I revel in his attention, it is like salve on a burn. To be loved by a man like Archibald Douglas is to be scorched, to be rejected is to be scarred. I want to heal and forget that I ever knew him. I want to rest in the adoration of Henry Stewart. I want to sleep beside him in the cool Scots nights and never dream of Archibald again.
With Henry I can be peaceful, which is just as well for I have many enemies and no allies. Archibald withdraws to Tantallon Castle and sends a stream of complaints about me to my brother Harry. He says that he has tried to reconcile with me but I am madly dangerous. He says that Harry’s own ambassadors will confirm that I turned the guns on him. Harry and his mouthpiece Cardinal Wolsey urge Archibald to try, and try again. They want the Douglas clan to keep the French out. They say that he must command me, that he may force me to reconcile. Ugly advice, violent words.
They won’t listen to me, they won’t support me. I hear nothing from them for the whole of the Christmas season and then I get a few pretty gifts and a note from my sister Mary. She speaks of one of the best Christmases ever . . . the clothes and the dancing and the masques and the gifts . . . at the very end she tells me why the court headed by an aging queen is making so very merry.
Mary Carey has a rival in her sister, Anne Boleyn—really! these Boleyn girls! She was my little maid-in-waiting in France, and she is very charming, very witty, very clever. I would never have been so kind to her if I had known what she would do with my lessons. I am sorry to say that she and her sister are turning the whole court wild with an unstoppable round of entertainments. Harry is quite dizzy between the two of them. He is cold to our sister Katherine, who cannot please him whatever she does, and distant to me. The Boleyn girls have been queens of the court this Christmas and they devise all the entertainments and games and Anne Boleyn wins them all. She makes her sister, who was so beloved, seem dull beside her, she makes me seem plain, think how she compares to poor Katherine! She is dazzling. God knows where this will end, but this is no pretty little whore; she is hungry for more.
Nothing about me. It is as if I never commanded Holyrood and turned the cannon up the Via Regis and defied my own husband, stared him down and defeated him. Nobody knows that I have left him, I am not a deserted wife, I am mistress of my own destiny. I am the very center of talk for the whole world but for London, where Harry has a new fancy and is making his queen unhappy. That is all that matters to London. It is against this, no doubt, that Archibald struggles to be heard. This is why I am forgotten. I may be fighting for my son’s rights, plotting to keep him safe, desperate for help from England, planning for Scotland, but all that they think about in London is Anne Boleyn’s promising dark eyes and Harry’s doting smile. Thank God that as I receive this letter I can rest my head on Henry Stewart’s shoulder and know that someone loves me. In London they may have all but forgotten me, but now I have someone who loves me for myself.
But there is no escape from Archibald. The English ambassador insists that Clan Douglas be admitted to Edinburgh and the lords who are in English pay must be admitted to the council. In turn they promise to support me as regent, and we all agree that there shall be peace with England and a betrothal between James and his cousin Princess Mary.
“You will bring peace and an alliance with England,” Archdeacon Magnus promises me. “You will serve both your countries. They will both be grateful to you.”
I am in a terror of being near to Archibald again. I feel as if he can cast a spell on me and I will be helpless before him. I know that I am being foolish, but I feel the helpless horror of a mouse in the yard which will freeze to watch a snake coming closer and closer, knowing that death is coming, incapable of running away.
“I don’t really want to walk with Archibald in procession,” I say feebly to Henry Stewart and James Hamilton, Earl of Arran. But how can I tell these two men that I am shaking at the thought of Archibald coming near me?
“He should be ashamed even to come near you,” Henry says hotly. “Why can’t we insist he stays away?”
“When was the last time you saw him?” Hamilton asks.
I shake my head to clear the vivid picture of Ard, so tall on his black horse, and the sulfurous smoke all around him. “I don’t know. I can’t remember.”
“There has to be a procession,” James Hamilton says. “You don’t have to go handclasped; but you will have to walk in procession. The world has to see that you will work together with the council.”
Henry spits out an oath and goes from the fireside in my privy chamber to stand at the window and look out at the swirling snow. “How can they ask it of you?” he demands. “How can your brother ask it of his innocent sister?”
“They do ask it,” James Hamilton says to me, looking worried. “You have to show that all the lords are united in the council, that the council is as one. The people have to see the council all together. But it’s as bad for him: he has to kneel to you and give you an oath of fealty.”
“You should spit in his face!” Henry swears. He turns to me in sudden despair. “You don’t mean to do it? You’re not going back to him?”
“No! Never! And he can’t kiss me,” I say in sudden panic. “He can’t take my hands.”
“He has to swear fealty,” Hamilton repeats patiently. “He can’t hurt you. We’ll all be beside you. He will kneel to you and put his hands together, you will take his hands in yours. Then he will bow and kiss your hand. That’s all.”
“All!” Henry explodes. “Everyone will think that they are husband and wife once more.”
“They won’t,” I say, finding my courage at his despair. “It means his fealty to me. It means I have won. Thirty paces—we have to take little more than thirty paces. Don’t think that it means anything, don’t think that I don’t love you, don’t think that I take him as my husband again for I swear that I do not. I never will. But I have to walk beside him, and I have to hold his hand, and we have to be dowager queen and the Earl of Angus, her husband, to lead all the lords into the council.”
“I can’t bear it!” He is wild, like an angry child.
“Bear it for me,” I say steadily. “For I have to bear it for my son James.”
At once his gaze softens. “For James,” he says.
“I have to do this for him.”
“It’s only a public oath of fealty,” James Hamilton reminds us both.
I hold myself still so I don’t shiver.
I walk beside my son James dressed in cloth of gold, both of us wearing our crowns as we enter the Tollbooth at Edinburgh. Archibald leads the procession carrying the crown, James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, follows him carrying the scepter, and the Earl of Argyll comes behind him with James’s ceremonial sword. Behind the three of them come James and I, walking side by side, with the cloth of estate carried over our heads. It is bitingly cold—we can see our breath in the air as we walk along—and little snowflakes swirl around us. I am paying a high price for peace between England and Scotland, a high price for the safety of my son. At dinner tonight in Holyroodhouse I will have to share a loving cup with my husband and send him the choicest dishes. He will smile and take the best cuts of meat just as he is legally collecting the rents from my lands once again. I will not look across the room at Henry Stewart where he sits, white-faced, among James’s household, eating nothing.
It is this evening that the English ambassador Archdeacon Thomas Magnus gives me a letter from Katherine herself.
“She sent it to you? Why not directly to me?”
“She wanted me to give it to you on this day, the day that you and your husband led the council.”
“Oh, did the earl dictate it? Just as he decided the procession?” I ask bitterly.
The archdeacon holds it up to show me. “Her Grace wrote it,” he says. “See, here is her seal unbroken. I don’t know what she writes to you, nor does anyone else. But she said you should have it when the Earl of Angus joined the council and swore loyalty to your son.”
“She knew it would happen?”