Succession

by Michael, Livi

  After the meal everyone rose while he led her out of the hall. She was conscious all over again, now that everyone was watching, that she barely reached above his elbow, and she tried to walk taller. Then he kissed her hand and left her to her nurse once more, while he accompanied Jasper to his own suite of rooms in Jasper’s mansion.

  Betsy could hardly contain her excitement as she helped her to undress: he was so tall, so handsome and so … knightly – there was not a better knight in all of Christendom. She, too, did not like Jasper – taking up all of Edmund’s time in that tedious way.

  ‘He is just jealous that he can’t have you, my poppet,’ she said, brushing her hair, and went on to say how impressed Edmund was at her scholarship and learning. But Margaret frowned at herself in the bronze plate that was her mirror.

  ‘I wish –’ she said, and stopped.

  ‘What, my duckling?’

  ‘I wish I might be pretty.’

  And Betsy exclaimed and clucked over her. She was pretty – what did she mean? She had pretty hazel eyes and fine bones. But Margaret looked with dissatisfaction at her hair, which was neither thick nor shiny, and would not grow, like Isolde’s, to cover her naked hips, but straggled to a halt just below her shoulders; and at her mouth, which was a thin line.

  ‘I am too small,’ she burst out eventually.

  ‘Oh, my pretty – my pretty sweet!’ cried Betsy, clasping her. ‘There is so much time left for growing! One day, my precious, one day you will be beautiful and tall – so beautiful that none of the bards will sing of Nesta any more. You will be the Helen of Wales!’

  They were married at Lamphey Palace, where they were to live. Once again she wore a white satin dress stitched with seed pearls as token of her purity. Her nurse combed out her hair and dressed it as well as she could, threading into it a pearl net, and told her how pretty she was: no bride had ever been prettier. And Margaret looked, disbelieving, at her yellowish skin and indeterminate eyes.

  But she would be beautiful one day.

  She and Edmund stood together, Jasper on one side and Betsy on the other. Edmund looked very handsome in his doublet of peacock blue. They repeated the vows she had said once already, in a different chapel, to a little boy, and Edmund held her fingers lightly, and she shivered in the sun.

  Afterwards there was a banquet for her new household, eel pie and a roasted kid with quail stuffed into its belly, and carrots carved into the shape of a swan. They sat in the gardens of their new home, which, with its big windows and its orchards, was as unlike Pembroke Castle as it was possible to be. And she danced three times with Edmund and once with Jasper, and her nurse said she danced very prettily. And this went on until late in the evening until she was tired and Edmund kissed the top of her head and told her she could go to bed. So she left with her nurse, and did not see who Edmund left with.

  And in the morning, Edmund had gone again.

  That was the pattern of their life together: long absences and sudden reappearance. She would wake up in her own room, the anticipation of seeing him lighting her whole day to a luminous sheen, then gradually the day would grow dull again as she realized he wasn’t there. Even when he was there she didn’t always see him, but sometimes she came on him unexpectedly, and then something in her unfurled and she walked taller. He would be in conversation with Jasper or his steward, but he was unfailingly good-humoured and courteous.

  ‘My Lady of Richmond,’ he would say, bowing.

  Only sometimes would she catch a look of something like resignation in his eyes, passing swiftly.

  If they were outdoors he would say, ‘How does your garden grow?’

  She was always very serious, she couldn’t even smile.

  ‘It is growing well, thank you,’ she said.

  ‘Have you checked the new flowers?’

  ‘I am going to.’

  ‘They won’t grow unless you check them.’

  She was silent then, recognizing the tone as one you would use to a much younger child. His smile broadened, then he turned to her nurse.

  ‘And you, Mistress Carew, how are you settling in to your rooms?’

  And Betsy, bashful as a young maiden, would curtsy deeply, though she had already curtsied once, and say, ‘We are getting used to them, my lord, only they are rather draughty.’

  And he would declare that he would send for more tapestries immediately.

  Then he would turn to Margaret and bow, or kiss her hand, and say that he would see her later. But he rarely did.

  The same pattern resumed, for this new household ran itself – no one needed her to give instructions and, besides, she was too small. She had no say in the management of the kitchens or gardens, the dairy or brewery, or the wash house. There was no point noticing where a wall needed mending, or a field had flooded; she could only practise her needlework and pursue her reading. She started work on a history of the Tudor family in silk, pausing from time to time to look out of the window at the sheep as they gathered and dispersed themselves under a changing sky.

  Edmund was rallying support for the king’s cause, suppressing a rebellion here, settling a dispute there, and negotiating with the Welsh leaders and bards. And sometimes when he returned he went straight to Jasper at Pembroke, and did not visit Lamphey at all.

  She was lonely, that was the trouble. She had never been lonely before, not at Bletsoe with her half-brothers and -sisters, nor at Ewelme with her young husband, and Alice Chaucer teaching her French. Sometimes the memory of her first husband’s stricken face as she rode away came back to her. He had been abandoned, she could see that now.

  When Edmund came back he was always with Jasper, and would remain closeted with him in one of the upstairs rooms. She could not demand more time with him, and she could never interrupt him. Edmund’s face, his blue-grey eyes, could turn steel cold if interrupted. And he could never tell her what business took him away from her and kept him locked in furious consultation with his brother.

  So she took to listening at doors, which was easier here, because there were no guards patrolling the windy corridors. Yet she rarely understood what was said. Names such as the Duke of Buckingham and those of her own Beaufort cousins passed in and out of the conversation, then the unintelligible names of bards.

  But she understood that the Duke of York was ruling once more, and the whole country was divided and might at any time rise against the king.

  Soon Edmund had to leave again, but he would be back, he told her, for Christmas, and they would spend it at Pembroke Castle, because his father would visit.

  ‘You will like my father,’ he said. And Margaret wanted to say that she would rather spend their first Christmas in their own home, but she could only nod solemnly. She did not say that she did not want to visit Jasper, and that she did not want him to leave. She curtsied and he kissed her lightly on both cheeks in the French way, then on the mouth in the English way, then he patted her hair in its net, and she could only watch him as he left through the snow that was already falling, and rising in little flurries around the horses, and settling again.

  She did not want to go to Pembroke Castle for the Christmas season.

  In fact it was the most extraordinary Christmas of her life. She travelled to the castle with her nurse, and once again Betsy was full of fear. They were being followed, she said, by Welsh warlords, who were accompanying them silently in the form of hunting birds. They would summon the little people to fly at their horses’ eyes and madden them. But they mustn’t look at them, no, for if they glanced out of the windows of their carriage, they would find no driver but an owl, guiding them straight into the underworld, where white and red hounds bayed, and licked the bloody feet of humans, and none of them should ever return.

  Betsy worked herself into a still greater terror with her stories (‘Oh, if it wasn’t for you, my own precious duckling, Old Betsy would stay in her bed and never come out more!’) so that Margaret had to hold her trembling hands again, and tell her that everyt
hing was all right, God was looking after them, and nothing bad would happen.

  They could hear music and shouts of laughter even before they reached the great hall, and as they entered, flanked by pages, they looked in on a mass of people. Then one of the pages blew a horn, and called, ‘The Lady Margaret,’ and the sea of faces all turned towards her so that her heart started hammering. She did not want to see the expressions of curiosity, amusement or pity, so after scanning the room for Edmund, but failing to find him, she lowered her eyes.

  Then the sea parted before her and she was guided towards a seat. And finally she saw Edmund at the top end of the longest table, and at the head of the table Jasper, looking quite different now in his scarlet silk. And to the right of Jasper, almost facing her, was a grey, grizzled man with red and broken veins on his cheeks and narrow, puffy eyes. His green jerkin was shabby and stained, and he seemed too rough to sit at the head of so great a table, but as she approached them all three men rose, and Edmund told her, ‘This is my father, Owen Tudor.’

  Suddenly, to her great surprise, he was no longer at Edmund’s side. He disappeared, and she had no time to think where, for his head bobbed up between Edmund’s place and her own, and she saw that he had dived beneath the table and was kneeling before her, his head almost level with her own. And he cried in a great voice, ‘A daughter-in-law at last! Praise be to God – someone to civilize these savage sons of mine, eh?’

  And he seized her hand and kissed it, then her wrist, then when the pale green sleeve fell open, revealing the kirtle beneath, he kissed her arm almost to the elbow, then looked up again at her and kissed her full on the mouth.

  ‘Forgive my father,’ Edmund said, smiling at her startled look. ‘He is part troll.’

  ‘Part troll, am I?’ Owen Tudor shouted. ‘Well, a troll may kiss a lady! But you should come and kiss her for yourself – some lusty bridegroom you!’

  And Edmund filled his mouth with wine and leaned across his father, and pressed his mouth to hers. She felt the warm liquid flowing past her teeth and had to gulp quickly before it all spilled down her chin.

  When she opened her eyes the three of them were laughing – even Jasper was smiling and relaxed – so that for the first time she could see the likeness between them, though the two sons were so courtly and the father so grizzled and wild. Yet beneath the courtliness there was some similar element, which would be more at home in the forests or the hills than in castles or at court, and she had never seen this before.

  ‘Now, mistress,’ said Owen Tudor, ‘I trust you will dance with me after dinner,’ and he took her hand again, quite gently.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, very formal, ‘I shall be delighted,’ and Owen in his turn was delighted with her, and he proposed a toast immediately, and everyone raised their glasses and she sat there smiling and blushing and shyly proud.

  Then the food arrived, dish after dish of hare and boar and peacock – its beak and claws replaced by vegetable sticks and almonds – and a wild boar’s head surrounded by meatballs fried in batter and coloured green to resemble apples, and a swan with outstretched wings. There were more than forty courses, and she could manage hardly any of them, but Owen managed all. Minstrels came and played around their table, and the mummers acted a farce about the wild men of the woods, and a great green man strode through the hall followed by live pigs running and squealing. And Owen Tudor chased after one and managed to ride it for almost a minute, and all the women laughed and the men cheered.

  Then the dancing began, and Owen Tudor lifted her and whirled her round, and she tried not to notice that Edmund was dancing with a tall girl with breasts, for it was all she could do to keep up with Owen and not stumble against him as he steered her past rows of clapping people.

  And the dancing got wilder as the wine flowed and the pigs returned and everyone gave chase, and Edmund leaped from table to chair, and then to the back of the largest pig, while all the women clapped and screamed.

  ‘He is so handsome, your husband,’ the tall girl with the breasts said, and Margaret felt pain and pride burning through her like a torch. For this girl, who was younger than she had thought, maybe just two or three years older than herself, would never have him fully; she would have to return to her own wrinkled, red-nosed husband, who had just collapsed, sweating, in his chair, and Edmund would have to return to her.

  And one day she would be tall, with breasts.

  So she kept her head high as the tall girl, whose name was Alice, danced with Edmund again and again. And she did not protest when Edmund came over to bid her goodnight, because it was time for her to leave the great hall with her nurse.

  But the next day he came to her room unexpectedly. She had been getting dressed for another feast when he came in, and her heart lurched as usual; and, as usual, she could think of nothing to say. But he sat on the edge of her bed and asked her what she thought of his father.

  ‘I like him,’ she said at once, and he said he had told her she would. And then he started talking to her, but not in his usual manner: telling her about his father, who had been persecuted by the Duke of Gloucester for marrying his mother, Queen Katherine of Valois, who was the widow of King Henry V.

  This same year [1438] one Owen, no man of birth, brake out of Newgate one night with the help of his priest and went his way hurting foul his keeper, but at the last, blessed be God, he was taken again. The which Owen had secretly wedded Queen Katherine and had three or four children by her, though people knew nothing of this until she was dead and buried.

  Great Chronicle of London

  Queen Katherine had been lonely, Edmund said, living in a great castle without either husband or son, for her young son was now king and was looked after by his uncles. It was said that Owen had charmed her by falling into her lap drunk at a ball. Later, Margaret heard another version of this story – that she had followed him to a river secretly to watch him bathing; that she was ‘unable to curb her carnal lusts’ – but this was not the version Edmund told and she was happy to listen to him; happy that he was speaking to her at all.

  He told her that after his mother’s death his father had been arrested, and waited for her to ask him why, but it was obvious to her that only the most reckless commoner would marry a queen. And only the most reckless queen would dare to marry a commoner.

  ‘No,’ Edmund said. ‘It was because he was Welsh.’

  He told her then of all the laws enacted against the Welsh, that they should not marry out of Wales, or own land, or be given any office, or bear arms, or have guests in their own houses without special licence. His father had fallen foul not only of these laws, but of a special statute devised by the Duke of Gloucester and the king’s council that made it possible to imprison and even execute a man who married a queen. Only the king could give permission for his mother to marry, and only when he came of age. So Owen and Katherine had lived together secretly, outside London. But after Katherine’s death, when Edmund was six or seven years old, the Duke of Gloucester had Owen thrown into prison, and the marriage declared unlawful, and their children bastards.

  She could not read the expression on his face, but a muscle on the side of his jaw was twitching. She said, ‘But you do not fight for the Welsh.’

  ‘I fight for my brother, the king,’ he said. But he was hardly English at all, Margaret thought. His father was Welsh and his mother French. Yet he was half-brother to the English king, who had eventually rescued Owen Tudor, taking him into his own household and exempting him from the laws against the Welsh. Also King Henry had treated Edmund and Jasper well, according to his mother’s wishes. They had been looked after by Katherine de la Pole, sister of the Duke of Suffolk, and then taken to court. Now the king had given Edmund the job of negotiating with the rebel chiefs, because of his Welsh father. And because he would not betray his brother, the king.

  She could see this contradiction in him. And she saw also that, when all the bells of the nation had rung for the birth of a son and hei
r to the king after eight long years of marriage, certain of his hopes, his unspoken desires, had been blighted. It would be that much harder to be the hope of Wales when it would one day be handed over to the little prince.

  Yet he would guard the prince, his nephew, with his life.

  She admired him for this. She would have liked to tell him that she admired him for his complicated loyalty. Yet she knew instinctively that he would not want to discuss the subject. His face had already changed; the conversation seemed to be over. He said he would leave her to prepare for the feast.

  The Christmas season passed, after many more festivities, and at last all the guests left, and Owen Tudor with them. Margaret saw the look on the tall girl’s face when Edmund came to bid everyone farewell. He was polite enough, of course, and formal, given that her husband was there. But the look that Lady Alice cast after him was stricken, full of regret, and Margaret was suddenly and meanly glad.

  Then Edmund said that he was leaving too, but she was to stay in Pembroke Castle because of the snow, which was banked up high on all the paths. And before she could prevent herself, Margaret cried ‘No!’ and he looked at her with mild surprise, until she said, ‘Why do you have to go?’

  She knew from his expression that this was the wrong thing to say. But he began to tell her anyway, that he had to go to the queen. He and Jasper were to leave the next day, to meet up with her cousin, Henry Beaufort, who was the new Duke of Somerset. There were many things to arrange and he would have to spend the rest of that day in consultation with his brother.

  She was silent then, but it was a mutinous silence.

  ‘You are always talking to Jasper –’ she said at last, sounding petulant even to her own ears.

  ‘Listen to me,’ Edmund said, interrupting her. ‘The king is ill again – not so badly as last time, thank God, but the queen has taken affairs into her own hands. She has moved the court to Coventry, and is setting up her own council around the prince.’