The Galliard (29 page)

The Bastard was pushing matters into open warfare, and Huntly and his sons determined in that event to defend Strathbogie against the forces of the Crown. Bothwell told Gordon to go back and tell his father not to be so mad, but the young man himself was plainly touched with a more dangerous madness. Huntiy had bragged from the beginning of his intention to marry the Queen to his eldest son; it might be the Gordon hoped to win by force of arms what his father’s diplomacy, or lack of it, had failed to achieve.

‘Am I to help every man in Scotland who is fool enough to fall in love with the Queen?’ Bothwell broke out to him. ‘And isn’t Arran’s fate sufficient warning to you?’

It was no use. Gordon had in his eyes the look which his own men would have called fey. He did not care what his fate might be, and only knew that he must follow it. He rode away, bearing his friend no ill-will for his refusal to join him, and left Bothwell ill at ease.

Had Gordon been at the head of this affair instead of his father it might have been another matter. But he had no confidence in Huntly – the Weathercock o’ the North, he called him, for Huntly had once turned against the Queen Regent. Besides, he had made up his mind; he would not be pushed either by his friends or his enemies into open rebellion against the Queen. He wrote to her to assure her of his loyalty, despite the fact that he, like the rebellious Sir John Gordon, had broken his ward; and he urged his friends and neighbours to keep the peace.

In the midst of such virtuous activities, it was a little irritating to get a message from John Knox urging him to the very course he was following, ‘so that his crime of prison-breaking might be the more easily pardoned’. But he was grateful for the prophet’s continued goodwill – ‘there’s some decency in the old ruffian after all’, was his irreverent comment.

By late autumn the news from the North was dark indeed. Mary had hoped to make peace with Huntly and proposed to stay
at Strathbogie, but she was warned of treachery there, and Huntly’s own behaviour gave colour to it, for his castle at Inverness closed its gates on her in open revolt.

That stung her to fury, and it was easy for James to rub salt into the wound by pointing out that it was the men of her own faith who were encouraging her troublesome subjects to rebellion against her. She would show her country that if Catholics disobeyed her, they should be punished equally with Protestant rebels.

In high excitement she took the field in person, sleeping and eating out on the open moors as if she were any old campaigner, and with a good deal more enjoyment.

‘I have always wished to be a man,’ she said, ‘to know what pleasure it is to lie all night in the fields and walk the causeway with a Glasgow buckler and broadsword by my side.’

Her words ran like a heath-fire through the ranks; the men were wild with enthusiasm for the lovely girl they had seen riding at their head, sharing the wind and the wet with them. Even Randolph, her quietly hostile English Envoy, was carried away by his admiration; he had ‘never seen her merrier, she was never dismayed’. The clans flocked to her aid; the castle at Inverness surrendered; and that, she hoped, was the end of the business.

But Huntly was driven into marching against Lord James’ forces and was defeated at Corrichie. The whole clan was crushed, the family ruined, Lord George Gordon imprisoned, and Huntly died of a fall from his horse in an apoplexy. Rumours were flying round the country. One of them, vouched for both by Knox and Buchanan, was that the Queen ‘glowmed’ when news was brought to her of her victory. Sir John Gordon, the chief occasion of the rebellion, was beheaded at Aberdeen, and the Queen fainted when forced by her brother to witness the execution from a window. It looked as though James’ sense of power were getting a little exuberant. But no doubt he felt he could afford it. He had already taken the coveted title of Earl of Moray with its revenues worth £26,000 a year, and laid hands on the splendid furnishings of Strathbogie, now forfeit to the Crown, which he was carrying south for his own apartments in Holyrood.

‘He’s climbing like a mule,’ was Bothwell’s comment.

A triumph over James enemy was sung in St Giles’ pulpit next Sunday, when Knox demanded of his congregation, ‘Have you not seen one who was greater than any of you, sitting where you now sit, pick his nails and pull down his bonnet over his eyes when idolatry and such vices were rebuked? Did he not say, “When will these knaves finish railing, when will they hold their peace?” Have you not heard me tell him to his face that God would avenge that blasphemy? Now God has punished the Earl of Huntly even as he and you heard me foretell.’

James had more solid reasons for triumph than the divine punishment for picking nails in sermon time. In the last few months he had crushed the heir to the throne, all the Haughty Hamiltons, together with the Queen’s boldest and most loyal supporter, the Earl of Bothwell; and now he had destroyed the only strong Catholic power that she could count on in her kingdom – ‘And all in the Queen’s name, that’s the beauty of it!’ Bothwell exclaimed to Janet Scott on her next visit, as they walked by the rocky burn that tossed and foamed in spate through the heather just beyond the huge ramparts of Hermitage Castle. ‘He has no need to attack his enemies to destroy them – he gets them to destroy themselves.’

‘He is eating the artichoke leaf by leaf,’ said Janet thoughtfully, ‘as Caesar Borgia did with the states of Italy – destroyed them one by one. Go quick to the Queen before that happens to you – as soon as ever she is back in Holyrood.’

And to her he went with a strong force at his back, at the end of November when it had turned bitter cold. A mysterious new disease was striking down one after another in Edinburgh, running through the town as fast as the plague, and yet there were no such definite symptoms as in the plague, only aching limbs and a rheumy nose and a great cough and a sore stomach and above all a high fever. People were calling it the New Acquaintance, and the doctors the Influence. It influenced Bothwell’s fortunes, for the Queen was seriously ill in bed for some weeks and could see no one. Lord James, though reported to be sneezing his head off, was, however, more active; he sent out an order to the Earl of
Bothwell to return to prison in the Castle of Edinburgh on pain of treason.

All his good behaviour had been for nothing; if he didn’t go back to prison he must flee the country. He chose flight, borrowed two thousand crowns from his sister and went to say goodbye to his mother at Morham.

That dark, uncompromising Highland woman stood very stiff and straight as she gave him her blessing and bade him beware of a knife in his shoulder-blades, poison in a friend’s cup and the kiss of a woman, ‘for there is nothing else you need fear’.

Just like her, he thought, admiring, amused, but slightly subdued, as he left her house for that of his mistress Anna Throndsen. He found her with their son Willie, a sturdy champion not yet two, engaged in playing ‘Willie Wastle in his castle’, that is to say, in shoving his playfellow, the son of his nurse, down the steps of the house. Willie was already so unruly that Anna despaired of managing him. In fact, she had given up any project of it for the time, for since the decline in her lover’s fortunes she was planning to pay a long visit to Scandinavia as soon as the winter was over, and the weather safer for sea-travel.

‘I want to go home,’ she drawled plaintively in her deep seductive voice. ‘You will be leaving me all alone in this strange country. My sister, who is married to a Scot in Shetland, will be home next year to see all the family, so why not I – who am not even married,
hélas
?’

Why not indeed? Since she was
ennuyée
here, ‘
Hélas
!’ repeated Bothwell fiendishly.

She intended to take her furniture with her, even a fine carved bedstead. It seemed a lot of truck to take on a visit. She had already made inquiries about her passport and had learned that she would have liberty to return to Scotland whenever she wished – ‘but that will depend on if you still wish it,’ she said yearningly.

‘More likely on what you can make some other man wish,’ he growled.

At that she flew into a rage; did he dare suggest she was going husband-hunting?

‘Looks like it, when you take your furniture and leave your son behind.’

He found to his annoyance that he was furiously jealous. She was a damned fine woman and his property; how dared she take it for granted that she was free to transfer herself to anyone else? But he choked back his unreasonable emotion; he knew he would be thankful to be rid of her so easily at this awkward time in his affairs, and forced himself to say:

‘Why not? I’m no use to you now I’m making tracks for France.’

She answered indignantly that she had always been faithful to him, though he had not been true to his promise. He laughed, she boxed his ears, and he flung her, on the bed. They both enjoyed a quarrel, and she looked her handsomest when angry.

Afterwards, when she was twisting up those magnificent great coils of black hair, she showed some sympathy for his misfortunes, but this he did not enjoy; there was something strained about it, and she got a few scratches into her stroking. ‘I may be able to raise money for you abroad,’ she said. ‘It will not be the first time I have helped you with a loan.’

Which he had not repaid, though he had had the value of it several times over in this comfortable house at Morham and its furniture, of which she was taking the best part away with her. But he did not choose to point that out, though his careless glance did fall on the things that she had collected together, and he began to whistle a tune. She flung herself on her knees before him, swore she cared nothing for the ‘dirty money’, all she wanted was himself. She would leave everything again, her baby son here, as she had left her home and parents in Denmark, if only he would marry her and take her with him on his wanderings, through the whole wide world if need be.

She looked beautiful with her hair tumbling again all over her splendid white shoulders; but her appeal made him shudder. What a clutch this woman would get on him if she could! He suddenly discovered that he was immensely relieved at what had at first piqued him – that she had of her own accord decided to
put the North Sea between them.

‘You’ll be much better off at home,’ he said.

She did not cry, as he had feared. There was an expression in those lustrous dark eyes that he had not noticed before. Perhaps he had not noticed her much all along. He had taken her for granted, as he had taken her body; and how much did he really know of her? At this moment he felt he was looking down, not at the Scandinavian Admiral’s daughter that he had met among a crowd of jolly sisters, not at the voluptuous Spanish lady that she loved to be told she was like, but at the black elflocks and white strange face of a Lapland witch.

Chapter Ten

In the last days of the year there was that unusual thing, an ice-storm: the rain as it fell ‘froze so vehemently’, complained Knox, ‘that the earth was but a sheet of ice’. He blamed it, as he had blamed all the bad weather since her arrival in that dark haar, on the Queen; she, the daughter of ‘mischievous Mary’, was proving to the full as mischievous, especially in the matter of bad harvests, floods and frosts and all occasions when ‘neither sun nor moon have performed their appropriate offices’.

After her long illness and convalescence, and a Christmas which she was too sad and listless to enjoy, Mary went at the end of December, informally with very few attendants, to ‘make merry’ at the New Year with her brother Johnnie at his house at Coldinghame, as she had promised a year ago. She was the only one to keep that promise, for d’Elboeuf had long since gone back to France, and nobody, not even Jan, knew where Bothwell was.

There was one other that Johnnie had vowed should be there – a fine boy a few weeks old, whose arrival had transformed Jan into a preternaturally wise and mature person. She smiled indulgently on the pranks of her husband and his royal guest as though they were a couple of children. All her awe of Mary had gone; how could she feel awe of this girl who went tearing along the frozen shore with Johnnie, dressed in an old suit of his and a pair of long riding-boots to keep out the sea-water – which they didn’t? Jan even found herself scolding the Queen.

‘Your hands are freezing even in those gloves. Your feet will be
wet through again, and you
must
remember you’ve been ill.’

‘Why should I remember? I’m not ill now. I shall remember nothing here that I don’t want to remember, nothing, nothing!’ she cried in such passionate answer that Jan flung her arms round her and exclaimed, ‘Nor you shall, my bairn.’

‘Bairn! How many months older are you than me?’

‘Years and years,’ replied Jan profoundly, ‘but I beg Your Grace’s pardon.’

‘Ah, leave “Your Grace” – I’m sure I’ve none in these breeks!’

‘The sea-water’s freezing on them too – come, off with them and into your furred gown; it’s spread in front of the fire in your room, and your bath is there – we’ll have up a cauldron of boiling water.’

‘Jan, Jan, we saw a gull walking on an ice-floe as big as this hall and half a mile or so out to sea – and all along the top of the tide-line there are thousands of poor frozen crabs no bigger than prawns, lying thick as pebbles, all stiff and stark – should I have brought them in for you like a clever housekeeper? How you’d have thanked me, wouldn’t you!’

She was chattering all the way upstairs and while Jan took off her ice-wet things and bathed and dressed her: ‘Oh I’ve been dead, dead,’ she said, ‘but now I’m alive again.’

Jan knew she was not thinking only of her illness, but had the sense to ask no questions. Mary was too much alive, her eyes and cheeks aflame, her whole slender body taut as a bowstring; what would happen to her if she did not soon get a good steady sensible husband to look after her? Johnnie, of whom Jan demanded this, replied airily, ‘Oh she’ll find one, you’ll see. She’s a likely lass. I’d ha’ married her myself if I hadn’t been her brother.’