I cannot receive anyone, though the Dacres make over their great presence chamber to me, and Lord Dacre says that he himself will carry me in his chair. He says he will pad it with cushions and hang the cloth of estate over it and it will be my throne. But I cannot bear even to be lifted from the bed; my leg is swollen so that it is nearly as big as my body. I see only those people whom I admit to my bedchamber, but I can’t leave my bed for them. I have become a cripple, as weak as one of the beggars at the mercat cross who has to be pushed around on a little cart and carried to the steps in the morning.
So Lady Bothwell and Lady Musgrove make their visit to my bedroom to sit with me, and Lady Dacre comes to my chamber a dozen times a day to see if I need anything. I receive Lord Hume, who has been loyal to my cause though it has cost him his lands and his safety, and together we discuss how I shall return and how I shall get my sons back. He looks a little askance as if there is something wrong when I speak of them. “My boys must live with me,” I say. “I don’t intend to put them into the keeping of my brother or his wife. They shall come to me.”
“Of course, of course,” he says with the sudden anxious soothing of a married man who knows that a woman should not be crossed when she is in pain. “We will talk about it more when you are better. And besides, I have some news for you that will be the best physic in the world.”
I can hear the tramp of booted feet along the gallery outside my chamber. “I cannot have visitors,” I start.
“You will welcome this one,” he says confidently, and he throws open the door to my bedchamber and the guard outside steps back . . . and Archibald, my husband, comes in.
I bounce up in bed and I cry out in pain at the same moment as he flings himself across the room. “My love, my love,” he whispers into my hair. He kisses my face, he embraces me tightly, and then gently holds me away from him so that he can see the tears streaming from my eyes as I say, “Archibald, oh, Ard! I never thought that I would see you again. And our little girl! You must see her.”
Lady Bothwell has already sent someone running to the nursery, and now the chief nurse comes with little Margaret in her arms. Ard holds her at arm’s length, looks into her sleeping face, shakes his head in awe at her. “She is so small!” he marvels. “She is so perfect.”
“I thought we would lose her, and that I would die!”
Carefully, he restores her to her nurse and turns back to me. “It must have been terrible for you. So many times I have wished that I was with you.”
“I knew you couldn’t be. You couldn’t risk being in England without a safe conduct!” At once the thought strikes me. “Ard, my love, are you safe now?”
“Your brother the king has sent a safe conduct for me and for Lord Hume, and for my brother. We are all to go to London in honor, as soon as you are well enough to travel.”
“I will be well soon,” I promise him. “The pain has been terrible. Not even Lord Dacre’s best physician from Newcastle knows what is wrong with my leg. But resting in bed is easing the pain, and I am sure the swelling is going down. I will be well enough to go to London, I swear I will, if you can come with me.”
They dine on cygnet and heron, venison and wild boar. They bring the best dishes to my room and Ard sits with me and feeds me from his own spoon. He keeps me company through the twelve days of Christmas and through the cold days, and together we listen to the merriment from the hall, he on a humble stool at my side, for I cannot bear anyone sitting on the bed and making the feather mattress dip. I lie propped low on only one beautifully embroidered pillow, so that my legs and back are still.
“I am no wife to you,” I say fretfully. I cannot hold him, I cannot lie with him, I cannot even stand beside him. In a few months I have become an old lady and he is far stronger and more handsome than when he was the young man appointed to be my carver. He has been hardened and toughened by his winter on the run; he has had to command men, face danger, defy the Regent of Scotland. He is more lithe than ever, quick on his feet, alert to any danger. And I am tired and in pain, fat from pregnancy, unable even to move from my bed without crying out.
“It was being my wife that has brought you to this,” he says. “If you had stayed a widow queen, you would still be in Stirling Castle.”
He is speaking soothingly, almost by rote, but suddenly the enormity of what he has said makes him fall silent and look at me. He swallows, as if he has never before felt the despair of these words on his tongue. “I have been your ruin.”
Bleakly, I look back at him. “And I yours.”
It is true. He has lost his castle Tantallon, his beautiful family home, which stood so proudly, so inviolate on the cliff. He has lost his land, and all the people who were his men and had belonged to his clan for generations have lost their leader and the head of their house. He is a named outlaw, he owns nothing but what he stands up in, he is a landless man, a man without followers: in Scotland that is as good as being a beggar. He is completely identified with the English cause: in Scotland that is as good as being a named traitor; and he is a named traitor.
“I have no regrets,” he says. He is lying. He must have, he does have. So do I.
“If Harry sends his army . . .”
He nods. Of course. Of course, it is what we always say to each other. If Harry sent his army then the world could change again in a moment. We must become warmongers like Thomas Dacre, wishing a merciless invasion on Scotland. We must argue for revenge, we must demand a fleet. If my brother will be a brother to me, if Katherine will advise him as a sister should do, then I will be queen regent again. It all depends on Harry. It all depends on my sister-in-law his wife.
“There is something I have to tell you,” Ard says, picking his words with care. “They did not tell you before, because they feared for your health.”
I feel my belly plummet as if I am falling. I am wildly, suddenly afraid. “What is it? Tell me quickly. Is it Mary, my little sister? She’s not dead in childbirth? God forbid it. It’s not her?”
He shakes his head.
“Katherine has lost her baby,” I say with certainty.
“No, it is your son.”
I knew it. I knew as soon as I saw the gravity on his face. “Is he dead?”
He nods.
I put my hand over my face as if to blot out his sympathy. Beneath my fingers my tears run sideways from my eyes and into my ears. I cannot raise my head to mop my face dry. I cannot cry out at this new pain, having screamed so much at the pain in my joints. “God take him to His own,” I whisper. “God bless and keep him.”
I think, naturally enough, even in the first shock, that at least I had two princes. If one is gone there is still a son and heir. I still have another. I still have an heir for Scotland, an heir for England. I am still the only one of the three queens to have a son. Even if one is dead, even if I have lost my boy, my heir, I still have my especial treasure; I still have my baby.
“Don’t you want to know which one is dead?” Archibald asks awkwardly.
I had assumed it was the king. That would be the worst thing. If the crowned king is dead then what is there to prevent a usurpation but one little baby alone? “Is it not James?”
“No. It was Alexander.”
“Oh God, no!” Now I wail. Alexander is my darling, my pretty boy, my baby boy. This is the baby that James left me with. Not even the new baby, Margaret, has replaced him in my heart. “It can’t be Alexander! He is so bonny and strong.”
Archibald nods, his face pale. “I am so sorry.”
“How did he die?”
Ard shrugs. He is a young man. He does not know how babies die. “He was sick, and then he weakened. My dear, I am so sorry.”
“I should have been there!”
“I know. You should have been. But he had good nursing, and he did not suffer . . .”
“My boy! Alexander! My little boy. This is the third boy that I have lost. My third boy!”
“I’ll leave you to the care of your ladies,” Archibald says formally. He does not know what to say or what to do. He is always having to comfort me. Nothing has ever gone right for us. Now he is bound to a crippled woman screaming for the loss of her son. He gets to his feet, bows to me, and goes from the room.
“My baby, my little boy!”