The Lady of Misrule Read online

  The bishop – Goose had been right, Stephen Gardiner was back to being a bishop – had departed too, although not, of course, for the delights of Southwark. He had work to do, serious work, not only as bishop but as Lord Chancellor, now, and Keeper of the Great Seal. This we gleaned not from Goose – not known for her interest in official appointments – but from the Partridges, over dinner one evening. That morning, Jane had looked up from her book as I’d returned from a kitchen trip, and announced, ‘We’re dining with the Partridges later.’ The offer had been there since the very first evening, but she hadn’t so far taken them up on it. When I asked if I should wait up for her, she frowned, puzzled and a little displeased at the misunderstanding: ‘We, I said: you’re coming.’

  I’d assumed she and Guildford were to be the guests.

  ‘So, be ready,’ she said, ‘for six o’clock.’

  That evening, at the Partridges’ table, Jane was keen for news of the outside world and unabashed in pressing her hosts for it. This was a side of her I hadn’t seen before, and hadn’t imagined. Who, she wanted to know as we tucked into beef pie, had the Queen appointed to her Council? I anticipated a long list of names I didn’t know but actually Mr Partridge just said, ‘Everyone,’ and checked with his wife, ‘Wouldn’t you say so?’

  Mouth full, she nodded.

  ‘All persuasions,’ he elaborated. ‘She wants to listen to absolutely everyone. It’s a huge council,’ which was when Mrs Partridge chipped in with the news of Bishop Gardiner’s promotion, adding, ‘And I didn’t think she liked him, because he didn’t help her mother back in those days.’

  Mr Partridge said cheerfully, ‘Oh, I don’t think anyone much likes him,’ and Jane almost smiled when she added, ‘And I think that’s mutual.’

  ‘Makes him a good choice, though, I suppose.’ Impartial, I took Mr Partridge to mean.

  Jane said, ‘He does like Edward Courtenay.’

  ‘No, did,’ Mrs Partridge whispered, ‘because have you heard about him?’

  Jane said, ‘We hear of little else.’

  ‘The only person who hasn’t heard,’ said Mr Partridge, ‘is the Queen herself, who’s still thinking she’ll marry him.’

  But Mrs Partridge wasn’t having that: ‘So people say. That’s what they like to think, Nathaniel, but I’m not sure she’s that—’ stupid? Whatever the word, she thought better of using it.

  Nevertheless, there was a pause, in recognition that she might’ve gone too far.

  Then Jane piped up, ‘Is Mass being said?’

  The Partridges appeared embarrassed by this cutting to the chase. Mrs Partridge looked to her husband, who nodded in reply but busied himself with his piece of pie.

  Jane asked, ‘And does the Lady Elizabeth go along?’

  Mr Partridge considered, ‘Well, we’ve heard she’s been ill, lately.’

  ‘Headaches,’ Mrs Partridge explained. ‘Chills.’

  Jane said, ‘Well, she’s going to have to become an invalid if she wants to escape it for much longer. The Queen won’t allow her to keep getting away with it.’

  An uncomfortable lack of response from the Partridges.

  ‘She’s either going to have to start going to Mass,’ Jane said, ‘or come out and say she won’t, and – I can tell you – she’ll never do that’

  Would you, though? But yes, I realised, she almost certainly would. And already had, with her comment in the chapel about the baker. But now she was shut in the Tower, with no one to hear what she had to say, whereas Elizabeth Tudor was still at liberty, in the public eye: a vision to sustain those who needed it, which might just be what she was keeping in mind as she trod her careful line, and wasn’t there something to be said for that?

  ‘Yesterday,’ Mrs Partridge said in a hushed tone, ‘someone threw a knife at the Queen’s chaplain at Paul’s Cross,’ adding hastily, ‘It missed, but—’ imagine the commotion.

  Jane shrugged, as if to say it was nothing, it was only to be expected. ‘It’s all already happened,’ she said; ‘we already know better. People won’t be turned back to the old days. No one will take it.’

  No one. She was talking as if I weren’t there – nominally Catholic me – which didn’t much matter because I was accustomed to her bluntness. But as far as I was aware, we knew nothing of the religious persuasion of the Partridges, even if there was the suggestion of nothing-hard-and-fast about it.

  ‘Well,’ Mrs Partridge said, with her serene smile, ‘the Queen has said that everyone should practise according to their conscience, unless Parliament ever chooses to rule otherwise.’

  Jane made a face, derisive. ‘Yes, but you know why that is? It’s because she can’t imagine that anyone, given the choice, would be anything other than a Roman Catholic. Still, I’d like to take her up on it – can we have someone preach here at the chapel?’

  ‘Actually, no.’ Mr Partridge, apologetic. ‘Because that, I’m afraid, she has forbidden.’

  Jane was puzzled: ‘Preaching here?’

  ‘Anywhere,’ admitted Mrs Partridge.

  I watched her take it in. Forbidden. The clergy back merely to conducting Mass, and nothing more to say for themselves.

  ‘Not that it’s stopped some of the bishops,’ Mrs Partridge confided: ‘because there’ve been arrests.’

  Jane put down her spoon. ‘Who?’

  ‘Bishop Hooper,’ said Mr Partridge, ‘and Ridley.’

  ‘Rogers,’ his wife spoke over him, ‘Latimer.’

  ‘And the archbishop?’

  Cranmer, the author of all the changes, and the champion all those years ago of Anne Boleyn.

  The Partridges demurred.

  Jane was confounded. ‘Really?’ she pressed them. ‘Not Thomas Cranmer? Are you sure?’ Because him, surely, above all others.

  The Partridges looked equally perplexed.

  Matter-of-fact, Jane concluded, ‘Oh but she’s biding her time, isn’t she. She’s making him sweat. Because he’s the biggest prize. She’ll save him for last,’ and I marvelled again at her worldliness. Then, ‘There’s the King’s funeral still to do, of course, and I imagine she’ll claim him, now, for Rome.’

  A Catholic funeral for the Protestant king.

  ‘There’s been no decision, is what we’ve been told,’ said Mr Partridge cautiously.

  Jane dismissed this. ‘But it’s what she’ll do.’

  Mr Partridge still wouldn’t quite have it: ‘I really don’t know, you know: the vigil, for instance, is still in darkness.’

  ‘Darkness?’ I hadn’t been able to stop myself, because what kind of vigil was that?

  Jane said, ‘Candles are papist.’

  I knew what she meant but, really, ‘Are they?’ because weren’t they also just candles? Pointedly, I looked around at the various candles that lit our soirée. Candles also just light up darkness. And darkness around a coffin was just wrong, surely, because what comfort was that to a soul?

  Jane ignored me. ‘It’d be monstrous of her,’ she said, ‘to do that to him, to go against his final wishes, against everything that ever mattered to him.’

  The Partridges looked sympathetic.

  ‘I mean,’ she insisted, ‘to do that to her brother! The brother she always said she loved so much.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s why she’ll do it, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘I mean, if she does. She’ll want him to have a proper burial—’

  Now Jane did turn to me, fierce-eyed.

  ‘–as she sees it,’ I finished.

  ‘After everything he did,’ she said, tight-lipped. ‘After what he lived for. His whole life was dedicated to moving his people away from this …’ words failed her, ‘pointless … magic.’

  I managed, ‘I suppose that’s not how she sees it.’

  Icily, she made sure to have the last word: ‘I don’t care how she “sees” it; she’s wrong.’

  And so it was, too, the following day, when Goose flourished one of the new coins, like a child with a find: ‘Look!’

>   Jane didn’t look, or not properly, bar the merest glance to ascertain what it was that Goose had in the palm of her hand.

  I did though, craning, making an appreciative noise for the sake of politeness.

  Goose carried on, artlessly: ‘What’s it say?’ She followed the inscription with the tip of her index finger.

  I doubted I’d be able to make sense of it so I drew back, but she didn’t let it rest. ‘What’s it say, here?’ She advanced on Jane, who tutted, glanced and said, ‘Veritas temporis filia,’ as if Goose were somehow at fault for something.

  But Goose laughed because for her – as for me – that answer was no answer at all. ‘No, but what does that mean?’

  Again Jane’s response was brusque. ‘It means, truth is the daughter of time.’

  Goose’s protest was predictable: ‘What’s that?’ If you’ve got something to say, say it.

  ‘It means’ – impatiently – ‘you can’t hide the truth for ever.’ Then she looked at Goose full-square to pronounce, ‘But it’s superstition.’

  Which didn’t help matters, because, ‘What is?’

  ‘Everything that she’ – the Queen – ‘regards as the truth.’ Said as flatly as if she were passing on news, of, say, a blocked thoroughfare: some inconvenience of which a person might like to take account. ‘It’s just superstition.’ And as if that decided it, she went back to her book.

  ‘But … she thinks it’s the truth,’ Goose tried: a genuine effort to comprehend what she was being told.

  ‘Yes,’ Jane didn’t look up. ‘She does. She thinks it’s the truth.’

  Goose slid her gaze to mine but I looked away. I was saying nothing.

  I was thinking, though. I was thinking that if Jane believed the Queen to be deluded and ignorant, then presumably she judged her unfit to rule. But if not Mary Tudor, then who did Jane deem worthy of the throne? Not the sly sister, as she saw her: I didn’t imagine Jane was any supporter of Lady Elizabeth. And Lady Elizabeth could never rule in place of the current queen because, if not one half-sister, then how the other? So, no half-sisters. But if no half-sisters, then who? Who, to Jane’s mind, should be ruling England? She’d claimed she didn’t want to be Queen, but for someone who made such a lot of noise about telling the truth, my suspicion was that she wasn’t being entirely truthful with herself.

  Jane’s scathing comments were nothing compared to how far some people would go to make their opposition known. A knife aimed at a chaplain later that week was wielded rather than thrown, which made it brutally effective. And perhaps the new Queen did end up listening to her conscience, but perhaps it was the increasingly knife-happy populace that worried her into playing safe. Whatever the reason, her brother was given a Protestant funeral at Westminster Abbey, conducted by his beloved Archbishop Cranmer, while the Queen kept to a requiem Mass said at the same time in her own chapel by the newly favoured Bishop Gardiner.

  The radiant half-sister stayed away from both, Mrs Partridge told us that evening, when she was up in our room. Not even the laying to rest of a little brother, it seemed, would have that princess show her true colours. Jane made no comment while Mrs Partridge was with us but as soon as we were left on our own, she said, with a longing the like of which I’d never heard from her, ‘I should have been there.’ She was standing at the window as she spoke, looking away over the green, and I felt I should back away, leave her be, but I’d have only gone into the bedroom and what good would that have been to her – me on the other side of the door as if waiting for her to finish her mourning? So I stayed, standing there – almost, but not quite, at her side – until, with a sigh, she returned to her books.

  At least her friend was at peace. I hoped she hadn’t heard the rumour – as I had, at the Fitzalans’ – that he’d have died sooner and more mercifully had her father-in-law not engaged the services of a woman to administer potions which prolonged his agonies. The King had been kept alive, people said, day after day, bloating and peeling and leaking until he’d signed that document in favour of Jane: splintering his ribs with his coughs and vomiting up the lining of his stomach, and all the time the duke at his bedside with that piece of paper and Sign this, why don’t you sign this … Was it possible to keep a dying boy alive? I didn’t know, but certainly the Fitzalans had been convinced.

  The duke’s own death would be over in an instant and there’d be no fighting about his funeral because traitors don’t have funerals: a dead traitor disappears as if he never existed in the first place. Guildford had been saying that his father wouldn’t even come to trial but then, when the date of the trial was made known to us, he’d switched instead to predicting a favourable outcome. ‘She’s pardoned everyone else,’ he’d hector Jane, as if it were her personal failing that the pardon hadn’t yet come. And in a way, I understood his refusal to believe it, because what did we know, shut up in the Tower while the new world took shape outside? It was possible, I supposed, that at any time we’d hear that the duke had indeed walked free. After all, Jane’s father had, so it was no wonder that Guildford continued to hope for the best for his own father. And proper, too, surely. And hadn’t he and Jane themselves just been indicted but reliably informed that they had nothing to fear? Their own forthcoming trial, Mr Partridge assured Jane, was merely for show. But then, they were children, or almost, not far off, and I remembered Goose’s words, You can’t do that to a kid.

  But the duke’s trial went ahead on the 18th of August and he was found guilty. The following day, up on the wall, Guildford was testing Jane’s patience. The wind was testing mine, although it seemed churlish to resent it, given the stifling conditions that we’d recently endured. Be careful what you wish for. Guildford’s attendant was the only one of us in relatively good spirits: hopping up, startlingly, to perch on the parapet. I’d been at the Tower for exactly a calendar month. Sometimes it seemed to me that we’d been living at the Partridges’ a long time, and sometimes it didn’t. That particular day, it did.

  I was no more keen on Guildford than Jane was but his reaction to the verdict was understandable, because hadn’t he been Daddy’s little prince? Literally so, in the end, if only for a matter of days. Surely it was natural, to say nothing of honourable, for him to be believing the best for his father until the very last moment, and I wished Jane could find it in herself to humour him, if not for his sake then for ours, so that we didn’t have to listen to his whining. But I might as well have been wishing for the moon.

  He was saying yet again, ‘She’s pardoned everyone else.’

  ‘Not everyone,’ Jane corrected him. Mr Partridge had told us of two other men who’d had trials and guilty verdicts. Their names had meant nothing to me, but he and Jane had agreed they were odd choices for the block.

  ‘Practically everyone,’ Guildford dismissed those two unfortunates, ‘including your own father.’

  Her traitorous father.

  ‘My father’s a fool,’ she said mildly.

  ‘Yes,’ he seized on it, ‘whereas my father’s useful. He ran this country for two years, he got England on an even keel after all the mess. He did an amazing job, you know he did. Everyone knows it. No one else could’ve done what he did. And I’m sure the Queen’s a good woman and everything, but so what? She has to govern this country now: that’s what she has to do, and she’ll need all the help she can get. And not’ – this was said with disgust – ‘from a load of clerics.’

  His father reinvented as good-natured helpmeet: I had to admire his gall.

  ‘And everyone listens to my father.’

  Not any more, they don’t.

  ‘And he’d give it all he’s got.’ He kicked distractedly at the parapet. ‘He’s incapable of doing otherwise: you know that. He lives to work. And he’s loyal.’ We were back to that. ‘He’ll do anything to stay loyal to the monarch.’

  ‘Yes; on which note,’ Jane remarked, ‘have you seen him lately?’

  Guildford was thrown: it was a nonsensical question because ‘You
know they won’t let me see him.’ He gave her a searching look: what did she mean? What was she up to?

  ‘Oh, but you can see him anyway.’ Her upturned little face, in the sunshine, was unreadable. ‘You can see him if you look out of your window towards chapel when the bell’s ringing for Mass.’

  He was still staring at her, clearly as baffled as I was, so she spelled it out: ‘He’s recanted, Guildford. Turned his back on everything he fought for, all these years, just like that. Down on his knees again for the Virgin Mary. That’s how far he’ll go to be loyal.’ And with that she was off, leaving him gawping in her wake, the wind contemptuous of his hair. At a complete loss, he turned from the sight of her, which meant that inadvertently he turned to me and then he was staring at me as he’d been staring after her, confounded. To spare him, I rose – it had me reel, the rush to my feet – and was on my way, hurrying after my charge.

  When the door to our room was shut behind us, I demanded of her, ‘Is that true?’

  She looked affronted: why else would she have said it? So it was true, then: she had seen the duke. She was rarely at our window but she’d seen him on his way to Mass, which meant she’d been watching for him, she’d known to wait for his capitulation. Something else that look of hers said was: Who are you to question me? Well, I was the one with her husband’s stare burned on to the back of my eyes. She’d delivered that most hurtful of blows then hadn’t so much as glanced back at him. ‘Did you really have to tell him like that?’ He hadn’t deserved that.

  ‘Listen,’ she was at least as loud back at me, ‘his father is despicable. Imagine betraying your most fundamental beliefs for a few more years of life.’

  Yes, and imagine telling his son like that.

  And, yes, actually, anyway, since you ask, I could imagine it, I could imagine perfectly well trading a prayer book for my life.

  ‘Elizabeth, all this –’ she threw an arm wide, encompassing who knew what, but her anger was unmistakable is the duke’s fault.’

  All that had befallen her. And of course she was right: what did I know? A mere month of her life, I’d known her, and it had felt like a long one, but lived pleasantly enough in here. I knew just about nothing of her life before our time together here in the Tower. Except this: the duke had taken her up, which she hadn’t wanted in the first place, and now he’d dumped her, which was even worse.