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

candles, and the boxes upon boxes of tapers they’d burned as they’d done so. A mountain of bills, but all adding up in the end to nothing. Jumped-up, French-spouting Anne Boleyn: you could build queens’ rooms for her, you could plant a queen’s garden for her, dress her in queens’ clothes and take her to Westminster for a crown to be put on her head, but she was never any queen. You could banish the real Queen and her little princess and kill any number of nay-sayers – a bishop or two, a chancellor – but even that wouldn’t turn a commoner into a queen and everyone had known it.
    Everyone except the King, or not for a while, not until that woman had sat beside him for a couple of years, growing thinner and sharper, carping and meddling and feuding and disparaging until eventually even he couldn’t fail to see her commoner’s bones showing through. But a king never makes a mistake, so the fault must’ve been hers. She must have been a liar, a beguiler – perhaps even, you could say, if you didn’t say it too loudly, a witch. A king never makes a mistake buthe’ll always right a wrong. He can raise someone up but much quicker cut a person down, and soon that so-called Queen was even less than the commoner she’d once been, she was a traitor and her bones not even a body but a heap, and only buried anywhere at all because bones have to be hidden or they’d be dug up by dogs.
    But the shut-away daughter had lived on – if only just, in those various faraway houses in Essex and Suffolk and Norfolk, keeping to her four walls, to her chapels, confessing to her priests and consulting her physicians. For years she’d lived the quiet life, reconciled to her lot: elder half-sister to little half-brother. But then the half-brother had died and after a quarter-century that half-sister was on her way back into the very heart of the kingdom. In a few days’ time, she could well be standing where I was, I thought, and perhaps she’d ask for the doors that Mrs Partridge had just locked behind us to be reopened, and then she’d walk where we’d just walked. Perhaps she’d go where we hadn’t, up into the building itself, into the rooms that, twenty years ago, had housed a woman who’d been so completely sure she’d got it made.
    Mary Tudor was the first ever queen coming to the Tower not at the invitation or on the order of any king. She was the King, if a female one. The invitation she had accepted was that of her subjects. The day Jane was declared Queen, the Lady Mary had written to everyone in England and the letter had been copied then and there, and the copy copied and so on, down row upon row of trestle tables in the hall at her Framlingham house, those copies passed hand over hand tothe ready riders for dispatching anywhere and everywhere. Within two days England was blanketed with what she’d had to say. Which was, basically, Remember me? That was all, more or less; that was all it took: Remember me, the old King’s eldest daughter? Well, here I am, if you’ll have me.
    I’d been leaving the Fitzalans’ house for the Tower, for my Jane-minding duties, when news had come of Queen Mary’s imminent declaration at the Eleanor Cross. The Fitzalans’ excitable fourteen-year-old son, Henry, little Lord Maltravers, had taken to the streets to see what was what, and he returned just as my mother and I were heading down the garden to their barge. ‘You should see it, out there,’ he called after us, and then suggested we do exactly that: forgo the Fitzalan landing-stage in favour of somewhere slightly downstream, just a few streets away, where we could take a wherry and he’d see us personally to the Tower. It was safe, he assured us, perfectly safe: there was nothing in the air, that morning, he said, but good will.
    â€˜London’s in love,’ was, I remembered, how he’d put it.