Three Sisters, Three Queens

HOLYROODHOUSE PALACE, EDINBURGH, SCOTLAND, SPRING 1510

James and I are so happy that not even the return of the two bastards from Padua causes trouble between us. Alexander, who was named as Archbishop of Saint Andrews, and his half brother James, Earl of Moray, come to pay their respects and I greet them with cool courtesy. I show them both the legitimate son of their father, and I tell them this is Arthur, Prince of Scotland and the Isles, and Duke of Rothesay. Both boys kneel to the little crib and swear fealty and Alexander blinks his short-sighted eyes behind his round glasses perched on his nose, and says doubtfully, “He’s very small for such a big title,” which makes me laugh.

I don’t even object when my husband names Alexander as Lord Chancellor. “I need someone I can completely trust,” he says.

“He’s little more than a boy,” I say irritably.

“We grow up early in Scotland.”

“Well, as long as he knows that all his learning has been for the benefit of his half brother,” I say.

“I am sure that Desiderius Erasmus never forgot it for a moment,” James says with his wry smile.

To my surprise, Katherine finally replies to my letter, writing in her own hand, with her pomegranate seal. It is a private letter to say that she is so sad and so ashamed, she has lost the baby she was carrying, and though it would have been a girl, she feels that she has failed to produce the one thing that Harry lacks, the one thing they need to make their joy complete.

She shocks me out of my righteous offense. She makes me stop and think of my little girl that died, and my son before her. I think how cruel I was to taunt her with being a mother for the first time at twenty-three. It was a poor joke when she read it and lost her baby. I am filled with remorse and I am ashamed that I let my rivalry with Katherine spill over into spite. I take her letter in my hand, and I go to chapel and pray for the little soul of the lost baby. I pray for Katherine’s sorrow, I pray for my brother’s disappointment and for the throne of England. I pray that a Tudor son and heir will come to them, to the young woman who has been my sister for eight years, whom I have loved and envied turn and turn about, but who has been in my heart and prayers for so long.

And then I bow my head lower and whisper to Saint Margaret who was swallowed by a dragon and must have known, as I know, the secret leap of joy of being rescued from the worst thing that can happen. Margaret came out of the dragon’s belly unscathed, and I came through labor and childbirth with a son and heir—the only Tudor son and heir. I would never wish ill to Katherine, nor to Harry or Mary—indeed, I truly pity her loss—but my son, Arthur, is heir to Scotland and England and will be so, until she has a boy. Her son, when he comes, will displace mine. Who could blame me for a little secret joy that I have a son and she does not?

The ambassador to England writes to say that although Katherine lost one child, a girl, she was—praise God—carrying twins and she still has a baby.

“That’s unusual,” my husband remarks to me as he reads the letter aloud by the fireside in my bedroom after all my ladies have been sent away. “She’s lucky.”

I feel a rush of understandable irritation at the thought of Katherine keeping a boy in her belly when I have been on my knees praying for her to find comfort in her loss. How ridiculous that she should write me such a tragic letter when she was still carrying a child. What a fuss she makes over nothing!

“What d’you mean, unusual?” I ask stiffly, irritated that my husband takes such an interest in the work of physicians, reading their horrid books himself and looking at disgusting drawings of diseased hearts and swollen entrails.

“It’s surprising that she did not lose both children when she lost one,” he says, rereading the letter. “God bless her, I hope it is the case; but it is very unusual to lose one twin and keep the other. I wonder how she knows. It’s a great pity that she cannot be examined by a physician. It may be only that her courses have not returned, but that she is not with child.”

I clap my hands over my ears. “You cannot speak of the Queen of England’s courses!” I protest.

He laughs at me, pulling my hands away. “I know you think that, but she is a woman like any other.”

“I would never admit a physician, even if I was dying in childbirth!” I swear. “How should a man come near a queen at such a time? My own grandmother specifically wrote that the queen shall go into confinement and be served only by women, in darkness in one shuttered and locked room. She cannot even see the priest who comes to give her the Mass—he has to pass the Host through a screen.”

“But what if a woman in confinement needs a physician’s knowledge?” my husband counters. “What if something goes wrong? Didn’t your grandmother nearly die in childbirth herself? Wouldn’t it have been better for her if she had a physician to advise her?”

“How should a man know anything about such things?”

“Oh, Margaret, don’t be a fool! These are not mysteries. The cow is in calf, the pig is in farrow. Do you think a queen births a child unlike any other female beast?”

I give a little scream. “I won’t hear this. It is heresy. Or treason. Or both.”

He pulls my hands down from my appalled face, and kisses each palm gently. “You need not hear any of it,” he says. “I’m not like the soothsayers at the mercat cross. I can know something without shouting about it.”

“At any rate, she must be the most lucky woman in the world,” I say resentfully. “To have everyone’s sympathy for losing a daughter and then carry a twin son.”

“Perhaps she is,” he concedes. “I certainly hope so.” He turns away from me and strips off his shirt. The cilice at his waist makes a little chinking noise.

“Oh, take that horrid thing off,” I say.

He looks at me. “As you wish,” he says. “Anything to please the second luckiest woman in the world—if she can be pleased being, as she is, forever in second place, a second-rate queen, in a second-rate kingdom, waiting for her newborn boy to be forced into second place.”

“I didn’t mean that,” I protest.

He takes me in his arms and does not trouble himself to answer.