The Lady of Misrule

by Suzannah Dunn

  ‘Give or take.’

  Not Wyatt through the gate, then, but Goose. And looking good on it, too.

  ‘And guess’ she bobbed with the excitement of it, almost made a jig of it, ‘who I saw?’

  Jane blundered in, wrapped in our coverlet.

  ‘No less,’ crowed Goose, ‘than our own lady Queen!’

  Jane staggered to the fireside stool.

  ‘At Guildhall. Come from the palace, where all her ladies have been screaming and crying and barricading themselves in, so says my sister, and she’d know.

  ‘And all of them armed, those ladies,’ she brandished our poker in demonstration, ‘and all the servants, too,’ accompanied by a provocative hitch of her eyebrows. ‘But there she was, our queen, at Guildhall, with the doors wide open to all of us. Got up in her robes and crown and on her throne and –’ to Jane ‘– isn’t she weeny!’

  Jane looked blank.

  ‘But what a voice!’ She was chucking cloths and brushes into her pail; it seemed that she wouldn’t be staying. ‘Everyone could hear her. All of us hundreds and hundreds of Londoners, packed in the hall or on the steps outside. And she’s our queen, was what she said, and loves us all like we’re her children, and everything she’s doing, it’s for us. It’s all, always for us, is what she said.’ She hefted the pail on to her arm. ‘And those men coming? Well, she said, we can see ’em off; “I’m not scared of them,” she said, and, I’m telling you, that was no word of a lie.’ From the door, she said, ‘Everything had been all shut up, doors bolted, but then suddenly everyone was everywhere again, and when ol’ Mister Wyatt got to Ludgate – he’d crossed at Kingston – he was thinking they’d open up but they didn’t.’ She shrugged: done and dusted. ‘And of course he couldn’t go back, because of the lords on his tail.

  ‘I mean, they couldn’t stop him coming, could they,’ a roll of her eyes, ‘but they could just about manage to stop him getting away.’

  Jane asked, ‘Where is he?’

  ‘On his way. Bell Tower. So, if you’ll excuse me,’ and she made a lot of it, the full Goosey force of her in that one word ‘excuse’, ‘I’ve got work to do.’

  And then nothing more, all day long; nothing out of the ordinary; no trace of the previous day’s turmoil. Everything back to normal. Men busy in the inner bailey, the cook and his boy in the kitchen putting good food on our tray for lunch and supper, Twig downstairs and Goose from time to time in our room despite her much-vaunted duties tending to Wyatt. And we read and stitched our way through the day; and Guildford, presumably, in his tower, was back to badgering William to play him at cards. It was as if nothing had ever happened, although surely no one trusted to that.

  During the night, sometime in the small hours, we were woken by Mr Partridge in our bedroom doorway, apologetic but firm: ‘Lady Jane, if you could come with me,’ and it was softly said only because of the hour. It wasn’t a request, but an order.

  I shot up but he shook his head at me, quick and secretive, Not you, as if I’d understand, as if there was an understanding between us. But this was lunacy: Mr Partridge had gone mad, cut loose and turning up here in our bedroom in the dead of night, asking for Jane to go alone with him. I had to get help. But he was our help. And he was blocking our doorway.

  Jane was startled too, but she focused on the practicality: ‘But I’m not dressed.’

  Of that, he was dismissive. ‘Well, just—’ throw something on, and he sounded sad and exhausted, not mad; and so, in my confusion, in my half-woken daze, her state of undress became the issue. Scrabbling from the bed to her chests, I pulled out a gown and held it aloft. ‘This?’

  Was she going outside? Who, exactly, would be seeing her?

  ‘Fine.’ He was spectacularly uninterested.

  There we were, in front of him in our nightdresses, the guileless white of them, their good-natured stitching. I was frantic to object because this was outrageous, she simply couldn’t leave this room in the middle of the night, not without me and certainly not with any man, even if that man was Mr Partridge. But the words stopped in my throat and Jane was the one of us who asked, ‘What’s wrong, Mr Partridge?’ She didn’t sound scared, but, if anything, sympathetic.

  He didn’t answer; said, ‘You need to come with me,’ but soothingly now, as if that were a reassurance.

  And she did. She got up, shrugged the gown loosely over her nightdress, and pattered from the room without a backwards glance.

  I’d never been alone before in those rooms of ours. Jane had, often enough, although never at night. I lay there tracking the scuttle of mice in the roof but, incredibly, must have dozed eventually, because then it was morning and she was back there beside me in the bed.

  I presumed she’d tell me what had happened, but she didn’t. We were both slow to rise, bone-tired from the difficult few days and nights, but still she said nothing and I didn’t dare ask for fear of bad news. And then came a knock at our door. She was ahead of me to it, which was odd because it was my job to answer it. What was going on? First I was excluded from an extraordinary night-time excursion which was ominously unexplained, and now she was answering our door as if I didn’t exist. Perhaps it was all somehow to do with me: perhaps, I worried, this was it, for me, and I was about to be told that my services were no longer required.

  She opened the door to an old priest. Or perhaps he was an old man impersonating a priest, so impeccably in character was he: a priest as I remembered them from my childhood, when they’d pinch my cheek and call me Jesus’s little lamb. Life had treated him well: he was broader than he was tall – although that wasn’t very – with cheeks ruddied by ale and sugar-shrunken teeth, not that he stinted on his smile. He stood there in our doorway, bouncing on the balls of his feet, and Jane welcomed him in. She’d been expecting him, was how it looked, and in he came, burbling greetings, his tiny jellied eyes everywhere at once as if unable to imagine any finer earthly place to be.

  If he was doing well in playing the priest, Jane did at least as well as the gracious hostess. ‘Father Feckenham, this is my friend Mistress Elizabeth Tilney; and Elizabeth, Father Feckenham,’ as she ushered him towards the fireside and into the chair that habitually she took as her own. For herself, she drew up the stool, and doing so, passing the table, made a minor adjustment to her pile of books. It was the merest touch and to no obvious end but perhaps more a taking of comfort from them. The priest was talking ceaselessly – ‘So good of you to see me, I do appreciate it, and I’m hoping we’ll make real progress, I’m sure we’ll discover lots of common ground’ – but spotting her reach for those books, his pitch rose as if in competition with them, to assert his own physical presence over theirs.

  Jane turned pleasantly from him to me: ‘Elizabeth, I wonder if you’d be so kind as to fetch Father Feckenham some refreshments.’

  The tray with which I returned was given a rapturous reception: ‘Oh, look at that, how very generous, how lovely, what an impressive spread, this looks absolutely delicious and you really shouldn’t leave it all to me because it won’t do me any good at all.’

  Jane, though, persisted with what was presumably an ongoing conversation. ‘He also said, “I’m a vine,” father, and, “I’m a door,” but he was neither of those, was He; I mean, surely you don’t think—’ She gestured towards the door, which I’d just closed behind me: Is that Jesus? She awaited the priest’s considered response, with which, wisely, he declined to furnish her. He turned his attention instead to the quince paste. ‘Doesn’t this look magnificent?’ and, incredulous, to both of us, ‘Are you sure you won’t have some?’ He spoke through a mouthful: ‘You wonder, don’t you, what spices your man has used, here, to give it such a delicate flavour.’

  Jane kept a smile on her face but, I saw, it didn’t reach her eyes, which was where her tiredness was pooled.

  Then the priest did come up with an answer, if only after a fashion: ‘Oh, but it’s all just words, Lady Jane, in the end, isn’t it, just words; and we c
an quibble for ever about words but I doubt we’re so very far apart on the important matters.’

  Hers was such a sweet smile, despite her obvious weariness, and I felt for that priest because he’d be beguiled. He wasn’t to know that whatever he said wouldn’t touch her. She’d heard it all before, countless times, since she was a small child. That poor man, he had no idea what he was up against. He’d have been better off, I thought, spending his time on me. I was the sinner in the room, if he wanted one. Except that I was no more interested in listening to him than she was.

  And then, mercifully, I didn’t have to, because Goose was at our door, come to tell me that Mr Locke had turned up downstairs to see me. Jane could of course be left in the presence of a priest, so I followed Goose to the parlour, where I spent perhaps as long as half an hour in the company – if it could be so termed – of my parents’ steward. He’d been in London when the siege had started, which had, at the time, put paid to any business he’d been there to do, and was eager to tell us what he’d experienced. ‘Shut up shop,’ he said, amazed, more than several times, ‘the whole city, shut up shop.’ For half an hour or so, Mr Partridge nodded sagely, Goose twiddled her thumbs and Twig chanced some begging, while Mr Locke and I exchanged appropriate pleasantries and any news, such as we had; and then, when he was sufficiently reassured that I’d survived recent events unscathed, I was free to leave him.

  My return upstairs coincided with Fr Feckenham’s departure. ‘And in view of how well we’ve done today,’ he was saying brightly to Jane, ‘I’d like to ask the Queen for more time, just a day or two. Given a little longer, I don’t doubt we’ll find our common ground.’

  I could hear Jane’s smile in her voice. ‘Thank you, father, you’re very kind, but, really, as I say, I’d like you to convey for me that tomorrow will be fine.’

  There followed a small silence, which I took to be nothing more than his shifting in the doorway to allow me past, but then, gravely, he said, ‘My Lady, please, I beg you to reconsider.’

  She was unmoved: ‘You’re very kind, father, but, really, tomorrow is my final word.’

  Shutting the door on him, I asked her, ‘What’s tomorrow?’ It was easier to ask about tomorrow, just mentioned, than the previous, mysterious night.

  She was tidying the table because, had the priest liked it or not, there’d obviously been some consultation of her books. Turning to hang up my cloak, I had my back to her when she said, ‘My execution.’

  There was no need for that, I was in no mood for jokes and I knocked it back at her: ‘Don’t say that.’

  She paused in her book-shuffling to look up at me but there was nothing in her eyes as she informed me, ‘My father was involved in the uprising.’

  Her father – the man with the canopy? A man who couldn’t even take down a canopy unaided. ‘Your father?’

  ‘Involved in the uprising.’

  But that made no sense. The bodged canopy-dismantling, and then the shameful skulking from the Tower by which he’d abandoned his daughter: that man was a coward. He’d already been in more than enough trouble for a lifetime and I couldn’t believe he’d go looking for any more. I must have misunderstood her. Uprising? I was thinking of Wyatt’s men but perhaps she was speaking historically. Perhaps ‘uprising’ was what she called her attempt to take the throne, although then she wouldn’t have been telling me that her father had been involved, because we both already knew that.

  ‘Hence,’ was all she said.

  Hence? Baffled, I could only repeat it back to her: ‘Hence?’

  ‘My execution.’ Offered up like that, in conclusion, she sounded almost pleased with it.

  But I was stuck, repeating it back to her: ‘Your father was involved in the uprising?’

  She gave me a small, humourless smile: Would you believe it?

  Well, no, actually, I wouldn’t. I still didn’t understand. ‘The one in favour of the princess?’

  She was busy again, now with the tray. ‘The very one.’

  She was humouring me. Stop it. Stop trying to pretend this is nothing. Because, I was realising, this was something, something had happened, something was happening, even if I wasn’t clear to me exactly what, and even if her prissy table-tidying belied it.

  She indicated the tray: ‘Should we take this down?’

  I ignored that. ‘Your father wouldn’t be involved in any uprising. He wouldn’t do that.’ Not when a mere six months ago he’d escaped with his life by the skin of his teeth. Not with his daughter, judged guilty of treason, held prisoner in the Tower.

  ‘Well, he did,’ she said, and then she was going into our bedroom.

  But no, Oh no you don’t, and, quicker than she was, I got myself between her and the door. ‘But,’ I said, ‘he’d have to be an idiot to do that.’

  She gave me a wry look.

  No. Enough. I hated how she was standing there, her emphatic show of tolerance as if I were a toddler on the verge of a tantrum. ‘That was for the princess.’ My breathing was louder than my words. ‘The uprising. That was in favour of the princess.’ You said.

  Wasn’t that what she’d said? Yes, she had, I was right about that, I was damn well right and she should admit it. One of us needed to be sensible here; one of us had to get a grip.

  She said, ‘I need the chamberpot, Elizabeth.’

  But no, no, she was going to confirm it for me first: I was the one of us who was speaking sense and I needed her to confirm that for me. ‘You said Wyatt was for the princess.’

  ‘And he was.’ She was surprised that I should doubt her.

  ‘Well then.’ I stood my ground. I had to have her agree that she was in no danger, no real danger; I couldn’t fathom her desire to pretend that she was.

  ‘Well then what?’

  ‘Well then, it had nothing to do with you.’ That was the nub of it: I’d got there, if with no help from her.

  She said, ‘My father planned that uprising. My father and a couple of his friends.’

  ‘Yes,’ I allowed, ‘but not for you. He did it for the princess. He just happens to be your father, but he didn’t do it for you.’ Why persist in the denial of it? ‘And he’ll tell them,’ I said. ‘He’ll tell them it had nothing to do with you.’ Obviously he would.

  ‘Elizabeth,’ she sighed, giving up on the chamberpot, wandering towards the window. ‘I don’t know what he’ll tell them, but whatever he tells them, it’s irrelevant.’

  But, no, she was wrong there: it was precisely what was at issue.

  ‘One attempt to put me on the throne …’ she shrugged, fair enough, in the case of a particularly merciful queen, ‘but twice …’ and again a shrug, but his time huge, a giving up.

  ‘But it’s not twice.’ I spoke too loudly, had to lower my voice, ‘because this one, this… uprising’ – I hated the word – ‘wasn’t for you.’

  She was exasperated. ‘But we don’t know that! She doesn’t know that.’ The Queen. ‘My father was one of the leaders, and who knows what he was thinking? For him, it might’ve been for me, and next time it could be. It’s too risky for her; I’m too much of a risk, I’m a threat.’

  Oh for God’s sake, I almost laughed. ‘You’re not a threat. You’re just a girl.’

  A girl, though, who would change the world.

  ‘Strictly speaking,’ she said, ‘I’m a married woman: I could have an heir.’

  Oh, well, yes, if you say so. ‘The princess,’ I insisted, ‘the princess is the one she needs to worry about.’

  Jane gazed over the green. ‘But she can’t touch her. Too close to home. And anyway, there’s nothing she can prove against her.’

  I burst out, ‘But there’s nothing she can prove against you! I mean,’ and it was almost funny, ‘you were in here’

  She looked over her shoulder at me. ‘Yes, and why? Why am I in here?’ Not a question, not really. And now she turned fully around to face me. ‘The Queen very nearly fell. Thousands and thousands of men marched on London. Ther
e’s no place in England, now, for traitors.’

  Which was all very well, but ‘She won’t do it.’ Those various, burly, scheming men, they’d have to face the consequences, of course they would, but ‘Not you. You know that. She won’t actually do it.’ Murder a girl? An innocent girl? A noble-born, serious-minded, Godly girl? Even if the Queen wanted to do it, she wouldn’t dare, because she’d never live it down. Why did I feel this was a corner that needed fighting? Why was I shaking so much that I was close to being sick? The Queen wouldn’t do it. She was a queen who wouldn’t have her cannons fired near civilians, a queen who’d knelt on the grass to take a boy up into her arms, a queen who had said we were all her children. ‘Who told you this?’ I demanded. Let’s get to the bottom of this. Who was the source of this disgusting scaremongering?

  ‘Mr Partridge.’

  Mr Partridge? Was that what that had been about last night?

  ‘Last night. He told me, and he showed me the warrant.’ She was ahead of me: ‘And yes, I did check that it was signed.’ There she stood, in front of me, arms folded, unyielding.

  ‘But so what?’ I said. ‘So what if it was signed? It has to be signed but she’s bluffing.’ Why couldn’t she see that? ‘She signs a warrant but then she pardons you and then she looks all wonderful and merciful.’

  ‘But she’s already done that. She’s already pardoned me once. Now, she has to look strong.’

  She’d seen the warrant – seen her name on it and, below, the Queen’s signature – and then she’d come back into this room and crept into bed beside me and gone to sleep. And when she’d got up in the morning, she hadn’t told me. You hid this from me. I didn’t know her, I realised, I didn’t know her at all, and perhaps that was why I said her name, just her name: heard myself say it, just the one syllable.

  What she said, in return, was, ‘Tomorrow,’ just as she’d said it to the priest. The priest: I’d forgotten him.

  ‘That priest’s here to get you to recant.’

  ‘Well,’ and she was faintly amused at the thought, ‘that’s what he’s hoping for.’