The Galliard (20 page)

‘Oh aye,’ was the imperturbable answer, and then, ‘Where does Arran come in?’

‘Next morning. We heard he’d crossed the Forth with horse and foot behind him, that he was going to join with Gavin Hamilton’s force inside the city and kidnap the Queen. I kept the burghers’ guard on as a permanency and set every courtier in the Palace on sentry-go in turn. I even got the builders to block the entries to her rooms. The Court had just settled down to it all happily – you
know how different it is the moment one knows what’s to be done – and they were making jokes on it and Mary writing a masque about it – when Châtelherault comes up to say it’s all a mistake; Arran had only come home the night before to see his father, with no armed force, nothing but a couple of servants and a page, and he can’t think how these ridiculous rumours can have got about! It made us look foolish, I can tell you. We disbanded the emergency guard, and it all fizzled out. But I stuck to it that her bodyguard of a dozen halberdiers must be doubled. I’ve wanted to do that for some time, though it’s raised the cry of armed tyranny – as if one could be a tyrant on the strength of twenty-four halberdiers!

‘You don’t think the warning was just a hoax?’

‘No, I don’t. I still think Arran’s dangerous. He’s been sulking ever since the chapel riot, and says it’s a crime to allow Mary to hear Mass. And yet he’s mad for love of her – it’s as though he’s jealous even of her God. But the worst is, he’s been saying how easy it would be to kidnap a Queen from Holyrood. There was once a plot to kidnap her mother There, wasn’t there?’

‘And he thinks it might succeed with her daughter? He’ll learn!’

Chapter Five

Alison Craig was the step-daughter-in-law of that grandmother whom Bothwell had been at such pains to prove a bastard. This complicated relationship is best explained by a brief glance at the grandmother in question. She was Agnes Stewart, illegitimate daughter of the Earl of Buchan, and was first the mistress of King James IV (Mary’s grandfather) and then the wife of the second Earl of Bothwell. Both King and Earl were killed, with nearly all the Scots nobility, at Flodden; the Earl while leading a counter-charge so furious that it was sung by succeeding poets for three hundred years, the contemporary epitaph being:

The Earl of Bothwell then outbrast,

Into the enemy throng he thrust.

That ‘hardy heart’ ceased to beat when he was only twenty-one: his widow Agnes was left with his infant son Patrick, and made up for her early bereavements by three more husbands. The last of these was Cuthbert Ramsay, a youth of twenty, who had already proved himself a family man with a baby son, and now married the indefatigable dowager, aged fifty.

Agnes died within a few weeks of the death of her son, Patrick the Fair Earl; and her grandson, James Hepburn, fourth Earl of Bothwell, promptly patched up what he could of his father’s debts by proving the illegitimacy of his recently deceased grandmother. By this he secured the escheat of her property from Cuthbert Ramsay,
and the disconsolate widower fought the action unavailingly.

‘A twittering sparrow of a man,’ as Bothwell called him, who had married a woman thirty years older than himself for her money, and lost it, Cuthbert was still determined to make what capital he could out of sex. His son had married a merchant’s daughter called Alison Craig; she continued to be called it even after her marriage, for there was little reason to remember her husband. But several nobles showed their gratitude to her father-in-law, for it was at Cuthbert Ramsay’s house that they were able to meet her without any open scandal.

Among these was the Earl of Bothwell, to whom Cuthbert now showed his forgiveness for his financial injuries by getting back through his daughter-in-law a small modicum of what he had lost through his wife. So accommodating was he that he twittered almost effectionately over his stepgrandson; he enjoyed the consequence brought him by his even more accommodating daughter-in-law; he was in fact that very rare bird, a natural pandar; his withered pink cheeks, his twinkling pale blue eyes and thin hair streaked with silver, showed the faded remains of the effeminate beauty that, combined with a happy shamelessness, had helped him at the romantic age of twenty to his unromantic marriage. Even so it had not been all for money; he had taken a vicarious pleasure in his wife’s career from the bed of a king and of an earl to that of his own. And he chirped with pride over Alison’s beauty and soft passivity that made her attractive to such widely different men – a rare girl that, for whom even the Earl of Arran was not too pious, nor the Earl of Bothwell too rakish, nor the Lord John Stewart too young and inexperienced.

But the Earl of Bothwell was not so accommodating when he paid a tactlessly impromptu visit and met his prospective brother-in-law walking down the steep garden path at the back of Ramsay’s house in St Mary’s Wynd. Lord John twirled his budding moustache and glanced with an absurdly proprietary air at the bee-skeps that bordered the cabbages, as he sauntered through the warm early December dusk. Bothwell, coming up the narrow path, was the first to see the other, and stood still, waiting for
him. Lord John pulled up short and gave a sharp whistle.

‘What!’ he exclaimed. ‘Do
you
know Alison?’

‘Who doesn’t? – if you speak biblically.’

Johnnie Stewart could hardly flush deeper than he had already done, but he laid his hand on his sword. ‘How dare you insult her—’ he began, but James Hepburn struck his hand off the hilt before he could get any further.

‘Put that away, you fool. Have you nothing better to do than defend the honour of a whore? Forgotten something, haven’t you?’

There was an instant’s pause while Lord John still made an attempt to keep his hold on the heroic, but the grim amusement in the other’s eye was too much for him; he grinned and said airily, ‘Ah yes, that little matter of your sister. Let’s go back and get married.’

He took his arm, and Bothwell swung round and marched him back to his house in the Canongate, where he set him down on the opposite side of his hearth and scanned him from the corner of an ogreish eye.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘what’s this foolery a few weeks before your wedding? If Jan got wind of it, you know her temper and the chances she’d pay you back in your own coin.’

Lord John’s explosive reply to this was entirely satisfactory to the other. But he did not so much like his excuses about his old friendship with Alison, his necessity ‘in common courtesy to say farewell’, and his insistence that Bothwell had maligned her – a gentle creature, with a churlish husband and an immorally mercenary father-in-law. It was plain that he half blamed, half flattered himself with having seduced her, and so paved the way for her falling to a cynical ruffian like James Hepburn, who was, he implied, incapable of understanding the essential innocence of any woman.

These high-toned sentiments made the affair much more dangerous from the point of view of the cynical ruffian, who knew how restful insipidity could prove after a fiery jade such as his young sister. At least he should have no chance to compare Alison’s
mealy-mouthed modesty in his mind with Jan’s frankly boyish crudity of speech.

‘Would you still believe in the virtue of that squashy pink plum if you found her with Arran?’ he demanded. ‘You’d not call
him
a seducer like me, I take it, or think no woman could resist him, like yourself.’

But his reputation for rough irreverence went against him. Proof was needed, and it would be an amusing revenge on Arran to blast his reputation, which stood so high with the godly. The sack of his house of Crichton had never been wiped out; and only last week he had had to send out a force of armed horsemen to collect his tithes at Melrose, since Arran’s men were out doing the same thing. To crown all, Arran’s father, the Duke of Châtelherault, had snubbed a friendly overture of his, made in compliance with the Queen’s wishes, with the reminder that he wanted no such assurances from an inferior in rank. Inferior! He, a Hepburn, inferior to any man in Scotland, let alone a Hamilton cockered up with a brand-new French title.

‘Duc de Châtelherault!’ he suddenly exclaimed. ‘If
he’s
a Duc, then I’m a drake!’

A cruel grin spread slowly on his face. ‘We’ll root up this “young plant” of Johnnie Knox! We’ll show his pastor and master just how deep Arran’s virtue grows. We’ll make a Christmas revel of it and catch him supping at the old pimp’s house: the godly won’t believe, whatever you do, that he goes there to say his prayers.’

Johnnie Stewart was relieved that Arran had become the centre of attention, so much so that he presently plucked up courage to ask if Bothwell had found it tolerably easy to ‘manage’ his sister as he had promised.

‘Oh aye,’ said the other airily, ‘she said she’d no mind to stay a Hepburn always, for she hates a name that sounds like a hiccup!’

Johnnie hurled himself upon him, and the brotherly rebuke ended in a rough-and-tumble.

When Bothwell presented himself to the Queen next day he found her and the Court in deep mourning for the anniversary of King
François’ death. Everyone with whom he spoke urged him to hurry home and change his scarlet velvet for a suit of sober black. But he refused, and was no whit disconcerted when he met the raised eyebrows of his Queen.

‘Did no one tell you?’ she asked. ‘But of course you will change for the memorial service in the chapel this evening.’

‘I can remember a year ago, Madam, without any memorial service.’

She gave him a startled look as though she resented his memory of a year ago. ‘Do you mean you will not come?’

‘I am a Protestant,’ he said. ‘I don’t attend services of the Mass.’

‘So are more than half my nobles, yet they are attending this one out of courtesy – and sympathy with me.’

Her voice shook a little with indignation, but he remained unmoved.

‘Then, Madam, you have from them what you expect. You’ve never found me a courtier, and as to sympathy—’

‘Yes?’ she said as he paused. ‘Are you going to tell me you never had sympathy with me a year ago?’

‘That was another matter.’

‘It was indeed!’ But she must not show her anger so plainly, for though he was being insolent, intolerable, she somehow felt that it was giving herself into his hands.

And so it proved, for standing there so nonchalantly, yet every inch of him alert with his powerful vitality, he was getting the mastery of her so that it was possible for him to say, quite easily and coolly and without rebuke from her, ‘You’re thinking more of your next husband than of your last, so why should I help you mourn him?’

And it was he who turned away, not she who sent him, it was that that angered her more than anything as she thought it over; for she did think it over, all through that memorial service, she in her white veils and her courtiers in black, and now holding a great white candle draped in black velvet to her husband’s memory – and how heavy it was, and how overpowering the fumes of the incense-perfumed
wax, and how dazzling that tapering heart-shaped flame flickering just in front of her eyes, now leaping, now guttering in the icy draughts that always blew through every building in Scotland.

The wind it blew frae north to south,

It blew into the floor.

She must not think of those rude country songs, she must think of this solemn Requiem the choir were chanting.

But she was thinking neither of her last husband nor her next, whether he were the Prince of Spain or the new little King of France, or the King of Sweden or of Denmark, or either of the Emperor’s two sons, or the Earl of Arran, or Lord Henry Darnley, but of the forcible, arresting face of the man who never cared whether he pleased her or not.

Three days later it was her nineteenth birthday and she gave a ball (‘One moment she is pretending to mourn her husband, and the next leaping and dancing,’ Knox complained to the citizens of Edinburgh). She wore Highland dress as she had done sometimes at the French Court, when they had declared that ‘rude barbaric costume’ the most becoming she had; it suited the lissome grace of her strong young body far better than the stiff gorgeous robes in which she never really felt at ease. She had learned the reels and flings years ago, and danced them now in an ecstasy of enjoyment. This cold grim country had provided the liveliest dances in the world, and here she was dancing them, the Queen of that country, and beautiful, and nineteen today. She called Mary Beton to her to pin up a long shining wisp of hair that had tossed out from under the eagle’s feather on her head. The reel had stopped, the music stepped into the stately royal dance of the Galliard. She turned to the man behind her who was talking with her youngest half-brother Johnnie.

‘Are you not dancing this, my Lord Bothwell? You should, for I think it bears your nickname.’

‘No, Madam, it is the Dance Royal, and the Galliard should not dance it except with royalty.’

The music flourished a magnificent panache and he swept her a bow in time to its rhythm. She flushed, scarcely knowing if he were laughing at her or asking her to dance; in either case an impertinence, to ask her so. She no longer felt a Queen – or nineteen; this odd teasing fellow always managed to make a child of her. She would not bother with him, and turned away to dance with Lord George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly’s eldest son, a magnificent young Highlander, as tall and silent as his father was fat and talkative. He had never taken his eyes off her since she had entered the room in their native dress.

Bothwell’s glance followed them as Gordon handed her across the floor, bowed, advanced to her again, took hands and swung her into the lovely postures of that formal measure. But all he said to Johnnie was, ‘My fellow Paris will bring word when he’s at Cuthbert’s; in another week or two will be best. The Christmas revels will be beginning then, and we’ll have an excuse to wear masks.’

‘What revel is that, my friends? May I make one at it?’

The Marquis d’Elboeuf was taking his arm, smiling under the waving line of his moustache, affable and almost ridiculously handsome.