Read The Lady of Misrule for Free Online Page A

King’s sister should be the one to succeed him.
    Half-sister, Harry corrected.
    But a half-sister is closer than a second cousin.
    â€˜Lizzie,’ he said, ‘listen: the Lady Mary is a spinster. A queen needs an heir and there’s scant chance she’d marry and produce, nearly forty as she is and always ailing and anyway onlyever wanted to be a nun. There’ll be no heir from there,’ he said. ‘Whereas the Grey girl is young, healthy and married. Married to a Dudley, true,’ he allowed, ‘but’ – and he said it cheerfully, unconcerned – ‘it’s not as if we aren’t used to Dudleys.’
    Dudleys: down below our window, someone came into view, chucking a ball for the Partridges’ dog, and only a double-take confirmed for me that he wasn’t Baby Dudley. This particular blond, whoever he was, lacked the finery and the attitude. Taller, this one, too, although perhaps I’d have thought him an older brother of the baby’s if I hadn’t known for a fact that the four older brothers were elsewhere with their father. The Dudleys were a close family, everyone said. Well, now they shared being the only people in England who couldn’t possibly hope to get away with the pretence of having rooted secretly for Lady Mary. Not that the duke hadn’t had a good try, according to the Fitzalans: hurling his cap into the air when he’d realised the game was well and truly up, hailing the new queen as if he’d never marched his own daughter-in-law on to her throne.
    No, the duke and the four sons who’d flanked him were the only people in England who couldn’t, by any stretch of the imagination, get away with it. But the baby of the family, the one who’d actually sat himself down on the throne, would be the one of them to go free. Because the new Queen, in magnanimously sparing her girl-cousin, would have to pardon the boy-husband, too.
    *
    There was absolutely nothing for me to do in that room at the Partridges’ house. No noble girl could be held alone, hence me – or someone, anyway, and in this case the someone was me because I’d been the one to raise my hand. A body, then, was all I really was. Funny to think it: me, of all the girls in England, there for the sake of propriety. I took full advantage, did nothing in those first few days and did it to excess, losing myself in the view from the window, the comings and goings of workmen at their various tasks in the inner bailey, the strutting of ravens almost too corporeal to be creatures of the air, and the slow winding of the sky behind the White Tower. Inside the room, I developed an interest in Susanna – not the bovine lady herself, too long soaked amid a clutch of bone-bright water-lilies, nor the gimlet-eyed elders leching around the corner, but in how exactly the tapestry had been done, how those folds of the laundered linen had been depicted, and the shuddering of the sunstruck water. Tilting my head, I could glimpse that pond for the differently coloured, differently shaped sections of stitching that it really was – I see your little trick – but, tilting again, could summon back the cool blue depths.
    One happy effect of retiring early and rising late was the shrinkage of the days. I got no complaint from Jane; on the contrary, she encouraged me. At the table amid an abundance of lighted wicks, she’d look up and suggest – nice as pie – that I take myself off to bed. She had work to do, as she saw it, but obviously I didn’t and I must’ve been a hindrance, sitting there staring into space, yawning, waiting for her tofinish. I was in the way: truly just a body in the room, rather than a companion. Then again, our eagerness to accommodate each other made us perfect companions.
    I was only ever ashamed of my indolence when the chambergirl came waging her war on dust and dirt, infestations and untidiness, or bringing us food and