The Lady of Misrule by Suzannah Dunn Read Free Book Online

one another in passing as if I were just another member of the household, not captor or captive or whatever I was, and the house not part of the Tower. Country girl that I was, I’d never lived in a townhouse. I’d been a guest in the London residences of family friends, such as the Fitzalans, but those places were grand and intimidating, whereas I rather liked the Partridges’; and there were times when I was on the stairs or standing in the kitchen doorway when I felt it wouldn’t be so bad to be living Mrs Partridge’s life.
    Back home, the kitchen had been no place for me. Shelley Place did all its own growing and milling, baking and brewing, butchery and preserving, and I’d grown up wary of the tumultuous kitchen which had to feed at least thirty peopletwice every day. Not that it was somewhere I could have stumbled upon: reaching it, behind the buttery and the various larders, took some doing. Catering at the Partridges’, though, was an altogether more homely affair, just for the immediate household, a consequence of which was that, as I made my way through the house, the kitchen was quite suddenly there. Along the passageway I’d go and then there it was. So much smaller than the kitchen at home, it was much hotter, too, and I’d have to take some deep breaths and let my stomach settle as I stood there watching the cook and his boy. At Shelley Place, our cooks and kitchen boys struggled to keep on top of the work, but the Partridges’ cook and boy had the luxury of being able to take pride in what they were producing. The cook was a small, energetic man, endearingly vole-like, bright-eyed and long-nosed; the kitchen boy, by contrast, broad-featured and serene, a steady pourer and stirrer of sauces. I got no acknowledgement there in the doorway until they were ready for me, but I never felt conspicuous and it was as if I were taking a place that was mine, as if my witnessing their work was a small but vital part of the process, or so I liked to think. Only when the fruits of their considerable labours had been decanted into various dishes would they come over and patiently talk me through the courses: ‘… and this sauce, here, is for this little dish, here – just a spoonful on the side …’
    I must have looked a sight, the first week, in that doorway of theirs. My belongings hadn’t yet arrived from Suffolk and Mrs Partridge was kindly lending me clean linen of her ownbut her shifts did me no favours, swamping me and rucking up fatly beneath the seams of the fancy Fitzalan-loaned kirtle.
    Size, though, was the least of the physical differences between Mrs Partridge and me. Like it or not, I was very much a Tilney girl in looks, and more than several times I’d overheard one or other of my sisters described with a kind of bafflement as ‘striking’. To me, back when I’d been growing up in their wake, they’d had an inside-out look to them: their skulls staring from beneath their faces, their limbs all shanks and sockets. They chewed their nails, bit their lips, shrugged their shoulders, and their glances were swift and accusatory. Always about to scarper, was how they’d looked: ready to hitch up their skirts in their claws, turn tail and run.
    As for me, I bristled with lashes and brows and even the whorls of my fingertips were, I imagined, declamatory, whereas Mrs Partridge’s might well make their mark by weight alone: a perfect oval, a dark dimple. But for all that she was substantial, she was so light on her feet and often at our door before I’d heard her, and I couldn’t help feel somehow improper in her benign, steady presence. I was tough, though, I knew, whereas she, with all that soft flesh, was vulnerable. At night, when I drew the expanse of her linen up and over my head, I’d slip entirely free of it, but she, undressing in her bedroom below me, would, I imagined, bear a criss-cross of seams and