Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  “We can’t stay here long,” Angus says. “It’s too small, there’s no comfort for you, and it can’t withstand a siege.”

  “Surely it could hold out forever!”

  He shakes his head. “Not if Albany brings up cannon. We know he has Mons. If we set a siege we can’t get out again, and he could wait us out. This is a good castle for short battles, for defense and attack. But we can’t wait for your brother. Are you sure he will come?”

  “He will not forget me,” I say awkwardly. “My sisters will tell him . . .”

  “Will he send Lord Dacre?”

  “I promise you, Harry loves me. His wife will tell him; the Dowager Queen of France will speak for me. He will not forget a Tudor princess. He will act now I have escaped. He will come for me, or I will go to him.”

  “I certainly hope so,” Archibald says unpleasantly. “For if he does not rescue you, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Or where we will go next.”

  “Next?” I ask. “But I need to rest, Archibald. I need to be somewhere safe to have my child.” The excitement of the escape has worn off and I am anxious about my boys, left in Albany’s keeping in Stirling. Someone will tell my son that his mother has run away and left him and his brother to their enemies.

  “You can rest here,” he says begrudgingly. “We will tell Lord Dacre that you have escaped, as he demanded. We are near to the border. He must come for you.”

  We ride down a narrow track and cross a massive ditch, deep enough to lose a regiment of cavalry. They would go down and never ride up again. There is an open field and then the castle moat crossed by a wooden bridge to the gatehouse.

  The guards recognize my husband, and I have a flush of pride that the drawbridge falls down and the portcullis rattles up without a word being spoken. Ard rides into his own, like the lord that he is.

  Inside the curtain walls it is a jumble like a poor village. The farmers and the peasants and serfs who live outside the castle have learned, in the way that these people always learn, that Archibald has ridden against the governor in the service of his wife, the queen regent. They may not understand what this means but they know that trouble is coming their way. Everyone who lives within a score of miles in any direction has piled inside the castle walls, and they have brought their livestock too. I see what Archibald means, that such a great castle cannot withstand a siege. The people will eat up everything in days.

  “They shouldn’t be here,” I say to Ard, quietly against his back. “You’ll have to send them away.”

  “These are my people,” he says grandly. “Of course they come to me when we are in danger. My danger is their danger. They want to share it.”

  Ard jumps off the horse and turns to lift me down. I am cramped from sitting behind him for so long, and weary and hungry.

  “The best rooms are not very comfortable,” he warns me. “But your ladies shall take you up.”

  I cannot think why he would bring me somewhere that is neither defensible nor comfortable, but I go up to my rooms without a word of complaint. He is right. Inside the cold walls it is damp and bleak. The fire lit in my bedchamber steadily emits smoke which finds its way out, upwards and through the arrow-slit windows, and when I go to look out towards the sea I shiver in the cold mist that slides in over the sill. Though I try to be glad that there will be no attacking my tower from the land, I cannot help but long for the luxury that I left behind in Linlithgow.

  “Fetch a warming pan, I’ll go to bed,” I decide. But then there is a long discussion about where the warming pan might be, and whether a brick would do as well, and that the sheets, which are rough and coarse, are not really damp. I am so tired that I lie on the bed and wrap myself in my traveling cloak while they puzzle how to make the room comfortable and what they have that is fit for me to eat.

  All my royal furniture and linen is left behind in Linlithgow. It won’t get here for days. I don’t have more than one change of clothes. I understand that we could not travel with my wagons with all my treasures, but this is not good enough. I cannot be neglected. I doze for a little while but I wake when Ard comes quietly to my bedside.

  “What now?”

  He bites his lip, he looks intensely anxious. “A message from Albany. He knows you’re here. We’ll have to go to the Humes’ castle, Blackadder. It’s properly garrisoned and guarded, and they have promised to defend you. They’ve got nothing left to lose—they’re declared as traitors already. And they are well paid.”

  “Paid?” I demand. “Not by me!”

  “Dacre,” he says shortly. “He pays all the border lords.”

  “But what for?” It is Dacre who has advised me into this danger. I have trusted him with everything.

  “He pays the lords to keep the borders in continual uproar,” Archibald says, “so that he can invade and claim to be keeping the peace. So that he can raid like a reiver himself, stir up trouble and steal cattle. So that he can have some lords obliged to England for money or support, and so that your brother can argue in the courts of Europe that the Scots are ungovernable. So we all look like lawless fools.”

  “He is my brother’s chief advisor!” I protest. “He serves me. He is loyal to me, I know this. He advises me, he cares for my safety.”

  “Doesn’t stop him being an enemy to the Scots,” Archibald says stonily. “Anyway, he has paid the Humes enough to keep them on your side. We can go there.”

  “What about my goods and my gowns and my jewels? My wagons are all coming here?”

  “They can be safely stored here till you send for them.”

  “Can’t we stay here and parley with Albany?” I ask weakly.

  “He’ll have my head,” Ard says grimly. “I broke my parole for you, remember.”

  I shudder. “We’ll go at once.”

  We leave at first light and I climb wearily onto the horse behind him. The touch of his jacket against my cheek comforts me like an embrace. The scent of him, the glimpse of his profile when he looks back and smiles at me and says, “Are you all right?”—all these things make me feel treasured and protected by him.

  I push disloyal thoughts to the back of my mind. I will not think that we are going to William Hume because Ard does not know what else to do, and, even worse, that if Dacre has been paying the border lords to rebel, was he paying my husband, too? Was he paying the Douglases before I married Ard? Did I marry Dacre’s spy?

  There is no road, there is no lane. There is a track wide enough for a single man riding alone from village to village; but little more than that, and some of the way we ride across fields, the crop standing in stooks. We know the direction only by keeping the sea cliffs on our left and our faces to the south. The skies arch above us, it is enormous countryside, and when I look up I can see the fields rolling away to the distant horizon, to the distant hills. Archibald knows the land for miles all around his castle and after that we take up a lad from every village we pass to guide us to the next.

  I go into a daze of tiredness and pain, and I fall asleep against my husband’s back, clinging to him and moaning a little at a new ominous pain in my hip, like something grinding into the very bone.

  I wake to see a horseman coming towards us, his mount muddied to the shoulders and sweat creaming his withers and neck. “Who is it?” I demand fearfully.

  “One of mine,” Archibald reassures me, and jumps down from the saddle and goes to talk with him.

  When he comes back to me his young face is grim. “We can’t stay at Blackadder Castle,” he says flatly. “Albany has raised a troop and is coming down the road from Edinburgh for you. We’re going to have to head for the border.” He pauses. “Dacre was right, we should have gone to England straight away. Albany has sworn he will recapture you and he is mustering an army.”

  “An army?” I say, and my voice trembles. “He is leading an army after me?”

  “Forty thousand men,” Archibald says tightly. “We can do nothing against such a force. Blackadder wouldn’t hold,