After Flodden (3 page)

Louise was right, though, in believing her father a kind man. If he had only a half-groat in his pocket, he would still have shared it. How he squared his knavery with his charity, she never
understood. The question taunted her to the end of her life.

Indeed, it was partly sympathy that made him offer for Louise’s mother, a widow with two children at her skirts as she touted roasted sweetmeats around the streets of Dieppe under the
noses of foreign merchants. The hungry eyes of her children, as well as their mother’s fragile beauty, fired his chivalry, and when, later, she insisted their infant daughter bear her name
and not his, he reluctantly agreed.

Now, with her second husband dead, Mme Brenier was adrift. She did not particularly miss him, but she missed the security he had brought her. And she also had the grace to admit that she had
used him badly. ‘He was a good man,’ she told Louise, ‘whatever others think. He told me he only ever killed one man, when he was young, and would not do it again, if it could be
avoided. He kept his word.’ She crossed herself, and turned to the window. ‘Good man or not, he was also an idiot, like almost every man who has ever lived. To put money ahead of his
safety. To risk everything, and lose it all.’

Her hand hovered over Louise’s head as she sat, staring into her lap. Louise felt its warmth, even though it did not touch a single hair. ‘He thought the world of you, ma
petite,’ she said. It was a rare moment of tenderness from mother to daughter, and Louise later realised it was also a testament of respect, if not love, from wife to husband.

Louise felt the loss of her father like a creel of stones on her back. Anger soon gave way to sorrow, but the dragging burden of his absence proved less easy to shift.

Everyone is equal in death, the priest intoned over Davy Turnbull’s grave, as he was pitched into the hole, but when Marguerite died, Louise understood that even the Church tells lies.
Marguerite’s death was not only a loss, but an outrage. It was as if the world had been shaken inside out and upside down: sky turned to sea, food into clay, day blackened into perpetual
night. More than a year later, and the sight of her sister’s velvet counterpane, and the wolf-skin on the floor by her bed, still stung Louise into tears. Yet she could not close her door,
nor seal up her room. Her sister’s voice rang around the house. Her laughing presence surrounded them all. It was an unexpected balm.

When she learnt that Benoit might also be dead, Louise spent the night in her sister’s room, face burrowed in a pillow still scented with lavender. The touch of cold bedclothes and a
fading perfume offered her more comfort than her mother, immersed as she was in private grief for her favourite child.

Now it seemed that the only living creature Louise could call on was the vixen. The hound slept that night by her side, her dog-breath warming her face.

Soup was simmering over the fire. Since Benoit had ridden off to war, Mme Brenier’s cooking had retreated to the simplest and cheapest fare: vegetables, fish, a rare shank of lamb or
knuckle of pork. Each week she took a handful of coins from the caddy where Benoit had stored his wage. The box was emptying, and she was growing uneasy.

‘Écoute-moi!’ she said, ladling out broth and tossing the stock bone into the vixen’s bowl. ‘The rain here, it is wetter than the sea. This country is barbaric,
you know. In Beaubecq now it will be golden and sunny. Hark at that wind!’

The shutters rattled in the gathering storm, hammered by rain driven in off the sea. It was September, but the last fortnight had been as wet and cold as winter. The weather suited the
country’s mood. With the king dead and so many with him, there was a deep sense of foreboding. Sunshine would have felt like mockery.

‘This surely is the most uncivilised land in the world,’ said Mme Brenier, gathering her shawl close as she sucked soup from her spoon. Louise said nothing, but for once she nodded.
This complaint had been her mother’s refrain from the first day she stepped ashore. She seemed to have been determined to like nothing about her new home except the distance she had put
between herself and her first husband’s grave, between her children and hunger.

The weather was an obvious target, but she also loathed the language (impenetrable) and the people (vulgar). Everything was rough and coarse here that in Normandy was refined and elegant. Even
the king was not glorious enough. She had seen him walk around Leith docks without a courtier or bodyguard in sight. He was no more impressive than any other nobleman, and they were a
penny-pinching, threadbare bunch compared with the gentils-hommes of Paris. King Louis, she liked to say, would no more be seen in public without his retinue than he would go to court in his
nightshift. Anyone who tried to touch his cloak would have had their hand chopped off. Yet she had seen James drop coins into a beggar’s dish even though the wastrel had clutched at his boot
to draw his attention, and no doubt smeared it with grease.

With a clatter, Mme Brenier cleared the dishes. Louise took a chair at one side of the fire, and her mother sat at the other, a piece of fine linen in her hands. The vixen lay across
Louise’s feet, warming her toes. Save for the rising wind outside, the room was quiet. Mme Brenier’s needle moved quickly. The rushlight was weak, but she could sew a straight seam
blindfold. She was making a shirt for her son.

In this subdued light, it was possible to guess at Mme Brenier’s youthful self, well hidden now beneath her pigeon-chest and sour brow. Louise looked at her bent head. She had been lovely,
once. Her eyes were large and dark, her mouth generous, her nose neat and winsome as a child’s. Now that nose was sunken in flesh that spilled into rolls at her neck, cleverly concealed by a
ruffle of cambric. Her black hair was now grey and brittle, but it escaped her cap in curls that recalled its once tipsy seductiveness.

By northern lights, Mme Brenier’s skin was exotic, not the wintry pallor or wind-roughened rosiness of local women. Benoit had inherited that skin. In summer, when he was working outdoors
in the dry dock he turned dark brown, as if someone had tipped a bottle of walnut juice over him while he slept. Louise’s complexion was, in contrast, like milk that’s been skimmed of
all cream. That came from her father, Davy Turnbull, whose additional bequest of his ginger hair had mellowed, in Louise, to the warmth of copper. Like her father, Louise was slight. Mme Brenier
bemoaned her lack of bosom, but she could not complain at the narrowness of her waist or the neatness of her hands and feet. Benoit, by contrast, had the barrel chest of his Norman father and the
swaggering gait that went with it. Mme Brenier would congratulate him on inheriting his father’s looks too often for Louise’s liking.

Staring into the fire, she remembered the salt smell of her father’s leather jerkin, as he scooped her into his arms. ‘My little fish,’ he’d say as she squirmed with
delight. ‘What’s my little fish been doing while I’ve been away?’

He would be gone for long stretches at sea, returning with a satchel of treats for the children and their mother. At the scrape of his boots at the door, Louise would throw herself at the latch
with a squeal. She was always the first into his arms, but even as a child she could tell that her father’s eyes went immediately to her mother, who would approach sedately, as if he had been
gone only a morning. She would kiss him, but her lips never lingered. When once he tried to pull her into an embrace, she pushed him away. Mind the children! she scolded. Sometimes at night there
were sounds from their room, but it was always her father Louise heard, never her mother.

‘I should never have married him,’ Mme Brenier told Marguerite, shortly after Davy Turnbull’s death. She did not hear Louise passing the door, and stopping at the sound of her
mother’s conspiratorial tone. ‘I only did it to keep us from starving. When we met, I was almost ill with worry about how to look after you both. I thought he realised that. I made it
plain from the beginning: this was not love. I could promise to be a faithful wife, une femme convenable, but I would never be a passionate one.’

‘Maman, please,’ said Marguerite, uncomfortable at such intimate detail.

‘You needn’t flinch like an ingénue,’ her mother replied. ‘Time’s coming when you will be thinking about such matters yourself. And the truth is, loving or
not, there is a duty on all wives to be amenable. Agréable. And so I was. Davy, he tried to fool himself I felt more for him than gratitude. Men are willing fools where bed is concerned
– you’ll soon learn that. A useful lesson.’

She sighed, though whether with remorse or exasperation Louise could not tell. ‘He went to his death deluded, for all I tried to make him see how things really stood between us.’

‘Better that, perhaps, than the cold facts,’ said Marguerite. Louise caught the unease in her sister’s voice, as if a door had blown open, a north wind delivering a truth about
the nature and conduct of married love that she did not want to hear.

And her mother had been right. Marguerite was pitched into love and passion before the year was out, as familiar by Christmas with the urges of men as her mother could wish. Mme Brenier could
not be accused of soliciting the king’s attentions towards her daughter, who caught sight of her by chance, but that she then did everything she could to encourage his interest made her, in
Louise’s eyes, partly to blame for Marguerite’s death. It must be one of the most uncomfortable feelings in the world, Louise thought, to blame your mother for your sister’s
death. Uncomfortable, unnatural, and unchristian. She had prayed to be able to forgive her mother, but as yet the bitterness was fresh, unassuaged by her nightly petitions to God.

There was no doubt that Mme Brenier had mourned her beautiful daughter and that she felt some guilt too. But in Mme Brenier’s universe there was little room for sentiment. The death of her
first husband had cured her of any tenderness or optimism, save for her beloved son. Life was hard, and the sooner one understood that, the more resolutely one would meet it. Nothing proved her
point better than the news from Flodden. There would be scarcely a family in the Lowlands unscathed by this battle. Louise gripped her hands in her lap and tried not to believe that God had cursed
this household. She was less afflicted than many.

The fire spat, and the vixen whined. Louise lifted her gaze from the flames to find her mother looking at her, her black eyes sparked into life by the firelight.

‘I wish your father was here,’ said Mme Brenier. Louise raised her eyebrows in surprise, and was rewarded by a severe stare, as if it was she who underrated Davy. ‘He would
know what to do in a situation like this,’ said Mme Brenier. ‘But in his absence, I have been thinking. There is one man who can help us. Who must help us, if he wishes to atone for his
sins.’

CHAPTER TWO

June 1512

The sea was whipped into cowlicks by a breeze that purpled Patrick Paniter’s cheek.

‘You’re blushing, my friend!’ cried James, spurring his horse into a trot. ‘Forget your lover, whoever she is. Let’s be moving.’

They rode fast, along the coast road. Their usual visit to the yard at Newhaven had been abandoned for a longer journey that morning. Up coast, away from spying eyes and marauders, lay the
king’s secret shipyard. It was three hours from the city by horse, on winding, sand-spindled roads, but when they got there, James hoped to be amply rewarded.

‘Barton tells me she is nearly complete,’ he shouted, vying with the wind for Paniter’s ear. Behind him the sea glittered in the noonday sun, and for a moment, framed against
sky and sea, James looked less a king and more a boy who had escaped his dominie’s eye for a day’s mischief. With a schoolyard yell, Paniter whipped off his hat and flourished it in the
wind, then urged his horse on to catch his lord and master whose mare kicked a taunt of sprayed earth in his wake.

The countryside grew lush as the firth narrowed, and their way was kept sweet by the plainsong of yellowhammers. Finally, after a steep ascent between boulders and gorse, they found themselves
on the brow of a hill overlooking the sea and a vista of countryside so douce and fertile it could have been used by the devil to tempt the messiah with near certainty of success.

At the foot of the hill was a miniature stage, where men the size of bees were scurrying as if their hive had just been knocked over. In the midst of them, beached on a pine cradle, lay a ship
so grand in proportions it was more like a castle. James unstoppered a flask and took a draught. Paniter did the same, a drink taken for celebration’s sake only, for they were already cheered
by anticipation.

‘The finest ship in Christendom, Your Majesty,’ said John Barton, when they dismounted beside the dry dock. He was a bragger as well as a brigand, but today he was telling the truth.
There was no ship so majestic anywhere in the world. Barton’s servant held out a platter of wine and dried figs, but James waved it away. ‘Later,’ he said. ‘I want to
inspect her first.’

The
Michael
, the king’s latest and most expensive mistress, was a four-masted, thousand-ton warship. She required a crew of three hundred to sail. She was fitted with thirty
cannons, and would carry one thousand soldiers. ‘For her, Your Majesty,’ said Barton, chewing on a fig, ‘Fife has been stripped of all its trees. There’s now no shade to be
had this side o’ St Andrews.’