Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  Neither Harry nor I are allowed to stay to the end of the feast, the escorting of the princess to bed, and the prayers over the wedding bed. I think it is very wrong and bad mannered to treat us like children. My grandmother sends us to our rooms and though I glance over to my mother, expecting her to say that Harry must go but I can stay up longer, she is blandly looking aside. Always, it is my grandmother’s word that is law: she is the hanging judge, my mother only grants the occasional rare royal pardon. So we make our bows and curtseys to the king and to my mother and to my lady grandmother, and to darling Arthur and Katherine of Arrogant, and then we have to go, dawdling as slowly as we dare, from the bright rooms where the white wax candles are burning down as if they cost no more than tallow, and the musicians are playing as if they are going to go on all night.

  “I am going to have a wedding just like this,” Harry says as we go up the stairs.

  “Not for years yet,” I say to irritate him. “But I shall be married very soon.”

  When I get to my room I kneel at my prie-dieu and, though I had intended to pray for Arthur’s long life and happiness, and remind God of His special debt to the Tudors, I find I can only pray that the Scottish ambassadors tell the king to send for me at once, for I want a marriage feast as grand as this one, and a wardrobe of clothes as good as Katherine of Arrogant’s, and shoes—I will have hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes, I swear it, and every one of them will have embroidered toes and gold laces.

  RICHMOND PALACE, ENGLAND, JANUARY 1502

  My prayer is answered, for God always listens to the prayers of the Tudors, and the King of Scotland orders his ambassadors to negotiate with my father’s advisors. They agree a price for my dowry, for my servants, for my allowance, for the lands that will become my own in Scotland, and all through the Christmas feast the letters come and go between Scotland Yard and Richmond Palace until my lady grandmother comes to me and says: “Princess Margaret, I am pleased to say that it is the will of God that you are to be married.”

  I rise up from my dutiful curtsey and look as maidenly and surprised as I can. But since I had been told this very morning that my lady grandmother and mother would see me before dinner, and that I was to wear my best gown as befits a great occasion, I am not too amazed. Really, they are quite ridiculous.

  “I am?” I say sweetly.

  “Yes,” my mother says. She entered the room ahead of my grandmother but somehow managed to be second with the announcement. “You are to marry King James of Scotland.”

  “Is it my father’s wish?” I say, as my lady governess has taught me.

  “It is,” my lady grandmother speaks out of turn. “My son, the king, has made an agreement. There is to be a lasting peace between ourselves and Scotland; your marriage will seal it. But I have requested that you stay with us, here in England, until you are a woman grown.”

  “What?” I am absolutely horrified that my grandmother is going to spoil everything, as she always does. “But when will I go? I have to go now!”

  “When you are fourteen years old,” my lady grandmother rules, and when my mother seems about to say something, she raises her hand and goes on: “I know—no one knows better than I—that an early marriage is very dangerous for a young woman. And the Scots king is not . . . He cannot be trusted not to . . . We felt that the King of Scots might . . .”

  For once, she seems to be lost for words. This has never happened before in the history of England that runs from Arthur of the Britons to my lady grandmother in a completely unbroken line. My lady grandmother has never failed to finish a sentence; no one has ever interrupted her.

  “But when am I to marry? And where?” I ask, thinking of Saint Paul’s Cathedral carpeted with red, and thousands of people crowding to see me, and a crown on my head and a cloth-of-gold train from my shoulders, and gold shoes and jewels, and jousts in my honor, and a masque, and the pretend sailing ship with peach sails and everyone admiring me.

  “This very month!” my mother says triumphantly. “The king will send his representative and you will be betrothed by proxy.”

  “A proxy? Not the king himself? Not in Saint Paul’s?” I ask. This sounds as if it is hardly worth doing at all. Not to leave for two years? That’s a lifetime to me now. Not in Saint Paul’s Cathedral like Katherine of Arrogant? Why would she get a better wedding than me? No king? Just some old lord?

  “In the chapel here,” my mother says, as if the whole point of marriage is not about crowds of thousands and fountains running with wine and everyone watching you.

  “But there will be another grand service at Edinburgh when you get there,” my lady grandmother reassures me. “When you are fourteen.” She turns to my mother and remarks: “And they will carry all the expense.”

  “But I don’t want to wait, I don’t need to wait!”

  She smiles but shakes her head. “We have decided,” she says. She means that she has decided, and there is no point in anyone else having a different opinion.

  “But you’ll be called Queen of Scotland.” My mother knows exactly how to console me for my disappointment. “You’ll be called Queen of Scotland this year, as soon as you are betrothed, and then you will take precedence over every lady at court except me.”

  I steal a look at my lady grandmother’s flinty face. I will go before her; she won’t like that. Just as I expected, her lips are moving silently. She will be praying that I do not become overly grand, that I do not suffer from the sin of pride. She will be thinking of ways to keep me in a state of grace as a miserable sinner and a granddaughter sworn in obedience to her. She will be thinking how she can be sure that I am a humble handmaiden serving my family, and not an upstart princess—no! a queen!—filled with self-importance. But I am absolutely determined to be a queen full of self-importance and I am going to have the most beautiful clothes and shoes like Katherine of Arrogant.

  “Oh, I don’t care about that, all I care about is being called to the state of matrimony by God, and serving the interests of my family,” I say cleverly, and my lady grandmother smiles, truly pleased with me for the first time this afternoon.

  I know someone else who will care about me walking before everyone, the equal of my mother. I know who will care so much that it will all but kill him. My brother Harry, a little peacock of vanity, a little mountebank of false pride, is going to be sick as a sinner with the Sweat when I tell him. I go to find him at the stables, coming in from a lesson of riding at the quintain. He is allowed to ride at the target with a padded lance, and the target is padded too. Everyone wants Harry to be fearless and skilled, but nobody dares to teach him properly. He’s always begging for someone to ride against, but nobody can bear to let him take any risks. He is a Tudor prince, one of only two. We Tudors are unlucky with boys, my mother’s side of the family has too many. My father was an only child and had only three sons, and lost one of them. Neither he nor my grandmother can bear to let Harry experience any danger. Even worse than that, my lady mother cannot say no to him. So he is a completely spoiled second son. Nobody would treat him like this if he were going to be king one day; they are making a tyrant. But it doesn’t matter because he’s going into the Church and will probably be pope. I swear he’ll be a really ridiculous pope.

  “What do you want?” he asks disagreeably, leading his horse into the huge yard. I know at once that his lesson has gone badly. Usually he is sunny and smiling; usually he rides extraordinarily well. He is good at all sports, and fiercely clever in the schoolroom too. He is princely in every way, which will make my news so particularly galling to him.

  “Did you fall off?”

  “Of course not. Stupid horse cast a shoe; she’s got to be shod. I hardly rode at all. It was a complete waste of time. The groom should be turned away. What are you doing here?”

  “Oh, I just came to tell you that I am to be betrothed.”

  “Finally agreed, did they?” He throws his reins to a groom and slaps his hands together to warm his fingers. “It�