“Oh, Davy! You stayed with my son.”
“I would never leave him,” he says. He corrects himself. “Och, no credit to me, I had nowhere else to go. Who wants a poet in these poor days? And he and I have been here and there together. We always remember you in our prayers, and we made up a song for you, didn’t we, Your Grace? D’you remember our song for the English rose?”
“Did you?” I ask James; but he is silent, and it is the makar who answers.
“Aye. We’ll sing it for you this evening. He’s as good a musician as his father was before him.”
James smiles at the praise, looking up at his tutor. “You said I was deaf as an adder.”
“And here is your stepfather, come to visit too!”
I think I sense a little chill. Davy Lyndsay bows to Archibald, James nods his head. But neither of them greets him with any familiarity, or warmth.
“You will have seen him often?” I ask Ard.
“Not very often,” he replies. “He signed a warrant for my execution, remember.”
“He signed your pardon too,” Davy Lyndsay interjects.
My son the king inclines his head and does not remark on this. This is a child and yet he minds his manners, and takes care what he says. I feel a slow burn of rage that my son has never been carefree. Katherine of Aragon ordered the death of his father and so destroyed his childhood. He was a king before he was out of swaddling; she made him in her own disciplined image. She could not make her own baby, she took mine from me.
“Well, we shall see a lot of each other now,” I declare. “I have been in England, James, and I have won a truce for Scotland. There shall be peace between our countries and peace on the borders, and I shall see you whenever we wish. I shall live with you as your mother again. Won’t that be wonderful?”
“Yes,” says the little boy in his clear Scots accent. “Whatever you wish, Lady Mother. Whatever my guardians allow.”
“They have broken his spirit,” I rage at Ard, striding up and down our room in the tower at Craigmillar. “They have broken my heart.”
“Not at all,” he says gently. “He has been raised carefully and well. You should be pleased that he thinks before he speaks, that he is cautious.”
“He should be running around laughing. He should be boating and playing truant, he should be out on his horse and stealing apples.”
“All at once?”
“I won’t be mocked!”
“Indeed, I see you are distressed.”
“They drive me from the country, they separate me from my son, then they bring him up as quiet as a monk!”
“No, he is playful and he does chatter. I have heard him myself. But of course he is shy with you after so long. He has been waiting for your return—of course he is a little overwhelmed. We all are. You come home more beautiful than any of us remembered.”
“It’s not that.” But I am mollified.
He takes my hand. “It is, my love. Trust me, all will be well. You be as loving to him as I know you long to be, and he will be your little boy again within days. He will play with his sister, and the two of them will be as noisy and as naughty as you could wish.”
I lean towards him. “But Ard, when I left him, he had a little brother. He had a little brother who smiled and cooed when he saw me.”
He puts his arm around my waist and presses my head against his shoulder. “I know. But at least we still have James. And we can make another little brother for him.”
I let my face nestle against his warm neck. “You want another child?”
“At once,” he says. “And this one will be born at Tantallon with every delicacy and luxury you can command. I shall dress you in a cloth-of-gold gown with rings on every finger as you go into confinement. And I shall keep you safe in confinement for month after month. I shall have a bed carved for you enameled with gold and you won’t get up for half a year.”
I smile. “It was so awful with baby Margaret.”
“I know. I thought I would die of fear for you. But everything will be better now.”
“There is nothing to explain or forgive?” I ask. “I hear such gossip.”
“Who knows what people say?” He shrugs and then draws me close again. “You should hear the things they told me about you!”
“Oh, what did they say about me?”
“That you would divorce me and marry the emperor, that your brother was determined to make the match. That Thomas Wolsey had drawn up the peace treaty that would make my poor Scotland the helpless victim of England and the empire. That they would say that our marriage had never happened.”
“I never even considered it,” I lie with my eyes on his.
“I knew you would not,” he says. “I trusted you, whatever they said of you. I knew that we were married for life, for good or bad, forever. I heard all sorts of things about you, but I never even listened.”
“Neither did I,” I say, and feel my passion for him burn me up. I like to hear the loyalty in my voice. “I never listened to one word that anyone ever said against you.”
In the days that follow I set myself to spend time with my son and make up for the missing months. I know it can never be done. I did not teach him to play the lute or sing the songs that Davy Lyndsay has taught him. I didn’t put him on his first shaggy little highland pony, and trot alongside him, holding him steady in the saddle. I didn’t take him out last winter to play in the snow, I did not build him an ice castle with a turret. He tells me all about it and I think, yes—that was when I was at Morpeth Castle, unable to get out of bed for the pain in my hip, when I thought I would die; that was when they told me that my younger son was dead. The closer he and I become, the more he tells me about his adventures while I was away, the more I remember that it was Katherine who gave orders to Thomas Howard to take no prisoners at the Battle of Flodden. The more he tells me of his life behind castle walls the more I resent the Duke of Albany taking power as regent and Katherine not insisting that my boy and I were rescued together.
I introduce him to his little half sister Margaret and he pulls faces at her to make her laugh, and encourages her to run behind him. When she falls he flinches at her loud cry, and I laugh and tell him that she has the temper of the Tudors.
Thomas Dacre, who always knows everything, writes to me that my sister Mary has had a pretty baby, Frances, and that she is well and returned to court. A few days later I get a letter from Mary herself, praising the baby and saying that her confinement was easy this time. She says that she misses me, that she prays I can find happiness with my husband at my home, and that we may both come to England again when it is safe for me to do so. She says that she is my little sister still, even when she is a matron with her children around her. She asks me to write to her to tell her that I am safe and well and that I have seen my son.
I hear that your husband is with you now, and I hope that you are happy,
she writes, as if she doubts that it can be so.
I reply cheerfully. I tell her that I have heard that Albany, the regent, is still in France and does not want to return to Scotland, and I pray that he will not. In his absence the country is at peace. I tell her that Antoine d’Arcy, the Sieur de la Bastie, is a true knight, as handsome as a woodcut in a book, and that we are happy as his guests; he is a nobleman in every way. I don’t say one word about her gossip with Katherine against Archibald’s good name. I ignore her concern for my happiness. She can learn from my silence to hold her tongue.
I speak to Antoine and suggest that we might share power. We might both be Regent of Scotland; we could work together. He never denies that it is possible, he always says it is essential that England keep the peace on the borders. It is from these troubled lands that all the unrest in Scotland flows. If I can persuade my brother, the king, to order Thomas Dacre to honor the peace of the borders then we can plan a future for Scotland together.
“If you will trust me?” Antoine teases me.