Three Sisters, Three Queens

STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1508

I think that this has always been an unlucky castle for me. I had my first quarrel with my husband here, and though I emptied it of his bastards, I often think of the children whose home it was, and the alchemist in his tower. I feel as if I miss them every time I enter under the heavy portcullis and climb up the sloping courtyard.

And it is here that the worst thing happens. The worst thing that can possibly happen. My baby, James, Prince James of Scotland and the Isles, Duke of Rothesay, dies in his sleep, in his royal cradle. Nobody knows why; nobody knows if he could have been saved. I am no longer the mother of the next King of Scotland. My belly is full with the next child; but I have an empty cradle, and I think I will never stop crying.

My husband comes to me and I am reminded of the to and fro between my mother and father’s rooms when Arthur died, so I look up when James comes in, and I think he is going to comfort me.

“I am so very unhappy,” I sob at him. “I wish I was dead myself.”

“Out,” he says shortly to my ladies, and they melt as if they are breath on cold air. “I have to ask you to be brave as I need to know something.” He is frowning, just as he is when he listens to someone explaining something mechanical, as if I am a puzzle to be solved, not a wife to be comforted with gifts.

“What?” I say, catching my breath.

“Do you think it possible that you are cursed?”

I sit up in my bed, my sobs silenced, and I stare at him, wordless.

“Your father had three sons and two of them are dead. Your brother never got a bairn, though he died at fifteen. You were barren for nearly three years and now our son has died. It’s a reasonable question.”

I wail out loud, and pitch into my pillow, both furious and heartbroken. This is typical of him, like his interest in what makes the teeth rot in a beggar’s head. He is fascinated by everything, however disgusting. I don’t know why Arthur died of the Sweat that spared Katherine. How should I know? I don’t even think of Edmund, my little brother who died before he was weaned. I don’t know why Arthur did not have a child with Katherine, I don’t like to think what she meant by “Alas, it never happened for us” and I am not going to discuss it now, when I am heartbroken and people should be comforting me, and diverting me, not coming into my room and asking me terrible questions in a cold voice.

“Because Prince Richard himself told me that the Tudors were cursed,” he goes on.

I clap my hands over my ears as if to ensure that I am deaf to these blasphemies. It is incredible to me that a husband so kind, so gentle, should come to me at this time, at the very pinnacle of my grief, and say things that are like the bad spells of his alchemist, which will translate life to death, gold to dross, everything into dark matter.

“Margaret, I need you to answer me,” he says, not raising his voice, as if he knows that I can hear everything through my fists, through my pillow.

“You mean Perkin Warbeck, I suppose,” I say, sullenly lifting my face.

“We all know that was not his name,” he says, as if it is a simple fact. “We all know that is the name that your father pinned on him. But he was Prince Richard, and your uncle. He was one of the two boy princes that Richard III put in the Tower of London, that your father says were happily never seen again. I know it. Richard came here to me before we invaded England. He was my dearest friend; we lived together as brother kings. I gave him my cousin in marriage, your lady-in-waiting Katherine Huntly. I rode out to battle at his side. And he told me that whoever tried to kill him and his brother Edward, was cursed.”

“You don’t know he was a prince at all,” is all I can stammer. “Nobody knows that. My lady grandmother will not allow anyone to say it. It’s treason to say it. And Katherine Huntly never, ever speaks of her husband.”

“I do know it. He told me himself.”

“Well, you shouldn’t tell me!” I burst out.

“No,” he concedes. “Except, I have to know. Richard said that there was a curse placed on the head of whoever killed his brother, the young king. The witch put it on—your mother’s mother, the white-witch queen, Elizabeth Woodville. She swore that whoever had taken the young king to his death would lose his son, and his son’s son, over and over till the line ended with a barren girl.”

I put my hand over my proud belly. I am not a barren girl. “I am with child,” I say defiantly.

“We have just lost our son,” he says, his voice curt and quiet. “And so I am forced to ask you. Do you think we have lost our son because there is a curse on you Tudors?”

“No,” I say furiously. “I think we lost him because your stinking country is dirty and cold, and half the children born will die of cold because they cannot breathe in smoky rooms and they cannot go outside in the killing cold air. It is your filthy country, it is your stupid midwives, it is your sickly wet nurses with their thin milk. It is not my curse.”

He nods as if this is interesting information. “But my other children live,” he observes. “In this filthy country with stupid midwives and sickly wet nurses and thin milk.”

“Not all of them. And anyway, I am carrying one. I am not a barren girl.”

He nods again, as if this is a true observation that he might jot in his notebook and discuss with his alchemist. “You are. I wish you good health. Try not to grieve too much for this one that is lost. You will endanger the one that you carry. And our boy is in heaven. We must know that he is innocent. He was baptized, he was christened. He may have been half yours, from the line of a usurper who killed children, and half mine, son of a regicide and patricide; we are a sinful pair of parents. But he was baptized against sin so we must pray that he is in heaven now.”

“I wish that I was in heaven with him!” I shout at him.

“With the sins of your family, how could you be?” he asks, and he leaves me. Just like that. Without even bowing.

Dear Katherine, I have lost my boy and my husband is most unkind to me. He has said the most dreadful things. The only thing that comforts me is that I am with child and hope that we will have another boy. Mary tells me that you are living very poorly and that there are no plans for your wedding to my brother. I am sorry for you. Now I have been brought very low myself, I understand better. I understand how unhappy you must be, and I think of you all the time. Who ever thought that anything could go so wrong for us who must be the favorites of God? Do you think there is any reason? There could not be a curse, of course? I will pray for you, Margaret the Queen.