Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  Then we have to wait. I find I keep hoping for a last-minute change of plans. I am a symbol of the perpetual peace; I cannot make myself understand that the peace is broken. They bring me news almost daily. James takes Norham Castle, and then Wark, Etal Castle and others. These are no petty victories; these are great fortresses, engraved on the hearts of the border men, and we are moving the border, pushing it farther and farther south, towards Newcastle. We are taking English castles, we are taking English land. The area that they call the “debatable lands” will be debated no more; it will become Scotland. This is becoming a great expedition: no mere raid, this is a victorious invasion.

  Each time the messenger draws close to the castle on the loch, the king’s standard rippling before him, a guard thundering behind him, we become more confident. As we foresaw, Thomas Howard brings all the forces that he can muster, but Thomas Howard is underprovisioned and fearful. He has no reserves, he has no local support. His own English border lords rob his wagon train and steal his horses. His allies are uncertain, and begrudge sending servants to fight at the border when they have already paid fees for a war in France. Harry has taken the flower of his nobility to France to make war for his father-in-law, to oblige his wife. He has left England woefully unprotected. He is a fool. We can win this war against an absent king and halfhearted defenders.

  Then James sends a short message to say that they will come to open battle. He will take possession of Branxton Hill. He has outmaneuvered Howard who should, if he had any sense, withdraw to Newcastle. Howard’s soldiers are hungry, thirsty, stealing their own rations, and the borderers—wild men, English and Scots—set upon stragglers, kill them, and strip them naked. James’s army, well fed and well armed, is established on the high ground of Flodden Edge. The English will have to fight uphill against Scots gunners.

  I wait for news. A battle must have been joined. Thomas Howard dare not go back to London to face Katherine without a battle to report. If he returns defeated, then the Howard family will be ruined. He has everything to lose. His reputation and the friendship of his king hang in the balance; I know how doggedly, how bitterly he will pursue his only course. But James need not fight, James could withdraw. He and his army could melt away back across our border, and boast of another successful raid on England that frightened them to death in the Northern counties and showed Harry that he cannot treat us with contempt.

  I am sure that is what James will do—it is how the Scots have always tormented the English—but then a message comes and tells us that battle has been joined. Half a day later someone comes from Edinburgh with news that we have won the day, and the Scots are marching south. They may march as far as London! What is to stop them if they have defeated the English army? Then another report comes from a runaway soldier that there was a terrible battle, but when he fled it was going against us.

  It pours with rain, a wall of water that holds us in the castle as if the sky has decided that no news shall come through. Every morning I wake to the patter of raindrops against the window and hear the gurgle of rainwater in the cisterns and the rush from the stone-carved gargoyle faces splashing down their streams into the stone courtyard. I think of my husband outside in the wind and the storm; I think of his archers with wet bowstrings, his gunners with damp powder. I swear that no one is to believe anything, they are not even to speak, until we hear from James himself. I have to be, as he called on me to be, a true queen, a Queen of Scots, a gallant heart and a proud one. But then they tell me that a messenger has come from the lords’ council in Edinburgh, with definite news, and he is waiting in my presence chamber.

  I find my heart is thudding fast and I feel sick, as if I am with child again. I put my hand to my throat and feel my pulse race. Everyone who has any business to be in my rooms and anyone who has any excuse to attend has crowded into the great chamber. I walk slowly from the chapel, where I was praying for James to come home, defeated or victorious—I find I don’t care as long as he comes home. The guards throw open the doors and the babble of speculation goes instantly silent as I walk through the massed crowd of strange faces and mount the steps to my throne, turn and stand before them, looking calmly around me. I think, irrelevantly, God help me, I am only twenty-three years old. Someone else should be here listening to this, someone who knows what to do. Katherine would know how to stand, how to listen, how to respond. I feel as if I am like my little sister Mary—too young to be part of important times.

  The messenger is standing before me in James’s livery, his writ from the lords’ council in his hand. “What news?” I say, and I try to speak steadily. “Good news, I hope?”

  The man is filthy from his ride from Edinburgh, muddy and wet from fording rivers, soaked from his head to his dirty boots. They will have told him to let nothing delay him and to report only to me. He kneels and I realize at once from the anguish in his face that there is no point in my saying “Good news, I hope?” in my stupid little-girl voice. It is not good news and I know it.

  “Speak,” I say quietly.

  “Defeated,” he chokes, as if he is ready to take my place and weep.

  “The king?”

  “Dead.”

  I sway but the carver of my household holds me upright, as if I have to hear this news on my feet, though my husband is facedown in the mud.

  “You’re sure?” I say, thinking of my little son, nearly a year and a half old, and now a fatherless boy; thinking of the baby that I may be carrying. “You’re certain? The Privy Council have confirmed it—there is no doubt?”

  “I was there,” he says. “I saw it.”

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “It will be a miracle if anyone survived,” he says bleakly. “We went down among them in a charge, and they had billhooks to our pikes and they sheared heads off like they were hedge trimming. Our gunners didn’t have the range, so though the English were bombarded the cannon fired over their heads, they were still in their ranks, unbroken and unhurt. We thought they would all be smashed up but they were fresh. The king led a mighty charge of horse and foot, and the clansmen were all behind him. Nobody failed him—I can’t say a word against any house—they were all there; but the ground gave way under our feet. It looked sound when we viewed it from the top of the hill; but it was treacherous, a green, weedy marsh. We got bogged down and sank, and couldn’t get up, and they let us struggle towards them. They stood in their ranks as we came on, going slower and slower, and then they ripped off heads and ripped out bellies and pulled down horses.”

  My ladies gather around me murmuring horrified questions, whispering names. They will have lost sons and husbands, and fathers and brothers.

  “How many lost?” I ask.

  “Dead,” he insists. “They’re dead. About ten thousand.”

  Ten thousand men! I feel myself reel again. “Ten thousand?” I repeat. “It’s not possible. The whole army was thirty thousand. They cannot have killed a third of the Scots army.”

  “Yes they can. Because they killed those who surrendered,” he says bitterly. “They killed the dying. They killed the wounded where they lay on the field of battle. They chased after those who had thrown down their weapons and had turned for home. They declared they would take no prisoners and they did not. It was brutal and evil and long-drawn-out. I have never seen the like of it. You would think yourself somewhere barbaric, like Spain. You would think yourself on a crusade among pagans. It was conquistador killing. There were men screaming for their lives and crying out as the billhooks went in their faces all the long afternoon, all the long night. There were wounded men only silenced when someone cut their throat.”

  “The king?” I whisper. James cannot have died on a hedging tool. Not James, not with his love of chivalry and the honorable ritual of the joust. He cannot have died bogged down in his beautiful armor with some English peasant’s axe in his face.

  “He fought his way through to Thomas Howard himself—it was nearly a single combat, just as he had challenged