The Galliard (11 page)

‘I fought side by side, sir, with the Sieur d’Oysel all through that last siege of Leith this spring, and ask nothing better. There was a sortie I led of French men-at-arms and my own light horse which swept the English trenches clean – and I never saw better work done in unison by horse and foot, though more than half could
not speak each other’s language. But French and Scots are a grand mixture.’

‘We have good proof of that,’ said the Duc de Guise, with a smile at his niece.

Bothwell did not want any distraction in the way of feminine compliments; he hastened to tell of the night sorties he had led, riding down with his prickers from Edinburgh Castle under cover of darkness to cut off the English supplies as they came up from Berwick – ‘We Borderers have a good nose for plunder’; how he and Geordie Seton had led the sally last Easter Monday, the hottest bit of fighting in the whole siege; they had succeeded in spiking the enemy’s guns, and Bothwell in his furious charge had himself unhorsed and wounded the two best leaders on the English side – ‘we cracked their Easter eggs for them hard enough,’ he said gleefully, with no trace now of the regret for his own men that had enraged d’Oysel.

‘Easter,’ said de Guise thoughtfully, ‘when discipline was slack, the men drinking and gaming in their trenches. Then All Hallows’ E’en and wasn’t there a Christmas raid of yours which startled London into reinforcing her northern garrison?’

‘Yes, he told me,’ murmured Mary, but neither paid attention, and the Guise was saying:

‘You have the secret of guerrilla warfare, a sense of the season, the right moment at which to strike a surprise blow.’

He turned again to the girl who had been content to stand and listen, though accustomed to be the whole centre of attention: ‘Take note of that, my Reinette, to think always what your enemies may be thinking. But why are you not dancing? It is dull for you to hear of sorties and surprise attacks.’

‘It is what I like best in the world,’ she answered, and her eyes were shining. ‘I wish I had been in Edinburgh with my mother this spring’; and it was plain she saw herself fighting for her, riding down from the Castle at the head of Bothwell’s light horse.

Her uncle smiled at her indulgently, then told Bothwell, ‘You must have a talk with my brother the Cardinal de Lorraine about the situation in Scotland. I gather that my sister’s death has left
the Protestant lords in charge of affairs there.’

‘Of whom I am one, Your Highness, though no longer in charge.’

‘Hey, what’s that? You a Protestant? I thought you a loyal man.’

‘So am I, sir, to my Sovereign
and
to my faith.’

‘Warning me not to try and change it, hey?’

‘I have too much respect for the value of Your Highness’ time.’

De Guise gave a short laugh. ‘I’ll take the hint. But I don’t like your creed.’

The young man stiffened. ‘Loyalty is my creed. It is also my line of action. I’ve no other to fall back on.’

‘It has done you no good with the bulk of your co-religionists.’

‘No, sir, they are my enemies, because of my allegiance to the throne. For that reason they sacked my house at Crichton; and for that reason I am unlikely to find further employment in Scotland.’

‘Humph, yes, and your diplomatic mission to Denmark pulled up in full course. Short of cash?’

‘Very.’

‘We must see to that. If you are still at a loose end later on, there’s always employment in France for men of your calibre. Remember that I should be glad to see to it, and if I’m not handy, I’ll leave word with my brother the Cardinal.’

He left them. ‘There!’ said Mary. ‘He is thinking of the Captaincy of the Scots Archers in France – I thought he would,’ and she nodded to Bothwell like a benevolent fairy godmother. He suddenly remembered that he owed this interview to her, and gave her a smile of real friendliness.

‘Your Grace has been kinder to me than my deserts.’

‘Now, that you know to be nonsense,’ said she, snatching at her momentary tactical superiority. ‘You do not honestly rate your deserts as lower than the last Captain’s!’

The last Captain of the Scots Archers had been the Earl of Arran.

‘But he,’ said Bothwell, with a sudden glint of amusement at
her, ‘had the disadvantage to lose his wits for love of his Queen.’

‘You are wrong, sir, it was Monsieur Calvin who unsettled his wits. My lord of Arran paid him a visit at Geneva and came back raving that he was damned, or that everyone else was. Monsieur Calvin must be an unsettling person. He has eleven diseases, but none of them succeed in being fatal.’

‘Your Grace knows a deal about the Father of the Reformed Religion.’

‘I can just remember his patroness, my husband’s great-aunt Marguerite, the sister of King François I. That is her pretty daughter over there, Jeanne d’Albret, with her husband of Navarre – can you see her?’

‘I can see,’ said the uncompromising Scot, ‘that the King of Navarre keeps a grey mare in his stable.’

As his Queen stared bewildered, he explained his native idiom by another: ‘I mean, it’s she who wears the breeches.’

She laughed at such frank criticism. ‘Certainly Queen Jeanne is more of a managing Reformer. But it was her mother, La Marguerite des Marguerites, who sheltered Calvin for years at her home in Meaux, to prevent his being martyred for his doctrine. Yet he has remained a martyr, and made everybody else one, to his digestion. He was always scolding her. He even quarrelled with Monsieur Rabelais, the most good-natured of men, who was also in her protection.’

Again Bothwell felt that half-unconscious pang of wonder and envy at this glimpse of a life beyond the scope of his own.

‘I would give all France,’ he had often said, unthinking, to express the quintessence of wealth. Now for the first time he had some perception of that wealth in the terms of civilization and the beauty prepared by men’s minds; all these fair châteaux whose images glimmer in the smooth waters of the Loire; all the songs of these new poets, Ronsard and du Bellay, weaving fantastic arabesques in praise of her woods and sedate gardens, and of this young girl whose shy beauty they watched unfolding like the petals of a flower; the stored wit and wisdom of Rabelais and Montaigne; the humanity of such spirits as La Marguerite des Marguerites,
whose power of love was wiser than all learning; a country that had been the spiritual as well as the material heaven of the Scots through the preceding centuries.

‘They say,’ he said, apparently inconsequently, ‘that good Scots go to Paris when they die.’

Chapter Six

It was the first of several conversations between them, sometimes in her mother’s language, sometimes her father’s. ‘Do I talk Scots well?’ she asked, preening herself for a compliment, and he told her, grinning, ‘With a braw French accent, Madam.’

‘It is too bad, I am always the foreigner. When I came here I could not speak a word of French, and they took my Maries away from me so that I should not chatter Scots with them.’

He liked her, especially when her eyes flashed at some tale of adventure, daring or absurd, such as that of Dickie o’ the Den who drove off a flock of sheep and disappeared with them, until the bloodhounds stopped dead at an enormous haystack where they scented the whole flock, and Dickie, completely covered with hay.

‘Ah, but that’s the grand lad! He’d lift anything that wasn’t too hot or too heavy. It was only the lack of four legs to it that kept him from driving off the haystack itself.’

The sympathies of her Lieutenant of the Border (and his Queen’s) were all with the robbers that he had sometimes to ride down and suppress. He told her of a respectable matron who at dinner would put a dish before her son, empty of all but a pair of spurs, as a hint that the larder needed replenishing and he must ride again on a cattle raid. ‘Ride, Rowley, naught’s in the pot,’ was the maternal injunction given by the Lady Graham of Netherby.

These Border women were of a piece with their men, gay with silver brooches and bracelets to show their men’s success in plunder, but their houses very bare of furniture, to be left lightly.

‘And I,’ Mary exclaimed, catching in her excitement at the fabulous pearls round her throat, given by Solyman the Magnificent to François I, ‘I do not care for possessions.’

He laughed at her, scrutinizing her narrowly. ‘Aye, it’s fine to talk so when one’s safe and snug with a hundred baggage-wagons piling up the furniture to move on to the next palace!’

For all that, he remembered that her father, with the same fine-drawn beauty and a constitution not strong enough to last more than thirty-one years, had been bred up in his boyhood in effeminate luxury by the Douglas family, who hoped thus to keep the power to themselves, and how he yet had the force and determination to break away from them when only fifteen, seize the reins of the throne, and govern with a resolute hand.

This lass looked like inheriting his spirit – his constitution also, the more’s the pity.

This was largely the reason why she still had no physical attraction for him. She was not of a stock he’d care to breed from; it was too highly bred, from a hundred kings, from Charlemagne and Saint Louis; apart from such practical considerations, she personally was too undeveloped, for all that she was nearing eighteen; she was also too delicate. The courtiers might rave about her beauty, but that was their business. He had no taste for a woman he could crush like glass; nor for one who might faint at any moment and have to spend days or even weeks in bed. Weak health was in itself exasperating to a man of his own full-blooded strength; if one were ill one had better die and make an end of it.

The Scottish Secretary of State, Mr Maitland of Lethington, was frankly banking all his policy on the likelihood of Mary dying of a consumption within the next year or two. But there Bothwell did wonder whether Master ‘Michael Wily’ (the Scots version of Machiavelli’s name) was quite as clever as he thought. Was he not counting on the wrong horse to fall on the course? To his eye there was something far more deadly in the thick puffy pallor of King François than the brilliant, swift-fleeting colour of his Queen.

She was always having to console and encourage him, and the robust vigour of the Borderer came as a relief to her. As she grew
less shy of him she told him something of her troubles. She never seemed to have enough money for all she wanted to do (‘Then we are like enough in one thing,’ he told her); she had recklessly given away too many of her dresses and jewels to the wrong people and so had not enough for the right ones, ‘and I am afraid they will say I am not at all like my mother, who was always so generous.’

Her worst trouble had been a very unkind governess, but the Cardinal de Lorraine had dismissed the old hag before even she had complained to him. That would show my Lord Bothwell what reason she had to adore her kind uncle – yes, and once he had even got up in the middle of the night to come to her.

‘And wouldn’t any man!’ exclaimed Bothwell with irrepressible amusement.

‘No, he would not – to a greedy child who had made herself sick, and he a terribly fastidious young man. But after that he ordered my diet himself, and as carefully as he did my lessons. But my mother-in-law, Queen Catherine, has always continued to teach me Latin,’ she ended on a note of despair.

He bore with these schoolgirl confidences from policy rather than patience, and led her to speak instead of what she could remember of Scotland. It was not much, for life had moved so fast with her that it scarcely gave her time to notice what it had poured through her childish hands.

She was born; in a few days her father died and she was Queen of Scotland. Then that ogre across the Border, King Henry VIII, uncle to her father, whom Henry’s armies had defeated at Solway Moss and thus killed of a broken heart, proposed to marry his son Prince Edward to the baby Queen in the North; insisted that he was to be her guardian, and that if she died in childhood the Scottish crown should pass to himself. Children died easily; in the guardianship of so wicked a great-uncle (he had already beheaded a couple of wives as well as countless numbers of his nobles and servants) Mary might die very easily indeed.

Her mother refused to part with the infant, and King Henry’s reply was his army order to invade Scotland and ‘put all to fire and sword – burn Edinburgh and raze the city to the ground, sack
Holyrood and as many towns and villages as you may conveniently, exterminating men, women and children without mercy.’

James Hepburn had watched that ‘rough wooing’ as he called it; again and again in his early boyhood he had seen the countryside round his home laid waste, and the flames and smoke swirling up from the nearest towns, the beautiful old Abbey churches of Kelso and Dryburgh and Melrose smashed to ruins, and the peasants flying in terror from the English and the German hagbut men that King Henry had hired to help his invasion, since the English soldiers, themselves peasants, refused to destroy their neighbours’ harvest.

‘But he did not get Edinburgh,’ he said – ‘nor you. He was told that the women and small boys of Scotland would fight for you with distaffs and stones – I was a small boy myself, and had my stones and catapult ready!’

‘You can remember it and I can’t! I had my first night-ride at seven months old when my mother took me out of my cradle and galloped with me to Stirling. But later I can remember hearing the English guns, and rushing away again from Stirling among huge silent overhanging mountains, and the man who carried me on his saddle said, “It’ll need be a bonny hunter who’ll run ye to earth in the Highlands.” But after that I even had to leave my mother and be taken away in dead secrecy to a monastery on an island in a loch – Inchmahome, the “Island of Peace”, they called it, all those kind black-robed men, whose cowled faces I never seemed to see, they were so far above me.’

Six months later she had been sent with her Maries to France to escape the clutches of the English ‘alliance’, and her convoy had had to dodge the enemy’s fleet all through the voyage.

A harried infancy, never bringing, as her devoted French grandmother, the Dowager Duchesse de Guise, lamented, a moment’s ‘rest and repose for the little creature’. The little creature had not known that, but she had known how important she was – Queen of Scotland from the week of her birth, told that she was also to be Queen of England, until the day she was told she would instead be Queen of France. The hurried journeys, the changes
of scene, the different people who looked after her so anxiously, petting and playing with her, were all pleasantly exciting; while in the background there was always her mother, that tall calm woman with the low voice and the amused mouth and clear considering eyes, who lived only that she might look after her small daughter and her interests, and with so selfless a devotion that she sent her away to her own country, ‘like a small bird’, as she herself wrote, ‘that makes a nest for its nurslings’.