Rebellion (19 page)

He had not closed the door
properly behind him.

Margaret waited for a moment, but there were
no other signs of life inside the chapel. She got up and cautiously pushed the door.

It was a tiny chapel reserved, apparently,
for private prayer. Possibly for the abbot's personal use, since it adjoined his room.
The walls were panelled with wood and, as Margaret had suspected, she could hear her
mother's voice through the panels, carping, insistent, then the abbot's deep, regretful
tones.

She knelt and lowered her head as though
praying.

There was something about the manner of her
father's death; the understandable need for discretion. And her mother's voice rose
shrilly. ‘Call yourself a man of God!' she said.

For reasons that she could not quite
determine, Margaret's heart was pounding. The pulse of it in her ears made it difficult
to hear. And now the voices were lowered again.

After another moment she got up and returned
to the bench. Just in time, for the door clicked open and her mother came out, looking
distraught. The abbot was grave and thoughtful.

‘This is not the end of it,' her mother
said. ‘I will come back.'

The abbot said he hoped they would return;
they were always welcome. ‘I trust you do not feel you have had a wasted journey,' he
said, and her mother made a small, explosive sound. He hoped they would forgive him for
not accompanying them to their carriage, but he was expecting another visitor any
time.

He retreated into his room. For once,
Margaret's mother seemed quite incapable of speech. They returned to the carriage and
Margaret helped her mother in and adjusted the quilted cover that she insisted on
carrying with her at all times.

Her mother did not look at her but stared
straight ahead. Her silence made it difficult for Margaret to speak. She ventured to ask
if her mother was quite well (she was very pale) and was snapped at for her pains. So
they travelled together locked in two different kinds of silence. But Margaret felt a
growing sense of outrage.
Whatever her mother was keeping from her
must have a direct relevance to herself, because it concerned her father. She was happy
to consult Margaret regularly, call on her for advice and criticize her, but not to tell
her the truth.

So when they came finally to the fortified
gatehouse of Maxey she said, ‘I'm not coming in, Mother, unless you have something to
tell me.'

She thought that her mother would vent the
full force of her rage against her, but instead she seemed to crumble. She nodded
several times as though to herself. ‘Very well then,' she said.

Inside the castle her mother's mood changed
once more; she was disconcerted, febrile. She put on one pair of spectacles, then a
different pair as she searched for something in her bureau. ‘It is here somewhere, I
know it,' she muttered, as though to discourage Margaret from interrupting or offering
to help. But Margaret merely watched, astonished as her mother fumbled through a drawer.
She seemed to have become suddenly old.

Finally she found a key.

She unlocked a drawer that seemed to be
hidden within the first drawer, and from it withdrew an elderly, crumpled parchment. She
carried it to the table but seemed reluctant to let it go. Margaret held out her hand,
though her sense of foreboding was strong. Instead of giving it to her, her mother set
it down on the table, and smoothed it once, twice, with those aged, fumbling hands. Then
abruptly she sat down, turning partially away from Margaret.

Margaret sat down herself, drawing the
parchment towards her. It was a fragment or copy of some longer work, she assumed. Her
father's name appeared on it in monkish script.

…
he accelerated his death by
putting an end to his existence, rather than pass a life of misery, labouring under
so disgraceful a charge.

Margaret looked up. ‘I don't understand,'
she said. Her mother would not look at her, but as her silence deepened Margaret found
that she did, after all, understand.

‘What disgraceful charge?'
she whispered. Her mother still said nothing, but she glanced at Margaret and her eyes
had reddened.

Margaret had never seen her cry.

‘It – was France, you see,' her mother said
finally. ‘Always France. He was asked to lead an expedition there, and he didn't want to
go. That was why they made him duke – to persuade him to go.'

Margaret waited.

‘He'd had enough of France the last time he
was there,' her mother said. ‘He only went in the end to recover his ransom.'

This part of the story Margaret knew.

Her father had set off to France, joining
Henry V's forces, as a very young man, not yet sixteen. Shortly afterwards he'd been
captured at the Battle of Baugé, and then he'd spent the next seventeen years in
captivity – the longest time endured by any nobleman in the course of the Hundred Years
War.

She had known this, but now, in this room,
in this heightened state of tension, she understood it differently. She could see him
setting off – so young, so full of dreams of glory – only to return in middle age with
half his life gone.

He had lost his life as surely as others had
lost theirs.

And his fortune; his ransom had cost him his
inheritance and his lands.

Eventually he had married her mother, a
match which (as no one ever said) under normal circumstances would have been beneath
him.

‘His health had suffered,' her mother said,
‘he was never really well. He had these terrible fits of despair; in his sleep he cried
out in French. When the summons came to return, I thought he would go out of his mind.
He said they were trying to destroy him.
If they wanted you dead they could execute
you
, he said,
but to destroy you they sent you to France
.

‘He kept delaying his departure – he
wouldn't leave until after
you'd been born. He negotiated some lands
in Kendal to leave to you – he was convinced he would die there, in France.

‘And then he went, and it was a disaster, of
course, because all he could think about was recouping his lost ransom. They said he had
levied illegal taxes in Normandy and Brittany, that he had cost the crown £26,000 and
brought both countries to the brink of a different war.

‘There was an enquiry, of course, on his
return, and he lost yet more of his property. He was allowed to retire, to one of his
smaller manors in Dorset, but he faced charges of treason.'

The word
treason
hung between them.
Margaret closed her eyes.

‘And so he –' her mother said. She started
again. ‘Two of his servants found him – in the stables. They cut him down. One of them
had the presence of mind to dip his body into the pond. It was said that he had slipped
and fallen into it. He was never a good swimmer.' Margaret opened her eyes. Her mother
managed to smile. ‘We buried him quietly at Wimborne Minster,' she said. ‘There was no
official enquiry. By courtesy of the king we were allowed to keep what remained of his
property and lands.'

The king had allowed them to inherit.

That was Henry VI, of course. Either from
kindness or negligence, he had not collected his due. Because suicide was a crime
against the king, and all goods were automatically forfeit to him. And her father had
already cost the crown a fortune. Yet out of compassion, or incompetence, or simply a
desire to cover things up, her father's title and some of his lands had been retained.
And because she still had value, as the daughter of a duke, her wardship was a valuable
gift. And she had been given, in fact, to the Duke of Suffolk.

All these thoughts came to her, but
overlying them all was the image of her father hanging in a barn.

She had been silent for so long that her
mother was looking at her with a mixture of curiosity and fear. But all Margaret said
was, ‘No one told me.'

‘How was I going to tell
you?' her mother said at once, and Margaret could tell she'd anticipated this objection.
‘You were a child – an infant.'

You've had time since
,
Margaret thought, but she didn't speak. She remembered that her father had died
just before her first birthday – a fact she had always attributed to misfortune. But now
she knew that he'd taken a rope and secured it round a beam, perhaps, and then his neck,
and stood on what? A stool or a box – something he could kick away?

‘You were his only child,' her mother said,
and there was a quaver in her voice. ‘He wouldn't leave – he wouldn't go to France,
until he'd seen you.'

Until he knew whether or not I was a
boy
, Margaret thought. And she remembered something that her old nurse Betsy
had once told her. That her mother had been so grieved by her father's death that she
had miscarried soon after. A little boy, who would have inherited the title of duke. But
the only living child had been a girl.

Unfortunate for her mother, and her father,
and for all of them.

Her mother was looking at her now with a
kind of anguish in her eyes, a kind of plea, which was unprecedented; as though this
dark story had changed their roles. But she was not going to think now of her mother's
suffering, or be coerced into any displays of affection. Her father had apparently had
no thought for his only child. Nor had her mother, as far as Margaret could see.

How she'd longed to be admitted to the inner
circle of her mother's affection, which was where all her other children seemed to be.
But she, Margaret, had been given away. And never fully readmitted, however hard she had
tried. Now it was as though her mother wanted something from her; sympathy at least for
the plight she'd been in. And with one part of her mind Margaret could see that her
suffering had been intense. But neither of her
parents had taken her
into consideration; they had simply not been able to, in the course of so much stress
and pain.

Something in her daughter's face must have
frightened Margaret's mother, because she started to speak rapidly. ‘We did what we
thought was best.'

We
, Margaret thought.

‘We didn't want you to grow up with that
stain, that disgrace –'

‘Who else knows?' Margaret said, and her
mother looked down, as though confused. Then in a very low voice she said, ‘The abbey
has it all on record.'

Margaret gave a short, incredulous laugh,
and shook her head.

‘So now, you see – if I pursue an enquiry –
into the land – it will all come out –'

And we would have no entitlement to the
land in any case
, Margaret thought. All the work they had done, all the
investigation, was a complete waste of time.

‘Yes,' was all she said. ‘I see.'

‘Margaret,' said her mother, but Margaret
was already gathering her things.

Waste of my time
, she was thinking.
No wonder the abbot was so confident.

‘You look like him, you know –'

Margaret got up at once. ‘I think I should
go now,' she said.

‘But you haven't eaten – at least stay for
some food.'

Margaret looked at her mother as though from
a great distance. ‘Thank you for telling me,' she said, and her mother said, ‘Margaret,'
again. But she was leaving, walking swiftly from the room, through the hallway to the
doors and outside, to her carriage.

All the way back she was surprised at
herself, at the amount of rage she felt. Why was she so angry? That her father had left
her, and her mother had kept things from her?

She could not say that she would not have
done the same.

Or was it because her background was so much
more
ignominious than she had been led to believe? She had been taught
to be proud of being the daughter of a duke, the Beaufort heiress.

And her father – she had imagined him as a
hero.

She'd been lied to, of course, but she did
not know that it should make her as angry as she was. Given the circumstances, there had
not been many options.

Given any circumstances, she had always
thought, there were never many options.

Yet she felt deprived, somehow, that was it.
Not deprived of a father, surely, for she'd never had one. Deprived, perhaps, of a state
of innocence, in which she'd believed in her heroic father.

He'd killed himself just days before her
first birthday. Had she not wanted to die, after Edmund's death, when she'd been left
alone and pregnant? Or when her son had been taken from her and given to William
Herbert?

But would she have put an end to her own
life? No. Because a woman with a child knows she has a reason to live.

You look like him
, she'd said. Her
features on the man swinging in the barn.

But they had been able to bury him on
consecrated ground; there was that at least.

She was angry with her father, yes, but even
more so with her mother, which made no sense. Her mother had surely had the very worst
part of the deal.

She would have done as her mother had done;
she would have married again as soon as she could and had another child.

It was not even her fault that she had given
Margaret up. The king had decided, and in those circumstances she could hardly refuse.
She'd not had to give up her other children, no; but Margaret was the only one who was
the daughter of a duke. And she'd maintained contact with her all these years.

Her mother would have put all these
arguments to her and they were all perfectly reasonable. And none of them appeased the
rage in her heart, the sense of grievance.

She should not be so angry
at her mother, but she was. Because all these years she'd waited for their relationship
to begin; to feel included in her mother's heart. And all this time there'd been no
chance of it, ever.