“We have to get away,” he reminds me. “We have to meet with Alexander Hume and his guard, and ride to my castle before they know you are gone.”
I wrap my arms around him and I put my belly against his back. My baby’s father is going to save us. He has rescued us from an unjust imprisonment. We are free.
TANTALLON CASTLE, FIRTH OF FORTH, SCOTLAND, SEPTEMBER 1515
We ride all night through country that I sense, but cannot see. There are wide skies above, and a rolling landscape around us. I hear owls, and once a white-faced ghost of a barn owl lifts off the hedge before us, making the horse shy, and I grip onto Ard in fright. For most of the journey I can hear the sea, which grows louder and louder, and then I hear the piercing cry of seagulls.
It is dawn before we come to Tantallon Castle, Ard’s own fortress, his family home, and I gasp when there is a gap in the trees and I see it for the first time. It is a formidable hulk of a building, beautifully designed with proud turrets each capped with a conical roof. It is faced with gray limestone but here and there the stone has been battered away by hard weather, and the plum color of the local stone makes the castle gleam as warm as sunrise.
It faces the North Sea, where the sun is showing long brilliant rays across the rolling waves. The sound of the sea roars on, as loud as our hoofbeats; the smell of the sea makes me lift my head, and breathe the salt air. The seagulls cry, whirling in the dawn light, and beyond the castle I see the Bass Rock: a great dome of rock like a mountain, blazing white in the morning light, with a cloud of seabirds around its cliffs and a little fort perched facing the land. Castle and island face each other, equally impregnable. Round the castle there is a constant swirl of house martins, and now I hear their screaming cries.
“We can’t stay here long,” Angus says. “It’s too small, there’s no comfort for you, and it can’t withstand a siege.”
“Surely it could hold out forever!”
He shakes his head. “Not if Albany brings up cannon. We know he has Mons. If we set a siege we can’t get out again, and he could wait us out. This is a good castle for short battles, for defense and attack. But we can’t wait for your brother. Are you sure he will come?”
“He will not forget me,” I say awkwardly. “My sisters will tell him . . .”
“Will he send Lord Dacre?”
“I promise you, Harry loves me. His wife will tell him; the Dowager Queen of France will speak for me. He will not forget a Tudor princess. He will act now I have escaped. He will come for me, or I will go to him.”
“I certainly hope so,” Archibald says unpleasantly. “For if he does not rescue you, I don’t know what we’re going to do. Or where we will go next.”
“Next?” I ask. “But I need to rest, Archibald. I need to be somewhere safe to have my child.” The excitement of the escape has worn off and I am anxious about my boys, left in Albany’s keeping in Stirling. Someone will tell my son that his mother has run away and left him and his brother to their enemies.
“You can rest here,” he says begrudgingly. “We will tell Lord Dacre that you have escaped, as he demanded. We are near to the border. He must come for you.”
We ride down a narrow track and cross a massive ditch, deep enough to lose a regiment of cavalry. They would go down and never ride up again. There is an open field and then the castle moat crossed by a wooden bridge to the gatehouse.
The guards recognize my husband, and I have a flush of pride that the drawbridge falls down and the portcullis rattles up without a word being spoken. Ard rides into his own, like the lord that he is.
Inside the curtain walls it is a jumble like a poor village. The farmers and the peasants and serfs who live outside the castle have learned, in the way that these people always learn, that Archibald has ridden against the governor in the service of his wife, the queen regent. They may not understand what this means but they know that trouble is coming their way. Everyone who lives within a score of miles in any direction has piled inside the castle walls, and they have brought their livestock too. I see what Archibald means, that such a great castle cannot withstand a siege. The people will eat up everything in days.
“They shouldn’t be here,” I say to Ard, quietly against his back. “You’ll have to send them away.”
“These are my people,” he says grandly. “Of course they come to me when we are in danger. My danger is their danger. They want to share it.”
Ard jumps off the horse and turns to lift me down. I am cramped from sitting behind him for so long, and weary and hungry.
“The best rooms are not very comfortable,” he warns me. “But your ladies shall take you up.”
I cannot think why he would bring me somewhere that is neither defensible nor comfortable, but I go up to my rooms without a word of complaint. He is right. Inside the cold walls it is damp and bleak. The fire lit in my bedchamber steadily emits smoke which finds its way out, upwards and through the arrow-slit windows, and when I go to look out towards the sea I shiver in the cold mist that slides in over the sill. Though I try to be glad that there will be no attacking my tower from the land, I cannot help but long for the luxury that I left behind in Linlithgow.
“Fetch a warming pan, I’ll go to bed,” I decide. But then there is a long discussion about where the warming pan might be, and whether a brick would do as well, and that the sheets, which are rough and coarse, are not really damp. I am so tired that I lie on the bed and wrap myself in my traveling cloak while they puzzle how to make the room comfortable and what they have that is fit for me to eat.
All my royal furniture and linen is left behind in Linlithgow. It won’t get here for days. I don’t have more than one change of clothes. I understand that we could not travel with my wagons with all my treasures, but this is not good enough. I cannot be neglected. I doze for a little while but I wake when Ard comes quietly to my bedside.
“What now?”
He bites his lip, he looks intensely anxious. “A message from Albany. He knows you’re here. We’ll have to go to the Humes’ castle, Blackadder. It’s properly garrisoned and guarded, and they have promised to defend you. They’ve got nothing left to lose—they’re declared as traitors already. And they are well paid.”
“Paid?” I demand. “Not by me!”
“Dacre,” he says shortly. “He pays all the border lords.”
“But what for?” It is Dacre who has advised me into this danger. I have trusted him with everything.
“He pays the lords to keep the borders in continual uproar,” Archibald says, “so that he can invade and claim to be keeping the peace. So that he can raid like a reiver himself, stir up trouble and steal cattle. So that he can have some lords obliged to England for money or support, and so that your brother can argue in the courts of Europe that the Scots are ungovernable. So we all look like lawless fools.”
“He is my brother’s chief advisor!” I protest. “He serves me. He is loyal to me, I know this. He advises me, he cares for my safety.”
“Doesn’t stop him being an enemy to the Scots,” Archibald says stonily. “Anyway, he has paid the Humes enough to keep them on your side. We can go there.”
“What about my goods and my gowns and my jewels? My wagons are all coming here?”
“They can be safely stored here till you send for them.”
“Can’t we stay here and parley with Albany?” I ask weakly.
“He’ll have my head,” Ard says grimly. “I broke my parole for you, remember.”
I shudder. “We’ll go at once.”