Rebellion (2 page)

Then she saw him, and felt a rush of relief.
He was standing in front of the first stable, leaning forward a little as though intent;
he didn't even move when she called out to him.

She crept up on him, determined to surprise
him, and to laugh at him for gazing so intently at a horse. Probably it was being shoed.
Henry did sometimes get absorbed by the mechanisms of routine tasks.

When she had almost reached him she could
see what he was looking at. The stable boy stripped to the waist, moving bales of hay
with unhurried, rhythmical movements. A pattern of muscle moved under his skin; beads of
sweat had collected between his shoulders.

The rush of knowledge that came to her then
was like a shock of cold air. She made a small sound, not speech, and Henry looked
round. His face was a little flushed, as though from sleep.

She turned and hurried back towards the
house.

She didn't know where her knowledge came
from. She knew
little of the world except what she had gathered from her
books. And the Bible. Once in church the priest had held up two men to shame for the sin
of Sodom; they had been whipped in the marketplace.

Look what happened in the
Inferno
to sodomites.

But this was Henry, her Henry, the kindest
man she knew.

She made her way to the room they didn't
share and sat down suddenly on her bed because her legs were trembling. So many things
made sense now.

They had borne together the curiosity of
other people about their childless state, the barbed comments of both their mothers, the
unspoken criticisms of those who, knowing she'd had to give up her first child, thought
that she should have replaced him by now with at least one other. All the time assuming
it was her fault.

In fact, it was her fault, though they
couldn't know that. Even Henry didn't know it – what the doctor had said after she'd had
her son had been left out of the marriage negotiations. That she was permanently
damaged; it was unlikely she would ever conceive again. She'd been easily cowed by the
criticisms, understanding what her duty was and that she'd failed.

But now this.

She couldn't even finish the thought. She
pressed her fingertips to the sides of her head.

Yet what had she seen, really?

Her husband, watching a stable boy.

It did not mean anything.

She remembered that when they had visited
his mother they had shared a bed and he had taken care not to touch her. Unwilling, she
had supposed, to rush her into anything she was not ready for.

But sometime after the loss of her son, when
it was still unbearable to her, her mother had made some comment about ‘starting a new
family instead of mourning the old'. And she had said sharply that she was not looking
to replace her son, but at the same time she had realized that she did, in fact, want
another baby. So fiercely that she could suppress the knowledge of what
the doctor had said, and her own inner knowledge of the workings of her body.

Are you saying
, Jasper had said to
the doctor,
that a miracle cannot happen?
And, of course, the doctor would say
no such thing.

And it was spring, the time for miracles. So
the next morning she'd gone into her husband's room while he slept, and her fingers
found the swollen part beneath the sheets, and he had ejaculated swiftly before he was
fully awake.

He had got up at once, and avoided her for
the rest of the day.

Of course, she knew she was not attractive;
bony-chested and woefully small. It was as though her early experience of childbirth had
caused her body to reject all the natural processes of maturity. She hadn't grown
since.

Still, that hadn't stopped Edmund.

But Henry was her loving, good husband, who
liked her better than anyone else, who preferred her company. Not like Edmund, who was
always going away. And so they'd carried on, like brother and sister.

Did she want to lose that now?

There was a tapping at the door. Gentle, but
it made her flinch. She lowered her hands from her face as the door opened.

There was Henry, looking at her.

It was a painful look, shy, eager, full of
concern for her, and a kind of desperation for himself. And the shade of fear that must
have been on her own face.

‘Margaret,' he said.

In that moment she knew there was knowledge
that could be allowed and knowledge that could not. And the knowledge that could not had
to be suppressed.

Henry took a step towards her. ‘Is something
wrong?' he said. Between them was the image of that boy, his naked back. She would not
look at it. Her gaze fell on the papers on her desk.

‘I have some accounting to do,' she
said.

She saw his face change, could sense the
alteration in his silence.
But she didn't want him to speak; she must
prevent him from speaking.

‘It's an inventory,' she said, ‘of old
clothes and hangings. To take to the Sanctuary.'

‘I see,' said Henry. ‘Will you come down for
food?'

‘I'm not hungry,' she said, then was sorry
that she'd said it, because it was a bone of contention between them, her rejection of
food, and now he would want to know why, to open a discussion that she wished to
avoid.

‘I'll have some soup in here,' she said,
then felt again that it was the wrong thing to say, because now he would think that she
was punishing him, and she did not want to punish him, she did not want any
acknowledgement of what had happened at all.

‘I see,' he said. ‘Perhaps you'll come down
later?'

‘Oh yes,' she said, adding in a rush, ‘I
could read to you if you like – from the book your mother sent us – but I have to write
to her – she will want to know if we like it.'

She glanced at him then, at the look of
baffled pain and disappointment in his eyes. But all he said was, ‘Very well then. I'll
eat now, and you'll come down later, and read to me.'

There was no bitterness; Henry was not a
bitter man. But there was something in his face, stricken, bleak, that she would
remember for a long time. There was another pause in which one of them might have
spoken, and then he turned and she could hear his heavy steps descending the stairs.

At once she got up and went to her desk.

She was relieved that she'd handled it this
way. Because already she was halfway to believing that she had seen nothing really,
nothing had happened. Henry had been watching a stable boy, that was all. He did
sometimes watch the servants, as she did; servants needed watching. And he was often
fascinated by mundane tasks such as fencing or cropping.

There was no need to discuss something that
hadn't happened.

Everything would continue, just as it had
before.

She had waited for several days outside the
palace at Amboise. She was dusty and shabby from the journey, but there was nowhere to
wash and no clothes to change into. So as soon as she was allowed in, with her son and
one or two attendants, and conducted to the room where her cousin the king sat in his
robes of state, she took two or three steps forward then fell to the floor, the full
length of her body embracing the cool tiles.

She felt rather than saw the ripple of shock
that passed through the room; all those painted, enamelled faces turning to the king.
But before the king could speak, ignoring all protocol, she began her impassioned
plea.

‘Oh, most gracious majesty,' she said,
barely lifting her head, ‘I come to you destitute of friends, of honour, of aid. A queen
expelled from her nation, reduced to utter wretchedness and misery.'

‘I cannot hear you if you talk to the
floor,' said the king.

When he made no move to help her rise, one
of her attendants stepped forward. She leaned on him heavily, getting up with none of
her usual energy and grace, and looked for the first time at her cousin with desperate
appeal.

‘If you do not help us, we must die outside
your walls,' she said.

King Louis' hooded eyes scarcely flickered;
his fleshy nostrils
quivered once. She could not tell if he was pleased
to see her so reduced or annoyed in the extreme. He was only a few years older than she
was, unprepossessing as ever, but in possession of such superior power. Infinitely
malign he seemed to her as he squatted there like a great toad. She could not help but
think of his father, her beloved uncle, in whose court she had always been made welcome.
But Louis had never liked his father and he despised the House of Anjou.

Lack of food made her sway slightly.

‘
Madame
,' her cousin said, ‘please
be seated.' And miraculously it seemed, because she had thought there was no other chair
in the room, one appeared. Smaller than her cousin's seat, of course, but placed next to
his so that they could speak. And she was offered a goblet of wine and some bread and
oil.

She looked towards her son, who was still
standing where she had left him, directing the full force of his stare at the king.

‘Your majesty, may I present my son the
prince,' she said.

The king leaned forward in his seat and
beckoned the little boy, who glanced at her before approaching, then dropped elegantly
to one knee. She watched eagerly as the king assessed him; the straightness of his back,
his silky hair. The king's own sons had died in infancy; he had only one daughter, the
princess Anne, who was just one year old.

‘You have travelled a long way,' he said to
her son. ‘I think you must be hungry. And thirsty.'

Without looking at her the little prince
replied, ‘It is nothing now that I have seen your majesty.'

She was so proud of him.
Even in
her distress she smiled.

But the king did not look at her.

‘I think you would like some refreshment,'
he said. He motioned to a servant, and the prince and her attendants were ushered away
before she could protest. She had been going to make her appeal with her son at her
side. But now she was alone, with the king and his attendants.

King Louis leaned towards
her. ‘Tell me what brings you so far into our country,' he said.

As if he didn't know.

However, the queen recounted her tale. The
sorry tale of King Henry, a good and pious man, whose cousins had risen against him and
torn the nation apart in one battle after another until all the land was bathed in
blood. Nothing could equal their treachery, their iniquity. And now the son of one of
these cousins, Edward of York, had set himself up as king.

‘He is not king!' she burst out. ‘He will
never be anything other than a usurper. He will die the death that all such traitors
die!'

King Louis commented only that he must have
had considerable support.

‘They have turned the hearts of the people
with their lies and malice!' said the queen.

The bulbous end of King Louis' nose twitched
once. ‘And where is the king, your husband?' he said.

King Henry was in Scotland. But the Scottish
queen had made it clear that she could not support him indefinitely. Scotland had been
subjected to threats and harassment from the House of York, and especially from the Earl
of Warwick, who had led his troops across the border to attack Scottish castles after
taking several castles in the north of England, so that there was nowhere for the
Lancastrian court to go.

‘The position would seem to be hopeless,'
the French king murmured. But Margaret of Anjou protested that it was not hopeless: she
had many supporters – there were many loyal subjects of the true king. In fact, as his
majesty knew, the Earl of Oxford had recently led a conspiracy to overthrow the
so-called ‘new king'
and organize an invasion from Scotland.

‘But that did not end well, I think,' said
King Louis, and the queen was forced to admit that, in fact, due to the efforts of a
Yorkist spy who had intercepted one of the messages from the earl, the uprising had been
brutally suppressed.

The Earl of Oxford fastened to a stretcher, disembowelled, castrated, then burned
alive, and his oldest son executed with him.

The French king dipped his fingers into a
bowl. ‘So how would you describe your position?' he said. An expression of distress
flitted across the queen's face.

‘We still have our supporters,' she said.
The Scottish queen would give them money to leave Scotland, she believed. And Queen Mary
had agreed to a marriage between her daughter and Prince Edward, who was the rightful
prince and heir.

The French king sat back. She could see him
thinking that it might suit him to have a member of his own family, half French, on the
English throne as his vassal. But all he said was, ‘Certainly we could not have two King
Edwards in England at the same time – that would confuse the people, eh?'