The Galliard (48 page)

‘It did, for it had too many heavy French trappings on it and a new French curb it didn’t well like. Forbye, he was riding for his life towards Dunbar with all Hume’s men after him in their coats of Kendal-green, and had little heed to spare to his going.’

He pulled the bar out of the furnace. It was red-hot and he leaned over her, stirring her ale, which hissed furiously and rose
higher and higher in a smooth creamy froth. His shadow soared behind him, it blackened all the ceiling. Tink tonk, Tink tonk went his son’s hammer on the red-hot shoe he was reshaping to fit the Night Hawk’s hoof. Shadows were stealing out again, sharp and pointed from behind the spears stacked in a corner. She sipped the warm ale, it was very soothing. The rising shadows as the fire died down again, and the swinging of the hammer, were becoming part of a dream spun by the old man’s gruff, gentle, monotonous voice. Was she really here or only dreaming of something she had heard long ago? Was it she herself, or the French knight, who was fleeing towards Dunbar?

‘Thou’rt safe if thou canst reach Dunbar

Afore the gloaming’s grey.’

Who was singing that? The old man, as he stirred her ale and told her to wake up now and drink it before she dropped the mug out of her hand.

‘Tell me the rest,’ she said.

Well, he had been out looking the hill, a wee lad minding his father’s herd, and himself saw that furious pursuit of the Warden and his handful of Frenchmen, and the running fight down in the dale along the banks of the Bluidy Burn, as the stream was now known; ‘from Langton Tower they’d come across the Corney Ford, by Pouterlaney and down eastward towards Duns’ Grueldykes, and it was in the bog near old Cramecrook’s house that he was laired, and I saw it all with these two eyes; I heard the shouting and the yelling and the clash of their arms down in the dale, and I ran along the hill just in time to see his horse flounder in the quivering marsh among the white bog-reeds. Eh, but I stood there aghast to see that slaughter down below, and the men of the Merse all riding up round him and his handful of men, and their long spears glinting in the sunlight. It was Tom Trotter cut off his head and held it up by its long long hair, and Sir David Hume of Wedderburn tied it to his saddle-bow and rode off light and gay. They stripped him of his white armour and his braw
duds, and the song they sing now tells you he was buried where he fell,

On Broomhousebanks without a Mass

Or prayer his soul to save,

but that last’s not true, for I and my father and brothers buried the puir French bodies that very night as they lay gaping at the moon, buried them there in the bog and said a prayer for them. It was a sair pity for him that he came to this land, for he was a great knight in his own country.

The leddies of France may wail and mourn,

May wail and mourn full sair,

For the bonny Bawty’s long brown locks

They’ll ne’er see waving mair.’

Now indeed she was dreaming, for she had heard this story before, but in another language, another voice, old too, but a woman’s, talking French; and suddenly she remembered the anxious tone of her grandmother de Guise, as she warned her that when she left France she would be going to a country far rougher and more savage; and told her of the dreadful fate in some obscure skirmish on the Scottish Border that befell the famous Chevalier Blanc, Seigneur de la Bastie of Dauphiné.

The crisp delicate old voice echoed strangely here in the blacksmith’s forge where her granddaughter sat on the shaft of a barrow and stared at a stack of spears, perhaps the very same spears that had done de la Bastie to his death.

‘I’ll never get hame to my ain dear land

That lies sweet o’er the sea.’

It was the old man singing that as he took her mug from her; was it of de la Bastie, or of her own despairing homesickness for France?

Bothwell saw that the tears were running down her face when he came back into the forge.

‘You’ll be safe now,’ he told her as they lifted her into his arms again on his horse’s back; ‘once over Batty’s Bog and it’s not far on to Dunbar, and look, the dawn’s coming up.’

But would they reach Dunbar ‘afore the gloaming’s grey’? And would the Night Hawk with its double burden not flounder in the quivering marsh, where now she could see the glimmer of the white bog-reeds?

She did not speak her fears, but she could not stop the tears from running down.

‘Seven centuries lie buried there,’ she said.

He thought she was light-headed and tried to give her some vague comfort, but she said again, ‘It lies there in the bog, the grave of the Auld Alliance that Charlemagne made with Scotland. Friendship between Crown and Crown, king and king, people and people, he set that down in his charter, the Golden Bull, seven hundred and seventy-seven years ago – and its climax came with my marriage – the Queen of Scotland to The King of France. But it came too late: the Scots had killed de la Bastie; they hounded my mother to the death, as you said yourself; and now are hounding me.’

‘Let them! They’ll not get you.’ His arms tightened round her.

But still she cried, ‘Is it all over? Will England have her way in the long run and take this country to her own?’

‘Only when the child that is in your womb is born to wear both Crowns, and then, and then only, the countries will be one. England will never conquer us; it is we, in your little body here, who will give her a King.’

They reached Dunbar when it was fully light, but the sun had not shown itself and a thin rain was falling. The North Sea rolled up in grey tossing waves to the little harbour and the blood-red fortress of the castle on its edge. The huge bulk of the Bass Rock out to sea was blurred with rain, its white cliffs faintly shining like a ghost-ship in the mist.

When they lifted Mary from off the horse, she stood dazed and rubbed her eyes. ‘But it’s all quite different,’ she said. ‘Just now I saw that rock clear, like pearl, and birds flying up round it with wings of fire.’

Joy and awe had swept her up, exalting her, dizzying her; but now that wave had flowed past and she did not know why she had felt it; it did not belong to this drear moment at all as she stood before the empty castle and the rain-drummed sea, and the rain fell on her.

A closely serried line of redshanks stood at the edge of the surf below, fishing for bits of flotsam with their black bills; they had nothing to do with those birds of fire that she had seen proudly soaring and floating round the Bass Rock, now grown invisible in the advancing rain. She felt very near tears.

They went into the hail, which was quite bare and very cold.

Anthony Standen came slowly down the stairs towards them, looking sheepish and indignant. The King, he said, had never drawn rein till he got here, drank a half-pint of whisky, and was now dead asleep, rolled in his cloak on a bare bedstead upstairs.

‘Good,’ said Bothwell with satisfaction.

They gathered round her, he and the other leaders who had ridden with him and whom she now saw clearly for the first time: Gordon, and the fathers of three of her Maries, the grave kindly Lord Fleming, jolly Lord Livingstone with his red face and bushy grey beard, and Bothwell’s old friend, lean and lantern-jawed, the chief of the Long Setons.

‘And now there’s but one Mary to do duty to three fathers!’ she said, smiling up at them as they hovered, anxious and rather helpless, not knowing what could be done for her beyond lighting fires everywhere, as the soldiers were already doing. The place was almost entirely unfurnished, and Margaret Carwood, exhausted by her constant anxiety of the last three days and nights, was distracted to find herself the only woman in this grim fortress, and no doctor, ‘and anything may happen any minute,’ she muttered, wringing her hands. Her mistress ought to be got straight to bed, but where were the blankets? They would all be damp and must be aired.

‘So they will be very soon,’ said Mary, who was sitting on a bench by the now crackling fire in the hall, ‘and I can tell you I am not going to bed till I have had some breakfast. I am ravenous, as you all must be. What can we eat?’

Some dry oatcake was discovered and kegs of ale, and a grinning soldier brought in his helmet full of eggs that he had found in the hen-roosts, and thought would be more to the fancy of a breeding woman than the salt beef which was all there was in the larders.

But who was to cook them? for Carwood was upstairs routing out the bedding. Mary cried that she would make omelettes for them all. There was a procession of the lords and the Queen into the kitchen; frying-pan and bowl and wooden spoon were found and wiped, and she set to work as chief cook with a zest that amazed them when they thought of it afterwards. At the moment they were so thankful to have reached the fortress safely and to find her not desperately ill as they had feared, that they were all in the highest spirits and it seemed quite natural that she should be too. She chaffed her three fathers and set them, most undutifully they declared, to beat the eggs and chop some herbs that yet another enterprising soldier had found at her command in the herb plot. The omelettes were delicious, and she heated the oatcake and stirred the ale with a red-hot poker – it wasn’t in the Court of France she had learned that trick, so where was it? they demanded, laughing.

‘This very night in the blacksmith’s forge, so you see how good it is for queens to go among their people.’

She was not her father’s daughter for nothing, they told her.

‘No, and in more ways than one, for with your help I have escaped from my captors as he did, and shall wake up to find I am indeed Sovereign of Scotland.’

She looked at Bothwell, who three years ago in the winter sunrise at Coldinghame had given her courage by telling her of that. He was astounded by the happiness in her face.

She was using herself to the uttermost, and glorying in it. This was to be alive: to find what she could do, and do it – and to do it beside the man who had done more than any other to show her how. The comforts and refinements that she had been taught to
look on as necessities mattered no more than a straw blown away in the wind; her hair was a tangled mass of elf-locks and her face unwashed and unpowdered, but that did not matter, as it would have done with Darnley. But not with him.

As he took the frying-pan from her hands, the man who loved courage more than anything looked at her with worship in his eyes. She would always rise to the occasion in danger, he knew. But to be able to joke and cook and cheer her waiting-maid after these three days and nights, and with such simple, carefree gaiety, was even better.

The roughest of his men would not have treated a foaling mare or cow as her enemies had treated this delicate pampered girl from the Court of France – shut her up alone to die of a miscarriage, untended. But she had survived their brutality, outwitted and escaped them, travelled thirty miles on horseback at night, and was now cooking their breakfast.

Chapter Twelve

Bothwell also rose to the occasion. This time it was in just three days that he mustered four thousand fully armed men round them. On Tuesday morning they arrived at Dunbar; by Thursday night there was their army complete, drawn from the dalesmen and rank-riders, besides four companies of trained infantry and a substantial backing of artillery. Cattle too had been driven in, the larders stocked, and it would be as hard to assail their position with their backs to the North Sea as to ‘ding down Tantallon or build a brig to the Bass’.

The effect of his army was as quick as its muster. It encouraged all the nobles who were hesitatingly watching the course of events to come riding up to Dunbar at the head of their retainers; Atholl descended from the hasty retreat he beat into the mountains over the weekend; Hume, who at that same moment had been escorting the Lord James back to Edinburgh, now rode up to serve the Queen; the Earl Marischal, though father-in-law to the Bastard, the Earls of Caithness, Cassillis, Crawford and Sutherland, all followed suit; and the Hamiltons sent word from Edinburgh that they and all the town were only waiting to give the Queen a right royal welcome on her return to her capital.

And that was by no means its chief effect. The band of conspirators in Edinburgh saw at once that the game was up. They saw it really from that first moment on Tuesday morning when they returned to Holyrood with their Act of Pardon all ready but for her signature, to find that the Queen had neither died nor miscarried
but had escaped from their power,
with
her husband – that took some time to swallow, even by those who knew their Darnley – and had fled, no one knew where.

Very soon they heard that she was at Dunbar with Bothwell in command of an army whose force increased hourly with every fresh report. That settled it. The most conspicuous of the murderers, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay at the head of them, fled precipitately over the Border to the safety of England and the very same quarters at Newcastle that James and his fellows had left for Scotland in such high hopes a few days before.

‘So they’ll find their nests kept warm for them,’ chuckled Bothwell.

He roared with laughter when those lords that were less conspicuously incriminated came riding up to Dunbar to crave their pardon from their ‘justly incensed Queen’.

‘Here comes the first flock of turtle doves,’ he said; ‘all the carrion crows will now be of the same feather.’

Sure enough, the Lord James, while keeping a safe distance, sent assurances that he had broken off all connection with those who ‘had committed the vile act.’ Darnley was hurt that James had sent no message to him.

And Knox, once again finding that absence makes the heart grow stronger, hastily disappeared until people should have forgotten his last Sunday’s sermon in praise of those who had executed ‘just punishment on that knave David.’

Mary’s spirit and Bothwell’s strength had saved her throne and given her complete victory. She rode back in triumph into the city from which she had fled so desperately just one week before. Beside her and her husband rode Bothwell at the head of his Borderers and professional infantry; behind them, all the lords who had flocked to her at Dunbar, with their troops; the Hamiltons, with the warlike Abbot, Gavin, at their head, rode out from Edinburgh to meet her and joined their forces to her army; all the townspeople poured out into the street, and roared themselves hoarse in her welcome. They were all her loyal and devoted servants, and once again an upward glance at that overhanging upper window in the house at the foot
of Netherbow showed her that she was no longer ‘overlooked’.