The Galliard (24 page)

‘He cadgily ranted and sang,

“She’s off with the gaberlunzie man!”’

Yet he never seemed to tire, not even when at the end of this active day he danced flings and reels one after the other without any pause, leaping higher than anyone, snapping his fingers, yelping against the fierce music of the pipes. Never was there such mad music and dancing; to Mary it was as though the cries of the curlews and the sea-birds had joined with the storm-wind to play the tunes.

But the music changed; fiddles and harps were now playing the stately music of the Galliard, and this time she had no doubt as to whether Bothwell had asked her to dance, and sufficiently respectfully; he bowed low before her and together they swept into
the measure of the Dance Royal. It was the first time he had danced with her; he danced well, and she was the best dancer of the day. In her grey and white dress she moved like a shadow in the flickering light of the fire and torchlight, and he like the red flame of a torch beside her.

To many who watched among the retainers and rough ‘ledcaptains’ of the house of Hepburn, the formal grace of that measure to the old grave music was the loveliest thing ever seen in that hall. To the young Highland lord, George Gordon, who watched with the blank blind eyes of one who sees other scenes from the past or future behind the present, the beauty of that dance did seem indeed unbearable, for before it was finished he turned his head away.

The music paced on to its last long note, the red dancer and his shadow were still, then smiled at each other without a word, and Bothwell led her back to the fire. She stood with one foot on a log, tapping the white wood-ash that had blown back from the fire over it so that it fluffed up in a little whirlpool. Her knees were being roasted while her heels and the back of her shins were icy; one needed to sit on a turning-spit to get warm all over in Scotland. Her finger traced an inscription carved in the stone of the chimney-piece:

They have said – What

Say they?

Let them say.

‘Who had that done?’ she asked.

‘My father,’ her host answered. ‘There was a deal said against him, so he put that up. I don’t know why he troubled.’

So the father had made the gesture to show he didn’t care – and did. The son would never care enough to think of the gesture.

She stole a sideways glance at the rugged powerful face. He was too sure of his power, that was the danger; he thought he could stand alone against everyone.

‘Do you then think me a coward?’ she asked him, ‘that I could not take the course I wished at Christmas and order the Hamiltons
to leave the city instead of you? But I
cannot
follow my own road yet. I am in my kingdom on sufferance, and barely that. Until I am strong enough to speak myself, I have to listen, to what others say.’

He glanced at Lord James huddling his cold hands in his sleeves as he talked with forced geniality to Lord Gordon.

‘For “others” read “brother”,’ he remarked.

‘As you will.’ She gave him a subtle smile. He began to realize that his warnings against Lord James had not been entirely in vain. It was not so much now that she refused to believe anything against him as that, whatever she believed, there was no way as yet in which she could take action.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘don’t ask me to do the same as yourself.’

‘I do ask it.’ She was vehement now, even commanding. ‘Does it amuse you to have enemies? I have read history, and I see that these private enmities between great families have been a greater curse to Scotland than the fiercest enemy from outside. How can I ever rule if my subjects will never unite? You could help me if you chose.’

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Make peace with Arran – friends with him if you can. You’ll find it easier than you think. He is terrified of you, and that is why he surrounds himself with an army, and so you have to do so too. It is absurd. How am I ever to have a civilized capital if all my nobles go about in it with a tail of several hundred men ready to fight each other at a moment’s notice?’

She faced him squarely this time and saw she had impressed him; he was looking very thoughtful.

‘Aye,’ he agreed soberly, ‘and the expense is terrible.’

He stared at her astonished as she bit her lip, made a sound like a suppressed sneeze, and then broke into a peal of irrepressible laughter. He had considered her opinion and come to the conclusion there was something in it; what on earth was there to laugh at?

In a flash of temper he said, ‘The Borderer’s a useful buffer for the nesh inland Scots against England. It’s in my mind, Madam,
that you find me useful too as a buffer against your other nobles – to take the kicks you daren’t give them.’

And he stalked away.

She was furious; all the more so that he left her before she had the chance to show it. She had practically apologized to him for that very thing, and this was how he took it! Well, but she should not have laughed; she had known it, but could not stop herself. It was ridiculous of him to be angry at that, when he had not been at her public reproof.

But then it struck her – did she know how angry he had been – and was now? It was an uncomfortable thought; she turned sharply from it, turned from one to another in the crowd, joking and laughing with them so that they felt no strangeness with this elegant and lovely creature.

She won the heart of Black Ormiston of the Moss Tower, Bothwell’s bailiff, a swarthy stalwart ruffian who stared like an indignant bull, by praising his care of his lord’s estate; and learned from him the surprising fact that the reivers, both Scots and English, were apt to levy protection money or ‘blackmail’ from those on the Border who were willing to pay a yearly subsidy, so that they should be left in peace in the raids.

She heard a great deal from a stocky bow-legged fellow about horses, and the ‘gay geldings the English gave the lords at Berwick, that they cracked up as better than any we’d brought out of Scotland –!’ the man jerked up his short red beard and shut his mouth.

‘What was the matter with them?’ she asked.

‘Ah, nothing at all, Madam. They’d do fine – as meat for the hounds.’

A grizzled led-captain told her that the Lord’s favourite black horse, Corbie, and the Lord himself too (it took Mary an instant to discover, that this reverent title referred to Bothwell), were like a pair of mountain cats the way they could ‘see in the blackest night. In fact, his horse seemed to matter rather more to the Borderer than his life; as well it might, seeing that his life so often depended on his being well-mounted. All Eskdale was once lost and won for the sake of a bonny white horse, she was told; and pleased
them by remarking that it was no wonder the Hepburn crest was a horse’s head: ‘And is the Hepburn motto “Horse-sense”?’ But there she went too far in jesting on a sacred subject: she was reminded gravely, with a knitting of shaggy brows, that it was ‘Keep trust’ – ‘and well the Lord has proved it to you and yours – Madam.’

That rebuke and belated ‘Madam’ brought home to her the family likeness between ‘the Lord’ and his men.

She talked with greybeards who told her escapades of her father when in disguise as the Goodman of Ballengeich; and from a minstrel with a white beard more prophetic than that of Knox, but a merry and irreverent blue eye, she heard how Harry VIII of England had tried to make her father suppress all of their calling, since they were always making comic ballads about him and his unlucky wives.

‘But your royal Da, a minstrel himself, knew better than to forbid the heather from growing or the birds from singing. Forbye he had no wish to, for I’ve seen him hold his sides with laughing at what the songs said of that wicked old sack of rotten guts down in London town.’

‘I wish I had known my father.’

‘You would have agreed well. Many’s the laugh you’d have had together.’

‘But all I did was to break his heart. The news that I was a girl, that killed him.’

‘Ah well,’ said the old man, ‘he has more sense now.’

She thought how good it was to be in a land that had never known serfdom like France, so that everyone she spoke to seemed as free and proud as a king.

It was growing late; even Johnnie admitted he ‘could not let one more leap or yap out of him’. But all called for one more song before they went to bed, and the minstrels gave them ‘Johnnie Armstrong’s Goodnight’. Bothwell would have stopped it because of its references to James V as a stern and cruel tyrant, but Mary would not let him.

‘You have just told me,’ she said haughtily, ‘that it’s Borderers like Armstrong who protect me from England, for all their unjust
reward, so why should I not hear others sing it? Is no one to have the privilege of abusing me but yourself?’

‘No,’ he admitted, smiling at her.

She could not keep it up, especially when, as they reached the last verse, he said low to her, ‘I was a fool to speak so,’ and joined in the lines:

‘What I ha’e done through lack of wit

I never, never can recall.’

To which she sang with the rest, in answer:

‘I hope you’re all my friends as yet,

And so goodnight unto you all,’

and for an instant she laid her hand on his.

Yes, she was very forgiving; too much so, that was the trouble, for what was the use of her forgiving him, if she forgave his enemies too, and hers?

He saw her go up the great staircase to undress the bride, followed by her ladies, their shadows rising taller and taller against the wall as they left the light below. Their silk skirts rustled and swept behind them. In front of them went the Queen, her soft velvet dress like a wisp of smoke and as noiseless; her hair, bright against the grim stone. She too held up her skirts with one hand while the other rested on that majestic balustrade. She looked down and saw Bothwell watching her, and her hand left the stairway and touched her lips. He saw this without seeing that she did it till afterwards, and at the time he never moved.

Then he went to Johnnie’s room to join with d’Elboeuf in undressing the bridegroom.

Johnnie was not drunk, but he was very gay and affectionate, also inclined to reminiscence. He kept reminding them of their raid on Ramsay’s house, an unsuitable bachelor recollection, as they pointed out.

‘Well, we
were
bachelors then, though we’ll never be again.’
He put a hand on each of their shoulders and chanted:

‘For gear will come and gear will gang,

But three brothers again we’ll never be.

‘But we will. We’ve sworn to hold our next New Year Revels at Coldinghame all of us – yes, you too, d’Elboeuf, for you’ve vowed never to refuse a drink – and I’ll get Mary to promise to be with us again, and what’s the betting but there’ll be a fine young newcomer as well, a lad bred of Stewart and Hepburn stock? Which reminds me—’

And he started for the door.

‘He is charming, your Johnnie,’ said d’Elboeuf after they had left him in Jan’s room, ‘a child, but of the most delightful.’

He took his host’s arm as they walked down the passage. ‘
What
a wedding!’ he breathed, ‘I have never seen anything like it in France.’

And the Prince of the house of Guise who had seen his eldest brother’s wedding to Anne d’Este, daughter of the Duke of Ferrara and granddaughter of Louis XII, a wedding more royal than that of many kings, who had seen the wedding of his niece Mary to the Dauphin, ‘to describe which was to describe all the glories of the Renaissance’, spoke as sincerely as he spoke truly; for certainly he had never enjoyed any wedding in France half as much.

Yes, it had gone off well, Bothwell agreed, and told himself that it had been worth the outlay, though he would have to sell yet more land to meet his debts.

He went to his room, well pleased. The Queen was sleeping under his roof; they had quarrelled but they had made it up; there was no doubt but that she was friendly to him. And she had been quite sound about Arran; he could not afford, from any angle, to keep up that feud.

Yes, in spite of his enemies he had done pretty well for himself. Here he was, still three years under thirty, and already looked like becoming one of the most trusted friends and councillors of the Queen. It was a great thing that she liked Jan and that she was
so fond of Johnnie; it all ought to help. Tomorrow morning she would ride away over the haugh to Borthwick Castle; would she ever sleep under his roof again? She might.

It was strange to think that she was there now, in the great room in the south wing, in the beautiful bed from Dunbar Castle in which, according to a family legend, Patrick Hepburn, Lord of Hailes, had slept a century ago with Queen Joan, widow of James I, when they defended Dunbar together against her subjects. He didn’t know if there were any truth in that tale of an amour during the siege; his father had liked to think there was – but then he would. He rather wished he had told the Queen of it and seen how she’d take it; he could still do so tomorrow, but breakfast was not so good a time.

He stretched his arms above his head in a cracking yawn. ‘Ah-a-ah well,’ he gaped, ‘that’s over. It
was
a wedding!’

Chapter Seven

Within a month there was another wedding in the family, that of the Lord James to Agnes Keith, daughter of the Earl Marischal – ‘And here comes James’ “long love”,’ whispered Johnnie wickedly as tall Lady Agnes, with long thin neck and nose rather blue on that raw day, came stepping high and mincingly like a crane in her gorgeous robes beside the husband whose tenacious affections were now at last rewarded ‘after long love’.

There was far more state at their wedding than at the other; many said low and significantly that it could scarcely have been more royal if he had been King. But the most outspokenly unfriendly criticism of it came from James’ chief friend. His pomp ‘caused great offence to the godly’, declared Mr Knox, meaning himself. He accused James of ‘growing cold’ and ‘seeking too much his own advancement’; he was busier over ratifying his new honours and lands than the new Church of Scotland, which had not yet been ratified by the Crown. He showed less penetration in his complaint that James ‘yielded to Mary’s appetite’; for he himself, far more direct and honest than James, was incapable of the deep subtlety of the Bastard’s game.