He is dressed like a poor man in a brown wool cape with a plaid over his shoulder of gray and brown. He has a thick belt around his waist and a great knife in a cheap scabbard on his hip. But he has his own good riding boots, and his own unmistakable beam of triumph.
“I got away!” He scoops me up into his arms and kisses me, a smacking kiss on both cheeks, then he takes me by the waist and dances me around the yard as his horse snorts and backs away from us and the men cheer. “I got away. At last. I’ve done it. I got away.”
“How, how did you?”
“He went off to the borders to make war on his own blackguards and I told everyone else that I would be up at dawn to go hunting. I went to bed early and so did everyone else. Jockie Hart and these two had my horse ready and a spare set of clothes and swore they would come with me. We had the horses out of the stable and were away up the North Road before dawn, before they even knew we were gone.”
“He’ll come after you,” I say, with a glance towards the south as if I can see Archibald’s army marching from Edinburgh.
“For sure. And he’ll guess I have come to you. Let’s get in and get the gates closed and post guards.”
He sweeps me in, his arm around my shoulder, and I call for lights as we go into the hall and the household wakes around us, half of them sleeping on trestles in the hall, getting to their feet and cheering the news that the king is here, the king himself, and he will never be captured again.
“We must fly the royal standard,” I order. “Then if they come against us they are declared traitors. And you must issue a warrant to ban any of the Clan Douglas from coming near you.”
“Write it out,” James says. “I’ll sign it and seal it with my ring.”
“You brought it?”
“I always wear it. Archibald has the big seal but I have this.”
“And send out a declaration that all the lords who are loyal to James are to come here to join His Grace. We’ll call a council of the lords and then a parliament in Edinburgh,” I say to my chief clerk, who is writing frantically, his writing desk slung around his neck, scattering sand on the letter to dry it. I give a little excited laugh. “It is like a masque, starting again. But this time we have the costumes and we know the moves.”
“And write to Edinburgh Castle to order the release of Henry Stewart,” James says.
I look up.
“It is your wish?” he asks me.
“Yes, of course, but I thought you were opposed to my marriage.”
“I was opposed to the scandal, not to the marriage,” he says, pedantic as any young man. “It was Archibald who ordered your husband’s arrest in my name. He wanted to please your brother and I consented, so he would think that you and I were enemies. Of course, Henry Stewart is not my choice; but if he is yours, he can be freed and I will make him a lord. What’s his estate?”
“Methven,” I say. “He can be Lord Methven.”
“Write it down,” James says, laughing. “These are my first acts as ruling king.”
EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND, SUMMER 1528
We enter Edinburgh in triumph, and it is a greater triumph than ever before. The lords meet us at the Tollbooth, the people throw flowers and scented water from the upper windows and crowd the narrow streets to see James and me together, smiling and acknowledging the cheers. James, their king, is finally the ruling king and Archibald is nowhere to be seen.
We keep the castle armed, victualed, and ready for a siege because I am constantly afraid that Archibald will return with the Douglas clan at his back. James has guards on his bedroom door and sleeps with an armed man on a pallet bed beside him. My brother Harry writes to me that I will be damned for all eternity for breaking my marriage vows and living in adultery. I don’t even reply. It is a terrible thing for a brother to write such words of condemnation to his sister, but a brother who is leaving his wife every day in order to pursue another woman, and is chaste only because his mistress is playing a long game, has no right to speak so to me. Never again will I think that morality is different for men.
The city buzzes with rumors of a Douglas army massed in the hills outside and preparing to set a siege. The citizens and the merchants support their young king but they are afraid of the Douglas power. Only six years ago the Douglas clan spilled blood in the streets of Edinburgh, and it is less than four years since I opened fire on them from Holyroodhouse. The people don’t want to be trapped in their own city between two warring powers; there is nothing in the world worse than a civil war.
The lords agree that the Douglas clan have been treasonous. The declaration is put to the horn—the herald goes to the mercat cross and, after three blasts of the trumpet, announces the names of traitors. My former husband, Archibald, is under sentence of death. Our enmity has finally brought us to this point. I have not just divorced him and married another man, I have ordered his death. I may have to watch him executed. This must be the end of everything between us.
“We should go to Stirling,” Henry advises. We are in James’s privy chamber. I am seated on the throne as James strides up and down, looking out of the windows. Some of the older lords are with us. Most have chosen the king against his stepfather. Nearly all of them say that they were loyal all along but were bribed by English gold and afraid of Archibald.
“Back to Stirling?” James asks. “I won’t look as if I am afraid. I won’t run away.”
“Stirling to regroup,” I advise. “Archibald cannot take Stirling Castle, and if he sets a siege before it, against the royal standard, then he is a self-declared traitor and no one should support him. Let’s go there, till we know if he is going to surrender to you and hand over his castles.”
James turns to the other lords. “Would this be your advice?” he asks with careful courtesy.
“Aye,” one of them says. “And we need to know what Harry of England is going to do for us, now we have put his nephew on the throne and his sister is married to another lord.”
They all turn to look at me, and I am ashamed that I cannot promise that I have my brother’s support.
“The King of England has always favored the Earl of Angus,” someone says bluntly.
“He cannot do so now!”
“Over his own sister?” someone else asks.
I turn my head away so they cannot see my grimace. He might.
EDINBURGH CASTLE, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1528
Parliament meets, and since Archibald did not come to the council of lords, nor swear loyalty to James, nor surrender his castles and lands as he was ordered to do, they confirm him as a traitor under sentence of death.
But even now, against the will of the Scots lords, against the rights of a king, against the wishes of a sister, my brother still supports Archibald, though he has taken arms against me and my son together. Incredibly, within weeks of James’s escape, there is a letter from England written by a clerk, addressed to James as king, advising him to restore Archibald to his power and his property as the best and wisest advisor that Scotland can offer.
“He says nothing of you,” James observes.
“No,” I say. “Perhaps he is not writing any personal letters. They are very ill in England.”
The Sweat—the terrible sickness that some people call the Tudor disease—is rife, and Harry has had a terror of it ever since our grandmother swore that he and Arthur should never be near anyone who was ill. The Tudor boys were such rarities that they could not be near disease. While his subjects die in their shops, behind the counters, in the churches at prayer, in the streets on their way home, Harry takes off for a breakneck tour of England, going from one great house to another and only staying if they swear that there is no disease behind their high walls. Anne Boleyn herself is taken ill and has gone off to Hever. If Katherine’s God is merciful to the queen who prays to Him with such fervor, Anne Boleyn will die there.