Free The Lady of Misrule by Suzannah Dunn Page B

though.’
    Jane turned a page, didn’t look up. ‘He’s not a bishop.’
    Goose countered, ‘Bishop Gardiner.’
    At which Jane did look up, to reiterate, ‘He’s not a bishop. He was a bishop but he wouldn’t accept the new teachings so the King put him in here, and if he’s in here, he’s not a bishop, is he.’ Then she was emphatically back to her book, which left Goose’s roll of the eyes for my benefit alone. It didn’t go unappreciated: I should learn from Goose, I thought; I could do worse around Jane than a bit of eye-rolling of my own.
    â€˜Well, yes, was Bishop Gardiner,’ Goose revised, put-upon, ‘was Bishop of Winchester, and I imagine will be again, soon.’
    A barely veiled reference to regime change, which I couldn’t help feeling was a bit insensitive in the circumstances, but Jane allowed it with a muttered, acerbic ‘Perhaps.’
    Not someone to suffer fools, was probably how Jane saw herself, if she gave any thought at all to how she conducted herself around people. Not that Goose was a fool; Jane underestimated Goose, I felt, at her peril. But then, who knew how Jane saw herself? Not me, for all that I spent every hour of every day and night in her company. We didn’t talk much. Inevitably, we conversed a bit over meals, if only about the food, and also, a little, when we dressed and undressed each other. And she’d chat to me from the chamberpot, whereas I didn’t use it at all unless she was on the other side of the closed door.
    Several times she spoke of her sisters, which was several times more than I’d spoken of mine. She didn’t hear from her family because, for her, letters were forbidden. I didn’t hear from mine because my mother couldn’t much write and my father wouldn’t have known what to say. Instead, our steward, Mr Locke, would be checking on me whenever he was in London.
    Once, Jane had described her sister Katherine to me as a rescuer of kittens and I told her about my father, about how everyone for miles around knew he’d take in any old hound. Somebody would only have to remark how they had a goodol’ fella past his best and what a shame to see how he couldn’t keep up, and there’d be my father leaping in with the offer of a home. Harry rescued people and my father rescued dogs. Dogs nosed into Shelley Place to throw themselves on our mercy, of which they got plenty along with a place on the hearth and the odd tasty scrap, and plenty of fussing of their ears – or what remained of them. ‘Old boy’, my father would address them, ‘Old girl’: no names, freeing them from being called upon (to which they’d have been deaf in any case) and even, in their dotage, from having to have a character. My mother had grown up in a household where dogs stayed outside and, for her, my father’s adopted companions were at best a source of irritation, at worse of disgust. ‘Under my feet’ was one objection, although had those dogs been physically capable of having it any other way, I was sure they would’ve. ‘Stinking’ was the other, which there was no denying.
    All this I told Jane, only to have her say that she couldn’t remember her sister ever having actually rescued any kittens; all she’d meant was that she was the type to do so. This was the sister she’d once described to me as ‘nice’, in a tone to suggest that niceness was suspect.
    I was amused. ‘And you’re not?’
    Which she’d dismissed with ‘You know what I mean.’
    Actually, I’d said, I didn’t.
    â€˜What I mean is, she knows exactly what to say to people.’
    And you don’t, I thought. Well, there was no arguing withthat. The surprise, for me, was that she knew it of herself, and, feeling slightly awkward in the face of that revelation, I’d turned jovial: ‘Family favourite, then, is