Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  “She came, and made a speech, and then she left.”

  “A speech? She addressed the court?”

  “She spoke to her supposed husband the king.”

  I don’t even address the weasel words of “supposed husband.” “Why, what did she say?”

  Even James, who is listening to this with half his attention, gently pulling the ears of his deerhound, looks up at this. “What did the queen say?”

  “She knelt to the king,” Magnus says, as if it makes it better. “She said that when they first married she was a true maid, without touch of man.”

  “She said that in court?” James demands, as riveted as I.

  “She said that she had been his true wife for twenty years and had never grudged a word or countenance or shown a spark of discontent.”

  James is openly laughing at the thought of this aging woman, on her knees, swearing to her long-ago virginity, but I have a strange, terrible feeling, as if I am going to cry. But why should there be anything in this to bring me to tears?

  “Go on! Go on!” says James. “This is as good as a play.”

  “She said some more.” Magnus loses the thread. “She knelt to him. She was on her knees, her head bowed.”

  “Yes, so you said, but what else?”

  “She said that if there be any just cause by the law that anyone could say, dishonesty or impediment, then she would go, but if there was none then she beseeched him to let her remain in her former estate and receive justice.”

  “My God,” James said, stunned into admiration at last. “She said all that? Before everyone?”

  “Oh, more, and then finally she said that she would be spared the extremity of the court and that she committed her cause to God.”

  “Then what?” I clear my throat to ask. My heart is hammering. I cannot think what is the matter with me.

  “Then she left.”

  “Walked out?”

  Magnus nods, unsmiling. “She curtseyed to the king and she walked out. The king said she should be called back into court and they shouted after her, ‘Katherine of Aragon, come into court,’ but she didn’t even turn her head, she just walked out. And outside . . .”

  “What outside?”

  “Outside the women cried out blessings on her, and the men said that she should never have been made to attend. People shouted that it was a shame, shame on the king, that such a wife should be forced to defend herself.”

  I rise up from my seat. My heart thumping so rapidly that I think I must be ill. I think of Katherine, confronting Harry the liar—he has been a little liar all his life—and facing him down, before the two cardinals, before the lords, before the men who rule our world, and then curtseying and walking away. How did she dare! What will he do?

  “What will he do?” My voice is like a croak. Why can I not speak?

  The ambassador looks at me gravely. “The cardinals will take the cause to the Holy Father for a decision. The king has not advanced his case, but the queen has openly defied him and said that she does not trust his advisors or his court. She has demanded to be treated as Queen of England and said that she is without fault. I don’t know what will happen next. I have no instruction, and nothing like this has ever happened in England before.”

  “Where is Harry now?”

  “He will be going on progress.” The ambassador looks down and clears his throat. “He is not taking the queen.”

  I understand from this that it is a breach, perhaps forever. He is taking Anne Boleyn, the mercer’s great-granddaughter, and she will ride beside him in the place of the Infanta of Spain. Harry has deserted Katherine. I understand also what I am feeling in this swirl of emotions. Triumph: that Harry’s words against me should be quoted back into his face: take that, you little hypocrite! And yet I am sorry, I am so, so sorry that it has come to this, that Katherine should kneel to him before all the lords of England and declare that she does not trust Harry or them. The fairy-tale marriage that caused me such agonies of jealousy is over, the beautiful princess has been abandoned, and I cannot help but be glad of it. At the same time, I cannot help a measureless grief that Katherine was my sister and now she is alone.

  HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, WINTER 1529

  Our court is as bright and as cultured as any in Europe. We bring in the greenwood tree in the old Christmas tradition and we have a piper every night and we dance the wild, fast reels of Scotland as well as the courtly dances of France. We have poetry every dinnertime from the great makars, reciting in their booming Scots, poems about freedom and the beauty of the mountains and the stormy seas of the North. We have ballads from the lowland country and love songs and troubadour poems in French and Latin. James loves music as much as his father did, and he will play on his lute for the court and dance all the night. He is a lover of women and drink—just as his father was—and I say nothing against this during the season of Christmas, for every young man goes roistering and whoring at this time of year and every young man is drunk. I did not bring him up to be a saint but to be a king, and I would rather have a son who was an open bawdy lover of women than the tortured secretive man that my brother has become.

  James honors the members of his court who have served him well this year, and gives rich gifts to all his favorites. Davy Lyndsay, still in royal service, never failing in his love and loyalty to the baby that I put in his keeping, is knighted and made Lyon King of Arms—a herald of great importance. This is an especially good choice for Davy, who has spent his life studying chivalry and poetry. Who better to represent James with messages to other kings or emperors? James invests the new herald himself and embraces him in public. “You have been a father to me,” he whispers to him. “I will never forget it.”

  The old man is greatly moved. I kiss his cheeks and find them damp with his tears. “Our boy is going to be a great king, thanks to your training,” I tell him.

  “He is a great king for he is the son of a great queen,” he tells me.

  We receive gifts from England, nothing that shows the loving care that Katherine used to put into the yards of silk that she chose for me, or the embroidered shirts she would give James. These courtesy gifts from one court to another come from the master of ceremonies, as part of his duties, not from a woman who loves her sister. I wonder what sort of Christmas Katherine will have now she is still a wife but no longer beloved; still a queen, but badly served. I have a letter from Mary after the twelve days which starts with the most important thing to her. I would laugh if I did not understand that she is describing the unraveling of Harry’s court. This is the end of order, the order that my lady grandmother encoded in her great book. This is the end of everything:

  He let her go before me.

  Mary writes with painful simplicity. Almost, I can see her shaking her golden head, seeing again before her Mademoiselle Anne overthrowing the sacred rules of precedence, the order of the nobles, hitching up her skirt and dancing into line before my sister, the sister of the King of England, the Dowager Queen of France.

  Maggie, she went before me. It was the ennobling of her father, a perfectly nice man, I have nothing against him; he served as Cousin Margaret’s steward, and he was carver for you—you will remember him. Thomas Boleyn is a good servant of the Crown, I know.

  I can hear Mary retracing her thinking, her unending puzzlement.

  Harry has made him Earl of Ormond, not only that, but also Earl of Wiltshire, which is no honor to Wiltshire I am sure. His son is to be called Viscount Rochford.

  I rest the pages so that I can think. Is this to be her price? Is Harry ennobling the father to buy his daughter’s honor? If this is so, then we may be at the end of our ordeal. Her father straps on the order of a double earldom, her mother becomes a bawd and a countess in the same moment, and the brother a viscount and a pimp. Why not? If Anne Boleyn will accept these honors in return for her own much-vaunted maidenhead then we can all be happy again.

  Harry gave them a great dinner to celebr