Dacre's War (8 page)

CHAPTER SIX

A week or so earlier, a fleet of French ships sailed within view of the Galloway hills late in the afternoon. The day was mild and the water calm, still as a frozen pond. Marbled with the opal greens of an early autumn sea, its colours shifted and changed as currents dragged beneath its skirts. By the time the vessels had glided into the sheltered inlets that brought them far inland, night was close and mist was rising around the prows of these painted men-of-war, the blue and gold of the French court’s livery catching the dying light. Weighed down with their cargo of armoured men and horses, the fleet moved slowly, each ship reaching the Gare Loch and finding its harbour as if guided by a celestial hand.

Long before they had dropped anchor, word of their arrival had licked along the Scottish coast by beacon and messenger. As they sailed into the cupped hand of this hill-bound port, the soaring masts and long-haired crew carried an echo of earlier visitors, butter-faced northerners who had once stepped ashore with swords at the ready and torches that turned the thatch of the first hovels they passed into bonfires announcing their presence.

The loch’s new arrivals came not from the north but the south. There were blond heads among them, but more were dark, and none had a face of russet or whey. In the first ship, a gaunt, dark-eyed man leaned on the rails to watch as his men coiled chains around the dockside posts and lowered the narrow ramp. He was John Stewart, Duke of Albany, Scotland’s temporary, reluctant and often absent ruler. French by birth, manner and allegiance, the regent spoke the language of his father’s land with hesitation and distaste, as if each word were a crust that needed softening.

Dressed more for an evening’s entertainment than for the gruelling march he planned into the borderlands, he wore a leather tunic over sleeves so puffed they might have been put to work as sails. On his bonnet bobbed a feather any peacock would have envied, and there was a flush high on his cheeks that, in the absence of a chafing breeze, was the only clue he was fathered by a Scot. When angered, which was often, Albany’s complexion turned from rose to red and swiftly into a sunset crimson.

Now, however, the regent was in contemplative mood, and he looked out on this lonely harbour and its tipsy wooden houses with resignation. He sucked his teeth, suggesting he was already hungry for home. But for all his faults, Albany was a dutiful man, and he had never yet shirked the obligations his unwelcome regency imposed. Though he had taken on the role with Francis I’s blessing – rather, indeed, at his prompting, the French king seeing how useful Scotland might prove if governed by his protégé – it was his ceaseless demands that kept the Duke shackled at Fontainebleau, or in Paris, or in charge of the French army. Slipping from Francis’s grasp needed a tongue as oiled as a mackerel and persuasive as a priest, but the exhilaration of being freed from the king’s grip was some compensation for the misery of his days at the cold Scottish court, at the head of a fractious, anxious, vulgar people in a country where rain and the north wind were in a constant duel.

Countless times in the past ten years he had sailed to Scotland. When the lords of the council had voted him regent in 1514, he had thought it would be a simple task to keep this diminutive land under control until the infant King James V was old enough to ascend the throne. Scotland, so soon after Flodden, was in a pitiful state, weak and woebegone after its leaders had been butchered, and worried as Henry VIII growled at their gates. All he need do, the regent initially thought, was remind Henry – a sensible man – of the advantages of maintaining good relations with his neighbour.

He had not bargained for Francis’s desire to foment trouble with England, nor for James’s mother Margaret, who bitterly resented being ousted as regent. Nor had he anticipated the venom of the Douglases, in the person of the Earl of Angus, Margaret’s second husband, who believed his claim to power far exceeded the duke’s. As the son of a man charged with treason against his brother, the Scottish king, Albany sympathised with Angus’s view, though this he never betrayed. Raised among French courtiers and statesmen, where dissembling and deceit were as necessary to survive each day as bread and ale, he had learned young how to act as if entitled to a seat at the king’s table, even if there was no coat of arms over the family’s door, nor a sou to spare in its purse.

He had never met the cousin into whose shoes he had stepped, but his father had spoken of him until the day he died. Where he left off, Albany’s mother took up the story, reciting the old litany of complaints as if they had never been aired before. Yet from what Albany had learned, Alexander was lucky to have lived to beget him. A less generous monarch than James III would have had him hunted down and executed for trying to remove him from the throne, and more than once. Instead, the old duke was banished, under sentence of death should he ever return. Had it not been for an ill-fated joust, where a splinter of spear pierced his helmet and entered his eye, he would have been allowed to grow old and objectionable in the company of his wife and her haughty kin in Auvergne. As it was, he was dead before young John could remember more of him than the roughness of his beard and the sour smell of his gloves, soaked in sweat after a hard day’s hunting.

Albany lowered his gaze from the Gare Loch hills to a callus on his thumb, which he began to pick. He scowled, as if this blemish was what most worried him, rather than the ranks of enemies and naysayers he must soon face. There were as many in this country as over the border. Nor did the Scots make simple foes. They changed sides faster than a gambler turns cards.

He winced as he peeled off a sliver of skin. When, to signal an end to their quarrel some years before, the dowager queen had taken his hand, she had looked startled, and examined the rough skin with a frown. ‘James’s palm was the same,’ she said, ‘from the way he gripped the reins. He never had a light touch, always clutching as if he feared they’d slip through his fingers.’ She looked up and, to his surprise, cupped his hand against her cheek, eyes closed as if she had forgotten whom she was with.

The regent was that day invited into her bedchamber, where for some months he was a frequent visitor. On that first occasion he was eager but wary, mistrusting a woman who until that meeting had appeared to wish him dead; then, when those fears were assuaged, he hoped she would not misconstrue their liaison as anything more than a dalliance. He was soon to realise that Margaret was the one in control, in this and all her relationships. Passionate and abandoned she might at times be, but there was iron in her soul. Mercury too, he guessed, given her shifting moods and grievances. Albany found her quixotic, unfathomable and fascinating – family traits, if one were to believe what they said of her brother, the English king. Their soft conversations, cocooned in her canopied bed, would have beguiled him utterly had he not remembered the other Margaret, the woman he had met on his first arrival at Holyrood Palace, whose eyes had narrowed at the sight of him.

On the day the court gathered to welcome their new ruler, he bowed, and she curtseyed with a sarcastic flourish. Courtiers and council looked on, eyes shifting from one player to the other. The hall took on the air of a cockpit when the crowd is waiting for the spurs to be removed. While the privy councillors appeared cordial – some preening with delight at his appearance – Margaret’s head was held high, her netted coif quivering with pearls. At her side was her husband, Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus. Striking in a tunic of gold and green, his legs were like stalks of ripe wheat. His smile held no warmth, and although the earl would have offered no serious challenge to the duke had they met in combat, the regent was not accustomed to such naked loathing, and his colour rose.

‘Your grace,’ said Margaret, before Albany could speak, ‘you honour us with your presence, come all the way from France, in such style. It is your first visit to this land, I am told. How extraordinary! Yet Scotland looks forward to making your acquaintance.’ She turned to face the court, her fury encompassing everyone in the hall. ‘As you will appreciate, it is not easy for me to meet my usurper, nor to tolerate the disloyalty of those in this room who unseated me.’ Her voice began to rise, and she pressed her hands on her bodice, steadying herself. ‘My beloved late husband James designated me regent should he die. That his court saw fit to overturn his wishes and have me stripped of office is not merely a humiliation for me, but dishonour to his name. Those who have played a part in this deed ought never sleep easy again.’

A muttering was heard from among the courtiers, and heels rasped on the flagstones.

‘Queen Margaret,’ said Albany, appalled to see her wipe away a tear, ‘no one meant you any ill-will. Surely one in your position must recognise better than most that my appointment is expedient, not treacherous.’ He looked at the Earl of Angus, who stared at a point above the regent’s head as if measuring the beam. ‘Had you not remarried,’ he continued, ‘you would have retained the role until young James’s accession.’

‘So you say,’ sniffed Margaret, ‘but I have reason to doubt that.’ She raised a hand to silence his reply. ‘Enough. I am not one to hold a grudge. I leave it to our holy father in heaven to weigh the scales and settle scores in the next life if not in this. Meanwhile, I ought to warn you that you will find this country very different from your homeland. It will take years to learn her ways.’

Her glance took in Albany’s fur-lined cloak and Italian boots, the earring tickling his collar, and her words were heavy with contempt. ‘And yet I hear you are not planning a long visit. Such a pity. There is so much work for one in your role, it is difficult to understand how it could be done from France. Scotland cannot be governed from afar, you know. When trouble arises here, it spreads fast. That you will very quickly discover.’

Before he could respond she turned and left the hall, her stiff gown swaying like a tolling bell, her husband at her heels. A burst of brittle laughter came from the passageway as the door closed behind them, but whether it was from Margaret or Angus the regent could not tell.

Once she was gone the Scottish court gathered around him, clucking with excitement, and keen to sound him out on more subjects than could be discussed in a year. After an hour, when it was evident even to the clansmen from the western isles that Albany was flagging, an equerry led him to his rooms, where a table was laid with wine and biscuits. ‘You will wish to rest, your grace,’ said the servant. ‘Dinner will commence in the great hall at the hour of four. Until then I will see you are not disturbed.’

Albany grunted and sat heavily on his bed, listening to the man’s steps disappear down the stairs, and wondering how much influence the dowager queen still held at court.

It was not to find an answer to this question that he took the young king out of her care, but in so doing he understood his position at last. Margaret had allies, some of them powerful, but even they did not contest his right to remove James from his mother, for the security of the realm.

When she heard of his edict, he later learned, Margaret put a hand to her throat and fainted. On coming to her senses she had a fit of hysterics, which frightened her almost as much as her maidservants. ‘Poppet, I beg you, be calm,’ implored her husband, chafing her hands, which she snatched away. Propped against the wall of her chambers in Stirling Castle, she looked blindly ahead, as if Angus were not in the room. He crouched by her side, reminding her that the regent would allow her to see her child regularly. In time he might be permitted to stay with her for a night or two. Things could have been worse, he continued: Albany might have carried James off to France. His words finally reached her, for her breathing calmed, she looked him in the eye, and then a slap rang out.