“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 swearing an unbreakable oath of loyalty to him. Certainly she was the great friend of his wife and carried her train at her coronation.
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.
I have to know more and I have to know what I can do. While I wait for advice from my lady grandmother I consult my lady-in-waiting Lady Katherine Huntly. She is from the Gordon clan and is a kinswoman to my husband. She can speak Erse as he does—as they all do—and she knows these people; she probably knows the mothers of the children. I suppose that half of them are related to her. This is not a nobility, it is a tribe—and these are little bastard savages.
I wait till my musicians are playing and we are seated at our sewing. We are working on an altar cloth that shows Saint Margaret as she confronts the dragon. I think that I too am forced to confront a dragon of sin, and Katherine can tell me how to defeat it.