Dacre shakes his head. “He’s false,” he says simply. “And he’s weak. He is lying to you. He was not coming to meet with you, he was coming to delay you, and to keep you here, right on the borders, in a house that cannot be defended, while the duke gets his army on the road. They would have made you wait here, writing and talking to the French ambassador, while they marched through the borders and snatched you, and even your husband. Your Grace, they would have imprisoned you, perhaps in a nunnery, perhaps in a tower at Glamis, miles away where we could never have reached you. And you, my lord, alas, you would have been hanged like a common criminal on Coldstream priory gates.”
I can feel Archibald stiffen in the saddle. “Good that we left then,” he says. “I saved her from Linlithgow, I took her to Berwick and Coldstream, and now I have saved her from capture here.”
“You have indeed,” Dacre says, like a man praising a child. “All of England will know what you have done for us.”
“At risk,” Archibald insists. “At enormous risk, and no payment.”
“You will be rewarded,” Dacre says smoothly.
Archibald ducks his head. “Everyone else is. How much does the prioress get?”
His lordship gives a little chuckle, but does not answer. “And here, we have to part,” he says firmly. “I have no safe conduct for you, my lord. I cannot take you into England or admit you to my castle at Morpeth. It was all done in such a rush that you, your noble brother, and the lords Hume, were not listed. I can take Her Grace, but that is all.”
“But Archibald has to come with me,” I say, hardly understanding what Lord Dacre is saying. One moment all of England is in Archibald’s debt. The next moment he cannot enter the country. “He is my husband. A safe conduct for me must mean a safe conduct for him.”
Dacre shouts to his troop, who halt as he pulls up his horse at the crossroads. “We have to get you to my castle as soon as we can,” he says. “You should be in confinement within the week. But you, my lord, must grant me your patience. I will send to London for your safe conduct and that of your brother, and then you can join us at Morpeth. It’s just a little delay.”
“I would rather come with you now,” Archibald says. He glances up the road that leads back to Scotland and I guess that he is imagining an army of forty thousand around the next bend.
“And so you shall,” Dacre assures him. “But you would not want me to delay in getting Her Grace to safety? When you can so easily find a refuge, keep out of sight, live off your wits, till I send for you to escort Her Grace your wife to London. I know that the king is eager to greet you, his new brother-in-law. What a hero you will be if you get yourself out of Scotland, on your own skills, not riding on a pillion saddle with your wife.”
“Of course,” Archibald stammers. “But I thought that I would come with you to Morpeth.”
“No safe conduct,” Lord Dacre repeats regretfully. “Will you step down from the saddle, my lord? I have fresh horses for you and your brother, and a purse of gold in the saddlebag that I don’t want any groom to get his hands on.”
Archibald pulls up our horse, and boyishly swings his leg over its neck, jumping down to the ground. He turns and takes my hands where I sit, sideways on the horse, without a rider before me, my face in a grimace of pain.
“Is it your wish?” he asks me urgently. “Shall I leave you here now, in Lord Dacre’s safekeeping, and come to you again at Morpeth Castle when I have my own safe conduct?”
I turn to Lord Dacre. “Can’t he come with us?” I ask.
“Alas, no,” he says.
So he leaves me. I have to be glad that he will find safety. Everyone knows where to find him if he is with me. I cannot bear to endanger him. But he, his brother George, and Alexander Hume ride off at high speed on fresh horses, and I see them, bent over the horses’ necks, racing each other, as if they were boys with nothing to worry about. I have a moment when I think that he is free now, a young man with everything to play for and danger to avoid, and he is free of me. He rides like a young man born to be in the saddle. He is a border lord. He was born to danger and chance and midnight raids. He is out of sight in a moment and I think perhaps I am out of mind before then.
I turn a cold, closed face towards Lord Dacre, who was supposed to be my savior but who has brought me nothing but heartache. “I am having birth pains,” I tell him. “I’m going to have the baby. You have to find me somewhere to give birth.”
Even then there is no easy road to a comfortable refuge. We ride all day, and I cling to a stranger in the saddle before me, but nothing can ease the jolting of the horse as it goes on and onward. The country becomes steeper, the valleys are rich and green and cold under the shade of the thick forests, and I look around us and fear that there are Scots lords waiting for us in an ambush. The road winds through the trees and comes out of the woods into high moorland; as far as the eye can see there is nothing but an unending pelt of weeds and heather and shrubs and reeds. The track is hard to detect: it is almost nothing through the heather and the grasses. It twists and turns up and up and up, and then when we are at the peak there is nothing to see but more hills and more sky and the track looping its way down to the river valley again. The rivers are broad, winding through lush floodplains. If there were men and women to farm these valley floors they would be fertile; but I see no one. Anyone who lives in these bare open lands has learned the trick of lying low like a leveret when someone passes by. Or else they scuttle away into the occasional stone towers that glower over the landscape. Nobody will greet anyone on the road. There are no travelers, and there is no road. I think that I have done little good for my kingdom since I have not made the peace run here. There is a warm sun; but I feel cold in my very belly.
On we go, and I beckon Lord Dacre to ride alongside me.
“How far?” I say through my teeth.
“Not long now.”
“An hour?”
“Maybe more.”
I take a breath. It might be half a day more. I have learned on this long ride that his lordship feels no obligation to accuracy.
“I tell you the truth, I cannot do it.”
“I know you are tired . . .”
“You know nothing. I am telling you. I cannot go on.”
“Your Grace, my house is at your command, it is comfortable and—”
“Do I have to write you a letter in code? I am going to have my baby. I cannot wait. I have to get into a house. My time has come.”
Of course, he reminds me that I am not due till next month, and I tell him that a woman knows, and that a woman with two strong sons and several losses certainly knows, and we pull up the horses and squabble away, standing on the road, till a cold east wind whips up some rain, and I say: “Am I to have this baby in a ditch?” Only then does he give up the idea of Morpeth and says that we will turn aside off the road and go to his little castle of Harbottle.
“Is it near?” I demand.
“Quite near,” he says, and from that I know that I have hours of pain ahead of me.
I rest my head on the groom’s broad back and I feel the horse go down into the valleys and up into the hills, and from time to time I look to the left and right and I see the trees and then the high lands. I see a buzzard circling over a wood. I see a fox slink into the bracken at the side of the track and his red back makes me think of Ard and I wonder where he is right now. Then we pass through a little village that is nothing more than a series of tumbledown shacks with children playing in the dust who run inside when they see us, and Lord Dacre says: “Here we are.”
The track to the castle rises steeply from the village, and as we climb upwards the drawbridge bangs down, and the portcullis rattles up. The horse bows its head and climbs and climbs. The castle is on a little cliff above the village and around me are other empty peaks. We go through a stone gateway and we are inside the curtain wall, and then the groom jumps down from the horse and I let his lordship lift me down and I cling to him as my legs are w
eak beneath me and he leads me through the guardhouse and into the keep.
HARBOTTLE CASTLE, ENGLAND, OCTOBER 1515
I rest, I sleep. I wake and I eat. The food is not good, but at least there is a rope bed, not a heap of straw tied up in sacking; but there is no good linen and no bed curtains to keep out the draughts and only one small pillow. It is the bedroom of the commander of the castle and I must say that the posting will not make him soft. The mattress is stuffed with lumps of rock from the feel of it—no bird can have had feathers like this—and it has fleas or lice, or at any rate something that bites. I have red weals all over my skin. But at least I am off the horse, and after a few days the pains subside and I think perhaps my baby may not come too early, but at any rate if he comes now it will be under a roof like a Christian and not in a hedgerow like a beast.
I don’t fret about Archibald, living wild in the debatable lands between Scotland and England, with no permit to enter one country, an outlaw in the other. I don’t even think about my son James, with Davy Lyndsay at Stirling Castle, no doubt asking for me, learning that the path to the throne is lonely and hard. I don’t think about his little brother, Alexander, my baby, my pet. I don’t think about Katherine, pregnant once again, hoping for a boy for England. I don’t think about Mary, pregnant too, according to Lord Dacre—though what does it matter really? At the very best all she can have is Charles Brandon’s son, heir to his father’s debt and his mother’s folly. I am the only queen likely to have a living son and I should be exultant, but I am so tired that I think that we are truly sisters at last, sisters in suffering and sisters in disappointment.
My pains come to nothing, I fall into a dull passivity, like a cow with a stuck calf inside her. There is nothing I can do to bring it on, and nothing I can do to hold it safe. I am afraid that the constant riding of the last few days has shaken him loose. I am afraid that he will die inside me, and then they will have to cut me open and I will certainly die too. I think this is my Flodden, this is my battle against an enemy, and I am almost certain to lose. I have to be desperately courageous and know that my duty has brought me here, and anyway, there is no way to escape.
When I try to get out of bed—for I need to urinate all the time, and they have no garderobe here but just a bucket under the bed—I realize that I have become paralyzed. These are not labor pains, they are some deep disease of the bones. I need a physician, not a wise woman. I tell Lord Dacre that I must see the French ambassador now, that I have no choice: I must make peace with the Duke of Albany because I am likely to die. He has to send me physicians from Edinburgh. “Send for the French ambassador,” I say. “He can follow us here. You can give him safe conduct.”
“I don’t know where he is. He may still be at Berwick.”
“He was at Berwick?”
He realizes that he has let this slip.
“He came to Berwick?”
“If you remember, we had to leave. What if his men had arrested your husband? You wouldn’t want to risk the earl’s arrest?”
Of course, Ard’s safety comes before everything, but if I had only seen the French ambassador, and he had been able to make an agreement with me, then I might not have been forced here, to this miserable fort, to suffer this pain without a physician or a wise woman or a herbalist I can trust.
“Send for him!” I command. “If he and I can make an agreement he can send me physicians from Edinburgh.”
“Not yet, Your Grace,” he replies carefully. “We don’t want to jeopardize your husband’s courage, his great endeavor.”
“Why, what is he doing?” I ask. “I thought he was hiding out till he can join us?”
Lord Dacre smiles, his old eyes twinkling. “I think you will find that a brave young lord like him can do better than that!”
“He is rescuing my sons,” I say, without a moment’s doubt, and the lord gives me a broad wink.
“He is, God speed him,” he says. “How will it be when you are both safe behind the walls of Morpeth Castle and your sons with you?”
“He will bring them to England?”
“There is nowhere else for them. You will all be together again.”
I shake my head. I don’t answer. He is right. Every step that I have taken, every choice that I have made, seems to lead me onward to places where I don’t want to be, to more choices that I don’t want to make.
“I’ll see,” I say. I think of my lady grandmother, who never told anyone what she was thinking nor what she might do. “I will decide when I have given birth to my child.”
“I have sent for physicians from Berwick,” he says. “If we could only get to Morpeth I could house you more comfortably. My wife is there, and her ladies. They would care for you and you would have rooms to your liking.”
“I know,” I say. “But it can’t be done. I can’t even walk, I couldn’t ride.” A sudden pain like a sword thrust to the belly makes me hold myself and gasp.
Dacre gets to his feet. “Is it now?”
I nod. “It’s now. I think it is really coming now.”
It takes days for the baby to come. Two days and three long nights of pain and drink and sleep and waking again to pain, hobbling up and down the room and groaning on the bed, before they give me a squalling bundle in a wrapping of linen cloths and say: “A girl. A girl, Your Grace.”
I am so exhausted that I don’t even care that it is not a boy. I am so glad that it is over and that I have a live child for all my labors that I lift my tearstained face to look at her and see a perfect little tiny baby, as neat and as complete as the bud of a rose, as sweet as a subtlety, an angel made of marchpane. I can’t speak for pain and exhaustion. I think if I die from giving birth to her, at least I have seen her, and Archibald will have a child from me.
“What will you call her?” someone asks.
“Margaret,” I say. “Margaret Douglas. A little Scots lady, even if her mother is dead.”
I really think that I will die. My pains go on even though the baby is born, the bleeding goes on, and nothing the midwives can do will stop it. They are frightened. They are poor, ignorant women who have made a little money from attending the births of their neighbors; usually they are paid in eggs. They have never been in the castle before, they have never swaddled a baby in good linen. They do all that they can, but nobody can help me as I slide into a fever and don’t know where I am, and I call for James, my husband James, not to go to the battle and not to give me pearls for mourning. I dream that he is nearby, and that Katherine has the wrong corpse. I dream that he is living wild like an animal in these wild lands and that he will come to me at the moment of my death.
I have long painful days, half drunk on rough ale mixed with uisge beatha. I drift in and out of consciousness, and see daylight and then the flickering lights of wax candles, and then the cold light of dawn. I hear, as if from far away, a thin cry and the sound of someone walking up and down and hushing a wailing child.
A girl is not much use to me. Archibald will not come out of hiding to see a girl. The Douglases don’t need a girl, they need the next head of the clan. But I am glad that she is alive. I was afraid that riding when I was so near to my time had killed her. And I am glad I am alive, though I still cannot sit or stand without pain, and my leg seems to be in a palsy.
I raise my head. “Write to my brother,” I say. “Tell him that I have another healthy child and that I am hoping he will be her godfather. Tell him that she needs an uncle to defend her.”
I lie back and drift away as I watch them swaddle her and bind her to the board. They have not been able to find a wet nurse, and they can’t even ride out to the distant villages, the roads are so dangerous with reivers and brigands and armed men. They are feeding her with sops—bread dipped in watered milk squeezed into her mouth. “Oh, I’ll feed her,” I say irritably, and then I whimper with a new pain as I put her to my breast.
She feeds a little and then they take her away and say that I can rest at last. I lie on the thin
pillow, it is damp with my sweat, but there is no change of linen for the bed. They bind my bleeding parts with moss and then at last they sit quietly and I hear the rocker tap her foot up and down on the pedal of the cradle and all the other noises die away as the rest of them go to eat or to sleep.
The candlelight flickers and gutters, the fire dies down in the grate. I cannot believe that I, a Tudor princess, should be trapped here, in little more than a border tower, watching the shadows jump on the mud-plaster ceiling and hearing the rats scratching on the floor. I close my eyes. I cannot understand how I can have been born so high and fallen so low. There is a cold draught through the shutters that makes the candle flames flare up and die down. There is no glass in the windows to keep out the cold. I can hear the nighttime noises of these hills, the persistent hooting of an owl, the sharp bark of a dog fox, and somewhere, miles away, the howl of a wolf.
HARBOTTLE CASTLE, ENGLAND, NOVEMBER 1515
A month later and my baby is thriving. We have found her a wet nurse and my birth pains have ceased. Lord Dacre comes to the door of the castle commander’s bedroom and asks if he may be admitted. Nothing is as it should be. I was churched in my bed, the baby christened in the tiny chapel. Her godfather named as Thomas Wolsey in his absence, with no time for his consent. We are like reivers ourselves, camped on the wild lands of the border. I say that he can come in. There is no point in trying to live to the standards of my lady grandmother’s book of the household when we are little better than outlaws.
He takes in my pale face, the poverty of the furnishings. “Your Grace, I was hoping that you might be well enough to make the journey to Morpeth Castle where my wife can care for you.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think I can go. There is something wrong with my bones. I am recovered from the birth but I am strangely lame. I cannot walk. I cannot even sit up. The Berwick physicians have never seen anything like it.”