On we go, and I beckon Lord Dacre to ride alongside me.
“How far?” I say through my teeth.
“Not long now.”
“An hour?”
“Maybe more.”
I take a breath. It might be half a day more. I have learned on this long ride that his lordship feels no obligation to accuracy.
“I tell you the truth, I cannot do it.”
“I know you are tired . . .”
“You know nothing. I am telling you. I cannot go on.”
“Your Grace, my house is at your command, it is comfortable and—”
“Do I have to write you a letter in code? I am going to have my baby. I cannot wait. I have to get into a house. My time has come.”
Of course, he reminds me that I am not due till next month, and I tell him that a woman knows, and that a woman with two strong sons and several losses certainly knows, and we pull up the horses and squabble away, standing on the road, till a cold east wind whips up some rain, and I say: “Am I to have this baby in a ditch?” Only then does he give up the idea of Morpeth and says that we will turn aside off the road and go to his little castle of Harbottle.
“Is it near?” I demand.
“Quite near,” he says, and from that I know that I have hours of pain ahead of me.
I rest my head on the groom’s broad back and I feel the horse go down into the valleys and up into the hills, and from time to time I look to the left and right and I see the trees and then the high lands. I see a buzzard circling over a wood. I see a fox slink into the bracken at the side of the track and his red back makes me think of Ard and I wonder where he is right now. Then we pass through a little village that is nothing more than a series of tumbledown shacks with children playing in the dust who run inside when they see us, and Lord Dacre says: “Here we are.”
The track to the castle rises steeply from the village, and as we climb upwards the drawbridge bangs down, and the portcullis rattles up. The horse bows its head and climbs and climbs. The castle is on a little cliff above the village and around me are other empty peaks. We go through a stone gateway and we are inside the curtain wall, and then the groom jumps down from the horse and I let his lordship lift me down and I cling to him as my legs are weak beneath me and he leads me through the guardhouse and into the keep.
HARBOTTLE CASTLE, ENGLAND, OCTOBER 1515
I rest, I sleep. I wake and I eat. The food is not good, but at least there is a rope bed, not a heap of straw tied up in sacking; but there is no good linen and no bed curtains to keep out the draughts and only one small pillow. It is the bedroom of the commander of the castle and I must say that the posting will not make him soft. The mattress is stuffed with lumps of rock from the feel of it—no bird can have had feathers like this—and it has fleas or lice, or at any rate something that bites. I have red weals all over my skin. But at least I am off the horse, and after a few days the pains subside and I think perhaps my baby may not come too early, but at any rate if he comes now it will be under a roof like a Christian and not in a hedgerow like a beast.
I don’t fret about Archibald, living wild in the debatable lands between Scotland and England, with no permit to enter one country, an outlaw in the other. I don’t even think about my son James, with Davy Lyndsay at Stirling Castle, no doubt asking for me, learning that the path to the throne is lonely and hard. I don’t think about his little brother, Alexander, my baby, my pet. I don’t think about Katherine, pregnant once again, hoping for a boy for England. I don’t think about Mary, pregnant too, according to Lord Dacre—though what does it matter really? At the very best all she can have is Charles Brandon’s son, heir to his father’s debt and his mother’s folly. I am the only queen likely to have a living son and I should be exultant, but I am so tired that I think that we are truly sisters at last, sisters in suffering and sisters in disappointment.
My pains come to nothing, I fall into a dull passivity, like a cow with a stuck calf inside her. There is nothing I can do to bring it on, and nothing I can do to hold it safe. I am afraid that the constant riding of the last few days has shaken him loose. I am afraid that he will die inside me, and then they will have to cut me open and I will certainly die too. I think this is my Flodden, this is my battle against an enemy, and I am almost certain to lose. I have to be desperately courageous and know that my duty has brought me here, and anyway, there is no way to escape.
When I try to get out of bed—for I need to urinate all the time, and they have no garderobe here but just a bucket under the bed—I realize that I have become paralyzed. These are not labor pains, they are some deep disease of the bones. I need a physician, not a wise woman. I tell Lord Dacre that I must see the French ambassador now, that I have no choice: I must make peace with the Duke of Albany because I am likely to die. He has to send me physicians from Edinburgh. “Send for the French ambassador,” I say. “He can follow us here. You can give him safe conduct.”
“I don’t know where he is. He may still be at Berwick.”
“He was at Berwick?”
He realizes that he has let this slip.
“He came to Berwick?”
“If you remember, we had to leave. What if his men had arrested your husband? You wouldn’t want to risk the earl’s arrest?”
Of course, Ard’s safety comes before everything, but if I had only seen the French ambassador, and he had been able to make an agreement with me, then I might not have been forced here, to this miserable fort, to suffer this pain without a physician or a wise woman or a herbalist I can trust.
“Send for him!” I command. “If he and I can make an agreement he can send me physicians from Edinburgh.”
“Not yet, Your Grace,” he replies carefully. “We don’t want to jeopardize your husband’s courage, his great endeavor.”
“Why, what is he doing?” I ask. “I thought he was hiding out till he can join us?”
Lord Dacre smiles, his old eyes twinkling. “I think you will find that a brave young lord like him can do better than that!”
“He is rescuing my sons,” I say, without a moment’s doubt, and the lord gives me a broad wink.
“He is, God speed him,” he says. “How will it be when you are both safe behind the walls of Morpeth Castle and your sons with you?”
“He will bring them to England?”
“There is nowhere else for them. You will all be together again.”
I shake my head. I don’t answer. He is right. Every step that I have taken, every choice that I have made, seems to lead me onward to places where I don’t want to be, to more choices that I don’t want to make.
“I’ll see,” I say. I think of my lady grandmother, who never told anyone what she was thinking nor what she might do. “I will decide when I have given birth to my child.”
“I have sent for physicians from Berwick,” he says. “If we could only get to Morpeth I could house you more comfortably. My wife is there, and her ladies. They would care for you and you would have rooms to your liking.”
“I know,” I say. “But it can’t be done. I can’t even walk, I couldn’t ride.” A sudden pain like a sword thrust to the belly makes me hold myself and gasp.
Dacre gets to his feet. “Is it now?”
I nod. “It’s now. I think it is really coming now.”