Woman Who Gave Birth to Rabbits - Donoghue [17]
Number of hands on the King's clock: 1.
Age of Margaret Tudor in 1496 when her father, the King of England, offered her to the King of Scotland as a bride, and the King of Scotland refused: 7.
Years in which Scotland and England went to war: 1496, 1497, and 1498.
Number of daughters borne to the King of Scotland by Margaret Drummond in 1496: 1.
Number of months after becoming the King's mistress that Margaret Drummond and her infant were sent home to her family: 11.
Reward received by Margaret Drummond from the King in 1497: a 9-year lease of lands in the earldom of Strathearn.
Year in which Lord Kennedy gave his daughter Janet to the King as a mistress: 1498.
Year in which Janet Kennedy bore the King a son: 1499.
Year in which the King announced that he would in fact marry Margaret Tudor, now ten years old, daughter of the King of England: 1499.
Year in which the King sent away his mistress, Janet Kennedy. 1499.
Year in which the King made a formal proxy treaty of marriage with Margaret Tudor, daughter of the King of England: 1502.
Age of Margaret Tudor in that year: 12.
Year in which the King took Margaret Drummond as his mistress again: 1502.
Amount he gave her in gold: £21.
Amount he gave her for their daughters nurse: -41 shillings.
Year in which rumour spread that the King was planning to marry Margaret Drummond instead of Margaret Tudor, daughter of the King of England: 1502.
Amount the King of Scotland paid an alchemist to discover the Philosophers Stone: unknown.
Number of Lord Drummond's daughters who breakfasted together one summer day in 1502: 3 (Margaret, Euphemia, Sibilla).
Number of Lord Drummond's daughters who died later the same day: 3 (Margaret, Euphemia, Sibilla).
Possible poisoners of this breakfast: A (the Murrays; the Kennedys; the Kings advisors; salmonella).
Number of blue headstones erected in Dunblane Cathedral: 3.
Year in which the King of Scotland married Margaret Tudor, daughter of the King of England: 1503.
Annual fee paid by the King of Scotland until 1508 for the saying of masses for the soul of Margaret Drummond: unknown.
Note
"Account" is the story of Margaret Drummond (c. 1472–1502), either the youngest or the eldest of the daughters of Lord Drummond, Laird of Cargill, and one of several mistresses of King James IV of Scotland. She and two of her sisters—Lady Euphernia Flemming and Lady Sibilla (ir Isabella) Drummond—died after sharing a breakfast in 1502. Family tradition, backed up by very little evidence, claims that Margaret was murdered to prevent her from marrying the King. Their daughter Lady Margaret Stewart was raised in Stirling Castle with the King's other illegitimate children.
Revelations
Friend Mother has drawn all her Children together, more than sixty of them, now, from all over Scotland. She has led them into the sweet fields of Nithsdale, to build their last house.
In her former life in Glasgow her name was Elspeth Buchan—nicknamed Luckie, for her power to survive all trials—but she has cut her ties to the world, and Friend Mother is the only name she will answer to now. She has told her minister, Hugh White, the great secret of the coming times: her Children will not die as other folk will, but be changed, transported into the clouds, to meet with Christ in the clean air and mingle with him forever.
The house the Buchanites have built—called Buchan Ha—is a low barn roofed with heather, with a ladder leading up to a garret where they all sleep on narrow pallets, the men at one end and the women at the other. They have made long deal tables and benches, a meal chest, a dresser, and stools. They have built stout doors with bars, just in case. Already Nithsdale folk are muttering against Buchan Ha, calling it a coop of lousy, fornicating idlers.
Hugh White—the Reverend Minister of the Relief Kirk at Irvine, as he once was—has tried to explain to the neighbours that he and his Brothers and Sisters are not idle but busy. It is already June, in this year that the world calls 1786 but that Friend Mother says is the true