The Galliard (5 page)

The inn where he was meeting his two friends was a better one than that at which he had to lodge. He saw them sitting waiting for him on a bench outside the house under some dusty plane trees, with wine on a rough table in front of them. They hailed him cheerily; Monsieur d’Oysel, the Commander of the French forces in Scotland, in cooperation with whom he had fought this last year, waved a fat gracious hand as he rose to embrace him, complaining in comfortably lethargic tones of the heat; while Long Geordie Seton had that lantern-jawed grin like a pike’s on him, and whistled the
tune of ‘The Gay Galliard’s men’ by way of greeting. They told him it was too hot to sup indoors and asked him, chaffing him, about his interview with the Dowager of France – had he been successful with yet another widowed Queen?

‘What are we eating?’ Bothwell demanded before he would answer, and put down a mugful of wine at a draught – ‘Ah, I needed that! Thirsty work, dowagers.’

Nor was he only joking; there had been something oddly exhausting about that large, deliberately jovial woman; she used up all the air round her.

‘She told me of the tosses she’d taken. That one take a toss! She’d fall like a load of pig-iron!’ And he sang the ribald rhyme of the Paris streets about her:

‘She is fat, so fat,

Forty stone in nothing but her hat:

Think of that!’

It was good to relax at ease with his fellow-campaigners of this last year and stretch his legs before him, grinding the dust up with his heels as he leaned back against a tree trunk and looked up at the broad leaves cut out against the glowing dusk.

Below him the river flowed and gleamed and stank. D’Oysel loosened his collar and released the roll of fat at the back of his neck, its crimson hue slowly paling. He sat, large, contented, and apparently immovable, speaking hardly at all at first and then in dulcet tones, moving his hands with a very slight flapping gesture, or his shoulders in a faint shrug, as he listened with a lazily benignant smile to the talk of the two Scots, Bothwell’s quick, curt voice and Seton’s slower, grinding, burring tones.

They had ordered trout baked in cream and chickens stuffed with mushrooms; meanwhile here were some sardines pickled in red wine, and plenty of the crisp fresh white bread of Paris. Lord Seton was wolfing it as a schoolboy would cakes.

‘You find this better than our dry oatcake,’ said my Lord of Bothwell.

‘Horses’ fodder!’ murmured d’Oysel on a soft note of horror; ‘strange how you Scots can gnaw oats and barley, even drink them in your barbarous whisky.’

‘A deal better than a
ragoût
of baked horse and
vol-au-vent
of roasted rats, anyway,
mon capitaine
,’ Seton remarked quickly before Bothwell should bristle, and d’Oysel responded with a wheezy chuckle.

‘Aye, this lucky dog missed all that,’ and Seton turned to Bothwell, ‘ – and a queer sight it was when the truce was settled, to see all the soldiery feeding together, friend with foe, on the sands of Leith, the Scots and French with their siege rations of horse or rat, and the English with their bacon and beef and chickens. I will say, though, they shared handsomely with our fellows.’

Bothwell showed little pleasure in that. ‘All over by June,’ he said; ‘and I need never have lost the half of my stout fellows in that foray I led on Easter Monday.’

The Frenchman blinked his little blue eyes but still seemed too comfortably placid for the effort of speech. It was Seton who protested:

‘You caused more than double that loss to the enemy.’

‘And what of that? When those that were left were all sharing their chicken and rats together in three months’ time! But old Toppet Hob o’ the Main got an Englishman under him that never got up again – but nor did Toppet Hob. And young Kirsty, who was learning to be a handy fellow with a horse, will never go home again; and Jock o’ the Lamb-hill will have to sit like an old woman at his door from now on, since the marrow of his shinbone ran down on his spur leather.’

D’Oysel’s solid calm suddenly exploded. He bounced up on his seat in a bubble of fury. ‘Never have I heard such impractical sentiment! Do you hope to make omelettes without breaking eggs, or battles without breaking bones? This Border warfare makes you Scots too soft; you think, of war as of a raid in which you all know each other by name, even the enemy, and carry off what loot you can with as little loss of life as possible. It is a ridiculous convention – and most dangerous.’

The younger man cocked an impudent eye across that palpitating bulk at Geordie Seton’s ironic grin. It was the first time James Hepburn had been accused of being soft. But his chief amusement was in seeing the fat hot Frenchman blowing up with excitement. He watched him delightedly, murmuring, ‘Up he goes again! No restraint!’

‘An amateur soldier!’ d’Oysel shrilled, then broke off abruptly. ‘It seems I make you laugh.’

‘As any Scot would,’ the Galliard replied airily, ‘when he hears a squeak like an exhausted bagpipe.’

It was a bad start for a pleasant evening. Seton wished his frugal mind hadn’t suggested a Dutch party for this supper; if he had agreed to d’Oysel’s wish to invite Bothwell, who was notoriously short of funds, as their guest, then both would have had to behave better. He quickly turned in a conciliatory way to the Frenchman, talking in his most deliberate fashion, determined not to be interrupted by either of them.

‘You think, Monsieur, in terms of the new artillery and massed armies, where we, as you say, think of our men as persons known by name and generally nickname; it is a habit due to generations, no, centuries of fighting between those who can be friends, and even of the same family, when they are not enemies. But you know well how heartily my lord of Bothwell believes in the modern methods of warfare, the value he places on cannon in siege—’

‘Aye, well he knows it!’ broke in the irrepressible Galliard in spite of him, ‘seeing I led off Harry Percy’s forces on that Christmas wildgoose chase at Haltwellsweir and thought Monsieur d’Oysel and his highly professional soldiers would take the opportunity to besiege Norham Castle. Maybe he’ll tell us now why he didn’t – if it isn’t beyond the comprehension of an amateur!’

‘Lad, you are incorrigible!’ growled Seton in deep annoyance as d’Oysel, with fat hands, fierce blue eyes and tufted eyebrows all upraised together, went off into a stream of Gallic oaths, explanation and abuse. If they got through this supper without the Galliard flinging down one of his challenges to mortal combat, he, Geordie
Seton, would need all his wits about him – and just when they were all hoping for Court favour!

But thank God the stuffed chickens had appeared and – ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ he protested, ‘if you must quarrel, leave it, I beg you, to the end of this course, and not let these mushrooms, the first of the season, cool on your plates.’

The poignant appeal went home, d’Oysel admitting with reverence that it would be a crime to spoil their flavour by letting them congeal in the grease of the gravy.

Bothwell laughed and said, ‘Aye, we should keep our breath to cool our porridge, not to fan such tender morsels as these,’ and filled his mouth with them.

Seton knew better than to hope for any sort of apology from him, and got on to politics as soon as d’Oysel showed signs of ceasing the really important discussion of the evening. (
‘C’est bon, ca, hein?
A suspicion more of the garlic vinegar in the sauce perhaps. – It is possible that the nutmeg has been applied a thought too freely.’)

They questioned how long the peace would last between England and the allies, France and Scotland; and Bothwell, what odds that would make, since the new Queen Elizabeth would work against them whether in war or peace. Or at least her minister, Sir William Cecil, would do so.

‘And our precious new Secretary of State for Scotland, Master “Michael Wily” Maitland of Lethington, is hand in glove with them, I’ll swear.’

‘Aye, I’ve heard him described as a sort of Scottish Cecil,’ said Seton, ‘and the English Queen calls him the flower of the wits in Scotland.’

‘Then the flower bears a rotten dry husk for fruit,’ Bothwell remarked sourly.

He had once caught a glimpse of Elizabeth before she was Queen – a fine upstanding whippy young woman with a wary eye. She would be rising twenty-seven by now, and still too soon to see how she’d shape on the throne; besides, as was to be expected at her age and yet unmarried, she was too busily engaged in making a fool of herself over a man.

Wave after wave of scandal about her and handsome Robert Dudley had been going on for the past eighteen months and had just broken in a storm over the news that Dudley’s inconvenient wife, Amy Robsart by birth, had been found dead at the foot of a staircase in extremely suspicious circumstances. Ambassadors who had been making delicate investigations on behalf of their masters, anxious to know whether they were indeed wooing a Virgin Queen, were now talking openly not merely of immorality but of condoned murder. Her Ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, was nearly beside himself with shame. ‘There are too many people here,’ he had burst out, ‘asking what religion is this, that a subject shall kill his wife, and his Queen not only bear with it, but marry him?’

Bothwell’s roar of disagreeable laughter followed the question with another: whether Elizabeth had lost her virginity at thirteen to her stepfather Admiral Seymour, or had waited for Dudley. But unchastity was a slight matter, marriage a serious. If she married her lover, the general view in England was that she would go to bed with him as Queen Elizabeth of England and rise the next morning as plain Mistress Dudley.

A most blessed conclusion, in all their opinions, since this would leave the English throne in the undoubted possession of their young mistress Mary, Queen of Scotland and France and (since Elizabeth had been doubly declared a bastard) of England. The late King Henri II of France, her father-in-law, had insisted on Mary bearing the Royal Arms of England quartered with those of Scotland and France, and had sworn to lead a crusade to win her rightful kingdom.

‘He wished to be young again, a knight errant, a champion of old, for the sake of that charming child – but what would you?’ D’Oysel’s hands outspread in gentle despair; his voice, now loosened and tender with good wine, rocked on mellifluously: ‘He was killed by his valour, his chivalry, his desire to shine before the eyes of his mistress, his wife, his daughter-in-law.’ (D’Oysel’s own eyes were moist at his touching picture of the royal domestic circle.) ‘And so, the sport, a tournament, the chance thrust of a lance in his eye, ended all hope of his championship of this unfolding rosebud.’

‘And what of her?’ asked Bothwell, unbuckling his belt and leaning back in his chair to drink his wine and stare under drowsy lids at the steel-dark river under the purple sky; even here under the dusty plane trees of the little inn garden it was stuffily close.

The gossip his friends repeated bore out his fleeting impression of that tall, grave, glittering child. She was seventeen and a half, and ripe therefore to be a wife, but most people about the French Court doubted that the marriage had ever been consummated, for King François, nearly two years younger than herself, was wretchedly backward and delicate, and had grown far worse in the eighteen months since their marriage, shooting up into a sudden height that overtaxed his already feeble strength.

And as for other affairs, there was still – it was really very odd, almost scandalous, d’Oysel seemed to think it – no hint of them. No doubt she was too closely guarded by her six magnificent uncles, and it would be a rash man who would dare to brave the fury of the Guises. Sheltered, pampered, treasured as an infinitely precious jewel from infancy, hers had been an utterly different upbringing from the smeared, scared girlhood of Elizabeth of England.

Elizabeth had been branded with bastardy by her own father, had struggled with the drab dangers of her over-familiar step-father, Admiral Seymour, of her slyly sensual brother-in-law, Philip of Spain, of her bitterly jealous half-sister, ‘Bloody Mary’.

But Mary Stewart had been the First Lady of the Land since her birth, the object of passionate care from every one of her relatives. The Cardinal de Lorraine watched over her with far more careful intimacy than over his own bastard daughter (‘Devil doubt him! That’s easy seen!’ muttered Bothwell); the late King’s elderly mistress, Diane de Poictiers, had vied with his wife Queen Catherine in supervision of her education and appointment of her governesses, showing that strict perfection of respectability that is only to be attained by a French royal mistress; and the little Queen on the whole spent less time at Court than in the remote country home of her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchesse de Guise, an old lady of severe charm and shrewd sympathy, as much a saint as an aristocrat.

Yet even as d’Oysel sketched these extenuating circumstances in a slow trickle of words like the dropping of sweet oil, he evidently found it a grievous oversight that in all this chattering Court, where it was only paying a woman her due compliment to tell tales of her lovers, there were as yet no such tales to tell of its young Queen.

‘But she’s not a woman yet, nor will be for many a day,’ observed Bothwell, with a grunt at the obtuseness of the French gallant, for he himself knew as well as any, and rather better, that women do not all grow up at the same age.

The Frenchman, unheeding, spoke hopefully of ‘a certain foolish fellow we all know, who they say is in serious danger – but yes, literally – of losing his wits for love of her.’

This was the young Earl of Arran, who had lately been Commander of the Scots Guard in France. Bothwell’s knowledge of the family history of that pale gaunt young man with the eyes of a startled hare led him to remark that the loss of his wits would make small odds to him.

‘Well, he’d wit enough to answer your challenge from a safe distance,’ Seton said with a grin at his companion’s strong long arms and nervous fingers that curved inwards in their instinctive grip – a grip that tightened at mention of Arran and memory of his sack of Crichton.