The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘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.

  He was unmissable, but more than that, he was a guest, so how did he contrive to disappear into his host’s chapel’s clock cupboard? He couldn’t even pretend to want to go to our chapel, reformist as he was. No genuflecting, for him, in front of our secret St Sunday.

  I never saw how he managed to slip away because I was always already there, ahead of him, waiting, shoulder to shoulder with that skeletal clock-mechanism, its bared teeth. He probably did it in plain sight: to my parents, a breezy I’ll see myself out, and then, in the courtyard, no word at all to his own men, just that good-natured shrug, and then off, who knew where or why. Because who was going to ask? Servants don’t ask. Or perhaps he’d even have mounted his horse, he’d be taking leave of my parents but Oh!, a sudden recollection of some task that needed doing and then, mindful of their comfort, You go hack inside, keep warm, don’t mind me, I can look after myself and they’d assume he had business to do with our cellarer, or perhaps our stablemaster or warrener, because there was always business to be done between our neighbouring households. And anyway, he was family, as good as. Your home is my home.

  Sometimes, I imagined, he’d have said nothing at all but just walked away, a hand raised in his wake, a half-wave, as brazen as that, just because he could. Harry could get away with anything. No one ever doubted him. No one ever thought anything but the best of him, because he always did his best for everyone.

  When he opened the alcove door, it didn’t matter how he’d got there; all that mattered was fitting him inside there with me. It was difficult enough to get the door shut on the pair of us and then there was the clock’s foliot of which to keep clear, the arcing of that arm one way then back again, as slow and steady in the semi-darkness as a sleeper’s breath.

  Old kneeling-cushions were heaped in there but even so I’d have Harry underneath me – better padded, he should be the one to suffer the flagstones – and no sooner was he down there than I’d be on top of him, ducking beneath the two hunks of stones that dangled on their chains, edging blindly downwards, and I’d be kissing him: kissing and kissing, my tongue circling his as if that were a way to wind myself open, because we didn’t have time to feel our way and I never found it much easier at the start than the first time. I wanted him sliding into me with ease; I wanted instantly the ease that I knew was coming, but at first it was a blundering, an ill-fit because this was new, for me: I was seventeen and this was all still new. I’d have to work my way down on to him and for a notch of one of those clock-wheels we’d be getting nowhere but then, before I knew it, my resistance was instead a grip, I’d have him in my grip and then we were laughing as much as we could with our mouths pressed together because there we were, and we were on our way.

  However much I’d needed my sleep and however swiftly it had come, I woke exhausted in the morning, having lain braced all night for the courtyard clock-strikes which were all too ready to extract another hour from the night’s dwindling store. But at least the bells did what they had to do and then, for a whole hour at a time, left me in peace – unlike sweet-breathing Jane, sleeping soundly beside me and only ever shifting, or so it seemed, precisely as I’d succeeded in nodding off. I’d rather she had snored: some proper disturbance to justify my grievance.

  When she rose, some time after the clock struck five, I played dead. If this was habitual for her, this early rising, then we’d have a problem, because I’d never been one for mornings. Rigid in my refusal to face the dawning day, nevertheless I must’ve drifted off because some time later there she was, beside the bed, regarding me with animal-like curiosity, as if about to extend a paw to worry at me.

  She asked, ‘Are you all right?’

  Doubtful that plain old tiredness would be sufficient excuse, I made a bit more of it: a headache, I told her, and it did the trick: ‘Sleep it off,’ she advised, turning away, and clearly glad to be going.

  Well, good riddance. And anyway, what would I be doing if I did get up and follow her into the main room? She was more than capable of looking after herself and this was very much her world, even if she was now held prisoner in it. Me, I was all at sea, hunching beneath the coverlet to make the most of my precious time alone in that bed with only the odd sound from next door – an occasional off-carpet footfall, some object placed on the table – to ripple my half-sleep.

  Later, when I surfaced, my head was full of nothing-noises from home, of summertime early mornings at Shelley Place: a shutter let go too soon; a pail dropped on to cobbles; my mother sneezing extravagantly; and my father whistling for the dogs. An odd music that I hadn’t realised I’d ever heard, let alone could sing to myself in my sleep, but there it was, as familiar to me as the rhythmic nudge of blood in my temples. Then suddenly it was gone again and irretrievable.

  When eventually I went through to the main room, Jane was dressed, at the table with a book open in front of her and the fortification of several more to one side. The glance she gave me was ready and friendly enough but her focus lagged, reluctant to leave the page. She flapped a hand towards a tray. ‘Breakfast, if you’d like.’

  God, no, no breakfast, thank you: not at the best of times and this certainly wasn’t that. But if I didn’t sit down to breakfast, then what? I ambled over to the window, where I noticed – down below, outside – somethi
ng that had escaped me in the afternoon light of the previous day: the green was failing in patches to live up to its name, because on it were the ghosts of tents that had been put up, some days back, for the men charged with the defence of the then-Queen. Those tents had made their mark but within a few more grass-growing days it would be as if they’d never been. The men would in all likelihood be back home now, drinking with everyone else to the proper Queen, the real one, the rightful one.

  And what would I be doing, if I weren’t here? Nothing much more productive. Practising the art of slipping by, sliding from view, making myself minimally useful in the hope of keeping everyone off my back. ‘Help your mother,’ my father always said. But my mother’s line was ‘If you want something doing, do it yourself.’

  And anyway, she was beyond help. Everything was too much for her – it never stopped raining or instead it was stifling; the servants were shifty, her physician sceptical, the dogs a disgrace, her daughters didn’t know they were born and her husband hadn’t the time of day for her. She couldn’t possibly feed any more people and the house was falling down around our ears while the tenants asked more and more of us and her headaches were worse than ever. Me, she’d given up on years ago. ‘Head in the clouds’, was what she said of me to anyone who’d listen, and anyone else too.

  Jane – across the room from me – had her head in a book. Did she do that at home? Did she get into trouble for it? We had no books at home; I couldn’t even imagine what books we would have, if we did, and they wouldn’t be covered, as hers were, in midnight-blue corded silk or filigree-lavish vermilion satin. What could we possibly learn from books that we didn’t already know?

  Dreamer, my mother always said of me, and always with irritation – although, to be fair, that was how she said pretty much everything. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Secretive, she’d said of me, even back when I wasn’t. I didn’t dream. I daydreamed sometimes, yes, but never had anything as serious, as hopeful for myself as an actual dream. Other girls had dreams of anything and everything, it seemed to me. My cousins and the girls who came to visit us and in the houses we visited, girls whom I could’ve called friends if I’d wanted to kid myself: those girls were always wide-eyed and hopeful, hugging themselves, barely able to contain themselves when they speculated on a coming Christmas, or some new piece of clothing, or a potential suitor. But what was the point? No one was ever any prettier for a length of ribbon or gold stitching – not really, not if you really looked – and Christmases come and go.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t think of my future. On the contrary, there was no escaping it; it was everywhere ahead of me like the horizon. Though like the horizon, ever-receding. But even if I did ever manage to catch it up, it would be – bar the details – more of the same. I could never quite imagine myself married but I supposed one day I probably would be and then I’d have my own floors to sweep and linen to patch, my own grumpy servants and tetchy priests to placate. More of the same, bar the details, and the problem was that I’d already had enough.

  Jane was staring into nowhere, gnawing her lower lip: she was thinking, as far as I could tell, and strenuously. She was already in her future as a wife – albeit little more than a child-wife – and I wondered what she made of it. I didn’t envy her being married to a boy. The boys I came across were boring: their high opinion of themselves, of what they considered themselves due, and their contempt for me as a girl. At least Harry was past all that.

  I gestured at her book. ‘What’s in it?’

  My question threw her. ‘It’s – I’m translating—’ but she halted; it was probably obvious I’d already lost interest, or, more accurately, had had no real interest in the first place.

  And, anyway, it had been none of my business to ask.

  Translating for whom, I puzzled: who was here to translate for?

  Returning to her page, she added, ‘There’s Mass, apparently, at ten.’ If you want it.

  I said nothing. You think you know me, but you don’t. I had no intention of going to Mass while I was here. There was no one watching me, so why should I go? Whatever else this incarceration was, it could be freedom from chapel; it might as well be that. Lolling on the window seat, listening to housemartin-chunter beneath the eaves, I drew up and clasped my knees. I’d stay here: this space at the window would be mine. She could have that table and those books, and the breakfast if she wanted it, and I could have this view of the outside world or, for as long as we were here, what would have to count as the outside world. It might not be much, but it was something.

  The soon-to-be-crowned Queen would be stopping en route at least once a day for Mass; every respectable household between here and Ipswich would be frantically preparing to welcome her. Ipswich was practically home for me; she’d been in my home town while I was here in what was about to become hers. She was heading for the Tower to prepare for her coronation. How different her journey from Ipswich to London would be from mine: no dressing down, no keeping her head down (although in her time she’d had to do more than enough of that). And no rush, because she had her subjects to receive in their thousands, all along the way. They were flocking to her, the Fitzalans had said: the earl had sent news home of people in their thousands tripping over themselves to kneel at the side of the road. Thousands upon thousands of them, relieved and overjoyed, as if it had taken Mary Tudor to come riding along as Queen to liberate them. We, her subjects, hadn’t come to her support but instead she’d come to ours: we’d needed her, and there she was. Just as well that no one, anywhere, during the troubled days, had fired a shot, because now absolutely everyone could claim to have been for her all along, but just cowed, hoodwinked, led astray.

  I had asked Harry about it, a couple of days before my mother and I made our dash to London. I’d asked him what was going to happen. If anyone knew, he would. ‘We’ll ask Harry,’ my father so often said. Harry knew whatever there was to know, not because he was all that frequently at court – he was happier at home – but because, being down-to-earth and commonsensical, he was trusted.

  On this, he’d been reluctant to speculate, but I’d pressed and eventually got an answer, which was nothing: nothing, he said, would happen. It’s done, he’d said, done and dusted: the Grey girl is Queen. He’d sounded pleased enough about it; he was reformist, but, anyway, he liked things decided. I’d persisted, though, because I just couldn’t quite believe it: would no one try anything? Try anything: I hadn’t wanted to say fight; I didn’t want to think of any fighting, even on behalf of poor, benighted Lady Mary.

  Harry didn’t think so; but if they did, he said, they’d be stupid, because they hadn’t a hope in Hell. And anyway, he said, why would anyone want the Lady Mary on the throne? She’d take the country back to Rome, he’d said, and we’re done with Rome. All of us, of any and every persuasion: we’re free of Rome, he said; Catholics are English Catholics now, not Roman Catholics. No one in England had any need of a pope.

  But it just wasn’t right, I said: the King’s sister should be the one to succeed him.

  Half-sister, Harry corrected.

  But a half-sister is closer than a second cousin.

  ‘Lizzie,’ he said, ‘listen: the Lady Mary is a spinster. A queen needs an heir and there’s scant chance she’d marry and produce, nearly forty as she is and always ailing and anyway only ever wanted to be a nun. There’ll be no heir from there,’ he said. ‘Whereas the Grey girl is young, healthy and married. Married to a Dudley, true,’ he allowed, ‘but’ – and he said it cheerfully, unconcerned – ‘it’s not as if we aren’t used to Dudleys.’

  Dudleys: down below our window, someone came into view, chucking a ball for the Partridges’ dog, and only a double-take confirmed for me that he wasn’t Baby Dudley. This particular blond, whoever he was, lacked the finery and the attitude. Taller, this one, too, although perhaps I’d have thought him an older brother of the baby’s if I hadn’t known for a fact that the four older brothers were elsewhere with their fat
her. The Dudleys were a close family, everyone said. Well, now they shared being the only people in England who couldn’t possibly hope to get away with the pretence of having rooted secretly for Lady Mary. Not that the duke hadn’t had a good try, according to the Fitzalans: hurling his cap into the air when he’d realised the game was well and truly up, hailing the new queen as if he’d never marched his own daughter-in-law on to her throne.

  No, the duke and the four sons who’d flanked him were the only people in England who couldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, get away with it. But the baby of the family, the one who’d actually sat himself down on the throne, would be the one of them to go free. Because the new Queen, in magnanimously sparing her girl-cousin, would have to pardon the boy-husband, too.

  *

  There was absolutely nothing for me to do in that room at the Partridges’ house. No noble girl could be held alone, hence me – or someone, anyway, and in this case the someone was me because I’d been the one to raise my hand. A body, then, was all I really was. Funny to think it: me, of all the girls in England, there for the sake of propriety. I took full advantage, did nothing in those first few days and did it to excess, losing myself in the view from the window, the comings and goings of workmen at their various tasks in the inner bailey, the strutting of ravens almost too corporeal to be creatures of the air, and the slow winding of the sky behind the White Tower. Inside the room, I developed an interest in Susanna – not the bovine lady herself, too long soaked amid a clutch of bone-bright water-lilies, nor the gimlet-eyed elders leching around the corner, but in how exactly the tapestry had been done, how those folds of the laundered linen had been depicted, and the shuddering of the sunstruck water. Tilting my head, I could glimpse that pond for the differently coloured, differently shaped sections of stitching that it really was – I see your little trick – but, tilting again, could summon back the cool blue depths.