The Lady of Misrule Read online

  She was with him up on the wall, though, that early-August afternoon when the new Queen rolled up. It was incredible that we hadn’t been informed that the procession was about to arrive, that someone or everyone had forgotten to let us know: Jane’s becoming irrelevant not about to begin but, it seemed, already happened and in one fell swoop. Unforewarned, though, we inadvertently had the best possible view. As it unfolded, none of us spoke a word, but all four of us leaned over the parapet, drawn to the edge and held transfixed as if we were in the middle of it, although that was exactly where we weren’t.

  The inner bailey was filling up as it had when the duke had been escorted into custody, but on this occasion everyone was on horseback and there were at least as many ladies as gentlemen. The expanse and depth of velvet down there had me half tempted to clamber over the parapet and try walking on it. I would never have guessed there were so many nobles in England. Harry would almost certainly be down there among them, ostentatious Mary-supporter that he’d needed to become for the sake of his son. It occurred to me that he was always completely taken up by whatever or whomever was directly in front of him – no bad thing if that was where you happened to be, which on plenty of occasions since Christmas I had – and there was more than enough going on down in the inner bailey to keep him there. I was safe from him bowling up to see me, full of that characteristic bonhomie which, I somehow just knew, would leave Jane cold.

  As we stood watching, one gentleman in particular managed to ride right through the gathering crowd. His horse was amazingly dressed – the gentleman himself, too, but it was the horse, draped in gold, that stole the show. Riding behind were two ladies, one hooded and her gem-beaded purple gown redolent of a winter fireside, the other shining blossom-white with a caul of silver threads over loosely knotted, honey-golden hair. I knew who they were; no one could fail to know them for the royal half-sisters who hadn’t seen each other for so many years. The old maid was the one who was to be crowned our queen; the other, half her age, was her heir.

  The Queen dismounted stiffly, which had me tense, as if to catch her should the need arise. Small, she didn’t stand tall, landing on the grass like a clot of something. Her radiant half-sister dropped like a skein down the flank of her horse. So much taller and standing taller still, that half-sister had the bearing of the old King, people said, if the sharp face of her mother. She looked at a bit of a loose end, with a self-conscious sway to her hips and her hands clasped in a stab at modesty.

  Her older sister crossed the grass, stepping cautiously but hopefully, as if to approach a cat, and that was when I saw the figures on their knees: a lady and three gentlemen, one of them the lute player who’d been the boy-prisoner. It was him to whom the Queen went first, crouching down as if to the child he’d been when he’d been taken from home, offering him her hands, raising him up, that lanky lad, and gathering him to her.

  Look at her, that spinster of nearly forty, exiled for three-quarters of her life in a succession of backwaters, that old-fashioned dresser with her high colour and stooped shoulders: how on earth had she done it? How had she managed to walk into the Tower and take it from the King’s designated successor? Not with any charm or charisma, nor any army, but simply by believing in her people. She’d appealed to her subjects’ sense of fairness and if the sea of velvet down there had failed me, the sense of righteousness alone would have borne me up.

  Guildford snapped back from the parapet as if severed from it. Nothing unusual in Jane keeping her thoughts to herself, but Guildford’s silence during the past quarter of an hour or so was as much a marvel as anything else I’d seen. He couldn’t hide what he was feeling, though: it had hit him, I saw, that nothing was as he’d thought. He’d believed what he’d been told, he’d swallowed it whole – the King’s half-sister’s unsuitability for the throne, the inevitability of his own wife’s succession – but now saw how wrong he’d been. I might’ve expected to feel vindicated – See? – and in a way I did, but at the same time I understood something of how he felt and, quite unexpectedly, my heart flipped and I had to quash an instinct to get hold of him, turn him away from the scene.

  Back in our room, Jane still said nothing, and didn’t even look at me. More unusually, she didn’t go to her books. Didn’t go anywhere. Stood as if undecided quite what to do, as if there were actual options. For once, she was the distraction. I took up my stitching but she began pacing and then she said, ‘It wasn’t my doing.’ She didn’t specify what, but she didn’t need to. Her being here, the reason she’d been escorted across the Tower precinct and why she was still residing in the Partridges’ house. I didn’t offer any response because I hadn’t been addressed: she was merely thinking aloud. And anyway, it was hardly news, it hardly needed remarking on. It was impossible to imagine her having hatched that particular plan, going to her father-in-law and saying, Here’s an idea, how about me for Queen? And if anyone ever doubted it, they should spend a couple of days shut up in a room with her, because all she cared about was whatever was in her books.

  Nothing else mattered to her, not the smallest of pleasures – or none that I’d ever detected. No touch of sunshine to her back, nor dish of strawberries on our tray, nor blackbird-brilliant dusk at our window. Never had I seen her pause to breathe something in, unlike me. Compared, I was a mess of hankerings. Even in the few minutes we’d been back in our room, I’d longed for a noseful of honeysuckle scent, a mouthful of pastry crust, the circling of my wrist by a glass bead bracelet that I’d left behind at Shelley Place.

  What would Jane have wanted with being Queen? The throne would have taken her from her books, her councillors would have interrupted her reading. Becoming Queen wasn’t something she’d done but something that had been done to her. It was the usual situation writ large, although very large, granted, because for most girls of any standing it was marriage that was done to them. Not that she hadn’t also had to endure that.

  She stood looking out of the window, her back to me, and said, ‘I didn’t want to be Queen.’

  I wasn’t stupid enough to believe that she cared what I thought; she was rehearsing her account, if only for herself. ‘I did say no. I said it and said it.’ For all the good it did me.

  Yes, but for girls such as her, from families such as hers, there was no saying no: not to the husbands chosen for them, nor, as it happened, to thrones. Books, though, by contrast, didn’t make her do anything, didn’t ask anything of her. They didn’t even speak until she opened their covers.

  She glanced at me and now it was definitely me, rather than the window, to whom she said, ‘Guildford’s mother was the one who said it first.’ Then, ‘Which was why I didn’t take it seriously.’

  I didn’t know Guildford’s mother – but I got the gist.

  ‘I was visiting for the day,’ she backtracked to explain. ‘I’d married Guildford but no way would I ever stay with the Dudleys.’

  Which was no explanation at all, because what did that mean? Married but not married. A very Jane sort of marriage. A so-far-celibate marriage, probably. Was that, then, how she’d resisted her parents’ plans for her? Useless though that resistance was, of course, because what did she think would happen in the end? For how long did she think she could refuse to stay with the Dudleys? I put down my sewing, to show I was listening. I might not be able to make sense of everything that she was saying, but I did want her to keep talking.

  She was back to speaking to the window, away from me, into the distance. ‘His mother was always trying to get me to stay, and I just thought this was some new ploy of hers. She said the time was near, the King was really ill, and I was his successor so I needed to be close by.’

  She shrugged to show how she’d regarded it at the time – unworthy of any credence – and added in her defence, ‘My own mother didn’t say anything.’ But in the silence that followed, she might’ve been hearing again her mother’s withholding and listening anew to the betrayal in it, because what was the betting that her mother
had known very well what was going on. ‘She didn’t say anything, but she did make me stay. There was the usual huge row, but this time she didn’t back me up and I ended up having to stay.’

  She related it to me as if it were something I’d understand – the usual huge row, the being backed up or not, the staying or not staying – but I had no idea how her kind of people lived their lives, no idea what understandings existed between them.

  And where was Guildford in all this? Presumably he’d been there, at the Dudley home: he must’ve been the purpose of those visits; surely she wouldn’t have gone there to visit his mother. But I didn’t dare ask, for fear of putting her off her stride. I’d sit tight and take whatever I was given.

  ‘So, we all had dinner’ – a deliberately false chirpiness to make clear it hadn’t been the most convivial of evenings – ‘and then off we went to bed.’

  Her and Guildford? If there’d only ever been day-long visits to the Dudleys before, then that could’ve been the first time. No longer a celibate marriage, then, perhaps. Although only perhaps. ‘But next morning, I went into my mother’s room and lay down on her bed and said, “I’m ill and I need to go home.’”

  Well, that told me something, if only that she hadn’t spent the night alongside her mother. No grounds for concluding she’d been in the same bed as her husband, still less for thinking that anything had happened between them. But wherever she’d slept and whatever had or hadn’t gone on, clearly she hadn’t been reassured because come morning, she was at least as desperate to leave that place. If she had slept with Guildford, then she was no convert to what my mother called ‘marital relations’. I felt the sting of pity for her. Mind you, I doubted it could have been all that much better for Guildford.

  ‘And my mother said,’ here she turned sing-song, to disparage her, “‘No, you’re not, and stop playing up, and don’t show me up”

  Then she dropped the act to give me a direct look – Mothers – and before I knew it, I’d raised my eyebrows in reply: Mothers indeed.

  Funny, though, to think of Jane as showing anyone up. Her mother should try me for size.

  ‘But I just lay there and said, “I’m ill,” and I just kept saying it, and in the end she took me back to Chelsea.

  ‘But then a couple of days later, Guildford’s sister Mary was at the steps.’ She added, ‘Mary’s all right.’ Then, ‘Which was why they sent her.’

  Because she’d find it hard to refuse Mary.

  ‘Poor Mary in her barge, refusing to come indoors, crying and saying, “You’ve got to come back, you’ve just got to come back.” Saying something had happened, but she wouldn’t – or couldn’t – say what.’

  In my mind’s eye, I saw a fragile, overdressed Mary Dudley, distraught in her lavishly cushioned barge. I might’ve been tempted to untie that mooring rope.

  Jane said, ‘Even if I did suspect it was all some nonsense of her mother’s, we couldn’t just turn her away, could we.’

  No?

  ‘We couldn’t send her all the way back on her own.’ She threw up her hands: What could we do? ‘So, we went all the way back with her, our barge behind hers.’

  She left the window for the table and settled, chin in hands. ‘When we got to the Dudleys’, we went into Hall but no one came. All that time on our barge and then there we were, just standing in their Hall for ages.’

  I almost smirked at this, it held something of the pique of a small child in need of a snack.

  ‘And there was Mary, looking nervous but insisting we stay. It was ridiculous.’

  And then I did feel for Mary; regardless of whatever she’d been put up to, I felt for her, stuck there with a fuming Jane. ‘And my mother pretending she was clueless, and then at last in came Mary’s mother’ – she was babbling now, in a bid for my sympathy – ‘and it’s all Hello-dear to me and to my mother it’s May-I-have-a little-word-please-Frances, and off went the pair of them’ – a sweep of her arm, doorwards – ‘and I said to Mary, “Right, that really is it, that’s enough, I’m off—’”

  I interrupted, curious: ‘Didn’t you worry that this was something to do with Guildford – that something had happened to Guildford?’

  ‘No,’ and not a missed beat, unless you counted my own because it was breathtaking, that nonchalance of hers regarding her husband’s welfare. Ridiculous he might well be, but harmless enough, surely; I didn’t think I could have been so dismissive of him. ‘But then the door opened and there was Guildford’s father and some of his cronies’ – her pitch and pace on the rise – ‘and they came up to me and they knelt.’ Here, at last, she did pause, to glare at me. A response was required, it seemed, but what was I was supposed to feel, picturing those men on their knees at her feet? In truth, I couldn’t quite see them because I was still lost somewhere in the various comings and goings, the barges here and there, the lack of snack.

  ‘Knelt,’ this time the disgust loud and clear, so I could oblige with a disapproving frown. ‘And you know what I thought?’

  No, but go on, tell me.

  ‘I thought they were making fun of me.’

  And there I did have to catch myself because for one disloyal moment it was irresistible, the vision she’d conjured. Because she did act superior: even if she couldn’t help it, she did, and, from what she was saying, everyone else knew it too. It wasn’t just me who suffered the rough end of it.

  ‘They think,’ she said, ‘that I see myself as too good for Guildford.’

  Which brought me to my senses. But you are, I wanted to say, aren’t you? I mean, anyone would be. Even I would be.

  She sat back in her chair. ‘Well, I wasn’t going to stand there and take that; I asked Mary to tell my boatmen I was leaving. But then in came my mother, to tell me the King had died.’

  It seemed to strike her anew, and suddenly all the belligerence was gone; instead, she was wide-eyed and bereft. ‘I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, I’d known he was ill, really ill, of course I had. Everyone knew it –’ she looked to me, and I didn’t deny it ‘– but, well, I don’t know, but …’

  And I saw it, then: how she lived her life in the certainty that thinking everything through was enough to protect against the untoward.

  ‘And then’ – and now she sounded truly amazed – ‘I couldn’t stop crying.’

  Not merely tearful in front of people but later owning up to it, and to me of all people.

  ‘And I said no. I said the crown was his sister’s. I said no, and I said it and said it.’

  And really, I wondered, what more could she have done? Punched and kicked the duke and bolted from the room? And then what? Because if everyone said she was Queen, then she was, and for one suffocating instant I felt the horror of it closing down on me, as if that fate had been my own.

  ‘But the duke was saying, “It’s not for you to decide,” and my mother said that if I didn’t do it then England would be taken over by papists and Spaniards; and in came my father and it was the same, Stop snivelling, do your duty, think what happens to this country if you don’t. And then Guildford—’ The recollection brought her up sharp. ‘All lovey-dovey.’

  Amazing that he’d thought that would cut some ice.

  ‘And then…’ A huge sigh, she’d had enough. ‘Then there was a banquet, that evening, for those who could stomach it,’ of which she clearly hadn’t been one, ‘and the next day we came here,’ she concluded, ‘and there you have it.’

  Did I, though? I wasn’t so sure that I did. This was the most – by far – that she’d ever said to me, but somehow I was none the wiser. All that barging about, and Chelsea and banqueting, the duplicitous mother-in-law and the husband who wasn’t quite a husband. Then again, what would I have said to anyone if I had to explain what had been happening, at the same time, to me? Would I have managed to make any more sense? A clock cupboard, a house like a lantern, a lady of misrule.

  It had begun the previous December. The days were no more than daubs of light, not that w
e at Shelley Place glimpsed much sky from behind the hefts of door, the fastened shutters and lined hangings, sore-eyed as we were in the spew from the long-smouldering fires and fatty, spitting wicks. We too were burning up: sick of preserved food, salt-addled and dry-mouthed, our headaches worsened by the interminable candlelight. How can such short days feel so very long?

  But then, as the month crawled towards its miserable end, bang came Christmas and Shelley Place shook off its torpor to put on its glad rags. We Tilneys threw a party for everyone from miles around – those mud-mired miles, scoured by wind – not because my parents were sociable but because it was a Tilney tradition, and most of Suffolk, it seemed to me, came trekking through the biting gusts to knock red-nosed at our door, all but insensible until revived with our spiced ale and pastries and a fire lavish with logs.

  It had been a good year, with a harvest at last and, for once, no war or plague, and more people than usual turned up that Christmas, many of whom I only ever saw at our annual party. Crowded into Hall were the kersey-bundled with the silk-draped, those who were lively with lice and others decked with gems, all of them side by side and then, later, hand in hand as the dancing demanded, and the volume of chatter was a physical presence of its own, strong enough to lift the roof. By early evening, we’d been fed twice and ful-somely, dinner and supper: Hall was girded with tables, the dishes breathing steam and the air zinging with cloves. And for those of us at the top table, there’d been special delights – jewel-bright sugary jellies and gilded stars of spice-bread, and a wine heavy with honey that kept coming my way.

  I’d lost track of how long I’d been there with the food and drink coming and going, the musicians sawing at their strings: it could’ve been days, judging from how tired I was. But, I knew, I’d need to be back on my feet before too long, because there was more dancing to come, and sure enough the tables were soon being cleared, dismantled and stacked against the panelling, and the musicians were manfully preparing to strike up, summoning the verve from God knows where so that it would’ve been churlish not to honour their efforts.