The Galliard (7 page)

Mary Stewart had a small adventure to tell her four Maries when they dressed her for the Court that evening. They were four girls who had been chosen from noble Scots families to be her companions from early childhood, of near the same age as herself and of the same Christian name, so that to distinguish them they called each other by their surnames, which was apt to give a jaunty
mock-masculine air to their conversation.

Mary Beton with her frivolous curls, her bright watchful eyes, her mocking smile, was the most excited to hear of the encounter in the forest. ‘Oh, but, Madam, I can tell you all about the young Earl of Bothwell. You must be careful of him! They call him the Galliard in his own country.’

‘But that is a French word.’

‘Many Scots words are. They use it for a gay rascal – as he has proved himself.’

‘And it is the name of the Dance Royal. But I promise you he shan’t lead me one,’ laughed Mary.

‘As he did my aunt, Madam! Yes, he is, or was, the lover of my wicked aunt, the Wizard Lady of Buccleuch—’

‘Sorcery – you?’

‘It’s in the family,’ said Mary Beton, unabashed, for sorcery was not yet a pervading terror in Scotland. ‘Her father learned it in the University at Padua, where the Devil held a fencing class and nearly caught him, but only got his shadow. That was why my grandfather cast no shadow to the day of his death. And Janet, my aunt, learned magic of him and has taught it to Bothwell, they say, but all the proof she’s given of it that I ever heard is her power to win a handsome young lord for her lover—’

‘Handsome? No, I’d never call him that,’ murmured Mary.

‘Monsieur Brantôme says he is hideous!’ exclaimed Livingstone.

‘That is probably because he has triumphed over Brantôme in some love-affair,’ said Beton wisely. ‘In any case, it is good proof of magic power in my aunt to win him when she’s past forty, and has already had three husbands and a lover whom she called her husband in the sight of God.’

‘God must have squinted then,’ observed Mary Stewart. ‘And is my lord of Bothwell her husband in the sight of God?’

‘Oh no, the affair is over, I believe, though they said he was handfasted to her.’ Her mistress looked rather thoughtful; was she disapproving? She hastened to tell her that her aunt had a great spirit. ‘She took a battleaxe and broke open the church door with her own hands when Kerr took sanctuary at the altar, after
he’d murdered her husband, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch.’

Ah, that might explain the affair! That dark, bold glance that had scanned her so keenly in the forest would appreciate a daring and revengeful temper. Mary herself felt a thrill of pleasure. If anyone dared hurt her poor François she would much enjoy breaking in a church door to get at them! (Her image of the malefactor was no ferocious Scot, but a stout lady in black with a flat blank face and receding chin – to wit, her mother-in-law.) But all she said in a cool, purring little voice was: ‘How encouraging are your glimpses of family life in Scotland! I am glad I have a husband in France and no chance of going back.’

Mary Livingstone disclosed more up-to-date gossip of Bothwell.

‘He’s left a woman behind in Flanders, though he really
is
handfasted to her, so I’ve heard.’

‘What varied tastes the man has! A great Flemish mare, I suppose, as a change from Beton’s aunt.’

‘No, she’s a Norwegian lady of good family who followed him from Denmark.’

‘The more fool she!’ observed their Queen. ‘I’ve no patience with women who make such fools of themselves over men. Look at Queen Elizabeth – she has lost her head so completely that she is likely to lose her crown as well.’

‘And we all know where that crown should be!’ cried Livingstone, and the rest of the dressing time was taken up with discussing Elizabeth. But Mary was still thinking of their gossip of Bothwell. All this tittle-tattle of women here, women there! What did it matter to her how many ladies of quality Bothwell had seduced in France, Flanders, Denmark? What she had to consider was that her mother had proved this young man so staunch and able in her service that she had found she could trust him as she had been able to do no other of her nobles. The damage he had done her enemies had been valued by the French Ambassador to Scotland at as much as £1,400.

That
was the way a Queen should think of her servants, not as lovers, as that uncontrolled Tudor woman was doing.

Chapter Three

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,

How does your garden grow?

Silver bells and cockle shells

And pretty maids all in a row.

James Hepburn was reminded of the English song when he was brought to his private audience with Mary Stewart, whom he found singing Italian madrigals with her Maries, sitting in a circle on bright cushions like the five petals of a flower. They sang of ‘passion’s burning sighs’ in voices cool as drops of water ‘Ardente miei sospini.’ He stepped back as though afraid he might tread on them, and certainly his boots seemed far too heavy in that company.

Mary put up a warning hand to him till the tiny song floated away like a thread of gossamer on the scented air; then they uprose with a winglike flutter and rustle of silks and she seated herself gravely, very much the Queen, on a gilded chair, with the other girls behind her in a fan-shape of wide coloured skirts and young slender bodies rising from them in their tight stiff bodices like the sticks of the fan. Their Queen seemed the youngest of them. He stood looking down on her, scrutinizing her as they talked.

Indoors she was different – he would scarcely have recognised her for that radiant creature he had met in the woods. She sat in that high-backed chair and pulled a gleaming silver thread in and out of some damned church embroidery. Was it, then, a waste of
time to talk with him unless her hands were also occupied? With her head bent to her work and her eyes downcast to it she looked like a demure schoolgirl – the thing he detested most in women. He discovered at this close range that she did not attract him physically, she was too young and slight, unformed in every way, unaware of his manhood.

His taste, like most young men’s, had been formed on much more mature charms – on those, first and chief, of Janet Scott of Buccleuch, née Beton, the aunt of one of these girls – (and there she was, he’d know that impudent chin and cool stare anywhere, the living spit of Janet!). That extraordinary woman had been old enough to be his mother, but had an inexhaustible vigour and zest, whether in love or blood-feud or forbidden learning. She and the foreign Anna, left behind in Flanders, his two most permanent mistresses, would make a round dozen of this variable, unawakened creature.

‘The man’s a fool that would think either to get or hold you easily,’ he thought, and quickly added to himself, ‘or to want you.’

But in one respect she was wholly admirable; she wanted to hear all about his exploits on the Border.

‘My mother has told me—’ she began, but, too quickly for good manners, he broke in:

‘Aye, Madam, and her enemies could tell you even better. The proudest testimony I bear is their proclamation a year ago that “the Earl Bothwell and Lord Seton are the only two of all the nobility who keep company with her”.’

His flash of angry pride made her flinch; he seemed to feel no pity for her lonely mother, surrounded by her enemies, only pleasure in his prowess on her behalf.

He glanced round that audience of smooth pretty faces, eyes and mouths all ready to open in admiration like daisies in the sun. How the hell was he to make them understand the wild joy of those silent watches in the winter dusk, and then the sudden onslaught, the crash of armed horsemen meeting like the clap of a thundercloud?

He drew a deep breath. ‘Well,’ he began, ‘you’ll have heard
how the Percies all but grabbed old Huntly, so slow he was to get his bulk across the saddle, though all the corn-bins of Duns and Langton had gone up in flames to warn him?’

It did not seem to have been quite the right beginning. But he was not going to be put off by the faint lowering of the temperature.

We got the news of that English raid by beacon – not much needed, since the corn-bins looked as though a dozen towns were afire! I got two thousand horse together, dashed across country through the night, and cut off the Percies’ retreat at Swinton just as the dawn as breaking. There they were, straggling home with their spoil – herd after herd of kine and sheep – never dreaming but they’d be safe in a few hours across the Border – and all their gunpowder damp in the early rising mist – hagbuts missing fire everywhere – that’s where the superior English musketry has to give way to cold Scottish steel.’

‘Oh, but my uncle says—’ began Mary, and stopped, suddenly shy.

‘Your uncle the Cardinal, Madam?’ demanded Bothwell, as suddenly grim.

‘No, my eldest uncle, the Duc de Guise. He says the musket has supplanted the arquebus as surely as the cannon will in time supplant the musket.’

‘I was not speaking of arquebuses’ – (his impatient tone was certainly forgetful of to whom he was speaking) – ‘but of getting to grips in a hand-to-hand fight when the enemy is unprepared in a misty dawn. No time then for the taking of aim, still less for slow and uncertain loading.’ (He suddenly remembered the Duc de Guise.) ‘Not but what your uncle, Madam, is entirely right. That is a giant; he belongs to a time when men were cast in another mould.’

‘Oh, you think so in Scotland too?’ Mary had flushed with pleasure.

‘How could anyone
not
think so after his retaking of Calais, in seven days, when England had held it for more than two hundred years? In one week he reduced her to a third-rate Power.’

‘I wish you knew him.’

‘I wish so too, Madam,’ (‘especially if I fail to find further employment in Scotland,’ he added to himself). His bold eye roved round the little group; there was one girl there that had already caught his eye, Mary Fleming, larger, riper than the rest, possibly the most beautiful. Aye, she was ‘fair o’ flesh’. His gaze, rested on her as he continued: ‘It was after the success of that counter-attack that the burghers sent a petition to your Lady-mother to appoint a nobleman for the protection of Edinburgh, and put my name first on their list. So Her Grace made me Lord of Liddesdale and Keeper of Hermitage.’

‘Ah yes, Hermitage Castle!’ Mary was anxious to show her knowledge of her country, though mostly acquired at a distance. ‘That is a lonely fortress on the Border, isn’t it?’

‘Aye, Madam, it stands watchdog over the whole of Liddesdale; no light job with all the Elliots and Armstrongs there for ever spoiling for a fight! But there’s little I’d ask better than a fight with Elliots or Armstrongs – they can follow gear quicker and wind the chase with bugle and bloodhound better than any family on the Border, bar the Hepburns—’

‘The Hepburns?’

‘My own, of course, Madam.’

‘Oh, of course, sir.’

Not exactly a lowered temperature this time, but a hint of irony which Bothwell did not like – if he did not lead it. There was an unexpected dimple in that small chin. So he flicked his eyelids in something very near a wink: ‘We Border robbers are somewhat shady gentlemen, Madam; we work best in the bright dark.’

She was quick to be gracious again. ‘Then it is true of you, as they said of my uncle the Duc de Guise – “the night brought out his star”.’

But to Bothwell the night was a fact, not a metaphor.

‘Aye, Madam, the day is our night, and the night our day, and our over-word, “We shall have moonlight again.” We are no milksops brought up by the fireside. We are used to win our meat by the sword; but for all that, it is we who bear the brunt of all the attacks from England, while the inland Scots sit safe in their castles.
Yet it’s not often that royalty deigns to recognise us, unless our King comes down on us with a punitive expedition as your royal father did on my father’s friend, Johnny Armstrong, and strung him up in a withy of a cow’s tail. Yes, your father had mine imprisoned when he was but seventeen, for protecting “the robbers”. But your royal mother dealt more kindly and, I think, more wisely with him; she set a thief to catch a thief and made him Lieutenant of the Border – and she did the same by me when she took the Lieutenancy from that asthmatic bag of guts, old Huntly—’

(There was a gasp at this description of the most powerful Catholic noble in Mary’s kingdom, but he did not stay to heed it.)

‘ – and gave it to me, with the Keeping of Hermitage – aye, and with Hermitage went a subsidy of twenty-three pounds a month, very handy after all the lawsuits left by my father’s death, and the sore necessity I was in to prove my grandmother a bastard.’

The silver thread quivered over the embroidery. Mary had started a ripple of laughter that ran all round the semicircle of girls. But she could not get him to tell her why he had needed so sorely to prove his grandmother a bastard; he had become self-conscious and actually wondered whether it had been a trifle sordid of him to do so. Besides, his grandmother had been mistress to Mary’s grandfather, James IV, before she had married the second Earl of Bothwell. Their disreputable grandparents might prove a common ground between them of a not altogether convenient nature, and he hastily sheered off them to sell her that as Lieutenant of the Border he had the power to command his neighbours, and if they disobeyed, ride upon them with fire and sword and besiege and cast down any houses held against him.

There was a faint gasp of a different kind at this; the young man who stood before them, his eyes flashing as he gave instance of his power, seemed alarmingly ready to put it into execution.

‘And did you?’ asked his Queen a little faintly.

‘No, Madam, I got to work on my enemies quicker than on my neighbours. If Edinburgh had seen I was the man for them, London soon paid me her compliments, for she had to reinforce
the garrisons all along the English side against my attacks. Did your mother – did Her Grace ever tell you of the Raid of Haltwellsweir?’