The Lady of Misrule (17 page)

He regarded me coolly, then quibbled, ‘Not all those writers are dead, you know. Probably not even most of them.'

‘Not the liveliest of company, though, either. Anyway, she's busy.' No excuses, this time, because he knew how it was and any pretence would be an insult. I'd reported her refusal regretfully enough and that would have to do.

It was one of those days that never really get started, a day that had sleep in its eyes. I was about to move off when he said, ‘Shame she doesn't spend as much time thinking where we'll end up.' He cocked his head. ‘Or does she?'

I hadn't been listening; he'd lost me. ‘Does she what?'

His eyes had the flatness of coins. ‘Think about how we're going to live our lives when we kiss this place goodbye.'

Well, how would I know? I put him straight: ‘She doesn't talk to me.' Did he think I was her confidante?

Not so much as a blink from him. ‘Yes, well, that's my job, I suppose, isn't it. As her husband. To worry about what'll happen to us.' Was he being sarcastic? ‘And it's the coronation next week.' As if I didn't know that. As if there was anyone, anywhere, who didn't know that. ‘After which…' he offered up his hands,
that's that.

Did he think he was going free after the Queen was crowned? Because Jane had been told the trial would have to happen first.

I reminded him: ‘There'll be the trial.'

‘Oh, well, yes, the
trial.'
Definitely sarcastic, now. ‘Yes, we're going to have to be paraded around publicly, my wife and I, in disgrace,'
because certain people can't be denied their fun and games.
‘But that's as far as it'll go. We're just a couple of kids. She daren't butcher us.' No doubt he'd been hoping I'd squirm. ‘Then we'll be allowed to run off into the sunset and –' suddenly bleak ‘– fade away.' He looked away over the bailey and around the towers, the sky concentrated and darkened on his eyes. ‘Someone will have to take us in.'

For an instant, I thought he meant me and him – there we were, standing outside, and we'd have to go back indoors. But no, he and Jane, he meant: as traitors, they would have their various means confiscated; they would become dependent on others. He and his wife: well, at least there was the pair
of them. They might not have chosen each other's company, but they had it, and neither of them would be braving life alone. And in time they'd probably have a family. Theirs would be a life, it seemed to me as I stood there in that chill wind. A life, even if it would have to be lived for a while in someone else's house.

‘And from there, we'll have to move around,' he said, ‘reliant on people's good will.'

But at least they'd have it. From some people, anyway. From enough people. There were people who bore them good will even if they were having to be quiet about it: people who thought the pair of them had done nothing wrong, and some people who thought they'd done right.

‘But it's there for you,' I said, ‘that good will.'

He conceded it. ‘But I'm not sure how that puts clothes on our backs.'

Oh, well, you cant have everything, can you.
‘It's not forever, though, is it,' I said. ‘It'll get better.'

He inclined his head, to size me up.

Which unsettled me, and had me back-track: ‘Well, if not for you, then for your children.'

His grandfather had been a traitor – everyone knew that – but his father had made good. Well, for a while, until it had all gone wrong again. ‘It's survivable, isn't it,' I said. ‘You'll survive it. You might have to live quietly for a few years, but …'
is that so bad?

He turned from me, to pace a circle. ‘Yes, how right you are. I mean, here I am, indicted for treason, my father hacked
in two on the scaffold, but yes, if you think about it, everything's rosy.'

And duly I was shamed. What on earth had got into me? Kicking him like that when he was down.

‘Did you get out of the wrong side of bed this morning?' It didn't sound unkind and I glanced up, the better to gauge it. He tried again: ‘The wrong side of bed: did you get out of it, this morning?'

I'd barely got out of it at all, as it happened, and, recalling that, suddenly I felt like crying.

‘You look awful,' but he said it cheerfully – pleased, perhaps, to come across someone in worse shape than himself, although with that attendant of his, he didn't lack for choice.

‘Thanks.' My own little chance for sarcasm. Then the truth: ‘I haven't been feeling too well.'

‘I'm sorry to hear that.' Which was what he'd said to his wife, that time, if only via me. ‘You had a bleeding?'

My heart contracted.

He frowned, concerned. ‘Did they bleed you? Because you're very pale.'

‘Oh,' and my heart breathed again. ‘No.'

‘Well, don't let them. You don't look as if you could take it.'

I nodded my thanks for the advice. ‘Well—'
I should go, now.

‘Stay,' he said.

Was that an order?

‘The air'll do you good. Being shut away inside's no good for you.'

Whereas standing here in a biting wind with a horribly bereft princeling: that
was
?

Frankly, I just wanted to go and lie down. Well, no, I did and I didn't; I didn't really want to do anything; there was nothing that I wanted to do. But I didn't move, if only because I was too tired. He was lonely; he needed someone, any distraction; anyone would do. Surely, even, at a push, that drippy attendant. He read my glance, ‘William?' A hitch of his eyebrows, sceptical. ‘Talks of nothing but his darling wife.'

Which had me take a second look at him: Darling wife? Him? ‘William'?

‘He's newly wed.'

‘Like you,' I'd said before I'd realised.

He shook his head, ‘That's different,' but didn't elucidate. ‘But while he's been stuck in here with me, she's probably run off with someone else.'

I laughed, if dismissively:
Don't.

‘No? You don't think so?' He came close to a smile. ‘Bit of a romantic, are you, Elizabeth?'

He'd remembered my name.

‘Not me,' I said. ‘But some people are.' William's darling bride, perhaps, I meant.

That seemed to throw him; he folded his arms as if to hold himself together. ‘Romance is all very well, isn't it.'

Not in my experience, no.

‘But it doesn't last. Marriage has to be about the future.'

A future: what a luxury.

His eyes came back to mine. ‘Don't you think so?' but before I could answer, even if I'd wanted to, he said, ‘My parents' marriage was very strong, they lived for each other,' and there was nothing I could say to that. ‘Falling in love, it's just make-believe. Made up,' he said, ‘to keep people happy.'

‘People': he did like to talk of ‘people', but wasn't he a person? And anyway, what was wrong with being happy?

‘You ever seen anyone in love after the first couple of months?'

‘The Partridges,' I said.

He considered it. ‘Oh, well, yes, but once she's had the baby …'

Mrs Partridge's condition had become wider-known and Goose had confirmed what I'd suspected from the age difference between the Partridges: there'd been a previous Mrs Partridge, who'd died in childbed. ‘Never get married, girls,' she'd added, breezily; then, to Jane, ‘Oh, but I forgot, you already are.'

Guildford shrugged. ‘I mean, that's all women really care about, isn't it: having babies.'

You really don't know much, do you.

‘Did you know Lady Jane,' I asked him, ‘before you were married?'

He looked startled, perhaps by the question itself, perhaps by my having asked him something. ‘Yes, of course. We'd met.' He revised, ‘We'd seen each other around.' He turned curious: ‘Doesn't she talk to you?'

About me,
he meant, but I answered in general: ‘We don't have a lot in common.'

And that, apparently, was funny. ‘Oh, well, with her, who does?' But more seriously, ‘It's hardly her fault, though. It's understandable enough. Brought up as she was, to be a kind of princess.'

Was it possible to be ‘a kind of princess'? But, then, his family had thought it possible for her to be a kind of queen.

‘She's been raised to be a scholar. An enlightener, a reformist. Right from the start. If I listed her tutors for you—'

I wouldn't have a clue who they were.

Which he saw, and stopped.

Although I supposed I could've taken his word for it.

‘Well, anyway,' he said, ‘her tutors told her she was going to change the world. That's how she's grown up: to think of herself like that. That's what you have to remember.'

But I didn't have to remember anything. I wasn't the one who'd be spending the rest of my life with her; she'd be gone in a few months' time and, like it or not, I'd never see her again.

‘Problem is, if you think you're busy saving the world, then everything and everyone else just gets in the way.'

He wasn't wrong about that.

He said, ‘It's a shame for you that you'll miss the coronation, stuck in here.'

I couldn't have cared less about the coronation. I was missing absolutely everything, stuck in the Tower, and didn't care about any of it.

‘The crowning of England's first ever ruling queen. Something to tell the grandchildren.'

Goose had been telling us of the building, painting and draping of platforms and arches in the streets, the regilding of the Cheapside cross and the St Paul's weathercock on which a Dutch acrobat was going to perform.

‘Except,' he said, ‘in less than no time she won't be. Ruling, I mean. Because she'll be married.'

And wives are ruled by their husbands. If Jane was to be believed, I remembered, her husband would've made a mere consort of her, had he had his way.

I said, ‘Who'll marry her, though?'

A certain light came into his eyes. ‘Yes, because who'd be fool enough to marry a queen.'

I shrugged: Have it your way.

But then he did answer: ‘In this particular case, either an idiot or a tyrant.'

Edward Courtenay, he meant, or the Spanish heir. Compared with whom, he wouldn't have been such a dire prospect.

He unfolded his arms, swung them. ‘Know what I miss most, being in here?' There was a playful challenge in it but, no, I didn't know and couldn't guess and why did he think I was interested? He corrected himself: ‘Not “what”. Who.'

His mother?

‘My dog, Pip.'

I couldn't help but be amused at that, because I'd always choose the company of a dog, if I could, over a person. And
he smiled, too: the first time I'd ever seen him smile. I knew then that I was going to hear all about the wonderful Pip: how there was no one else like him, how in his eyes you could do no wrong, he'd follow you to the ends of the earth and you could trust him with your life. I could've recited it all, saved him the trouble, but actually I was happy enough to stand there and listen to it.

He finished by telling me that Pip had been the runt of the litter, ‘Which,' he concluded, ‘just goes to show.'

His brothers – all those big brothers of his – had had the pick of the puppies but he, being youngest, had been left with the runt. And it occurred to me that his being youngest made him the runt of the Dudley litter. But those brothers of his were shut in their rooms, while he was free, within the limits of the Tower, to come and go.

I left without trying to tell him of our dogs back at Shelley Place. Ours weren't the sort for eulogising. I had no comparable story of childhood canine companionship; there'd been no endearing, dewy-eyed pup for me. Not that I minded. I didn't doubt Guildford's dog was a delight but ours, coming to Shelley Place as a last resort, to doze away their days, had seen life. There was that to say for them: ours were survivors.

Something that struck me as I hauled myself up the stairs back to the room was that in a way those Shelley Place dogs had given me refuge rather than the other way around. ‘Get those mutts out of here,' my mother would shout, and I'd be on hand to do exactly that, and then off we'd slope, me and
the dogs, to the privacy of some nook or cranny, some hidey-hole.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I had to concede that Guildford had been right: I did feel much better for having been outside; he'd been right to make me stay a little longer. I felt alive, for the first time in a long while, startlingly conscious of the shift of blood in my veins. I was glowing as I entered that room, as I walked into that miasma of dried lavender: I was silvered with evening air and I didn't see why I should hide it or apologise for it because this could have been her, if she'd wanted; she could have gone out there, if she'd wanted, and she still could. Any time, she could. There was nothing and no one to stop her. Within the walls, she was free to come and go; it was just that she chose not to.

But that hadn't been my choice for myself, and she shouldn't deny me. And it seemed to me that that was what she was trying to do, as she sat there over her books, refusing to look up. Here I was, arriving back, and she didn't so much as raise her eyes. But the fact remained that I'd been out of our room, doing something – talking, and mulling over good times – while she hadn't, and none of her pretending otherwise made it disappear.

Swinging down on to the window seat I said, as if in passing, ‘He misses his dog.'

He
: as if she and I were already mid-conversation.

I'd been to see her husband and it was only proper that we acknowledged that. And anyway it felt to me that I was dispensing a bit of the conversation that he and I had had; it was
mine to bestow and for once I was in good spirits, I was feeling magnanimous. And if she didn't want to be let in on it? Well, she should. And anyway, she did, I could tell she did, even if she wouldn't admit it to herself. Well, I could help her out with that.