The Lady of Misrule (30 page)

But she didn't, and step by step she still didn't, and then by default I was doing as Lucy had insisted. One step back, then another, and soon I was alone in that courtyard as they moved off and the only place for me to go was back.

But it was nothing, I told myself as I climbed the stairs: Lucy's ferocity had come from the stresses and strains of the awful circumstances and I knew much better than to take it to heart. And, anyway, it had been for my benefit because here I was, safe and sound, back inside, and only shaking so horribly because I was cold.

*

Odder even than going to the kitchen for lunch was heading there again at suppertime, but I wanted to discover who was still in the house. All day long, no one had been up to our room and from the time I'd seen Mrs Partridge and her sisters leaving, there'd been no sound of Twig.

The air beyond our door had an ashy sourness to it, and darkness reared up the staircase. If I'd been hoping against hope that the kitchen might be back in use, that was increasingly hard to envisage as I went downstairs, and when I reached the end of the passageway, the room gaped: nobody, no fire nor lights. If the kitchen was abandoned then so too, I reckoned, was the rest of the house. Most likely, everyone had followed Mrs Partridge's example and retreated deeper into the Tower.

My little light was tremulous in that cavern and my nose so cold that it seeped. There'd been no gunfire for a couple of hours and I willed the peace to hold for as long as I was alone in there. What I heard instead, though, were footsteps, the light scratching of soles across stone, and I half sobbed with relief when into the doorway came Sarah, although I hadn't forgotten our earlier encounter. Her light, borne before her, like a pulsing heart, cast the rest of her cadaverous in its shadow. My standing there, motionless, in the sickly lit darkness seemed to give her a fright but she was quick to recover and go about her business, and of course she did, because it was far too cold for any hanging around.

She hadn't said a word, so I pitched in, grave but hopeful: ‘How's Mrs Partridge?'

‘Tired.' She turned her back to me, became busy at one of the benches.

Tired, yes, of course, after the upheaval.

As she carved slices from something – I couldn't see what – she said, ‘This is terrible for her, in her condition,' and I heard that she was livid. ‘You really wouldn't think it so much to ask: a couple of weeks' rest before the baby.'

I was quick to agree.

‘But there are people,' she hissed over the rasping of the blade, ‘who don't stop to think about anyone else. People who are so caught up in their own—' But here she halted, as if it were offensive to name.

Who were these people who didn't stop to think? The men in Southwark? I hadn't even known they existed until the kitchen boy had told me, so why did I feel that Sarah was blaming me for their insurrection?

‘People who are so very sure they know what's best for the rest of us,' and then she did turn to me, the knife sleek and honed at her side. ‘Because most of us would've given it a chance, this Spanish marriage; it's not perfect, but what is?' She glared at me as if I might have an actual answer. And, indeed, whatever it was that was so wrong between us, my standing meekly mute certainly wasn't helping put it right. Pathetically, all I could come up with was ‘Is there anything I can do for you?'

That, though, was a red rag to a bull. ‘You'll be pleased to tell your Lady Jane,' she seethed, ‘that Nate says no one's mustering. They're giving up, in the city. When Wyatt gets
to the gate tomorrow, they'll just open it and in he'll come.'

And sweeping up a laden tray, she was gone back through the doorway.

I suffered a whiplash of tears, because what on earth did she mean by
pleased to tell your Lady Jane
? Then came a flash of fury because how dare she, that cow, how fucking dare she presume and pronounce on us like that.

Storming back into our room, I blared, ‘What if people think it's for you? What if people think Wyatt wants you?'

Jane, though, wasn't troubled for an instant. ‘Oh, no one wants me.' She seemed cheerful. ‘I've already lost, remember. I'm the kiss of death.'

And so impressed was I by her breezy confidence that I forgot what I'd actually asked:
What if people
think
it's for you?

The firing stopped not long after dusk and the silence lay everywhere like snowfall. No bells, even, I realised after some time: the clocks hadn't been wound. Should we, I wondered, go to bed? Would we sleep? We did, and it was waking that came as the surprise, as if we'd forgotten the existence of mornings.

We were woken by the sound of Goose, but of course it couldn't be Goose because she was at her sister's. But that, in our room, was definitely Goose. I shifted on my pillow to look at Jane and found her staring back at me. ‘And to think,' she breathed sleepily, ‘that it was Wyatt we were fearing.'

I got up and went through. Goose was seeing to the fire.
‘Sorry I'm late,' she trilled, obviously not sorry at all; on the contrary, hugely pleased with herself.

I crept towards her as if I still didn't quite know what, up close, I'd find. ‘How did you get here?'

She flapped a hand behind her. ‘Stairs, door, the usual.'

‘Goose,' I stressed, ‘we're under siege.'

‘Lady Lip,' she answered back, rising, and striking her hands down her apron, ‘you're behind the times.' With evident pleasure, she said, ‘I've just walked from my sister's, all through fair-ol'-London-town and right through Lion Gate.'

It was inconceivable. ‘Just now?'

‘Give or take.'

Not Wyatt through the gate, then, but Goose. And looking good on it, too.

‘And
guess'
she bobbed with the excitement of it, almost made a jig of it, ‘who I saw?'

Jane blundered in, wrapped in our coverlet.

‘No less,' crowed Goose, ‘than our own lady Queen!'

Jane staggered to the fireside stool.

‘At Guildhall. Come from the palace, where all her ladies have been screaming and crying and barricading themselves in, so says my sister, and she'd know.

‘And all of them armed, those ladies,' she brandished our poker in demonstration, ‘and all the servants, too,' accompanied by a provocative hitch of her eyebrows. ‘But there she was, our queen, at Guildhall, with the doors wide open to all of us. Got up in her robes and crown and on her throne and –' to Jane ‘– isn't she weeny!'

Jane looked blank.

‘But what a voice!' She was chucking cloths and brushes into her pail; it seemed that she wouldn't be staying. ‘Everyone could hear her. All of us hundreds and hundreds of Londoners, packed in the hall or on the steps outside. And she's our queen, was what she said, and loves us all like we're her children, and everything she's doing, it's for us. It's all, always for us, is what she said.' She hefted the pail on to her arm. ‘And those men coming? Well, she said, we can see 'em off; “I'm not scared of them,” she said, and, I'm telling you, that was no word of a lie.' From the door, she said, ‘Everything had been all shut up, doors bolted, but then suddenly everyone was everywhere again, and when ol' Mister Wyatt got to Ludgate – he'd crossed at Kingston – he was thinking they'd open up but they didn't.' She shrugged: done and dusted. ‘And of course he couldn't go back, because of the lords on his tail.

‘I mean, they couldn't stop him coming, could they,' a roll of her eyes, ‘but they could just about manage to stop him getting away.'

Jane asked, ‘Where is he?'

‘On his way. Bell Tower. So, if you'll excuse me,' and she made a lot of it, the full Goosey force of her in that one word ‘excuse', ‘I've got work to do.'

And then nothing more, all day long; nothing out of the ordinary; no trace of the previous day's turmoil. Everything back to normal. Men busy in the inner bailey, the cook and his boy in the kitchen putting good food on our tray for lunch
and supper, Twig downstairs and Goose from time to time in our room despite her much-vaunted duties tending to Wyatt. And we read and stitched our way through the day; and Guildford, presumably, in his tower, was back to badgering William to play him at cards. It was as if nothing had ever happened, although surely no one trusted to that.

During the night, sometime in the small hours, we were woken by Mr Partridge in our bedroom doorway, apologetic but firm: ‘Lady Jane, if you could come with me,' and it was softly said only because of the hour. It wasn't a request, but an order.

I shot up but he shook his head at me, quick and secretive,
Not you,
as if I'd understand, as if there was an understanding between us. But this was lunacy: Mr Partridge had gone mad, cut loose and turning up here in our bedroom in the dead of night, asking for Jane to go alone with him. I had to get help. But he
was
our help. And he was blocking our doorway.

Jane was startled too, but she focused on the practicality: ‘But I'm not dressed.'

Of that, he was dismissive. ‘Well, just—'
throw something on,
and he sounded sad and exhausted, not mad; and so, in my confusion, in my half-woken daze, her state of undress became the issue. Scrabbling from the bed to her chests, I pulled out a gown and held it aloft. ‘This?'

Was she going outside? Who, exactly, would be seeing her?

‘Fine.' He was spectacularly uninterested.

There we were, in front of him in our nightdresses, the
guileless white of them, their good-natured stitching. I was frantic to object because this was outrageous, she simply couldn't leave this room in the middle of the night, not without me and certainly not with any man, even if that man was Mr Partridge. But the words stopped in my throat and Jane was the one of us who asked, ‘What's wrong, Mr Partridge?' She didn't sound scared, but, if anything, sympathetic.

He didn't answer; said, ‘You need to come with me,' but soothingly now, as if that were a reassurance.

And she did. She got up, shrugged the gown loosely over her nightdress, and pattered from the room without a backwards glance.

I'd never been alone before in those rooms of ours. Jane had, often enough, although never at night. I lay there tracking the scuttle of mice in the roof but, incredibly, must have dozed eventually, because then it was morning and she was back there beside me in the bed.

I presumed she'd tell me what had happened, but she didn't. We were both slow to rise, bone-tired from the difficult few days and nights, but still she said nothing and I didn't dare ask for fear of bad news. And then came a knock at our door. She was ahead of me to it, which was odd because it was my job to answer it. What was going on? First I was excluded from an extraordinary night-time excursion which was ominously unexplained, and now she was answering our door as if I didn't exist. Perhaps it was all somehow to do with me: perhaps, I worried, this was it, for me, and I was about to be told that my services were no longer required.

She opened the door to an old priest. Or perhaps he was an old man impersonating a priest, so impeccably in character was he: a priest as I remembered them from my childhood, when they'd pinch my cheek and call me Jesus's little lamb. Life had treated him well: he was broader than he was tall – although that wasn't very – with cheeks ruddied by ale and sugar-shrunken teeth, not that he stinted on his smile. He stood there in our doorway, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and Jane welcomed him in. She'd been expecting him, was how it looked, and in he came, burbling greetings, his tiny jellied eyes everywhere at once as if unable to imagine any finer earthly place to be.

If he was doing well in playing the priest, Jane did at least as well as the gracious hostess. ‘Father Feckenham, this is my friend Mistress Elizabeth Tilney; and Elizabeth, Father Feckenham,' as she ushered him towards the fireside and into the chair that habitually she took as her own. For herself, she drew up the stool, and doing so, passing the table, made a minor adjustment to her pile of books. It was the merest touch and to no obvious end but perhaps more a taking of comfort from them. The priest was talking ceaselessly – ‘So good of you to see me, I do appreciate it, and I'm hoping we'll make real progress, I'm sure we'll discover lots of common ground' – but spotting her reach for those books, his pitch rose as if in competition with them, to assert his own physical presence over theirs.

Jane turned pleasantly from him to me: ‘Elizabeth, I wonder if you'd be so kind as to fetch Father Feckenham some refreshments.'

The tray with which I returned was given a rapturous reception: ‘Oh, look at that, how very generous, how lovely, what an impressive spread, this looks absolutely delicious and you really shouldn't leave it all to me because it won't do me any good at all.'

Jane, though, persisted with what was presumably an ongoing conversation. ‘He also said, “I'm a vine,” father, and, “I'm a door,” but he was neither of those, was He; I mean, surely you don't think—' She gestured towards the door, which I'd just closed behind me:
Is that Jesus?
She awaited the priest's considered response, with which, wisely, he declined to furnish her. He turned his attention instead to the quince paste. ‘Doesn't this look magnificent?' and, incredulous, to both of us, ‘Are you sure you won't have some?' He spoke through a mouthful: ‘You wonder, don't you, what spices your man has used, here, to give it such a delicate flavour.'

Jane kept a smile on her face but, I saw, it didn't reach her eyes, which was where her tiredness was pooled.

Then the priest did come up with an answer, if only after a fashion: ‘Oh, but it's all just words, Lady Jane, in the end, isn't it, just words; and we can quibble for ever about words but I doubt we're so very far apart on the important matters.'