Gemini (95 page)

Then he saw that they were trying to turn the guns, to point back to the camp, to the King’s captors.

Later, he thought that Angus and Buchan and Grey would have managed to stop them: the cavalry threw itself forward, and there was a sudden and effective deployment to cut off the bridge from the rest of the dissentients. In response the crowd round the bridge seemed to thicken, and the noise increased yet again, the thud and squeal of weapons being punctuated by bouts of frenzied cheering. There were men—gunners?—clambering up on the carts, head and shoulders above the fighting about them. Two of them fell, pierced by arrows, and after a moment the others began to climb down. It was the first indication that the anti-war party might be prevailing. Driven by fear, Tobie forced his way up to the bridge, dodging weapons and ducking between horses. He heard Ramsay following. Then, suddenly, he caught sight of Moriz and John. They were in the thick of the mob by the guns, and were being set upon. Moriz was protecting his head; John was laying about him, and losing. ‘Here’s another!’ his assailants were yelling. ‘Hang him over his guns!’

Hang him over his guns?

‘You bloody fools!’ John was screeching. ‘I don’t want to fight! I’m the one who jammed the gun-carriers for you!’

‘That for a tale!’ someone roared. They’d wrapped a belt round his neck.

Tobie arrived. The impact, in the person of a middle-aged medical man who did not observe his wife’s dietary regimen, had all the violence of one of Tam’s thirty-three pounder gunstones. ‘Stop! He’s on your side! He can disable the guns! He can help you!’

They did stop, for a moment, being winded. Then, disregarding all he was yelling, they laid hands on him, and Johnnie Ramsay as well. Running out of baldricks, they were cutting up harness. John was continuing to shout. He was shouting, ‘No! No! Listen! Look! Wait!’ And all the time he was trying to point. Tobie looked.

Five years ago, he had experienced something like this; not in summer, but in winter; not in this country but in Lorraine, at the start of the battle that had obliterated the fine little company he fought with, and rendered Robin a cripple, and brought Nicholas home with barely his
life. Then, it had been Swiss horns, not trumpets. Then, the snow had turned black beneath the massed hooves of the enemy cavalry, thundering out of its hiding place. Now, the red July sun lit the steel of a different horde distantly pounding towards them: a horde that came from the west, and so could not be English.

It was not English. Its banners were those familiar in Ayrshire, Renfrew, the Lennox. Its commander’s pennant, unreeling its six ells of rain-sodden taffeta, bore the chequered device of John Stewart of Darnley.

At last. At last; and at the same time, Tobie Beventini suspected, too late.

H
ALFWAY THROUGH THE
long hilly journey to Lauder, breasting swollen rivers and stumbling about broken bridges and bogs, Darnley had known that he could not reach the King’s army by Sunday, and that someone else would have to try to stop James. Approaching his destination at sunup on Monday, he was thankful to detect, from the noise, that the whole force was surely still there, even if in fierce disarray. Someone, he guessed, had announced the retreat against the King’s wishes, and the army had split.

Topping the rise, he saw that this was the case: soldiers who had been clearly encamped in the meadow were now scattered between Lauder and the bridge, where fighting was taking place. All the tents seemed to be empty or struck but those of the King, which were closed, with a squad of armed men surrounding them. They looked surprised as he brought his troop down: as he suspected, his advance riders had failed him. It didn’t matter. He reported to Buchan, his counterpart, spurring up towards him, and then both made with speed for the bridge. The guns were there. He wondered how the hell the warmongers had got them away from Tam Cochrane. He had three of Tam’s relatives among the lairds and their men at his tail. They would give him the hard time he deserved. But first: secure the bridge with his spears and his bows, and they could reduce the rest of the trouble at leisure. He set to gallop, with Rothesay Herald and his trumpeters blaring beside him. That would stop it.

It did. The struggle in the field was coming to a halt even before he thundered through it; and the barrier of men preserving the approach to the bridge let them through into the only quarter where steel was still flashing. The bridge was packed, the guns rising in the midst two by two, like water-horses stuck in the Ark. As in the field, though, the war party was now outnumbered by those intent on halting the advance. Among the fallen were men wearing the tool-satchels of gunners and carpenters. Angus’s men and the rest had made it their business to strike first at the foundations of the advance: to reduce the services without which it could not take place. To render useless the smiths and the weapons; to abstract
the gold that was to pay for its provisions and wages; to corral the quartermasters and the team of experts whose business it was to handle and furnish the King’s pavilions, and the acres of canvas required by the army. All such men were huddled under guard, Buchan had said; Dod Robieson and Jamie Hommyll among them, and where Dod’s treasure chest had gone was anyone’s guess.

Darnley kept his horse moving in the throng on the bridge, his sword drawn, shouting orders. He was a big, fleshy man, from a military family, and knew how to fight and how to manage others. He left his men to deal with the hand-to-hand scuffles and didn’t interfere, even when some youth screamed his name; even when it was reinforced by a second voice. Then someone tugged at his arm and he saw the latter belonged to the King’s mediciner, Dr Tobias, who certainly should not have been there. Beside him were three other men, one of them with a strap round his neck, and one just rising, bleeding, from a series of blows. The injured man, the boy who had screamed, was the heir of a Napier, and thus remotely his kinsman. Darnley called in return, and sent over his men to extricate the four from their attackers. It didn’t take long. When they staggered out, he pulled the boy, as seemed only friendly, into the saddle behind him, while the other three were accommodated by others. It transpired that one of them, John, was a gunner. Ned Cochrane, leaning over, addressed him.

‘So? Where’s Big Tam, the deil?’

The gunner looked round. His neck was black with bruising, and his face was mottled and glistening with white and red bristles. When he spat his answer, it was to Darnley, not Cochrane. ‘Where he wouldn’t have been, if you’d come when you said. I hope you have an excuse you can sleep with, you bastard.’

‘Where is he?’ said Darnley. His voice was quiet. As the fighting died, his other man gathered about him.

‘Oh, ye haven’t far to look,’ said the man. ‘Just glance over the parapet. Mind you don’t get dizzy, of course. It’s a fair distance down to the water.’ His words, cut from Aberdeen granite, occupied the space where all the drubbing and shouting and clattering had been, and then stopped, so that you could hear the sound of the river, and the jingle and snorting of horses, and the murmur of massed men in the distance.

John Stewart of Darnley dismounted, leaving the boy, and walked to the parapet, and looked over.

Three dead men hung there, swaying lackadaisically in the updraught from the river. Being the heaviest, Big Tam Cochrane had an ox harness bound round his neck, and there was still a trace of surprise on the suffused face above it. To one side of him depended his argumentative kinsman by marriage, Leithie Preston. And on his other side, his throat sealed in perpetuity by the bite of a thong, hung Will Roger.

L
ATE THAT MONDAY
, trembling with fury and weakness, James, King of Scotland, was brought to the Castle of Edinburgh and there delivered to its Governor, his half-uncle Atholl. His other half-uncles also remained with him. So did his captor and escort, John Stewart, Lord Darnley, with sixty-six chief men of his train, including Maxwells and Drummonds, Muirs and Douglases of Morton, a Semple, a Crawford, a Fleming, a Wallace, a Brown and three Cochranes. And, of course, more Stewarts than anyone, including Walter, the half-brother of Avandale.

So quietly was it done that no one realised at first that the King had come back. The horses were left outside the town: only the King and his immediate circle had been mounted, and their animals had been immediately sent out. The rest of the army had already disbanded. Knollys returned to Torphichen. Some leaders—Nowie Sinclair, the Prestons—went back to their castles, taking their dead. Some had set out for their properties in the south, including Alexander Home, grandson of the bailie of Coldingham, sweetened beforehand by Huntly, who had lands down there by Gordon, of which Alex Home was now bailie for life. Others went east, to Haddington, the traditional muster-point for the region between Edinburgh and the east coast. The eastern muster, which included Archie of Berecrofts, had not, of course, been asked to set out for Lauder. Its part had still to be played.

For Tobie, the ride north was wretched, almost as the long journey from Nancy had been grim. The sick man this time was the King, who depended on Tobie, and yet recoiled from him as a traitor. Nor was it a relief, having arrived at the Castle, to relinquish his patient to Andreas, for even Adorne’s physician was tainted, in the King’s eyes, by his presence in what was a prison. By then, the King was in no doubt that his
nobles, paid by England and Albany, had turned against him, and that he might end as Johndie had, dead in the care of his doctors. At present, there was no safe way of comforting him.

Leaving the Castle, the participants had been briefly thanked for their part in the stratagem, and asked to remain out of public view until morning. Colin Argyll had already gone, having taken no part in the physical delivery of the King to the Castle. So far as the outside world was concerned, the King’s other ministers had never left Edinburgh, and were innocent of any complicity. The same was true of Nicholas and Adorne, who had been in the Borders, and nowhere near Lauder.

Amid all that farrago of half-lies, it seemed to be true that Nicholas had somehow followed Adorne back to Edinburgh. About to join Moriz and John at the Castle gates, Tobie had turned back, on an impulse, to confirm it. After all the hapless, miserable losses at Lauder, the return of Nicholas would be something to exult over, at least. It struck him, abruptly, that Nicholas himself would not yet have heard about Lauder.

As he had hoped, John Stewart of Darnley had the information he wanted. Nicholas was back. He had had business in Kelso. Since it was no longer private, Darnley mentioned, regretfully, what de Fleury’s concerns at Kelso had been.

For a while, Tobie stayed in the Castle, speaking to no one, and doing nothing in particular. Then he walked slowly down to the guardroom, where John and Moriz were waiting.

They looked angry and anxious. John said, ‘So, what? Couldn’t you find out? Has something happened to Nicholas?’

‘No. He’s here,’ Tobie said.

John said, ‘Well, where? We ought to find him. I don’t want him hearing the news from just anybody.’

‘The news?’ Tobie said. He felt ill.

Then Father Moriz said, ‘Of Lauder. Of the death of his friends. Tobie? What is wrong? What have you heard?’

Tobie looked at him. He said, ‘Darnley just told me why Nicholas didn’t come back with Adorne. He has been at Kelso all night.’

‘Kelso?’ said John. Moriz was silent, but he had taken his crucifix unthinkingly in his fingers.

‘Kelso Abbey,’ Tobie said. ‘Simon and Henry de St Pol both died yesterday, drowned in the Till during a skirmish. Nicholas brought them away, and carried them both to the Abbey. They are still there.’

‘And
Henry
?’ Moriz said. His fierce face was drawn. Of course, Moriz knew. He was one of the few people who knew. John did not.

John’s mouth had opened. He said, ‘Nicholas was coming from York. How could Simon be there, on the English side, at the same time? No one was supposed to know where Nicholas was crossing.’

‘Except Adorne,’ Tobie said suddenly. ‘Adorne was on the Borders,
and knew. If someone arranged this, I am going to find him and kill him.’ Then he broke off and said, ‘But, dear God, that is the least of it.’

Father Moriz closed his eyes. He said, ‘To Nicholas, certainly. This, to Nicholas, is more than the death of a handsome man, and a … beautiful stripling.’

John said, ‘I suppose he’ll never find out, now, whether he was Simon’s son. It will stop Julius’s prying, at least.’

‘It hasn’t,’ said Tobie. ‘This very afternoon, apparently, Nicholas knocked him off the steps of Kilmirren House, and kept at his throat all the way down to the Nor’ Loch. Julius has been put to bed in the Canongate, and Nicholas has been removed from public view by his disapproving superiors. He isn’t at home.’ He sneezed. It felt like a cramp in the vein of his heart.

‘Bless you,’ said the priest gently.

Tobie took out his kerchief and blew his nose. He couldn’t remember when he had last felt so sick, or so helpless. He said, ‘So you see, we have nothing so momentous to tell Nicholas, have we? Nothing, by the divine pity, so terrible as the darkness he is walking through now.’

F
AR DISTANT FROM
the mishaps that beset every grand plan, the complex strategy of the King of England’s campaign unfolded: half evolved by its own leadership, and half dictated by changing circumstances, which, however exasperating, were proof of a Scottish incompetence of truly marvellous proportions. By the evening of that same Monday, the memorable twenty-second day of July, it was known to the English command that the advance against them had stopped. That, for some shameful reason, the King of Scotland’s army had revolted at Lauder, and had refused to march further south. An hour later, and they heard that it had disbanded.