The Galliard (32 page)

He too had determined not to be bound by the formulas of other men – not to be disloyal because he was Protestant, nor to be Catholic because he was for the Queen.

But look at the result! Because he belonged to no party, his just treatment was nobody’s business. He had stood by the Queen, but the Queen was not strong enough to stand by him. Would she ever be strong enough to stand alone? Lethington was hinting it when he gave her these soothing pats about her growing popularity; he himself had urged it yesterday when he had told her of her father’s escape from bondage. But he knew, and had not said, for fear of
discouraging her, that the cases were clean different. Her father had had to fight his nobles, as she was doing. He had not had to fight the ministers as well. He had been King of the Commons. But his daughter was a girl alone against the world.

Then, in bald selfish reasoning, what good had he done here, or could ever do, either for the Queen or himself? In spite of all Elizabeth’s determination to prevent it, she was pretty certain to marry some foreign prince, especially after this amazing insult of the offer of Dudley; and after a year or so would leave the country. He would then have lost his only well-wisher – he could hardly call her ally; and his worst enemy, the ‘Good Lord James’, would be still more firmly in power, as Regent in her place.

He would get out of it all long before that – out of it in the next week, with any luck. It was Saturday night now; even Lethington would not flout public opinion by travelling on the Sabbath. He’d not give that tame cat any time to inform against him when he’d finished being stroked by the ladies and gone back to Edinburgh. ‘Wait till he has purred his way up to his snug bed with his feet against a wrapped hot brick; wait till I can get Johnnie aside and ask him for a couple of his best horses with their shoes well cocked for the ice – he owes me that, now I’ve just paid off Jan’s loan – and then off tonight “by the ae light o’ the moon”, off alone with Paris, back along the coast to Berrington, and a boat for France and the Guise; he is the greatest man in Europe, and France is sick of the Medici and her brood, maybe he’ll be her King!’

And in any case there were chances in the foreign wars: foreign estates and titles, castles in Spain!

Chapter Eleven

It was Sunday afternoon, and the little Northumbrian village of Berrington near the coast was sound asleep. John Rively, farmer, slept sounder than any after his dinner of stuffed goose and salted mutton, hot dough cakes and home-brewed ale, the best in the country, he’d say that for it, and had said it at dinner so often that he could scarcely say anything else. But now he was snoring instead, spread out at length in his chair, with his head fallen back and his feet on the hearthstone and his belt unbuckled and his hands clasping the two ends of it as if in unavailing attempt to make them meet across his now unfettered belly, that swelled up in the highest curve of that hill chain of his contours, bulging forehead and podgy nose and chin upon chin. To wake him now was an imprudence that neither his wife nor his nephew John would commit; it was reserved for a stranger.

Someone knocked on the door of the house, and a stertorous awakening snort shook the mountain chain into volcanic upheaval. Silence fell again, and the volcano subsided. But the knock came again, louder and repeated; John Rively opened round glaring eyes, shouted ‘Who’s that?’ in a vain attempt to stave off the evil moment, finally jerked all his curves forward, pulled himself out of his chair and went to the door.

A little man stood there, wrapped in a plaid, a ragged peak of red beard sharpening the point of his narrow face. His eyes were screwed up against the wind and now twinkled up at John Rively’s massive face with a sharp shrewish questing look, like that of a
small lean terrier investigating an over-fed mastiff.

‘Know me?’ he repeated Rively’s question. ‘If you don’t know Willie Tatt of Coldinghame, it’s likely you’ll know of Black Ormiston of the Moss Tower. You’re a friend, I think, of the Forster family, and they’ve had friendly dealings with him in the past bad times, sending him the kindly word when it would be well to thresh his corn and secure his cattle when Sir John Forster was going to march North.’

Rively knew well enough of these unprofessional relations between the English Warden and his Scots neighbours, or enemies, and cultivated them himself whenever possible. With a heavy wink he replied, ‘Aye, it’s better to have a friend on the wrong side of the fence than two on the right side, I say.’

He had heard of Willie Tatt as a warm man, with a snug farm across the Border, and it encouraged him to prove his maxim; whatever he could do for Tatt he’d do – ‘and mind you make it tit for Tatt, ha ha, when we meet in the next Border fighting!’ (‘Though I could eat you then at one mouthful, you starveling red-feathered cock-sparrow!’ he added contemptuously to himself.)

Willie Tatt’s demands were modest enough at the outset. He had come in a trodd of sheep; some had strayed and he wanted help to collect them. John Rively promised him his nephew as soon as he should return to the house; in the meantime, Tatt must come in and taste his ale. Over the ale, and after Tatt had taken some further soundings as to John Rively’s policy and verified that it was based on a sound sense of commercial values, he confided to him that there was more in the matter than a trodd of sheep, and that Rively might get the chance to make a more important ally ‘on the wrong side of the fence’ than Willie Tatt, one too who would pay more for his benefits.

‘My master,’ said Tatt, ‘has had the bad luck to offend the Queen of Scotland, and has had to leave the country on the quiet. Now, if you could house him and his servant with their horses in those caves you use as cellars behind the house—’

‘And how do you know about my cellars?’ asked Rively.

It was Willie Tatt’s turn to wink. Black Ormiston had informed
him that the cellars could be – and had been – used for other purposes than storing kegs of ale.

John Rively was not altogether pleased by this, but he was busy pursuing a subtle piece of statecraft that all but eluded him in the soporific haze of the Sabbath. At last, however, he ran it to earth. Laying a finger like a sausage to the side of his bulbous nose, he said profoundly, ‘If your master is upsides with your Queen, it’s likely he’ll be on the right side of mine?’

‘Nothing likelier,’ agreed Tatt.

‘Who is your master?’

‘The Earl of Bothwell.’

Rively’s supposition did not look so likely now to him. He had a pretty fair idea of which names among the Scots figured on the pension list from England, in return for their ‘goodwill and private information’, a list headed by Lord James and including Mr George Buchanan, who was not too learned to be canny, and many more of the Protestant nobles and gentry, also their womenfolk.

But no doubt Bothwell would now be induced to join it, and anyway what odds, so long as Rively got paid? So he agreed to hide the Earl and his servant until they had done their business in Berrington; he could make a shrewd guess at its nature when Willie Tatt said he would want a guide across the sands at low tide next day to the harbour of Holy Island. As soon as they could get a ship his visitors would be off, that was plain. It was money for nothing, and all his curves expanded with geniality.

They were blown to their fullest extent when he greeted the noble Earl himself and his French servant, showed them the cellars and the beds put up in them, and the stout door that could be locked ‘as safe and snug as that dungeon in your Lordship’s castle of Hermitage where the Dark Knight of Liddesdale threw his friend and horse to starve together.’

And he roared delightedly at the happy reminiscence as he ushered them back to the house to dine, with profuse apologies for ‘my meagre and humble fare’ in the same breath that he pointed out its excellencies, lamented that he had no wine, ‘but this young rascal my nephew knows where to get as good a bottle as any in
England when he takes Your Lordship’s servant to the harbour tomorrow – it’s not for nothing that the French ships call there with the best from Bordeaux – we’ll make merry on it tomorrow to make up for this plebeian stuff tonight. Not but what it’s the best brew – ‘ and again he told why it was the best, while the ‘young rascal’ his nephew looked sourly on with a pale contemptuous face, picking up the jug to refill it as soon as it was empty, with an air of weary indifference.

Next day he set off with Tatt for the harbour and the wine in the fishing village, and grumbled about his uncle all through the expedition. He was mean as hell, he said, for all his jovial airs, he made his nephew work for nothing, he would get blood out of a stone, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for money. This account of their genial host bore out Bothwell’s impression of Rively as a
faux
bonhomme
and untrustworthy. Luckily Tatt had found there was a ship that would sail next day, so they would only have to rely on this bag of bombast for one night. They endured his boasting over the wine and young John’s sullen silence, and went early to their vault. Bothwell ordered the horses to be ready saddled and his two followers to keep on their clothes, and their weapons by them, and locked the door himself before he went to bed.

The precaution was useless; there were two keys to that door, and it was opened from outside at about four in the morning. The light of torches guttering in the night wind showed four of the Berwick officers at the head of a party from their garrison. Behind the door cowered Rively in his nightshirt, unavailingly trying to keep a blanket wrapped about him, hiding his face in it while the wind revealed his unmistakably bandy legs. Bothwell leaped out of bed at Rively’s throat, but he was seized before he could reach him.

‘He sent us no information,’ said the Under Marshal; ‘we’re taking him along too for harbouring suspects.’

‘But Your Honours,’ gasped Rively, seeing the Earl now securely held by the soldiers, ‘I led you straight to this vault, I intended all along to give them up.’

‘Much use that was!’ exclaimed the Master of Ordnance, in
charge of the expedition. ‘If Captain Carew here hadn’t had word from Edinburgh to search the ship at Holy Island, they’d have sailed in her tomorrow.’

‘And they’d have done that,’ broke in Captain Carew, conceitedly twirling his moustache, ‘if I hadn’t searched the village too, and seen your lad buying wine there, so that I guessed you had company.’ He looked challengingly at the Master of Ordnance as though he expected to receive promotion for his cleverness on the spot; but the Master only nodded impatiently, grunted, ‘Very fine, very fine,’ and asked Bothwell if he would dress and go with them quietly to Berwick, or be carried in his shirt.

‘I’ll dress,’ said the prisoner, ‘and before I leave this place you’ll give me pen and ink and I’ll write to my friends in England to demand for what reason, and by what authority, I have been taken prisoner in my bed in time of peace, with no charge preferred against me.’

At this Captain Carew looked somewhat anxiously at his commanding officer, but the Master of Ordnance with a smile granted the prisoner’s request, if he would state the names of his English friends. Bothwell unhesitatingly replied with the names of the two antagonists whom he had twice worsted in battle in the Border wars, the Earl of Northumberland and his brother, Sir Henry Percy.

Interlude

A
BROAD

‘There is no one in England,’ said Bothwell, ‘whom I’d sooner kill than Cecil and John Rively.’

‘Why John Rively?’ asked Sir Henry Percy.

‘Because he was the reason I was here last March, am here this March, and if things go no better with me on this journey to London now than they did a year ago, am like to be here next March as well, listening to the spring gales break themselves on these damned grey rocks and the seagulls scream—’

‘And your host play the clarinet,’ finished Sir Henry, picking up that instrument.

He was a small man, considerably older than Bothwell, very fair, with a tiny pointed chin-tuft of beard already growing white. He spoke seldom and incisively, and never made an unnecessary movement. The effect of his silence, his stillness, the neatly chiselled stony-white of his features, and his hard light unswerving eyes, made one think of a marble knight on a tombstone. All his life he had been compared unfavourably with his elder brother Thomas, the Earl of Northumberland, who was so much taller, handsomer, jollier and more popular, but he knew himself the wiser man and the better soldier, and was content whether other men knew it or not.

His previous encounters with Bothwell in the fighting between Scots and English at the end of the Queen Regent’s reign had given him a great respect for his enemy. He had twice nearly fallen
into the strong hands of this tall quick dark young man who now lounged opposite him, kicking the table in his impatience, the next instant leaping from his chair to stride up and down and rub his clenched hand against his head, as fiercely restless as some lithe black panther prowling up and down in his cage.

To cage such a creature seemed to the Percy, a usually unemotional observer, an act against nature. He lowered his clarinet from his lips to say, ‘They’ll not put you in the Tower again, or my own liberty shall go bail for yours!’

But it was an unnecessary remark, so he continued to play instead. His companion whistled the time in accompaniment, then sang in a deep rollicking voice:

‘Oh there was horsing, horsing in haste,

And cracking o’ whips out o’er the lea,

Until we came to the Till water,

And it was running like the sea.’

And Bothwell swung round from the window where he had been staring out at the North Sea that surged up against the headland of Tynemouth. ‘What’s put you on to the ballad of our raid at Haltwellsweir? Our second merry-meeting, wasn’t it? Merrier if I’d caught you! Odd how nearly you were my prisoner then, and now I’m yours.’