The Lady of Misrule

I

A good Catholic girl was what they’d said they needed, and, seeing as no one knew otherwise, I was trying my hand at being exactly that. And so far – on that first, mid-July, swift-sweet day – I was getting away with it, scurrying behind the Lady Lieutenant through the Tower of London. We were on our way to some lodgings, I thought: somewhere for me to kick off my shoes and lay down my head, fasten some shutters against the belting of London’s bells. After two long days on the road, that was as far as I could think, it was all I wanted, and at seventeen I was naïve enough to think that whatever I wanted, I’d get.

Nothing about the unguarded door to which she led me was any different from all the others we’d passed in passageways and courtyards. Not that I’d had time to see much; she wasn’t hanging around. Tight-lipped and bustling, she acted as if England’s unequivocal proclaiming of the wrong queen, thirteen days before, had been an oversight for which she, with a hasty rejig of household arrangements, could make amends.

Follow me, she’d said at the gatehouse, and diligently I’d done so, almost tripping over myself to keep up, but as far as I was concerned I was under no one’s orders. I’d chosen to come, surprising myself as much as anyone else, the evening before, by raising my hand. Me, who usually kept my head well down. Me, who, if truth be told, couldn’t have cared less who had been or should be Queen.

The Lady Lieutenant knocked on that unguarded door cursorily before opening it and drawing back, leaving me to go ahead. The walls were silk-hung, the ceiling looked gem-worked and the floor was a welter of honey-coloured carpets, each and every one of the thousands of brush-touches and knots of silk there to honour the occupant of the centrepiece, which was a throne. It was empty, though, and its gold-cloth canopy was being dismantled by a man who was overdressed for the task, the close-stitched pearls of his doublet squeaking against one another as he strained this way and that. His foreshortened steps around the obstacle of the throne gave him a fractious air, and he snatched at the canopy as if it were a prop and the show was over. His every move was thwarted by that expanse of thread-thin gold, which slipped and slid, making him cower and cringe as it threatened to swipe off his jewelled cap.

It was quite a spectacle, but the others in that room weren’t paying him the slightest attention. All four of them were standing around a table on which was a leather chest, lid open. Two richly dressed gentlemen, stiff with self-regard, faced a girl of twelve or thirteen and – to judge from the protective hand on her shoulder – her older brother or cousin. So stunningly dressed were the younger pair – she in her deep, glossy greens and he from top to toe in gold-embroidered white – that I didn’t, at first, think of them as real. They were players, I supposed, on their way to or from something ceremonial.

I too was in borrowed clothes, although mine were notably less glamorous and also too big for me. My sudden, belated awareness of how bad I must look gave rise to my first misgiving: what was I doing here? This was no place for me. But the Lady Lieutenant was ushering me forward – Get on with you – as she pushed past me to claim attention from one of the men: a touch to his elbow, a whisper which I overheard. ‘The Tilney girl’, she called me.

‘Right,’ was all the man said. I’d do, presumably, whoever I was: the catch-all Catholic girl that – in his eyes – I was. If he spared me a glance, I didn’t spy it.

That green-dressed girl did, though: she regarded me briefly, and although there was nothing in particular to the look, there was light in it. And that was when I saw that she wasn’t anything like twelve or thirteen, just small. The man who hadn’t bothered to look at me continued his business: ‘And the purse,’ indicating the little drawstring bag that hung from the girl’s girdle.

‘Oh—’ of course, and she obliged, unfastening it while the boy huffed and muttered on her behalf at the indignity, the pettiness of it. As soon as the man had hold of the purse, he stuck two fingers into its neck to stretch it, then upturned it over the table and shook it to release its cache. Two vigorous shakes yielded a splash of small coins, at which he jabbed with an interrogative fingertip.

That was when it occurred to me who that girl might be. But here, behind an unguarded door in the company of a couple of plume-crested, linen-spry dandies, along with that canopy-draped incompetent and a six-foot sulk? If she was who I thought she was, then the blond at her side – half as tall again – was no brother but a husband. Baby of the Dudley family, married off six weeks ago to the Grey heiress. Just in time, as his family would’ve seen it: just before she was bundled on to the throne. Mummy’s boy, people were saying. What a pair they made. Not an ounce of flesh on either of them: any closer together and they’d cut each other. Six weeks, that pair had been married, and I couldn’t help but wonder: were they actually, truly, man and wife? Hard to imagine, particularly of her.

There she was, the girl who had, until that morning, been England’s queen but was now being divested of even her small change. Not that she seemed bothered. Her attention drifted again from the man’s endeavours, to find its way to me, and she smiled. Only a passing smile, not pausing for me to reciprocate, but it was warm enough: it was a hello.

Which was all very well, but where was everyone else? Where were all her other ladies? Finishing his job, recording the sum and dropping the confiscated coins into the case on the table, the man relaxed, became jovial. To the little ex-queen he said, as if she were a guest, ‘The Lady Lieutenant here will show you to your rooms,’ and to her husband, similarly, ‘You come with us, we’ll see you over to yours.’

The boy reeled as if to take issue with that, but the girl cut across him: ‘Can’t I go home?’

Home: despite the softness with which it was said, like a request for warm milk, it brought us all back down to earth, as if someone had blundered in among the gilt and tapestries in nothing but a nightshirt. With that one simple word the ceiling was suddenly just paint-encrusted and chipped, the carpets musty, and those statuesque silk-built figures on the walls turned whey-faced and silly in their wimples. This was no home, and didn’t a sixteen-year-old girl – particularly one stripped even of her small change – need a home?

There was no denying it was well and truly over for her. The bells confirmed it: their ringing in a different queen. England was turning, and rip-roaringly. This girl’s time had already been and gone, and none of it had been of her doing in the first place. And now she was left with a coin-collector and his lackey, a gentleman defeated by a piece of cloth, and a posturing boy-husband. Oh, and a lady lieutenant and me. I mean, we were no army, were we.

Freedom would come soon enough for her, was what everyone said. As soon as the clamour died down and the new Queen was crowned, the new reign established: then the girl-pretender could slip away as if none of it had ever happened. And where, I wondered, was it that she envisaged closing a door behind her, sinking on to a cushion and slipping off her little shoes? I had a home, back in Suffolk; she had one in Leicestershire, I knew, and she’d have one in London, but for a girl like her there’d be others. Perhaps there was even a marital home, too, for the newly-weds. Although, come to think of it, she’d said ‘I’, not ‘we’.

No one in that room wanted to be the one to refuse her. The Lady Lieutenant lowered her eyes: she was just doing her job, no more, and even that – she had probably guessed – not for much longer. They were all caught on the hop, was my guess. No one – absolutely no one, of any persuasion – had expected, two weeks ago, to be facing this situation. Not even two days ago had there been the remotest possibility of having to decide what to do with a pretend queen. Because she hadn’t been a pretend queen: she’d been the Queen proper and no pretence about it. The dying boy-King had chosen her over his Catholic half-sister and she’d been proclaimed as such by every last councillor, all of them, reformist and traditionalist alike, and practically every nobleman in the land. Towns all around the country had declared for her, the royal guard and navy, too, and the Tower was hers and she was already in it, inside its very throne room. Home and dry, done and dusted: Queen Jane.

But now, just thirteen days later, she was being taken from this room to another to make a prisoner of her.

Here she stood, asking to go home instead and looking them in the eye, every one of them somehow all at once; she didn’t waver, and it was quite something to see. Myself, I made sure never to look anyone in the eye if I could avoid it. The officious man seemed ill at ease. He didn’t reply, presumably hoping his colleague would step into the breach, but the other man busied himself shutting the leather case, its straps suddenly proving troublesome, so eventually the first man said, ‘It’s probably best you stay here for now.’

‘Best?’ This from the boy, who stalked away to glare moodily from a window; I’d have liked to deny him the satisfaction of being watched, but couldn’t quite resist. He turned back to us. ‘Says who?’

Again the girl spoke over him, to object but still in that reasonable tone of hers: ‘My mother’s gone home.’

I knew she had a mother – the dead King’s cousin, no less – but for all that she was tiny, and the paucity of coinage in her purse, something told me that she didn’t have much use for one. Perhaps we had that in common. Well, that and both our mothers being elsewhere, upriver, but the crucial difference was that my mother was thrilled for me to be in the Tower: it was cause at long last to be pleased with me, it was as good as it gets for a girl as useless as me. ‘And –’ the girl looked at the gentleman who was having such a job subduing that canopy ‘– my father’s off home, just as soon as he’s …’

The Duke of Suffolk, then, on the rough end of that gold cloth. Would he be shamed by our collective gaze into a declaration of paternal devotion? Goodness, no, sweetheart, as if I’d leave you alone here!

Nothing was forthcoming, so the officious man was probably right to say again, ‘It’s best you stay here for now.’ With a father as spineless as that, she might well be better off with me, even if I’d never in my life looked after anyone. That was when the man gestured towards me: ‘Miss Tilney here will attend you,’ and there I was, conjured up in my new guise as her personal captor. She gave me another of her smiles but the speed of this one suggested that what he’d said was news to her. She hadn’t realised why I was there. Her life, these past couple of weeks, must have been full of all kinds of people coming and going. Going, mostly, lately.

I saw her file it away: a good Catholic girl come to supervise her in her detention. Every girl in England now, under the circumstances, made sure to be a good Catholic girl. Except her, of course. And, if only she knew it, me.

The man had reckoned without remonstration from the regally attired boy-husband. ‘My wife stays with me. No way am I turning her over to you bastards.’

Tough talk from Baby Dudley. I had to turn away or I’d have laughed. Who did he think he was? Baby of a traitor-family, married in what was still probably name only, to a girl who could barely bring herself to look at him. I did, though: turned and looked right at him. Creature, I thought: the cheekbones, the brackish eyes, the broad mouth. Cold fish. And clueless, to think that talk like that would get him anywhere, although it certainly livened up the proceedings.

The man didn’t rise to it: ‘She’ll have her own rooms. You’ll be able to meet—’

‘On whose orders?’

He was probably right to ask, because whose orders, currently, counted? While one queen was being escorted from the throne room but the next had yet to arrive, who could give orders to whom?

‘Lord Arundel,’ the man replied, but barely, as if it were entirely by-the-by who’d given the order, as if it could be on anyone’s orders: Anyone’s but yours.

To which the boy said, ‘Fucking turncoats. All of you. Fucking cowards.’

Judging from the lack of response from the two men, they’d heard all this before.

As if she’d not heard it at all, Jane said, ‘Shall we go?’ and then, to her husband, with a smile, ‘I’ll be fine, thank you, Guildford, don’t you worry.’

Don’t you worry your pretty little head. He didn’t like it, but he was quick, recovering in an instant and changing tack: ‘Jane—’

An entreaty, which struck us all: every one of us stopped sharp and stared at the pair of them. Now that he had our attention, he didn’t seem to know what to do with it. His hand hovered and I could see he wanted to touch her cheek but didn’t quite dare. That pleasant, patient demeanour of hers was somehow forbidding. She was facing him down, I saw, in her own peculiar way, and – perhaps not quite so stupid after all – he backed down, withdrew his hand. ‘Till soon, then,’ was all he could say.

She nodded and took us with her to the door.

Back down those stairs, then, the Lady Lieutenant and me, but now with a deposed queen in our keeping. We were on our way, I supposed, to join all the other ladies and girls, and I could sink happily back to being no one in particular. Down that staircase trooped the three of us, into that exultation of bells, and I wondered what the girl made of the din. She’d know why they were ringing but, shut away in here, she couldn’t possibly guess at the glee out there on the streets. England was proclaiming loud and clear and at length how very glad it was to be rid of her, but all she showed us was that faintly cheerful, freckle-sparkled look of hers.

Stepping ahead of me from the stairwell, the bottom of her gown spilled over the cobbles and it occurred to me that perhaps I was supposed to pick it up and carry it for her. I had no idea of any duties I might have; nobody had yet said anything to me about duties. Possibly her captors themselves didn’t know how to treat a pretender-queen. Then and there, I made a snap decision, emboldened by the riotous bells: I wouldn’t do it, I wouldn’t take up her train. Why should I? She was no queen and never had been.

Our friends the Fitzalans had told us that when she’d come to the Tower, two weeks back, her mother had been the one to oblige. Up the riverside steps they’d come from their barge, the Duchess of Suffolk grappling with taffeta. ‘Her own mother’: a roomful of scandalised Fitzalans had wondered aloud how that could that ever be right. Because even if the Greys had been the heirs to the throne, even if the cousin duchess was closer in blood to the King than his two supposedly bastard half-sisters – even if that could possibly have been true – then why hadn’t it been the duchess herself swanning up those steps on her way to the throne? Why her daughter? The Fitzalans had asked it merely to express their disapproval. Like everyone else in England, they knew the answer: because it was the daughter who was married to the baby Dudley, and this was all his father’s doing.

The father, the Duke of Northumberland, had ruled for the boy-King for years and wasn’t about to give up and go home just because the boy-King was dying. He’d stayed beside the sickbed until that poor boy had accepted his helping hand in signing the throne over, not to the rightful heir, his half-sister, the middle-aged daughter of the long-ago Spanish Queen, but to his cousin’s daughter, English rose and kindred spirit Lady Jane Grey, or Lady Jane Dudley as – conveniently for the duke – she’d only recently become. Watching her emerge ahead of me from the stairwell into the sunshine, it struck me that however bad this situation was for her, it was also freedom from the Duke of Northumberland: there was that, surely, to say for it.

We were retracing my steps, as if to make our way back to Lion’s Gate and onwards into Petty Wales and the city, but once we were clear of the maze of courtyards and into the inner bailey, the Lady Lieutenant led us instead towards a house built hard against the wall, a house that would’ve belonged better on the other side of it: a three-storey, jettied townhouse, quince-hued around its timbers, incongruous among the old stone towers. It even had, beside the front door, its own little herb garden.

‘Mr Partridge’s house,’ she said. ‘Gentleman-gaoler. There’s a Mrs Partridge, too.’

Indicating the neighbouring tower, she told Jane, ‘That’s where your husband’s going to be,’ adding hastily, ‘Good rooms, too, those,’ don’t worry. ‘Just better, we thought, for you girls to be here.’

Making it up as they went along, probably: I imagined a meeting last night, someone’s anxious question, Where shall we hold the Queen? and someone else’s rapid reminder, She’s not the Queen.

Girls, the Lady Lieutenant had called us: Lady Jane was just a girl now, like me.

Girls, both of us, together, in need of a home for a while and this, it seemed, was to be it.

My heart contracted as we walked into the shadow of the house where we’d be living until the new Queen was crowned and the pretend one could be released.

It was an unlikely prison, but that was what it was.

‘Nice house,’ the Lady Lieutenant mused.

But small. Where was everyone else? The Lady Lieutenant honoured its tenants with a knock, which failed to elicit a response. Not someone to be fazed by a locked door, she selected a key from the jangle at her waist. ‘I’d have liked this house for myself, rather than our big old place,’ she confided. ‘Ours is too close to the river: damp and draughty,’ at which she gave a comical shudder, but this chumminess was rather late in the day and we stood there in silence, we two girls, on that threshold. ‘Still …’ she finished as she disappeared ahead of us into the house, by which she probably meant it no longer mattered.

Directly inside the doorway was a staircase, up which we followed her to the top where she opened an unlocked door, releasing into the stairwell a scent of floorboards, of prolonged unoccupancy. As we shuffled in, the long-undisturbed air shifted and rearranged itself around us. The room seemed wary, doing its painful best for us: a chair angled artfully at the fireplace, a jug of roses dead-centre on the table. On one wall was a hanging too big for the space, bunched at one end on its rail although its subjects were unimpeded in their little drama: Susanna and the elders, Susanna conveniently already having done her naked bathing and well wrapped up as she always was by the time the tapestry makers got to her and, unbeknown to her, the repugnant elders lurking behind her on a hiding to nothing.

‘Well, make yourself at home,’ said the Lady Lieutenant in the sceptical, resigned tone with which, at the door, she’d muttered that one word, Still … ‘I’m off to get your boxes brought up.’

Or, just as likely, to pack her own.

No switch of a key in the lock, just retreating steps doled out stair by stair until there was silence. If this was it – if there really was nowhere else but the room we were standing in, and a bedroom behind the internal door – then there could only be the two of us who would be living here. Alone together for the first time, we were too close for comfort. I went to the window, and Lady Jane opened the bedroom door, ostensibly in exploration but probably as desperate as I was for a snatch of solitude. What had I got myself into? How could I have been so stupid as to get myself shut up like this? What had I been thinking, last night, when I’d volunteered? It had seemed a good idea at the time. And it wasn’t as if I was doing much else. There I’d been, newly arrived to stay at the Fitzalans’, when word had come home from the earl that a girl was needed. No doubt he’d have expected one of his own daughters to volunteer but it had been me who’d raised my hand, I’ll do it.

Hearing the door drop home against its jamb, I turned around to the room, which came back at me with a blank stare of its own, but down in a corner was something – alive, dark, fast – and my heart cannoned into my breastbone before I understood I was seeing a cat. It froze, mirroring me: the pair of us in a stand-off. I must’ve exclaimed because suddenly Jane was back in the doorway, alarmed: ‘What?’ I slid her gaze with mine to the animal, which glanced between us, affronted, and took a single, exaggerated backwards step. ‘I can’t breathe,’ I gabbled as if my breath were already gone, ‘if there’s a cat in the room.’

She snapped into practicality: ‘Well, you’re in the right place, because I can’t stand them,’ and in a couple of strides she was at the main door, throwing it wide and ordering the cat on its way. It was an impressive performance for someone so small and, had it been directed at me, I’d have been falling over myself to oblige. But the cat, being a cat, feigned confusion and terror, shrinking and cringing, and only when I’d resigned myself to a merry dance did it surprise me by knowing what was good for it and streaking for the stairs.

There we stood, Jane and I, looking into that gaping, unguarded doorway: both of us, I think, embarrassed to be complicit in her captivity. If she ran, though, she’d only get as far as a gatehouse, which was where the guards were. And, even if she could possibly get past those guards, then where? There was no one, now, who would have her. She closed the door, saying decisively, ‘We don’t have to have that in here.’

We did have to be in here – or she did – but we needn’t submit to further indignities. There were limits.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘Oh –’ she shrugged it off ‘– my little sister’s the same,’ and went to open the window. ‘With my other sister,’ she said, easing up the catch, ‘it’s horses,’ and turning back around to me, she raised her sketchy eyebrows: Imagine!

‘Why don’t you like them?’ I asked her. ‘Cats,’ I clarified, not your sisters.

‘Devious,’ pronouncing it as if it were the final word on the subject.

With the window open came the banging of those bells.

‘What’s your name?’ she asked me, and for an instant the devil in me almost had me claim my cousin’s identity, Cat, but of course I stuck to the truth: ‘Elizabeth.’

‘Well, Elizabeth,’ and she presented her back to me, ‘would you help me out of this?’ She raised her arms a little, offering herself up for unpinning. ‘I hate the thing, and it’s hot in here.’

‘The thing’ was made of such heavy damask that the pins were in it up to their necks. I wondered