The Lady of Misrule (18 page)

But then she surprised me with, ‘Well, it's a nice dog.' And so the dog was claimed: it was a dog she knew and with whom she'd spent time. That dog of Guildford's was, suddenly, practically, as good as hers. And then, with a speculative tilt of her head, gaze unfocused, to make the very picture of imperfect recollection: ‘Chip?'

‘Pip,' I said, too quickly.

‘Oh, Pip, yes,' and I saw she'd known all along and had been testing me, and that the test had been something over and above the mere matter of the dog's name.

The coronation couldn't possibly be sprung on us as the Queen's initial August arrival had been, because even two weeks beforehand, in mid-September, the Tower was teeming. Day after day 1 watched lords and ladies arriving amid flurries of smartly liveried retainers; they were coming to make pre-emptive claims on what Mrs Partridge had told us was a limited number of guest lodgings.

I was always looking for Harry, even as I dreaded spotting him. Harry, down there in the fray, enjoying better wine than at home and more of it, and more people with whom to drink it. Everyone happy, which was how he liked it and why everyone loved him. He would almost certainly have forgotten that
I was near by. The surprise, for me, was how that came as a relief. Something else I'd realised was that even if I told what had happened, no one would believe me. Not even Harry himself, probably – likely not merely to deny it but also to believe himself. And maybe there was something in that, maybe I could understand it, because it was incredible to me, by then, that we'd ever been together.

The Tower might well have been just as overcrowded when the Queen had been in residence back in August, but then the atmosphere had been hushed, reverential, her victory against all odds seeming like a miracle. Now, though, it was business as usual. The impending coronation was something to be got on with, and it was, with gusto, caution thrown to the wind. The place was a mess. Lords and ladies in lodgings needed food prepared, fires lit, furnishings cleaned and in reasonable repair, and closet pits scoured, so the Tower was like a city for those September days, a small, walled, workaday city, and often, under pressure of time, workanight too. Playing fast and loose with the curfew allowed jobs to be done and supplies to arrive for unloading and unpacking at all hours. Jane and I found it hard to sleep, with the courtyards and passageways and the lane behind us ringing with footfalls, the skittering of horses, the whine of wheels and the grunt of the gates.

And even if the workmen didn't keep us awake, there was their knocking off late after a long, hard day. Impromptu revelry was of course forbidden in the Tower but there was only so much that the outnumbered watchmen could do. At all
hours beneath our windows, old acquaintances were re-established and celebrated, or old feuds reignited, and no one needed to be especially raucous in order to rattle us because in the smallest hours a single exclamation was enough, amplified inside the vast stone walls or a stairwell. And then would come the calls to pipe down, which usually only made it worse, the watchmen's taking to task of miscreants never failing to give rise to recriminations and back-chat, so that the settling of any dispute was always at least as noisy as the initial affray.

One problem was that the new arrivals acted as if they owned the place whereas actually the majority of them had nowhere to go. Even a lord or lady would have two rooms at most; retainers did their bedding down (and worse) in halls, porches and doorways. One morning, I spotted a couple of men daubing a wall with red paint, and when I made passing mention of it to Jane, she only baffled me further by saying, ‘It's to stop the peeing.'

The what?

‘They're crosses.'

Which had me look again and so they were: the vertical streaks were being slashed by horizontal ones to make big, red, fairly regularly spaced crosses.

Which still made no sense. ‘Peeing?'

She obliged me with the explanation: ‘No one dares pee on a cross.'

Was there no end to the things she knew?

Another morning, when we pointed out to Goose that we
were running low on firewood, her response was a mere ‘There isn't any left,' and ‘Maybe later or tomorrow.' As if it didn't matter. As if we didn't matter. We were, it seemed, low-priority. Well, we were prisoners, that was true; or Jane was, and, by association, me. We were being held, kicking our heels, biding our time before Jane's inevitable release but the Tower, pissed all over though it now was, had suddenly become all about the future, the new, steady reign. We played no part in that; we had no claim on it. It belonged to all those workers and officials, busy with their jobs, and the nobles with their optimism. The Tower, that late September, was a place for those who were building England's future.

Had we mentioned the lack of firewood to the Partridges, they probably wouldn't have been all that much more receptive because they too, it seemed to me, had become a little devil-may-care; they too sported a new, festive air. The day before the coronation, Mrs Partridge told us that the Earl of Arundel would be standing in for the Queen, that evening, in the creation of the new Knights of the Bath, ‘Because imagine,' she laughed, ‘if it was the Queen who had to be clambering into the bath to kiss those men on their shoulders.' And so it was good, clean fun, the coming coronation, and the Queen in her femininity was endearing.

Jane and I were united in our disdain for the palaver. We didn't much discuss it, but during those trying days we acted put-upon, scowling, huffing and muttering at the various inconveniences, and drawing in on ourselves, a little less convivial with Mrs Partridge, a little more disapproving of
Goose, and I closed the shutters earlier than necessary in the evenings.

One afternoon about a week before the coronation, something had me pause at the chamberpot and swivel inside my shift, wrenching it around my hips and craning to check the back of it. And there on the linen was a blotch of the blood on which I'd given up hope. There, on the back of my shift, as unequivocal as a thumbprint. My heart hammered to see it and even though I was the one who'd uncovered it, I felt wonderfully sprung. It had crept up on me. Unbeknown to me, something had got going, staking its claim, taking root in the fabric of my shift.

Brash and bold, that poppy-bright bloom was unlike the start of my usual monthly bleed, which would have been a trace, a smudge, a half-hearted stirring. This blood had a confidence to it, proclaiming its own arrival. There was jubilation in it, and flourish:
See?

What I saw, written there on that linen, was my reprieve, my own blood come to save me.

Let it come, let it come
, and I vowed then and there to God, the heavens, the Devil, whoever else might be listening, that I would never, ever do again what I'd done in that clock cupboard, I would never so much as look at a boy or a man. I would be faultless, unimpeachable, a shining light, a fucking saint,
if you please please please just give me this.
There I stood, staring at that stain, not daring to relinquish it because nothing was more precious to me than that blood and there could
never be enough of it. But at the same time I was afraid that, if I kept looking, I might scare it off, this steady, stealthy animal creep of my insides. I should pretend to look the other way, and leave it to do its work.

Preparations, first, though: I would need to cover its tracks. Well, I'd do whatever I could, I'd be the perfect handmaiden, I couldn't do enough for it if only it would just keep on coming. Practicalities: I was going to have to go back next door and bide my time, keep this to myself, live out the rest of the day as if nothing were happening, although I didn't know how I was going to do that with elation rising indecently off me like steam.

And I almost laughed aloud to think of it – me here, leaking and matted, my blood-fouled linen hoiked around my waist while on the other side of that door was the girl whom the whole world considered to be the errant one. There she was, head bowed over a book, quill poised; I was surprised and pleased by how clearly I pictured her – the precise incline of her neck, the exact configuration of rings on her inky fingers – and even more surprised how pleased I was to know I'd find her there. And I felt for her, all of a sudden, because she immersed herself in books but what, really, did she know of anything that mattered? She would never know the glory of having taken a wrong step and got yourself lost but then, by a sheer accident of nature, being handed back, intact, your life.

Off to bed, that night, padded up, I anticipated nothing but a steady bleeding, and fell asleep easily. Some time later,
though, in deep darkness, my consciousness began to make its presence felt, and eventually I came properly awake to find myself already on all fours in a kind of surfacing, pain having bowled me over and up. Another cramp was closing on me, taking me back down, and so there I was, wide-eyed in the dark and busy before I knew it: rocking back and forth, breathing deeply to get myself through.

The fist-sized, fist-tight pain was familiar enough from my usual monthly bleeding; what was new was its viciousness. And perhaps I should've been scared but instead I was awestruck because it was extraordinary in its intensity, it was a creature come to reside in me, impressive in its strength and purpose, vital and kind of beautiful, big and hot and bright as it was. It had work to do and I knew I shouldn't hinder it; all I had to do, I knew, was breathe, to keep myself alive until it was done. And I didn't doubt I could do that; I was more than able to do my bit. I had the help of a darkness, too, that was quite different from any I'd ever known: not bearing down on me but bearing me up, making itself my refuge, my lair.

And so I rocked and breathed, endured and survived while my body ground out its insides. How much time was passing, I had no idea, because there was only ever the coming contraction, and then, when it loosened, the following one on its way. And each and every one of them, I welcomed: braced and ready to ride it forward,
Don't stop, don't stop.

At the very edge of my mind, though, was the mess of blood that I imagined to be in the bed: blood printed liberally across the bedclothes, I suspected, florid and indelible. I was
going to have to deal with that. And I would, I told myself, I certainly would, but later.

And something else of which I couldn't be completely unaware – or, rather, some
one
: Jane, as persistent a presence in the bed as that blood. Then again, I didn't have to worry about her, because she was asleep, shut tight into her diligent dreams until her early rise-and-shine. Except that she wasn't, because just as I'd found myself awake in the darkness, eventually I grew conscious of her watchfulness.

Not that it touched me: I was way beyond it, bowing back and forth, and anyway, she'd soon be sinking away again, like a child lifted and carried somewhere, suddenly wide-eyed, apparently all-seeing, fleetingly lucid but just as quickly back asleep.

But then, ‘Elizabeth?' Whispered, but coming like a call despite our being together in the bed. ‘Elizabeth? What's wrong?' A peculiar lightness to it, as if she were in a cart cresting a bridge.

I managed an unconvincing ‘Nothing.'

Which earned me a pointed lack of response. What was obvious, though, in the darkness, was her scrutiny, which was the very last thing I wanted. I'd been doing fine. I needed her off my back, I wanted her gone, which would happen soon enough, I knew, because she wasn't much interested in people and especially not in me.

I dredged up the energy to give her just a little more, to send her on her way: ‘A pain,' I said. ‘I get it.' Sometimes, I meant. Which wasn't wholly a lie.

There was a small silence, the very sound of disbelief, before she voiced a sceptical ‘You do?'

But she'd distracted me and the next fist came before I was prepared; my focus had slipped, I'd lost ground and had to scrabble for a toehold.

She said, ‘I'm going to get someone,' a flex of the mattress confirming it.

‘
No
.' I'd never spoken to her like that before and it gave her pause, during which I heard a humming and realised it was coming from me, and that it was helping. I rode that long hum over the clench and it was quite a find, it was quite possibly the answer, the key, because suddenly this was easy, or almost, or soon would be.

But Jane was trying again, if less surely: ‘I should get someone.' Seeking my permission was how it sounded, which struck an odd note.

She'd shifted – she was sitting up – which had the advantage of putting space between us; I had space, at last, and breathed it in.

The disadvantage was that from her distance she could better regard me, and I really didn't want to be a spectacle.

Her being there beside me was holding me back and dragging me down; I didn't want to have to take account of her. If she weren't there, if only she weren't there, I could do this, I knew I could. I could hum my way right through this pain to the other side.

Who knew what she thought she was witnessing? But that wasn't my problem and, anyway, if I could ignore her for
long enough, if I could just do that, I was sure she'd give up and go back to sleep.

Not yet, though, because, ‘What's happening?' and loud and clear in this demand for an explanation was her certainty that I had one.

‘Nothing.'

Wrong answer, because,
Right
, ‘I'm going to get someone.'

‘No!'
and for an instant I was so much bigger than the pain, shooting above it to sit squarely back on my heels and confront her, forbid her.
‘No.'

An admission, though, that this was something: not nothing, but something, and to be kept between us.

And she got it: I felt it hit her that whatever she went on to do, she was, whether she liked it or not, my secret-keeper.

She backed down, reluctantly asking, ‘Well, then, do you need anything? Can I do anything?' and it was softer-voiced, but I didn't trust to that because it was gentle not from kindness, but stealth: she was still after an explanation, and despite everything I almost laughed because even if I told her, how could she possibly understand?