“Exactly,” says one of them. “He is your husband, he lives in your houses, he takes your rents, he does not send them to you.”
The old lord raises his head, a red bruise on his forehead, and looks at me. “And who is the lady of the house?” he asks. “Your house? Who sleeps on your fine linen, who dines at the head of your table, who tells your cooks to bring the finest of dishes for her to eat off your golden plates? Who has been wearing your jewels? Who sends for your musicians? Who rides your horses?”
“I will not listen to scandal,” I warn them. My hands are as cold as ice. All my rings turn loosely on my white fingers. “I care nothing for gossip.”
I think: I will show them. I will be a queen like Katherine of Aragon, I won’t even remark when my husband falls in love with my lady-in-waiting. Katherine’s heart was broken, her trust shaken, but she never said one word of complaint to Harry. She never even frowned at Bessie Blount. I know that a husband’s fidelity does not matter. I will show them queenly pride. I will show them that I care nothing for their petty worries. I am a queen. No one can displace me. Even if someone else eats off my plates, even if someone else wears my jewels, I am still Archibald’s wife, I am still dowager queen, I am still the mother of the king, the mother of Ard’s daughter.
“It is his own wife that he has put in your house,” someone says from so far down the table that I understand that even the lowest of the lords knows everything. He is a man so unimportant that he is standing with the commoners at the back of the room. “It is his own wife, whom he married long before his grandfather made him swear to you. Bonny Janet Stewart of Traquair. She has been living like his lady, as she should, as an honest wife should. And the two of them have made merry on your rents and on your cellars and in your bed. You are not his wife. You never were. You are his ambition, his clan’s bloody ambition. He was married to her, years ago, not betrothed. He was married. He pretended to marry you, and you have given him everything and now you want to give him Scotland.”
“I don’t believe it,” is the first thing I can say. Deny them! Deny everything! I say to myself. “You are lying. Where did they live together? Where was all this marital joy?”
“In Newark Castle,” they say, one after another. They are united in this, it has to be the truth. “Didn’t you notice the swept floor, the fresh rushes, the clean linen?”
“Janet Stewart moved out the day before you moved in and left it clean and tidy for her husband, like the good wife she is.”
“She even took your stockings to mend.”
I look from one furious frustrated man to another. There is no sympathy, just rage that I have been fooled and that I have tried to fool them in turn. I think: he chose Janet Stewart in preference to me. When I left for England he went to her. While I was struggling with the ambassadors and borrowing money from Wolsey he was happy with her, his first choice.
I don’t know how I get out of the council chamber, how I get down the hill, that steep mile to Holyroodhouse. I don’t know how I dismount from my horse and wave aside my ladies and get to my own bedroom and find myself terribly alone in the beautiful royal rooms.
I put myself to bed as if I am a little girl, overtired by the day. The ladies come and ask me, am I well? Shall I dine with the court? I say I am sick with women’s troubles. They think I mean that I am bleeding, but I think that these are women’s troubles indeed—when a woman loves a man who betrays her. Betrays her completely—in thought and word and deed. In plan and in whisper, in the day and in the night, and—worst of all—in public, before the world.
They bring me a dark sweet ale, they bring me hot mead. I don’t say that I don’t need this, that the women’s troubles are those of jealousy, bile, envy, hate. I drink the ale, I sip the mead. I say that Archibald may not come to me, that I must be alone. I lie on my bed and I allow myself to cry. Then I sleep.
I wake in the night, thinking I am the greatest fool that ever lived and I am humbled to dust for my stupidity. I think of Katherine marrying a King of England and standing at his side, never considering her own feelings, never pursuing her own desires, but being ceaselessly, faultlessly loyal to him because she had given her word. She has constancy of purpose. She makes up her mind to something and nothing moves her. That is why she is a great woman.
I think of me, married to a king, giving him my word that I would be a good regent, and then falling in love with a handsome face, a youth that I knew to be promised to another. I think of my determination that he should like me best, even when I knew he was betrothed. I think of my delight that I took him from another—in truth—I preferred it that he was not free, I triumphed over a girl I had never even seen. I took her sweetheart from her, I stole her betrothed. Now, for the first time, I feel ashamed of this.
I feel so low that I even think that my little sister Mary has made more sense of her life than I have done. I have called her a fool and yet she has played her cards with more skill than me. She married a man for love and she took him with simple authority and now she is his wife. She lives with him, I know that he never looks at another woman. They are never apart. But I—I turn my face into my pillow and I muffle my groan of despair at my own folly. I go to sleep again with my head buried as if I never want to see the dawn.
In the morning when I wake, I hear that Archibald has gone hunting, but he has left me a dozen loving messages and promised to bring me a fat buck for my dinner. I suppose that he has heard what the lords said to me: this is a city of spies and gossip. I suppose that he is planning on brazening it out, or sliding his arm around my waist and seducing me into stupidity once again. From the quiet attentive service that my ladies give me as they dress me and bring my things for the day, I suppose that they know too. I imagine everyone in Edinburgh knows that the queen has been told that her husband has stolen her fortune and was all along married to another woman—the wife of his choice. Half of them will be laughing at this humiliation to an English princess, and the other half shrugging at the folly of women of any nation. They will say that women are not fit to rule. They will say that I have proved that women are not fit to rule.
I go to Prime but I cannot hear the prayers. I go to breakfast but I cannot eat. A delegation of the lords is coming from the council and I have to receive them in the presence chamber. I dress carefully, patting rice powder onto my swollen pink eyelids, a little red ochre on my pale cheeks and lips. I choose a white gown with Tudor green sleeves, I wear my silver slippers with the gold laces. I let them enter when I am seated on my throne with my ladies around me and my household servants ranged obediently against the walls. We put on as good a show as we can; but it is an empty show, like a canvas castle in a masque. I have no power, and they know it. I have no fortune, and they know who has it. I have no husband and everyone but me has known that for months.
They bow with the appearance of respect. I note that James Hamilton, Earl of Arran, who negotiated my wedding settlement to James the king and was made an earl for his trouble, is towards the back, unusually modest, and that the lord at the front has a paper in his hand, spotted with seals. Clearly, they have agreed to something and are coming to me to announce it. Clearly, James Hamilton is not going to be the one who speaks first.
“My lords. I thank you for your attentiveness.” I must not sound sulky, though Our Lady knows I feel it.
They bow. Clearly, they are uncomfortable at my subdued shame.
“We have elected a new regent,” one of the lords says quietly. I see the door at the back of the presence chamber open, and Archibald comes. He stands there quietly listening, his intense gaze on me. Perhaps he thinks I have been able to force the lords to do his will. Perhaps he hopes that they are going to say his name. Perhaps he is waiting to see if I can face down the humiliation that he has caused.