The Lady of Misrule by Suzannah Dunn Read Free Book Online Page A

she’d have to rub those chafings away, ease the blood back into her skin to reclaim her lovely lunar glow.
    Personal items, she had added, smiling nervously, to thediscussion of linen and laundry on that first morning: bundle them up, she said, yours and Lady Jane’s, and hand them to Goose; don’t try to wash them out yourself. Personal items : I’d loved that. My mother would’ve said – did say – ‘your rags’, and at Shelley Place I did wash them myself.
    At the end of our first week, Mrs Partridge – coming across me on the stairs – invited me to accompany her to the Queen’s Garden. All those flowers in there, she rued, going to waste. A queen’s garden without a queen, it seemed, was a garden up for grabs. Jane wasn’t mentioned and I understood that under no circumstances could she be allowed back over there, even for innocuous flower-gathering. Not that she’d miss it, I thought; she probably hadn’t ever left her books to go down there even when she could. She didn’t strike me as a girl with an interest in flower arrangement. Mrs Partridge said we could look on it as a bit of deadheading, which, given where we were, struck me as an unfortunate choice of word.
    I told Jane I was off to pick flowers, but avoided saying where. Mrs Partridge’s short-cut started at an unremarkable door in a wall on the far side of the bailey and took us into the first of a series of courtyards which could’ve been rooms but for their lack of ceilings. On the walls, which were rendered an apple-skin red, were stone carvings the hue of honey, of beatific faces or bucolic scenes, and in the third courtyard, high up, was a sundial incongruously painted with an arc of inky sky, a lick of moon, a gaudy splat of stars. Beneath ourfeet were no cobbles or flags but tiles, creamy-coloured in the first two courtyards and river-green in the third, where each square depicted a kiln-blurry beast of some kind – tails, horns, paws – or a perky fleur-de-lys. The soles of our shoes, though, scored tracks in grime, and here and there in corners lay last autumn’s leaves. ‘Hardly anyone ever comes this way,’ Mrs Partridge explained, ‘because it was built for You-know-who.’
    Actually, I didn’t.
    â€˜Queen Anne.’
    Queen Anne?
    â€˜Boleyn.’
    â€˜Oh!’ – I’d forgotten that Anne Boleyn, or ‘the King’s whore’ as I’d more usually heard her called, had ever properly been Queen. But yes, I remembered, she had indeed been crowned, unlike the bevy of queens who’d followed her. All those queens, young and old, pious or irreverent, clever or silly, but none of them, in the end, in the old King’s eyes, quite up to the job. So there I was, in the courtyard of a thousand-day queen now almost twenty years dead. Second wife of the old King, second of the six and the start of all the trouble.
    Until now – until Jane, until Mary – all a queen could ever have been was a wife, a mother: chief wife, chief mother, her job to sit beside the king and grow bigger for nine months of every year, praying for the baby to be a boy. River-lit rooms had been built for Anne Boleyn but in return she was supposed to produce a prince, which, to judge from her gusto in pursuing the throne, she hadn’t doubted she’d do. But howhad she reckoned on that? Faith in God? Or trusting to luck? Or perhaps she’d tried not to think about it: perhaps she’d told herself that it’s possible to think too much.
    Standing there in the courtyard and looking up and around at that building, I wondered how many men had sketched the designs for its staircases and fireplaces, then resketched to make them bigger and better, then how many masons and carpenters, plasterers and glaziers had pored over those plans. All the candles, too, to light their labours, and the chandlers who’d worked late to make those