“You’re sure?” I say, thinking of my little son, nearly a year and a half old, and now a fatherless boy; thinking of the baby that I may be carrying. “You’re certain? The Privy Council have confirmed it—there is no doubt?”
“I was there,” he says. “I saw it.”
“Tell me what you saw.”
“It will be a miracle if anyone survived,” he says bleakly. “We went down among them in a charge, and they had billhooks to our pikes and they sheared heads off like they were hedge trimming. Our gunners didn’t have the range, so though the English were bombarded the cannon fired over their heads, they were still in their ranks, unbroken and unhurt. We thought they would all be smashed up but they were fresh. The king led a mighty charge of horse and foot, and the clansmen were all behind him. Nobody failed him—I can’t say a word against any house—they were all there; but the ground gave way under our feet. It looked sound when we viewed it from the top of the hill; but it was treacherous, a green, weedy marsh. We got bogged down and sank, and couldn’t get up, and they let us struggle towards them. They stood in their ranks as we came on, going slower and slower, and then they ripped off heads and ripped out bellies and pulled down horses.”
My ladies gather around me murmuring horrified questions, whispering names. They will have lost sons and husbands, and fathers and brothers.
“How many lost?” I ask.
“Dead,” he insists. “They’re dead. About ten thousand.”
Ten thousand men! I feel myself reel again. “Ten thousand?” I repeat. “It’s not possible. The whole army was thirty thousand. They cannot have killed a third of the Scots army.”
“Yes they can. Because they killed those who surrendered,” he says bitterly. “They killed the dying. They killed the wounded where they lay on the field of battle. They chased after those who had thrown down their weapons and had turned for home. They declared they would take no prisoners and they did not. It was brutal and evil and long-drawn-out. I have never seen the like of it. You would think yourself somewhere barbaric, like Spain. You would think yourself on a crusade among pagans. It was conquistador killing. There were men screaming for their lives and crying out as the billhooks went in their faces all the long afternoon, all the long night. There were wounded men only silenced when someone cut their throat.”
“The king?” I whisper. James cannot have died on a hedging tool. Not James, not with his love of chivalry and the honorable ritual of the joust. He cannot have died bogged down in his beautiful armor with some English peasant’s axe in his face.
“He fought his way through to Thomas Howard himself—it was nearly a single combat, just as he had challenged. But a billhook smashed his head to a pulp just as he reached the English standard, and an arrow opened his side.”
I bow my head. I cannot believe this, and I don’t know what I should say or do. Although I warned him, although I dreamed of widow’s pearls, I never really thought that he would not come home. He always comes home. Again and again he goes off to his mistresses or off to see his children, a pilgrimage, a progress to give judgment, riding off to see a cannon out of the forge or the launch of a ship; but he always comes home. He swore to me that he would never leave me. He knows I am too young to be left alone.
“Where is his body?” I ask.
We will have to have a grand funeral; I will have to arrange it. My boy James will have to be declared king; he will have to be taken to Scone Abbey for a great coronation. I don’t know how to do it without my husband, who has always done everything for me, everything for his country.
“Where is his body? It must lie in state in the chapel. They must bring it to Edinburgh.”
He shall lie in state in the chapel at Holyroodhouse, where we married, where he crowned me queen; and the country—everyone, even his bastards and their mothers—will come and pay their respects to the greatest King of Scotland since Malcolm, since Robert de Brus. The chieftains shall come in their tartans and the lords will come and their standards will fly over the coffin, and the swell of a Scots lament will sound out for their great king, and we will all always remember him. We will bury him in a coffin of Scots pine under a pall of black velvet with a cross of gold thread, we will fly the flag of a crusader, for he would have been a crusader, the bells will toll for every one of his forty years. The cannon that he commissioned will roar as if they too are heartbroken. We will honor our king, we will never forget him.
The messenger sinks to his knees as if the weight of his words is too much for him to bear. He looks up at me and his white face is agonized beneath the dirt.
“They took his body,” he says. “The English. They took his precious body, out of the mud, broken and bleeding as he was. And they sent him to London for her.”
“What?”
“The English queen, Katherine, said she wanted his body as a trophy. So they turned him over in the mud and took his breastplate and his coat, his beautiful coat, they stripped it off him, and his gloves, and his boots and his spurs. So he was barefoot, like a dead beggar. They took his sword, they levered off the crown from his helmet. They stripped him like he was a spoil of war. They threw all his things in a box, and they put his body on a cart and they have taken it away to Berwick.”
My knees give way then and someone helps me down to sit on a stool.
“My husband?”
“Dragged from the battlefield like a carcass on a wagon. The English queen wanted his dead body for a trophy, and now she has him.”
I will never forgive her this. I will never forget this. In France, Harry wins a battle at somewhere called Thérouanne, and in reply to his triumph Katherine writes to him that she has won a battle just as good as his. She boasts that she wanted to send him my husband’s severed head but that her English advisors prevented her. She wanted to pickle James in brine and send him as a gift. But Thomas Howard had already had the body encased in lead and sent on a wagon to London. Deprived of her corpse, Katherine sends instead the royal standard, and James’s own coat. His red coat, with the gold thread, that I embroidered myself. Now it is stained with his blood, and dirty with the mud of the battlefield, and stinking of smoke. His brains were spilled on the embossed collar where I had sewn golden thistles. But she sends it to Harry, triumphantly, as if such a thing can be a gift, as if such a thing should be anywhere but reverently buried in the king’s own chapel.
She is a barbarian, worse than a barbarian. This is the body of her brother-in-law, the sacred body of a king. This is the widow who saw her own husband taken out in the most solemn procession to be buried, traveling in the night with burning torches, a woman who wore black and begged me to be kind to her in her grief—but when I am widowed, she has my husband’s body tumbled into a cart and brought like a butcher’s carcass to Smithfield. What savages are these? Only a brute would not return a king’s body to his people for an honorable burial. Only a beast would feed off it, as she wants to do. I will never forgive her this. I will never forget it. She is no sister to me, she is a harpy—a monster who tears at flesh.
I will never speak of it either. I cannot put it out of my mind. But they must never know how I hate them for this and how I will never forgive her. I am going to make peace with this thief, with this grave robber. I am going to have to claim sisterhood with this wolf that feasts off the dead. I am going to have to send ambassadors and write letters and perhaps even meet the man who was once my brother and the vulture that is his wife. If I am to be queen and get my son on the throne, I am going to need their support and their help. I am going to beg for it and never let them see the contempt in my eyes. I am going to have to be what my husband commanded me to be: a great woman and not a silly girl. But she is a demon, a woman who besmirches the honor of her place, who has smeared my mother’s throne with blood. She is a woman who wants to be equal to a king, a woman who sat beside my brother’s deathbed, and ordered the killing of my husband. She is a Lilith. I hate her.