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In the years to come, Margaret will be forever grateful that Peter knew without a word.
She turns, her control spun-sugar, as fragile as the gossamer strands of a spider-web. If she speaks, she is lost; if she speaks, she will break and founder, drowning beneath the waves of her grief. It beats inside her breast, frightening in its strength, and she struggles to breathe.
He takes a step towards her, and then another. She sees the moment the hope leaves his eyes, as he blinks, stunned. She has murdered that hope; he has read the truth in her face, and she shakes her head in confirmation, stricken mute.
Margaret was the happiest of children, her merry laugh ready and free. Her delayed marriage may have dimmed her joy somewhat, but she has been living these past years in impatient anticipation of her happiness. She has been discontent, but never disconsolate. How could she be, when she had Elizabeth’s promise? Only to wait, and she would be Peter’s wife, his treasure, nevermore parted.
Now she wishes she could go back to those days, when the world was poised on the brink of the dawn.
Peter holds her in his arms; she clings to him tightly, as if she can keep their dream from slipping away by the sheer tenacity of her grasp.
❧
Even as she leads Peter into her bedroom, Margaret knows in the depths of her bones that this is their last night. He will have to return to Brussels; if he remains in England, she will be unable to stay away. He is her lodestone, her guiding star, the other half of her bruised and broken heart. Scandal or no scandal, if he was within reach she would fly to him.
She touches his cheek, her fingers trembling, clumsy. “Peter,” she says, low.
He closes his eyes, turning his face into her touch.
(Later, she will look back and realise how hard he was working that night to be strong for her. He was as devastated and bereft as she, and yet he never broke. He was her rock. Even decades later, she loves him for that final gift, with a fierce tenderness that aches within her.)
“Forget everything,” Peter says, his eyes still closed, his voice a rasp. “Forget everything else, and be here with me, tonight.”
“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be.”
Well. Westminster Abbey, resplendent in white satin, veil, and diamond tiara, with Peter at her side. Margaret remembers Elizabeth and Philip’s wedding day, the radiant glow on her sister’s face that outshone all her bridal nerves. She longs for the like. To stand in front of God and man, declaring her vows to the man she loves – isn’t that what every woman wants? Why should she be denied it, simply because her sister is a Queen?
Yet to dwell on that dream now is to feed the pain in her breast, and they have such little time left.
“My Margaret,” Peter says, the words a caress, and she kisses him, suddenly desperate.
The country will pity her. They are on her side, she knows they are, whatever Elizabeth and her Church and her Cabinet and her Parliament say. Still, they will assume, just as Elizabeth and the others do, that Margaret will love again. To them it will be a temporary tragedy, a youthful first love blighted by chance and the grim demands of duty.
To Margaret it is everything.
She kisses Peter with all the frustrated love that has bubbled pent-up inside her during these long years of separation, denied its natural outlet and now released at last. He is hers, hers, hers, and his mouth fits against her own like a key in a lock, like two halves of a whole, like the answer to the only question in the world worth asking.
They will never stand in Westminster Abbey together, hand in hand before God. But here in the hush of the night before the end, Margaret will make her vows with all the voiceless eloquence of her body and her heart.
Peter’s calm shatters under the passion of her kisses, and he stoops to swing her up into his arms, carrying her bodily across the room and throwing her on the bed. On any other day she would laugh, stretching under the heavy weight of his gaze as it dragged languidly down her body, demanding he join her with an ebullient peremptoriness passed down to her through the generations from some regal ancestor.
But it is not any other day, and she says his name, simple and spare.
Then he is with her on the bed, and Margaret flings her leg over him. She will lay her claim here in the pale sun of the afternoon, here in the bittersweet sin of her thwarted marriage bed. If this is to be the last time Margaret will thrill at the touch of the man she loves, she will seize every illicit moment with all the power she possesses, and damn anyone who would censure her. Let Elizabeth freeze in the icy correctness of her gilded cage, forsworn and heartless. Here on this last afternoon, Margaret will live.
Peter is pressing his mouth to the curve of her shoulder, his lips tickling her skin. Margaret blinks back the sudden prickling of tears, and sets out to chase one last joy.
❧
In a kinder world, perhaps their love would have led to a surge of support from the British public, triggering a change of heart from the powers that so obstinately denied them.
In a later world, perhaps their love would have met only approval.
In the world Margaret lives in, she watches the man she loves forswear their relationship, his words stilted and painful, and feels the shard of every syllable lodge in her heart.
“We have resolved to make the ultimate sacrifice,” Peter says, and she closes her eyes.
There is no Peter to hold her now, to be her rock, to protect her and make her feel safe. Margaret can no longer be vulnerable, because she no longer has his strength to buttress her own. If she gives way to tears, she doesn’t know how she would stop.
“Be happy,” Peter whispered into her hair, when he thought she was asleep. “Try, my love. Be happy.”
Perhaps someday Margaret will be able to obey, will be able to find a joy as free and unfettered as the one she lived in his arms. When she had Peter, all things seemed possible, all futures bright. Her long waiting would be rewarded, and she would stand triumphant at his side, resplendent for all to see in the blaze of true love. Perhaps dreams such as those can be reborn with another – but she cannot imagine it, not on this day, not on the morning after her last night with the man she loves.
She turns her face to the sun, into the pallid light of all her empty tomorrows.
❧