“Where else?”
“Go to Stirling,” I say rapidly. “It’s mine—nobody can deny that—go to Stirling and muster the castle guard. Check the reinforcements and make it a safe refuge for us, if it ever goes wrong here.”
I am making work for him, giving him a task that will make him feel important. “Please,” I say. “Though you can’t protect me here, you can give me somewhere safe to go, if we ever need it. Who knows what the Douglas clan will do?”
“They will do whatever the English command,” he says drily. “And you will too.”
“I will for now,” I agree. “I have to, for now. But you know that I am working for my freedom and for the freedom of my son to be a true king of a free country.”
“But still you keep Douglas and his clan on your side,” he says astutely.
I hesitate before telling him the truth. My feelings are so contradictory I can hardly explain them to myself. “I am afraid of him,” I admit. “I know he is ruthless, I don’t know how far he will go. And because of that, when he is on my side I know that I am safe.” I give an unhappy laugh. “I have no enemy outside the castle when he is inside. When he is good to me I know that nothing can hurt me.”
“Don’t you see that you must get free of him?” he demands with the impatient clarity of youth. “You are living with him for fear.”
“My sisters insist,” I say. “My brother insists. I am doing it for James.”
“You will not become his wife in deed as well as in name?”
He is a young man, he cannot tell when I am lying. “Never,” I tell him, thinking that Katherine has promised just that, at Whitsun. “Don’t ever think it.”
“You don’t love him?”
He does not yet know how a woman can love and fear and hate all at the same time. “No,” I say carefully. “It is not love like that.”
He softens, as he bends his head and kisses my clinging hands. “Very well,” he says. “I will go to Stirling and wait for you to send for me. You know that I only want to serve you.”
I endure the spring without my young lover, though I miss his sulky presence and jealous looks from the back of the hall. Every day I grow more anxious as Archibald’s ambition becomes clearer, as he increases his influence on the council of lords, and his determination to rule Scotland becomes more obvious. His connection with England is so strong, his fortune (my fortune) is so great, his authority as a man dominates them all. He remains tender and attentive and easy with me but I am dreading Easter and then Whitsun when he will return to my bed and I can see no way to refuse him. What makes it worse is that he speaks of it as an agreement that we have both entered freely, as if we wanted to wait for the season of summer to mark our reconciliation, as if we hope for another child like a pair of pretty blackbirds nesting in an apple tree. Katherine’s plan—to give me time to become accustomed to him—has become a courtship leading, inexorably, back to our marriage.
He’s too clever to say any of this openly, but he orders new hangings for my bed and new linen, and tells the sempstress that it must be ready for Whitsun. He speaks confidently of the summer and says that we will go to Linlithgow, and farther north, that we must take James around his country on a royal tour, as his father used to do. He says that he will teach Margaret to ride astride, like a boy, so that she can enjoy hunting and riding out. There is never any doubt in his voice that we will be together, man and wife, this summer and every summer thereafter.
Confidently, he applies to Cardinal Wolsey for the full use of my lands: all my rents and all my fees and all the produce will go to him as my acknowledged husband. I can get no news of the woman that he once called his wife, Janet Stewart of Traquair. I don’t know if she is living at Tantallon Castle in state as its lady or in one of my properties, and no one dares to tell me. I don’t even know if she is discarded and he has abandoned her and she is somewhere, perhaps Traquair House on a knife edge of hope that he might come back to her and fear that he will. He never mentions her, and a terrible awkwardness stops my tongue too. I have lost the courage to challenge him.
By singing the song of our happiness, of our marriage against the odds, of our struggle to be together, he has painted a new picture. I can see how he must have done this so well in London, as he does it here too, in Edinburgh. He convinces my son, almost he convinces me that he and I were deeply in love, separated by accident, true through so many difficulties, and are now restored to each other. I cannot cling on to my own sense of myself. I start to think that he is right, that he loves me, that he is my only safety. His view of the world, his opinion of me, his account of our lives together, slowly overwhelms me.
One day, he even dares to say: “The smoke of the cannons cleared and I saw you behind the guns, and I thought then—my God, that is the only woman I have ever wanted. It’s always been a great passion with us, Margaret, hatred and love all at once.”
“I gave them the order to prepare to fire. I knew it was you,” I tell him.
He smiles, his confidence is quite unshaken. “I know you did, and you saw me look at you, and you knew what I was thinking.”
I remember his silhouette on his horse, as he stood at the height of the Via Regis as if he were daring me to fire on him again.
“No, I didn’t know what you were thinking,” I say stubbornly. “All I wanted was for you to go away.”
“Oh, I’ll never do that.”
He represents my brother, the great king, he has the God-given certainty of my sister-in-law, the Queen of England, he is endorsed by the power of man and of God. He has me in his thrall. I am not in love—God save me from such grief—but he dominates the court and he masters James and he lords it over me and I feel as if there is nothing that I can say or do to claim my freedom. He tells me what I think as if my own mind is subject to him. I can only wait for news from Rome that my divorce has been approved, and only then will I be able to say to him that I am free and that he is a lord of the council and nothing more to me. On that day I will be able to tell him that he is not my husband, he is not stepfather to the king. He is father to my daughter but he does not command me. He may be an ally of the King of England but he is no longer his kinsman. Every night I kneel before my crucifix and pray that the Holy Father’s clerks will write at once and free me from this strange half life where I live with a husband that I dare not defy, and long for a man that I may not even see.