Three Sisters, Three Queens

HARBOTTLE CASTLE, ENGLAND, NOVEMBER 1515

A month later and my baby is thriving. We have found her a wet nurse and my birth pains have ceased. Lord Dacre comes to the door of the castle commander’s bedroom and asks if he may be admitted. Nothing is as it should be. I was churched in my bed, the baby christened in the tiny chapel. Her godfather named as Thomas Wolsey in his absence, with no time for his consent. We are like reivers ourselves, camped on the wild lands of the border. I say that he can come in. There is no point in trying to live to the standards of my lady grandmother’s book of the household when we are little better than outlaws.

He takes in my pale face, the poverty of the furnishings. “Your Grace, I was hoping that you might be well enough to make the journey to Morpeth Castle where my wife can care for you.”

I shake my head. “I don’t think I can go. There is something wrong with my bones. I am recovered from the birth but I am strangely lame. I cannot walk. I cannot even sit up. The Berwick physicians have never seen anything like it.”

“We could take you in slow stages.”

“I can’t do it,” I repeat.

One of the ladies who has been found to serve me steps forward and curtseys to the English lord. “She can’t get out of her bed,” she says bluntly. “Her pain is quite terrible.”

He looks at me. “It is so bad?”

“It is.”

He hesitates. “Your brother has sent you wagonloads of goods for your comfort at Morpeth Castle,” he remarks. “And Queen Katherine has sent you some beautiful gowns.”

I feel desire clutch me like hunger. “Katherine has sent me gowns?”

“And yards of rich cloth, yards and yards of it.”

“I must see them. Can you bring them here?”

“I would be robbed on the road,” he says. “But I can take you to them. If you could find the courage, Your Grace.”

The thought of Morpeth and wagonloads of goods, clean linen and decent wine, and my gowns—new gowns—gives me courage.

“I have commanded physicians to come to Morpeth and see you there,” he says. “Your brother is determined that you shall be well again. And then you can go to London in the New Year.”

“London,” I repeat wistfully.

“Yes indeed,” he says. “And half of Europe is up in arms at the way that you have been treated. People are calling for war on France, and war on the duke. You are their heroine. If only you were able to rise up you could claim your throne.”

“How ever can I get to Morpeth?”

“My men can carry your bed.”

My lady-in-waiting billows forward. “Her Grace cannot be carried in her bed by common soldiers.”

Lord Dacre turns his weather-beaten hard face to me. “What d’you think? It’s that, or hold your Christmas feast garrisoned here, and we could be attacked at any time.”

“I’ll do it,” I say. “How many gowns has she sent?”

They tie me into the bed for fear of an accident, and I grip the rope as they manhandle it down the three steps from the chamber to the great hall below. I hide my face in the pillow to silence my moans; at every jolt I feel as if I have been stabbed with a burning poker in my hip. I have never known such agony, I am certain that my back is broken.

Once in the great hall the men gather around my bed and run long poles underneath it as they might carry a coffin. There are six on each side and they go carefully, in step, out of the hall, across the drawbridge and down the long winding ride that leads up the steep slopes of the castle. Before us go the guards, Dacre riding among them, my baby held in the arms of my maid-in-waiting, riding pillion.

The ragged inhabitants, and the poor people who live in shanties against the castle walls hoping for some protection from the weather and the reivers, stand amazed as I go by, swaying like some icon being paraded on a feast day around the borders of a parish. I would feel foolish if I were not completely absorbed by the pain. I lie back on my pillow, and I see the snow clouds thickening in the skies above me and I draw on every scrap of Tudor courage that I have, and pray that this nightmare journey of swaying, jolting steps does not outlast me, and that I don’t break down before we have reached the end of it.