Three Sisters, Three Queens

ON PROGRESS, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1503

When it gets a little colder and the leaves start to crisp and change color, my husband takes me on a progress to see some of the lands that are mine as queen. I think of my lady grandmother’s keen stewardship of her lands and her quiet avarice in adding to her landholding, and I look around me as I ride westwards out of the city, along the raised tracks that weave through the marshy lands at the edge of a great river, the Forth, and hope that my land is being profitably managed.

The trees grow down to the water’s edge and rain their leaves on us as if we were in a parade and people were throwing flowers. The woods are all the colors of bronze and gold, red and brown, and the higher slopes of the hills are ablaze with the red of rowan trees. The few villages along the way are surrounded by a patchwork of little fields and all the hedgerows are bright with hips and hawthorn berries, and in the thicker clumps there is the fat gleam of sloes as black as jet. Above our heads the geese flying south cross the sky in huge processions, one behind the other, and we often hear the loud creak of great wings as flights of swans go south away from the cold weather of the north. Every morning and every dusk we see herds of deer disappearing through the trees, moving so silently that the hounds cannot see them, and at night sometimes we hear wolves.

We travel agreeably together. James loves music and I play for him and the court musicians come with us. He has a passion for poetry and writing, and his court carries its own makar—a poet who travels with us everywhere like a cook, as if you might need poetry like dinner when you stop for the evening. To my surprise, James does need poetry like this; he wants it like wine before dinner, and he has an appetite for talk about books and philosophy. He expects me to learn their language, for unless I do I will never appreciate the beauty of the poems in the evening. He says they cannot be translated, you have to hear them as they were first sung. He says that they speak of the people and the land and they cannot be translated into English. “The English don’t think like us,” he says. “They don’t love the land and the people the way a Scot does.”

When I protest, he tells me that further north the people only speak their own language called Erse and really, I should learn that too. The people of the islands far out in the cold north seas speak a language halfway to Danish and had to be forced to recognize his rule, thinking that they were a people and a kingdom all of their own. “And what is beyond them?” I ask.

“Far, far away, a land of whiteness,” he says. “Where they have no night and day but whole seasons of darkness and then months of white light, and the land is only ice.”

James has a profound interest in the workings of things, and wherever we go he is off to bell towers to see the mechanisms of clocks, or to water mills to see a new way of loading wheat into the grinding stones. In one little village they have a wind pump to get the water out of the ditches and he spends half the day with the Dutchman who built it, going up and down the sluices and up and down the stairs to the sails until he understands completely how it works. I can share some of his interests; but often I find him totally incomprehensible. He is fascinated by the workings of the human form, even the dirty bodies of poor people, and he will talk with doctors about the air that we breathe and if the same comes out as goes in, and where it goes and what it does, or how the blood will spurt from the neck but ooze from the arm and why that might be? He has no shame and he has no sense of disgust. When I say that I don’t want to know why the veins in my wrist are blue but the blood that spills out of them is red, he says: “But, Margaret, this is the stuff of life, this is the work of God. You must want to understand it all.”

When we approach Stirling, riding up and up the winding streets of the little town that clings to the side of the hill, he warns me that he keeps a philosopher, who has one of the towers as his private domain and is studying the nature of being itself. He has a forge and a distilling urn, and I must not be troubled by the noise of hammering or the strange smell of the smoke.

“But what is he doing there?” I ask, disturbed. “What do you hope to find?”

“If we were to be blessed, then we would find the fifth element,” he answers. “There is fire, water, earth, and air, and there is something else, the very essence of life. All these things have to be present for life, and we know that they live inside us, but there must be another element, unseen but felt, that animates us. If I could find that, I could make the philosopher’s stone and I would have power over life itself.”

“There are philosophers all over the world looking for the secret to eternal life and the stone that turns base matter into gold,” I remark. “And yet you hope that it will be you who finds it, before anyone else?”

“We are getting closer every day,” he assures me. “And he is also studying how birds fly, so that we might fly too.”

The castle guns salute us with a roar as they see our standard coming up the lane that winds to and fro up the steep hill, and the drawbridge crashes down and the portcullis rattles up. The huge stone walls are unbroken except for the gate that faces us. I can see—running away to the right and to the left—how the walls climb up along the cliff face, higher and higher until they are a narrow rim over the sheer drop below them, part of the cliff itself.

“The best of my castles,” James says with satisfaction. “Only a fool says that a fortress cannot be taken—but this one, Margaret, this is the brooch that pins the Highlands and the Lowlands together, this is the one that I would back against any other in Christendom. It is set so high that you can see for miles in every direction from the turrets, and no enemy can make the climb to the foot of the walls unseen, let alone scale them. They are built on solid rock, no one could mine them. I could hold this castle with twenty men against an army of thousands. Make sure you tell that to your father, when you write. He has nothing as secure as this, nothing as beautiful as this.”

“But he does not need one, for there is a perpetual peace now, thank God,” I say as if by rote. And then, in quite a different voice, I ask: “And who are these?”

As we ride through the thick main gate, as deep as a tunnel, I can see the great courtyard ahead, built on the slant of the hill. The servants are lining up and dropping to their knees and suddenly, summoned by the cannon blast, half a dozen children of all ages, dressed as richly as little lords and ladies, are running down the steps from the highest side of the building and bounding into the courtyard as if delighted to see us, dipping into a bow or a curtsey like a loyal mob. They tumble towards James as he leaps from the saddle and hugs them all in a wide embrace, muttering name after name and blessing them in Erse, so I don’t understand a word that is said.

My master of horse lifts me down from the saddle and sets me on my feet. I use his arm to steady myself as I turn to my husband. “Who are these?” I ask him again.

He is on his knees on the wet cobblestones so that he can kiss the smallest child and he takes a baby from its nurse as he gets up. His eyes are alight with love—I have never seen him like this before. The other little ones scamper around him, pulling at his riding jacket, and the oldest boy stands proudly beside the king as if he is of such importance that he should be presented to me, as if he expects that I shall be glad to meet him.

“Who are these?”

James beams at this beautiful surprise. “These are my children!” he announces, his wide-armed gesture taking in the six little heads and the one in his arms. “My little bairns.” He turns to them. “My little lords, ladies, this is the new Queen of Scotland, my wife. This is my Queen Margaret, who has come all the way from England to do me the honor of being my wife and your good mother.”

They all bow or curtsey with a trained grace. I incline my head but am completely lost as to what I should do. Wildly, I wonder if he was married before and nobody told me? Surely he cannot have a secret wife, the mother to all these children, hidden away here, in my castle. What should I do? If she were faced with these terrible circumstances, what would Katherine do?

“Do they have a mother?” I ask.

“Several,” James says cheerfully.

The eldest boy bows to me but I do not acknowledge him. I do not smile on the little bowed heads and, gently, James hands the baby back to her nurse. One of the Stirling ladies, seeing my frosty face, takes the hand of the toddler and shepherds the children towards the open doorway to the tower.

“Mothers,” the king shows no trace of awkwardness. “One, God bless her, Margaret Drummond, is dead. My dear friend Marion will not come to court again. Janet lives elsewhere, and Isabel too. They need not trouble you, you need not concern yourself with them. They will not be your friends or ladies-in-waiting.”

Not trouble me? Four mistresses? Four mistresses and only one of them thankfully dead? As if I will not be wondering about them and comparing myself to them every moment for the rest of my life. As if I will not be looking into the pretty faces of the little girls and wondering if they take after their mothers. As if I will not be thinking every time that James leaves court that he is visiting one of this pack of fertile women, or mourning the one who is mercifully gone.

“These will be half brothers and sisters to our own child when he comes,” the king says pleasantly. “Aren’t they like a band of little angels? I thought you would be pleased to meet them.”

“No,” is all that I am able to say. “I am not.”