The Galliard (71 page)

‘I have heard nothing of this matter, nor do I wish to hear,’ said James severely.

‘But Mr Secretary Lethington may be more interested.’

‘Lethington?’ exclaimed James. ‘But he is now on the side of the Queen.’

‘The Chameleon,’ replied the scholar, ponderously playful, ‘changes colour to suit his surroundings. So does the Secretary bird. The combination that the Lords are forming against Bothwell is now strong enough for Lethington to join it. Just before I sailed he left the Court, and without taking his leave. And,’ he continued, warming to his theme as he gulped down another glass of Bordeaux, ‘I showed him the note from the Queen among my Lord Bothwell’s papers. It is curt and businesslike, but it could be used almost as it stands. It is dated only “this Saturday”, and is unaddressed, but was evidently written at Craigmillar shortly before the Christening. Put the word “Glasgow” at the top, and it will suggest that it is written during her visit to the King there, just before he went to Kirk o’ Field, and that she was luring him to his doom.’

He balanced a top-heavy lump of butter on his crust of delicious French bread and crammed it into his mouth. James avoided looking at that gobbling turkey-cock and his pleasure in this atrocious suggestion.

His cold and indeterminate mind had long used religion as a tool. Now the weapon turned against him; for an instant he wondered what it should profit him if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul.

But there was no room for the old simple standards of Christianity in modern statecraft. Not for him the luxury of the private virtues, gratitude, pity, personal honour. He must make the great abnegation and devote, not only his life but his virtue to the public good.

In pained resignation to the Divine Will he said, ‘My sister was once the creature on earth dearest to me.’ (Yes, his eyes had once filled with tears for her. Never had they done that for anyone else.) ‘If she would renounce this godless marriage, I would find it in my heart to love her as much as ever I did. But if she do not, she must pay the price of her guilt, for she
must
be guilty. She
is
guilty. Prove it then. I do not wish to know how. But as for this filthy trash, this “Detection of Mary Stewart”,’ – and he spat out the title like a foul taste, his scorn for his vile tools making some amends to him for his use of them – ‘it may pass muster in England or the Continent, but I advise you to suppress it in Scotland, where no one now living can believe a word of it.’

The indignant author flung out a black-sleeved arm in a gesture as portentous as that of Mr Knox. ‘I,’ he prophesied, ‘write for posterity.’

Chapter Thirty-Two

‘The dance has begun!’ said Bothwell, and she laughed with him in sheer light-heartedness. This was no dancing floor. They stood on the battlements of Borthwick Castle and saw the dark masses of horsemen on the horizon advancing against them.

‘We’re in luck,’ she cried. ‘An hour or two later, the Castle would have been surrounded, and you cut off from me.’

‘I’d have got through to you somehow. There must be at least a thousand altogether over there.’

She strained her eyes into the distance, but good as they were they could not equal his hawk gaze, trained from childhood in Border warfare. Like a hawk he looked on this eyrie of Borthwick tower, his head held high, his eyes fierce and cool as they watched the oncoming of his enemies. A sick spasm beset her at the thought of how nearly he might have fallen into their hands, but she quickly fought it down.

He had brought her here after just a month at Edinburgh, on the day that Lethington’s desertion had given the first quiet signal that it was no longer safe for the Queen to stay at Holyrood Palace. Bothwell had already summoned all ‘lords, landed men and substantial yeomen’ to muster at Melrose on the 15th of June with arms and a fortnight’s provisions, on the usual pretext of disciplinary measures on the Border. But things were moving too fast to wait for the muster. So he placed the Queen in this massive stronghold, under the guardianship of the loyal Lord Borthwick and his men, and the addition of his own artillery and a hundred
and fifty of his two hundred hagbutters.

With the remaining fifty he himself left the Castle quietly at night, the first time that he had left her since he had carried her off to Dunbar, and rode to Melrose to collect any early comers that might have come in, in response to the summons for next week. But no one had yet done so; all he could do in the time was to leave his fifty hagbutters and their Captain there to hurry things up as best they might, and ride back with only one or two men to Borthwick.

No sooner had he sat down to eat and drink and tell Mary his adventures than one of his outposts came galloping up with news of an army of cavalry advancing on them from the north. Down went their knives, and up they sprang from the table to scamper up the stone stairs to the top of the tower. They gazed out over the wide rolling sweep of country, all sparkling and waving with the feathery shoots of the young bracken in the mid-day sunshine, and saw those dark clouds moving over the northern skyline towards them, and laughed, for the dance had begun, and they were in luck, since they were together.

Once before, Bothwell had stood on this tower, and given a roar of laughter to see his house and barns of Crichton go up in smoke; and now he flung his arm round Mary. ‘Here’s a prettier piece of Venetian glass than any that Arran’s troopers smashed!’ he cried as he kissed her.

They ran downstairs, clatter clatter as they went round and round, faster and faster, the two of them whirling together down that dark spiral stair. Whisht! Here they were at the bottom, she the Queen again, and he the Commander, calling in a stern purposeful voice for Lord Borthwick, and marching off with him to see to the defences of the Castle.

Within the hour a party of troopers came galloping up hell for leather and battered on the gates, shouting that the rebels were after them.

‘We are loyal. Let us in or we are all dead men,’ they called, but Bothwell insisted on having a leisurely look at them first.

‘Just what I thought – young Kerr of Cessford’s among them.
That’s the gay lad who helped murder his kinsman, the old Abbot of Kelso, for knowing too much about the Bastard. Well, the Hepburns have always known too much about the Crabbed Kerrs!’

Mary thought his suspicions very harsh, but they were soon proved right. As the main body of horsemen came up under the Earl of Morton, whose huge bulk and orange-coloured whiskers were plainly to be seen in their midst, the Kerrs drew back and joined them, showing that their cry for succour had been nothing but a ruse to enter the Castle.

That having failed, there was nothing for their army to do but fire their muskets in futile attack against those enormous stones; then, coming nearer, they yelled insults at the Duke of Orkney and his Queen. Mary slipped away and appeared on the tower to answer them and appeal to her subjects’ loyalty – to Bothwell’s fury when he found how she had exposed herself to their fire. He himself was even more reckless, for so enraged was he by their taunts, daring him to come out and support his challenge to single combat, that his men had to hold him back from rushing out to pull Morton’s whiskers.

Midsummer madness had fallen on both of them, old Lord Borthwick declared when they at last sat down to eat a ravenous supper after their interrupted dinner. He was a bad-tempered old man, mortally sick of a disreputable disease. Now as he watched these two young things in their hour of danger and desperate venture joking together so light-heartedly, he felt that if his whole life were given to him again, he would gladly throw it all away for one hour of such happiness as now danced like a flame between them.

‘Midsummer madness,’ he growled with some reason later that night when James Hepburn made one of his lightning decisions. The Castle could stand a siege indefinitely, but what use would that be to the Queen? He must get out to raise an army for her, and lead it in the field.

How the devil did he hope to cut his way out through what had now proved to be over twelve hundred men? And Lord Borthwick started counting up the numbers he could take from the garrison, but Bothwell cut him short.

‘One is all I’ll take, if that. But who was that great gaunt hag I saw with a bundle in the courtyard?’

‘Muckle Meg the laundress!’

‘She’ll do. I’ll go out in her hooded cloak, now while it’s raining and pit-murk. I’ve done it before.’

Yes, he’d done it before in Sandybed’s kitchen, turning the spit in Big Bess’s clothes; he’d watched from Borthwick tower before; he had lived through all this before and was living it over again now – but now there was Mary beside him, and for the first time he knew what it was to feel another’s agony as his own.

It had been bad enough for her to see him leave the shelter of the Castle with only fifty men, but that was safety itself compared with this mad escapade, going blindly out into the night alone among all those wolves who had howled for his blood. She touched his chamois-leather sleeve, it felt like a nice horse, much smoother than his hand, and that she dared not touch, not with this new piercing knowledge that the least joint of his little finger was more precious to her than her whole body.

‘Let me be the one you’ll take. I can disguise myself too – I’ve done it.’

He could not let her take so hideous a risk; she must stay in the practically impregnable safety of the Castle till he came with reinforcements to rescue her. She turned away, fighting back the tears and words that might even now bind him here to her: she must again be brave on his account, not only on her own. And she laughed as he swung the old woman’s cloak round him, stooped in admirable disguise of his height, and hobbled out into the darkness.

One of his men went too, at a little distance, and was caught. But Bothwell, though within a stone’s throw of him, got through safely to Haddington. From their prisoner the besiegers learned that the Duke of Orkney was no longer at Borthwick. His absence put them in an awkward position; if they stayed, they could no longer pretend that they were acting only against him and not against the Queen.

So the next morning those inside the Castle saw their enemies
raise the siege and march off. Mary at once sent word to Bothwell that they had gone, and she would join him that very night, at a little distance from the Castle, in case of any spies on the lookout for his return there.

But she reckoned without her host. Lord Borthwick swore explosively that she had been put in his charge and should not leave it on any such prank. His ‘duty to his Sovereign’? God’s blood, his duty was to his friend, not to a skittering lass who’d got a man to look after her at last, but too late, it seemed, to learn how to obey him. ‘A pretty time I’d have of it from that mad young fellow of yours if any harm came to you! You’ll stay in your room, Madam, under lock and key if there’s another word on the matter!’

And his thunderous roar was followed by a succession of oaths. Mary assured him smilingly of her complete submission, ran upstairs at top speed, shut the door behind her, flung out her arms and cried, ‘Quick, my girls! Get a suit of young Willie Crookston’s clothes from him. He’s about my size. And tell him not to breathe a word of it.’

That night, when most in the Castle were asleep, there stole out of her room a gallant young page with a big hat jammed down over a face alight with mischief, accompanied by a couple of quaking girls, also in their stockinged feet, and with bundles of sheets in their arms. Noiselessly they felt their way down the turret stair and into the great banqueting hall. This was as far as they could descend without danger of meeting any of the servants or the guards below. The window was twenty-eight feet from the ground, but Mary was not to be daunted by that – Bothwell had jumped out of a first-floor window into a lion-pit for her, and she was quite prepared to do as much by him. They knotted the sheets together and one end of them to an enormous table-leg; then she climbed out of the window down this improvised rope, waved a hand to the two girls above who were drawing up the sheets, slipped through the low postern gate through which Bothwell had escaped, and was soon outside the walls in open country.

Now she had to find the rendezvous she had appointed, the Devil’s Pool, farther down Borthwick Water, about a mile from
the Castle; she had thought she could not miss it, she had only to follow the water. But to do so at night, through seeping bogs and tangled thickets, stumbling and scrambling and sinking up to her knees, was harder than she had foreseen, though luckily it was a perfect June night, the long-drawn-out Northern twilight never deepening into real darkness. The twisted trees crouched against it like the black forms of waiting foes; at any point they might turn into them, spring out, and capture her.

Yet she scarcely felt fear, so lovely was the night, so certain was she of finding her lover in it, blown towards him on the shifting summer breeze as naturally and inevitably as the pollen dust of trees to find its mate. Only when at last she saw something stir among them, her heart gave a leap of panic terror. What if it should not be himself?

But it was.

He leaped from his saddle, seized her, hugged her, shook her, swore at her. ‘How
dared
you do it? I’d have stopped it if there’d been time – there wasn’t. Yet I’ve been waiting here for ever!’

It was the first time she had ever seen him shaken, and she scolded him for it as soon as she could get her breath in his grip – ‘an old campaigner like you to lose your nerve with a bit of night-watching, and here am I on my first trial as a moss-trooper! – would I make a good one for your troop?’

‘It’s what I thought the first moment I clapped eyes on you: you ought to have been a boy.’

‘So my father said, and cursed me for not being one: “The Devil take it!” he said.
Has
the Devil taken me?’ And she clung to him laughing as he swung her up into his arms, then mounted her in the saddle (a man’s) of a close-cropped cob that he had led with him. He himself was on the Night Hawk.