“The English queen, Katherine, said she wanted his body as a trophy. So they turned him over in the mud and took his breastplate and his coat, his beautiful coat, they stripped it off him, and his gloves, and his boots and his spurs. So he was barefoot, like a dead beggar. They took his sword, they levered off the crown from his helmet. They stripped him like he was a spoil of war. They threw all his things in a box, and they put his body on a cart and they have taken it away to Berwick.”
My knees give way then and someone helps me down to sit on a stool.
“My husband?”
“Dragged from the battlefield like a carcass on a wagon. The English queen wanted his dead body for a trophy, and now she has him.”
I will never forgive her this. I will never forget this. In France, Harry wins a battle at somewhere called Thérouanne, and in reply to his triumph Katherine writes to him that she has won a battle just as good as his. She boasts that she wanted to send him my husband’s severed head but that her English advisors prevented her. She wanted to pickle James in brine and send him as a gift. But Thomas Howard had already had the body encased in lead and sent on a wagon to London. Deprived of her corpse, Katherine sends instead the royal standard, and James’s own coat. His red coat, with the gold thread, that I embroidered myself. Now it is stained with his blood, and dirty with the mud of the battlefield, and stinking of smoke. His brains were spilled on the embossed collar where I had sewn golden thistles. But she sends it to Harry, triumphantly, as if such a thing can be a gift, as if such a thing should be anywhere but reverently buried in the king’s own chapel.
She is a barbarian, worse than a barbarian. This is the body of her brother-in-law, the sacred body of a king. This is the widow who saw her own husband taken out in the most solemn procession to be buried, traveling in the night with burning torches, a woman who wore black and begged me to be kind to her in her grief—but when I am widowed, she has my husband’s body tumbled into a cart and brought like a butcher’s carcass to Smithfield. What savages are these? Only a brute would not return a king’s body to his people for an honorable burial. Only a beast would feed off it, as she wants to do. I will never forgive her this. I will never forget it. She is no sister to me, she is a harpy—a monster who tears at flesh.
I will never speak of it either. I cannot put it out of my mind. But they must never know how I hate them for this and how I will never forgive her. I am going to make peace with this thief, with this grave robber. I am going to have to claim sisterhood with this wolf that feasts off the dead. I am going to have to send ambassadors and write letters and perhaps even meet the man who was once my brother and the vulture that is his wife. If I am to be queen and get my son on the throne, I am going to need their support and their help. I am going to beg for it and never let them see the contempt in my eyes. I am going to have to be what my husband commanded me to be: a great woman and not a silly girl. But she is a demon, a woman who besmirches the honor of her place, who has smeared my mother’s throne with blood. She is a woman who wants to be equal to a king, a woman who sat beside my brother’s deathbed, and ordered the killing of my husband. She is a Lilith. I hate her.
We have to get my baby James to Stirling Castle—the fortress that his father promised me was the safest in the kingdom. He will have to be crowned there. I dare not take him farther north to Scone Abbey; the danger is too great. Thomas Howard, no great friend before and my deadly enemy now, is almost certain to follow up his victory by invading my poor country. With all our cannons on our ships at sea or stuck in the mud of Flodden, how can we defend our capital city? What will prevent Thomas Howard’s victorious army from marching on to my palace at Linlithgow? Or coming farther north to Stirling? Thomas Howard—who knows the traditions of Scotland as well as I do—may be coming now, as fast as he can, on a forced march to snatch my little King of Scotland before he is crowned.
We set out before dawn the next day, while the moon is low and only a line of gray, like tailor’s chalk on mourning cloth, marks the sky in the east. Ahead of us goes the royal standard and the guards shoulder to shoulder around it. In the center rides my husband’s makar, the poet Davy Lyndsay, on a strong horse with James, not yet two years old, on the saddle bow before him. A standard bearer rides beside them with the prince’s own coat of arms rippling over their heads. Nobody can attack us and leave the prince down on the ground with a spear through his heart and then pretend that they did not know who it was. James sits up straight, confident in Davy’s grip. They have ridden together dozens of times, but never before pursued by an enemy at breakneck speed. Davy sees my white face and gives me his lopsided smile.
I ride just behind them, certain now that I am with child, my belly tight with the baby that James has left me, my eyes on the son that I have to guard. I don’t think of anything; I just watch my son, and the windswept road ahead of us. If I took a moment to think, then I would pull up my horse and lean forward on his neck and cry for fear, like a girl. I dare not think. I can only ride and hope that we get to Stirling before the English come after us.
As soon as we are north of Linlithgow the open countryside gets wilder and bigger and the skies get higher. The rounded hills of Lothian, great bowls of valleys and wide ranges of uplands, become grander still as we go north into Stirlingshire. As the sun comes up and we ride onward we enter the thick forests of the valley floors. There is just a trace of the road through the forest, skirting a boggy patch, winding around a long-fallen tree, disappearing altogether where a stream has burst its banks and swept the track away. We have to keep the rising sun behind us, but we can hardly see it through thickness of the canopy. We ride blind, hoping that we are going west. James knew the way very well. He made this journey often, riding between Linlithgow and Stirling and then onward to the north to keep the peace and sit in judgment. But James will never ride in these high hills again. I don’t think of this. I look to his son and see that he has fallen asleep in the saddle, in Davy’s careful grip. I won’t think that my son’s father will never ride with him like this, that his father will never ride again.
No one has planted these woods, no one manages them. No one fells them, not for firewood or charcoal, not for beams for the shipyards or houses. There are no shipyards or houses anywhere near, there are no charcoal burners’ cottages, there are no woodsmen making a living from little shanties. There are not even poachers for there is scant game, nor brigands for there are not enough people for them to prey on, there are so few travelers. The woods are empty of anyone but elusive deer and the beasts that we cannot see: foxes, boar, and wolves. The guards close up, riding knee to knee around Davy Lyndsay and my precious boy, and they lower the royal standard and hold it like a lance, so that it does not catch on the low, sweeping boughs of trees.
This is not like England, not even like the great royal parks of England where no one is allowed to cut trees or hunt game. These are thick forests like the ones before the making of man, and we are like ghosts riding silently through them. We don’t belong here. These trees are older than the time of Christ; these are not Christian forests, they are the land of the little people, the old people that James used to tell me about in stories.