The Hammer of the Scots by Jean Plaidy

asked the little boy.
    She nodded. ‘Your father, your grandmother, your sister and myself … we shall all be there and soon there will be another little brother or sister to join us. You will like that, Henry.’
    Henry thought he would and he was clearly happy to be with his mother. He had never forgotten the long time she had been away from him.
    ‘When you are well …’ She was constantly using that phrase to him but each day when she rose, and even during the night, she would go to his little bed and assure herself that he had not already left them.
    As the days passed she knew that Merton had nothing to offer him.
    Perhaps, she thought, we should go back to Westminster.
    But Henry never went back. One morning when she went to his bed she realised that the vigils of widows, the images in oil and the skins of the freshly killed sheep had been of no avail.
    The little Prince had gone as his brother John had before him.

    Her spirits were buoyed up by the child she was carrying.
    Edward said, ‘It will be a boy, you see. God has taken Henry but he will give us another boy. I am sure of it, my love.’
    Edward was upset but not as deeply as she and the Queen Mother were. A deep depression settled on the latter.
    ‘Nothing goes right for me since the King died,’ she complained.
    Those about her might have said that nothing had gone right for others while he lived, but they dared not to her.
    It was almost as though she had had a premonition of disaster for, shortly after the death of the little Prince, a messenger came from Scotland with the news which she had been dreading.
    Alexander had sent him to tell her that Margaret was very ill indeed, and that when they had returned to Scotland after the coronation her health had taken a turn for the worse.
    The Queen Mother, frantic with grief, was ready to start immediately to her daughter, but Edward restrained her.
    ‘Nay, Mother,’ he said, ‘you must not go. Stay awhile. There will be more news later.’
    ‘Not go? When my own daughter is ill and needs me? You know that when Margaret was a prisoner in that miserable castle of Edinburgh I urged your father to leave at once that we might go to her. Do you think he tried to detain me?’
    ‘No, dear Mother, I know he did not. But this … this is different.’
    ‘Different! How different? If a child of mine needs me that is where I shall be.’
    He looked at her sadly and the horrible truth dawned on her.
    ‘There is something else,’ she said slowly. ‘They have not told me the truth …’ She went to him and laid her hands on his chest. ‘Edward,’ she said quietly, ‘tell me.’
    He drew her to him and held her fast in his arms.
    ‘There is something else. I know it,’ she cried.
    She heard him say what she dreaded to hear. ‘Yes, dear Mother, it is true that there is something else. I wanted it to be broken gently.’
    ‘So … she is gone … my Margaret … gone.’
    ‘Alexander is heart-broken. He had summoned the best physicians, the most noble prelates to her bedside. There was nothing that could be done. She went peacefully – our dear Margaret. She is at rest now.’
    ‘But she was so young … my little girl … just a child.’
    ‘She was thirty-four years old, my lady.’
    ‘It is too young to die … too young … too young … They are all dying … yet I am left.’
    ‘And will be with us for many years to come, praise God,’ said Edward. ‘I understand your grief. I share it. Pray let me take you to your chamber. Shall I send the Queen to you? She has a rare gentleness for times like this.’
    ‘First tell me.’
    ‘I know only that she had been ailing for some weeks. She was never really strong.’
    ‘I know that well. They undermined her health, those wicked men up there. I shall never forgive the Scots for this. She should have stayed with me. We should never have let her go.’
    ‘She had her life to live. She had her husband and her children. She loved Alexander dearly