Gemini (70 page)

In Scotland, the basic counter-measures were already long in place. For Nicholas, one of the headier satisfactions of the past months had lain in the preparation for this war. Plans had always existed, changing week by week and month by month as secret pacts came to light, and balance shifted between England and Burgundy and France, and, outside that close triangle of power, among the more distant states whose accommodation and markets they depended on.

Every country had spies. From long experience abroad, Nicholas had a knack for interpretation, for disentangling what was false or misleading. Added to that was his numeracy: the fast, effortless calculations upon which war logistics relied. His team had other skills.

In Burgundy, he had been an outside adviser within a structure which was already firmly in place, and headed by a strong-minded wrong-headed leader whom none could contradict. Scotland was different. He had been here now for four years, eight times as long as any previous visit. In pursuit of his own business he had explored every part of the country, and met all those of importance within it. In these last
months, in common with the macers and heralds, he had quartered the country, carrying orders, seeking information, holding consultations. He was part of an active, intelligent group surrounding a King who might be as ambitious as Charles or Louis, but who had none of the abundant energy, the charm, the innovative imagination that could have drawn the men of worth to his side and made every corner of this small country his own. The well-intentioned lessons in style, in self-confidence had failed. After decades of quarrelling, the loss of Albany and of Mar had left the King isolated and astray. His unruly sister Margaret had deserted him for a lover. His sister Mary, now free of responsible advisers, had relapsed into emotional planning for the welfare of her first husband’s children, and sent him demands instead of sisterly compassion. Resentful of guidance, he brooded.

Will Scheves spoke of it to Nicholas. ‘Cortachy has been a courtier and adviser to great lords, and is a delightful companion to men of his own world. But this young King of ours will not confide in a paragon. We should have made you the King’s man from the beginning, instead of Albany’s.’

These days, he looked oppressed, as did Andreas. Nicholas thought of the King of France, and his physician-astrologer, whose reputation, too, depended on the health of his patient. And, of course, his financial wellbeing. It was said that when Louis fell ill, he paid his doctor ten thousand crowns monthly to encourage him to prolong his life. Nicholas said, ‘I think worse might have happened if Albany had been left un-supervised. At least we knew what to expect. And the King has some friends.’

This was true, for between them they made sure of it. The men of the chamber were not drinking-companions like Barbaro, or elevated dwarves, as in France; but they gave the King companionship, and played cards, and made music with him when he wished it. Had Nicholas not served Albany, he would have passed his days at the Castle in such a role. He didn’t think that the Archbishop was suggesting that he should do so now. He didn’t possess the King’s entire trust, as Adorne did. If he were to influence the throne, it would have to be done in some other way.

Himself, he fretted over his distance from Albany. Twice, there had been letters from Sandy in which, either directly or indirectly, Nicholas had been commanded to come back to France. When he had replied with explanations in place of instant obedience, the letters had stopped. Liddell still heard with some regularity: the Duke’s estates, after all, were in his hands. Nicholas had appointed Julius to act as a link between Jamie Liddell and himself, so that he might have a sense of Albany’s frame of mind, and convey, in turn, what was most useful for Sandy to know. Jamie and Julius had a long acquaintance dating back to Sandy’s childhood in Bruges, when the Liddell good looks had impressed the young
Charetty girls, as Nicholas remembered. But that was a long time ago. Tilde was married to Diniz, and Catherine was now the mother of Henry van Borselen, a name to conjure with.

Gelis, welcoming news of that birth, had found it hard to equal his flippancy, even though the pang it concealed was his, and not hers. Katelina van Borselen her sister had also named her child Henry—Nicholas’s child, whom she had carried to Simon. There was no reason, of course, why there should not be another so called.

He had reassured Gelis, he hoped; she had enough to contend with for his sake. But for him, she would not be here, working day and night in the cause of a country to which she, at least, owed no debt. Jodi would not be here, freed from the royal household since the Princess Mary’s bereavement and acting, ferociously, as combined henchman and runner to Robin. It was necessary to remind himself that, for most of the time, they were both exultantly happy. As was he.

In March, the power shifted again, when there came such news from France that all Europe shivered—some with delight, but many with dumb apprehension.

The Great Spider, Louis of France, had been struck down by a fit, and for a space had been mindless and speechless. He had overcome it, they said, but some day he would be seized by another. Louis, who couldn’t bear fools, had been touched by a curse that could make a clod of a genius. And the Dauphin his heir was a boy.

From London, King Edward reminded the world that his army intended for Scotland could be quite as easily deployed against France. His sister the Dowager Duchess of Burgundy had not wasted her summer in England.

To Adorne, as to Nicholas, personal considerations faded to nothing during these packed, breathless months. Adorne’s family were perplexed. From their various religious retreats, his sons and daughters lamented their father’s continuing absence from the house and tomb of his beloved lady their mother. His oldest son Jan, now a canon of Lille like Antoon, had actually left Rome in the expectation of a welcome at Bruges, and had been mortified to find the family home empty, and his brother Arnaud in Ghent, distracted by grief for his wife, and for his newest loss, the death of the baby Aerendtken.

Adorne wrote to them all, and tried not to take pleasure in his visits to the Priory at Haddington where his little deaf daughter, aged three, was the sunny heart of the nursery.

It was, too, where Nicholas had met Bonne von Hanseyck during her brief stay the previous autumn.

He had been busy, as they all were without cease, but he made time to call, and indeed had gone first to the noisiest part of the Priory where, as anyone could wincingly hear, Will Roger and his drums were entertaining
the same small Efemie who stood, her round cheek buried in the buzzing drumskins, shrieking with delight. Now she could lip-read, Nicholas was teaching her patter-words.

Bonne, when he reached her, had been judicial. ‘Poor child. One wonders, though, how the Sisters can concentrate. We shall not be sorry to leave.’

They were going to the smaller Priory at Eccles, which to his mind was rather close to the Borders, but which should be safe enough this side of spring. The placement had been arranged by the Cistercians at Tart, partly because Bonne’s late mother had had links with the Priory. As Tobie had so cleverly found out, Sister Ysabeau of Eccles had had a sister married to Thibault de Fleury. Not that Bonne or anyone would learn much about all that now. Sister Ysabeau, now dead, had been too old and deaf in her later years to communicate much about the de Fleury family.

At any rate, the girl Bonne had been determined to make her way to the Priory and remain there, in the belief, as Nicholas understood it, that it would save her from unwanted suitors. He had had no time to thrash it out with her, even though he had not been convinced by the story. He felt, irritably, that it was Julius’s place, not his, to explore the problem. After all, Bonne had been part of Julius’s household. Anyone other than a self-centred, handsome bastard like Julius would surely know how her mind worked by now. He spent some time with the German nun, and impressed on her that she must call on him, if in difficulty. Then he had left.

That same autumn, Simon de St Pol and his father had moved to Kilmirren, and had stayed in the west ever since. The West March reached down to the Border, close to the Duke of Gloucester’s fortress at Carlisle. Gloucester had repaired the walls recently, and even through winter storms, castles such as Lochmaben and Threave could be subjected to perfunctory raids. It was not long before Simon abandoned the boredom of Kilmirren to join Henry at Threave, and supervise and improve the lad’s idea of how to manage a troop.

It did not occur to him that Henry would resist this: they faced one another in surprise and anger and, eventually, an outburst of violence that left Henry withdrawn and sullen for a week. Then Simon, forgetting, called him out on some expedition involving burning and looting that proved rather hilarious, with old goats, human and animal, running about and his father with a whip galloping whooping among them. They took a lot of booty and got drunk, and when he found his father in a barn with two girls, he just shrugged and went off and found one for himself. Henry never had any trouble with girls. He had been initiated into all that, even before he could do it himself.

And after that, it was much as it had been in Madeira. He had lost command of the Kilmirren muster, and his father had ridiculed his venture
with horses, but most of the time it was good. Henry made up a band of local youths and took them on raids of his own.

In Edinburgh that April, Parliament passed the statutes necessary to put the Scottish nation on a footing of war, to counter the known resolution of England. The King’s castles and Dunbar and Lochmaben were to be provided with food and artillery, and the same was to be done in coastal castles of power north of Berwick. Towards victualling Berwick-upon-Tweed itself, the Three Estates had bound themselves to raise seven thousand marks in special taxes, one-fifth from the burghs, two-fifths from the clergy, and two-fifths from owners of land.

Colin Argyll was called to the west, where trouble, not by chance, had broken out again in the Isles. The King’s half-uncle Atholl was to sail with him. Before he left, Argyll summoned Nicholas. ‘I have to go. Do you want to come with me?’

Nicholas had paused. ‘Lord Cortachy—’

‘Seaulme can manage without you, unless all your own predictions are wrong. King Edward is still in the south. So are our envoys, with the kind of offers which should hold his in talk for quite a while. And didn’t you report that the Cardinal legate is threatening to excommunicate both Edward and James if they commit their resources to anything other than war against Turkey?’

‘So King James has been told,’ Nicholas said.

‘Therefore he will do nothing rash. Do not feel,’ said the Earl, ‘that you are required to come. I have sufficient men for my galleys. Even Kilmirren the Younger and his son, although I fancy the son will be of more use at sea than his father. It occurred to me that on such a voyage you could patch up your difference of opinion with that very beautiful youth. He stayed in your house at one time, did he not? And Mar is dead, after all.’

‘I am sorry,’ Nicholas said. ‘There is nothing I should have liked better, but I think I hold with what my lord of Avandale has been saying. We have to prepare for irrational hazards. I want to check the East March without Angus. I am not convinced that the King can restrain his impulses. There is the money. Also, the wind that will be good for you may be less so for us on the east. I may invite you to sail on one of my ships, when you get back.’

The pale eyes had sharpened. ‘If it comes to it, you would take part?’

And Nicholas answered, ‘I am not declining to come, MacChalein Mor, because I dislike the sea.’

H
E WENT TO
Berwick after that, in one day, calling at each of the east coast strongholds on the way. Julius and John le Grant rode with him,
and some of the dozen men-at-arms he now paid. They came from Leith, and were also capable of making themselves useful on shipboard. Crackbene had picked them, with John’s approval.

From the beginning, the expedition went well: a good cracking ride down the eastern seaboard through the earldom of March, Albany’s country. Nicholas let Julius make all the early running. Because of his friendship with Liddell, Julius was familiar with the landowners round North Berwick, the Bass and Dunbar, and could count on some sort of welcome from the Earl of Angus and his vigilant colony in the rock-fortress of Tantallon.

Angus, perpetrator of the raid which had broken the peace, had fittingly been rewarded with the duties of Warden of the East March of Scotland on the unspoken premise:
you got us into the war, so now fight it
. In fact, being determined to guard his own land, he accepted the post as his due; but remained resentful of intrusive authority, and suspicious of any friend of Adorne’s. Julius treated him with easy deference, and gave the impression that he was here to admire, not to examine, the March’s defences. These days, Julius was in the most buoyant of moods, all the disgruntlement of Cologne cast aside.

Nicholas let him have his head, and John, too. Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, was just over thirty and used to getting his own way. Ill-advisedly, he had married a Boyd, whose father had been adopted in exile by England. The marriage had not helped his career, and had cast temporary doubts on his loyalty. His loyalty to the King was still questionable, but not his friendship with the King’s brother and sister, or his readiness to invade English soil, to the point of provoking a war. Which would make him popular with the French King as well.

He had a nephew there at the castle: Jamie Boyd, Princess Mary’s young son. Nicholas saw the boy watching him, and sent John over to speak to him. He knew the boy didn’t want John, and that common foresight required that he himself should cultivate both the Boyd children. At the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had meddled enough with that family.

Riding away, he quizzed Julius. ‘What do you think? I’d rather see Angus down on the March, but if he’s done all he says he has done, then it isn’t bad.’