Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  And then I bow my head lower and whisper to Saint Margaret who was swallowed by a dragon and must have known, as I know, the secret leap of joy of being rescued from the worst thing that can happen. Margaret came out of the dragon’s belly unscathed, and I came through labor and childbirth with a son and heir—the only Tudor son and heir. I would never wish ill to Katherine, nor to Harry or Mary—indeed, I truly pity her loss—but my son, Arthur, is heir to Scotland and England and will be so, until she has a boy. Her son, when he comes, will displace mine. Who could blame me for a little secret joy that I have a son and she does not?

  The ambassador to England writes to say that although Katherine lost one child, a girl, she was—praise God—carrying twins and she still has a baby.

  “That’s unusual,” my husband remarks to me as he reads the letter aloud by the fireside in my bedroom after all my ladies have been sent away. “She’s lucky.”

  I feel a rush of understandable irritation at the thought of Katherine keeping a boy in her belly when I have been on my knees praying for her to find comfort in her loss. How ridiculous that she should write me such a tragic letter when she was still carrying a child. What a fuss she makes over nothing!

  “What d’you mean, unusual?” I ask stiffly, irritated that my husband takes such an interest in the work of physicians, reading their horrid books himself and looking at disgusting drawings of diseased hearts and swollen entrails.

  “It’s surprising that she did not lose both children when she lost one,” he says, rereading the letter. “God bless her, I hope it is the case; but it is very unusual to lose one twin and keep the other. I wonder how she knows. It’s a great pity that she cannot be examined by a physician. It may be only that her courses have not returned, but that she is not with child.”

  I clap my hands over my ears. “You cannot speak of the Queen of England’s courses!” I protest.

  He laughs at me, pulling my hands away. “I know you think that, but she is a woman like any other.”

  “I would never admit a physician, even if I was dying in childbirth!” I swear. “How should a man come near a queen at such a time? My own grandmother specifically wrote that the queen shall go into confinement and be served only by women, in darkness in one shuttered and locked room. She cannot even see the priest who comes to give her the Mass—he has to pass the Host through a screen.”

  “But what if a woman in confinement needs a physician’s knowledge?” my husband counters. “What if something goes wrong? Didn’t your grandmother nearly die in childbirth herself? Wouldn’t it have been better for her if she had a physician to advise her?”

  “How should a man know anything about such things?”

  “Oh, Margaret, don’t be a fool! These are not mysteries. The cow is in calf, the pig is in farrow. Do you think a queen births a child unlike any other female beast?”

  I give a little scream. “I won’t hear this. It is heresy. Or treason. Or both.”

  He pulls my hands down from my appalled face, and kisses each palm gently. “You need not hear any of it,” he says. “I’m not like the soothsayers at the mercat cross. I can know something without shouting about it.”

  “At any rate, she must be the most lucky woman in the world,” I say resentfully. “To have everyone’s sympathy for losing a daughter and then carry a twin son.”

  “Perhaps she is,” he concedes. “I certainly hope so.” He turns away from me and strips off his shirt. The cilice at his waist makes a little chinking noise.

  “Oh, take that horrid thing off,” I say.

  He looks at me. “As you wish,” he says. “Anything to please the second luckiest woman in the world—if she can be pleased being, as she is, forever in second place, a second-rate queen, in a second-rate kingdom, waiting for her newborn boy to be forced into second place.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” I protest.

  He takes me in his arms and does not trouble himself to answer.

  LINLITHGOW PALACE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1510

  In May, when we are at our lakeside palace, I get a short handwritten letter from Katherine saying that, after all, there does not seem to be another baby. She writes in a tiny crabbed hand, as if she wishes she were not writing at all.

  I have begged my father not to reproach me. I did nothing that was careless or wrong. They told me that I had lost a baby but kept her twin, and I did not know that there was nothing there until my belly went down again as if from a bloat, and my courses started. How should I know? Nobody told me. How should I know?

  She says that her husband has been kindness itself, but that she cannot stop herself crying all the time. I push the letter away and I cannot bring myself to reply for irritation at them both. The idea of Harry being kind to his wife—my little brother who never had a thought in his head but for himself!—and the idea of Katherine of Arrogant humbling herself to apologize for something that she could not help sends me into a little fury. The idea of her unable to stop crying fills me with disdain. How would I be if I could not stop crying when I lost a child? I would never have made another. Why should Katherine revel in grief and publish it to the world? Should she not show queenly courage, as I did?

  I have to concede, also, that my husband may have been right about her seeing a physician. How could people have told her that she was with child when she had just miscarried a baby? How could the wise women be so foolish? How could she have been so stupid as to listen?

  I suppose it is just everyone trying to please Harry as usual. People cannot bear to tell him bad news, as he has no tolerance for anything that denies his own will. Just like my lady grandmother, he has an idea of how things should be, and he will not listen when someone says that the world is not like that. He has always been completely spoiled. I suppose that when they told him Katherine had lost a baby girl, he looked at them as if such a disappointment was simply impossible, and then they all felt they must assure him that she was still pregnant, probably with a boy. Now that lie has been revealed and Katherine will feel worse than ever. But who is to blame?

  I go to the royal nursery and see my own baby, the heir of Scotland and England, plump and strong, in the arms of his rocker. “He is well?” I ask. They smile and tell me he is very well, eating well and growing daily.

  I go back to my rooms and write to Katherine:

  Praise God, my son is strong and very healthy. We are blessed indeed to have him. I am so sorry to hear of your mistake. I pray for you in your sorrow and your embarrassment.

  “Don’t write that,” my husband says, looking over my shoulder and rudely reading my private letter.

  I scatter it with sand to dry the ink, and I wave it in the air so he cannot read my sympathetic words. “It’s just a sisterly letter,” I say.

  “Don’t send it. She has enough trouble without you adding your sympathy to her burdens.”

  “Sympathy is hardly a burden.”

  “It’s one of the worst.”

  “Anyway, what is a woman like her troubled with?” I demand. “She has everything that she ever dreamed of but a child, and surely one will come.”

  I see him look away as if he has a secret. “James! Tell me! What have you heard?”

  He pulls forward a stool and sits on it, smiling up at me. “You must not rejoice in the misfortune of others,” he instructs me.

  I cannot hide my smile. “You know that I would not be so unkind. Is it Katherine’s misfortune?”

  “You will rewrite the letter.”

  “I will. If you will tell me what you know.”

  “Well, for all his gentle upbringing, your sainted brother Harry is no better than a mere sinner like me,” he says. “For all that you reproach me for the bairns and send them away from their little nursery, your brother Harry is no better a husband than I; he is no better than the rest of us. While his wife was in confinement he was caught in bed with one of her ladies-in-waiting.”

  “Oh! No! Which one? Who?” I gasp. “Actually in bed with her?�