The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ Which was what he’d said to his wife, that time, if only via me. ‘You had a bleeding?’

  My heart contracted.

  He frowned, concerned. ‘Did they bleed you? Because you’re very pale.’

  ‘Oh,’ and my heart breathed again. ‘No.’

  ‘Well, don’t let them. You don’t look as if you could take it.’

  I nodded my thanks for the advice. ‘Well—’ I should go, now.

  ‘Stay,’ he said.

  Was that an order?

  ‘The air’ll do you good. Being shut away inside’s no good for you.’

  Whereas standing here in a biting wind with a horribly bereft princeling: that was?

  Frankly, I just wanted to go and lie down. Well, no, I did and I didn’t; I didn’t really want to do anything; there was nothing that I wanted to do. But I didn’t move, if only because I was too tired. He was lonely; he needed someone, any distraction; anyone would do. Surely, even, at a push, that drippy attendant. He read my glance, ‘William?’ A hitch of his eyebrows, sceptical. ‘Talks of nothing but his darling wife.’

  Which had me take a second look at him: Darling wife? Him? ‘William’?

  ‘He’s newly wed.’

  ‘Like you,’ I’d said before I’d realised.

  He shook his head, ‘That’s different,’ but didn’t elucidate. ‘But while he’s been stuck in here with me, she’s probably run off with someone else.’

  I laughed, if dismissively: Don’t.

  ‘No? You don’t think so?’ He came close to a smile. ‘Bit of a romantic, are you, Elizabeth?’

  He’d remembered my name.

  ‘Not me,’ I said. ‘But some people are.’ William’s darling bride, perhaps, I meant.

  That seemed to throw him; he folded his arms as if to hold himself together. ‘Romance is all very well, isn’t it.’

  Not in my experience, no.

  ‘But it doesn’t last. Marriage has to be about the future.’

  A future: what a luxury.

  His eyes came back to mine. ‘Don’t you think so?’ but before I could answer, even if I’d wanted to, he said, ‘My parents’ marriage was very strong, they lived for each other,’ and there was nothing I could say to that. ‘Falling in love, it’s just make-believe. Made up,’ he said, ‘to keep people happy.’

  ‘People’: he did like to talk of ‘people’, but wasn’t he a person? And anyway, what was wrong with being happy?

  ‘You ever seen anyone in love after the first couple of months?’

  ‘The Partridges,’ I said.

  He considered it. ‘Oh, well, yes, but once she’s had the baby …’

  Mrs Partridge’s condition had become wider-known and Goose had confirmed what I’d suspected from the age difference between the Partridges: there’d been a previous Mrs Partridge, who’d died in childbed. ‘Never get married, girls,’ she’d added, breezily; then, to Jane, ‘Oh, but I forgot, you already are.’

  Guildford shrugged. ‘I mean, that’s all women really care about, isn’t it: having babies.’

  You really don’t know much, do you.

  ‘Did you know Lady Jane,’ I asked him, ‘before you were married?’

  He looked startled, perhaps by the question itself, perhaps by my having asked him something. ‘Yes, of course. We’d met.’ He revised, ‘We’d seen each other around.’ He turned curious: ‘Doesn’t she talk to you?’

  About me, he meant, but I answered in general: ‘We don’t have a lot in common.’

  And that, apparently, was funny. ‘Oh, well, with her, who does?’ But more seriously, ‘It’s hardly her fault, though. It’s understandable enough. Brought up as she was, to be a kind of princess.’

  Was it possible to be ‘a kind of princess’? But, then, his family had thought it possible for her to be a kind of queen.

  ‘She’s been raised to be a scholar. An enlightener, a reformist. Right from the start. If I listed her tutors for you—’

  I wouldn’t have a clue who they were.

  Which he saw, and stopped.

  Although I supposed I could’ve taken his word for it.

  ‘Well, anyway,’ he said, ‘her tutors told her she was going to change the world. That’s how she’s grown up: to think of herself like that. That’s what you have to remember.’

  But I didn’t have to remember anything. I wasn’t the one who’d be spending the rest of my life with her; she’d be gone in a few months’ time and, like it or not, I’d never see her again.

  ‘Problem is, if you think you’re busy saving the world, then everything and everyone else just gets in the way.’

  He wasn’t wrong about that.

  He said, ‘It’s a shame for you that you’ll miss the coronation, stuck in here.’

  I couldn’t have cared less about the coronation. I was missing absolutely everything, stuck in the Tower, and didn’t care about any of it.

  ‘The crowning of England’s first ever ruling queen. Something to tell the grandchildren.’

  Goose had been telling us of the building, painting and draping of platforms and arches in the streets, the regilding of the Cheapside cross and the St Paul’s weathercock on which a Dutch acrobat was going to perform.

  ‘Except,’ he said, ‘in less than no time she won’t be. Ruling, I mean. Because she’ll be married.’

  And wives are ruled by their husbands. If Jane was to be believed, I remembered, her husband would’ve made a mere consort of her, had he had his way.

  I said, ‘Who’ll marry her, though?’

  A certain light came into his eyes. ‘Yes, because who’d be fool enough to marry a queen.’

  I shrugged: Have it your way.

  But then he did answer: ‘In this particular case, either an idiot or a tyrant.’

  Edward Courtenay, he meant, or the Spanish heir. Compared with whom, he wouldn’t have been such a dire prospect.

  He unfolded his arms, swung them. ‘Know what I miss most, being in here?’ There was a playful challenge in it but, no, I didn’t know and couldn’t guess and why did he think I was interested? He corrected himself: ‘Not “what”. Who.’

  His mother?

  ‘My dog, Pip.’

  I couldn’t help but be amused at that, because I’d always choose the company of a dog, if I could, over a person. And he smiled, too: the first time I’d ever seen him smile. I knew then that I was going to hear all about the wonderful Pip: how there was no one else like him, how in his eyes you could do no wrong, he’d follow you to the ends of the earth and you could trust him with your life. I could’ve recited it all, saved him the trouble, but actually I was happy enough to stand there and listen to it.

  He finished by telling me that Pip had been the runt of the litter, ‘Which,’ he concluded, ‘just goes to show.’

  His brothers – all those big brothers of his – had had the pick of the puppies but he, being youngest, had been left with the runt. And it occurred to me that his being youngest made him the runt of the Dudley litter. But those brothers of his were shut in their rooms, while he was free, within the limits of the Tower, to come and go.

  I left without trying to tell him of our dogs back at Shelley Place. Ours weren’t the sort for eulogising. I had no comparable story of childhood canine companionship; there’d been no endearing, dewy-eyed pup for me. Not that I minded. I didn’t doubt Guildford’s dog was a delight but ours, coming to Shelley Place as a last resort, to doze away their days, had seen life. There was that to say for them: ours were survivors.

  Something that struck me as I hauled myself up the stairs back to the room was that in a way those Shelley Place dogs had given me refuge rather than the other way around. ‘Get those mutts out of here,’ my mother would shout, and I’d be on hand to do exactly that, and then off we’d slope, me and the dogs, to the privacy of some nook or cranny, some hidey-hole.

  Reaching the top of the stairs, I had to concede that Guildford had been right: I did fee
l much better for having been outside; he’d been right to make me stay a little longer. I felt alive, for the first time in a long while, startlingly conscious of the shift of blood in my veins. I was glowing as I entered that room, as I walked into that miasma of dried lavender: I was silvered with evening air and I didn’t see why I should hide it or apologise for it because this could have been her, if she’d wanted; she could have gone out there, if she’d wanted, and she still could. Any time, she could. There was nothing and no one to stop her. Within the walls, she was free to come and go; it was just that she chose not to.

  But that hadn’t been my choice for myself, and she shouldn’t deny me. And it seemed to me that that was what she was trying to do, as she sat there over her books, refusing to look up. Here I was, arriving back, and she didn’t so much as raise her eyes. But the fact remained that I’d been out of our room, doing something – talking, and mulling over good times – while she hadn’t, and none of her pretending otherwise made it disappear.

  Swinging down on to the window seat I said, as if in passing, ‘He misses his dog.’

  He: as if she and I were already mid-conversation.

  I’d been to see her husband and it was only proper that we acknowledged that. And anyway it felt to me that I was dispensing a bit of the conversation that he and I had had; it was mine to bestow and for once I was in good spirits, I was feeling magnanimous. And if she didn’t want to be let in on it? Well, she should. And anyway, she did, I could tell she did, even if she wouldn’t admit it to herself. Well, I could help her out with that.

  But then she surprised me with, ‘Well, it’s a nice dog.’ And so the dog was claimed: it was a dog she knew and with whom she’d spent time. That dog of Guildford’s was, suddenly, practically, as good as hers. And then, with a speculative tilt of her head, gaze unfocused, to make the very picture of imperfect recollection: ‘Chip?’

  ‘Pip,’ I said, too quickly.

  ‘Oh, Pip, yes,’ and I saw she’d known all along and had been testing me, and that the test had been something over and above the mere matter of the dog’s name.

  The coronation couldn’t possibly be sprung on us as the Queen’s initial August arrival had been, because even two weeks beforehand, in mid-September, the Tower was teeming. Day after day 1 watched lords and ladies arriving amid flurries of smartly liveried retainers; they were coming to make pre-emptive claims on what Mrs Partridge had told us was a limited number of guest lodgings.

  I was always looking for Harry, even as I dreaded spotting him. Harry, down there in the fray, enjoying better wine than at home and more of it, and more people with whom to drink it. Everyone happy, which was how he liked it and why everyone loved him. He would almost certainly have forgotten that I was near by. The surprise, for me, was how that came as a relief. Something else I’d realised was that even if I told what had happened, no one would believe me. Not even Harry himself, probably – likely not merely to deny it but also to believe himself. And maybe there was something in that, maybe I could understand it, because it was incredible to me, by then, that we’d ever been together.

  The Tower might well have been just as overcrowded when the Queen had been in residence back in August, but then the atmosphere had been hushed, reverential, her victory against all odds seeming like a miracle. Now, though, it was business as usual. The impending coronation was something to be got on with, and it was, with gusto, caution thrown to the wind. The place was a mess. Lords and ladies in lodgings needed food prepared, fires lit, furnishings cleaned and in reasonable repair, and closet pits scoured, so the Tower was like a city for those September days, a small, walled, workaday city, and often, under pressure of time, workanight too. Playing fast and loose with the curfew allowed jobs to be done and supplies to arrive for unloading and unpacking at all hours. Jane and I found it hard to sleep, with the courtyards and passageways and the lane behind us ringing with footfalls, the skittering of horses, the whine of wheels and the grunt of the gates.

  And even if the workmen didn’t keep us awake, there was their knocking off late after a long, hard day. Impromptu revelry was of course forbidden in the Tower but there was only so much that the outnumbered watchmen could do. At all hours beneath our windows, old acquaintances were re-established and celebrated, or old feuds reignited, and no one needed to be especially raucous in order to rattle us because in the smallest hours a single exclamation was enough, amplified inside the vast stone walls or a stairwell. And then would come the calls to pipe down, which usually only made it worse, the watchmen’s taking to task of miscreants never failing to give rise to recriminations and back-chat, so that the settling of any dispute was always at least as noisy as the initial affray.

  One problem was that the new arrivals acted as if they owned the place whereas actually the majority of them had nowhere to go. Even a lord or lady would have two rooms at most; retainers did their bedding down (and worse) in halls, porches and doorways. One morning, I spotted a couple of men daubing a wall with red paint, and when I made passing mention of it to Jane, she only baffled me further by saying, ‘It’s to stop the peeing.’

  The what?

  ‘They’re crosses.’

  Which had me look again and so they were: the vertical streaks were being slashed by horizontal ones to make big, red, fairly regularly spaced crosses.

  Which still made no sense. ‘Peeing?’

  She obliged me with the explanation: ‘No one dares pee on a cross.’

  Was there no end to the things she knew?

  Another morning, when we pointed out to Goose that we were running low on firewood, her response was a mere ‘There isn’t any left,’ and ‘Maybe later or tomorrow.’ As if it didn’t matter. As if we didn’t matter. We were, it seemed, low-priority. Well, we were prisoners, that was true; or Jane was, and, by association, me. We were being held, kicking our heels, biding our time before Jane’s inevitable release but the Tower, pissed all over though it now was, had suddenly become all about the future, the new, steady reign. We played no part in that; we had no claim on it. It belonged to all those workers and officials, busy with their jobs, and the nobles with their optimism. The Tower, that late September, was a place for those who were building England’s future.

  Had we mentioned the lack of firewood to the Partridges, they probably wouldn’t have been all that much more receptive because they too, it seemed to me, had become a little devil-may-care; they too sported a new, festive air. The day before the coronation, Mrs Partridge told us that the Earl of Arundel would be standing in for the Queen, that evening, in the creation of the new Knights of the Bath, ‘Because imagine,’ she laughed, ‘if it was the Queen who had to be clambering into the bath to kiss those men on their shoulders.’ And so it was good, clean fun, the coming coronation, and the Queen in her femininity was endearing.

  Jane and I were united in our disdain for the palaver. We didn’t much discuss it, but during those trying days we acted put-upon, scowling, huffing and muttering at the various inconveniences, and drawing in on ourselves, a little less convivial with Mrs Partridge, a little more disapproving of Goose, and I closed the shutters earlier than necessary in the evenings.

  One afternoon about a week before the coronation, something had me pause at the chamberpot and swivel inside my shift, wrenching it around my hips and craning to check the back of it. And there on the linen was a blotch of the blood on which I’d given up hope. There, on the back of my shift, as unequivocal as a thumbprint. My heart hammered to see it and even though I was the one who’d uncovered it, I felt wonderfully sprung. It had crept up on me. Unbeknown to me, something had got going, staking its claim, taking root in the fabric of my shift.

  Brash and bold, that poppy-bright bloom was unlike the start of my usual monthly bleed, which would have been a trace, a smudge, a half-hearted stirring. This blood had a confidence to it, proclaiming its own arrival. There was jubilation in it, and flourish: See?

  What I saw, written there on that linen, wa
s my reprieve, my own blood come to save me.

  Let it come, let it come, and I vowed then and there to God, the heavens, the Devil, whoever else might be listening, that I would never, ever do again what I’d done in that clock cupboard, I would never so much as look at a boy or a man. I would be faultless, unimpeachable, a shining light, a fucking saint, if you please please please just give me this. There I stood, staring at that stain, not daring to relinquish it because nothing was more precious to me than that blood and there could never be enough of it. But at the same time I was afraid that, if I kept looking, I might scare it off, this steady, stealthy animal creep of my insides. I should pretend to look the other way, and leave it to do its work.

  Preparations, first, though: I would need to cover its tracks. Well, I’d do whatever I could, I’d be the perfect handmaiden, I couldn’t do enough for it if only it would just keep on coming. Practicalities: I was going to have to go back next door and bide my time, keep this to myself, live out the rest of the day as if nothing were happening, although I didn’t know how I was going to do that with elation rising indecently off me like steam.

  And I almost laughed aloud to think of it – me here, leaking and matted, my blood-fouled linen hoiked around my waist while on the other side of that door was the girl whom the whole world considered to be the errant one. There she was, head bowed over a book, quill poised; I was surprised and pleased by how clearly I pictured her – the precise incline of her neck, the exact configuration of rings on her inky fingers – and even more surprised how pleased I was to know I’d find her there. And I felt for her, all of a sudden, because she immersed herself in books but what, really, did she know of anything that mattered? She would never know the glory of having taken a wrong step and got yourself lost but then, by a sheer accident of nature, being handed back, intact, your life.

  Off to bed, that night, padded up, I anticipated nothing but a steady bleeding, and fell asleep easily. Some time later, though, in deep darkness, my consciousness began to make its presence felt, and eventually I came properly awake to find myself already on all fours in a kind of surfacing, pain having bowled me over and up. Another cramp was closing on me, taking me back down, and so there I was, wide-eyed in the dark and busy before I knew it: rocking back and forth, breathing deeply to get myself through.