The Galliard (21 page)

‘May I tell him?’ asked Johnnie eagerly, and Bothwell nodded, and Mary’s young uncle was allowed to share in the plot – one after his heart, for here was a chance to expose the hypocrisy of that insolent canting knave who had dared insult his niece at her Mass. He insisted that he too should be allowed to ‘testify’ – to use their own jargon – ‘to the impurity of the godly’.

‘Aye, it will be a Christmas sport for you as good as your mumming tourney that I’d the bad luck to miss,’ Bothwell conceded, and the three young men stayed in their corner so long, talking low and laughing loud together, that the Queen had to send her Maries with a royal command to dance. But she was not entirely satisfied with the result, for though her uncle and half-brother both clamoured to dance with her after that, the Galliard danced only with Mary Fleming.

Nor was Mr Maitland of Lethington pleased. Forty years old,
thin, dry, delicate, a little wizened, he could not deny to himself that the two made a splendid couple; Mr George Buchanan, now fulsomely intent on showing himself a courtier, wheezed heavily into his ear that Mary Fleming was a venus for beauty, a Minerva for wit, and a Juno for wealth.

‘And her partner,’ said Lethington in his gently dispassionate fashion, ‘is, I suppose, a Ganymede for beauty, a Joseph for chastity, and a Moses for meekness.’

When the dance was over, he complimented Bothwell so elaborately on his dancing that the young man began to have an angry suspicion that he had somehow made a fool of himself, and their political animosity was much increased.

Christmastide set in fine and frosty. The dark goblin figures of little boys were running and squawking, pelting each other with snowballs in St Mary’s Wynd that moonlit evening, when three masked revellers knocked at the door of Cuthbert Ramsay’s house, and were inside it before their ‘host’ had discovered who they were.

‘And who did you think we were?’ demanded Bothwell as Cuthbert twittered and fluttered before him, overcome by such embarrassment of riches as two of his daughter-in-law’s lovers at once, and in company with the young foreign nobleman whose armorial bearings (as Cuthbert could have told you on the instant, having always nursed a wistful passion for heraldry) included the lilies of Anjou and Sicily, the crimson bars of Hungary, the double cross of Jerusalem, and hovering over all, the silver eaglets of Lorraine – the arms, in fact, of the royal house of Guise.

He chirped insistently that he had expected no visitors, but was delighted to have these; he called to Alison to bring them wine, and she came at once, all fluttering eyelashes and shy smiles. There was no sign of Arran. Paris must have mistaken.

‘The women of your country are indeed wonderful,’ murmured d’Elboeuf as they strolled down the hill again to Holyrood later in the evening. ‘At what stage, if any, do they cease, to simper?’

Paris’ information was wrong by twenty-four hours; it was
the next evening, he discovered, that Arran would be at Ramsay’s house, and thither went the three indefatigable gallants yet again – to find the doors barred and bolted against them, sure proof that this time their scent was not at fault. They had dined at d’Elboeuf’s expense before coming out, the cold night air acted powerfully on his warmed Armagnac, and the opposition of the barricaded house gave a final stimulus to their rampant spirits.

‘To me, one and all!’ roared Bothwell, and the three of them rushed at the door and smashed it in with their shoulders.

They were in time to see Cuthbert’s hinder parts crawling under the stairway and Alison’s scampering up it, but again no sight of Arran. Bothwell leaped at the back door on to the garden and dragged it open. A tall shadow was visible for one moment running and stumbling downhill. Bothwell yelled to his comrades, hallooing them on to the hunt, and led the charge through the cabbages. Here was sport indeed, with that skulking shadow ahead of him and the frosty air sharp on his face, his blood tingling with the force of that mighty drive against the door, and the crash of rending timber still echoing in his ears – but here he fell headlong over a bee-skep.

Johnnie reached the bottom of the garden to find the door there open, the quarry fled. It was useless to seek him outside in that rabbit-warren of twisted passages, dark courtyards and low shadowy archways. But he returned in some triumph, for at the bottom of the garden he had found Arran’s hat; this he waved proudly before the eyes of his fallen commander, who was picking himself up and blinking at the stars that bounced about so inordinately above his head.

The two champions of virtue returned at leisure to the house, where René d’Elboeuf, now disappeared upstairs, was presumably testing the extent of Alison’s capacity to simper. That of Cuthbert’s was unlimited; he was waiting for them with a coy smirk, and only giggled when Johnnie shook Arran’s hat in his face in righteous wrath.

‘Te-he-he!’ he tittered. ‘If your Lordship could but see yourself!’

‘I’ll wring your scraggy neck,’ growled His Lordship, but was distracted from this purpose by a yelp from Bothwell, who was busy shaking some sleepy bees out of the flaps of his boots. In the warm air of the room they were beginning to zoom and fly about, and one had already stung him. The two champions departed in haste.

But it was a hornets’ nest they had aroused rather than a skep of drowsy winter bees.

Arran sobbed out his complaints, not only to his clan but to his Church. Knox made a thunderous attack on the Court; James came to his young sister with a face as long as Knox’s beard, and dark hints of a matter ‘so heinous and horrible’ that he could not bear to sully her ears with it.

‘Well, if you can’t tell me I can’t deal with it,’ she snapped, ‘so why speak of it at all?’

But James was fully determined to speak of it; he would ‘think himself guilty if he passed it over in silence’.

‘And why not think yourself guilty for once, dear James? You might enjoy the change.’

She spoke in her most coaxingly teasing voice, taking his arm and laughing up into his face; but he went rigid under her touch and his face red with real anger. It was no use, she must never again make the fatal mistake of laughing at James.

His account was still veiled and allusive in regard for her modesty, but as far as she could make out, a citizen’s house had been broken into, and a citizen’s wife dragged from her husband’s bed to please these outrageous rioters. She flatly refused to believe it either of her uncle or her delightful brother Johnnie. The Earl of Bothwell was another matter, he seemed to enjoy showing there was nothing of which he was not capable.

James heartily endorsed this opinion, and added that my Lord Arran and the whole great clan of Hamilton were mortally offended with him.

‘Arran! But what has he to do with the matter?’

James was reluctantly forced to explain that the citizen’s wife had also pleased Lord Arran; then, when pressed, that she had been the
mistress both of Bothwell and Lord John; finally, that the outraged house had not been that of her husband, but of her father-in-law, an acknowledged pimp in the matter. ‘But this throws an utterly different light on the business,’ she declared, and rounded furiously on him for bothering her with such an ugly silly affair. Her Uncle René was a foreigner and did not understand the sanctity of a Scot’s home (even when it was a pandar’s); Johnnie was a lad not quite twenty, his two companions only half a dozen years older: Bothwell had the excuse of his quarrel with Arran, who had shown little regard for the sanctity of Bothwell’s home when he sacked Crichton.

‘That was political,’ said Lord James stiffly.

‘I have yet to learn,’ she replied, ‘that a crime is any the less a crime when it can be labelled political.’

He looked at her pityingly and reminded her that she was a woman and had only just had her nineteenth birthday. She just restrained herself from hitting him.

Finally she promised to reprove the roysterers, and did so, but it was not the end of the riot.

Knox accused her publicly of ‘maintaining impiety, and whoredom in especial’.

Arran was out for blood. Three hundred of his clan planned to attack the three gallants on Christmas Eve as they returned from supping with the Queen, and Paris, more Cock-up-Spotty than ever at proving himself ‘a damned good spy’, brought word of it to Bothwell when he was already at the Palace. His master tapped Johnnie on the shoulder.

‘The Hamiltons are on the street. Warn d’Elboeuf and tell him to send as many men as he can muster instantly to my house. You do the same. But keep the Guise himself out of it. We don’t want his death in a street brawl.’

‘Hadn’t we better leave a hint here how matters stand?’

‘We’ll do that when we’ve mustered our own men – and rather more too than the Hamiltons! Bring Arran’s hat. We’ll stick it on a pole for our banner.’

Within the hour Bothwell’s faithful lieutenant, Black Ormiston
of the Moss Tower, had gathered together a mixed bag of Hepburns, Lord John’s men and d’Elboeuf’s ‘Papishes’, amounting in all to between four and five hundred. Johnnie had the devil’s own work in keeping René d’Elboeuf out of the fray, for he at once grabbed a halberd, and a dozen men were barely able to hold him back, but as luck had it Johnnie had already taken the precaution of locking the inner gates on him.

Gavin Hamilton, the warlike Abbot of Kilwinning, was reported to be in command of his kinsmen at the market-place, and the whole city was buzzing with the news that the Hepburns and Hamiltons were out for a Christmas Eve row; the shopkeepers and their prentices left their mince pies and plum porridge and were busy sharpening their spears and axes in the little lighted booths throughout the town, for every merchant was bound by law to keep a stout weapon handy so as to be ready to rush to any fray in the streets, should the Common Bell summon them to keep the peace. So the tinsmiths and braziers in the West Bow were clanging noisier metal than their wares; the linen merchants in the Lawnmarket and the goldsmiths of Elphinstone Court near the Mint were handling weightier weapons than scissors and trinkets; the butchers just below the Netherbow and just under John Knox’s window were preparing for bigger game than calves and sheep.

The preacher was writing his sermon against the superstitious observance, of Christmas when the ‘dreadful noise of armour pierced his heart’. Brave as he was in words to any man’s face, he could not bear the actual sight and sound of an armed clash. It did not help to steady his nerves when the door flung open and Mrs Bowes, the mother of his young wife who had died last year, threw herself on her knees beside him.

‘Oh Master,’ she sobbed, ‘Maigret says they’re fighting up by the Tron, hundreds and hundreds of them, and we’ll all be murdered and raped and burnt in our beds. Stop them, Master!’

‘Maigret’s a fool. It’s only some fash of the Hepburns and Hamiltons. The citizens will deal with it.’

But the mistress was a worse fool than the maid. She seemed
to think he had only to put his head out of the window and preach to them, for them all to disperse quietly. She went on nagging at him:

‘Oh Master, save me, save us all! I came here for your sake – do this for mine.’

She was sobbing hysterically, and he pushed her away as she clutched at his knees. ‘I asked for you to come and take the burden of housekeeping from me, not add to my burden by weeping and howling’ – and as this produced a still louder howl – ‘There, there, woman, I’m only telling you to have sense.’

But the women that John Knox preferred to have about him were singularly lacking in sense. Mrs Bowes continued to plead for ‘one trumpet note’ of that voice which in his own ears sounded weaker and hoarser every time he spoke.

For the uproar was thickening in the street below – ‘Hoo! Hoo! Hoo for a Hepburn!’ came the cry; ‘Fye Tyndale, to it!’; and ‘Bide me fair!’ Farther up the hill it was answered by, ‘A Hamilton! A Hamilton!’

Knox found to his intense annoyance that his knee, still clutched by Mrs Bowes, was shaking.

‘For my life,’ he said severely, ‘I count it not a rush. It is my Maker’s, to be called back by Him when He so pleases. I say this of my deliberate mind to my God. But for this infirmity of the flesh I cannot answer; it comes, I think, from the time when I suffered the continual fear of the lash in the galleys.’

That was a time he seldom spoke of, and would not have done so now, but to excuse his trembling. But Mrs Bowes mistook his meaning, as she usually did, and thought he referred to his complaint of the stone, the galley’s painful inheritance; she was at once busy with hot possets and logs for the fire, forgetting her own fears and drowning those of her son-in-law in his helpless irritation at her fussing. But even as she rushed at him with a fleecy plaid in one hand and a steaming bowl in the other she dropped them both, for into the little warm room so closely shuttered against the wintry night outside, there came the muffled clanging of the Common Bell.

Men below were running, shouting, dogs barking, women shrieking, and rushing to and fro went the bells above them higgledy-piggledy in a hideous clamour. Down went Mrs Bowes on her knees again, instinctively mopping up the mess of the posset with the plaid, while she screamed and prayed in alternate gusts of breath, and her son-in-law silently asked God what devil-sent impulse had ever betrayed him to get her to leave England to look after his household.

He stormed at her to stop mopping up the slops with his best plaid, then checked as other noises came swinging uphill from the Canongate into the Netherbow, sweeping on up towards the market-place, the steady run of disciplined armed forces and shouts of ‘In the name of the Queen!’ Law and order were on the march against the riot. In a spasm of irritation, relief, and determined courage, John Knox sprang up, away from that tousled sprawling bundle of dishevelled hair and clothes, and flung open his shuttered window.

The Lord James and the Earl of Huntly were in command of the guards from Holyrood, and shouting to their respective religious sects that any man who stayed in the streets would be put to death. Mr Knox shut his window hurriedly. In twenty minutes neither Protestant nor Papist could be found out of doors.