Three Sisters, Three Queens

DURHAM HOUSE, LONDON, ENGLAND, MARCH 1503

Unwilling and uncertain, I obey my grandmother and go to visit my sister-in-law, Katherine. I find her seated in her privy chamber hunched over a small fire. She is wrapped in a dark shawl and wearing a black gown, in double mourning, as we all are, but she looks up and springs to her feet when she sees me and her smile is bright.

“How lovely to see you. Did you bring Mary?”

“No,” I say, irritated. “Why should I bring her?”

She laughs at my bad temper. “No, no, I am so pleased you came alone, now we can be cozy.” She nods at the servant who has shown me into the room. “You can put on another log,” she says, as if firewood should be used carefully. She turns to me: “Will you have a glass of small ale?”

I accept a glass and then I have to laugh when I see her sip hers and put it aside. “You still don’t like it?”

She shakes her head and laughs. “I don’t think I ever will.”

“What did you drink in Spain?”

“Oh, we had clean water,” she says. “We had fruit juices, and sherbets, light wines and ice from the ice houses.”

“Ice? Water?”

She shrugs, with that little gesture, as if she wants to forget the luxuries of her home at the Alhambra Palace. “All sorts of things,” she says. “They don’t matter now.”

“I would think you would want to go home,” I say, raising the subject in obedience to my grandmother.

“Would you?” she asks, as if she is interested in my opinion. “Would you want to go home and leave your husband’s country if you were widowed?”

I have not thought of it. “I suppose so.”

“I don’t. England is my home now. And I am Dowager Princess of Wales.”

“You won’t ever be queen,” I say bluntly.

“I will, if I marry your brother,” she says.

“You won’t marry my father?”

“No. What an idea!”

We are both silent. “My lady grandmother thought that was your intention,” I say awkwardly.

She looks sideways at me as if she is about to laugh. “Did she send you here to stop me?”

I can’t help but giggle. “Not exactly, but, you know . . .”

“To spy on me,” she says agreeably.

“She can’t bear the thought of him remarrying,” I say. “Actually, neither can I.”

She puts her arm around my shoulders. Her hair smells of roses. “Of course not,” she says. “I have no intention, and my mother would never allow it.”

“But they don’t insist you go home?”

She looks into the fire, and I am able to study her exquisite profile. I would think she could marry anyone she chose.

“I expect them to work out the dowry payments and betroth me to Harry,” she says.

“But if they don’t?” I press her. “If my lady grandmother wants Harry for another princess?”

She turns and looks me directly in the eye, her beautiful face open to my scrutiny. “Margaret, I pray that this never happens to you. To love and to lose a husband is a terrible grief. But the only comfort I have is that I will do what my parents require, what Arthur wanted, and what God Himself has set as my destiny. I will be Queen of England. I have been called Princess of Wales since I was a baby in the nursery, I learned it as I learned my name. I won’t change my name now.”

I am stunned by her certainty. “I hope it never happens to me too. But if it did—I wouldn’t stay in Scotland. I’d come home to England.”

“You can’t do what you want when you are a princess,” she says simply. “You have to obey God and the king and queen, your mother and father. You’re not free, Margaret. You’re not like a plowman’s daughter. You are doing the work of God, you are going to be mother to a king, you are one below the angels, you have a destiny.”

I look around the bare room, and I notice for the first time that one or two of the tapestries are missing from the walls, and that there are gaps in the collection of silver plate on the sideboard. “Do you have enough money?” I ask her diffidently. “Enough for your household.”

She shakes her head without shame. “No,” she says. “My father will not send me an allowance, he says I am the responsibility of the king, and your father will not pay me my widow’s dower until all my bridal money has been paid to him. I am between two millstones and they are grinding me down.”

“But what will you do?”

She smiles at me as if she is quite unafraid. “I’ll endure. I will outlast them both. Because I know my destiny is to be Queen of England.”

“I wish I were like you,” I say honestly. “I am certain of nothing.”

“You will be. When you are tested, you will be certain too. We are princesses, we were born to be queens, we are sisters.”

I ride away from the house on my expensive palfrey with my fur cape buttoned up to my nose, and I think I will report to my grandmother that Katherine of Arrogant is as proud and as beautiful as ever, but that she does not intend to marry my father. I will not tell her that the princess reminded me, in her stubborn determination, of my lady grandmother herself. If it comes to a battle of wills they will be well matched—but, actually, I would put my money on Katherine.

I will not tell my grandmother either that, for the first time, I like Katherine. I cannot help but think she will make a wonderful Queen of England.