The Galliard (30 page)

The north wind howled and rumbled in the chimney, and the huge fire on the hearth went roaring up to meet it; outside, the sea crashed and thundered on the shore. ‘God help the sailors!’ they prayed. But each was thinking, not of the sailors, but of Bothwell, who most probably was even now on the North Sea, since the last news of him was that he had been seen some days ago making inquiries among the ships in Leith Harbour. But they did not
speak of him lest they should increase each other’s anxiety; they told stories of ghosts and bogles as they sat as close as they could to the fire, and roasted nuts and watched the ice-blue flames leap up among the red, for the logs were driftwood washed up from some wrecked ship, encrusted with salt and sputtering sea-spray, though blazing all the more fiercely for that. ‘New Year’s Eve and what will the New Year bring, and I was twenty last month,’ thought the Queen, watching for pictures in the fire that should tell her her fate.

She heard a door bang, a quick step outside. Jan sprang up with a joyous shout and with her the dogs, barking madly. A voice rang out, ‘Hey there, you rascals! I’ve kept my vow – now for yours!’

Bothwell swung in through the doorway, the dogs leaping round him, Jan flinging herself on him, the quiet scene flaring up into life and movement, a hundred questions and exclamations – and then he saw the Queen. There was an instant’s pause, he gave a quick glance at her face, then swaggered up and dropped on his knees before her in an exaggeratedly penitential attitude.

‘This is a bad shock for you, my lord of Bothwell,’ she said severely.

‘On the contrary, Madam, I am here only to give myself up into your ward again!’

Jan cried impetuously, ‘Oh, but Your Grace will never keep him prisoner!’

Mary said sternly, ‘I condemn him to imprisonment here in my loyal brother’s house, for as long as it is safe for him to stay.’

He kissed both her hands, and sprang up with a shout of laughter. He was half frozen, ravenous, and in tearing spirits. He ate and drank enough for ten men as he told his adventures with as much gusto as if they had been a triumphal progress, instead of his attempt to fly the country in disgrace. He had played stowaway on a boat leaving Leith Harbour, but it had been driven back by storms on to Holy Island, which was garrisoned most inconveniently with English soldiers, so he had made his way across the sands at low tide – ‘they were safe enough’, he answered their alarmed exclamations, ‘frozen hard for the most part’ – and
walked the twenty miles or so across the Border to Coldinghame.

‘Had you not even money to buy a horse?’ wailed his sister. ‘What’s become of the two thousand crowns I lent you?’

‘Here, in bills of payment.’ He thrust a bundle of papers into Johnnie’s hand. ‘Keep ’em safe for her. I know what Jan’s like with papers – she can’t believe they mean money. I mortgaged more land through Barron before I left Edinburgh. Poor old Barron, his wife’s left too; run away across the Border, and the ministers in hue and cry after her, Knox writing to all the English bishops to send her back again. Nothing to do with me, I tell you, Johnnie, so it’s no use your eyeing me. I’ll take Barron’s money, but not his wife.’

‘Then why no horse?’

‘I’d no mind anyone should see me who needn’t.’

‘Had you no servant?’

‘Only my French lad, now hogging it in the kitchens as I’m doing here. So here I am at your New Year revels, uninvited as I promised – and where’s the new guest? Are you calling him James after me?’

‘Not I! I’ll not be reminded of my precious elder brother every time I call my son. We’re giving him your father’s name, Francis.’

And Johnnie insisted on showing Bothwell his sleeping nephew – a queer dark elf with pointed ears.

‘Has it got its eyes open yet?’ the uncle solemnly inquired, to the indignation of the proud father.

‘Do you take it for a pup, my lord?’ he demanded furiously, then joined in the roar of laughter against himself.

Mary said very little, but laughed as much as any, and watched and listened with shining eyes as if she were drinking in new life with all that careless merriment. As the bells rang out at midnight they all drank to 1563, clinking their cups together, ‘and may the luck turn for you’, said Johnnie to his brother-in-law, ‘as the tide’s now turned on the shore outside – listen to it coming roaring in!’

‘As
you
will, when your luck’s in!’ said Jan.

Mary cried, ‘Let’s go and greet the rising tide and pray that your luck rises with it, my lord!’

She seized the painted fool’s bauble that they had been tossing
in the hall earlier that evening, and declared they should launch it in honour of his coming voyage. In breeks and boots and the thick woollen scarves of Border warfare muffled round their heads and necks, the four of them ran out from the hot fireside and warm smells of meat and wine, into the breathless glittering night. The wind had gone down, the moon was up, the frosty stars were crackling like white fireworks overhead and –

‘The night’s enchanted,’ cried Mary. ‘Look! There are spirits of fire joining battle in the sky!’

Far in the north, spears of fiery and bluish light shot upwards through the dark.

‘The Merry Dancers are out,’ said Bothwell; and Jan, ‘The spirits are riding the Northern Lights.’ Mary, who had never seen the Aurora Borealis before, still believed that it was a portent of victorious war.

She had been hushed and silent in the house, a smiling shadow in the background; she was another creature out of doors, a wild young Maenad, drunk on the iced wine of that stinging air, now rushing along the shore away from them, her head back to see the stars and those strange lights in the north, her hair flying out from under her scarf; now leading them headlong over the frozen shore and the pools of ice that glinted between the rocks, down to the very edge of the huge silver-hollowed waves that came rolling and roaring up under the moon. Her bauble went bobbing darkly over them, the wind caught it and drove it this way and that, while they cheered it on, laughing at its vagaries. The tide came up, rushing round the great banks of crusted wavy ice that had frozen in its pattern; it broke over them and broke them up, washing them off the shore so that the sea was dark with floating ice for a long way out.

Mary led her company to help launch the floating islands and push them into the swirling silver-dappled water; they scrunched and splashed through ice and wet, played ducks and drakes with flat pieces of ice, and Mary tore bunches of frozen seaweed off the rocks, so encrusted with ice that each brown globe was only a seed in the heart of an enormous crystal grape. She danced madly with
them, tossing and clattering them together like castanets, holding them up for the moon to shine through, calling to the others, ‘Come and suck my crystal fruits! or will you only tell me that the grapes are salt?’

This mad laughing creature was something that Bothwell had never seen in her before; it was a shame, he thought, even to coop up such a wild thing in woman’s dress, let alone a Queen’s stiff robes of state. Well, she had flung all that now to the cold winds!

Next day he was up before the late winter sunrise, and out on the shore to see what promise the sea gave for his further voyaging; and there she was by herself, standing looking out to where the dawn light was gleaming on the nearer water, while the distant sea was still iron-dark.

‘Have you been out all night?’ he asked. ‘I can almost believe it, for I hear Your Grace is an old campaigner now, and asks nothing better than to make the heather your bed and ride all day on the march. It is your turn to tell your adventures.’

But the face she turned on him was no longer that of the spirit of freedom he had seen last night. ‘The adventure of hounding a fat old man to his death,’ she said. ‘It was a brave one, wasn’t it!’

He said, ‘Well, Huntly fought against your mother for his own ends. You’d already a score to pay.’

But she never heard him. ‘I saw him lying there on the cold stones,’ she said, ‘with only a cloth of rough Irish frieze flung over him, and stockings of coarse hodden grey. They had taken all the finery he loved so. Do you know that he would have avoided that battle at Corrichie – he had meant to retreat that morning – but they could not wake him before it was ten o’clock? They say his spirits were weighed down with his corpulence; it made him clumsy, helpless – and nervous, since he knew he could not move fast. It’s hard to understand that, isn’t it, when one’s body is light and free to move quickly, and so one’s mind too.’

Her passion of pity took him by surprise; he had expected it for Sir John Gordon, a young man accounted the handsomest in Scotland, who was reported to have said on the scaffold that ‘he died for love of his Queen’, though it was difficult to see how he
had expressed it by stabbing a private enemy, breaking prison and raising rebellion.

But her restless sadness was not for him, nor, Bothwell suspected, only for Huntly. She told him her pride in setting out on that campaign, thinking that now at last she had a chance to prove herself the true leader of her people, putting down rebellion with equal justice and no favouritism to those of her own faith – ‘A Scot first and a Catholic second,’ she said, ‘as I had determined to be all along, but no one here will recognise it – though I have been blamed for it by my own Church again and again. The Pope keeps asking me what I have done here for the Faith, and I have to fob him off with excuses. But here, that horrible old man, Knox, tells all my people that I am only waiting my chance to put the Catholics in power and persecute all the rest. So when James told me all that Huntly was working against me, I was glad,
glad
– fool that I was! – that now they would see the truth. But do people ever see the truth?’

‘They see what they want to see. It’s not often it happens to be true.’

The white dawn now had spread into the upper sky. The long curved white-crested waves were rolling in at as regular a succession as the march of troops, their foam blown forward like white hair. The curve of a gull’s wings flashed against the dark headland towards which they were walking briskly to keep warm.

Mary laughed sadly at his answer. ‘That is true of me too,’ she said. ‘I saw the tall pines standing like black sentinels against the stars when I slept out, wrapped in a great plaid, and smelt the sharp spiced smell of the pine needles and the heather and the bracken, and I thought how the night brought out the star of the Guise, and how you had always fought best in the bright dark – and that now I too was a soldier. I proved it too when the clans came flocking to me at Inverness and stormed the rebel castle; Mackintosh and Fraser and the Graham of Montrose – it was for
me
they fought, and not the Bastard.’

Bothwell drew in his breath sharply. It was the first time she had ever given the Lord James, now Earl of Moray, the title he
had borne from birth. But she did not notice; she was busy telling him of the assault at Inverness, so swift and resolute that the castle yielded almost at once and not a man in the attack was killed, ‘and their pipes playing them into action as though it were a dance, and those mad kilted Highlanders singing, yelling – do you remember showing me them singing in the courtyard of your castle a year ago, and that wild chant –

Little wot ye wha’s coming!

Colin’s coming, Donald’s coming’,—

‘
Mony a buttock bare’s coming!
’ he joined in.

‘Yes, they came to me then! They charged the castle high above the town, and I marched in to the music of the pipes, with the river glittering below and the distant mountains all purple in their pride. I dined in the great hall that night, and they told me stories of the chief, Macbeth, who slew his King there. You are too fond of killing your King’s in Scotland.’

‘Well, we’ve not killed a Queen yet. And won’t get the chance if you’re so stout a warrior. You weren’t at Corrichie when Huntly was killed?’ he asked, with a sharp return to seriousness.

‘No, thank God!’ She hit her thickly gloved hands together and broke into a run, then turned and walked soberly back to him. ‘It need not have happened,’ she said, ‘I’ll swear it. He only fought at Corrichie because he believed that half James’ army was on his side, and would desert to him as soon as the battle was joined. What had led him to believe that?’

‘The Lord James’ agents,’ said Bothwell boldly.

‘Do you know that?’

‘No, but I can guess. His spy work is excellent, and the chief work of a spy is to give wrong information to the enemy.’

‘Oh God, is war as foul as that?’

‘It gets fouler every year, I fancy. But I’m only a rough Borderer. I’m not civilized enough to appreciate the modern methods.’

‘Need
none
of it have happened? Was James all along engineering trouble for his own ends? – Sir John’s private brawl, old Huntly’s
wish to put the Catholics in power, with himself at the head?
That
was true, but I don’t believe he meant to go to war for it. Though James has found papers of Sir John Gordon’s proving all sorts of plots against the Government.’

‘James is gey good at finding papers to justify what he’s already done. I wonder he troubles, seeing that he’s now destroyed the only family left in Scotland who might dispute his power.’

She cried in anguish, ‘And it is I who have done it!
I
have put him in power. I have set him up to destroy my friends – and if he ever wishes to take the chance, to destroy myself.’

Her cry, in echo to his suspicions, moved him unbearably. He flung his arm round her shoulders, hurrying her forward in a yet faster stride. At that moment she was to him only what she appeared in her man’s clothes, a very young, sexless, friendless creature, cruelly perplexed, and his only thought to give her heart – as he would if she were indeed a lad who had been worsted by his enemies.

‘You will win through,’ he said. ‘It’s true Scotland’s not kind to her Kings, but by God what a race of ’em she’s bred! Think of your own father when he was younger than you by four or five years; what chance did
he
have, would you say? A Flodden orphan, seized in his boyhood by the Douglases. Yet he broke away from them, and when he was still only a lad, stole out of Falkland Castle when they thought him in bed, rode all night to Stirling, fell asleep there, and woke to find himself King. What a Stewart King has done, he can do again – a Stewart Queen I mean, and I beg Your Grace’s pardon for gripping you! You’re shivering under all that wool and leather – let’s run to our porridge before they cool.’