We have to get my baby James to Stirling Castle—the fortress that his father promised me was the safest in the kingdom. He will have to be crowned there. I dare not take him farther north to Scone Abbey; the danger is too great. Thomas Howard, no great friend before and my deadly enemy now, is almost certain to follow up his victory by invading my poor country. With all our cannons on our ships at sea or stuck in the mud of Flodden, how can we defend our capital city? What will prevent Thomas Howard’s victorious army from marching on to my palace at Linlithgow? Or coming farther north to Stirling? Thomas Howard—who knows the traditions of Scotland as well as I do—may be coming now, as fast as he can, on a forced march to snatch my little King of Scotland before he is crowned.
We set out before dawn the next day, while the moon is low and only a line of gray, like tailor’s chalk on mourning cloth, marks the sky in the east. Ahead of us goes the royal standard and the guards shoulder to shoulder around it. In the center rides my husband’s makar, the poet Davy Lyndsay, on a strong horse with James, not yet two years old, on the saddle bow before him. A standard bearer rides beside them with the prince’s own coat of arms rippling over their heads. Nobody can attack us and leave the prince down on the ground with a spear through his heart and then pretend that they did not know who it was. James sits up straight, confident in Davy’s grip. They have ridden together dozens of times, but never before pursued by an enemy at breakneck speed. Davy sees my white face and gives me his lopsided smile.
I ride just behind them, certain now that I am with child, my belly tight with the baby that James has left me, my eyes on the son that I have to guard. I don’t think of anything; I just watch my son, and the windswept road ahead of us. If I took a moment to think, then I would pull up my horse and lean forward on his neck and cry for fear, like a girl. I dare not think. I can only ride and hope that we get to Stirling before the English come after us.
As soon as we are north of Linlithgow the open countryside gets wilder and bigger and the skies get higher. The rounded hills of Lothian, great bowls of valleys and wide ranges of uplands, become grander still as we go north into Stirlingshire. As the sun comes up and we ride onward we enter the thick forests of the valley floors. There is just a trace of the road through the forest, skirting a boggy patch, winding around a long-fallen tree, disappearing altogether where a stream has burst its banks and swept the track away. We have to keep the rising sun behind us, but we can hardly see it through thickness of the canopy. We ride blind, hoping that we are going west. James knew the way very well. He made this journey often, riding between Linlithgow and Stirling and then onward to the north to keep the peace and sit in judgment. But James will never ride in these high hills again. I don’t think of this. I look to his son and see that he has fallen asleep in the saddle, in Davy’s careful grip. I won’t think that my son’s father will never ride with him like this, that his father will never ride again.
No one has planted these woods, no one manages them. No one fells them, not for firewood or charcoal, not for beams for the shipyards or houses. There are no shipyards or houses anywhere near, there are no charcoal burners’ cottages, there are no woodsmen making a living from little shanties. There are not even poachers for there is scant game, nor brigands for there are not enough people for them to prey on, there are so few travelers. The woods are empty of anyone but elusive deer and the beasts that we cannot see: foxes, boar, and wolves. The guards close up, riding knee to knee around Davy Lyndsay and my precious boy, and they lower the royal standard and hold it like a lance, so that it does not catch on the low, sweeping boughs of trees.
This is not like England, not even like the great royal parks of England where no one is allowed to cut trees or hunt game. These are thick forests like the ones before the making of man, and we are like ghosts riding silently through them. We don’t belong here. These trees are older than the time of Christ; these are not Christian forests, they are the land of the little people, the old people that James used to tell me about in stories.
I shiver in the cool gloom, though the sun is high in the sky outside. We cannot feel the heat, we cannot even see the noonday light. The trees and even the air seem to press against us.
It is a relief when the land starts to rise up and we can see a little brightness ahead as the forest grows thinner and there are shrubs and plants at the side of the track, growing towards the light, and then we are going through glades of silver birches and slowly, almost leaf by leaf, we leave the shadows. Now we can see the sky, and we are climbing higher and higher and come out on the flank of a hill that still stretches high above us. The horses blow out and we lean forward as they lower their heads and start to climb up and up, following the faintest of tracks that skirts the cliffs, which fall away on the far side, and takes us over the rounded top. But all we can see are more hills, stretching on and onward before us, as if they were towering waves in an unending sea, before we have to wind down again to the valley floor, now going north, always looking behind us for any sign of the glint of sun on metal, or the distant rumble of Howard’s army.
We ride all day, stopping before noon for something to eat, and then riding on all of the afternoon. As the sun begins to sink towards the tops of the hills and the shadows lengthen over the track, almost obscuring it so that we begin to fear we will lose the way, James cries in a little whiney voice that he is tired, and Davy reaches into his pocket for a piece of bread and gives him a flask filled with milk. James eats, held steady on the saddle, and then leans back against his guardian and sleeps as we keep the steady pace.
Still we go north, now with the setting sun on our left, and I say softly to Davy, “Is it much farther? It will be dark within a few hours.”
“We’ll be in before dark, God willing,” he says. “And if they are following us, they won’t dare to come on in the dark. They’ll camp for the night. They’ll be afraid of ambush and they don’t know the country at all. They can’t find their way in the dark.”
I nod. I am aching in every bone in my body and fearful for the new baby that I am carrying.
“You’ll have a grand dinner and a good night in a soft bed,” Davy says quietly to me. “Behind strong walls.”
I nod; but I think, what if he is wrong and darkness falls and we are still traveling? Will we have to camp out and sleep on the cold hillside? Or what if we have missed the road and gone past the town? What if we are riding onward and onward north, and Stirling is now behind us and we won’t know till tomorrow morning? Then I think: I had better not think like this or I will break down and not be able to ride at all. I have to think, for now and for always, of only one thing at a time, the next thing that I have to do. I have to see these small tasks laid out like matched pearls strung on a necklace with a knot between each one—and not worry that they are the symbols of mourning, as I knew when I dreamed that my husband, my charming, playful husband, tied a string of diamonds around my neck and I watched them melt and drip into widow’s pearls.
Finally, we see a few lights, high up on a hill above us.
“That’s Stirling now, Your Grace,” the standard bearer reins back to tell me, and the horses prick their ears and go forward more briskly, as if they know there are stables with hay and water waiting for them.