Three Sisters, Three Queens

TANTALLON CASTLE, FIRTH OF FORTH, SCOTLAND, SEPTEMBER 1515

We ride all night through country that I sense, but cannot see. There are wide skies above, and a rolling landscape around us. I hear owls, and once a white-faced ghost of a barn owl lifts off the hedge before us, making the horse shy, and I grip onto Ard in fright. For most of the journey I can hear the sea, which grows louder and louder, and then I hear the piercing cry of seagulls.

It is dawn before we come to Tantallon Castle, Ard’s own fortress, his family home, and I gasp when there is a gap in the trees and I see it for the first time. It is a formidable hulk of a building, beautifully designed with proud turrets each capped with a conical roof. It is faced with gray limestone but here and there the stone has been battered away by hard weather, and the plum color of the local stone makes the castle gleam as warm as sunrise.

It faces the North Sea, where the sun is showing long brilliant rays across the rolling waves. The sound of the sea roars on, as loud as our hoofbeats; the smell of the sea makes me lift my head, and breathe the salt air. The seagulls cry, whirling in the dawn light, and beyond the castle I see the Bass Rock: a great dome of rock like a mountain, blazing white in the morning light, with a cloud of seabirds around its cliffs and a little fort perched facing the land. Castle and island face each other, equally impregnable. Round the castle there is a constant swirl of house martins, and now I hear their screaming cries.

“We can’t stay here long,” Angus says. “It’s too small, there’s no comfort for you, and it can’t withstand a siege.”

“Surely it could hold out forever!”

He shakes his head. “Not if Albany brings up cannon. We know he has Mons. If we set a siege we can’t get out again, and he could wait us out. This is a good castle for short battles, for defense and attack. But we can’t wait for your brother. Are you sure he will come?”

“He will not forget me,” I say awkwardly. “My sisters will tell him . . .”

“Will he send Lord Dacre?”

“I promise you, Harry loves me. His wife will tell him; the Dowager Queen of France will speak for me. He will not forget a Tudor princess. He will act now I have escaped. He will come for me, or I will go to him.”

“I certainly hope so,” Archibald says unpleasantly. “For if he does not rescue you, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Or where we will go next.”

“Next?” I ask. “But I need to rest, Archibald. I need to be somewhere safe to have my child.” The excitement of the escape has worn off and I am anxious about my boys, left in Albany’s keeping in Stirling. Someone will tell my son that his mother has run away and left him and his brother to their enemies.

“You can rest here,” he says begrudgingly. “We will tell Lord Dacre that you have escaped, as he demanded. We are near to the border. He must come for you.”

We ride down a narrow track and cross a massive ditch, deep enough to lose a regiment of cavalry. They would go down and never ride up again. There is an open field and then the castle moat crossed by a wooden bridge to the gatehouse.

The guards recognize my husband, and I have a flush of pride that the drawbridge falls down and the portcullis rattles up without a word being spoken. Ard rides into his own, like the lord that he is.

Inside the curtain walls it is a jumble like a poor village. The farmers and the peasants and serfs who live outside the castle have learned, in the way that these people always learn, that Archibald has ridden against the governor in the service of his wife, the queen regent. They may not understand what this means but they know that trouble is coming their way. Everyone who lives within a score of miles in any direction has piled inside the castle walls, and they have brought their livestock too. I see what Archibald means, that such a great castle cannot withstand a siege. The people will eat up everything in days.

“They shouldn’t be here,” I say to Ard, quietly against his back. “You’ll have to send them away.”

“These are my people,” he says grandly. “Of course they come to me when we are in danger. My danger is their danger. They want to share it.”

Ard jumps off the horse and turns to lift me down. I am cramped from sitting behind him for so long, and weary and hungry.

“The best rooms are not very comfortable,” he warns me. “But your ladies shall take you up.”

I cannot think why he would bring me somewhere that is neither defensible nor comfortable, but I go up to my rooms without a word of complaint. He is right. Inside the cold walls it is damp and bleak. The fire lit in my bedchamber steadily emits smoke which finds its way out, upwards and through the arrow-slit windows, and when I go to look out towards the sea I shiver in the cold mist that slides in over the sill. Though I try to be glad that there will be no attacking my tower from the land, I cannot help but long for the luxury that I left behind in Linlithgow.

“Fetch a warming pan, I’ll go to bed,” I decide. But then there is a long discussion about where the warming pan might be, and whether a brick would do as well, and that the sheets, which are rough and coarse, are not really damp. I am so tired that I lie on the bed and wrap myself in my traveling cloak while they puzzle how to make the room comfortable and what they have that is fit for me to eat.

All my royal furniture and linen is left behind in Linlithgow. It won’t get here for days. I don’t have more than one change of clothes. I understand that we could not travel with my wagons with all my treasures, but this is not good enough. I cannot be neglected. I doze for a little while but I wake when Ard comes quietly to my bedside.

“What now?”

He bites his lip, he looks intensely anxious. “A message from Albany. He knows you’re here. We’ll have to go to the Humes’ castle, Blackadder. It’s properly garrisoned and guarded, and they have promised to defend you. They’ve got nothing left to lose—they’re declared as traitors already. And they are well paid.”

“Paid?” I demand. “Not by me!”

“Dacre,” he says shortly. “He pays all the border lords.”

“But what for?” It is Dacre who has advised me into this danger. I have trusted him with everything.

“He pays the lords to keep the borders in continual uproar,” Archibald says, “so that he can invade and claim to be keeping the peace. So that he can raid like a reiver himself, stir up trouble and steal cattle. So that he can have some lords obliged to England for money or support, and so that your brother can argue in the courts of Europe that the Scots are ungovernable. So we all look like lawless fools.”

“He is my brother’s chief advisor!” I protest. “He serves me. He is loyal to me, I know this. He advises me, he cares for my safety.”

“Doesn’t stop him being an enemy to the Scots,” Archibald says stonily. “Anyway, he has paid the Humes enough to keep them on your side. We can go there.”

“What about my goods and my gowns and my jewels? My wagons are all coming here?”

“They can be safely stored here till you send for them.”

“Can’t we stay here and parley with Albany?” I ask weakly.

“He’ll have my head,” Ard says grimly. “I broke my parole for you, remember.”

I shudder. “We’ll go at once.”

We leave at first light and I climb wearily onto the horse behind him. The touch of his jacket against my cheek comforts me like an embrace. The scent of him, the glimpse of his profile when he looks back and smiles at me and says, “Are you all right?”—all these things make me feel treasured and protected by him.

I push disloyal thoughts to the back of my mind. I will not think that we are going to William Hume because Ard does not know what else to do, and, even worse, that if Dacre has been paying the border lords to rebel, was he paying my husband, too? Was he paying the Douglases before I married Ard? Did I marry Dacre’s spy?

There is no road, there is no lane. There is a track wide enough for a single man riding alone from village to village; but little more than that, and some of the way we ride across fields, the crop standing in stooks. We know the direction only by keeping the sea cliffs on our left and our faces to the south. The skies arch above us, it is enormous countryside, and when I look up I can see the fields rolling away to the distant horizon, to the distant hills. Archibald knows the land for miles all around his castle and after that we take up a lad from every village we pass to guide us to the next.

I go into a daze of tiredness and pain, and I fall asleep against my husband’s back, clinging to him and moaning a little at a new ominous pain in my hip, like something grinding into the very bone.

I wake to see a horseman coming towards us, his mount muddied to the shoulders and sweat creaming his withers and neck. “Who is it?” I demand fearfully.

“One of mine,” Archibald reassures me, and jumps down from the saddle and goes to talk with him.

When he comes back to me his young face is grim. “We can’t stay at Blackadder Castle,” he says flatly. “Albany has raised a troop and is coming down the road from Edinburgh for you. We’re going to have to head for the border.” He pauses. “Dacre was right, we should have gone to England straight away. Albany has sworn he will recapture you and he is mustering an army.”

“An army?” I say, and my voice trembles. “He is leading an army after me?”

“Forty thousand men,” Archibald says tightly. “We can do nothing against such a force. Blackadder wouldn’t hold, we’re safe nowhere but over the border.”

“Forty thousand?” I repeat in a shriek. “Forty thousand? Why would he send so many? Why would he come himself? If he just agreed to my demands I would return to my sons in peace!”

“We’re past that,” Archibald says bluntly. “That’s what the forty thousand shows. It’s war. It’s not you and him trying to come to agreement—it’s not a private quarrel—you have split the nation. The army of the governor will set siege to the Lord Chamberlain’s castle if you are inside.” He turns to his horse and rests his head against its neck as if he would weep. “It’s the very thing that your husband prevented. It’s the very thing he never wanted: Scotland divided on itself, a war of brother against brother; and I have helped to bring it about. I have led you into danger, I have left your sons in danger, and I have set the stage for a whole new battle.”

“It’s not our fault,” I say stoutly. I snap my fingers for a groom to lift me down from the saddle, ignoring the shooting pain that goes from hip to toes, clinging to the footrest of the saddle with my hands so that my knees do not give way beneath me. “If they had accepted my rule—”

“It is our fault,” he insists. “If you had been more amenable to Albany when he came, or if you had been fairer to the Scots lords, if we had waited before marrying, if we had asked for their consent . . .”

“Why should I ask for consent?” I demand furiously. “My sister Mary married who she pleased and my brother forgave her in a moment. Why should Mary marry the man she loves and you—my own husband!—tell me that I should be bound where she is free, that I should be less of a princess than her! That I should be a lonely widow but she can celebrate her second wedding the moment she steps out of her widow’s confinement? How can you tell me that Mary can be happy and I cannot?”

“Nobody but you cares about Mary!” he shouts at me, before everyone. Everyone turns around to look at us. My ladies, white-faced, know that a Tudor princess, a queen regent, cannot be abused. But Archibald is furious. “Not about Mary and not whether you get the things she has, not about Katherine. It’s not about the rivalry of three foolish women! This is about Scotland—my God—it’s about your late husband’s wishes, about his wisdom. And I have not been guided by him, but by you, and by the enemies of Scotland. And we have all been advised by the man who took your husband’s body off the battlefield as a trophy. Yes! It was Dacre who did that! No need to look as if you did not know! And now he tells me to bring you to England as if you were another royal corpse! And I know that you will never get back to Scotland if I do. You will never get back to Scotland. We will never bring the king’s body home. Your son will never get to the throne. He is advising me to destroy the royal family and my country, and he is our only advisor!”

“And what is he paying you?” I spit. “What are you getting? What is Alexander Hume getting? What is your brother George getting? What are the Douglases getting from Lord Dacre? What did he pay you to conspire against my husband the king?”

There is a terrible silence.

His face is white. “You insult my honor,” he says, suddenly quiet, and I have a pang of fear. We have never quarreled like this before. I have never seen him beside himself with anger, and then suddenly grow icy like this. We have quarreled like lovers, hot words forgotten in hot kisses. But this is something new and terrible. “I will take you to safety in England, and then I will leave you. If you think I am a traitor to you I can serve you no longer.”

“Archibald!”

He cannot choose to leave me. I am queen regent: he has to wait until he is dismissed. But he bows very low and he gestures to the groom to lift me back up on the horse. “Mount up,” he says. “We’re going to Berwick.”

My face pressed to his unyielding back, I cry silently. I feel my big belly heaving with my sobs and I think this child is having the worst preparation for the world possible. Surely he will never survive this. Then I think that I will never survive this, and then I think I hope that I don’t. Archibald can struggle with his honor and his conscience, and my brother can be merry with his wife and my sister, and everyone can forget that I ever lived and tried to do the right thing for my two countries and my two sons while they all squander a fortune and throw away political advantage to satisfy their own desires. I sniffle a little with jealousy and self-pity as it starts to rain, and I fall asleep, my cheek against my husband’s back, my hood shrouding my face, and my shoulders getting steadily more damp.

I wake when they stop to water the horses and for everyone to eat. The sky is a beautiful hazy dark blue; clouds like gray gauze laid over blue satin define the horizon. Archibald lifts me down from the horse and helps me to a seat on the ground where someone has spread a rug. My lady brings me wine, a little bread, some meat, my maid kneels before me to hold the cup. I do not dare to tell anyone how very ill I feel.

The countryside is wild and open—it is wasteland, nobody lives here, nobody farms, nobody even hunts here. These are the open lands of the border where it is too wild to live and unsafe for any house less than a fortified tower. I have a sense of huge overarching skies and our little procession crawling like ants across a massive plain. At least nobody will find us, I think. There is so much wild land and so few roads, nobody will be able to guess where we are.

I eat some bread, I drink some wine and water. My ladies press me to have more but the pain in my belly is so intense that I think I will vomit if I eat more than a mouthful.

Archibald comes over while they are urging me to drink some small ale.

“We have to go on,” he says bluntly.

“My leg hurts,” I say. “I don’t think I can get back onto the saddle.”

“I am sorry, but you have no choice. We have to get to England. Albany will know that we are heading for Berwick. We’ve got about six miles still to go; we’re halfway there. We have to get over the border. Lord Dacre says that we must make sure there is no shot exchanged between Albany and ourselves. King Henry’s orders. A single shot would mean war between England and Scotland. And France would send an army to support Scotland. He says we must not be the cause of breaking the peace.”

“I don’t care,” I say stubbornly. “Let Albany come! Let us make a stand and start a war. It can serve Harry right for not coming earlier.”

“D’you know where you are?” Archibald asks me. His young voice is taunting, as if he were bullying another child in the schoolroom. “Do you know where you are, when you talk about starting a war?”

I shake my head.

My lady-in-waiting bends down to whisper in my ear. “We are on the route your husband the king took when he marched south to Flodden, Your Grace. My own husband died on the way, and is buried near here.”

Archibald sees my aghast face and laughs harshly. “There will be no war for you,” he says. “We would all be dead before Henry’s army took one step out of London. The cannon would plow these fields again, before your brother even called his parliament. You forget what a great general your husband was—he said that his cannon would mean the end of the old warfare, the end of all chivalry, and he was right. We have to live in the world that he foresaw. Now get up. We have to go.”

I cry out and cling to Archibald when they lift me onto the pillion saddle behind him. I think that my hip must have broken, the pain is so intense. It is like a sword thrust every time I move, and I am jolted at every pace as the horse starts to plod south again.

“We’re going to Berwick Castle.” Archibald tightens my hands around his waist and pats them gently, reassuringly. He is kind again, now that we are on the move. Resentfully, I think that he can be loving only when we are on the road. It is when we halt that he is so afraid that he hides it in anger. “We’re going to England and we’ll be there in about two hours.”

“I can’t ride for two hours,” I whisper. “I can’t.”

He puts his hand inside his jacket and hands me back a horn flask. “Take a sip,” he says. “Only a sip. It’s uisge beatha—whisky.”

The smell is like a potion from James’s old alchemist. “Ugh,” I say.

He gives a little grunt of irritation. “It’ll ease the pain,” he says. “And your temper,” he adds in an undertone.

I take a sip and it burns my throat, but then the burning spreads to my belly and all through my body. “It helps,” I say.

“Be brave,” Archibald recommends. “We’re going to get to safety tonight. To England.”