The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  And got one in return. ‘What? She is my wife’

  ‘She’s busy changing the world, remember.’

  He sighed, hugely. ‘Well, what about you, then? It’s only a lining that’s coming away.’

  ‘William would be your better bet.’

  ‘No one you’re stitching presents for, then?’

  I wasn’t getting into that.

  ‘Well, if you’re not stitching, and you’re not praying – and I know you’re not doing that – then what are you doing all day every day in there?’

  ‘Looking out.’

  ‘And thinking.’

  No, actually, not thinking: not thinking was what I was emphatically doing. ‘And what do you do, all day?’

  ‘Pester William to play cards, mostly. But he’s always writing to his wife. A letter every day: a long, long letter.’

  I was incredulous. ‘What does he find to say?’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s for we lesser mortals to wonder.’ He heaved himself off the wall to press one foot hard on to the ground: cramp, or pins and needles. ‘Then again, perhaps not. Because perhaps you’ve been in love, Elizabeth; have you?’ He cocked his head, appraising me. ‘Anyone you have your eye on? Any suitable Suffolk sorts? Or,’ he smirked, ‘anyone unsuitable? Any – I don’t know – stablehands?’

  ‘No, but how about you? Any stablehands you have your eye on?’

  ‘Elizabeth,’ he warned. You could die for that. He peered into the distance as if to check on William. ‘Well, anyway, you’ve got all that to come,’ he said, ‘because you’ll be marrying for love, won’t you.’

  ‘Which is a stupid thing to do, according to you.’

  ‘No, for me.’ He turned back around. ‘For someone such as me, coming from a family such as mine.’

  I couldn’t let that pass. ‘And what do you know about my family?’

  Hands up. ‘Good Catholic family, and well connected: must be, to have got you here.’

  I put him straight: ‘I volunteered, and let me tell you that I didn’t have a lot of competition.’

  He was surprised. ‘You volunteered for this? Why?’

  Questions, questions, questions. ‘Because I thought I might meet my prince.’

  Another of those searching looks of his. ‘You want a prince?’

  ‘No, Guildford,’ I said, moving off past him. ‘Actually, what I want is some peace and quiet.’

  I didn’t see him every day, nor even most days, because sometimes the cold was too much for me or he himself was too much, and the day after we’d stood discussing Jane’s embroidery was one of those times, although it was my mistake to think it would be easier to stay put. Jane was pleased with her progress on the honeysuckle bag, and that afternoon she pressed on with it. I wasn’t bothered when she was reading or writing but, inexplicably, her embroidering drove me to distraction. I could never have joined her in her reading and writing, but I could well have joined her in the needlework. She’d offered – several times – to share her silks with me, but the silks weren’t the half of it because I also lacked her eye for detail, her steady hand, her patience. I didn’t want to show myself up. Not that I said so. I just declined politely, and she could think what she liked.

  That particular November afternoon was when she nodded towards the Susanna tapestry and, apropos of nothing, pronounced, ‘Apocryphal.’

  I got the impression this was supposed to be helpful.

  What?

  ‘Means it didn’t really happen. It’s just a story.’

  Oh, what, unlike the rest?

  Anyway, how did she – or anyone – know? They’d read it somewhere in a book, but who’d written the book and how had the writer known? And the funny thing was – and I nearly said it to her – that Susanna was one story that I could believe. Those two old men, the respected elders: You either let us do whatever we want to you or we tell everyone you have a lover, and just who, girly, do you think they’ll listen to?

  And, actually, while we were on the subject, there was something I’d often wondered: ‘Why don’t you ever try to convert me?’

  I’d thrown it at her from nowhere but she didn’t so much as glance up to reply, ‘Well, if I took the time to try to convert everyone

  But I wasn’t everyone. And I was right there under her nose. Right there, day after day, week after week. ‘But I’ve started going to Mass again,’ I said, at which she did glance up, but sceptical, which infuriated me. ‘I have!’

  She was already back at her stitching. ‘Did I say you haven’t?’

  ‘Well, why don’t you ever try to stop me?’

  She said nothing, just sat there stitching.

  ‘Why don’t you ever really talk to me?’

  ‘We’re in prison,’ she said. ‘Not at a party.’

  ‘But isn’t that all the more reason we should talk? Stuck in here like this, just the two of us?’

  ‘Talk about what?’ A pulling tight of a thread gave her an instant in which to frown up at me, but I couldn’t read it: puzzlement? Disapproval? Challenge?

  How could we ever know what we might have in common if we didn’t talk? And anyway, I thought, what does anyone ever talk about? What did Guildford and I talk about? ‘Just … anything,’ I ended up saying, pathetically.

  Suddenly she surprised me, laying her embroidery down in her lap and saying in the manner of offering me something, ‘Katherine Parr would’ve converted you.’

  As a conversation opener, it left me at a loss. Katherine Parr? The one who’d survived the old King.

  She warmed to her theme, literally: sitting back, stretching her legs, her feet closer to the fire. ‘I lived with her for a while at Chelsea and, I tell you, she would’ve converted you. She wrote and published a whole book but she still managed to win everyone over, convert everyone she came across.’

  ‘How?’

  That had her shrugging, although taking some pleasure in it, making light of her own cluelessness: if she knew, said that shrug, then she’d be doing it, wouldn’t she. ‘She was just …’ she came back with, ‘lovely.’

  ‘She won you over,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ she crossed her ankles. ‘She didn’t have to; I was raised Protestant, remember. My father likes to think of himself as a man of ideas,’ it was obvious she didn’t concur, ‘although my mother’s more of a horsewoman. In her view, life’s for living,’ which she pronounced to make clear that she was quoting, and raised her eyebrows as if we agreed that was self-evidently absurd. ‘So, no,’ she said, ‘the Dowager Queen didn’t have to win me over.’

  ‘Actually,’ I had to tell her, ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’

  And she got it, ‘Oh,’ and turned shy. ‘Well, yes, I was very fond of her, yes.’

  Fond. I almost smiled: it struck me as a most Jane-like word.

  She remembered, ‘We used to talk, the two of us. She used to sit me down morning and night to comb my hair and that was when we had our best talks. About what—’ another shrug, for what was lost. ‘But I remember the feeling of it. She’d ask me to think, really, and then think a little more and then a little more, and there was always further to go, and I loved that.’

  ‘What was she like?’ I didn’t know quite what I could expect as an answer.

  Jane didn’t hesitate: ‘Tall,’ before reflecting, ‘but I was nine, so everyone was tall,’ and then, with the twitch of a smile in her eyes, ‘Mind you, everyone still is.’ She decided, ‘She was good: that was what she was,’ but then, mitigating against my taking ‘good’ to mean ‘pious and sanctimonious’, ‘No, she was clever and kind and funny and forgiving.’ Unlike her own mother, was my guess. Suddenly I felt the lack of Katherine Parr. We were in need of her, I felt: we could’ve done with her here with us.

  ‘She was a queen,’ I said, although I didn’t know why I’d said it and then worried that I shouldn’t have.

  But Jane, back at her stitching, was unperturbed. ‘By then,’ she corrected me, ‘she was just a wife.’ />
  I recalled the story as I knew it: only very briefly a widow, a dowager queen, then once again a wife. I had a sense it hadn’t gone well, that latter marriage, but if I’d ever known the details, I couldn’t remember them.

  ‘She was sure I was going to be both,’ said Jane evenly, absorbed in a stitch. ‘She was sure I’d marry the King.’ The boy-King, the Dowager Queen’s little stepson. Jane sounded vaguely interested in the idea, as if discussing someone other than herself. If she had married him, she’d probably have been no better off. She’d already be his widow, his dowager queen, and with Mary Tudor on the throne, she might well have ended up in here anyway.

  I thought I might as well ask: ‘Why didn’t you? Marry him.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know.’ She didn’t look up. ‘She died and I got sent back home and everything changed.’

  ‘I thought you’d suffered a loss of faith,’ Guildford said when I turned up several days later.

  ‘I’ve been busy,’ I said, sitting down beside him on the thyme, ‘listening to your wife talking.’

  The speed with which he turned to me was a joy to behold and I’d have loved to have strung him along further, unsettled him a bit more, but actually I just told him straight: ‘Not about you,’ refraining from adding, You should he so lucky. ‘She was telling me about when she lived with the Dowager Queen.’

  ‘Oh.’ He was reassured, and uninterested.

  Nevertheless, he was going to hear about it, because ‘She was happy there,’ which, surely, was worthy of note.

  ‘Well, yes, until that husband disgraced himself.’ And then, seeing my incomprehension: ‘You didn’t know? The Dowager Queen’s new husband and the princess? You don’t know about that?’

  Was he having me on? ‘Which princess?’

  ‘Well, not Mary, obviously,’ he said brutally. ‘But Elizabeth. She was there too, at Chelsea – gone there to live with her stepmother. She was –’ he took a guess ‘– fourteen?’

  ‘And?’ I was agog.

  ‘And the husband was …’ he considered how to put it, ‘“over-familiar” with her.’

  Over-familiar: a borrowed expression behind which he’d taken refuge, but he still looked uncomfortable.

  Which was nothing, I suspected, to how I looked.

  Over-familiar: was that what people would say Harry had been with me, if ever they got to know?

  ‘Not that anyone knows exactly, of course – it’s all rumour – but whatever happened was bad enough for the princess to be sent to friends and Jane taken back home.’

  ‘But hadn’t they just married?’ The new husband, the Dowager Queen: married for love, far too soon, mere weeks into her widowhood. She’d been left in a position to be able to choose for herself. ‘So, why would he do that?’

  Guildford shrugged. ‘He was a chancer. A dowager queen is a dowager queen but a princess is a princess. Too good a chance to miss, I suppose.’

  A chancer, was that what Harry was?

  ‘And afterwards,’ he said, ‘they made the best of it, I think, for appearances’ sake, but then she had a baby and died, and once she’d gone, Council moved in for the kill, because no one’s going to behave like that with a princess and get away with it.’

  I’d given Harry the chance. He hadn’t been looking for it, he was too lazy to be bothered. Opportunities had to be handed to him, and I’d done that.

  I said, ‘Jane didn’t tell me any of that.’

  He gave me a look.

  It occurred to me: ‘What did she know of it all, at the time?’ She’d been nine, she’d said.

  He sighed. ‘It’s never what she knows, is it. She knows an awful lot. It’s what she understands of anything.’

  Well, yes. Poor Jane: ‘There she was, to have that wonderful upbringing with the Dowager Queen, and then that happens.’

  He looked surprised. ‘Oh, but that wasn’t why she was there. Did she tell you that?’ He allowed, ‘Well, perhaps there was something of that, perhaps that was what the Dowager Queen wanted. But she was there because her parents sold her to that chancer. He’d said he’d marry her to the King. He was the King’s uncle, remember.’

  ‘Sold her?’

  ‘Wardship. Sold her wardship. Seymour paid her parents and then he’d get to keep whatever more he could make from her.’ He said, ‘You know how it works.’

  I’d never thought of wardships in that way. He was right, though, I supposed. ‘Did Jane know that?’

  He pulled a face: ‘As I say …’ Even if she did, who knew what she understood of it, either at the time or since.

  Poor Jane: first that, and then the betrothal to another Seymour, and then her Dudley marriage. Always associated with the wrong men. But then perhaps all men are the wrong men, I thought: perhaps there’s no other kind.

  And that was when Guildford said, quietly, ‘I know what you think of me.’

  Well, I was glad one of us did. Heart in mouth I listened for what he might say.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I could probably do it, I could probably walk away from my marriage. I could probably get this marriage annulled, but then what becomes of her? She’s back where she started and they’ll just marry her off to someone else.’ He said, ‘I know you think I’m stupid, because she’s never going to thank me for standing by her. You think I don’t know that, but I do. The way I see it, though, is that someone has to do right by her, for once, whether she likes it or not.’

  *

  The decision about whether or not to go and meet Guildford was there to be made every day, after the breakfast I never ate and before the Mass I never attended, and I resented it because my life here in the Tower was supposed to be easy. Wasn’t that why I’d come? Not to have to think. Not to have to see anyone.

  What weighed on me was the thought of him waiting for me, which he never failed to do, perhaps even in the worst of weathers, because he was always there whenever I did turn up. The times when I hadn’t appeared were never mentioned; I came trailing them but they weren’t acknowledged, which only made them more conspicuous.

  But why was it sometimes so hard – too hard – to go and spend a little time with him? Why so difficult to sit and talk about nothing very much? I’d never expected to like him, but I did; or on the whole, I did. There were still times when he was high-handed and self-righteous and then I’d have loved to set Goose on him. That was how I got though the times when he was less than likeable: by pondering what Goose would make of him.

  Generally, though, my reluctance had nothing to do with what he did or didn’t say. What made me want to run was how he looked at me whenever I did turn up: the looking up at me – he never, after that first time, got to his feet – as if he were handing himself over to me. As if I could save him. But from what?

  And if on the days when I didn’t see him I still kept company with him inside my head, that was only because it was empty of everything else.

  One day in late October he told me he was worried that his exercise was going to be curtailed or even stopped. That was what it was, for him, officially, our sitting side by side: exercise. That was how he put it to William and to anyone else who needed to know. For me it was Mass, but for him it was exercise. ‘Honeymoon’s over,’ he raised his eyebrows, ‘for our new queen. She’s getting a harder time of it. People are asking questions. About how far she’s going to go. Waking up a bit, now, they are. Too bloody late, the dozy bastards, but they wouldn’t be told, would they.’ He coughed. ‘Easy for her to be magnanimous when everything’s rosy, but when things turn iffy, it’s easier to have us under lock and key.’ He revised, ‘Or more locks, more keys.’

  Thrown, unsure what to say, I fell back on the worst possible thing: ‘Well, you’ll need to start going to Mass, then,’ realising even as I said it that he of all people wouldn’t appreciate flippancy about expedient conversion. Flustered, I tried to make light of it – ‘I mean, I have to’ – but he didn’t look at me and sounded tired when he said, simply, ‘Well, you’ll get
your place in Heaven, won’t you.’

  And after that, understandably, he was poor company, so before long I gave up on him and resigned myself to a long afternoon back in our room.

  When the Partridges invited us down to dine, one evening in early November, it was because they had news for Jane: there was a date for the trial, the 13th, a mere week away. Jane gave no sign of how she felt to hear it, and perhaps she felt nothing at all. She’d been living with the threat of the trial for a long time, and, as Mr Partridge had been quick to reiterate, it was of no real consequence, whatever the verdict: it had to be done; it was just something to be gone through.

  Me, though, suddenly I found I had all kinds of questions. I’d understood all along that the trial would be a formality but only now did I wonder what form it would take. For a start, how long would it last? Hours or days? And where would it be?

  As if he’d read my mind, Mr Partridge said, ‘It’ll be at Guildhall.’

  At that, though, Jane’s demeanour changed. ‘Guildhall?’ Apparently this was of some significance to her. Her sights were firmly on Mr Partridge and I had a sense that she was refusing to let him off a hook. Holding him in that unnerving gaze of hers, she then cocked her head as if listening hard for something. ‘Not Westminster?’

  He took a breath, audibly, to fortify himself before confirming, ‘No.’

  And Jane drew back in on herself, as if to consider.

  I looked to Mrs Partridge, but she was staring down at her hands. Nothing particularly unusual in that, but still, something was going on. ‘What?’ I piped up, but no one responded. Instead, Jane asked the Partridges, ‘How will we get there?’

  ‘Barge, first,’ said Mr Partridge, ‘then a walk.’

  A walk, as if it were a stroll. But if I was fooled, Jane wasn’t; she pinned him down: ‘How much of a walk?’

  He lost his nerve, referred the question to his wife, who was notably reluctant to take it up. ‘Half an hour?’ Said diffidently, to disown it.

  To me, this presented a practical problem. ‘You’ll need boots,’ I said to Jane. ‘Half an hour through London streets in November. You’ll need boots.’ It was my job, after all, to think of such things. She’d been detained in July and then the only walks she’d been expected to be taking would be brief and at her choosing, on the finer days; she had no boots with her, she hadn’t come equipped and in four months neither we nor anyone else had remedied that. I said to the Partridges, ‘She’ll need some boots,’ but it seemed that no one was listening to me, so I said to Jane, ‘Or I suppose you could try mine.’