The Lady of Misrule

For Katy Rensten, with whom I spent a lot of time

cooped up when we were sixteen, but voluntarily,

and listening to ‘Low' and eating toast.

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?