“The best rooms are not very comfortable,” he warns me. “But your ladies shall take you up.”
I cannot think why he would bring me somewhere that is neither defensible nor comfortable, but I go up to my rooms without a word of complaint. He is right. Inside the cold walls it is damp and bleak. The fire lit in my bedchamber steadily emits smoke which finds its way out, upwards and through the arrow-slit windows, and when I go to look out towards the sea I shiver in the cold mist that slides in over the sill. Though I try to be glad that there will be no attacking my tower from the land, I cannot help but long for the luxury that I left behind in Linlithgow.
“Fetch a warming pan, I’ll go to bed,” I decide. But then there is a long discussion about where the warming pan might be, and whether a brick would do as well, and that the sheets, which are rough and coarse, are not really damp. I am so tired that I lie on the bed and wrap myself in my traveling cloak while they puzzle how to make the room comfortable and what they have that is fit for me to eat.
All my royal furniture and linen is left behind in Linlithgow. It won’t get here for days. I don’t have more than one change of clothes. I understand that we could not travel with my wagons with all my treasures, but this is not good enough. I cannot be neglected. I doze for a little while but I wake when Ard comes quietly to my bedside.
“What now?”
He bites his lip, he looks intensely anxious. “A message from Albany. He knows you’re here. We’ll have to go to the Humes’ castle, Blackadder. It’s properly garrisoned and guarded, and they have promised to defend you. They’ve got nothing left to lose—they’re declared as traitors already. And they are well paid.”
“Paid?” I demand. “Not by me!”
“Dacre,” he says shortly. “He pays all the border lords.”
“But what for?” It is Dacre who has advised me into this danger. I have trusted him with everything.
“He pays the lords to keep the borders in continual uproar,” Archibald says, “so that he can invade and claim to be keeping the peace. So that he can raid like a reiver himself, stir up trouble and steal cattle. So that he can have some lords obliged to England for money or support, and so that your brother can argue in the courts of Europe that the Scots are ungovernable. So we all look like lawless fools.”
“He is my brother’s chief advisor!” I protest. “He serves me. He is loyal to me, I know this. He advises me, he cares for my safety.”
“Doesn’t stop him being an enemy to the Scots,” Archibald says stonily. “Anyway, he has paid the Humes enough to keep them on your side. We can go there.”
“What about my goods and my gowns and my jewels? My wagons are all coming here?”
“They can be safely stored here till you send for them.”
“Can’t we stay here and parley with Albany?” I ask weakly.
“He’ll have my head,” Ard says grimly. “I broke my parole for you, remember.”
I shudder. “We’ll go at once.”
We leave at first light and I climb wearily onto the horse behind him. The touch of his jacket against my cheek comforts me like an embrace. The scent of him, the glimpse of his profile when he looks back and smiles at me and says, “Are you all right?”—all these things make me feel treasured and protected by him.
I push disloyal thoughts to the back of my mind. I will not think that we are going to William Hume because Ard does not know what else to do, and, even worse, that if Dacre has been paying the border lords to rebel, was he paying my husband, too? Was he paying the Douglases before I married Ard? Did I marry Dacre’s spy?
There is no road, there is no lane. There is a track wide enough for a single man riding alone from village to village; but little more than that, and some of the way we ride across fields, the crop standing in stooks. We know the direction only by keeping the sea cliffs on our left and our faces to the south. The skies arch above us, it is enormous countryside, and when I look up I can see the fields rolling away to the distant horizon, to the distant hills. Archibald knows the land for miles all around his castle and after that we take up a lad from every village we pass to guide us to the next.
I go into a daze of tiredness and pain, and I fall asleep against my husband’s back, clinging to him and moaning a little at a new ominous pain in my hip, like something grinding into the very bone.
I wake to see a horseman coming towards us, his mount muddied to the shoulders and sweat creaming his withers and neck. “Who is it?” I demand fearfully.
“One of mine,” Archibald reassures me, and jumps down from the saddle and goes to talk with him.
When he comes back to me his young face is grim. “We can’t stay at Blackadder Castle,” he says flatly. “Albany has raised a troop and is coming down the road from Edinburgh for you. We’re going to have to head for the border.” He pauses. “Dacre was right, we should have gone to England straight away. Albany has sworn he will recapture you and he is mustering an army.”
“An army?” I say, and my voice trembles. “He is leading an army after me?”
“Forty thousand men,” Archibald says tightly. “We can do nothing against such a force. Blackadder wouldn’t hold, we’re safe nowhere but over the border.”
“Forty thousand?” I repeat in a shriek. “Forty thousand? Why would he send so many? Why would he come himself? If he just agreed to my demands I would return to my sons in peace!”
“We’re past that,” Archibald says bluntly. “That’s what the forty thousand shows. It’s war. It’s not you and him trying to come to agreement—it’s not a private quarrel—you have split the nation. The army of the governor will set siege to the Lord Chamberlain’s castle if you are inside.” He turns to his horse and rests his head against its neck as if he would weep. “It’s the very thing that your husband prevented. It’s the very thing he never wanted: Scotland divided on itself, a war of brother against brother; and I have helped to bring it about. I have led you into danger, I have left your sons in danger, and I have set the stage for a whole new battle.”
“It’s not our fault,” I say stoutly. I snap my fingers for a groom to lift me down from the saddle, ignoring the shooting pain that goes from hip to toes, clinging to the footrest of the saddle with my hands so that my knees do not give way beneath me. “If they had accepted my rule—”
“It is our fault,” he insists. “If you had been more amenable to Albany when he came, or if you had been fairer to the Scots lords, if we had waited before marrying, if we had asked for their consent . . .”
“Why should I ask for consent?” I demand furiously. “My sister Mary married who she pleased and my brother forgave her in a moment. Why should Mary marry the man she loves and you—my own husband!—tell me that I should be bound where she is free, that I should be less of a princess than her! That I should be a lonely widow but she can celebrate her second wedding the moment she steps out of her widow’s confinement? How can you tell me that Mary can be happy and I cannot?”
“Nobody but you cares about Mary!” he shouts at me, before everyone. Everyone turns around to look at us. My ladies, white-faced, know that a Tudor princess, a queen regent, cannot be abused. But Archibald is furious. “Not about Mary and not whether you get the things she has, not about Katherine. It’s not about the rivalry of three foolish women! This is about Scotland—my God—it’s about your late husband’s wishes, about his wisdom. And I have not been guided by him, but by you, and by the enemies of Scotland. And we have all been advised by the man who took your husband’s body off the battlefield as a trophy. Yes! It was Dacre who did that! No need to look as if you did not know! And now he tells me to bring you to England as if you were another royal corpse! And I know that you will never get back to Scotland if I do. You will never get back to Scotland. We will never bring the king’s body home. Your son will never get to the throne. He is advising me to destroy the royal family and my country, and he is our only advisor!”