Succession by Michael Livi

Author:Michael, Livi [Michael, Livi]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780241966693
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-06-26T06:00:00+00:00

Brother of King Henry, nephew of the dauphin, son of Owen – [Wales without Edmund] is a land without water, a house without feasting, a church without a priest, a castle without soldiers, a hearth without smoke.

Lewis Glyn Cothi

Each night after hearing of his death she dreamed of him, and when she woke, feeling his touch, she believed for one precious moment that he was there. Then came the more terrible awakening, the crushing realization, so that soon she came to dread going to sleep.

‘You must eat,’ her nurse said, over and over. ‘Do you think your husband would want his son to starve?’

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.

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