Three Sisters, Three Queens

HARBOTTLE CASTLE, ENGLAND, OCTOBER 1515

I rest, I sleep. I wake and I eat. The food is not good, but at least there is a rope bed, not a heap of straw tied up in sacking; but there is no good linen and no bed curtains to keep out the draughts and only one small pillow. It is the bedroom of the commander of the castle and I must say that the posting will not make him soft. The mattress is stuffed with lumps of rock from the feel of it—no bird can have had feathers like this—and it has fleas or lice, or at any rate something that bites. I have red weals all over my skin. But at least I am off the horse, and after a few days the pains subside and I think perhaps my baby may not come too early, but at any rate if he comes now it will be under a roof like a Christian and not in a hedgerow like a beast.

I don’t fret about Archibald, living wild in the debatable lands between Scotland and England, with no permit to enter one country, an outlaw in the other. I don’t even think about my son James, with Davy Lyndsay at Stirling Castle, no doubt asking for me, learning that the path to the throne is lonely and hard. I don’t think about his little brother, Alexander, my baby, my pet. I don’t think about Katherine, pregnant once again, hoping for a boy for England. I don’t think about Mary, pregnant too, according to Lord Dacre—though what does it matter really? At the very best all she can have is Charles Brandon’s son, heir to his father’s debt and his mother’s folly. I am the only queen likely to have a living son and I should be exultant, but I am so tired that I think that we are truly sisters at last, sisters in suffering and sisters in disappointment.

My pains come to nothing, I fall into a dull passivity, like a cow with a stuck calf inside her. There is nothing I can do to bring it on, and nothing I can do to hold it safe. I am afraid that the constant riding of the last few days has shaken him loose. I am afraid that he will die inside me, and then they will have to cut me open and I will certainly die too. I think this is my Flodden, this is my battle against an enemy, and I am almost certain to lose. I have to be desperately courageous and know that my duty has brought me here, and anyway, there is no way to escape.

When I try to get out of bed—for I need to urinate all the time, and they have no garderobe here but just a bucket under the bed—I realize that I have become paralyzed. These are not labor pains, they are some deep disease of the bones. I need a physician, not a wise woman. I tell Lord Dacre that I must see the French ambassador now, that I have no choice: I must make peace with the Duke of Albany because I am likely to die. He has to send me physicians from Edinburgh. “Send for the French ambassador,” I say. “He can follow us here. You can give him safe conduct.”

“I don’t know where he is. He may still be at Berwick.”

“He was at Berwick?”

He realizes that he has let this slip.

“He came to Berwick?”

“If you remember, we had to leave. What if his men had arrested your husband? You wouldn’t want to risk the earl’s arrest?”

Of course, Ard’s safety comes before everything, but if I had only seen the French ambassador, and he had been able to make an agreement with me, then I might not have been forced here, to this miserable fort, to suffer this pain without a physician or a wise woman or a herbalist I can trust.

“Send for him!” I command. “If he and I can make an agreement he can send me physicians from Edinburgh.”

“Not yet, Your Grace,” he replies carefully. “We don’t want to jeopardize your husband’s courage, his great endeavor.”

“Why, what is he doing?” I ask. “I thought he was hiding out till he can join us?”

Lord Dacre smiles, his old eyes twinkling. “I think you will find that a brave young lord like him can do better than that!”

“He is rescuing my sons,” I say, without a moment’s doubt, and the lord gives me a broad wink.

“He is, God speed him,” he says. “How will it be when you are both safe behind the walls of Morpeth Castle and your sons with you?”

“He will bring them to England?”

“There is nowhere else for them. You will all be together again.”

I shake my head. I don’t answer. He is right. Every step that I have taken, every choice that I have made, seems to lead me onward to places where I don’t want to be, to more choices that I don’t want to make.

“I’ll see,” I say. I think of my lady grandmother, who never told anyone what she was thinking nor what she might do. “I will decide when I have given birth to my child.”

“I have sent for physicians from Berwick,” he says. “If we could only get to Morpeth I could house you more comfortably. My wife is there, and her ladies. They would care for you and you would have rooms to your liking.”

“I know,” I say. “But it can’t be done. I can’t even walk, I couldn’t ride.” A sudden pain like a sword thrust to the belly makes me hold myself and gasp.

Dacre gets to his feet. “Is it now?”

I nod. “It’s now. I think it is really coming now.”

It takes days for the baby to come. Two days and three long nights of pain and drink and sleep and waking again to pain, hobbling up and down the room and groaning on the bed, before they give me a squalling bundle in a wrapping of linen cloths and say: “A girl. A girl, Your Grace.”

I am so exhausted that I don’t even care that it is not a boy. I am so glad that it is over and that I have a live child for all my labors that I lift my tearstained face to look at her and see a perfect little tiny baby, as neat and as complete as the bud of a rose, as sweet as a subtlety, an angel made of marchpane. I can’t speak for pain and exhaustion. I think if I die from giving birth to her, at least I have seen her, and Archibald will have a child from me.

“What will you call her?” someone asks.

“Margaret,” I say. “Margaret Douglas. A little Scots lady, even if her mother is dead.”

I really think that I will die. My pains go on even though the baby is born, the bleeding goes on, and nothing the midwives can do will stop it. They are frightened. They are poor, ignorant women who have made a little money from attending the births of their neighbors; usually they are paid in eggs. They have never been in the castle before, they have never swaddled a baby in good linen. They do all that they can, but nobody can help me as I slide into a fever and don’t know where I am, and I call for James, my husband James, not to go to the battle and not to give me pearls for mourning. I dream that he is nearby, and that Katherine has the wrong corpse. I dream that he is living wild like an animal in these wild lands and that he will come to me at the moment of my death.

I have long painful days, half drunk on rough ale mixed with uisge beatha. I drift in and out of consciousness, and see daylight and then the flickering lights of wax candles, and then the cold light of dawn. I hear, as if from far away, a thin cry and the sound of someone walking up and down and hushing a wailing child.

A girl is not much use to me. Archibald will not come out of hiding to see a girl. The Douglases don’t need a girl, they need the next head of the clan. But I am glad that she is alive. I was afraid that riding when I was so near to my time had killed her. And I am glad I am alive, though I still cannot sit or stand without pain, and my leg seems to be in a palsy.

I raise my head. “Write to my brother,” I say. “Tell him that I have another healthy child and that I am hoping he will be her godfather. Tell him that she needs an uncle to defend her.”

I lie back and drift away as I watch them swaddle her and bind her to the board. They have not been able to find a wet nurse, and they can’t even ride out to the distant villages, the roads are so dangerous with reivers and brigands and armed men. They are feeding her with sops—bread dipped in watered milk squeezed into her mouth. “Oh, I’ll feed her,” I say irritably, and then I whimper with a new pain as I put her to my breast.

She feeds a little and then they take her away and say that I can rest at last. I lie on the thin pillow, it is damp with my sweat, but there is no change of linen for the bed. They bind my bleeding parts with moss and then at last they sit quietly and I hear the rocker tap her foot up and down on the pedal of the cradle and all the other noises die away as the rest of them go to eat or to sleep.

The candlelight flickers and gutters, the fire dies down in the grate. I cannot believe that I, a Tudor princess, should be trapped here, in little more than a border tower, watching the shadows jump on the mud-plaster ceiling and hearing the rats scratching on the floor. I close my eyes. I cannot understand how I can have been born so high and fallen so low. There is a cold draught through the shutters that makes the candle flames flare up and die down. There is no glass in the windows to keep out the cold. I can hear the nighttime noises of these hills, the persistent hooting of an owl, the sharp bark of a dog fox, and somewhere, miles away, the howl of a wolf.