Free Succession by Livi Michael Page A

II: 1450–55

16
     

The Wedding
     
    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 wasgood 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