“If Samson comes to be shorn, who shall refuse him?” Agnes Howard says. “But we don’t want to cut off your strength, Your Grace. We would not hurt you for the world.”
“You shall make me as handsome as an English courtier,” he assures her. “If Her Grace the little Queen of Scots does not want a handsome Highland beard in her bed, she need not endure one. She has to have me, wild enough for any woman—she need not have a great beard as well.”
He sits down on a stool, tucks the napkin around his neck and presents the scissors to me. I take them and make a nervous snip. A whole clump of red pelt falls into his lap. Aghast, I stop, but the king laughs and says: “Bravo, Bravo, Queen Margaret! Go to it!” And I make another snip and then another until it is all off. He is still thickly bearded, but the cascade of hair that tumbled over his chest is now lying on the floor.
“Now, Lady Agnes,” he says, “I swear that you know how to shave a man. Show Her Grace how it is done and make sure that you don’t cut my poor throat.”
“Should we not send for a barber?” she asks, just as I did.
He laughs. “Oh, give me a noble shearing,” he says, and Lady Agnes sends for hot water and a razor and the finest soap and sets about him while I watch and the king laughs at my appalled expression.
At the end she wraps him in warm linen and he pats his newly bared face gently and then unwraps for me.
“What do you think?” he asks. “Do I please you now, Your Grace?”
His lower face is white-skinned, far paler than the rest, as it has been shaded from the sun and wind by his beard while his cheeks and his brow are deeply tanned, and he has white smile lines around his eyes. He looks odd, but his chin is strong and slightly dimpled and his mouth is sensual, the lips full and shapely.
“You do,” I say, for I can hardly say anything else.
He gives me a warm kiss on the mouth, and Agnes Howard claps her hands as if all the credit is due to her.
“Wait till they see me,” he says. “My loyal lords will know that I am wedded and bedded to an English princess indeed, for I have become so very English and smart.”
We stay in Holyroodhouse Palace until the autumn and there are constant jousts and celebrations. The French knight Antoine d’Arcy, the Sieur de la Bastie, is a great favorite, and swears that he would be my chevalier were he not already promised to Anne of Brittany. I pretend to be offended, but then he tells me that in honor of her he wears armor and trappings of pure white, and nothing suits him better. He really cannot switch to green. This makes me laugh and I agree that he has to be “the white knight” for the rest of his life, but that I will know and he will know that his heart is mine. This is very pretty nonsense, especially from a young man so dazzlingly good-looking, and it is part of the work of being a beautiful queen.
ON PROGRESS, SCOTLAND, AUTUMN 1503
When it gets a little colder and the leaves start to crisp and change color, my husband takes me on a progress to see some of the lands that are mine as queen. I think of my lady grandmother’s keen stewardship of her lands and her quiet avarice in adding to her landholding, and I look around me as I ride westwards out of the city, along the raised tracks that weave through the marshy lands at the edge of a great river, the Forth, and hope that my land is being profitably managed.
The trees grow down to the water’s edge and rain their leaves on us as if we were in a parade and people were throwing flowers. The woods are all the colors of bronze and gold, red and brown, and the higher slopes of the hills are ablaze with the red of rowan trees. The few villages along the way are surrounded by a patchwork of little fields and all the hedgerows are bright with hips and hawthorn berries, and in the thicker clumps there is the fat gleam of sloes as black as jet. Above our heads the geese flying south cross the sky in huge processions, one behind the other, and we often hear the loud creak of great wings as flights of swans go south away from the cold weather of the north. Every morning and every dusk we see herds of deer disappearing through the trees, moving so silently that the hounds cannot see them, and at night sometimes we hear wolves.
We travel agreeably together. James loves music and I play for him and the court musicians come with us. He has a passion for poetry and writing, and his court carries its own makar—a poet who travels with us everywhere like a cook, as if you might need poetry like dinner when you stop for the evening. To my surprise, James does need poetry like this; he wants it like wine before dinner, and he has an appetite for talk about books and philosophy. He expects me to learn their language, for unless I do I will never appreciate the beauty of the poems in the evening. He says they cannot be translated, you have to hear them as they were first sung. He says that they speak of the people and the land and they cannot be translated into English. “The English don’t think like us,” he says. “They don’t love the land and the people the way a Scot does.”
When I protest, he tells me that further north the people only speak their own language called Erse and really, I should learn that too. The people of the islands far out in the cold north seas speak a language halfway to Danish and had to be forced to recognize his rule, thinking that they were a people and a kingdom all of their own. “And what is beyond them?” I ask.
“Far, far away, a land of whiteness,” he says. “Where they have no night and day but whole seasons of darkness and then months of white light, and the land is only ice.”
James has a profound interest in the workings of things, and wherever we go he is off to bell towers to see the mechanisms of clocks, or to water mills to see a new way of loading wheat into the grinding stones. In one little village they have a wind pump to get the water out of the ditches and he spends half the day with the Dutchman who built it, going up and down the sluices and up and down the stairs to the sails until he understands completely how it works. I can share some of his interests; but often I find him totally incomprehensible. He is fascinated by the workings of the human form, even the dirty bodies of poor people, and he will talk with doctors about the air that we breathe and if the same comes out as goes in, and where it goes and what it does, or how the blood will spurt from the neck but ooze from the arm and why that might be? He has no shame and he has no sense of disgust. When I say that I don’t want to know why the veins in my wrist are blue but the blood that spills out of them is red, he says: “But, Margaret, this is the stuff of life, this is the work of God. You must want to understand it all.”
When we approach Stirling, riding up and up the winding streets of the little town that clings to the side of the hill, he warns me that he keeps a philosopher, who has one of the towers as his private domain and is studying the nature of being itself. He has a forge and a distilling urn, and I must not be troubled by the noise of hammering or the strange smell of the smoke.
“But what is he doing there?” I ask, disturbed. “What do you hope to find?”
“If we were to be blessed, then we would find the fifth element,” he answers. “There is fire, water, earth, and air, and there is something else, the very essence of life. All these things have to be present for life, and we know that they live inside us, but there must be another element, unseen but felt, that animates us. If I could find that, I could make the philosopher’s stone and I would have power over life itself.”
“There are philosophers all over the world looking for the secret to eternal life and the stone that turns base matter into gold,” I remark. “And yet you hope that it will be you who finds it, before anyone else?”