It takes days for the baby to come. Two days and three long nights of pain and drink and sleep and waking again to pain, hobbling up and down the room and groaning on the bed, before they give me a squalling bundle in a wrapping of linen cloths and say: “A girl. A girl, Your Grace.”
I am so exhausted that I don’t even care that it is not a boy. I am so glad that it is over and that I have a live child for all my labors that I lift my tearstained face to look at her and see a perfect little tiny baby, as neat and as complete as the bud of a rose, as sweet as a subtlety, an angel made of marchpane. I can’t speak for pain and exhaustion. I think if I die from giving birth to her, at least I have seen her, and Archibald will have a child from me.
“What will you call her?” someone asks.
“Margaret,” I say. “Margaret Douglas. A little Scots lady, even if her mother is dead.”
I really think that I will die. My pains go on even though the baby is born, the bleeding goes on, and nothing the midwives can do will stop it. They are frightened. They are poor, ignorant women who have made a little money from attending the births of their neighbors; usually they are paid in eggs. They have never been in the castle before, they have never swaddled a baby in good linen. They do all that they can, but nobody can help me as I slide into a fever and don’t know where I am, and I call for James, my husband James, not to go to the battle and not to give me pearls for mourning. I dream that he is nearby, and that Katherine has the wrong corpse. I dream that he is living wild like an animal in these wild lands and that he will come to me at the moment of my death.
I have long painful days, half drunk on rough ale mixed with uisge beatha. I drift in and out of consciousness, and see daylight and then the flickering lights of wax candles, and then the cold light of dawn. I hear, as if from far away, a thin cry and the sound of someone walking up and down and hushing a wailing child.
A girl is not much use to me. Archibald will not come out of hiding to see a girl. The Douglases don’t need a girl, they need the next head of the clan. But I am glad that she is alive. I was afraid that riding when I was so near to my time had killed her. And I am glad I am alive, though I still cannot sit or stand without pain, and my leg seems to be in a palsy.
I raise my head. “Write to my brother,” I say. “Tell him that I have another healthy child and that I am hoping he will be her godfather. Tell him that she needs an uncle to defend her.”
I lie back and drift away as I watch them swaddle her and bind her to the board. They have not been able to find a wet nurse, and they can’t even ride out to the distant villages, the roads are so dangerous with reivers and brigands and armed men. They are feeding her with sops—bread dipped in watered milk squeezed into her mouth. “Oh, I’ll feed her,” I say irritably, and then I whimper with a new pain as I put her to my breast.
She feeds a little and then they take her away and say that I can rest at last. I lie on the thin pillow, it is damp with my sweat, but there is no change of linen for the bed. They bind my bleeding parts with moss and then at last they sit quietly and I hear the rocker tap her foot up and down on the pedal of the cradle and all the other noises die away as the rest of them go to eat or to sleep.
The candlelight flickers and gutters, the fire dies down in the grate. I cannot believe that I, a Tudor princess, should be trapped here, in little more than a border tower, watching the shadows jump on the mud-plaster ceiling and hearing the rats scratching on the floor. I close my eyes. I cannot understand how I can have been born so high and fallen so low. There is a cold draught through the shutters that makes the candle flames flare up and die down. There is no glass in the windows to keep out the cold. I can hear the nighttime noises of these hills, the persistent hooting of an owl, the sharp bark of a dog fox, and somewhere, miles away, the howl of a wolf.
HARBOTTLE CASTLE, ENGLAND, NOVEMBER 1515
A month later and my baby is thriving. We have found her a wet nurse and my birth pains have ceased. Lord Dacre comes to the door of the castle commander’s bedroom and asks if he may be admitted. Nothing is as it should be. I was churched in my bed, the baby christened in the tiny chapel. Her godfather named as Thomas Wolsey in his absence, with no time for his consent. We are like reivers ourselves, camped on the wild lands of the border. I say that he can come in. There is no point in trying to live to the standards of my lady grandmother’s book of the household when we are little better than outlaws.
He takes in my pale face, the poverty of the furnishings. “Your Grace, I was hoping that you might be well enough to make the journey to Morpeth Castle where my wife can care for you.”
I shake my head. “I don’t think I can go. There is something wrong with my bones. I am recovered from the birth but I am strangely lame. I cannot walk. I cannot even sit up. The Berwick physicians have never seen anything like it.”
“We could take you in slow stages.”
“I can’t do it,” I repeat.
One of the ladies who has been found to serve me steps forward and curtseys to the English lord. “She can’t get out of her bed,” she says bluntly. “Her pain is quite terrible.”
He looks at me. “It is so bad?”
“It is.”
He hesitates. “Your brother has sent you wagonloads of goods for your comfort at Morpeth Castle,” he remarks. “And Queen Katherine has sent you some beautiful gowns.”
I feel desire clutch me like hunger. “Katherine has sent me gowns?”
“And yards of rich cloth, yards and yards of it.”
“I must see them. Can you bring them here?”
“I would be robbed on the road,” he says. “But I can take you to them. If you could find the courage, Your Grace.”
The thought of Morpeth and wagonloads of goods, clean linen and decent wine, and my gowns—new gowns—gives me courage.
“I have commanded physicians to come to Morpeth and see you there,” he says. “Your brother is determined that you shall be well again. And then you can go to London in the New Year.”
“London,” I repeat wistfully.
“Yes indeed,” he says. “And half of Europe is up in arms at the way that you have been treated. People are calling for war on France, and war on the duke. You are their heroine. If only you were able to rise up you could claim your throne.”
“How ever can I get to Morpeth?”
“My men can carry your bed.”
My lady-in-waiting billows forward. “Her Grace cannot be carried in her bed by common soldiers.”
Lord Dacre turns his weather-beaten hard face to me. “What d’you think? It’s that, or hold your Christmas feast garrisoned here, and we could be attacked at any time.”
“I’ll do it,” I say. “How many gowns has she sent?”
They tie me into the bed for fear of an accident, and I grip the rope as they manhandle it down the three steps from the chamber to the great hall below. I hide my face in the pillow to silence my moans; at every jolt I feel as if I have been stabbed with a burning poker in my hip. I have never known such agony, I am certain that my back is broken.
Once in the great hall the men gather around my bed and run long poles underneath it as they might carry a coffin. There are six on each side and they go carefully, in step, out of the hall, across the drawbridge and down the long winding ride that leads up the steep slopes of the castle. Before us go the guards, Dacre riding among them, my baby held in the arms of my maid-in-waiting, riding pillion.
The ragged inhabitants, and the poor people who live in shanties against the castle walls hoping for some protection from the weather and the reivers, stand amazed as I go by, swaying like some icon being paraded on a feast day around the borders of a parish. I would feel foolish if I were not completely absorbed by the pain. I lie back on my pillow, and I see the snow clouds thickening in the skies above me and I draw on every scrap of Tudor courage that I have, and pray that this nightmare journey of swaying, jolting steps does not outlast me, and that I don’t break down before we have reached the end of it.