt.

I suspected we were both putting off going to bed. We might've managed a tentative accord for the evening – her at the table with her books and me at the window with the view – but our other room was uncharted territory. It felt odd, too, somehow, to be deciding our own bedtime, extinguishing our own candles: I felt as if we should ask permission of someone. Eventually, though, I could put it off no longer, and declared I was turning in.

‘Me too.' She closed her book and stood, ready, which had me despairing that I hadn't gone earlier to use the chamberpot – I'd missed my chance, now, of some privacy. My light, as I followed her through the bedroom doorway, struck the bed's coverlet, the silk-depicted, ruby-fruited vines. ‘Isn't that beautiful!' I wondered if it was Mrs Partridge's own work.

‘There's no truckle,' was all Jane said: no second, little bed to pull from beneath the main one for me. She must've ascertained it when she'd first looked in, back in the afternoon. We'd have to sleep together in the big bed. Well, at least we were both small.

First, though, we were going to have to undress each other. And how, I wondered, should we go about that? Because if I
started with her, as presumably an attendant should do, then she'd be undressed while I was still clothed and that didn't seem right. Come to think of it, though, she'd been stripped down to her kirtle earlier, at her own request. So when she'd removed her headdress and the string of pearls that was her girdle, I offered – ‘Shall I?' – and, yes, immediately she turned her back to me, her row of pins, and there I was, undressing a queen for bed, or an ex-queen, and thinking of Harry –
Look at me, Harry, undressing a queen
– because that was something he hadn't ever done. One up on Harry, then. Then again, one up on just about everybody.

When I was finished and had lifted away her gown and her kirtle, she pulled her shift up over her head with a dismaying lack of self-consciousness, reaching for her nightdress but unhurriedly, not attempting to hide anything. But, then, really, what was there to hide? We were both the same, underneath.

Then it was my turn. At home, I'd have roped in my mother to unpin me, or her chamberlady, or any of the other girl-servants: I'd call down from my room for help or waylay someone somewhere and stand still in a stairwell or passageway while the pins were extracted. But here I had an ex-queen at my disposal and in the event she proved satisfyingly deft, sheen slipping around on her hair as she bent this way and that, the better to tackle the task.

Having finished with me, she went blithely to the chamberpot, which was when I made sure to disappear briefly into a flurry of linen: shift off and nightdress on. I decided I'd have
to forgo the chamberpot: I'd hold on, if I could, until morning. And if I couldn't, if I woke during the night, I'd be very quiet about it. She combed her hair, then prayed beside the bed. I only ever prayed in chapel, and only because it was expected of me. As she knelt there, I busied myself folding and stowing away our various garments. What confidence, it seemed to me, to think God would listen to her here, in her own room. But then maybe He would, because what did I know.

She got into bed in the same manner I'd seen her do everything else that day – brisk, resolute, no equivocation or trepidation – and thus she had the choice of sides. She left me to close the shutters, too, and light the night-light, draw the hangings, do the proper work of the attendant that I now was. It was when I was dealing with the shutters that I noticed a lit window in the neighbouring tower and almost said so
–Look! Your husband
– but then didn't because perhaps it would've been improper for me to remark on it when she hadn't.

I climbed into bed. She smelled of almonds.

‘Do you snore?' she asked.

I said I didn't know.

‘Well, if no one's ever said, then you probably don't, do you.'

I had to explain that no one would've told me because there was no one to know: I didn't share a bedroom with anyone. ‘I'm the youngest': my sisters grown up and gone before I was ever in any bed with them.

‘Well, you're lucky,' she said. ‘My littlest sister coughs, and the other one talks in her sleep.'

Which had me curious: ‘What does she say?'

She had to think about that. ‘Oh, nothing really.' She cast around: “‘Put it in the bucket.” That kind of thing.'

And I laughed, because how was that a ‘kind of thing'?

‘Mind you,' she said drily, ‘she doesn't say anything much more meaningful when she's awake.'

When she said nothing more, I asked, ‘And what do
you
do?'

She turned to me, uncomprehending.

‘In your sleep.' What, if anything, should I be prepared for?

‘Me?' She sounded surprised. ‘Nothing. I sleep like the dead.'

And she was true to her word, turning over then and there to do exactly that. Me, I was ready to lie awake for a long time, pondering my predicament, but actually all I wondered before I fell asleep was whether Harry had noticed I was gone. Had he turned up at home yet, and asked casually, as if it were nothing much, as if I were nothing much to him, ‘So, where's your Lizzie?'

He would have expected to find me, earlier in the day, in the clock alcove in our chapel. At the start he hadn't liked the idea, which was mine, but in no time he'd come to appreciate it, as I'd known he would, because, even if I said so myself, it was a good one. Perfect, no less: we Tilneys
weren't the most observant of families; none of us was ever in chapel unless we had to be. That alcove, behind its own door, was the quietest corner of Shelley Place's quietest room. No one was permitted anywhere near, however laudable the intention, except for my father, who wound the mechanism every morning, and the clockmaker, Mr Farebrother, on his infrequent and well heralded visits. Otherwise, my father decreed, there was to be no cleaning or polishing, no sweeping or tidying, no coaxing, tinkering, easing or tightening; none of the meddling and ministrations to which everything else in the household, living or inanimate, was subject. That clock was my father's pride and joy and we were all to leave it well alone, to let it get on with its work.

I didn't find it hard to shut myself away inside that bell chute because no one was ever looking for me. I'd grown up trailing in everyone else's footsteps; it was second nature for me to drop back and slip from view. And so it had been paying off, lately, at last, the benign neglect with which I'd been brought up, as perhaps I'd always had an inkling it would do.

Harry, though, was impossible to miss. Ordinary enough in his looks – forties, portly and mousey, although the smile was certainly something, the glee in it – he was none the less a presence, always at the centre of everything, even of our household, to which he didn't even belong. ‘Like family', my father always said of his boyhood best friend. And more like family, perhaps, than our actual rather sorry excuse for a
family, although in his company we did rather better because somehow he brought out the best in everyone. How did he do that? Even he himself probably didn't know, because there was nothing calculated about him. He was a natural, a man's man who was just as comfortable in the company of women. A big character, literally so in girth if not in height, although of course, back when I was younger, he'd towered over me. And now, if he was past his prime – still wearing it, but outgrown it – at least he'd had one.