The Galliard (9 page)

So it was with her life here, bright, sheltered, social, with people always telling her pleasant things in polite voices, paying her compliments on her beauty, her grace, her learning, and above all, her manners; but all round it, behind it, and perhaps some day in front of it again, there lay, far in the bleak North, the far-off land of Scotland that she had left long ago.

There in the ‘bright dark’ (those two words of the Borderer would remain with her always) stood a bare hillside and a dark loch and a gaunt castle like a thundercloud, carved out against the scudding clouds and the light like silver behind them. For years she had been homesick for the sight, as she had been for her mother, whom she had left behind in Scotland at six years old. Would she ever see it again?

‘We shall have moonlight again,’ she heard his voice answer her with a promise. Yes, those words would remain with her too. She did not care how unpleasant he had been, he did not matter enough for that, but she was glad she had met him, for he had brought back Scotland to her, here in this small painted room with the marble salamander of François I prancing delicately over the fireplace, and her Maries gossiping behind her; he had brought back something to which she belonged more passionately than the fair, flat fields of France.

Chapter Four

Bothwell was not ill pleased with himself as he walked away from the palace; he had told a good tale and held their attention – that was a fine girl, that Fleming girl, good hips. He had rammed it well home to the Queen that he was a useful fellow, good at need, but one to be reckoned with too, if she did not treat him according to his deserts.

He swung through the gates into the dusty square of the great courtyard outside, to the inn where he was lodging, and there saw a slight, shabby, perky figure lounging back against the doorpost, and recognised him instantly.

‘Halloa!’ he called. ‘Has all Paris come to Fontainebleau?’

The youth sprang to attention and bowed profoundly. ‘My lord, this letter reached your lodging in Paris; it would never have reached you here if I had not brought it.’

Bothwell took the letter, flicked it over, looked sourly at the seal and superscription. Now he would have to pay this fellow handsomely, and heaven knew how he was to do it!

The lad must have guessed his thought, for he was hurrying on: ‘I ask no payment, only a reward.’

‘And why should I reward you for bringing me a letter I don’t want from a whore I’ve left behind?’ he muttered inaudibly. Paris looked at him like a puzzled dog that has performed a trick which failed to please its master.

‘Well, what are you asking?’ demanded Bothwell.

‘To enter my lord’s service.’

The answer came with a harsh laugh: ‘What pickings do you hope from that? I’ve not money enough for the fellows now with me – none for any more.’

And he twisted the letter this way and that as he thought how he had had to let Anna Throndsen give his men their long arrears of pay in Flanders when he had run clean out of cash, and how proud she had been of doing it, and how she would probably remind him of it again in this letter that he would have to read as soon as he had settled with this fellow. He began to feel in his pouch for a coin, but Paris threw out a hand.

‘My lord need not trouble. When my lord has been lucky at play he can give me something, and in the meantime I can scratch along for myself if there are not too many questions asked. I would be of use to you, sir.’

‘How? There’s not much of you.’

‘I am quick with my hands for all that. And with my wits. I can read and write – yes, and in English too. I was one of the ragged scholars at the Sorbonne when I thought to be a priest.’

‘But why do you want to enter my service?’

‘I have a great desire to see the world,’ said the lad, throwing out his chest.

‘And a great notion that you’ll make your way in it,’ said Bothwell, with a laugh that sounded less harsh. It struck him that this boy had much the same notions as himself. Anyway, to take him on would save a crown-piece at the moment or, wait a bit, there was that slack dog Maltby, untrustworthy too, he’d already told him he’d get rid of him as soon as he’d found another to fill his shoes.

‘If you can find clothes to do me credit I’ll not ask where you got them, and you can serve me,’ he told him, and went to his room to read his letter.

God, how long it was! The French not near as easy as he could write it, and the sentences all tied up because she wanted to be learned. What was all this high-falutin’ stuff about a bracelet she was making him with a pattern of skull and bones and pearls for tears, which he was always to wear, but which nobody must see?
Difficult to manage, that. If she’d stick to gloves, that would be a deal more useful.

And here was another of those ‘sonnets’ of hers, full of the usual complaints that she had left her home for him and was crawling at his feet – and apparently imagining he should like her the better for it! He’d liked her better when holding her head when she was sick from a debauch together – she’d had good reason to complain then, of his leading her on to drink more than she could hold; but she hadn’t done so, for all her shame at it she had helped him laugh it off, and had been grateful for his self-reproachful tenderness. He had been nearer real fondness for her then than at any time since they had left Denmark – but this stuff about living only to make herself good enough for him, these ‘pearls for tears’, etc., made him more sick than his drink had made her. He would tear it up as soon as he had answered, for answer he must, there was some matter here about her being with child, and he must read it more carefully.

He sat down, frowning, at the table, spread the letter before him, drew pen, ink and paper towards him, and sat chewing the end of his quill till the damp feather tickled his palate, and finding his throat uncomfortably dry he shouted for wine. It was brought him swiftly, silently, and it was only as the bearer whisked out of the room again that Bothwell noticed it was the new lad, ‘Paris’.

He was not writing, though he could write, as easily in French as in English, in a fluent, even elegant hand founded on the Italian script, owing to the education he had had at the Paris University. It was an unusual accomplishment among the Scots nobles, who wrote mostly in a vile old-fashioned crabbed script, if at all.

His mistress, Janet Scott of Buccleuch, had been the only person in his own country to share his educated tastes after he had come of age; she had enjoyed with him his French translations of the classics, his ‘One Hundred and Twenty Stories of Battle’, even his books on arithmetic and geometry, a taste so unusual that it saddled them both with the charge
of necromancy. ‘Charms’ certainly she had taught him, for the young ruffian of the Border whose instinct was to take forcibly any woman he had a fancy to, as he would carry off cattle on a raid, had learned great cunning as a lover from his experienced mistress. That had stood him in good stead (or maybe in evil) when provocation, opportunity, and his own furious blood, impatient of any delay, had led him to take Anna by storm; and his practised ability to give pleasure had won her consent soon enough – and all too permanently.

There was nothing of the coy schoolgirl in Anna – a fine showy young woman, the second of seven daughters, all wanting husbands and the solid cash to buy them, for all their brave show of jewels and parents’ promises! Why had he been such a fool as to promise marriage to her? True, it was with her money that he had been able to come to the French Court now. But that was only common sense, since this adventure was his best chance to repair his fortunes – by which Anna herself would profit.

And if it came to fair dealing, then by God she owed him every penny of it, for he had been lured into that very same promise of marriage by her family’s promise of a dowry of 40,000 silver dollars. It had come at a moment when his fortune seemed desperate, for he had just heard of the Queen Regent’s death, on top of all he had lost in her service. But devil a dowry had he got or would get out of Anna he had found – so why should she get her part of the bargain?

If it came to that, he had been ‘hand-fasted’ to Janet Scott of Buccleuch before he had ever met Anna, though that had been only for appearances’ sake and they had both of them chuckled together over it, especially on that absurd occasion when Janet had been summoned in a law-case before him as sheriff of his county, and the plaintiff complained of a case in which the judge bore so intimate a connection with the defendant!

A promise of marriage didn’t count for much when marriage itself went for so little these days that there was the proclaimed bastard Elizabeth reigning as the legitimate Sovereign of England. And the marriage of Bothwell’s parents had been dissolved
without any prejudice to his own legitimacy – dissolved because, so Patrick the Fair Earl had boasted again and again in his cups, the Queen Regent of Scotland had won his doubtful loyalty by promising him marriage ‘even to the fixing of the date’.

It was only four years since his death, four years since he had sat at table complaining in his weak querulous voice of the fair French Queen who had played him false, and of all the wrong that she and hers had done him.

At the other end of the table the saturnine face of his son had watched with a certain sardonic pity that flushed consumptive beauty of the Fair Earl as he sat stooping over his table, fingering the Venetian bubbles of blown glass of which he was so proud, counting up the great expenses of his vain courtship of the Queen Regent, all the fine clothes and jewels he had bought in order to brave it before her at Court in rivalry with the Earl of Lennox, another aspirant to her hand – ‘all for her, and all to no end!’

But the expense that he did not mention, and his son silently counted, was that for her he had divorced his faithful wife, the mother of his children. James Hepburn well remembered his mother going, sent disgracefully, needlessly away, and her anguished tenderness over leaving his small sister and himself, a savage, scowling, bewildered boy of nine.

Where parents and sovereigns set such an example, what wonder if sons and subjects followed?

So he argued with himself, thinking of Janet Scott’s worn but vivid face laughing in the county court; of his mother crying and the queer shock it had given him to see her face crumple up, all red and ugly; of Anna kissing his hands in passionate subjection – things so different and happening at such different times, and yet all a part of his own life. And he bit his pen and drank his wine, and knew that he must now give ease and comfort to the girl who had been so eager to leave her home and family for him. If he went back to Scotland he would take her with him, and the child should be brought up as one of the family. That decided, he pulled the paper towards him, wrote quickly and shortly, sealed it, stood up and squared his shoulders, finished
his wine at a draught and gave a long ‘A-ah!’, then picked up her letter and poem to tear them across.

But he did not tear them. His vanity reminded him that this was the second learned as well as beautiful lady who had loved him; he thought of her flashing dark eyes, unusual in a Scandinavian, which had led her to fancy herself in a Spanish dress her father had brought home from one of his voyages; she had worn it whenever possible (and sometimes when Bothwell had thought it impossible, but this he did not think of now) – a damned fine woman, who had helped him in Flanders and loved him enough to throw away everything for him.

So he opened a silver casket in which he kept his papers, threw letter and poem into it and locked it again, and went down the rickety little dark stairs, whistling, and out on to the square, and there sat at his ease on the rough wooden bench and looked across at the great wrought-iron gates that François I had set up in front of the drawbridge to the royal palace.

As his eye followed the fantastic convolutions of their pattern, black against the golden evening light, he found himself thinking, for the first time since he had left her this afternoon, of the young Queen who had just given him audience; but not as he had seen her then, scarcely distinguishing her among the other girls, but in his first view of her, walking with her uncle the Cardinal, the two so much alike in height and bearing and that transparent mother-o’-pearl fairness.

An odd pang of jealousy, of a kind quite new to him, shot through him at the mental vision of those two creatures of a beauty bred to the highest point of race, of a culture far beyond his small, prized collection of books and his understanding of modern warfare and his learned mistress’s long-winded verses which he kept for trophies though they bored him. Anna Throndsen the Norwegian admiral’s daughter seemed at this moment unbearably crude and provincial, a woman of no importance.

And he whistled happily the refrain of that song of ‘the good poor man’s King’ that had shuttled from mouth to mouth of
soldier, sailor, tinker, tailor, until even the English sailors had got wind of it and made their own version of it:

‘So I’ll go no more a-roving

With you, fair maid!’

for that was what they would go on saying through all the ages to the maids they left behind them, left rather as no maids.

Chapter Five

He saw her again, surrounded by her uncle the Cardinal de Lorraine and her other uncle the Cardinal de Guise, a jolly red-faced young man distinguished from his elder brother by the soubriquet of the Bottle Cardinal, and by still younger and jollier uncles, Claude Duc d’Aumale and that famous sailor the Grand Prior, and the soldier Marquis d’Elboeuf – in fact, by the whole galaxy of the six superb uncles, and at head of them that great and gay and generous Commander-in-Chief of the army, the Duc de Guise himself. These ‘heirs of Charlemagne and Saint Louis’, with eight royal quarterings in their coat of arms, were the tallest, handsomest, most powerful men in France, too arrogant even to count themselves as of France, but as half-foreign potentates; and the chief aim of these ‘Princes without a fatherland’, whose father had been buried with more royal magnificence than many French Kings, was to found a reigning dynasty. They built their hopes of it on this slight docile child; they domineered over her and her even younger husband, the impotent little King of France, and were watched furtively, patiently, by the blank inexpressive eyes of his mother, Catherine.