Little James is perfect. I have dressed him in green and white to remind everyone that he is a Tudor prince, but on his back he carries his father’s lyre. It’s a beautiful touch. I am wearing white, widow white, and a cloth-of-gold train and a heavy gable hood in gold like a crown. My belly is broad, as if to remind everyone that I gave King James sons and heirs. Beside me the nursemaid holds the baby Alexander in his white lawn gown with a perfectly white lace shawl gathered around him. Here is the widowed queen—we say it just by standing here. Here is the King of Scotland, here is his brother, the Duke of Ross. We are dressed in white like the heavenly host. Who is going to dare to part us? Who would bring us down to earth?
People roar with approval at the sight of the three of us. We are royal Stewarts, we are beloved. Nobody can hear anything over the shouts. The people are mad for the sight of their little king and his mother dressed like a martyr, pale as a widow, her belly large with another Scot.
The delegates from parliament come forward and I call out: “Stay and declare the cause of your coming!”
I see the grimace from the councillor in front. This is not going to look well, given the mood of the crowd, and he is wishing himself elsewhere, doubting that he can do this at all. In a voice so low that the crowd shout out, “Sing up!” and “What does he say?” and “Only villains whisper!” he tells me quietly that they have come for the king. He must live in the care of his new guardians who have been appointed by the Duke of Albany and the council.
I make a little gesture with my hand and the portcullis slams down before us, the delegation shut out, my household and myself safely within. James jumps at the rattle of the chain and the scream of the metal coming down and the crash of the teeth on stone, and I pinch his little hand to remind him not to cry. The people roar with approval and I raise my voice and shout to them that I am my son’s guardian, and his mother, that I will consider the recommendations of parliament, but my son is my son, he will always be my son and I must always be with him.
The roar of approval is an endorsement. I let the adulation wash over me, restore me, and then I meet the eyes of the parliamentary delegation through the stout portcullis with bold triumph. I have won this match, they have lost. I smile at them and turn and lead my son and household back inside. Archibald follows.
I try to hold that moment of triumph. I try to remember the deep bellow of the crowd and my knowledge that the people of Scotland love me. I try to remember the endearing touch of James’s little hand in mine, knowing that I have a son, knowing that my son is a king. What greater joy can a woman have than this? I have achieved what it took my grandmother a hard lifetime to achieve, and I am still only twenty-five. I have a royal family, and I have a husband who risks everything to be with me.
I am clinging to the love that the Scots had for my husband, have for my son, surely have for me. I am clinging to my love for Ard—I cannot consider what it has cost me—when I get a letter from England with Mary’s scrawl over the front and her seal on the flap. She is using the royal seal of France; she will forever call herself the Queen of France, I know it.
Dear Sister, dearest Sister, I am so happy, this must be my greatest day. I have married my beloved Charles, for the second time, in England, and Harry and Katherine came to the wedding and rejoiced in my happiness. We have a terrible debt to pay, we will never have any money, we will have to live on prayer like Franciscans, but at least I have got my way. Even queens can marry where they love. Katherine did, you did, I have. Why should I not choose my happiness when she and you did? And everyone who says that I am a fool can ask themselves—who married the greatest king in Christendom and then married for love? Me!
There is more. It goes on and on. She predicts that Harry will be unable to be angry for long. He has fined them into poverty, they will never be out of debt to him, but he loves his friend Charles and he adores her . . . and so on, and so on, crisscross over the page, with foolish exclamations about her happiness added in the margins.
At the very end she says that she must surely be forgiven the debt because Harry is in the greatest of spirits about Katherine’s pregnancy. They are certain this time the baby will go to full term, and all the physicians say that she is carrying him well.
I hold the letter in my lap and look out of the window. I remind myself that I have two sons in the nursery, and I am carrying another child. I have not married a nobody that I am trying to foist on my family and drag into the nobility. My son with Ard will not be a prince, but he will be born an earl in his own right. What was Charles Brandon’s family a generation ago? How will Mary bear it when the first flush has worn off and she sees a man whose entire reputation rests on her? Does she think that the joy of the first year lasts forever?
I have a young husband, a handsome husband from a great family, and he loves me, only me, while Katherine has to look the other way from Harry’s infidelities and pretend not to mind. I am a queen just as good as her, and better than her—far better—I have a son who is king. She gives birth to nothing but dead babies or babies who die after birth; she must be wretched. She should be wretched. When I think what she has done to me I know that she should be wretched forever.
But it is no comfort to think of her hunched over her swelling belly and praying that this time God grants her a live child, hoping that Harry won’t be unfaithful during the months of her confinement. Although I feel sour and envious, I find I get no pleasure in imagining her being wretched. For despite listing my blessings—my handsome husband, my two boys, the baby in my belly—I feel rather wretched too.
We wait to hear what the response will be from the Duke of Albany, and the council of lords. Archibald rides out with James every day, teaching him how to sit on his pony and raise a hand to take a salute. He talks to him of battles. I don’t like them to go far afield, as I am afraid that the council may grow impatient and kidnap our little king. I am uneasy, nervous in my pregnancy. I think that I am allowing myself to be frightened of shadows. Then sometimes I think that I have much to fear.
I have the vivid dreams of pregnancy. I start to think of Albany with dread, as if he were the devil himself and not a careful, courteous politician. I think he will take James by force. I think he will take Ard from me. I think of him stripping John, Lord Drummond, of his wealth, for nothing more than being a good advisor to me, a tender grandfather. Although they have promised to release him from imprisonment, they have ruined him, taking his estates and his castles. Ard has lost his inheritance and now we have no money at all. Bishop Gavin Douglas is imprisoned with no hope of release, and my secret letters to Harry have been read by everyone. Everyone knows that I was plotting to bring the English down on my own country, that my husband and his family were profiting from my treason. George Douglas, Ard’s younger brother, has fled to England, marking the whole family as traitors. I feel as if I have lost all my friends, I feel as if Ard has lost his family for me, and yet still my brother sends neither money nor help. Still Katherine does not advise him that they should compensate me—yet who brought me into this danger but her?
I know that the Duke of Albany will not wait forever, and at the end of July he sends for James, my son. The council is determined that I hand over the little king to his new guardians.