Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  “Can this be true?” Henry Stewart is with me, with Archbishop Beaton, and the Earl of Lennox, as one of the friendly lords comes to report. Davy Lyndsay stands in a doorway, listening like a faithful hound missing his master. “Has Archibald turned the boy’s head by giving him nothing but amusement, by allowing him to be corrupted?”

  We turn to the messenger. “The young king spoke without coercion,” the lord says. “The Earl of Angus was with him all the time, but the boy could have spoken out, he could have taken three steps across the great hall and joined us. He did not do so. He specifically said that his mother need not fear for him.”

  “But I do!” I burst out.

  Henry puts a gentle hand on my shoulder. “We all do,” he says.

  There is a clatter in the presence chamber and a murmur of sound from the people waiting out there to see me. I notice Henry’s hand go to where his sword would be. “Are you expecting anyone?” he asks.

  I shake my head as the guards swing open the door and a young man comes in wearing royal livery. I recognize one of James’s grooms. He comes straight to my feet and kneels.

  “I come from His Grace the king,” he says.

  Davy Lyndsay steps forward. “I know this lad,” he says. “Is the king well, Alec?”

  “Aye, he is in good health.”

  “You may stand,” I say.

  He gets to his feet and says: “I bring a message. He didn’t want to write it down. His Grace says that he was forced to speak to the lords as he did, that he is a prisoner of the Earl of Angus, and that he begs you to save him. He says that you promised to come for him. He says that you must come.”

  I put my hand to my heart as it thuds at the appeal from my son. The youth realizes, as he speaks, that he should not address a queen like this, and his color flames up into his face and he drops to one knee and bows his head. “I am speaking His Grace’s words,” he mutters. “He taught them to me just like that.”

  “I understand.” I touch his bowed head lightly with my hand. “Are you to go back with an answer?”

  “Yes. Nobody saw me leave and no one knows where I am.”

  “You hope,” Lennox says dourly.

  The boy shows a swift brave grin. “I hope,” he agrees.

  “Tell him we will come for him,” I say. “Tell him I will not fail him. Tell him I am putting together an army that will march against the Earl of Angus and that we will free him.”

  The boy nods. “You know that George Douglas, brother to the Earl of Angus, is now master of the king’s household?”

  “Master?” Davy Lyndsay asks.

  There is an aghast silence. “Then the king is in danger of his life,” the Earl of Lennox says soberly. “There is no one around him who loves him. There is no one around him who would not benefit from his death.”

  “Archibald wouldn’t kill him,” I protest disbelievingly. “You can’t say that.”

  Lennox turns on me. “Archibald has royal blood, and he has taken all the power of the king. He has the keeping of the king and no one can free him. What is this but the step before imprisoning the king and then declaring him sick or mad? And that is one little step before declaring him dead, and Archibald as king himself.”

  I shrink back and sink into my chair. “He would not. I know him. He would never hurt my son. He loves him.” I nearly say: “And he loves me.”

  “Not if we stop him,” Henry Stewart says.

  We muster an army, and a number of lords join us with their armed retainers. Some are Archibald’s sworn enemies and would join any venture against him, some hope for the profit and opportunity of a battle, but some—a good number—want to see my son freed. We plan to attack Archibald’s new ally, my former friend the turncoat, James Hamilton, the Earl of Arran, at the village of Linlithgow Bridge, before Archibald can bring up his army from Edinburgh. The Earl of Arran and the Hamilton clan hold the bridge and so Lennox takes his army through the river and through boggy ground to attack their flank. They wheel to meet him, and then the Douglas army comes up in a rush from the south. My lords are horrified to see the royal standard at the rear of Archibald’s forces. The wicked man, my husband, has brought James to his first battle. He has brought James to watch his mother’s men dying in the fight to free him.

  Of course, this is not just spite, it is a brilliant tactic. He is using James just as I did when I sent him out, a boy of just three years old, to surrender the keys of Stirling Castle. This child has been hauled about like an icon before the people since he was born, and now Archibald is putting James and the royal standard at the heart of a treasonous army. Half of our men will not raise arms against the royal standard; it is like blasphemy for them. The Earl of Lennox looks around helplessly as his allies hang back, but the men at the front of both armies are bitterly engaged, shouting insults, stabbing with pikes, hacking with axes and swinging great battle swords. It is bloody and dreadful, and James, trapped at the back, can hear the cries of men mad with rage and those screaming as they go down. He thinks he sees a chance to get away and spurs his horse forward to weave through the armies, and it is then that the new master of the king’s household, George Douglas, my husband’s brother, snatches my boy by the arm, and holds him in a cruel grip in his metaled fist. George yells into my boy’s face that he had better stay with them for the Douglas clan will never let him go.

  “Bide where you are, sir, for if they get hold of one of your arms, we will pull you in pieces rather than part with you.”

  James, terrorized, turns his head away from the man who sits so high on his horse and holds him so hard, but he obeys. He does not dare try to get to the Earl of Lennox any more. The struggle breaks off—it was doomed as soon as they raised the royal standard—and our men fall away and scatter. One leader fails to retreat; we have to leave the Earl of Lennox injured on the field, and when we recover his body it has been stabbed over and over again. Our forces fall back to Stirling Castle and Archibald pursues us, coming behind us on the dirty tracks as we wind through the hills and splash through the fords, and climb up and up the rocky road to the castle where we scuttle inside, raise the bridge, drop the portcullis, and set the siege.

  Just as James promised me, all those years ago, Stirling Castle is strong. Archibald cannot take the castle until he brings the cannons, but there is nobody to rescue us.

  “We have to go,” Henry says to me and to Archbishop Beaton. “We’ll have to surrender the castle, and it will be better if he does not find us here.”

  I look at him miserably. “We surrender?”

  “We lost,” he says shortly. “You’d better go back to Linlithgow and hope that Archibald will come to terms with you. You can’t stay here and wait for him to capture you.”

  The archbishop does not need telling twice. He is throwing off his good cloak and his thickly padded jacket. “I’ll go out of the sally port,” he says. “I’ll get a crook off one of the shepherds and his jacket too. I won’t be taken by the Douglas clan. They’ll behead me like they did the chevalier. I don’t want my head nailed on the mercat cross.”

  I look from the man I love to the man I trust. They are both desperate to get away from my castle, to hide from my husband. They are in terror of the man who is coming for them, coming for me. I realize, once again, that no one is going to help me. I am going to have to save myself.

  I ride cross-country with just a handful of men to guard me. It rains and the torrential water blots out the signs of our passing, and muffles the sound of the horses. Archibald, riding his men hard through the storm towards Stirling Castle, does not know that I pass within a mile of him. I know his army is there, on the road, headed north, but I cannot see him nor hear the splash and clatter of his cavalry. The country is so empty and so wild that there is no one to tell him of our hard ride over the twenty miles from Stirling to Linlithgow. No one sees us go by, not even the rain-soaked fishermen, not even the herdboys. When the castle at Stirling lowers the drawbridge and opens the gates in a sha