Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  Dacre shakes his head. “He’s false,” he says simply. “And he’s weak. He is lying to you. He was not coming to meet with you, he was coming to delay you, and to keep you here, right on the borders, in a house that cannot be defended, while the duke gets his army on the road. They would have made you wait here, writing and talking to the French ambassador, while they marched through the borders and snatched you, and even your husband. Your Grace, they would have imprisoned you, perhaps in a nunnery, perhaps in a tower at Glamis, miles away where we could never have reached you. And you, my lord, alas, you would have been hanged like a common criminal on Coldstream priory gates.”

  I can feel Archibald stiffen in the saddle. “Good that we left then,” he says. “I saved her from Linlithgow, I took her to Berwick and Coldstream, and now I have saved her from capture here.”

  “You have indeed,” Dacre says, like a man praising a child. “All of England will know what you have done for us.”

  “At risk,” Archibald insists. “At enormous risk, and no payment.”

  “You will be rewarded,” Dacre says smoothly.

  Archibald ducks his head. “Everyone else is. How much does the prioress get?”

  His lordship gives a little chuckle, but does not answer. “And here, we have to part,” he says firmly. “I have no safe conduct for you, my lord. I cannot take you into England or admit you to my castle at Morpeth. It was all done in such a rush that you, your noble brother, and the lords Hume, were not listed. I can take Her Grace, but that is all.”

  “But Archibald has to come with me,” I say, hardly understanding what Lord Dacre is saying. One moment all of England is in Archibald’s debt. The next moment he cannot enter the country. “He is my husband. A safe conduct for me must mean a safe conduct for him.”

  Dacre shouts to his troop, who halt as he pulls up his horse at the crossroads. “We have to get you to my castle as soon as we can,” he says. “You should be in confinement within the week. But you, my lord, must grant me your patience. I will send to London for your safe conduct and that of your brother, and then you can join us at Morpeth. It’s just a little delay.”

  “I would rather come with you now,” Archibald says. He glances up the road that leads back to Scotland and I guess that he is imagining an army of forty thousand around the next bend.

  “And so you shall,” Dacre assures him. “But you would not want me to delay in getting Her Grace to safety? When you can so easily find a refuge, keep out of sight, live off your wits, till I send for you to escort Her Grace your wife to London. I know that the king is eager to greet you, his new brother-in-law. What a hero you will be if you get yourself out of Scotland, on your own skills, not riding on a pillion saddle with your wife.”

  “Of course,” Archibald stammers. “But I thought that I would come with you to Morpeth.”

  “No safe conduct,” Lord Dacre repeats regretfully. “Will you step down from the saddle, my lord? I have fresh horses for you and your brother, and a purse of gold in the saddlebag that I don’t want any groom to get his hands on.”

  Archibald pulls up our horse, and boyishly swings his leg over its neck, jumping down to the ground. He turns and takes my hands where I sit, sideways on the horse, without a rider before me, my face in a grimace of pain.

  “Is it your wish?” he asks me urgently. “Shall I leave you here now, in Lord Dacre’s safekeeping, and come to you again at Morpeth Castle when I have my own safe conduct?”

  I turn to Lord Dacre. “Can’t he come with us?” I ask.

  “Alas, no,” he says.

  So he leaves me. I have to be glad that he will find safety. Everyone knows where to find him if he is with me. I cannot bear to endanger him. But he, his brother George, and Alexander Hume ride off at high speed on fresh horses, and I see them, bent over the horses’ necks, racing each other, as if they were boys with nothing to worry about. I have a moment when I think that he is free now, a young man with everything to play for and danger to avoid, and he is free of me. He rides like a young man born to be in the saddle. He is a border lord. He was born to danger and chance and midnight raids. He is out of sight in a moment and I think perhaps I am out of mind before then.

  I turn a cold, closed face towards Lord Dacre, who was supposed to be my savior but who has brought me nothing but heartache. “I am having birth pains,” I tell him. “I’m going to have the baby. You have to find me somewhere to give birth.”

  Even then there is no easy road to a comfortable refuge. We ride all day, and I cling to a stranger in the saddle before me, but nothing can ease the jolting of the horse as it goes on and onward. The country becomes steeper, the valleys are rich and green and cold under the shade of the thick forests, and I look around us and fear that there are Scots lords waiting for us in an ambush. The road winds through the trees and comes out of the woods into high moorland; as far as the eye can see there is nothing but an unending pelt of weeds and heather and shrubs and reeds. The track is hard to detect: it is almost nothing through the heather and the grasses. It twists and turns up and up and up, and then when we are at the peak there is nothing to see but more hills and more sky and the track looping its way down to the river valley again. The rivers are broad, winding through lush floodplains. If there were men and women to farm these valley floors they would be fertile; but I see no one. Anyone who lives in these bare open lands has learned the trick of lying low like a leveret when someone passes by. Or else they scuttle away into the occasional stone towers that glower over the landscape. Nobody will greet anyone on the road. There are no travelers, and there is no road. I think that I have done little good for my kingdom since I have not made the peace run here. There is a warm sun; but I feel cold in my very belly.

  On we go, and I beckon Lord Dacre to ride alongside me.

  “How far?” I say through my teeth.

  “Not long now.”

  “An hour?”

  “Maybe more.”

  I take a breath. It might be half a day more. I have learned on this long ride that his lordship feels no obligation to accuracy.

  “I tell you the truth, I cannot do it.”

  “I know you are tired . . .”

  “You know nothing. I am telling you. I cannot go on.”

  “Your Grace, my house is at your command, it is comfortable and—”

  “Do I have to write you a letter in code? I am going to have my baby. I cannot wait. I have to get into a house. My time has come.”

  Of course, he reminds me that I am not due till next month, and I tell him that a woman knows, and that a woman with two strong sons and several losses certainly knows, and we pull up the horses and squabble away, standing on the road, till a cold east wind whips up some rain, and I say: “Am I to have this baby in a ditch?” Only then does he give up the idea of Morpeth and says that we will turn aside off the road and go to his little castle of Harbottle.

  “Is it near?” I demand.

  “Quite near,” he says, and from that I know that I have hours of pain ahead of me.

  I rest my head on the groom’s broad back and I feel the horse go down into the valleys and up into the hills, and from time to time I look to the left and right and I see the trees and then the high lands. I see a buzzard circling over a wood. I see a fox slink into the bracken at the side of the track and his red back makes me think of Ard and I wonder where he is right now. Then we pass through a little village that is nothing more than a series of tumbledown shacks with children playing in the dust who run inside when they see us, and Lord Dacre says: “Here we are.”

  The track to the castle rises steeply from the village, and as we climb upwards the drawbridge bangs down, and the portcullis rattles up. The horse bows its head and climbs and climbs. The castle is on a little cliff above the village and around me are other empty peaks. We go through a stone gateway and we are inside the curtain wall, and then the groom jumps down from the horse and I let his lordship lift me down and I cling to him as my legs are w