Three Sisters, Three Queens

EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1522

We take Edinburgh Castle without a shot being fired. Archibald simply surrenders, leaving the castle and my children, and the duke has him escorted to France under guard. His uncle Gavin Douglas flees to England, to Harry, with a mouthful of lies.

The duke and I, on matching white horses, wait outside the castle while the trumpets sound from the battlements and the drawbridge is lowered. All the people of the city are on the castle hill, watching this masque of power. The constable comes out in the livery of the Stewarts—I imagine wryly that he has made a hasty change of clothes, and that Archibald’s colors are kicked under his bed—and bows and presents the keys of the castle to the regent, the Duke of Albany. In a beautiful gesture Albany takes them, and turns to me. He smiles at the delight in my face and presents them to me. As the people cheer, I touch the keys with my hand to acknowledge acceptance, and return them to him as regent, and then we all ride inside the castle.

James, my son, is in the inner keep. I jump from my horse without ceremony and go quickly towards him. I glance at Davy Lyndsay’s beard—grizzled gray in the months that we have been apart—and I could curse Archibald for what we have all endured, but I can see nothing but my son’s pale face and his urgent expression. I curtsey, as a subject should, and he kneels to me for a mother’s blessing, as I wrap my arms around him and hold him tightly.

He feels different. He is a little taller, a little stronger since I last saw him. He is nine now, he has grown stiff and awkward. He does not yield to me, he does not lean against me. I feel as if he will never cling to me again. He has been taught to mistrust me and I see that I will have the task of teaching him to love and value me all over again. I look up to see Davy’s brown eyes are filled with tears. He rubs them away with the back of his hand. “Welcome home, Your Grace,” is all he says.

“God bless you, Davy Lyndsay,” I say to him. I rest my cheek against James’s warm curls and I do indeed bless Davy Lyndsay for staying beside my son, through it all, for keeping him safe.

I am not the only Scot to rejoice in the return of the Duke of Albany. The Hamiltons know that with him returned to Scotland, and the power of the French behind him, they can recover. The Scots lords can see a way out from the tyranny of the Clan Douglas. The people of Scotland, their borderlands destroyed by Dacre’s continual raids, their capital bloodstained and unruly, long for the rule of the regent who brought them peace before.

I write a gleeful taunting letter to Lord Dacre and tell him that, despite his gloomy predictions, the duke has returned to Edinburgh, peace will come to Scotland, and England will not dare to invade now that we are protected by France. I say that his good friend, my husband, seems to have abandoned his post and his family and I beg nobody will reproach me for failing to accompany him into a traitor’s exile. At last we can have some happiness in Scotland again. I laugh as I write; Dacre will know that the tables are turned on him and that I am a free woman and I am in power.

I think my brother must have gone mad. I cannot believe that anyone would dare to speak of a reigning queen in the terms that they are speaking of me. I cannot believe that my brother would listen. A true brother would denounce the gossips. If his wife were a true sister to me, she would insist that they are silenced. The English blacksmiths are commanded by law to slice the tongue of anyone who slanders the royal family, but it is my own brother who writes scandal to Dacre and permits him—a border lord!—to accuse me of unspeakable crimes.

Archibald’s uncle, Gavin Douglas, is an honored guest at the court in London and has told everyone that I am the Duke of Albany’s mistress. He swears that the good duke came to Scotland only to seduce me, to murder my son and put himself on the throne.

This much is madness: insane to say, worse to hear, but Gavin Douglas says even more. He claims that the duke keeps my son in poverty, stealing the red velvet and the cloth-of-gold sleeves for his own pages, refusing to let my son see his tutors or even eat. He says that the regent is starving the young king to death and that I am allowing it to happen, and together we will claim the throne. Worse than this—if there could be worse—he claims that the duke poisoned my poor lost boy Alexander. They say that I am bedding the murderer of my son. They say this, in the courts of Westminster and the throne room at Greenwich, and nobody—not my brother the king, not my sister-in-law the queen, not their favorite, my own little sister Mary—leaps up and denies it. Not even Mary cries out that it cannot be true.

How can the three of them not speak up for me? Katherine saw me just months after I had learned of the death of Alexander. She saw me unable to speak his name for grief. She and Mary both held me while I sobbed for him. How can she listen when my proclaimed enemy says that my lover murdered my son, and that I allowed it?

The two of them, my two sisters, have hurt me before, they have ignored me, they have misunderstood me. But this is greater than anything. This time they are making accusations that I would not level at a witch. I think they must have lost their minds. I think that all of them must have lost their minds and have forgotten everything that we were to each other. I said that they were no sisters to me, that I would forget them. But they have gone further than this: they have become my enemies.