Mary’s letter is filled with news of the court and their autumn doings. Henry has built and equipped a great ship, the greatest galley in Europe, and everyone calls her the Princess Mary in a ridiculous compliment to my little sister. Mary writes that they all had the greatest of fun, that Harry took her on board, that he was dressed in a sailor suit of cloth of gold, that he took the wheel and Mary called time for the rowers and banged on the drum like the hortator, that they went faster than the wind, faster than a sailing ship could travel. There are pages and pages of this boasting and a few more pages as to how blessed she is with a loyal husband, which I take as a taunt for having to part from Ard, and how happy they are preparing their country house together, which I understand is her telling me that she knows I could not stay at Tantallon. I hand the whole bundle of letters to the groom of the chamber who is throwing logs on the fire. “Burn this,” I say.
He takes it as if it might scorch him. “Is it secrets?” he asks, awed.
“Sinful vanity,” I say, as irritable as my lady grandmother would have been.
I lie in the great bedchamber, the best room of the house. Lord Dacre and his wife, Elizabeth, have hastily vacated it for me and there are royal hangings on the wall from London, and a cloth of estate over the chair by the fireside. Massive stone carvings, showing the arms of the Greystokes, which Lord Dacre gained from his heiress wife, boast of their importance. But they have to sleep in a lesser chamber while I am here.
They put on a great Christmas feast in the massive old hall in my honor. There has never been a queen in residence at Christmas before, and the steward and the servants and the master of horse have excelled themselves in preparing the castle for the season. Dacre has appointed a witty actor to be master of the feast and every day there is a concert of music, or singing, dancing, a play or an entertainment, a hunt, a race, a challenge. The bleak countryside all around has been stripped of food and provisions so that the castle may feast. Even the woods have their greenery hacked down and carried in so that there are boughs over every door, a Yule log in every fireplace, and the sweet smell of evergreen hanging in the air. The castle is bright in the deep darkness of the North of England, burning like a brand in the night of the North. Travelers from miles away can see the lighted windows as priceless candles are set in every sconce and every fireplace is hot.
Half the nobility of Scotland and all of the North of England come to pay their respects to me and to celebrate the season which is such a promising one for them. They are all determined that England shall make war on the Duke of Albany’s Scotland. They all hope to gain Scottish lands, to steal Scottish goods. The simmering unrest that Thomas Dacre has kept stoked through two reigns is coming to the boil as he declares to every visitor that the King of England will not tolerate such an insult to his sister, that he is certain to invade, that my suffering makes his cause just and (though he never says this) Dacre himself can find his greatest happiness in going to war again.
I cannot receive anyone, though the Dacres make over their great presence chamber to me, and Lord Dacre says that he himself will carry me in his chair. He says he will pad it with cushions and hang the cloth of estate over it and it will be my throne. But I cannot bear even to be lifted from the bed; my leg is swollen so that it is nearly as big as my body. I see only those people whom I admit to my bedchamber, but I can’t leave my bed for them. I have become a cripple, as weak as one of the beggars at the mercat cross who has to be pushed around on a little cart and carried to the steps in the morning.
So Lady Bothwell and Lady Musgrove make their visit to my bedroom to sit with me, and Lady Dacre comes to my chamber a dozen times a day to see if I need anything. I receive Lord Hume, who has been loyal to my cause though it has cost him his lands and his safety, and together we discuss how I shall return and how I shall get my sons back. He looks a little askance as if there is something wrong when I speak of them. “My boys must live with me,” I say. “I don’t intend to put them into the keeping of my brother or his wife. They shall come to me.”
“Of course, of course,” he says with the sudden anxious soothing of a married man who knows that a woman should not be crossed when she is in pain. “We will talk about it more when you are better. And besides, I have some news for you that will be the best physic in the world.”
I can hear the tramp of booted feet along the gallery outside my chamber. “I cannot have visitors,” I start.
“You will welcome this one,” he says confidently, and he throws open the door to my bedchamber and the guard outside steps back . . . and Archibald, my husband, comes in.
I bounce up in bed and I cry out in pain at the same moment as he flings himself across the room. “My love, my love,” he whispers into my hair. He kisses my face, he embraces me tightly, and then gently holds me away from him so that he can see the tears streaming from my eyes as I say, “Archibald, oh, Ard! I never thought that I would see you again. And our little girl! You must see her.”
Lady Bothwell has already sent someone running to the nursery, and now the chief nurse comes with little Margaret in her arms. Ard holds her at arm’s length, looks into her sleeping face, shakes his head in awe at her. “She is so small!” he marvels. “She is so perfect.”
“I thought we would lose her, and that I would die!”
Carefully, he restores her to her nurse and turns back to me. “It must have been terrible for you. So many times I have wished that I was with you.”
“I knew you couldn’t be. You couldn’t risk being in England without a safe conduct!” At once the thought strikes me. “Ard, my love, are you safe now?”
“Your brother the king has sent a safe conduct for me and for Lord Hume, and for my brother. We are all to go to London in honor, as soon as you are well enough to travel.”
“I will be well soon,” I promise him. “The pain has been terrible. Not even Lord Dacre’s best physician from Newcastle knows what is wrong with my leg. But resting in bed is easing the pain, and I am sure the swelling is going down. I will be well enough to go to London, I swear I will, if you can come with me.”
They dine on cygnet and heron, venison and wild boar. They bring the best dishes to my room and Ard sits with me and feeds me from his own spoon. He keeps me company through the twelve days of Christmas and through the cold days, and together we listen to the merriment from the hall, he on a humble stool at my side, for I cannot bear anyone sitting on the bed and making the feather mattress dip. I lie propped low on only one beautifully embroidered pillow, so that my legs and back are still.
“I am no wife to you,” I say fretfully. I cannot hold him, I cannot lie with him, I cannot even stand beside him. In a few months I have become an old lady and he is far stronger and more handsome than when he was the young man appointed to be my carver. He has been hardened and toughened by his winter on the run; he has had to command men, face danger, defy the Regent of Scotland. He is more lithe than ever, quick on his feet, alert to any danger. And I am tired and in pain, fat from pregnancy, unable even to move from my bed without crying out.
“It was being my wife that has brought you to this,” he says. “If you had stayed a widow queen, you would still be in Stirling Castle.”
He is speaking soothingly, almost by rote, but suddenly the enormity of what he has said makes him fall silent and look at me. He swallows, as if he has never before felt the despair of these words on his tongue. “I have been your ruin.”