Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  The first is from my sister Mary. She writes that she was ill in spring but that she was well enough, thank God, to go with the king and queen to France. She bubbles with delight, her letter filled with misspellings and blots of excitable ink. Through the scrawl I make out that the visit was to sign a great treaty to confirm the peace between England and France, and that they made a masque every day. Harry took a hundred tents, a thousand tents, to the field outside Calais and all the nobility of England took their households and their horses and their hawks and their servants and built their own summer palaces out of canvas and wood and showed off their wealth and their joy. Harry summoned a city for a summer’s day and at the center of it a fountain flowing with wine with silver cups for anyone to drink.

  Mary has thirty-three gowns, she lists her shoes, she had a cloth-of-gold canopy held over her head when she walked out in the brilliant sunshine. She rode the most beautiful horses, everyone cheered her as she went by.

  I so wish you had come! You would have loved it so!

  I daresay that I would. It is a long long time since anyone cheered me, or the Scots had anything to cheer about. I open a small package from Katherine.

  My dear Sister,

  The king, my husband, was much surprised to learn from His Grace King Francis of France that you have been writing to the Duc of Albany and urging his return to Scotland. I was ashamed to hear also that the duc has spoken to the Holy Father and urged that you should be released from your marriage on the grounds that King James IV was not killed at Flodden—you know this is not true. You know that I was obliged to take his body so that this lie should never be spoken. They are saying that you and the Duc of Albany are plotting his return to Scotland so that you can marry should his wife die.

  Margaret, please! This is horrifying scandal to attach to you. Write at once to your brother and say that it is not so, and then publicly return to your husband so that there can be no doubt that you have not become the French duc’s whore. God forgive you if you have forgotten what you owe to your family and your name. Write at once and assure me that you are in a state of heavenly grace and married to the good Earl of Angus. My love to your dear son—Margaret, think of him! How can he inherit the throne if there is any question of your honor? And what of your daughter? A divorce will name her as a bastard. How can you bear this? How can you be my royal sister and declare yourself as a whore?

  Katherine

  I walk across the courtyard and go out of the little sally port to walk down the hill to the loch. The water meadows stretch before me to the side of the water, the short-legged cattle graze on the rich grass, the swallows weave in and out of them. A dozen milkmaids go past me with their buckets swinging from the yokes laid across their shoulders, carrying their milking stools in their hands. They call the cows in, and the animals lift their heads when they hear their names sung out in the high, sweet voices. James used to like to go out with the milkmaids and they would take a ladle and let him drink from the bucket. It would leave a little creamy moustache on his upper lip, and I would wipe his round face with my sleeve and kiss him.

  I have not seen my boy, since the battle between Angus and Hamilton that they are calling “the cleansing of the causeway” after the scrubbing of the blood from the cobbles. I have not seen Archibald since he marched into the castle and I withdrew to Linlithgow, riding out through his army in silence. I have not seen James Hamilton since he galloped away to save his life. I have no daughter: she must live with her father. I have no son; he is all but imprisoned. I have no ally. I have no husband and now Katherine tells me I have sisters only upon impossible conditions.

  Mary is not the fool that she pretends to be. She is desperate to avoid being caught in a quarrel between Katherine and me. She will write to me forever about gowns and lutes and hunting, always avoiding the knowledge that I am alone and unhappy and in danger. She won’t speak for me to Harry—she is too fearful for her own status at court. She will be the very model of an English princess, a radiant beauty, a wife beyond reproach. She will not risk her position at court by saying one word in my favor.

  I know that I am lost to Katherine. This is a woman who left home at fifteen and endured years of loneliness and poverty in order to marry the king and become Queen of England. She will never contemplate anything that might threaten her place. She may love me, but she cannot bear me to challenge the vows of marriage. She may love me, but her whole life depends on there being no end to marriage but death.

  STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, DECEMBER 1521

  My luck changes, at last, at last.

  The Duke of Albany himself walks into my chamber, handsome as ever, urbane as always, and bows over my hand with a French flourish as if he has just stepped out to order his cape to be brushed, and has been no time at all.

  “Your Grace, I am at your command,” he says in his Burgundian French—the very pinnacle of elegance and charm.

  I jump to my feet; I can barely breathe. “Your Grace!”

  “Your loyal servant,” he says.

  “How ever did you get here? They’re watching the ports!”

  “The English fleet was at sea looking for me but they did not find me. Their spies were watching me in France—they saw me leave court but they did not see where I went.”

  “My God, I have prayed for this,” I say frankly.

  He takes both my hands and holds them warmly. “I came as soon as I could get away. I have been begging King Francis to let me come to you for more than a year, as soon as I heard the terrible trouble that you were in,” he says. “The deaths of the Hamiltons! Fighting in the streets of Edinburgh! You must have thought the kingdom was being destroyed before your eyes.”

  “It has been terrible. Terrible. And they forced me to leave my son!”

  “They will beg your forgiveness, and your son will be restored to you.”

  “I will see James again?”

  “You shall be his guardian, I swear it. But what of your husband? Is he your enemy? You cannot reconcile?”

  “It’s over between us, forever.” I realize that the duke and I are still holding hands. I flush and release him. “You can count on me,” I promise. “I will never return to him.”

  He hesitates, before he lets me go. “And you can depend on me,” he says.

  EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1522

  We take Edinburgh Castle without a shot being fired. Archibald simply surrenders, leaving the castle and my children, and the duke has him escorted to France under guard. His uncle Gavin Douglas flees to England, to Harry, with a mouthful of lies.

  The duke and I, on matching white horses, wait outside the castle while the trumpets sound from the battlements and the drawbridge is lowered. All the people of the city are on the castle hill, watching this masque of power. The constable comes out in the livery of the Stewarts—I imagine wryly that he has made a hasty change of clothes, and that Archibald’s colors are kicked under his bed—and bows and presents the keys of the castle to the regent, the Duke of Albany. In a beautiful gesture Albany takes them, and turns to me. He smiles at the delight in my face and presents them to me. As the people cheer, I touch the keys with my hand to acknowledge acceptance, and return them to him as regent, and then we all ride inside the castle.

  James, my son, is in the inner keep. I jump from my horse without ceremony and go quickly towards him. I glance at Davy Lyndsay’s beard—grizzled gray in the months that we have been apart—and I could curse Archibald for what we have all endured, but I can see nothing but my son’s pale face and his urgent expression. I curtsey, as a subject should, and he kneels to me for a mother’s blessing, as I wrap my arms around him and hold him tightly.

  He feels different. He is a little taller, a little stronger since I last saw him. He is nine now, he has grown stiff and awkward. He does not yield to me, he does not lean against me. I feel as if he will never cling to me again. He has been taught to mistrust me and I see that I will have the task of teaching him to love