Succession (22 page)

She allowed herself to be spoon-fed a little milk and honey mixed with oatmeal, held it in her mouth and deposited it into her sleeve or her bedclothes when no one was watching.

A doctor was sent for, and he said that bed rest was allowable; he
recommended building up the fire to sweat out the evil humours of grief. He sat on her bed and explained to her that too much grieving would harm the baby; she must begin to look forward to the birth.

Margaret looked at him and saw death hovering behind his eyes.

Jasper came and she turned away from him.
You do not belong here
, she thought, meaning,
with the living.
Why should he be alive, grey and pale as he was, when her Edmund, laughing and golden, lay rotting in some grave?

Everything had changed, but he had not changed. A little more stern and sallow, maybe, his dark hair flecked with grey and the lines running down from his mouth cut deeper so that he looked far older than his years. But he had always been old.

It should have been you
, she thought.

He sat on the edge of her bed, then unexpectedly he reached out and touched the mound of her belly, through the bedclothes.

‘Is the baby quick?’ he said.

She flinched away from him and pulled her knees up as far as they would go beneath her swollen stomach. He looked at her for a moment, then left the room. She could hear him talking with her nurse outside. It seemed that they were always talking together these days, but she did not care and did not try to hear. All she could really hear was the silence and emptiness in her skull.

But that night she dreamed that the child in her belly was covered in plague spots, and woke screaming. And her nurse crushed her to her breast, and then she cried loudly, in a high-pitched tone, and her nurse rocked her saying ‘shusha, shusha’, but she could not stop crying.

‘My baby, my baby,’ she cried.

Her nurse climbed into the bed with her and stroked her hair and asked her, what about her baby? And Margaret could hardly speak, hardly bring herself to say it, but in the end, moaning and babbling, she spilled it out: that her baby had the plague.

In vain did her nurse point out that no baby had ever been
born
with plague. Margaret cried hard and would not be comforted, convinced that infected humours had passed from Edmund’s blood to her child’s.

Betsy stopped trying to reason with her and only clasped her tightly, rocking her.

‘Oh, my baby, my flower-pod, my little chick,’ she murmured, and Margaret had to listen, for she did not raise her voice, but murmured on, and gradually she realized that she was telling her a story, the story of Nesta. That one day she would be like Nesta, and have a long neck like a swan and a mass of hair down to her knees. None of the bards would sing of Nesta any more;
she
would be the Helen of Wales.

Her nurse talked on, combing her fingers through the snags in Margaret’s raggedy brown hair, and Margaret listened as she had listened many times before, though now there was no Edmund, of course, and no reason to be beautiful any more.

They said that she had given up the will to live, but that was not quite true. She was terrified of death; it was vividly real to her, a huge darkness in the depths of her mind. If she truly loved Edmund she would want to be with him, but she didn’t want to, the blank darkness was terrifying to her. Everyone told her that he still existed, he was looking over her from heaven, with God, but she was shocked at the thoughts that spoke so clearly in her head, without permission:
he does not exist, he is nowhere.

It was as though God had died in her heart, and death squatted there instead.

She had known death before, of course: her father (when she was an infant); the Duke of Suffolk, her guardian (though she had not known him well); her cousin, the Duke of Somerset, though he was little more than a stranger. All these deaths were distant from her, though she had often imagined them. Lying awake at night, staring into the darkness, she had imagined what it would be like to lie in a tomb.

This death was different. She could smell it in her nostrils and feel its horny wings unfolding in her soul. She had said goodbye to her childhood as surely as if a line had been ruled through it. Losing her virginity, becoming pregnant, had had no such effect.
Only now did she know in the most intimate way that she could die.

Jasper came to see her again. He was trying to raise an army, he told her. The king and queen had sent out many summonses to Herbert, who had not responded. And if Herbert summoned his allies there could be war.

She responded dully to this. There was always war. It was as though they had all fallen into some dark, terrible dream of war.

But the next thing he said woke her up immediately.

‘That is why I have decided,’ he said, ‘that you should go at once to Pembroke Castle.’

‘No!’ she said quickly.

‘You will be safe there,’ he said, moving his hands awkwardly in the way he did when he was distressed. ‘Herbert’s allies will attack soon. They may already know about Edmund’s heir. It would be a great advantage to have you hostage.’

He had frightened her. William Herbert reared in her imagination as a monstrous figure, almost supernatural,
a cruel man prepared for any crime.
She was more terrified of him than of the plague. Yet she did not want to go.

‘You must be safe – for the birth,’ Jasper said. She would not look at him. She was amazed that he could not feel her hatred radiating towards him. Then suddenly she knew that he did feel it; she hated him and he knew it, but he did not know why. At least she had that.

‘My child will be born here,’ she said, ‘in my home … My husband –’ she could not say Edmund’s name – ‘he wouldn’t want it.’

She waited for Jasper’s wrath to break over her, but when he spoke his voice was soft.

‘He would want me to look after you.’

She shook her head, mutinous, but he went on. ‘And that is what I intend to do. Pembroke is better fortified against attack and against the plague. We have enough food for the whole winter if needs be. I have already made the necessary arrangements – we will set off tomorrow.’

Margaret could hear her heart hammering. It would be no use to
fling herself at the feet of this man and beg, or to burst into stormy tears – nothing moved him. Yet it seemed to her vitally important that she win this point. For the first time she stared into his eyes, directing the full force of her hostility into his gaze.

‘I am not going to Pembroke Castle,’ she said.

Pembroke Castle rose like a cliff of grey stone out of the estuary. Margaret looked at it once and turned away. She had cried silently most of the way, and her nurse had tried to comfort her.

‘You will be safe there, my poppet – we will all be safe – it is what Edmund would have wanted – it is the best place for the baby –’

Later she would wonder why her nurse had come out with all the same arguments as Jasper, and why she had seemed unsurprised by the move in the first place. But for now all she could do was to permit her face to be crushed into Betsy’s shoulder and to be rocked like a little child.

As the carriage juddered to a halt she dried her eyes but wouldn’t look at the fortress as the great gates opened, because it still seemed like a prison to her.

Jasper himself greeted them and took them into his living quarters beside the gatehouse. She did not reply to his greeting.

Inside it was unexpectedly bright; there were torches burning and tapestries on the wall, an Arabic carpet across the table. The portrait of Edmund and Jasper had been moved to the dining hall. She could not look at it – it wrung her heart with a piercing sorrow.

And she could eat very little of the food. She crumbled some bread in her hands and chewed a little but could not swallow. Her nurse remonstrated, but Jasper shook his head, indicating that she should be left alone. He talked of the changes he was making: a new window was being put in, a section of the outer wall was being repaired and the roof of the great tower too. So she and Betsy were being lodged in a tower to the other side of the gatehouse – he had thought they would not want to be disturbed by so much banging and hammering.

‘Is that not thoughtful?’ Betsy said as Margaret maintained her
stony silence. If they were near the gatehouse they would be near Jasper; he would have access to them at all times.

‘We will be able to dine together in the evenings,’ he said.

Also, there was a fine view of the town – he thought it would be more interesting for her to see what was going on in the town than to overlook the estuary, with its flat grey expanse of water and sky.

‘But it is well guarded,’ he said. Guards patrolled the adjacent walls and there were lookouts on the roof of the tower itself.

‘My lord has thought of everything,’ Betsy said. Margaret did not say that she had no wish to watch all the comings and goings of the town while she herself was kept prisoner. She merely stared at her plate and toyed with her food as her nurse made her exclamations of gratitude. She had discovered that there was a power in silence, that she could free herself entirely from the impulse to speak when spoken to, and Jasper was mystified by this: he did not know what to do.

The tower had simple furniture and impressive views. There was a serving maid called Ceri, and an older lady called Joan who would help with the baby when the time came. She was calm and capable, with large hands and reddish cheeks. There was a short passage from the bedroom to a tiny chapel, which was for Margaret’s own use; she was free to use it whenever she liked, and here at least she could be alone.

As soon as she could she sent Joan away, and the other servants, and retired as before to her bed.
We will not stay here
, she whispered to her baby when they were alone, but she knew that there was no choice. So she stayed in her bed and ignored Jasper when he came.

‘He is grieving too, you know,’ Betsy said, but Margaret did not care. Only here, in her bed, could she retain the sensation of Edmund, the scent of him which remained behind the bridge of her nose. She could sense him in the darkness behind her eyes, and still feel his touch as she awoke.

The festive season approached, but there would be no festivities, no mummers or bards this year; the castle was in mourning. Jasper went away again and Betsy became increasingly anxious for
Margaret. She was so thin her belly looked like a seed that was about to burst. Her navel had popped out and blue veins ran like a map over the mound. When the baby moved it was possible to see which part of him pressed against the skin: his head, his foot – even, her nurse said, his nose.

‘I’ll send for your mother,’ Betsy warned, and Margaret tried to force down a further mouthful of meat. She did not want her mother to come. But the food choked her on the way down, then burned her in her gut as though there were no room for anything inside her but the baby.

‘You’ll need your strength, for when the baby comes,’ Betsy told her at least once every day.

Both Joan and Betsy insisted on feeling her stomach each morning to check that the baby was quick. She lay beneath their fingers, beneath this alien, quivering mound. Because she would not speak, they spoke to one another, over her head. Betsy rubbed goose fat into her stomach, and the smell was foul.

When the baby prevented her from sleeping, she made the short walk from her room to the little chapel, holding on to the wall. Ceri brought her a special stool to sit on at prayer; kneeling was bad for the baby, she said.

It was cold in the chapel, they all said, which was true, since there was no glass in the window. Joan suggested covering it with a tapestry.

‘No,’ Margaret said. She liked the breath of knife-cold air, the tang of the sea, even if she could not see it. She liked to see the gulls wheeling and calling. She liked the simplicity of the little chapel. It was a tiny room yet in it she had a sense of space and light that she did not have in any other part of the castle. She leaned forward on her stool and felt the damp air on her cheeks and listened to the roar and pound of waves and the seagulls’ plaintive cries.

Her attendants didn’t know that she could not pray.

Afterwards she would make her way back to her room, climb into her bed and lie watching the slit of grey sky that she could see from this angle, or sink back into the darkness of Edmund.

At Christmas, Owen Tudor arrived. He came straight to her room, sending Betsy and Joan and Ceri away.

She was shocked at the change in him. His hair and face were greyer, his eyes sunken.

He knelt by the bed, and took her hands and kissed them, then instead of releasing them he buried his face in them and groaned aloud. When he did look up, his eyes were wet and helpless as a babe’s.

‘Look at me,’ he said, in his hoarse, musical voice. ‘I keep asking myself why it is that I should still be alive. I’m past fifty. Most of the bones in my body have been broken at one time or another, and knit back together like a badly hewn frame. I have lost the sight of one eye and my liver is damaged beyond repair. Yet he – who was beautiful and young –’

But he could not go on. He twisted the sheets of the bed in his fists, then suddenly clasped her to him, sheets and all, crushing her face to his chest and roaring in agony.

He was as strong as a bear and she could not breathe. He rocked her and his own body was rocked in a passion of grief. He buried his face in her shoulder and sobbed aloud, and there was a note of incredulity in the sobbing.

She did not know what to do. She could feel the heat of his breath through her hair.

They stayed like that for a while, until his sobbing died away into silence.

And at length Owen Tudor shifted on his broken knees and said, ‘Edmund loved you, you know.’

She recoiled a little, a pang of pure pain passing through her. But all she said was, ‘He did not love me.’

It was the first time she had allowed herself even to think it, let alone say it out loud. But she found she could say it, and feel nothing; she was cold and still. He had never loved her, and now he never could.