The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  Him.

  she’d intended this all along, I realised, and now it was too late for me to do anything much about it.

  And ill? A lie, from her?

  I stood there, gormless, dropped right in it, charged with doing her dirty work. She looked back down at her book in order to dismiss me – but guiltily, I was sure of it, as well she might because what had happened to only ever telling the truth? And I could’ve said so, I could’ve thrown a hissy fit, refused to go – Your husband, your duty’ – because she couldn’t have made me do it. But he was already waiting, that bereaved boy, up there on the wall, composing himself for the encounter, perhaps even rehearsing silently for it as he watched the rooftop door for her arrival. I didn’t have to like him to feel sorry for him. I simply hadn’t the heart to leave him there like that. It was common courtesy and cost me nothing to go and put him out of his misery.

  As I stepped up through the doorway, he watched me intently. No, actually, he didn’t, he watched intently for Jane and let me go across his vision. I could almost see myself gliding across the surface of his eyes. What I saw of him was how awful he looked, and I had an urge to explore precisely how, but was wary of staring. His attendant, surveying London, kept his back to me. When Guildford realised I was alone, he focused on me just enough to hear me out.

  Apologetically, I said, ‘She’s ill,’ delivering what I knew was a lie, which he didn’t deserve, and squirming in case he saw through it.

  But he looked a bit dazed. ‘Ill?’ It seemed to worry him and I realised too late that she hadn’t provided me with details as to what else I could say, what explanation I might give. He shouldn’t have to worry, I thought: he’d had enough to worry about. I should let him off that hook, so, ‘Oh—’ and I shrugged, just general, nothing serious, which could’ve been an oblique reference to ladies’ problems.

  He looked at me – kept looking at me – in that same expectant manner, then almost shook himself, remembered himself. ‘Oh. Well, tell her I’m sorry to hear it.’ Which was of course the right response.

  And it was a dismissal, too, but as I turned away, I realised I didn’t have something similar for him and he was the one who’d suffered. So I turned back, just enough to say, ‘And she’s sorry—’ but stopped because it was another lie and the hunger in his eyes was a blade to my heart.

  Sorry that she hadn’t turned up? Sorry that his father had been killed? It could’ve been either but anyway it was a lie and he knew it. What I’d done was worse than if I’d merely left it be.

  But then came just the faintest concession – I couldn’t have called it a smile, it was nowhere near as much as that although there was something of a smile in it. It was an acknowledgement, or an acceptance: he knew very well she hadn’t said she was sorry, he knew that had come from me, but he took it for what it was.

  The very next day, Jane dropped me in it again – but at least this time she was honest about it: ‘I can’t,’ she said, and it was a plea: I can’t, but you can. She’d waited until we were at the door before saying it and those amber eyes of hers held mine in a way that was new; she was hanging on my response, offering herself up in her helplessness, which turned me upside-down.

  ‘Jane,’ I said, a plea of my own, don’t make me do this.

  ‘I just can’t do it,’ and this time it was said with a note of panic, although there was something stronger, too, in it: a certain reckoning; she’d asked nothing of me so far, in all the time we’d been together but now she needed my help.

  Without another word between us, I undertook to do it, which meant I was on my own as regards the excuse. But then, what would it matter what I told him? Because whatever it was, it would be a lie.

  I stomped up to the wall-walk, frazzled and flushed. I had a job to do, as I saw it, and I’d do it, I’d do whatever needed doing, but however quickly I was able to get back down to our room, it wouldn’t be soon enough. Even sewing, I told myself, was preferable to Guildford. As for what I was going to say to him, I decided I’d think about that when I got there. I’d think of something.

  There was a nick of rain in the air. Guildford looked worse than before – was there really nothing that gloomy attendant could do? He was obviously disappointed to see me in place of his wife. He said, for me to confirm it, ‘She’s no better,’ but there was no recognition, this time, of it being a lie: he’d said it gravely and so we were to take it as the truth. Well, if he could do it – if he were generous enough or deluded enough to be able to do it – then fine. I shrugged, leaving it up to him. He could think what he liked.

  But then came a flicker of reflection, and he kind of laughed it off: ‘Well, you know, I’m not so great myself.’

  No response from me would’ve been less than trite, but nor could I just turn and go; a respectful pause was required, and mine was genuine enough. So there I stood, resisting the urge to reach over and somehow tidy him up, perhaps reset his cap, do the job of that loafing, London-fixated attendant; just something – anything – to help restore him to himself. A buzzard drifted overhead, a moth-like underside to its wings.

  And then he was asking me, ‘Are you married?’ Although he didn’t sound much interested.

  I shook my head, which got me a lofty, world-weary ‘Oh well, then: just you wait.’

  As if he were an old hand, but I bet I knew a great deal more about any number of things from the times that I’d spent in the Shelley Place clock cupboard than he did from a few months of his so-called marriage. And anyway, how pitiful, this attempt to make his wife’s refusal to see him into some run-of-the-mill marital spat. And why bother? I mean, it wasn’t as if I cared.

  And, just you wait? I resented that assumption. He knew nothing about me. I was nothing like his many sisters, all of them – I knew, because everyone knew – so very well married off: there’d been a roaring trade, in recent years, in Dudley-daughter marriages.

  ‘I might never marry,’ I countered.

  He was unruffled: ‘Oh, a life of contemplation, is it, then, for you?’

  A religious life, he meant, and I didn’t know why he just didn’t say it.

  ‘No.’

  He smiled, sort of, to himself. ‘Not your style.’

  Which was one way to put it.

  ‘What is your style?’

  He was merely prolonging the encounter, but mine wasn’t the company he wanted or needed. Making to move off, I said, ‘I’ll tell her you asked after her,’ although actually he hadn’t.

  He asked, ‘What’s your name?’

  I couldn’t help but know his – everyone knew it, for good or bad – but had I not come up here to make Jane’s excuses for her, I might’ve got away with him never knowing mine. When I told him, he said, ‘Well, Elizabeth, it’s worse for you, in a way, isn’t it, to be stuck here, seeing as you haven’t done anything wrong.’

  He’d said my name as if he were examining it at arm’s length, or tasting it.

  We’ve all done something wrong, I thought, if you look hard enough.

  And, anyway, what was it that he’d done, really? Swanned around in white and gold silk, from what I could gather.

  I simply said, ‘Here’s as good as anywhere,’ and there was some truth in that.

  When I got back to our room, Jane barely even looked up from whatever it was she was writing; I might’ve been no more than a draught coming through that doorway. No acknowledgement, either, of where I’d been, of what I’d just done for her. And I wasn’t having that; perhaps it was petty of me, but I just wasn’t going to allow it. Something should be said, I determined, even if I was the one to speak up. So, I said, ‘He was all right.’

  She gave me the look that was in fact no look, and I could’ve sworn she didn’t know who I was talking about. Then, turning back to her writing, she muttered something that I missed but which might have been ‘That’s good.’

  Retreating to the window, it occurred to me that actually it hadn’t been so bad after all to go and see him: it
hadn’t been the ordeal I’d feared it would be. In his wife’s company, he blustered – furious or defensive or wheedling – but he didn’t have to do any of that with me.

  From then onwards, his requests stopped, he backed off, didn’t push it, appeared to have got the message and instead sent enquiries after her health, which, I felt, couldn’t help but be pointed. Mrs Partridge, stuck in the middle, was rigorous in keeping the knowingness from her voice – ‘Your husband’s asking how you are, whether you’re feeling any better’ – but she herself never asked about Jane’s alleged indisposition, which suggested she knew it for what it was. Not that she was, I sensed, necessarily unsympathetic.

  Jane’s responses were carefully vague, ‘So-so,’ ‘Not so bad,’ ‘A little brighter, and I marvelled at how she kept it up, she who usually made so much of telling the truth; I would never have guessed she could lie so well. It couldn’t last for ever, though, this keeping of him at arm’s length. And hadn’t she been cutting about Princess Elizabeth’s playing the invalid? Yet here she was, doing the same. Sooner or later, she was going to have to see her husband or make clear her refusal to do so. She couldn’t just avoid him for the rest of her life.

  As she wasn’t going outdoors, then nor officially was I; but in fact Mrs Partridge came regularly to my rescue, inviting me when the weather was fine enough to accompany her to the Queen’s Garden. No pretence of posy-picking by that time of year, but we harvested the last of the roses, my bowl always somehow feeling lighter for being full of those petals, and we enjoyed the too-blue early-autumn sky and the shadows cast by its slight winterwards incline. Our own shadows strode out from our feet: big and bold and detailed. What we talked about as we strolled side by side along the paths, I could rarely later recall: nothing much, but such a different kind of nothingness from that which I had to suffer back at the house with Jane. They were happy times for me, those walks in the Queen’s Garden: falling in with Mrs Partridge’s steady tread, trying and no doubt failing to imitate the stately swing of her hips. What a revelation she was, with none of the gripes and grudges that drove my mother and sisters and which I’d been raised to think were the necessary business of a life. There she was, her life every bit as real as theirs, but lovely: that gently rakish husband of hers, the walled home and royal garden.

  And then one perfect late afternoon, the air as bright as a bell-chime, she confided with a lift of her voice, as if granting me a wish, that she had some news: she was expecting a baby. And of course, I thought, of course she was, the only surprise being that I’d not already known it. How had I failed to see it? There amid the rosebushes, the sky heavy-fruited with birdsong, a bumblebee lifted on the breeze, I rushed with congratulations and all the right questions, while feeling foolish because I hadn’t already known. Of course she was pregnant, because why wouldn’t she be? Young, healthy, not long married but still childless Mrs Partridge: she couldn’t possibly be anything but pregnant, if I thought about it. Due at the end of February, she was telling me: four months gone. She’d been pregnant, then, all the time I’d known her. The Mrs Partridge whose shifts I’d worn: all that time, her pregnancy had already been under way. We’d been walking together in these gardens but she’d have been thinking of someone else, someone precious to whom next summer she’d be saying, Look at this, isn’t this pretty? Someone who would soon be scampering ahead of her on these crushed-shell paths.

  But anyway, I’d be long gone by then, I reminded myself: I shouldn’t forget that, I’d be gone long before the Partridge baby arrived, the fledgling. By the time he or she was born I’d be no more than a memory in this place, possibly even a nameless one: just the girl who’d roomed upstairs briefly with Lady Jane Grey. Four months: she hadn’t wanted to tell me earlier, she was saying, just in case. Best to be sure, she said, to keep it under wraps for a while, and I was rushing to agree as if that was something that I too did, every day – which was when it hit me. There in the early-autumn, late-afternoon air, so still as to seem spellbound, I realised I had in fact been doing exactly that.

  Beside me, Mrs Partridge was picking rose petals, countering their beguiling resistance, extracting them one by one from each bloom. One evening a couple of months back, I’d raised my hand and said ‘I’ll do it,’ and the following day I’d clambered off a wherry on to the Lion Gate steps. It had been as simple as that, and I had so very nearly managed it, had so very nearly stepped up out of my own footsteps into a new life. But the damage had already been done, it had come with me down the river and there could be no walking away from it. As I stood there in a garden so meticulous that it might have been built and stitched rather than grown from soil, my own personal horizon tilted and sank.

  ‘Elizabeth?’ Mrs Partridge paused in her petal-picking. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied, ‘I’m fine, thank you,’ but the truth was that I had a problem, a big problem, which was only going to grow bigger until every last person could see it and there was nothing left of the girl who’d been me. I turned, actually physically turned there on the path to look back where just moments ago I’d come sauntering unencumbered, but of course there was no one, that girl was gone and my heart slammed shut because, I knew, I should’ve taken better care of her.

  All the way back to the house with Mrs Partridge, I took not a single breath – not really, not properly – because I didn’t dare touch the air, not even with my insides; I had to be sliding clean through the moment when I’d realised and safely into the next, so that something else – anything else – could happen.

  At the foot of the stairs, I managed a seemingly cheerful goodbye; then, halfway up, something side-swiped me with the ferocity of sickness but it was rage, sheer rage, although at whom and for what I didn’t know and it didn’t matter, because what was important was that it pass before it burned me away to nothing. I stopped still to let it go through me, and then I continued on up and opened the door.

  Now, a performance was called for: I had to act as if nothing had happened, as if nothing were happening or going to happen. It would have to be flawless, a perfect imitation of everything being exactly the same as when I’d left the room. Not that Jane would be looking, of course. In that respect, I had it easy. I was in the best possible place: I had something to hide, and this was the place – hers the company – in which to do it.

  Closing the door behind me, I thought I should sit; it was what I’d normally do. Go and sit. I did, and gazed unseeing at the men going about their business down below on the green. Up high, a full moon was stamped on the daytime sky. Across the room was Susanna and, had I not known better, I might have thought that things were looking bad for her: she’d got herself into a bit of a fix with all that lingering naked in her garden. But she was a good woman, a perfect wife and mother, never putting a lily-white foot wrong, and all it would take, for her, was a good man to know it, and although she was as yet unaware, that man was on his way. For Susanna, everything was going to be fine.

  I sat there and wondered how I hadn’t known what was happening to me. It was that, as much as anything, which astounded me. All this while, the fact of my predicament had been lying low, biding its time in the certainty that eventually – no rush – it would become known. How had it taken me so long to see it? I’d been drifting through the days, the weeks, thinking of myself as sluggardly, as being shut up and out of sorts. Cooped up in a strange place. All of which, I’d supposed, had been taking its toll. I was imprisoned, kind of, and come to a stop: that was how I’d understood it. And perhaps, for a time, that hadn’t been so stupid of me. Perhaps I’d been right, for a while, not to leap to conclusions. Because what was the advantage of knowing?

  Harry, who knew everything, didn’t know this. Here, Harry, is something you don’t know. One up on Harry. You could see it that way. I shut my eyes. I should get word to him. But then again, no: I didn’t want him knowing. I didn’t want him coming here. And anyway, what could he do? Nothing. Not even Harry, with his listening ear
and deep coffers. Harry, the only person I knew who sent his tenants’ sons to school, the only person who could make my mother laugh. There was nothing he could do about this. And anyway, hadn’t he already done enough?

  ‘Come on,’ he’d said, that last time, crossing the chapel ahead of me. ‘Quick,’ impatient with me, as if I were doing something wrong. I’d been asking him what would happen now that the second cousin had been declared Queen over the half-sister. He hadn’t answered and I was nervous that he felt there was something better left unsaid. I was wondering if – and how – I dared ask him again, but then, as he opened the door to the alcove, he did answer. ‘It’s done,’ he said, ‘done and dusted. The Grey girl is Queen,’ unbothered by it, as if this state of affairs were unconnected to us: a natural phenomenon and far away, like a cloud formation.

  I didn’t quite believe that, but what did I know? Whereas he knew everything; if there was anything to know, he’d know it. But still, I couldn’t quite believe it, so, with my hand on his arm to halt him, I checked – ‘Will no one try anything?’ – but the response was his mouth over mine, right there in chapel, for anyone – should anyone come in – to see. What on earth was he doing? Shutting me up, that was what, as he manoeuvred me with him into the cupboard. But I held back, dug my heels in, because Not today, Harry: that was what I’d come to tell him. Back in Hall, he’d given me the look that had said Chapel and I’d been at a loss for a look in return that would’ve said Wrong time of the month. He should’ve known it, but in all the excitement of this deeply peculiar, queen-proclaiming day, he seemed to be forgetting himself.

  My resistance hadn’t worked, or hadn’t been enough, because the door was closing behind us. ‘Try anything?’ he asked. ‘Fight? Oh, there’ll be a bit of a stand-off. Fight, though? No, that’d be stupid. They haven’t a hope in Hell.’

  I needed to get the pair of us back on the other side of that door. ‘Harry—’