Free The Thistle and the Rose by Jean Plaidy Page A

her brows and looked at the woman, who lifted her shoulders and murmured: “She is but a child, Your Grace. You know how children prattle on… without sense.”
    “Then if your father is the King, who is your mother?” asked Margaret suddenly, ignoring the woman and addressing the child.
    “She was Margaret too,” the child told her. “I am named for her.”
    “Is the child's mother here?” asked Margaret.
    “No, Your Grace. Her mother is dead.”
    “She is not,” declared the child. “My father says she is not dead, and will never die.”
    “Oh come… come…you weary Her Grace.”
    Margaret did not seek to detain them; she watched the woman take the child's hand and lead her away.
    She went immediately to the King, who was in his own apartments playing his lute. Imperiously she said: “James, I wish to speak to you… privately.”
    James regarded her somewhat lazily and, seeing that she was truly agitated, signed to his friends to leave him.
    “Well?” he said when they were alone.
    “There is a child here—Margaret—who says she is your daughter. I know that this is not so, but I like not that she should proclaim herself to be. I want you to stop this.”
    James was silent for a while; then he strummed a few notes on his lute. The time had come. He would have to explain.
    “The child speaks the truth,” he said. “She is my daughter.”
    “Your daughter! But…”
    “I was to have married her mother, but she… died. She was poisoned with her two sisters when at breakfast.”
    Margaret's blue eyes opened wide and the color flamed into her cheeks. He noted that the fact that his mistress had been poisoned did not shock her so much as that she had existed.
    “So…you had a mistress!”
    “My dear Margaret! What do you expect? Not one…but many.”
    “And…a child!”
    “Children,” he corrected her.
    She was angry. She had been hoping for signs of her own pregnancy and there had been none. And now he… her own husband… admitted not only to having had mistresses…but children.
    “I am glad you know,” he said. “I visit them often. They are after all my own flesh and blood and I have always promised myself that my children should never be treated by their father as I was by mine—perhaps in the hope that they will never have to suffer the remorse I did for the part I played in my father's end.”
    Margaret stood up and went to the door. She was so angry that she knew she must escape because she had a great desire to fly at him and fight him with all her strength. She had been cheated. She saw that she had been young and foolish and that her naïvet must have been apparent to him. She felt insulted and her Tudor pride was in revolt. She had loved him too deeply, too trustingly.
    He did not attempt to detain her. He shrugged his shoulders and turned idly to his lute. He strummed without hearing; the recent scene had made him think of that other Margaret and the longing for her was almost too great to be borne.
    Margaret could not rest until she discovered more about her husband's premarital love affairs. She insisted on her Scottish ladies' telling her all they knew. So the King had been so enamored of Margaret Drummond that he had wanted to marry her against the advice of his ministers; and she had borne him a daughter, that child, Lady Margaret Stuart, who was so petted and pampered at the King's command. And there were two children by a certain Marian Boyd: Catherine and Alexander; and the young Earl of Moray—who had been given this title when he was scarcely two— was the King's son by Janet Kennedy.
    What a family! And he so proud of them—sneaking off to visit them on the pretense that he was engaged on state affairs! And what was worse, leaving his wife in order to do so!
    All her
amour propre
—which was very strong in the young Tudors—was in revolt.
    She now saw her husband in a new light. He was not the personwho in her girlish imagination she had believed him to be.