Three Sisters Three Queens Read online

  He smiles at me, very charming, and he shakes his head. “You would suggest a sisterhood of queens, a sisterhood of women,” he says. “You would suggest that a woman can rise from the place where God has put her—below her husband in every way. You would overthrow the God-given order.”

  “I don’t believe that God wants me ill-educated and poor,” I say staunchly. “I don’t believe that God wants any woman in poverty and stupidity. I believe that God wants me in His image, thinking with the brain that He has given me, earning my fortune with the skills that He has given me, and loving with the heart that He has given me.”

  The earl’s chaplain says grace and we bow our heads for the long prayer.

  “I won’t argue with you,” the papal ambassador says diplomatically. “For you speak with the beautiful logic of a beautiful woman, and no man can understand it.”

  “And I won’t argue with you, for you think that you are paying me a compliment,” I reply. “I will hold my peace, but I know what I know.”

  We stay in the palace of green trees for three days, and every day James and the earl and the ambassador go out hunting. Some days they fish; one day it is so hot that James strips down naked and he and the earl and the court go swimming in the river. I watch them from the window of my bower, terrified that James will be swept away by the water. He is the hope of Scotland, he is the future of the country—I don’t like him to be in any danger at all.

  On the third day we thank them and say that we have to move on. James kisses the earl and the countess and gives them a gold chain from his own neck. I give her one of my rings. It is not one of my favorites: a ruby from my inheritance.

  As we ride away the papal ambassador looks back and exclaims: “Mother of God!”

  We all turn. Where the palace had been tall and turreted there are plumes of smoke from the greenwood and the crackle of fire. Little cracks of gunpowder going off under the walls tell us that the fire has been set to destroy the summer palace. James reins in so that we can watch as the yellow flames greedily run up the dried leaves and little twigs and set the bracken roof alight in moments. Then there is a great roar as the walls catch fire and a crash as the first tower collapses into the heart of the blaze.

  “We should go back! We could soak it from the moat!” the papal ambassador cries. “We could save it.”

  James lifts a hand. “No, it has been fired on purpose. It is the tradition,” he says grandly. “It’s a great sight.”

  “A tradition?”

  “When a Highland chief gives a great feast he builds the dining hall and when the feast is done he burns everything, tables, chairs, and hall. It will never be used again: it was a singular experience.”

  “But the tapestries? The silverware?”

  James shrugs, a king to his fingertips. “All gone. That is the beauty of Highland hospitality: it is total. We were guests of a great lord; he gave us everything. You are in a wealthy kingdom, a kingdom like a fairy tale.”

  I think James is going a bit far, but the ambassador crosses himself as if he has just seen a miracle. “That was a mighty sight,” he says.

  “My son is a great king,” I remind him. “This shows you the esteem of his people.”

  I don’t doubt for a moment that the countess took down the tapestries and all the valuables. They probably took the windows out before they fired the wooden walls. But it is a great sight, and it has done its work. The papal ambassador will go home to Rome and tell the Pope that my son James can look higher and farther than his cousin Princess Mary. Scotland is a great country, it can ally with whom it chooses. He can tell him also that I will not side with my brother against my sister-in-law. We are fellow queens, we are sisters, that means something.

  STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, WINTER 1530

  James is paying a great deal of attention to Margaret Erskine, a pretty twenty-year-old young woman, the wife of Sir Robert Douglas of Lochleven. I cannot like it. She is undoubtedly the loveliest girl at court and there is a spark about her that sets her apart from all the other young women that James dances with and rides with, and—I suppose—meets in secret for lovemaking. But certainly, she’s no commoner to bed and to leave. She is the daughter of Baron Erskine and they are not a family to be trifled with.

  “Who says I am trifling?” James asks me with his sideways smile.

  “You cannot be doing anything else when you ride into Stirling disguised and kiss the merchants’ wives and then tell them you are the king.”

  James laughs. “Oh, I don’t stop at kissing.”

  “You should stop at kissing, James; you should see, from England, the trouble that a king can get himself into with a woman.”

  “I don’t get into trouble,” he says. “I adore Margaret, but also I have a great liking for Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth who?”

  He smiles at me, quite unrepentant. “Several Elizabeths, actually. But I never forget that I have to marry an ally to the kingdom. And I don’t think it will be my cousin Princess Mary.”

  “Harry will never put Mary aside, whatever the Pope rules about Katherine. He loves Mary. And see, my marriage was set aside and yet my daughter is not named as a bastard. Margaret is known as Lady Margaret Douglas and received with every respect in London. Princess Mary could keep her title even if her mother is not queen. And her father loves her.”

  “He says that he loves Katherine—that won’t save her.”

  I look blankly at my son. “I can’t think it. I can’t imagine England without her as queen.”

  “Because for so long you have thought of Queen Katherine as your rival and your model,” he says astutely. “You have lived in her shadow, but it is all changed now.”

  I am struck by my son’s perception. “It was that there were the three of us, all fated to be queens. Sisters and rivals.”

  “I know, I see that. But Katherine is not the queen that she was when she sent an army to destroy Scotland. Time has beaten her when the flower of Scotland could not.”

  “It’s not time,” I say with sudden irritation. “Time comes against every woman, and every man too. She has not been defeated by time but by the allure of a common rival, the selfishness of my brother, and the weakness of her family, who should have sent an armada the minute that she was exiled from court.”

  “But they didn’t,” James observes. “Because she was a woman, and though she was a queen she had no power.”

  “Is that all that defends a woman?” I demand. “Power? What about chivalry? What about the law?”

  “Chivalry and the law are what the powerful give to the powerless if they wish,” James replies, a king who was captive for all his childhood. “No one of any sense would depend on chivalry. You never did.”

  “That’s because my husband was my enemy,” I say.

  “So is Katherine’s.”

  James sets me thinking about my daughter Margaret, about little Princess Mary, and about her mother Katherine, my rival, my sister, my other self. If Harry names his daughter as illegitimate then he will have sacrificed his last surviving legitimate child for the Boleyn woman’s promises; he will have no legitimate direct heirs at all. I think of Katherine threatening me with hell if I let Margaret be named as illegitimate—I think once again we go hand in hand into danger together: her life is mine, her horrors are mine.

  If Harry puts Katherine aside and denies their daughter then my son becomes his heir, and he could be the greatest king that has ever been: the first Tudor–Stewart monarch to rule the united kingdoms, from the westernmost point of Ireland to the northernmost point of Scotland. What a king my son will be! What a kingdom he will rule! Of course my ambition leaps at the thought of it; of course I pray that the Boleyn woman never has a legitimate son to Harry. When the messenger from England brings me a sealed letter from my sister Mary, I don’t expect good news, I don’t even know what I hope to read.

  You will have heard that Thomas Wolsey has died under arrest, an example of how far she is pr