Succession (8 page)

When Margaret closed her eyes she could still see the colours of the stained-glass windows, scarlet, indigo and gold. It was another world, behind her eyelids, with its own patterns of light and shade, its own depths and shallows. It was where, she believed, God was hiding. God, whose presence was immanent in the world, which meant that you couldn’t see Him. But if you waited without ever giving up hope, and paid attention to the spaces between words or the pause between one breath and the next, God, like a shy deer, might emerge from the hidden, shadowy places.

God was also in Heaven, of course, which was part of the mystery. The chapel ceiling had been painted a deep blue to represent the cerulean of Paradise. This she could not see through her eyelids, but if she pressed the balls of her eyes surreptitiously, contrary to the warnings of her nurse, she could see swirling lines, blocks of colour and dots which spiralled away from each other and re-formed differently. If she kept up the pressure long enough, it seemed to her that these patterns might resolve into a different world; one that was ordinarily too dazzling for human eyes.

This was what she thought about while the priest intoned the mass in Latin, and further along the pew her guardian’s son, John, fidgeted and twisted in his seat and kicked the bench in front. They had been separated because he kept trying to pull her hair from its cap, then tie it to the pew behind. Even now he was trying to attract her attention – she could see him from the corner of her eye. Which was another reason for keeping her eyes closed.

She had been told that she must play with him like a good little girl; he was her brother now.

Which was a little confusing because her mother had married again and had a little boy who was also her brother, and also named John.

At first there had been other children to play with in this household, and then just Margaret and John. The other children were never mentioned again; she did not know if they had died, or been sent away. But she understood that she was in some way special. ‘This is your second home,’ she had been told. And her nurse had said she was lucky – ‘a lucky little chick’ – to have such a grand home in addition to her own.

She knew she was lucky, though she sometimes wished she could play with someone else. When she glanced secretly at her foster-brother he was pulling faces at her, as if he knew, all the time, that she would look. She leaned forward in her seat and pressed her fingertips still more firmly into her eyelids, waiting for the revelation of God.

When it didn’t happen, and the service ended, they were taken to John’s rooms to play, because they played together so well.

They played together well, she had discovered, as long as she let him win. If not, she had been astonished to find that he cried louder and harder than she, and his nurse would come running to comfort him, while her nurse chided her gently: it was only natural that a boy would want to win.

‘But he always wants to win,’ she had objected on more than one occasion, and her nurse would say ‘Well!’ As if it were of so little consequence that she shouldn’t make a fuss. And then she would make one of the comments that even from a young age had outraged Margaret’s logic, such as ‘Losing is the way little ladies win’, or ‘The ball that would rise, must fall.’

‘Not if you catch it,’ Margaret would say, but her nurse would never engage in arguments of this kind. She would only press her lips together over her toothless gums and tell her that she had lost one tooth every time her little ward argued; every time she was
good she stood a chance of growing one back. ‘But look,’ she said, opening her lips and exposing her shrunken gums; Little Peg had obviously not been very good yet. If she went back to play, like a good little lady, she could come back later to see whether her old Betsy had grown a tooth back.

Her nurse’s name was Elizabeth, but Margaret had always called her Betsy, to distinguish her from all the other Elizabeths in the household. And because it was all she could manage to say when she was very young. That or Bet-bet. In return, Betsy called her Little Peg, for there were almost as many Margarets in the household as Elizabeths. Her own mother was called Margaret, as was the queen.

For as long as she could remember, Little Peg had slept between Betsy’s heavy breasts and rounded stomach. Before sleep, Betsy would let her play with the folds and creases of her face. Her tiny fingers pried into the dimples of her nurse’s cheeks and chin and even into her mouth, when she would pretend to bite. Betsy’s face was softly furred with downy lines and when she laughed she was like an infant, revealing crinkled gums. She had large eyes full of greenish lights and heavy eyebrows that seemed at odds with the wispy tendrils of her hair, the darkish strands on her upper lip.

And she was full of stories, for her mother was a Cornishwoman, and it was a different world down there, she said, magical, disappearing at night. People told stories all night long to make the land come back each morning. And it was a different land each time, for nobody could tell the same story twice.

If you cut your finger at the new moon you were bound for ever to the goblin king unless you turned round quickly three times and said your own name backwards. If you were using salt you had to throw some over your left shoulder, or the devil would appear.

As she got older, Margaret would question her nurse or argue until Betsy would throw her arms up in mock horror, and call her Little Miss Plato, and tell her she was far too clever for her old nurse, now that she was being tutored by the Lady Alice.

It was Betsy who had taken her on her first visit to the new household, where she had clung fiercely to her nurse or followed her
around like a tiny planet orbiting her sun. It was Betsy who had lost her that fateful day when her guardian had shown her the world in all its strangeness and colour, and Betsy whose footsteps had come pounding along the corridor to find her. Coming on them finally, breathless and distracted, she had sunk into a curtsy so low that she could not get up again, and the duke himself had helped her to her feet.

And it was Betsy who told her that she must play nicely with her new brother – ‘like a good little girl’ – and let him win.

Once he was breeched this was easy for him, because he could run about in his new trousers and she could only stumble after him in her long skirts. She could not climb trees or ford streams anywhere near as well as he. Also she was several months younger than he was, and small for her age, all of which made him well disposed towards her. Once, he had carried her across the stones in the stream like St Christopher, though she did not much like being carried and had clung to his neck for all she was worth, convinced he would drop her by accident or on purpose. She had worked out quite quickly, however, that he was not supposed to treat her ‘with any discourtesy’, and so she always made sure that if she was about to do anything to enrage him, such as winning at hide and seek, they were within earshot of his mother or his nurse.

And if he annoyed her by insisting on winning at indoor games he would sometimes find that his carved geese or horsemen, or his finest marbles, would mysteriously disappear. His nurse said that if he didn’t leave them scattered around they would not be lost, but she would question the servants; in all probability they had simply been put away.

And so they had: in Margaret’s room, in her private box.

On this particular Sunday it was very cold, and they had to play inside. So John took out his castle and his carved wooden knights and horses and they each had a mounted knight which they pushed down a ramp until they collided and the one that fell over lost. And since John pushed harder, Margaret’s knight always lost. And then they played Siege, and her knights waited in the castle to be captured.

After that, since it wasn’t snowing, they were allowed outside briefly, well wrapped in furs. It was a still, brown day with strands of pale light in the sky. They made their way to the pond to see if there was any life beneath its frozen surface and crouched down. John said he could see a fish, but though he pointed with a stick she couldn’t see anything beneath the opaque patterns of ice. She wondered if the fish in its shadowy world was dreaming of the sky, or whether it thought that the surface of the pool was the sky, glinting above it in shards of light.

‘We will be married soon,’ John said suddenly. She looked up at him sharply but he was still studying the pond and his face was sober.

‘I’m not getting married,’ she said, and he cleared some withered stalks from the surface with his stick.

‘You are,’ he said.

‘I’m not.’

He looked at her. ‘You have to. Girls have to.’

She got up, shaking her skirts. ‘Who says so?’

‘My father. And my mother.’

‘I’m not getting married to
you
,’ she said. She hurried away from him then and only stopped when she heard a noise from behind. He was crying loudly, his mouth wide open. But she hesitated only for a moment, and then ran all the way to her nurse.

‘I’m not getting married,’ she panted.

Betsy sat back in dismay.

‘Of course you are, my poppet,’ she said.

Margaret was outraged. ‘But – he is my brother – you said so!’

Betsy gathered her up on to her knee in the way she used to when Margaret was very small. ‘He is not your real brother, poppet – he is your brother in spirit. Which is the best thing that a husband can be. Don’t you want to be married to your very best friend?’

Margaret started to protest that she didn’t want to be married at all, but Betsy swept this aside. Of course she wanted to be married. All good little girls got married, it was God’s blessing on them for being good. Because God knew how good she was, he wanted to
bless the earth with more little girls and boys who would be as good as she was.

Margaret looked at her, appalled, but her nurse said she would be a fine lady, like Lady Alice, and have her own household. She would be a duchess and her husband a duke. Didn’t she want to be a duchess?

At the mention of Lady Alice she tried to wriggle off her nurse’s knee. ‘I will ask her,’ she said, but her nurse clasped her more tightly and said she mustn’t, she was not to bother Lady Alice when she was so busy making arrangements. It was going to be the best wedding in the world, she said: the Faerie Queen herself had said so.

Betsy told her that the Lady Alice had spent a week or more on her knees praying to Our Lady in Heaven to know who would be the perfect wife for her son. And at the end of that week the Queen of the Faeries had come to her in a dream. Her hair was as wild as bracken and her eyes were like the night sky. She had taken a garland of daisies from her hair and given them to Lady Alice. And in each daisy, instead of droplets of dew, there had been a shining pearl.

Pearls and daisies were the symbols of her name, Margaret.

Betsy’s voice had grown hushed and her eyes luminous, but Margaret’s forehead contracted into a frown. ‘Why would Our Lady send the Faerie Queen?’ she asked.

Betsy said that God’s mother could choose her own messengers if anyone could. And, anyway, if she didn’t believe her old Betsy, she could believe the dress that was being made for her. It was being embroidered with seed pearls in the shape of daisies. Betsy herself had seen it. ‘You will look like a little angel from heaven,’ she said, her eyes misting over.

Margaret finally wriggled free. ‘I’m going to ask Lady Alice,’ she said, and set off at a run so that her old nurse couldn’t follow.

Lady Alice was not in the schoolroom where she taught Margaret, and she was not in the little chapel, listening to her choir of poor boys. Nor was she in the hospital where she cared for paupers, or for her own servants who had fallen ill. In the end Margaret had
to ask one of the servants, who said she was in her private room, and reluctantly agreed to disturb her. And Lady Alice said she could be shown in.

She stood facing the window, with her back to Margaret, but as soon as the servant left she turned, then stood entirely still, with her face partially obscured by the light that was shining from behind.

‘Well,’ she said softly. ‘What is it?’

But Margaret was suddenly overcome by the sense that she had done a monstrous thing, demanding to see the duchess in her room. She looked down at the floor and mumbled something to the effect that she had heard, Betsy had said, that she was to be married.

‘Do you not wish to be married?’ Lady Alice said.

When Margaret did not answer she came towards her, then unexpectedly crouched down on a little stool so that her face was more or less level with Margaret’s own.

‘You are so young,’ she said. Margaret looked at her in growing dismay. It was not possible that Lady Alice had been crying.

There was no one Margaret admired so much as Lady Alice; she loved nothing better than to be taught by her, while John was learning to ride, and wear armour, and manage a sword. Lady Alice would read poems to her in French and make her repeat them. Even when she didn’t understand the words she understood that Lady Alice loved reading them aloud and Margaret loved being read to; they were bound together by this love. Lady Alice praised her constantly for doing well in her studies and had insisted that she should be called Margaret, not Little Peg. When she grew up, Margaret wanted to be just like Lady Alice: elegant and learned, healing the afflicted by the soothing power of her presence. But it was not possible to love the Lady Alice in the same way as she did her nurse; there was always something inaccessible about her – she was as remote and serene as the moon.

But now she had been crying, and Margaret was shocked into silence.

Lady Alice touched her face and moved a strand of her hair, which had escaped from its cap.

‘I was not much older than you when I was first married,’ she said, and there was a catch in her voice. She tried to smile, but her eyes filled with tears again. Then she rested her hands on Margaret’s bony shoulders. ‘You are like a little bird,’ she said, and she went on to say that she had her whole life in front of her, but life was often difficult, and marriage – marriage was difficult also.