Susan Fraser King - Queen Hereafter: A Novel of Margaret of Scotland

I am grateful for the encouragement and support of many friends and colleagues, including Julie Booth, Joanne Zaslow, Anita Havas, Joanne Szadkowski. And endless thanks are due Mary Jo Putney and Patricia Rice as willing sources of opinion, inspiration, and friendship.

Also, I am very thankful to Benjamin Hudson, Ph.D., who discussed with me the many historical complexities that surround Malcolm and Margaret (and shared his inspiring theory that good girl Margaret and bad boy Malcolm are like the song Leader of the Pack). In addition, Malcolm Furgol deserves a nod for his stalwart defense of the merits of Margaret and his namesake, helping to convince me to write the book. Special thanks are due Mary Grady for graciously tutoring me in Celtic harp and sharing her wisdom in lessons that despite our crazy schedules did indeed sink in (I can pluck out some tunes!). I must thank Celtic harper Ann Heymann once againthe conversations we had when I wrote another book about a medieval harper, along with Anns dazzling CD recordings, were inspiring for this novel, too. And thanks go to Richard Green for carefully correcting the Latin so that my characters would sound like educated royals rather than idjits playing around with an online translator; and lastly, thanks to Tommy D. for the harp!

My editor, Heather Lazare, has gentle patience and a guiding hand, and my agent, Karen Solem, is always there through thick and thinand the Crown art department produced a gorgeous cover right out of the gate. Finally, my wonderful guys, David, Josh, Jeremy, and Sean, have put up with a lot, accepting the books as practically family members

Thank you all.

ALSO BY SUSAN FRASER KING

Lady Macbeth

There is perhaps no more beautiful character recorded in history.

W. F. S KENE , Celtic Scotland, 1895, ON Q UEEN M ARGARET

A medieval fairy tale: a princess, the eldest child of an exiled prince and an exotic noblewoman, raised in a pious royal court, sails with her family to the land of her fathers birth and the throne promised there. The father dies within a week of arriving, possibly poisoned, and his widow raises their children alonetwo princesses and a small prince who is to inherit the throne. When the aging king dies a decade later, his enemies invade and the royal family must flee. Sailing over raging seas, they are shipwrecked along a northern coast belonging to a barbarian people.

That king, known to be a brute warrior, offers the fugitives sanctuary; he soon falls in love with the eldest princess, requesting her hand in marriage. Devout, educated, a beautiful young creature of a virtuous and charitable character, the princess intends to become a nun. But for the good of all she is persuaded to marry the warrior-king.

Their marriage of near opposites produces eight healthy childrensix boys and two girlsand the queen works tirelessly to bring charity, refined culture, and religious reform to her adopted nation, earning the love and trust of the people. The king and queen adore each other: she teaches him to read and turns his plain fortress into a palace; he translates for her when she lectures his foreign priests on theology; she feeds orphans with her own golden spoon and establishes a free ferry for pilgrims; she steals the kings gold to give it to the poor and releases his ransomed prisoners, for which he affectionately calls her a little thief. He orders a cover of precious metal and gems made for her favorite old book; she gives away her garments; he adores her, and she loves him, their children, and her faith more than life. Their enduring affection for each other is widely admired.

Twenty-two years later, the king is killed in battle alongside his eldest son, and the queen dies of heartbreak within days. Their royal dynasty lasts generations, the queen is declared a saint by her descendants, the king is immortalized in literature, and their memory is still revered.

Fairy tales and romance, indeedyet this is Margaret and Malcolms story in a nutshell, handed along by generations of historians and supported by medieval documents. Historians know a good deal about them by now, but their romantic story remains a solid foundation beneath both new and accumulating facts.

Margaret of Scotland has long fascinated historians as one of the most complex women in medieval history. What adds to her uniqueness is a rare detailed biography written by her personal confessor, along with annals and records by other chroniclers and historians both in her lifetime and after. More is known about Margaret than about most medieval queens. Her biographer, confessor, and friend, Bishop Turgot, was an Anglo-Dane who escaped Norman captivity in Lincoln to join the exiled Saxon royals in Scotland; he later became Bishop of Saint Andrews (at the time called Kilrymont or Cill Rimhinn), and he was also prior of Durham. Margaret regarded Turgot as a close friend, and he was another who adored her. Several years after her death he wrote about her life for her daughter, Edith, known as Queen Matilda after she married Henry I of England.

Despite stilted medieval language and ideals, Turgots Vita S. Margaretae, which has survived in medieval copies, was based on his personal memories and brings Margaret to life as an intense young woman of piety, conscience, charity, compassion, and intelligence. There was gravity in her very joy and something stately in her anger, he wrote. She gave birth to eight healthy babies who thrived to adulthood (Edward, Edmund, Edgar, Aethelred, Alexander, David, Edith, and Maryfour kings of Scots, an abbot, and a queen of England among them) at a time when too many infants were lost early; that Margaret survived eight births was remarkable as well. As a mother, Margaret was attentive and affectionate, teaching her children lessons and manners but recommending that her beloved brood be whipped when they were naughty, as frolicsome children will be, Turgot tells us.

And she had a feisty side, pilfering her husbands treasury and springing his prisoners loose, and disguising herself as a boy to enter a church forbidden to women. After losing her temper, she would ask for more penances, and she pressed Turgot to rebuke her if he saw fault in her behavior. When he said he could find no flaw, she gently chided him for negligence.

A certain mythology has developed around Margaret, in part due to the information gathered for her sainthood 150 years after her death. She kept an altar in a hidden cave near Dunfermline where she prayed and meditated; she fed and clothed the poor and provided for pilgrims; she lost her silver-cased Gospel while crossing a river, but by some miracle its delicate painted pages were unharmed (even more miraculously, the manuscript survived the ages and is now preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford).

So much of Margarets life is knownalmost too much to pack into a novel that covers just a portion of her lifeand only some of it can be real, the rest exaggeration. Certainly her medieval chroniclers applied to her the ideals of perfection that measured most medieval queens and noblewomen, based on the model of the Virgin Mary (the Marian cult was already developing in the eleventh century). Yet any woman with eight young children and several households to run was simply too busy to spend hours praying each day, which may be closer to the truth than some of the tales about her.

Turgots Margaret conveys as genuine, her charitable deeds believable, such as giving away the clothing on her back to the poor on outings (her courtiers did the same, embarrassed into it by her example), feeding orphans from her own dish, and creating Scotlands queens ferry, free to pilgrims (bishops could pay or walk). She prayed, admonished, and celebrated with fanatical intensity, fasted frequently, and lost sleep to devotions, benefitting her soul and ruining her health.