The Lady of Misrule (16 page)

‘It's a perfect time,' and I heard the smile in the words. ‘Everyone taken up with what's going on.' He was getting down on the floor and I was going with him but only to make
him listen to me. Crouching there beside him, I said, ‘No—' he'd misunderstood but, oddly, it was me who felt stupid. ‘It's the wrong time
for me.
It's my eleventh day.'
Please understand.

And he did. He stopped, and gazed at me: that loving gaze of his; I knew it there in the gloom from the give in his shoulders and the softening of his breath. He was pleased with me, because I'd saved us from ourselves: one of us had had to do it, and it had been me. And for that, I got a kiss, so brief and gentle that it barely counted; it was a goodbye kiss, a blessing, which was when I realised how hard I'd been holding myself from him, so I relaxed and drew him close, breathed in the fragrant warmth of his neck.

‘With everything that's going on, though,' his whisper was so very close as to seem an actual physical entity inside my ear, ‘it's the only chance we'll have for a while.'

I looked at him, despite the darkness: I wanted him looked at, reckoned with.

‘Eleven's fine,' he murmured. ‘I promise you.'

I flushed, feeling oddly caught out. ‘But you said …'

Days eight to eighteen, was what he'd said, back when we'd started. Best avoided: days eight to eighteen. Best to play safe. He'd been the one to explain to me the significance of times of the month because I'd known nothing, I had no friends to speak of and my sisters were so much older than I was, and my mother didn't talk to me about things like that, which was fair enough because it wasn't as if I was married. There are changes all through the month, he'd said, which did strike a chord with what I knew of myself: I did indeed
change – and keep changing – all through each month. At certain times, he'd told me, I'd be more ready than others for a baby. That's how you do it, he'd said, that's how it's done: that's how you avoid having a baby. And he'd know: Harry, man of the world, twice-married but only four children. What he'd told me had come as good news and bad news: bad in that it was hard enough to have time together without there being more considerations, but good because there was a way to do what we wanted without consequence. We'd just have to be careful, was what he'd said, which had appealed to me because careful was what we were in any case. It was how we had to be, it was in the very nature of the scant time we spent together. To have time together, we used whatever we could and the new information that Harry gave me was just something more. We'd decided to avoid days eight to eighteen and had been scrupulous in doing so. But now he was saying that day eleven was fine, as if there was some detail that I hadn't grasped and – what did I know? – perhaps that was so.

And his hand was already up inside my shift, his fingers scrabbling at me as if trying to locate something to take from me. ‘You're dry,' he observed.

I really couldn't think what to say to that. ‘Yes,' I said, hating how it sounded, as if I were owning up to something.

Dry, yes, but still he was pushing fingers inside me, which was exactly how it felt: me and his fingers, and no melding of the two.

‘Come on,' he murmured, ‘be a good girl.'

Tears smacked the back of my nose and for a moment I couldn't draw breath. It hurt, was all, I told myself: I wasn't ready, so his fingers hurt, hence the tears. But Please, please no tears, because they were clogging up my throat when I needed to be saying—

Saying what?

Because who was I to be saying no?

And anyway it was already happening, he'd moved beneath me and was jabbing at me – ‘Open your legs a bit wider,' glad to give this tip, as if my legs, their closedness, were the problem – and instinct had me reach down to better position him because I knew it would be worse for me if I didn't.

It wouldn't take long, I told myself. Usually, I'd be racing him but this time I closed my eyes and let him go ahead, concentrated instead on the swing of that foliot above me. One drop of the wheel, one notch, I felt, should do it. But actually it took an age, went on and on, and even he seemed to think so, at one point saying, ‘You could at least pretend you're enjoying it,' with an embarrassed half-laugh as if even he couldn't quite believe he'd gone so far. An almost-laugh which, incredibly, hopelessly, I echoed.

It was nothing, though, I told myself: really, it was nothing; it didn't hurt much more than the first time. We had to take our chances, he'd said, which was all he was doing. And shouldn't I, too? Why couldn't I enter into the spirit of it? This was the only chance we'd have for a while, he'd said. My eleventh day was fine, he'd said – not ideal, but fine – and
he was no risk taker. No, that was me: I'd been the one to get us started and to keep us going; the clock cupboard had been my idea. I'd started this, so shouldn't I see it through?

I kept my tears balled up in my throat and when at last he did manage to finish, I got off him and stood up as if nothing were amiss, as if I wasn't burning so much that I feared I was bleeding, and busied myself in settling my skirts and straightening my hood.

He said, ‘Things will take a couple of days at least to calm down,' and I didn't realise for a moment that he was talking about England, about who was its queen. There we were, continuing our earlier conversation. So I said, ‘But the King had a sister.'

‘Half-sister.' His focus, I could hear, was on relacing himself and with the same distracted air he said, ‘The Lady Mary is a spinster,' and told me how she'd never have an heir whereas Lady Jane Grey probably would. ‘Married to a Dudley, true,' he said as we went back through the little doorway into chapel, ‘but it's not as if we aren't used to Dudleys,' and he placed a kiss on my forehead, his usual kind of kiss, no-nonsense and fond.

That night, with Jane sleeping beside me, her every breath into the darkness as sweet and smooth as a spoonful of honey, I was sick with envy because she would never have to suffer this: this particular dirty secret was one she'd never have to
keep. Married, she was protected from it, she'd been pitched beyond it.

While she slept, I returned to myself little by little: the girl I thought I'd lost out there on the path came creeping back into my veins, curling up close to my heart. Not gone, then, or not entirely, but in hiding, and perhaps there was something in that: perhaps if I stayed still and quiet enough, there was the smallest chance that this calamity might fail to find me. Because what would it want with me anyway, no one and nothing as I was. Perhaps this scandal, this disgrace, would pass over me in a hunt for more satisfying prey.

I'd never known any unmarried girl have a baby. Where would any such girl go? But then, where did any girl go, if, for whatever reason, she couldn't be married off:
A life of contemplation,
as Guildford had said. Which was one way to put it. ‘Taken in and walled up' was another. Condemned to a life of penance and servitude. What hit me, that night, was that I'd never now go free. I'd go from stitching Mrs Partridge's odds and ends to wringing blood from a nunnery-load of cloths. Perhaps I should run, while I still could. But where? Because now no one in the world but nuns would take me in.

The days came and went, bearing me towards a future that I knew wasn't there.

I had to trust to luck, of which I knew there was none. There was nothing I could do, nor was there anyone, anywhere, who could help me. No one: not Mrs Partridge, for all her kindness, nor Jane, not even if she'd still been the Queen of England.

I sat at the window and let the hours wash over me as if they might wear me clean; ossifying while all day every day sunlight edged across the floor like a sandbank. On the wall was Susanna, who'd had rather too much her own way in life, and seemed, to me, a little too pleased with herself. Everything was rosy in her garden. But is that ever really true? There she was, having had a touch too much of the sun, having spent a little too long submerged amid the lilies, and I could've smacked her, slapped her face,
Wake up, dozy!
Because there she was, believing her own story, which, it seemed to me, is always fatal.

Sometimes, I almost said something of my predicament to Mrs Partridge, or even to Jane. Or, rather, sometimes the fact of it nearly got told; I was brimming with it and it nearly spilled, the telling about to occur of its own accord. There was so little between not saying and saying; just breath, really. A mere breath. If I let go a breath carelessly, then it would be said.

But I knew that wasn't true, because for it to be told, it would have to go into words, and it didn't fit.

I'm going to have a baby.

I think I'm expecting a baby.

How could I possibly be expecting a baby? That was what anyone would ask first. They'd want to know how on earth I could possibly be expecting a baby, and what could I tell them? That I'd met with a man? Don't make me laugh. That I'd lain with a man? But ‘lain' didn't begin to cover it. And that was what it would be about, for anyone else – a middle-aged
man, a cupboard, the relentless swipe of a clock mechanism, the kneeling-cushions.

Early one evening, I saw Guildford down on the green, presumably for fresh air after several days of rain, but unfortunately he spotted me in return and began gesticulating. A fly, he brought to mind, buzzing at our window. I knew what he wanted: Jane to be fetched into view.

‘Lord Guildford,' I relayed. Needing to be dealt with, I meant.

Which she elected to ignore.

No such luxury for me, ensnared there at the window; no escape unless I actively cast him off, which, under the circumstances, I felt, would be cruel.

‘Lord Guildford,' I repeated.

At that, though, she tutted vehemently, as if I'd been going on and on about him and had worn her patience thin. ‘And?'

What did she mean,
And?
Wasn't it obvious? He wanted her, at the window. There was also the small matter of his father having recently been murdered in front of the entire population of London but his wife still to offer him her condolences.

‘Out there,' I said.

‘And?'
Higher-pitched, this time, doubly irked. ‘Can't you see I'm busy?'

Well, no, now that she mentioned it. Whatever she was doing with those books didn't count, for me, as being busy. Busy was what Goose was, wherever she was.

Guildford had stopped the show, but only because he was awaiting my response. I wished he'd go away; I didn't have the energy for him. How could I convey that his wife wasn't interested? I tried a shrug but, expansive though I tried to make it, it obviously failed to travel the distance because there he remained, expectant.

So then I did have to go for a benign, by-the-by gazing elsewhere, which was what I'd been doing anyway before he'd muscled into view, but now it was contrived, not unlike the studied indifference of the Partridges' cat. And in any case it didn't work because, concluding that I hadn't understood him, he was signalling harder. It was no good: I'd have to be brutal, get up and go elsewhere.

What, though, if that too were misconstrued? He might assume we were on our way down – or me, at least, with some explanation or excuse of his wife's. And then, in time, he'd have to acknowledge his mistake, down there under the mordant gaze of that attendant whose dawdling at such a distance, over by the White Tower, was frankly bordering on neglect of duty. There might be others, too, who'd noticed and were watching, ready to gloat. No, I couldn't quite do it to him, I couldn't leave him hanging there. My turn, then, for a flouncy huff, because I was going to have to go down even though I was far from up to it.

I'd barely moved in almost two weeks and it felt as if it took me that long again to get down the stairs. And then there was a shilly-shally with Twig at the door (in? out?), so that when eventually I did step from the house, Guildford was in
a state of agitation which my arrival only worsened.

If I looked bad – and I was quite sure I did – he was no prettier. When I'd first seen him, back in July, he'd been pristine: unsullied, or so it had seemed, by a moment's discomfort or difficulty in his life. Gilded with confidence. Well, now he was stripped of that shine, and pallor lay on him like grime. He looked hungry, too: eyes keen but jaw set in expectation of disappointment. I would've liked to feel more kindly towards him, but merely being there was hard enough.

‘Where's my wife?' he was anxious to know even as I was closing the door on the prevaricating dog.

And a good afternoon to you, too.
‘Talking with the dead,' I said before I'd given it a thought.
The dead
, and his own father barely cold in his grave, not that he'd actually even been granted so much as a grave. Shamefacedly, I rephrased, ‘Reading her books.'