The Lady of Misrule Read Online Free PDF Page B

this certainly wasn’t that. But if I didn’t sit down to breakfast, then what? I ambled over to the window, where Inoticed – down below, outside – something that had escaped me in the afternoon light of the previous day: the green was failing in patches to live up to its name, because on it were the ghosts of tents that had been put up, some days back, for the men charged with the defence of the then-Queen. Those tents had made their mark but within a few more grass-growing days it would be as if they’d never been. The men would in all likelihood be back home now, drinking with everyone else to the proper Queen, the real one, the rightful one.
    And what would I be doing, if I weren’t here? Nothing much more productive. Practising the art of slipping by, sliding from view, making myself minimally useful in the hope of keeping everyone off my back. ‘Help your mother,’ my father always said. But my mother’s line was ‘If you want something doing, do it yourself.’
    And anyway, she was beyond help. Everything was too much for her – it never stopped raining or instead it was stifling; the servants were shifty, her physician sceptical, the dogs a disgrace, her daughters didn’t know they were born and her husband hadn’t the time of day for her. She couldn’t possibly feed any more people and the house was falling down around our ears while the tenants asked more and more of us and her headaches were worse than ever. Me, she’d given up on years ago. ‘Head in the clouds’, was what she said of me to anyone who’d listen, and anyone else too.
    Jane – across the room from me – had her head in a book. Did she do that at home? Did she get into trouble for it? We had no books at home; I couldn’t even imagine what bookswe would have, if we did, and they wouldn’t be covered, as hers were, in midnight-blue corded silk or filigree-lavish vermilion satin. What could we possibly learn from books that we didn’t already know?
    Dreamer, my mother always said of me, and always with irritation – although, to be fair, that was how she said pretty much everything. She couldn’t have been more wrong. Secretive, she’d said of me, even back when I wasn’t. I didn’t dream. I daydreamed sometimes, yes, but never had anything as serious, as hopeful for myself as an actual dream. Other girls had dreams of anything and everything, it seemed to me. My cousins and the girls who came to visit us and in the houses we visited, girls whom I could’ve called friends if I’d wanted to kid myself: those girls were always wide-eyed and hopeful, hugging themselves, barely able to contain themselves when they speculated on a coming Christmas, or some new piece of clothing, or a potential suitor. But what was the point? No one was ever any prettier for a length of ribbon or gold stitching – not really, not if you really looked – and Christmases come and go.
    It wasn’t that I didn’t think of my future. On the contrary, there was no escaping it; it was everywhere ahead of me like the horizon. Though like the horizon, ever-receding. But even if I did ever manage to catch it up, it would be – bar the details – more of the same. I could never quite imagine myself married but I supposed one day I probably would be and then I’d have my own floors to sweep and linen to patch, my own grumpy servants and tetchy priests to placate. Moreof the same, bar the details, and the problem was that I’d already had enough.
    Jane was staring into nowhere, gnawing her lower lip: she was thinking, as far as I could tell, and strenuously. She was already in her future as a wife – albeit little more than a child-wife – and I wondered what she made of it. I didn’t envy her being married to a boy. The boys I came across were boring: their high opinion of themselves, of what they considered themselves due,