The Lady of Misrule Read online

  Guildford’s father and brothers were taken to the Beauchamp Tower where, the following morning, Jane’s own father became a fellow-prisoner, although he’d arrived with no procession of any kind and we’d have been none the wiser if not informed by a carefully sympathetic Mr Partridge. Jane didn’t ask Mr Partridge if she could send any message and none came for her, and then within days her father was free again, perhaps because he was the Queen’s cousin’s husband, or perhaps – as Jane seemed to suggest – because he was a harmless idiot.

  ‘Oh, he’s no danger,’ she’d said airily, when I’d raised it.

  We were getting ready for bed at the time: she sitting on the bed and me kneeling up behind her, combing her hair. Her ivory comb was carved with four figures and once, spotting me looking at them, she’d said, ‘Paris,’ which had me ask who she knew in France and she’d had to explain that Paris was a man judging which of three goddesses was the fairest; and when I’d asked whom he’d chosen, all she’d said was ‘The wrong one.’

  Now she was saying, ‘My father’s no threat to anyone. Full of talk, that’s all. And all of it about himself.’

  She raised a hand to signal I’d done enough combing, and we scrambled to swap places.

  ‘To his mind,’ she said, ‘he’s a thinker, but he’s easily impressed and the Lady Mary knows it.’

  Lady Mary, not ‘the Queen’, but that was an oversight, surely, a slip of the tongue. I said that she too would soon go free, because if her father – an instigator – was already pardoned, then it couldn’t be much longer before that privilege was extended to her. Not that I particularly relished the prospect, although of course I didn’t mention that. Whenever she went free, so would I, but I didn’t feel quite ready to go. Sometimes – times like these – I quite liked being here in the Tower. Or perhaps it was that I quite liked not being at home.

  Jane said knowingly, and not without satisfaction, ‘Oh, I don’t think she’ll be quite so forgiving of me.’

  I turned to object, but was stilled by her touch to my head. She said, ‘We didn’t part, last, on good terms,’ then told me how, when she and her family had last stayed with the Queen, back when she was still Lady Mary, she’d gone into the chapel with one of the household’s ladies in search of her little sister, and the lady had genuflected to the reserved sacrament. Jane said, ‘I asked her why she did that and she said, “Because our Lord is there.” So I said, “Where?” Inside the reserved sacrament, she meant, on the altar. “Because I don’t see him.’” The combing ceased, and fabrics rustled as she slid down from the bed. “‘I see something the baker made.” And of course she went and told Lady Mary, who was –’ she paused to indicate the next words weren’t her own ‘–“very disappointed” in me.’

  Exasperated, I said, ‘And that surprised you?’

  After all, the Queen had lived for years in fear of her life for exactly that belief.

  Inspecting her stockings for holes, Jane was sharp in return: ‘No, it didn’t surprise me. But it needed saying.’

  ‘Did it?’ I almost laughed. ‘Did it, though?’ What difference had she hoped it would make? Had she thought the Lady Mary might suddenly see the error of her ways? Oh, how silly of me! Because now that you mention it …

  She said, ‘It’s the truth.’

  Which only exasperated me further. ‘Well, maybe it is and maybe it isn’t’ – because who could ever know the truth about bread and bodies? – ‘but you can’t go around saying it to the Queen.’

  She didn’t shift, not an iota, just sent it straight back at me, ‘It’s the truth,’ and I saw it was pointless for me to persist.

  Later, lying in that bed, trying to sleep, I pondered how I didn’t believe half of what I was told. At least half. And did most people, really? Just stories, surely, so much of it. But did I rub anyone’s nose in it? No, I kept it to myself. As did most people. Because that was the price of peace. Smile and nod. Each to his or her own. I would never dream of trying to ruin anything for anyone else. But then again, perhaps the smiling and nodding was truer of me than of most people. I was well practised at keeping out of trouble. I’d grown up a little girl in a big house, the last daughter by a long way, accustomed to slipping by unseen, and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Jane, though, heiress of a family with the strongest of royal connections; perhaps she felt that she couldn’t keep out of trouble if she tried, and so had nothing to lose.

  Not many days after I’d seen the one of the Dudley brothers sobbing, I watched the tall, fair Dudley brothers’ lookalike loping across the green with a lute. ‘Who is that?’ I wondered aloud, not so much asking as venting an inexplicable impatience with him. Something about him irritated me. Or everything: the capering with canines, the lording it about with that lute.

  It wasn’t a question, but it would get an answer because Goose was in our room and she had an answer to everything. Sure enough, she was past me to the window in a trice. ‘Ohhh,’ as if she had a treat in store for me: ’that, Lady Loopy-Lou, is Edward Courtenay.’

  To my amazement, Jane was up from the table and across the room: the first time I’d seen her show an interest in anything but books, and even more extraordinarily, she and Goose were suddenly a team, subjecting that young man to dual scrutiny.

  ‘So that’s him,’ Jane breathed.

  But, ‘Who?’

  She didn’t relinquish him, spoke to the window. ‘Edward Courtenay.’

  No, but, ‘Who is Edward Courtenay?’

  Which then made me the object of curiosity: both girls turning wide-eyed – incredulous – to me.

  But how on earth would I know? Whoever he was, down there with his fancy lute, he hadn’t figured in Suffolk.

  Goose started to gabble, ‘Oh, but he’s been here years and years, he’s been a prisoner here since long before I came, back in the days of the old King.’ She’d got that wrong, though, because back then he’d have been a boy. ‘Since he was a boy,’ she said.

  ‘But why?’ That was horrific. ‘What did he do?’

  Jane shook her head: it wasn’t what he’d done, ‘It’s who he is,’ at which I almost laughed, despite it being anything but laughable, because we were going in circles. ‘Yes, but who is he?’

  ‘Someone,’ said Goose, turning away, leaving him be, happy to have the details beyond her.

  Jane knew, though. ‘Plantagenet heir; heir to the house of York.’

  A possible rival claimant to the throne.

  Was Jane here because of what she did – of what was done in her name – or because of who she was?

  Goose was back to her sweeping. ‘Too young, though, he was. His father –’ she shrugged, fair enough ‘– but you can’t do that to a kid, can you,’, which was when I realised she was talking about an execution: Edward Courtenay’s father, executed, but his son held here in the Tower.

  Settling herself back down at the table, Jane said, ‘But now he’s going to be free.’

  ‘Is he?’ I wanted to hear more of that. He might well have irritated me, but I couldn’t begrudge him his long-overdue freedom.

  Goose flexed her eyebrows. ‘Oh, very much a man of the Mass, that one.’

  So, he’d be one of the new Queen’s men.

  Jane said, ‘She’ll wait, though, until she gets here, then make something of it.’ His release, his pardoning: the new Queen would do it with some ceremony. It surprised me to hear such a worldly, even cynical observation from Jane.

  ‘How long,’ I heard myself asking even as I couldn’t quite bear to ask, ‘how long has he been here?’

  Jane didn’t look up. ‘He was ten.’

  He looked to me as if he were well into his twenties. I tried to remember myself at ten but it was an impossibly long time ago, a lifetime ago.

  Goose said cheerily, ‘Been spoiled rotten by the bishop, though.’

  Jane turned a page, didn’t look up. ‘He’s not a bishop.’

  Goose countered, ‘Bishop Gardiner.’

  At whi
ch Jane did look up, to reiterate, ‘He’s not a bishop. He was a bishop but he wouldn’t accept the new teachings so the King put him in here, and if he’s in here, he’s not a bishop, is he.’ Then she was emphatically back to her book, which left Goose’s roll of the eyes for my benefit alone. It didn’t go unappreciated: I should learn from Goose, I thought; I could do worse around Jane than a bit of eye-rolling of my own.

  ‘Well, yes, was Bishop Gardiner,’ Goose revised, put-upon, ‘was Bishop of Winchester, and I imagine will be again, soon.’

  A barely veiled reference to regime change, which I couldn’t help feeling was a bit insensitive in the circumstances, but Jane allowed it with a muttered, acerbic ‘Perhaps.’

  Not someone to suffer fools, was probably how Jane saw herself, if she gave any thought at all to how she conducted herself around people. Not that Goose was a fool; Jane underestimated Goose, I felt, at her peril. But then, who knew how Jane saw herself? Not me, for all that I spent every hour of every day and night in her company. We didn’t talk much. Inevitably, we conversed a bit over meals, if only about the food, and also, a little, when we dressed and undressed each other. And she’d chat to me from the chamberpot, whereas I didn’t use it at all unless she was on the other side of the closed door.

  Several times she spoke of her sisters, which was several times more than I’d spoken of mine. She didn’t hear from her family because, for her, letters were forbidden. I didn’t hear from mine because my mother couldn’t much write and my father wouldn’t have known what to say. Instead, our steward, Mr Locke, would be checking on me whenever he was in London.

  Once, Jane had described her sister Katherine to me as a rescuer of kittens and I told her about my father, about how everyone for miles around knew he’d take in any old hound. Somebody would only have to remark how they had a good ol’ fella past his best and what a shame to see how he couldn’t keep up, and there’d be my father leaping in with the offer of a home. Harry rescued people and my father rescued dogs. Dogs nosed into Shelley Place to throw themselves on our mercy, of which they got plenty along with a place on the hearth and the odd tasty scrap, and plenty of fussing of their ears – or what remained of them. ‘Old boy’, my father would address them, ‘Old girl’: no names, freeing them from being called upon (to which they’d have been deaf in any case) and even, in their dotage, from having to have a character. My mother had grown up in a household where dogs stayed outside and, for her, my father’s adopted companions were at best a source of irritation, at worse of disgust. ‘Under my feet’ was one objection, although had those dogs been physically capable of having it any other way, I was sure they would’ve. ‘Stinking’ was the other, which there was no denying.

  All this I told Jane, only to have her say that she couldn’t remember her sister ever having actually rescued any kittens; all she’d meant was that she was the type to do so. This was the sister she’d once described to me as ‘nice’, in a tone to suggest that niceness was suspect.

  I was amused. ‘And you’re not?’

  Which she’d dismissed with ‘You know what I mean.’

  Actually, I’d said, I didn’t.

  ‘What I mean is, she knows exactly what to say to people.’

  And you don’t, I thought. Well, there was no arguing with that. The surprise, for me, was that she knew it of herself, and, feeling slightly awkward in the face of that revelation, I’d turned jovial: ‘Family favourite, then, is she, your Katherine?’

  Po-faced, Jane said, ‘All three of us are disappointments to our parents in our own different ways. None of us is what they wanted.’

  ‘Which was … ?’

  ‘Sons,’ and she gave me a look, Ask a silly question … ‘Although they do now have a son-in-law …’ But he too was a disappointment, it seemed, if, for now, of an unspecified nature. ‘My mother would’ve been happier if we girls had taken to hunting, but …’ She sighed: ‘Katherine,’ rescuer of kittens, ‘and Mary … Well, she can’t help how she is.’

  Mary, I knew from what Jane had once earlier told me, hadn’t grown: Mary, the little little sister. ‘And me … Well, my mother’s always asking, what use are books?’

  Best left uncommented upon, I decided. Instead I asked, ‘Do your parents get on?’

  She shrugged, then, to my surprise, asked me, ‘Do yours argue much?’

  ‘Might be better if they did,’ and I told her how they had little to do with each other, their exchanges limited to information or instructions given in passing as they went about their separate lives. Even in each other’s company they talked as if the other weren’t there:

  ‘Your father is going …’

  ‘Your mother says …’

  Then she asked me, ‘Who are you going to marry?’ Just like that, she asked it. Not a personal question, in her view, I didn’t suppose, because in her world marriage was a matter of arrangements. But I came from a different world and there’d been no arrangement made for me, nor was there ever likely to be: me being the third girl, any dowry having dwindled and Tilney money in general having run low after the difficult years we’d had. Unlike her, I wasn’t valuable. Any arrangements, I’d have to make for myself. Which, of course, was no bad thing. I couldn’t have married Harry even if I’d wanted to, because although his wife had gone off with someone else before I was old enough to remember her, they were still married. And they’d stay that way if England went back to Rome, because divorce would only come with the reformists.

  It was my turn to shrug, which seemed the best answer.

  She said, ‘I was going to be married to Edward Seymour,’ and, seeing my confusion, clarified, ‘His son.’ Edward Seymour’s son Edward: eldest son of the Lord-Protector-as-had-been. The Lord Protector, seen off to the block for his various incompetencies by the fearless duke, who’d replaced him as de facto ruler of England and styled himself Lord President. Jane had been going to be married to the first one’s son but had ended up being married to the son of the second: shunted along to keep up with the times, to maintain her advantage.

  I asked, ‘Did you like him? Edward Seymour?’

  Like was regrettably lame, but she answered unhesitantly: ‘Yes.’ Unreadable, though. ‘Yes, I did.’ Then she was back to her book, and I didn’t like to press her.

  There had been no mention of Guildford.

  The day when the soon-to-be-crowned Queen reached the Tower would be the day, as I understood it, when everything would change. If Jane didn’t actually walk free that day, she could certainly get packing. Queen Mary’s arrival would herald a new era: calm, kind and dignified; no place for scheming and self-promotion. Lady Jane Grey would quickly become a relic, a curiosity, barely more than a story. Consigned to the past, she would, however, discreetly be handed back a future, albeit a small Jane-sized one, but nevertheless a future all of her own – well, apart from Guildford being in it, because it was too late now to do anything about him.

  When the all-important day did eventually come, though, two weeks after my own arrival at the Tower, it would have passed us by had we not been up on the wall. The section of wall behind the Partridges’ house had become Guildford’s preferred, Partridge-approved venue for time spent with his wife, but from where, elevated though we were, we still had no view of the river.

  His invitations came daily and his persistence was, I felt, genuine enough; I didn’t think the intention was to browbeat Jane. Probably, he saw himself as doing her a favour: new husband behaving honourably towards his young wife. Certainly he took every opportunity to bore on about honour, which, unsurprisingly, he judged as lacking in others but to be the very lifeblood of the Dudleys.

  Any good intentions aside, though, he must’ve been lonely, denied contact with his nearby father and brothers, and shut in a room with that baleful attendant. His eagerness for walks outside on the wall was understandable. What was unaccountable was Jane’s giving in, every day, and agreeing to see him. Because giving in was clearly what it was, for her. Why did she
do it? From what I knew of her, she was hardly someone to favour the path of least resistance. Perhaps she saw it as a choosing of battles, and regarded this one as beneath her. Much of their time together was taken up with his recriminations, his misguided efforts to get her attention, but never once did I hear her make even the faintest of sympathetic noises, and I had to admire her resistance to being drawn in.

  All those unbidden invitations for her, day after day, but no word for me from Harry. Not that I was expecting any. Nor had I tried writing to him. And even if either of us had been any kind of writer, what would there be to say? We’d never spoken much except to make our arrangements, pressing and complicated as they were. And then, even when we’d been together, we hadn’t really dared speak for fear of giving ourselves away. Nor, of course, had we had the time for it.

  On the day of the new Queen’s arrival, Jane could well have cried off her walk because she’d started her monthly and was notably below par. Not that she’d have had to give Guildford the real reason, although it would’ve been amusing to see him squirm. She’d woken pale and puffy-eyed, and had asked me what to do with her used cloth, which was how I knew.

  She was uncharacteristically hesitant about handing her cloths to Goose, which was fair enough in a sense but I suspected there was more to it. After all, this was a girl who stripped off at the drop of a hat and didn’t think twice about using the chamberpot in company. Nor had Goose’s sensibilities ever seemed to be much of a priority for her. And anyway, we all bleed.

  No, there was something beyond the mere fact of her bleeding, I felt, that she didn’t like Goose and me knowing. That there was no heir on the way? But that was good news, surely, because look at Edward Courtenay: a pretender is trouble enough, but an heir to a pretender is a complication too far. Before the new Queen was in London and everything was settled for good, Jane would do best to stay unencumbered and have the fact well known. My guess was that she balked at anything at all being known about her and Guildford’s marriage, even if only that they weren’t so far producing an heir, and even if no one was sure that they’d ever actually tried. My suspicion was that she hated even to figure in the same thought as her husband.