The Lady of Misrule (11 page)

And just as we were reaching the door, just as we were about to step into the light of the bracketed torch to be reclaimed by Christmas, just as we needed to release each other, I stopped but didn't let go. Perhaps I wanted a little more of what we'd had – the easy companionship, the sly solidarity – and possibly I'd have been satisfied with a smile, an acknowledgement of what we'd shared; but halted, Harry
turned, surprised and quizzical and unbalanced, and then it was not just our hands that were together but our mouths.

I'd never been kissed before, and how extraordinary it was, how much mouth he had; it was all I could do to stand there and take it. His tongue, tentative though its touches were to mine, seemed to reach right into me, and so the whole of me was held there, hanging from our joined mouths. There was nothing precarious about it, though: I'd never felt so certain about anything in my life. And all the time my heart hollered, and how exhilarating to ignore its clamorous warning, to let it ring on and on regardless, and to go ahead anyway and do just as I wanted.

But suddenly his mouth was off mine, leaving it wet and cold, and he breathed something like a bashful laugh, saying, ‘We should go back inside.'

We,
was what I heard of it. And
should
: how sceptically it was said. My life was all about what I should and shouldn't do and here at last was someone who understood them for the risible words they were.

And better still, and whoever would've guessed it: that someone was Harry, ever-obliging Harry, everyone's favourite. Well, I knew a thing or two about Harry, now, that no one else did. And no one but he knew the first thing about me.

II

 

 

T
he Queen was in the Tower but nothing had changed. If we hadn't seen her arrive, we wouldn't have known she was there. We'd had the very best view of her that afternoon, but in the following days and then weeks, despite her living just a stone's throw from us, there was nothing more, not a glimpse. She was there, though. They were both there, she and Jane, either side of the Tower, in a peculiar kind of balance: victor and vanquished. Jane wouldn't be in the Partridges' house if it weren't for the Queen, but neither, it seemed to me, would the Queen be quite the victor she was if there had never been a pretender. The jubilation jamming the streets on the day I'd run hand in hand with Henry Fitzalan, and, two weeks later, the elation hovering over the green like its own little Heaven: for all that, I suspected, the Queen had Jane to thank.

What, I wondered, would Jane – or, more accurately, her father-in-law and his cronies – have done with Lady Mary, as she'd been, had England gone
their
way? Would they –
could
they – have left her be? She'd given Council so much grief
for so long – more a bargepole in its side than a thorn – but those battles had always been about her freedom to worship as she wished. But if her second cousin had been successfully elevated over her to the throne? Would she have kept to skirmishes over altars and priests? Eldest daughter of the old King and his first, true queen, she was at least as importantly a niece of the Holy Roman Empire: not only rightful, but dangerously closely related to all the right people. True, Spain had made no move before, but back then no one – not even England's vastly powerful adversary – had quibbled over her half-brother's right to rule. With the boy-King dead, though, would the Holy Roman Emperor really have sat back to watch his niece passed over in favour of some English Protestant pipsqueak second cousin? The Lady Mary would've been trouble for Jane's regime and might well have ended up in Jane's place at the Partridges', but, I suspected, facing a far worse fate.

As it was, though, she was safely installed in the Tower's royal apartment, from where all kings and queens go to their coronations. Or, in the case of two of the old King's unfortunate queens, to the scaffold. Well, where queens go from, then, be it for good or bad. Good, though, in this case, and so much so that there was no rush, no date for the coronation. This queen could afford to bide her time; the crown was hers for the taking at her leisure and anyway, August had turned too hot to risk crowds in London.

The heat had taken us all by surprise, steaming into the sky one afternoon and setting up camp to make London its
dominion. We suffered particularly badly at the Partridges', the house, hard against the Tower's west wall, absorbing every last touch of the slow-setting sun. Opening the windows only seemed to let more heat in. Keeping them shut, though, didn't spare us the flies.

By mid-August, Jane and I were shrinking from each new day, not even dressing but just changing nightshirts in the morning for fresh ones. Jane looked harried and flushed, so utterly unlike herself that sometimes, despite the misery of it, I'd want to laugh. Any foray of mine beyond our room had me wearing a kirtle, but only a kirtle and as loosely as possible. I still did the runs to and from the kitchen, although they'd become anything but runs. It would have been unfair, I felt, to have expected Goose to step in just because the going had got tough: no fair-weather tray fetcher, me. But I didn't hang around the kitchen doorway, and the sweat-slathered cook and his boy didn't have the energy to talk much to me about their dishes nor even properly to acknowledge me. Which was a blessing, really, seeing as I was in their company in nothing but in a slack kirtle. In turn, shamefully, Jane and I couldn't face eating much of what they strove to provide for us.

Until it turned cooler, Jane was refusing to go outside to meet Guildford. I wondered if the Queen was braving her garden, and if her blossom-white sister with her golden hair, wherever she was, was retaining her radiance. In my fevered memory, Shelley Place had become a palace of shade – the draughty old hall, the scrubbed-bare dairy-house, the slimy
cobbles of a kitchen courtyard that never got the sun. I longed for it so hard that the very marrow of my bones was leaching homeward. Not that the Tilneys, huffing and puffing as I knew they would be, appreciated what they had. They should try this, I'd think – being in the basin of the Thames, cupped inside walls opened to a tight, white sky.

The moat stank. Or something did, sliding into our room and sticking close, yet keeping just the far side of identifiable so that we could never be sure it wasn't we ourselves who were at fault, that there wasn't something we should've washed or discarded, something of ours for which a pit should've been dug. In truth, all that was hanging around us was the tang of fresh linen and the faint animal scent of our hair which we'd left loose.

The nights were harder even than the days to bear, because of the confounding of the anticipation of relief, the persecutory edge to the heat, the redoubling of its efforts,
You thought you could escape me, did you?
We tried lying on top of the bed-clothes but I couldn't sleep exposed so went back under while Jane didn't, which only made matters worse, the linen around me like a winding-sheet. All day every day, we were witnessing the naked greed of flies, their galling sense of entitlement, but at night came the turn of the fleas left to us by that bastard cat. The heat had them jumping for joy and winkling into our folds so that we woke every morning rubied with bites. Despite taking the heat much worse than we did, Goose was on our side against those fleas and it was just a shame they couldn't be scared to death. While we sat
around dabbing our bites disconsolately with lavender water and honey, she bashed her broom everywhere and swabbed the floorboards with verjuice.

Her appetite for gossip blissfully undiminished, though, she told us that Edward Courtenay, who'd done so much of his growing up inside these walls, was already gone: skedaddled, she said, as soon as he could, and who could blame him, and good luck to him. The Queen hadn't only raised him from his knees but had restored him to the earldom of Devon, which meant that he had riches coming his way and could get credit extended to him, not least by the Queen herself. She couldn't do enough, according to Goose, for the boy who'd been shut in for as long as she'd been shut out. Rumour had it, she added, that he was spending hundreds of pounds on clothes. No longer kicking around with an incarcerated bishop, he was off into town and keen to look the part.

Dressed to the nines, Goose told us, he'd headed across the river to Southwark, where he'd made himself amply at home. Arching an eyebrow, she specified with relish, ‘In houses of ill-repute.' Voiced in that accent of hers, there was something of the goose-honk in ‘repute'. ‘And fair enough,' she said, ‘because he's a lad with a lot of catching up to do. But first things first: it's horses he should be learning to ride.'

Jane said, ‘But if he's sticking to Southwark, he doesn't need a horse, does he.'

Goose continued, ‘Everyone knows what he's up to' –

Well, everyone but Jane.

– ‘but there they were, only a week ago, saying he'd be the ideal husband for the Queen. Now they know better, even if the poor lady herself doesn't. Everyone knows what he's up to, except the Queen herself.' Then came that gappy smile of hers at the very idea of the pair of them: the pious lady and the popinjay.

In the face of Goose's glee, Jane made something of turning back to her book. Whatever she felt about the Queen, she didn't feel it appropriate, it seemed, to make fun of her. Or for Goose to do so, anyway.

Guildford had much the same story when, on the first of the cooler days, Jane gave in and went up on to the wall to walk with him. It was still hot up there; the herb garden would have been a better choice. None of us actually walked, or even stood; all four of us sat heavily on the hot flagstones, below the jeering gulls, in as much shade as the parapet could offer. How I would've loved sight of the river inside its skin of glare. Guildford seemed to have his own source of stories, a Goose-equivalent. ‘No one's impressed,' he said several times of Edward Courtenay's alleged vanity, but for someone so keen to stress just how unimpressed he was, he couldn't stop going on about it. Don't push it, I thought, because that was more or less how he was regarded by his own wife.

‘… and,' he said at one point, ‘he's gadding off south of the river—'

‘In houses of ill repute,' I interjected in Goose's accent, or as close as I could get, just for the sheer pleasure of it.

Guildford looked startled, as well he might because I'd never before breathed a word in his presence. I was about to explain myself –
So says Goose –
and detected that Jane was ready to do the same but then neither of us did because it was too hot to bother, and in a moment Guildford looked away, let it go.

The bishop – Goose had been right, Stephen Gardiner was back to being a bishop – had departed too, although not, of course, for the delights of Southwark. He had work to do, serious work, not only as bishop but as Lord Chancellor, now, and Keeper of the Great Seal. This we gleaned not from Goose – not known for her interest in official appointments – but from the Partridges, over dinner one evening. That morning, Jane had looked up from her book as I'd returned from a kitchen trip, and announced, ‘We're dining with the Partridges later.' The offer had been there since the very first evening, but she hadn't so far taken them up on it. When I asked if I should wait up for her, she frowned, puzzled and a little displeased at the misunderstanding: ‘
We,
I said: you're coming.'

I'd assumed she and Guildford were to be the guests.

‘So, be ready,' she said, ‘for six o'clock.'

That evening, at the Partridges' table, Jane was keen for news of the outside world and unabashed in pressing her hosts for it. This was a side of her I hadn't seen before, and hadn't imagined. Who, she wanted to know as we tucked into beef pie, had the Queen appointed to her Council? I
anticipated a long list of names I didn't know but actually Mr Partridge just said, ‘Everyone,' and checked with his wife, ‘Wouldn't you say so?'

Mouth full, she nodded.

‘All persuasions,' he elaborated. ‘She wants to listen to absolutely everyone. It's a huge council,' which was when Mrs Partridge chipped in with the news of Bishop Gardiner's promotion, adding, ‘And I didn't think she liked him, because he didn't help her mother back in those days.'

Mr Partridge said cheerfully, ‘Oh, I don't think
anyone
much likes him,' and Jane almost smiled when she added, ‘And I think that's mutual.'

‘Makes him a good choice, though, I suppose.' Impartial, I took Mr Partridge to mean.

Jane said, ‘He does like Edward Courtenay.'

‘No,
did,'
Mrs Partridge whispered, ‘because have you heard about him?'

Jane said, ‘We hear of little else.'

‘The only person who hasn't heard,' said Mr Partridge, ‘is the Queen herself, who's still thinking she'll marry him.'

But Mrs Partridge wasn't having that: ‘So people
say.
That's what they like to think, Nathaniel, but I'm not sure she's that—'
stupid
? Whatever the word, she thought better of using it.

Nevertheless, there was a pause, in recognition that she might've gone too far.

Then Jane piped up, ‘Is Mass being said?'

The Partridges appeared embarrassed by this cutting to the
chase. Mrs Partridge looked to her husband, who nodded in reply but busied himself with his piece of pie.

Jane asked, ‘And does the Lady Elizabeth go along?'

Mr Partridge considered, ‘Well, we've heard she's been ill, lately.'

‘Headaches,' Mrs Partridge explained. ‘Chills.'

Jane said, ‘Well, she's going to have to become an invalid if she wants to escape it for much longer. The Queen won't allow her to keep getting away with it.'

An uncomfortable lack of response from the Partridges.