“I do,” I agree. But I am thinking of Archibald, and she is thinking of my son James. “And at least he has been living on his wits in the borderlands,” I continue. “It’s hard to find somewhere safe for the night, hard to get enough to eat. There are no beautiful girls composing songs there.”
Katherine does not smile. “I hope that he never turns from you, wherever he lives,” she says. “It is an awful bereavement, when the man who has your love and your happiness in his keeping forgets about you.”
“Is that how it feels for you?” I ask, thinking of my wild fury with James and his open infidelities; of all the little bastards who came running towards him, and I knowing that their mothers lived conveniently nearby and that he rode out to see them on his way to holy pilgrimage.
“It makes me feel as if I am of no use,” she says quietly. “And I don’t know how to remind him that his honor and his heart are mine, sworn to me. I don’t know how to recall him to do his duty before God, as I do mine. Even if we never have another child—though I pray every day that we have a son—but even if we never have another child I am his partner and his helpmeet, at his side through war and through peace. I am his wife and his queen. He cannot forget me.”
I have a moment of shame that my little brother should treat his wife so badly. “He’s a fool,” I say abruptly.
She stops me with a small gesture of her heavily ringed hand. “I cannot allow a criticism of him,” she says. “Not even from you. He is the king. I have promised him my love and obedience forever.”
RICHMOND PALACE, ENGLAND, SUMMER 1517
I am to leave England again. It has been a long and beautiful year, but I always knew that I would return north on the long road to Scotland. Once again I have to say good-bye to my family and my friends, once again I have to travel that journey and hope to succeed at the end of it.
“Do you have to go?” Mary asks childishly. We are beyond the formal privy garden, strolling beside the river, and we turn to sit on a little bench under a tree, the sun warm on our backs, and watch the barges and boats bringing visitors and goods to entertain and feed the insatiable court. Mary’s hand rests on her swelling belly. She is with child again. “I so hoped you would stay.”
I don’t dare to say that I was beginning to hope so too. It seems very hard that Katherine should live here, and Mary with her, and that I am the only sister who has to go far away, to such an uncertain future in a country that has been so hard-hearted to me.
“It’s been like being girls again, having you home. Why don’t you stay longer? Why don’t you live with us and never go back at all?”
“I have to do my duty,” I say stiffly.
“But why now?” she asks lazily. “At the start of summer, which is the best time of year.”
“It is the best time of year for me to do the journey and I have my safe conduct to Scotland.” I cannot keep the bitterness from my voice. “My son, my five-year-old son, has sent me safe conduct.”
That catches her attention, she sits up. “You have to have little James’s permission to go to him?”
“Of course I do. He’s the king, it is under his seal. It isn’t him really, of course. It is Albany who has decided that I can come home. And he sends conditions: no more than twenty-four companions, no rebels at my side, and then there are conditions for seeing my son. I may not go as his tutor, not as regent. Just as his mother.”
“The French are very powerful,” she says. “But I found them kind if you obey their rules. They love pretty things and courtesy. If you could only agree . . .”
“Of course, you would be on their side, since they pay your allowance,” I say sharply. “Everyone knows that you have nothing to live on but your dower money from them. But they do not pay mine, they do not honor their debts to me, so you cannot expect me to jump to their piping like you and Brandon.”
She flushes a little. “Of course I need the money,” she says. “We are paupers, we are royal paupers. And every day there is a new masque or a new dance or a new pageant and the king insists that I lead it. If there is a joust he insists that Brandon fight in it. The horses alone are worth their weight in gold and a suit of armor costs ten times as much as a gown.” She puts her hand to her belly to comfort herself. “Anyway, perhaps this is another boy and he will make our fortune. He will be heir to the throne after his brother and after your son James, after all.”
“Only if Katherine has no son,” I remind her smartly.
“God grant it.” She wishes her son out of the succession with complete sincerity. “But, Maggie, I do really think that you should try to agree with France. Can’t you make a better agreement with Albany? He is such a well-mannered nobleman. I liked him and his wife. And now she is ill and he is bound to want to go home to her. He might go back to France and leave Scotland to your rule? You could trust him, you could talk to him.”
“How much do they pay you for this?” I ask suddenly. “The French? And could you tell them, when you report back to your spymaster, that I would be happy to agree with them if they would take their soldiers out of my country and see to the paying of the rents on my dower lands, just as they pay you? You have been cheaply bought; but I have a country to take care of. I come at a higher price.”
I see the flush of her temper in her cheeks. “I am no spy. I take French money and so does half the court. There’s no need to throw it in my face. And I know you’ve been borrowing money from Wolsey, just as we all do. You’re no better than us and you have no right to scold me.”
“I certainly have,” I say. “I am your older sister—it is my duty to tell you when you are wrong. You’re as bad as a traitor—in the pay of the French. You can tell them to pay me my rents if you are so friendly with them.”
“I can’t tell them,” she blazes out. “It would do you no good if I spoke to them. You’re such a fool! It’s not the French who have been keeping your rents, but your own husband. You can’t blame Albany for it. Your husband has been collecting your rents in your name and not passing them on to you.”
“That’s a lie! A stupid lie as well as a wicked one. Archibald would never do such a thing. He’s not like your husband, who married you only for your fortune and title. Archibald is a great lord in his own right, he has great lands in his own right. He wouldn’t stoop to cheat me. You wouldn’t know. You’ve never loved anyone but an adventurer. A commoner, a climber! Of course Brandon would take your lands. He lives off you and every woman he has ever married. My God! Brandon makes Wolsey look well bred.”
She leaps to her feet, her blue eyes blazing with temper. “You think your husband doesn’t cheat you? When he makes peace with Albany without you? When he lives with a woman he calls his wife? When he tells everyone you will never go back to Scotland, and he is glad of it? You dare to compare your traitor to my Charles, who has never been disloyal to Harry or faithless to me?”
I feel as if she has punched me in the belly, as if the air is knocked out of me. I double up as if I am winded. “What? What? What are you saying?” I hear the words ringing in my ears, but I cannot understand them. “What did you say? A wife?”
At once she is sorry. She pitches heavily on her knees beside me to peer up into my face, her own face still wet with angry tears. “Oh, Maggie! Oh, Maggie! I am so sorry! Forgive me! I am so wicked! Oh, my dear! I should not have said. We agreed we would say nothing—and then I . . . ! It was when you spoke against Charles! But I should never have said a word!”
She is patting my gown and stroking my shoulder, and pushing my chin up so that she can look into my face. I keep my head down, my face hidden. I am speechless with humiliation.
“I am so sorry. I should not have said anything. She made me promise to say nothing.”
“Who?” I ask. I put my hands over my face so that she cannot see my burning eyes, my blanched cheeks. “Who told you to say nothing?”
“Katherine,” she whispers.
“She says this? She told you all this? About my r
ents? About Archibald living with a woman?”
The golden head nods. “But we swore that we would not tell you. She said that it would break your heart. She made me promise I would say nothing. She said that you could not bear to hear that he is unfaithful. That you must talk to him yourself. It must be between the two of you.”
“Oh, rubbish,” I say. All at once, I am completely furious at the thought of this mealy-mouthed gossip. “She’s such an old maid. As if all men don’t take lovers! As if Ard was going to live like a monk for months at a time! As if a wife should care!”
“Don’t you care?” my little sister asks me, aghast.
“Not at all!” I lie furiously. “She is a nothing. She is nothing to him and so she is nothing to me. Katherine is making a fuss out of nothing because she is grieved that Harry has taken Bessie Blount for a lover and she wants the world to think that Ard is as bad as he. That it matters, for God’s sake! That anyone cares!”
“Did you know about your husband’s woman then?”
“ ’Course I did,” I say. “Half of Scotland knows of her, and her easy virtue. Half the lords have probably had her. Why should I care about a whore?”
“Because she says she is his wife,” she says softly.
“As do all whores.”
Mary wants to believe me. She has always looked up to me. She wants to take my word for this. “Didn’t he marry you for love? And it was a proper wedding? He was not married to her at all?”
“What d’you mean at all? You’re such a fool. No. Never. They were betrothed when she was a child. It was never intended it should go ahead. He left her for me, for love of me, he preferred me to all the other women in Scotland. So what if he now amuses himself while I am away? As soon as I return to Scotland he will leave her again.”
“But my dear, they say that she lives in your house as his wife.”
“It means nothing to me.”
“But what if they have a child?”
“Why would I care about another bastard?” I demand, furious at the parroting of Katherine’s sentimentality. “James had dozens and our grandmother and our father sent me to marry him, knowing full well that he housed them in my dower castle. You think I care that Janet Stewart might have a baby when my husband the king had his own regiment of bastards? When he named one of them as his heir before I had my boy!”
She sits back on her heels, her eyelashes dark with tears, her forehead crumpled with a puzzled frown. “Really? You really don’t care?”
“Not at all,” I say. “And when you find your husband has lain with some slut, you won’t care either. It should make no difference to you, one way or the other.”
She puts her hand to where her pulse is beating in the little hollow at the base of her throat. “Oh, I would care,” she says. “I would, and Katherine does.”
“Then you’re a pair of fools,” I declare. “I am queen, I am his queen. He looks up to me and loves me as a subject and a lover and a man, my man. It doesn’t matter to me if he eats his dinner off a wooden platter now and then. It does not devalue my gold plates.”
Wonderingly, she looks at me, her blue eyes wide. “I never thought of it that way. I always thought a husband and wife should be all in all to each other. Like Brandon is to me.”
“You should rest,” I say abruptly, suddenly noticing the creamy pallor of her perfect skin. “You’re not carrying a prince, but you should still take care. You shouldn’t be crying, you shouldn’t be kneeling. Get up.”
I put out an unfriendly hand to her and haul her to her feet. I take her arm and lead her back through the gardens, into the cool of the garden stairs.
“You are sure he will come back to you when you get to Scotland?”
“I am his wife. Where else should he go?”
We walk for a few moments in silence.
“How do you know all this anyway?” I cannot hide my irritation that she and Katherine have been sorrowfully whispering about me. I cannot stand the thought that they have been mumbling over news from Scotland, all big-eyed and anxious.
“Thomas Wolsey told Katherine, and she told me. Thomas Wolsey knows everything that goes on in Scotland. He has spies everywhere.”
“Spying on my husband,” I remark.
“Oh, I am sure not. Not specially. Just if he is—” She breaks off before saying that they suspect him of disloyalty to my country as well as to me. She hesitates. “May I tell Katherine that you are not concerned about this rumor? She will be so relieved.”
“Why, do you have to tell her everything? Is she your confessor now?”
“No, it’s just that we always tell each other everything.”
I snort. “That must please your husbands. Did you tell her that Harry was bedding her maid-in-waiting Bessie?”
She dawdles behind me, up the stairs. “Yes,” she whispers. “I tell her everything I know, even when it breaks my heart to tell her.”
“And does she tell you of your husband’s flirtations?”
She puts her hand to the stone wall as her feet fail her. “Oh! No! He has none.”
I cannot claim, even in my temper, that he does. “None that I know of,” I say disagreeably. “But he will have someone while you are like this, the size of a barn and unable to lie with him. Every man takes some slut when his wife goes into confinement.”
Once again the easy tears well up into her eyes. “Don’t say that! I am sure he does not. I am sure that he would not. He comes to my bed and sleeps beside me, he likes to hold me. I like to sleep in his arms. I really don’t think he has a lover. I really believe he would not.”
“Oh, go and cry with Katherine,” I say, irritated beyond endurance, as we reach the top of the stairs. “The two of you make a fine pair weeping over nothing. But keep your spiteful tongues off my husband and me.”
“We didn’t gossip!” she exclaims. “We were keeping it secret for fear that you should be distressed. I promised I would say nothing. It was very wrong of me to say anything.”
“You’re so stupid,” I say, falling into nursery abuse. “I look at you, and all I think is that it is as well you are pretty for God knows you are the stupidest girl I know. For Katherine, old and plain as she is, there is no hope at all.”
She turns her head away from this unkindness and hurries up the stairs to the queen’s rooms. I turn away to my own rooms. I am cured of my longing to stay here. I want to go home to Scotland. I am sick of this household of women; I am sick of these women who call themselves my sisters but gossip about me behind my back. The English queen and the French queen, I hate them both.
I am not the only one who is sick of the French and the way that they buy the favorites at court. Mary and her husband are openly French pensioners, and half the English court is taking bribes. The French merchants and craftsmen have taken bread from honest English mouths in every trade and store in the city. I warn Harry that the French won’t have to invade by coming with a fleet, they are so numerous already that you can hardly hear English spoken on a London street, it is so packed with m’sieurs and milords.
Harry laughs—nothing can penetrate his sunny mood. He spends all his day hawking, while all the work of kingship is done by Thomas Wolsey, who brings him the documents to sign when he should be listening to Mass. Harry scrawls his signature, attending neither to God nor to his duty.
But the people of London feel as I do, that there are too many foreigners stealing a living from the trusting Englishmen. Every day there are half a dozen incidents reported of foreign tradesmen cheating, of French seductions and abductions, of good Englishmen shouldered off the highway, or pushed out of jobs. When the French are summonsed they bribe the magistrates, and walk away scot-free. The people of London become more and more angry.
The apprentices take the freedoms of Easter, when ale flows freely and everyone is exuberantly liberated from the long fast of Lent. They get stormingly drunk and arm themselves against French intruders. A powerful French-baiting sermon in Spitalfiel
ds stirs them up. The masters give the lads the day off for May Day, and they are armed with the weapons that they have to carry for the defense of the City. It all turns into a potent brew for the young men who would as soon fight as drink, and find that on this day they can do both. Bigger and bigger gangs of lads come together and roam around smashing the windows of the foreign merchants, bawling abuse at the doors of foreign lords. The Portuguese ambassador has the filth from the midden thrown at his walls and tightly closed gate, the Spanish ambassador’s servants sally out for a battle, the French traders batten down their shutters and sit in darkness in the back rooms of their houses. But wherever there is a French name over a shop door, or a swinging sign in French, or anything that might be French—for the apprentice boys are not the most educated of youths—they catcall at the windows, and lever up the cobblestones, throw a hail of dirt and pebbles and bellow insults.
Even Thomas Wolsey—a man from their own class—does not escape. His beautiful new London house is ringed by a mob who shout that he shall answer to them for his attempt to distribute charity to the poor. There shall be no charity to foreigners, they warn him. They don’t like him and his clever ways. Besides, if they were paid a good wage they would need no charity. Demand succeeds demand as they chant for good times to come, for justice to be restored. The Lord Chancellor, listening behind his stout doors with his enormous household armed and ready, fears that sooner or later someone is going to call for the white rose, for the Plantagenets, for my mother’s defeated family, and those are the words that cannot be allowed. He sends for the king to turn out the yeomen of the guard, who are keeping a safe distance from the city at Richmond Palace.
“I shall ride against my own people,” Harry says grandly. It is late in the evening, the dark blue evening of a summer midnight. We have been dining and drinking late into the night. Katherine looks exhausted, but Mary’s husband Charles Brandon and Harry are flushed with exercise and with wine and look as if they would dance till dawn. Mary, exquisite in cream and pearls, with her arms linked with the two men, looks up in concern at her brother. “Oh, but you can’t!” she says.