Two months before turning seventeen Madeleine de Valois wrote to her father that she was getting better. Twenty-nine days later she would be dead.

Her mother had died the same way, coughing through the last years of her life while Madeleine was still a small child at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Francis I watched his daughter grow up thin and feverish in the same pattern and sent her south to the warmer air of the Loire, away from Paris, away from the damp he blamed for killing her mother. When Scotland asked for a French bride, he tried to give them someone else. He offered Marie de Bourbon instead, hoping to keep his sick daughter out of a northern climate his own doctors thought would finish what her mother's sickness had started.

James V met Marie de Bourbon in France and felt nothing. He met Madeleine and would not be talked out of her. Francis said no. Madeleine and James kept asking. Francis, who had spent sixteen years trying to keep this exact climate away from this exact daughter, eventually said yes. They married at Notre-Dame on the first of January, 1537. Then Francis stalled. Four months of festivities in Paris and the Loire, one delay after another, a father who kept finding reasons his daughter should not yet board the ship.

She boarded it anyway. Ten French vessels crossed to Leith, and by the time they reached the Scottish coast on 19 May, Madeleine already had a fever that would not break and a cough that would not stop. She knelt on the sand before anyone could stop her and kissed the ground of the country she had just spent a childhood being kept away from. James watched his new queen thank God for a kingdom that was already killing her.

For a few weeks in June, it seemed as though it might not. On the eighth, from Edinburgh, she wrote to her father that her symptoms had eased. She was better. James had already sent for a French physician, Master Francisco, to attend her, and Madeleine added a line in her own hand: he was only needed now to finish the cure, not to save her. Coronation preparations began.

Nobody in Edinburgh was planning a funeral.

She died in James's arms at Holyroodhouse on the seventh of July, a month before her seventeenth birthday, six months and six days after the wedding at Notre-Dame. They buried her at Holyrood Abbey. According to George Buchanan, the court had never worn black for a death before.

They wore it for her.