“There’s only one key, not six.”
Again I see the little gleam at my ruthlessness. “Aye, well, that was well done. We can explain it when the council find out.”
“They won’t like it. They don’t like being ruled by a woman.”
He pauses for a moment. “Perhaps you would be well advised to take another husband?”
“My Lord Drummond—I have not yet been a year widowed. I have just come out from confinement. My husband appointed me regent and told me that I should rule Scotland alone.”
“But he wasn’t to know the difficulties you would face in council. I don’t think anyone could have imagined it. God knows, it is a different country without him.”
“There’s the emperor,” I remark, thinking of the great men of Europe who are seeking a wife. “Not that I can marry for a year. And the King of France has just lost his wife.”
“So you have been thinking? Fool that I am! Of course you have.”
“I had no one to talk to in confinement, and I have long dark nights alone. Of course I consider my future. I know that I will be expected to marry again.”
“You will, and your brother will want to advise you. He’ll want you to marry for the advantage of England. He won’t want the little King of Scotland to have a stepfather who is his enemy. He would forbid you to marry the King of France, for instance.”
“If my sister Mary married Charles of Castile, and I married Louis of France, then I would be the greater queen,” I remark. “And if I were to be Queen of France, then I would be the equal of Katherine.”
“Superseding your sisters is not important. What matters more is that Scotland has a powerful ally, not which of you has the bigger crown.”
“I know, I know,” I say a little irritably. “But if you had seen Katherine of Aragon when she married my brother Prince Arthur, you would understand that I never want to come second to her—” I break off, remembering the bloodstained coat. “Now more than ever.”
“Aye, I understand it well enough. But think again, Your Grace. If you married one of these distant kings, you’d have to go and live in Burgundy or in France, and the council would keep your boys in Scotland. On the other hand, if you married a Scots nobleman, then you’d still be Queen of Scots, you’d still be regent, you’d still have your title and your fortune, you’d live with your sons, and yet you’d have someone to keep you warm at night and safe in your castles.” He pauses, looking at my thoughtful face. “And you’d be his master,” he adds. “You’d be his wife, but you’d still be his queen.”
I look down the dining hall at my court, the mixture of the wild and the cultured. The highlanders who cut their meat with their daggers and eat it off the points of their knives, the young men who have been raised in France and use the new forks and have napkins tossed over their shoulders to wipe their fingertips. Those who eat at the trestle tables from a common bowl, arguing in broad Erse, and the lords from the distant islands and mountains who come to court very seldom and sit with their households, proudly ignoring each other, speaking their own incomprehensible language.
“Yes, but there’s no one,” I say desolately to myself. “There is no one I can trust.”
John Drummond is right to think ahead. Almost as soon as I am out of confinement the marriage proposals arrive. God forgive me, I find it hard to hide my delight at the thought of the courts of Europe gossiping about my future and seeing me, once again, as a prize. Once again I am a trophy to be won, not a wife tucked away in the ownership of a king, of interest only when I am with child. I am a princess and I must choose a husband—who is it going to be? Katherine may wear the crown of England (though she has no baby in the cradle and I have two), Mary may have been drenched in jewels and betrothed to Charles of Castile, but I am free to choose either Maximilian, the Holy Roman Emperor, or Louis, the King of France. These are the wealthiest and most important men in Christendom. I feel my ambition rise. Graciously, I receive emissaries from both courts. It is clear that both great kings would be glad to marry me, both of them would endow me with a fortune, and make me queen of huge lands and wealthy beautiful courts. One of them would make me an empress.
This is not a personal matter, it is a decision about a dynasty. My brother will have to negotiate the terms and advise me; I will have to consider very carefully what is best for my country of Scotland, my home of England, and my future. My Scots advisors will have a say in my decision too, since I am regent, and my choice will affect the country, taking us into alliances, making new enemies. If I choose well, Scotland could be enriched by my new husband, and guarded by him. If I choose badly, I will give them a tyrant, my son an evil guardian, and myself a lifetime of unhappiness. There is no more important decision. Divorce is unthinkable, and anyway unattainable. Whoever I choose, I will have him till death.
Suddenly, I am high in Harry’s favor. He remembers that he has a sister now that I am a player in the continual struggle for power in Europe. My throne is the gateway to England—whoever marries me is married to England’s dangerous neighbor. My country is poor, but powerfully fortified and learned. My fortune is not great, but I am fertile, and I am young and in the flush of beauty. Harry is very warm and friendly, happy to advise, writing to me through Lord Dacre, recommending him as a good neighbor and reliable advisor, urgent that I must consider what is best for my sons and for myself. Harry thinks that an alliance with the emperor would be the best. Of course he does, he is married to the emperor’s kinswoman and desperate to go to war with France again.
I shall decide for myself, I say, looking at Harry’s letter, written in a perfect clerk’s hand by one of his secretaries. Obviously, he has dictated it while busy with something else. But at the end he has scrawled his good wishes and signed his own name. Katherine has written an affectionate note in the margin.
I should be so happy to call you cousin by marriage as well as sister, and I know that my uncle Maximilian would keep you safe and prosperous. I do hope that you don’t think of France, my dear. I hear that Louis the king is very old and diseased and vicious in his habits, and we would never see you. It would be very dreadful if yet another husband of yours were to make war on England, when you think of the last outcome.
I read and reread this odd mixture of affection, threat, and spite where she warns me against marrying the King of France, and even dares to threaten me with another husband’s death.
Mary encloses a page of news of her studies in Spanish and her music and her new gowns. I see, with a little added bitterness, how much more attentive they are now that I have such prospects. If I become empress, I will be more important than my brother, and I will never again write him a letter in my own hand. As empress I shall outrank Katherine, as empress I shall outrank Mary, whose boy husband—the emperor’s grandson—will not inherit until the emperor dies.
This gives me pause; there will be a great pleasure in taking a throne seated beside a man who outranks my sisters’ husbands—but when he dies I will be widowed again. He is fifty-five years old now—how much longer can he live? I don’t want to be widowed again and worse, worst of all, I would be Dowager Empress and Mary, my little sister, would step up into my place and inherit my crown while I would have to step back and watch her do it. I know I couldn’t bear that.
I do want a great husband, but I want a friend and a lover, a companion and a comrade. I hate sleeping alone, I hate dining in front of the whole court without a husband at my side. My only comfort at the great dinners when I am seated alone before the whole court is my carver, Archibald Douglas, the only man allowed to be at my table. The haunches of meat are put beside me on the high table and he carves my portion and slices for the rest of the lords, and he smiles at me and talks to me quietly so that I don’t feel so lonely.