Three Sisters, Three Queens by Philippa Gregory
The bed ropes creak as he gets into bed beside me, this king killer, this murderer. “Can you not go on pilgrimage?” I ask faintly. “Can you not go on crusade? Can the Holy Father not dispense for your sin?”
“I hope to do so,” he says quietly. “This country has never been peaceful enough for me to safely leave, but I would like to go on crusade. I hope to go to Jerusalem one day—that would wash my soul clean.”
“I didn’t know,” I say quietly. “I didn’t know anything about this.”
He shrugs and pulls the covers up over his belly, spreading himself out in the bed, feet to both corners, arms folded across his broad chest, as if all the bed is his and I must fit into one corner, or mold myself around him.
“Your own father led a rebellion against a crowned ordained king,” he says, as if it is not the most terrible thing to do. “And he married your mother against her will, and he killed her kinsmen, young men of royal blood. To take the throne and to hold it, you sometimes have to do terrible things.”
I let out a little squeak of protest. “No, he did not! Not any of those things, or at any rate, not like that!”
“Sin is sin,” the murderer tells me, and then he goes to sleep.
The next morning is the best day of my life. It is a tradition that the Scots kings give their brides their dower lands the morning after the wedding, and I go into James’s privy chamber where he and I sit either side of a heavy table as he signs over the deeds of one enormous forest and one great castle after another until I know that I am indeed as wealthy as any queen. I am happy and the court is happy for me. They too have gleaned gifts at my harvest. James Hamilton, who negotiated the marriage treaty, is to be Earl of Arran, a title created for him in reward for his work and to acknowledge his kinship to the king. All my ladies receive gifts, all the Scots lords are given money and some of them get titles.
Then the king turns to me, and says with a slight smile: “I am informed that you don’t like my beard, Your Grace. This too can be at your command. Behold, I am a willing Samson. I will be shorn for love.”
He has surprised me. “You will?” I say. “Who told you? I never said anything about it.”
“You would rather I kept it long?” He strokes the great bush of it from his chin to his belly.
“No! No!” I shake my head and this makes him laugh again.
He turns and nods to one of his companions and the man opens the door to the presence chamber. All the people outside peep in to see what their betters are doing, as a servant comes in with a bowl and a jug, linen, and a great pair of golden scissors.
At once my ladies laugh and clap their hands, but I feel awkward and I am glad when the door is shut and the petitioners and visitors can’t see us. “I don’t know what you mean to do. Can’t we send for a barber?”
“You do it,” he says teasingly. “You don’t want my beard, you take it off. Or are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid,” I say boldly.
“I think you are,” he says, his smile gleaming through the fox brush. “But Lady Agnes will help you.”
I glance at her in case this is not allowed, but she is smiling and laughing.
“May I?” I say doubtfully.
“If Samson comes to be shorn, who shall refuse him?” Agnes Howard says. “But we don’t want to cut off your strength, Your Grace. We would not hurt you for the world.”
“You shall make me as handsome as an English courtier,” he assures her. “If Her Grace the little Queen of Scots does not want a handsome Highland beard in her bed, she need not endure one. She has to have me, wild enough for any woman—she need not have a great beard as well.”
He sits down on a stool, tucks the napkin around his neck and presents the scissors to me. I take them and make a nervous snip. A whole clump of red pelt falls into his lap. Aghast, I stop, but the king laughs and says: “Bravo, Bravo, Queen Margaret! Go to it!” And I make another snip and then another until it is all off. He is still thickly bearded, but the cascade of hair that tumbled over his chest is now lying on the floor.
“Now, Lady Agnes,” he says, “I swear that you know how to shave a man. Show Her Grace how it is done and make sure that you don’t cut my poor throat.”
“Should we not send for a barber?” she asks, just as I did.
He laughs. “Oh, give me a noble shearing,” he says, and Lady Agnes sends for hot water and a razor and the finest soap and sets about him while I watch and the king laughs at my appalled expression.
At the end she wraps him in warm linen and he pats his newly bared face gently and then unwraps for me.
“What do you think?” he asks. “Do I please you now, Your Grace?”
His lower face is white-skinned, far paler than the rest, as it has been shaded from the sun and wind by his beard while his cheeks and his brow are deeply tanned, and he has white smile lines around his eyes. He looks odd, but his chin is strong and slightly dimpled and his mouth is sensual, the lips full and shapely.
“You do,” I say, for I can hardly say anything else.
He gives me a warm kiss on the mouth, and Agnes Howard claps her hands as if all the credit is due to her.
“Wait till they see me,” he says. “My loyal lords will know that I am wedded and bedded to an English princess indeed, for I have become so very English and smart.”
We stay in Holyroodhouse Palace until the autumn and there are constant jousts and celebrations. The French knight Antoine d’Arcy, the Sieur de la Bastie, is a great favorite, and swears that he would be my chevalier were he not already promised to Anne of Brittany. I pretend to be offended, but then he tells me that in honor of her he wears armor and trappings of pure white, and nothing suits him better. He really cannot switch to green. This makes me laugh and I agree that he has to be “the white knight” for the rest of his life, but that I will know and he will know that his heart is mine. This is very pretty nonsense, especially from a young man so dazzlingly good-looking, and it is part of the work of being a beautiful queen.
ON PROGRESS, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1503
When it gets a little colder and the leaves start to crisp and change color, my husband takes me on a progress to see some of the lands that are mine as queen. I think of my lady grandmother’s keen stewardship of her lands and her quiet avarice in adding to her landholding, and I look around me as I ride westwards out of the city, along the raised tracks that weave through the marshy lands at the edge of a great river, the Forth, and hope that my land is being profitably managed.
The trees grow down to the water’s edge and rain their leaves on us as if we were in a parade and people were throwing flowers. The woods are all the colors of bronze and gold, red and brown, and the higher slopes of the hills are ablaze with the red of rowan trees. The few villages along the way are surrounded by a patchwork of little fields and all the hedgerows are bright with hips and hawthorn berries, and in the thicker clumps there is the fat gleam of sloes as black as jet. Above our heads the geese flying south cross the sky in huge processions, one behind the other, and we often hear the loud creak of great wings as flights of swans go south away from the cold weather of the north. Every morning and every dusk we see herds of deer disappearing through the trees, moving so silently that the hounds cannot see them, and at night sometimes we hear wolves.
We travel agreeably together. James loves music and I play for him and the court musicians come with us. He has a passion for poetry and writing, and his court carries its own makar—a poet who travels with us everywhere like a cook, as if you might need poetry like dinner when you stop for the evening. To my surprise, James does need poetry like this; he wants it like wine before dinner, and he has an appetite for talk about books and philosophy. He expects me to learn their language, for unless I do I will never appreciate the beauty of the poems in the evening. He says they cannot be translated, you have to hear them as they were first sung. He says that they speak of the people and the land and they cannot be translated into English. “
When I protest, he tells me that further north the people only speak their own language called Erse and really, I should learn that too. The people of the islands far out in the cold north seas speak a language halfway to Danish and had to be forced to recognize his rule, thinking that they were a people and a kingdom all of their own. “And what is beyond them?” I ask.
“Far, far away, a land of whiteness,” he says. “Where they have no night and day but whole seasons of darkness and then months of white light, and the land is only ice.”
James has a profound interest in the workings of things, and wherever we go he is off to bell towers to see the mechanisms of clocks, or to water mills to see a new way of loading wheat into the grinding stones. In one little village they have a wind pump to get the water out of the ditches and he spends half the day with the Dutchman who built it, going up and down the sluices and up and down the stairs to the sails until he understands completely how it works. I can share some of his interests; but often I find him totally incomprehensible. He is fascinated by the workings of the human form, even the dirty bodies of poor people, and he will talk with doctors about the air that we breathe and if the same comes out as goes in, and where it goes and what it does, or how the blood will spurt from the neck but ooze from the arm and why that might be? He has no shame and he has no sense of disgust. When I say that I don’t want to know why the veins in my wrist are blue but the blood that spills out of them is red, he says: “But, Margaret, this is the stuff of life, this is the work of God. You must want to understand it all.”
When we approach Stirling, riding up and up the winding streets of the little town that clings to the side of the hill, he warns me that he keeps a philosopher, who has one of the towers as his private domain and is studying the nature of being itself. He has a forge and a distilling urn, and I must not be troubled by the noise of hammering or the strange smell of the smoke.
“But what is he doing there?” I ask, disturbed. “What do you hope to find?”
“If we were to be blessed, then we would find the fifth element,” he answers. “There is fire, water, earth, and air, and there is something else, the very essence of life. All these things have to be present for life, and we know that they live inside us, but there must be another element, unseen but felt, that animates us. If I could find that, I could make the philosopher’s stone and I would have power over life itself.”
“There are philosophers all over the world looking for the secret to eternal life and the stone that turns base matter into gold,” I remark. “And yet you hope that it will be you who finds it, before anyone else?”
“We are getting closer every day,” he assures me. “And he is also studying how birds fly, so that we might fly too.”
The castle guns salute us with a roar as they see our standard coming up the lane that winds to and fro up the steep hill, and the drawbridge crashes down and the portcullis rattles up. The huge stone walls are unbroken except for the gate that faces us. I can see—running away to the right and to the left—how the walls climb up along the cliff face, higher and higher until they are a narrow rim over the sheer drop below them, part of the cliff itself.
“The best of my castles,” James says with satisfaction. “Only a fool says that a fortress cannot be taken—but this one, Margaret, this is the brooch that pins the Highlands and the Lowlands together, this is the one that I would back against any other in Christendom. It is set so high that you can see for miles in every direction from the turrets, and no enemy can make the climb to the foot of the walls unseen, let alone scale them. They are built on solid rock, no one could mine them. I could hold this castle with twenty men against an army of thousands. Make sure you tell that to your father, when you write. He has nothing as secure as this, nothing as beautiful as this.”
“But he does not need one, for there is a perpetual peace now, thank God,” I say as if by rote. And then, in quite a different voice, I ask: “And who are these?”
As we ride through the thick main gate, as deep as a tunnel, I can see the great courtyard ahead, built on the slant of the hill. The servants are lining up and dropping to their knees and suddenly, summoned by the cannon blast, half a dozen children of all ages, dressed as richly as little lords and ladies, are running down the steps from the highest side of the building and bounding into the courtyard as if delighted to see us, dipping into a bow or a curtsey like a loyal mob. They tumble towards James as he leaps from the saddle and hugs them all in a wide embrace, muttering name after name and blessing them in Erse, so I don’t understand a word that is said.
My master of horse lifts me down from the saddle and sets me on my feet. I use his arm to steady myself as I turn to my husband. “Who are these?” I ask him again.
He is on his knees on the wet cobblestones so that he can kiss the smallest child and he takes a baby from its nurse as he gets up. His eyes are alight with love—I have never seen him like this before. The other little ones scamper around him, pulling at his riding jacket, and the oldest boy stands proudly beside the king as if he is of such importance that he should be presented to me, as if he expects that I shall be glad to meet him.
“Who are these?”
James beams at this beautiful surprise. “These are my children!” he announces, his wide-armed gesture taking in the six little heads and the one in his arms. “My little bairns.” He turns to them. “My little lords, ladies, this is the new Queen of Scotland, my wife. This is my Queen Margaret, who has come all the way from England to do me the honor of being my wife and your good mother.”
They all bow or curtsey with a trained grace. I incline my head but am completely lost as to what I should do. Wildly, I wonder if he was married before and nobody told me? Surely he cannot have a secret wife, the mother to all these children, hidden away here, in my castle. What should I do? If she were faced with these terrible circumstances, what would Katherine do?
“Do they have a mother?” I ask.
“Several,” James says cheerfully.
The eldest boy bows to me but I do not acknowledge him. I do not smile on the little bowed heads and, gently, James hands the baby back to her nurse. One of the Stirling ladies, seeing my frosty face, takes the hand of the toddler and shepherds the children towards the open doorway to the tower.
“Mothers,” the king shows no trace of awkwardness. “One, God bless her, Margaret Drummond, is dead. My dear friend Marion will not come to court again. Janet lives elsewhere, and Isabel too. They need not trouble you, you need not concern yourself with them. They will not be your friends or ladies-in-waiting.”
Not trouble me? Four mistresses? Four mistresses and only one of them thankfully dead? As if I will not be wondering about them and comparing myself to them every moment for the rest of my life. As if I will not be looking into the pretty faces of the little girls and wondering if they take after their mothers. As if I will not be thinking every time that James leaves court that he is visiting one of this pack of fertile women, or mourning the one who is mercifully gone.
“These will be half brothers and sisters to our own child when he comes,” the king says pleasantly. “Aren’t they like a band of little angels? I thought you would be pleased to meet them.”
“No,” is all that I am able to say. “I am not.”
STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1503
I write to my lady grandmother that my husband is mired in sin. I spend hours on my knees in the chapel puzzling over what I can tell her to ensure that she is as outraged as I am. I am very careful what I say about the certainty of his damnation because I don’t want to mention his rebellion and the death of his father. Rebellion is an awkward topic for us Tudors since we took the throne from the Plantagenets and they were ordained kings and every Englishman had sworn fealty to them. I am pretty sure that my lady grandmother crafted the rebellion against King Richard after
So I don’t speak of my husband’s rebellion against his father, but I stress to my lady grandmother that he is deep in sin and I am surprised and unhappy to encounter these bastard children. I don’t know what to make of the oldest boy, Alexander, who is placed next to his father at dinner, where they sit as family in descending order from ten-year-old Alexander right down to the baby on her nurse’s lap, who bangs on the table with her own silver spoon—with a thistle on the handle! The royal emblem! James behaves as if I should be happy to have them all at the royal table, as if these handsome children are a credit to us both.
This is a sin, I write. And also, it is an insult to me, the queen. If my father knew anything of them before my marriage, he should have ruled that these children could not stay in my castle. They should live far away from my dower lands. Surely I cannot be expected to house them? Really, they should never have been born. But I don’t know what I can do to dismiss them.
At least I can keep them out of my rooms. Their nursery and schoolroom are in one tower, the philosopher—as if it were not bad enough that I have to house him—is in the other. I have the queen’s interconnected rooms, presence chamber, privy chamber, and bedchamber, the most beautiful that I have ever seen. I make it clear to my ladies and to the king’s steward that only my ladies are to attend my rooms. There are to be no “bairns” of any age or description, regardless of their parentage, running in and out as if I wanted their company.