“What?”
“I was the king’s groom. I followed the English back to Berwick. I thought I should wash the body and prepare it for the coffin.” He swallows on a dry throat as if he is trying to choke down tears. “He was my lord. It was my last duty.”
“And?”
“They let me see the body but they would not let me wash him. They wanted him dirty and bloody. And there was no coffin. They were rolling the body in lead so they could take it to London.” He pauses. “In the heat,” he explains. “The body in the heat . . . the flies . . . they had to . . .”
“I understand. Go on.”
“I saw the body as they got the lead ready to roll him up. It wasn’t him.”
Wearily, I look at the man. I don’t think he is lying; but equally this cannot be the truth. “Why don’t you think it was him?”
“It didn’t look like him.”
“Wasn’t his head smashed by a billhook?” I ask harshly. “Wasn’t his face cut off?”
“Yes. But it wasn’t that. There was no cilice.”
“What?”
“The body they rolled in lead and shipped to England had no cilice around the waist.”
This is incomprehensible. James would never have taken off the cilice before battle. Surely nobody could be so wicked as to cut it off for a trophy? Can he have escaped from the battle? Can someone have stolen his body from Katherine? My thoughts are whirling but nothing helps me. I look down at my begging letter to the sister-in-law I despise. “What difference does it make to me?” I ask despairingly. “If he was coming home he would be here by now. If he wasn’t dead he would still be fighting. It makes no difference at all.”
We convene a council of the lords that have survived and they recognize me as regent according to the king’s will. I am to rule with their advice. I am to have my son in my keeping. I am to have a council of lords to assist me. Head of them will be the Earl of Angus, whom they call “Bell the Cat” from an old triumph. He stands before me now with his face grooved with grief. Two of his sons rode with my husband at Flodden, and they won’t come home either. I know that he is untrustworthy. He has sided with England and Scotland one after the other through a long life of border warfare, and James once imprisoned him over a woman, the mother of one of the bastards. But he looks at me and his dark eyes are sharp. “You can trust me,” he says.
I can tell by the glances between the lords that they can hardly believe themselves, sitting in unity under the command of an English woman. I can hardly believe it myself. But everything is unexpected, everything is wrong. There is not a man at the table who has not lost a beloved son or brother or father or friend. We have all lost our king, and we still don’t know what can be saved.
We agree to reinforce Stirling. This will be the new center of government, the focus of our defense. We agree to build a new wall at Edinburgh Castle, but we know that if Howard comes with his army in force, the castle will fall. I tell them that I have written to my brother and sister-in-law to beg for peace and they greet this news with unfriendly silence. “We have to make peace with them,” I say. “Whatever we feel.”
I tell them that my brother Henry, King of England, has commanded me to send my baby into his keeping in London to be raised as King of Scotland far from his home. He says I must not let the lords of Scotland lay hands on my little boy and take him off to the Isles where he will be “in danger and hard for the king to attain.” They laugh shortly at that, though there is little real mirth among us all. We agree, without discussion, that James V, the new King of Scotland, will stay in his country and with his mother. Katherine has stolen the body of the father; she is not getting the son as well.
The law of the land has ceased to run. There are too many fatherless sons and they are not being given their inheritance. There are too many widows with no one to protect them. The borderlands are in a constant state of warfare, as the Warden of the Marches, Thomas, Lord Dacre, under Katherine’s orders, rides out every day to burn crops, destroy homes, and keep the debatable lands in a state of constant danger and distress. No man trusts his neighbor. They arm against one another. Without my husband James to hold the kingdom together it is breaking down into lordships and tribal lands, warring against each other.
We pass laws, we issue commands. Soldiers returning from Flodden must be supported, but they must not steal and rape. Orphans must be provided for. But there are not enough lords to enforce the laws and the good men who rode with them are dead.
It is a dark council. But I have one piece of good news for them. “I must inform you, my lords, that I am with child,” I say quietly, my eyes on the table. Of course this should be done by an announcement by herald, from a queen to her royal husband: but nothing is as it should be.
There is an embarrassed murmur of sympathy and congratulation from the lords but old Bell the Cat does not respond as a lord but as a father. He puts his hand over mine, though he should not touch a royal person, and he looks at me with rough sympathy. “God bless you, poor little bairn,” he says shockingly. “And God bless you that James has left us something to remember him by. And are you due in the spring?”
I gasp at his familiarity, and the three ladies seated behind my chair rise to their feet and come forward as if to shield me from rudeness. Someone’s head goes up and someone says a short angry word, but then I see that there are tears in the earl’s eyes and I realize that he is not thinking of me as a queen, or an untouchable English princess, but like one of his own, one of the many Scots widows who will have children in the cradle and babies in the womb and no husband coming home to help them ever again.
STIRLING CASTLE, SCOTLAND, CHRISTMAS 1513
We have a quiet Christmas. I have no money to spend on feasting and dances, and no one is in the mood for a celebration. The court is in mourning, still shocked by the loss of so many men. There is no handsome king to call for music or wine, and there is no money to pay for either.
The old advisor, the Earl of Angus, retires to his castle, perched on a cliff at Tantallon, and dies at Whithorn to the sound of calling gulls. The title goes to his grandson, a young man in my household who serves as my carver, and I have lost another experienced man. My council is divided between those who would like to make peace with England, our dangerous neighbor, and those who will never forgive the English for our losses and long to take French money to make war on them for our revenge.
But we have one visitor who makes the arduous journey north from London, traveling slowly through the mud and the ice, struggling through the snowdrifts, rising late in the dark mornings, having to find shelter in the dark afternoons. Friar Bonaventure Langley brings me the condolences of my sister-in-law, as if all my troubles were not made by her. Incredibly, Katherine, knowing that I am widowed, knowing that I am with child, knowing that I am alone in a dangerous kingdom with a little boy in my keeping, knowing that I am penniless and heartbroken, thinks that the most helpful thing she can do is to send me a confessor.
Gently, he takes my hands; kindly, he signs the cross over my bowed head. I kiss the crucifix he offers me as he helps me to rise, and then he says: “Can you assure me, daughter, that he really is dead? There is a fearsome rumor in England and abroad that the King of Scots is alive. The queen must know—she has promised her husband that she will discover the truth.”
I feel a wave of nausea and bile rises into my mouth. I put my hand to my face and swallow it down like grief. “She sent you all this way to ask me this? In the steps of the army who killed him?”