The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  One happy effect of retiring early and rising late was the shrinkage of the days. I got no complaint from Jane; on the contrary, she encouraged me. At the table amid an abundance of lighted wicks, she’d look up and suggest – nice as pie – that I take myself off to bed. She had work to do, as she saw it, but obviously I didn’t and I must’ve been a hindrance, sitting there staring into space, yawning, waiting for her to finish. I was in the way: truly just a body in the room, rather than a companion. Then again, our eagerness to accommodate each other made us perfect companions.

  I was only ever ashamed of my indolence when the chambergirl came waging her war on dust and dirt, infestations and untidiness, or bringing us food and ale, pitchers and clean chamberpots, linen and lights. Mrs Partridge had introduced her to us on our first evening as ‘Goose’, with no qualification or explanation nor any apology. Goose was bafflingly ungoosey: a vivacious, snub-nosed redhead, her hair so vivid as to be closer in colour, I felt, to purple. A gap between her front teeth made a smile within a smile, both of which came for me whenever I offered to help, along with a reassurance which sounded anything but: ‘You stay where you are.’ Or sometimes even a triumphant ‘Uh-uh-UH!’ as if my attempt to be less of a burden had somehow been underhand. Did she think – as my mother did – that I’d end up creating more work? All I was ever offering to do was lift my feet for her broom, or run a cloth over the panelling, or plump up the pillows – what scope was there in any of that for disaster? Perhaps she feared she’d get into trouble with the Partridges if she allowed it. Perhaps, though, she just liked to refuse me. She had an accent I couldn’t place – which, come to think of it, did have a rather honking quality – despite our having to hear a great deal of it. Amazingly, her ceaseless, wide-ranging commentary – food prices, weather conditions, bowel habits, gardening tips, corruption, witchcraft and deformities – never had Jane so much as look up from her books.

  It didn’t take long for me to get sick of flopping around; it was strangely exhausting to spend so much time in bed or at a window. Mrs Partridge came visiting several times each day – often a little too dusted with cat fur for my comfort – with solicitous enquiries as to our well-being, and on the fourth afternoon I cracked and begged her for something – anything – to do. Shelling peas, perhaps, I said, or tying lavender bunches. She looked doubtful – no peas that particular day, apparently, and already more lavender that summer than boxes and chests in which to make it useful. Polishing plate, then, I suggested, or folding linen; but by then she seemed almost scared.

  ‘Goose—’ She didn’t have to finish. I understood. Repairs, then, I offered, in desperation; never in my life had I thought I’d hear myself actually offering to patch and darn, but any household, even one as small as the Partridges’, would have more patching and darning to be done than any single person could manage. All those sagging hems and missing hooks-and-eyes, the detached belt loops and ripped linings: Goose would be cutting off her beak to spite her face if she objected to some help with those. But if it did have to be repairs, I warned Mrs Partridge, they’d need to be hidden. Sweetly, she tried to laugh that off as false modesty on my part until I allowed her a glimpse of a seam on my sleeve, after which she was good at coming up with jobs on which it was safe to let me loose.

  So there I was, for hours on end, fidgeting a needle and thread around in floppy old linen against the backdrop of Susanna, whose stitches were hidden in the clear light of day, packed so tightly as to forge a single, continuous surface.

  On my fifth afternoon, I found a means of regular, brief escape: I’d fetch our meals from the Partridges’ kitchen and return the tray when we’d finished. This too, though, was the job of no-nonsense Goose, and nonsense was exactly what she thought it was for me to be making what she called unnecessary trips up and down the stairs. I stood my ground until Mrs Partridge was called to adjudicate and pronounced it fine for me to do so if I wished.

  And I did wish, I definitely did. It wasn’t much of a freedom but it was something, and much more than just a break from Jane. I liked being elsewhere in the house, even if it was just on the stairs. Usually I’d come across someone – if on occasions only the Partridges’ cheerful hound, Twig – and we’d greet one another in passing as if I were just another member of the household, not captor or captive or whatever I was, and the house not part of the Tower. Country girl that I was, I’d never lived in a townhouse. I’d been a guest in the London residences of family friends, such as the Fitzalans, but those places were grand and intimidating, whereas I rather liked the Partridges’; and there were times when I was on the stairs or standing in the kitchen doorway when I felt it wouldn’t be so bad to be living Mrs Partridge’s life.

  Back home, the kitchen had been no place for me. Shelley Place did all its own growing and milling, baking and brewing, butchery and preserving, and I’d grown up wary of the tumultuous kitchen which had to feed at least thirty people twice every day. Not that it was somewhere I could have stumbled upon: reaching it, behind the buttery and the various larders, took some doing. Catering at the Partridges’, though, was an altogether more homely affair, just for the immediate household, a consequence of which was that, as I made my way through the house, the kitchen was quite suddenly there. Along the passageway I’d go and then there it was. So much smaller than the kitchen at home, it was much hotter, too, and I’d have to take some deep breaths and let my stomach settle as I stood there watching the cook and his boy. At Shelley Place, our cooks and kitchen boys struggled to keep on top of the work, but the Partridges’ cook and boy had the luxury of being able to take pride in what they were producing. The cook was a small, energetic man, endearingly vole-like, bright-eyed and long-nosed; the kitchen boy, by contrast, broad-featured and serene, a steady pourer and stirrer of sauces. I got no acknowledgement there in the doorway until they were ready for me, but I never felt conspicuous and it was as if I were taking a place that was mine, as if my witnessing their work was a small but vital part of the process, or so I liked to think. Only when the fruits of their considerable labours had been decanted into various dishes would they come over and patiently talk me through the courses: ‘… and this sauce, here, is for this little dish, here – just a spoonful on the side …’

  I must have looked a sight, the first week, in that doorway of theirs. My belongings hadn’t yet arrived from Suffolk and Mrs Partridge was kindly lending me clean linen of her own but her shifts did me no favours, swamping me and rucking up fatly beneath the seams of the fancy Fitzalan-loaned kirtle.

  Size, though, was the least of the physical differences between Mrs Partridge and me. Like it or not, I was very much a Tilney girl in looks, and more than several times I’d overheard one or other of my sisters described with a kind of bafflement as ‘striking’. To me, back when I’d been growing up in their wake, they’d had an inside-out look to them: their skulls staring from beneath their faces, their limbs all shanks and sockets. They chewed their nails, bit their lips, shrugged their shoulders, and their glances were swift and accusatory. Always about to scarper, was how they’d looked: ready to hitch up their skirts in their claws, turn tail and run.

  As for me, I bristled with lashes and brows and even the whorls of my fingertips were, I imagined, declamatory, whereas Mrs Partridge’s might well make their mark by weight alone: a perfect oval, a dark dimple. But for all that she was substantial, she was so light on her feet and often at our door before I’d heard her, and I couldn’t help feel somehow improper in her benign, steady presence. I was tough, though, I knew, whereas she, with all that soft flesh, was vulnerable. At night, when I drew the expanse of her linen up and over my head, I’d slip entirely free of it, but she, undressing in her bedroom below me, would, I imagined, bear a criss-cross of seams and she’d have to rub those chafings away, ease the blood back into her skin to reclaim her lovely lunar glow.

  Personal items, she had added, smiling nervously, to the discussion of linen and laundry on that first morning: bundle
them up, she said, yours and Lady Jane’s, and hand them to Goose; don’t try to wash them out yourself. Personal items: I’d loved that. My mother would’ve said – did say – ‘your rags’, and at Shelley Place I did wash them myself.

  At the end of our first week, Mrs Partridge – coming across me on the stairs – invited me to accompany her to the Queen’s Garden. All those flowers in there, she rued, going to waste. A queen’s garden without a queen, it seemed, was a garden up for grabs. Jane wasn’t mentioned and I understood that under no circumstances could she be allowed back over there, even for innocuous flower-gathering. Not that she’d miss it, I thought; she probably hadn’t ever left her books to go down there even when she could. She didn’t strike me as a girl with an interest in flower arrangement. Mrs Partridge said we could look on it as a bit of deadheading, which, given where we were, struck me as an unfortunate choice of word.

  I told Jane I was off to pick flowers, but avoided saying where. Mrs Partridge’s short-cut started at an unremarkable door in a wall on the far side of the bailey and took us into the first of a series of courtyards which could’ve been rooms but for their lack of ceilings. On the walls, which were rendered an apple-skin red, were stone carvings the hue of honey, of beatific faces or bucolic scenes, and in the third courtyard, high up, was a sundial incongruously painted with an arc of inky sky, a lick of moon, a gaudy splat of stars. Beneath our feet were no cobbles or flags but tiles, creamy-coloured in the first two courtyards and river-green in the third, where each square depicted a kiln-blurry beast of some kind – tails, horns, paws – or a perky fleur-de-lys. The soles of our shoes, though, scored tracks in grime, and here and there in corners lay last autumn’s leaves. ‘Hardly anyone ever comes this way,’ Mrs Partridge explained, ‘because it was built for You-know-who.’

  Actually, I didn’t.

  ‘Queen Anne.’

  Queen Anne?

  ‘Boleyn.’

  ‘Oh!’ – I’d forgotten that Anne Boleyn, or ‘the King’s whore’ as I’d more usually heard her called, had ever properly been Queen. But yes, I remembered, she had indeed been crowned, unlike the bevy of queens who’d followed her. All those queens, young and old, pious or irreverent, clever or silly, but none of them, in the end, in the old King’s eyes, quite up to the job. So there I was, in the courtyard of a thousand-day queen now almost twenty years dead. Second wife of the old King, second of the six and the start of all the trouble.

  Until now – until Jane, until Mary – all a queen could ever have been was a wife, a mother: chief wife, chief mother, her job to sit beside the king and grow bigger for nine months of every year, praying for the baby to be a boy. River-lit rooms had been built for Anne Boleyn but in return she was supposed to produce a prince, which, to judge from her gusto in pursuing the throne, she hadn’t doubted she’d do. But how had she reckoned on that? Faith in God? Or trusting to luck? Or perhaps she’d tried not to think about it: perhaps she’d told herself that it’s possible to think too much.

  Standing there in the courtyard and looking up and around at that building, I wondered how many men had sketched the designs for its staircases and fireplaces, then resketched to make them bigger and better, then how many masons and carpenters, plasterers and glaziers had pored over those plans. All the candles, too, to light their labours, and the chandlers who’d worked late to make those candles, and the boxes upon boxes of tapers they’d burned as they’d done so. A mountain of bills, but all adding up in the end to nothing. Jumped-up, French-spouting Anne Boleyn: you could build queens’ rooms for her, you could plant a queen’s garden for her, dress her in queens’ clothes and take her to Westminster for a crown to be put on her head, but she was never any queen. You could banish the real Queen and her little princess and kill any number of nay-sayers – a bishop or two, a chancellor – but even that wouldn’t turn a commoner into a queen and everyone had known it.

  Everyone except the King, or not for a while, not until that woman had sat beside him for a couple of years, growing thinner and sharper, carping and meddling and feuding and disparaging until eventually even he couldn’t fail to see her commoner’s bones showing through. But a king never makes a mistake, so the fault must’ve been hers. She must have been a liar, a beguiler – perhaps even, you could say, if you didn’t say it too loudly, a witch. A king never makes a mistake but he’ll always right a wrong. He can raise someone up but much quicker cut a person down, and soon that so-called Queen was even less than the commoner she’d once been, she was a traitor and her bones not even a body but a heap, and only buried anywhere at all because bones have to be hidden or they’d be dug up by dogs.

  But the shut-away daughter had lived on – if only just, in those various faraway houses in Essex and Suffolk and Norfolk, keeping to her four walls, to her chapels, confessing to her priests and consulting her physicians. For years she’d lived the quiet life, reconciled to her lot: elder half-sister to little half-brother. But then the half-brother had died and after a quarter-century that half-sister was on her way back into the very heart of the kingdom. In a few days’ time, she could well be standing where I was, I thought, and perhaps she’d ask for the doors that Mrs Partridge had just locked behind us to be reopened, and then she’d walk where we’d just walked. Perhaps she’d go where we hadn’t, up into the building itself, into the rooms that, twenty years ago, had housed a woman who’d been so completely sure she’d got it made.

  Mary Tudor was the first ever queen coming to the Tower not at the invitation or on the order of any king. She was the King, if a female one. The invitation she had accepted was that of her subjects. The day Jane was declared Queen, the Lady Mary had written to everyone in England and the letter had been copied then and there, and the copy copied and so on, down row upon row of trestle tables in the hall at her Framlingham house, those copies passed hand over hand to the ready riders for dispatching anywhere and everywhere. Within two days England was blanketed with what she’d had to say. Which was, basically, Remember me? That was all, more or less; that was all it took: Remember me, the old King’s eldest daughter? Well, here I am, if you’ll have me.

  I’d been leaving the Fitzalans’ house for the Tower, for my Jane-minding duties, when news had come of Queen Mary’s imminent declaration at the Eleanor Cross. The Fitzalans’ excitable fourteen-year-old son, Henry, little Lord Maltravers, had taken to the streets to see what was what, and he returned just as my mother and I were heading down the garden to their barge. ‘You should see it, out there,’ he called after us, and then suggested we do exactly that: forgo the Fitzalan landing-stage in favour of somewhere slightly downstream, just a few streets away, where we could take a wherry and he’d see us personally to the Tower. It was safe, he assured us, perfectly safe: there was nothing in the air, that morning, he said, but good will.

  ‘London’s in love,’ was, I remembered, how he’d put it. Smitten, he’d meant, by the dowdy lady who had, against the odds, just become its queen.

  My mother claimed a headache but I was curious and keen to stretch my legs after two long days in the saddle. Even keener, if truth be told, to delay venturing on to the water, which was to be a new experience for me. Surprisingly, I didn’t have to argue too hard: my mother agreed I could go with Henry as long as we promised to stick close to our Fitzalan minders.

  Our own goodbyes didn’t detain us, so there I was, minutes later, leaving the gatehouse in the company of the funny little Fitzalan heir, although, as I teetered on the threshold, there seemed to be no place in that packed lane for a single extra footfall. Somehow I managed it, took the first step and pitched myself in. Once inside the crowd, I discovered it to be built of shoulderblades. United, too, those shoulders: everyone hugging everyone else as if they were long-lost friends, but me in the midst of them knowing no one, not a soul. My heart drummed a warning but I kept calm: it had been a mistake to think I’d be up to this, but no harm done, easily remedied, all I had to do was reverse that single step of mine back up into the
gatehouse. I turned but, behind me, my minder misunderstood and pressed what he intended as a helping hand into the small of my back, and dodging it took me a couple of steps further adrift. Get me back, I should’ve said to him, please, but my mouth had shut itself against the viscous stench: the lane reeked like a ditch, like skin and bone dumped, although actually the source was broad grins and armpits opening up for all that hugging.

  Dancing, too, even in that dense crowd; a rhythm being beaten on something and a handful of people barging into bystanders, of which I was about to become one. On tiptoe, I glimpsed the feather of Henry’s cap: no chance of me catching him up, saddle-sore as I was and sweltering and swollen inside my boots. Boots which then blundered into a body down on the ground, battering at a clutch of child-ribs, bringing my heart to a screeching halt; but no, I saw, looking down, thank God, no body: a child, yes, but busy, unbothered, filching coins from the cobbles. Coins: that was what they were, then, those splashes of glare: handfuls of coins chucked into the air. But something else was in the sky, too, and rushing our way: black smoke, a great roiling of it. ‘Bonfire,’ the minder blared into my ear. He could prod all he liked but I was going back. Glancing round, though, I found the gatehouse had gone from view: my tiny steps, with which I’d been keeping my ground, had in fact been taking me deeper into the city. We were too close to the fire, its shocking incandescence, and I saw that whatever was at the heart of it was keeling over, rigid, as if agonised. But that was when Henry Fitzalan’s hand took mine, and how he’d made his way back through the crowd to me I simply couldn’t imagine: but there it was, his hand in mine and his smile over a stranger’s shoulder, and from then on we were on the move, we were unstoppable and I was tripping over my own boots, my breath no longer hampering me but blowing me along the streets. Little Lord Maltravers threaded us expertly between elbows and then, when we turned a corner, there it was, above our heads and higher than the rooftops: a gilded tower topped with a cross. And then came the roar – Mary Tudor proclaimed Queen – and my bones were singing with it and me too, yes, even me: I was yelling, because you couldn’t not, you just couldn’t not.