A Column of Fire (63 page)

They went outside.

It was just a few steps from the tower door to the compound gate, but it seemed more. The courtyard was full of people watching the game. Alison spotted Drysdale, hitting the ball with his two hands clamped together, concentrating hard.

Then Willie was at the gate.

He put the iron key into the big lock and turned it. Alison kept her back to the crowd, hiding her face, but that meant she could not tell whether anyone was looking at them. It took an effort of will to resist the temptation to look back over her shoulder. The massive timber gate creaked noisily as Willie pushed it open: did anyone hear that sound over the cheering? The three fugitives stepped through. No one came after them. Willie closed the gate behind them.

‘Lock it,’ said Alison. ‘It may slow them down.’

Willie locked the gate, then dropped the key into the barrel of the cannon that stood beside the entrance.

No one had seen them.

They ran down to the beach.

Willie took hold of the one undamaged boat and pushed it into the shallows, then held it with its keel just touching the shore. Alison clambered in, then turned to help Mary. The queen stepped into the boat and sat down. Willie pushed it off from the beach, jumped in, and started to row.

Alison looked back. There was no sign that they had been missed: no one on the ramparts, no one leaning out of the castle windows, no one running down to the beach.

Was it possible that they had escaped?

The sun had not yet set, and a long summer evening stretched ahead. The breeze, though stiff, was warm. Willie pulled strongly at the oars. He had long arms and legs, and he was motivated by love. All the same, their progress across the wide lake seemed agonizingly slow. Alison kept looking back, but there was no pursuit yet. Even if they realized the queen had gone, what could they do? They would have to mend one of the remaining boats before they could give chase.

She began to believe they were free.

As they approached the mainland, Alison saw the figure of a man she did not recognize, waiting on the shore. ‘Hell,’ she said. ‘Who’s that?’ She was possessed by a terrible fear that they had come this far only to be trapped again.

Willie looked over his shoulder. ‘That’s Alistair Hoey. He’s with George.’

Alison’s heartbeat slowed again.

They reached the shore and jumped out of the boat. Alistair led them along a path between houses. Alison heard horses stamping and snorting impatiently. The escapers emerged onto the main road through the village – and there was Pretty Geordie, smiling in triumph, surrounded by armed men. Horses were saddled ready for the fugitives. George helped Mary onto her mount, and Willie had the joy of holding Alison’s foot while she swung herself up.

Then they all rode out of the village to freedom.

*

E
XACTLY TWO WEEKS
later, Alison was convinced that Mary was about to make the greatest mistake of her life.

Mary and Alison were at Dundrennan Abbey, on the south coast of Scotland, across the Solway Firth from England. Dundrennan had been the grandest monastery in Scotland. The monasteries had been secularized, but there was still a magnificent Gothic church and an extensive range of comfortable quarters. Mary and Alison sat alone in what had been the abbot’s luxurious suite of rooms, grimly contemplating their future.

Everything had gone wrong for Queen Mary – again.

Mary’s army had met the forces of her brother, James Stuart, at a village called Langside, near Glasgow. Mary had ridden with her men, and had been so brave that they had had to restrain her from leading the charge, but she had been defeated, and now she was on the run again. She had ridden south, across bleak windswept moorland, burning bridges behind her to slow pursuit. One miserable evening Alison had cut off all Mary’s lovely auburn hair, to make her less easily recognizable, and now she was wearing a dull brown wig. It seemed to complete her wretchedness.

She wanted to go to England, and Alison was trying to talk her out of it.

‘You still have thousands of supporters,’ Alison said brightly. ‘Most Scots people are Catholic. Only upstarts and merchants are Protestant.’

‘An exaggeration, but with some truth,’ Mary said.

‘You can regroup, assemble a bigger army, try again.’

Mary shook her head. ‘I had the larger army at Langside. It seems I cannot win the civil war without outside help.’

‘Then let us go back to France. You have lands there, and money.’

‘In France I am an ex-queen. I feel too young for that role.’

Mary was an ex-queen everywhere, Alison thought, but she did not say it. ‘Your French relations are the most powerful family in the country. They might assemble an army to back you, if you ask them personally.’

‘If I go to France now, I will never return to Scotland. I know it.’

‘So you’re determined . . .’

‘I will go to England.’

They had had this discussion several times, and each time Mary came to the same conclusion.

She went on: ‘Elizabeth may be a Protestant, but she believes that a monarch who has been anointed with holy oils – as I was when I was nine months old – rules by divine right. She cannot validate a usurper such as my brother James – she is in too much danger of being usurped herself.’

Alison was not sure how precarious Elizabeth’s position was. She had been queen for ten years without serious opposition. But perhaps all monarchs felt vulnerable.

Mary went on: ‘Elizabeth must help me regain my throne.’

‘No one else thinks that.’

It was true. All the noblemen who had fought at Langside and had accompanied Mary on her flight south were opposed to her plan.

But she would make up her own mind, as always. ‘I’m right,’ she said. ‘And they’re wrong.’

Mary had always been wilful, Alison thought, but this was almost suicidal.

Mary stood up. ‘It’s time to go.’

They went outside. George and Willie were waiting in front of the church, with a farewell party of noblemen and a small group of servants who would accompany the queen. They mounted horses and followed a grassy track alongside a stream that ran, gurgling and chuckling, through the abbey grounds towards the sea. The path went through spring-green woodland sprinkled with wild flowers, then the vegetation changed to tough gorse bushes splashed with deep-golden-yellow blossoms. Spring blooms signalled hope, but Alison had none.

They reached a wide pebble beach where the stream emptied into the sea.

A fishing boat waited at a crude wooden jetty.

On the jetty, Mary stopped, turned, and spoke directly to Alison in a low voice. ‘You don’t have to come,’ she said.

It was true. Alison could have walked away. Mary’s enemies would have left her alone, seeing no danger: they would think a mere lady-in-waiting could not organize a counter-revolution, and they would be right. Alison had an amiable uncle in Stirling who would take her in. She might marry again: she was certainly young enough.

But the prospect of freedom without Mary seemed the most dismal of all possible outcomes. She had spent her life serving Mary. Even during the long empty weeks and months at Loch Leven she had wanted nothing else. She was imprisoned, not by stone walls, but by her love.

‘Well?’ said Mary. ‘Will you come?’

‘Of course I will,’ Alison said.

They got into the boat.

‘We could still go to France,’ Alison said desperately.

Mary smiled. ‘There is one factor you overlook,’ she said. ‘The Pope and all the monarchs of Europe believe that Elizabeth is an illegitimate child. Therefore she was never entitled to the throne of England.’ She paused, looking across the twenty miles of water to the far side of the estuary. Following her gaze Alison saw, dimmed by haze, the low green hills of England. ‘And if Elizabeth is not queen of England,’ said Mary, ‘then I am.’

*

‘S
COTTISH
M
ARY HAS
arrived in Carlisle,’ said Ned Willard to Queen Elizabeth, in the presence chamber at White Hall palace.

The queen expected Ned to know such things, and he made it his job to have answers ready. That was why she had made him Sir Ned.

‘She’s moved into the castle there,’ Ned went on, ‘and the deputy governor of Carlisle has written to you asking what he should do with her.’

Carlisle was in the far north-west corner of England, and close to the Scottish border, which was why there was a fortress there.

Elizabeth paced the room, her magnificent silk gown rustling with her impatient steps. ‘What the devil shall I tell him?’

Elizabeth was thirty-four. For ten years she had ruled England with a firm hand. She had a confident grasp of European politics, navigating those treacherous tides and undercurrents with Sir William Cecil as her pilot. But she did not know what to do about Mary. The queen of the Scots was a problem with no satisfactory solution.

‘I can’t have Scottish Mary running around England, stirring up discontent among the Catholics,’ Elizabeth said with frustration. ‘They would start saying she is the rightful queen, and we’d have a rebellion to deal with before you could say transubstantiation.’

Cecil, the lawyer, said: ‘You don’t have to let her stay. She is a foreign monarch on English soil without your permission, which is at least a discourtesy and could even be interpreted as an invasion.’

‘People would call me heartless,’ Elizabeth said. ‘Throwing her to the Scottish wolves.’ Ned knew that Elizabeth could be heartless when it suited her. However, she was always sensitive to what the English people would think of her actions.

Ned said: ‘What Mary wants is for you to send an English army to Scotland to help her regain her rightful throne.’

‘I haven’t got the money,’ Elizabeth said quickly. She hated war and she hated spending money. Neither Ned nor Cecil was surprised at her instant rejection of this possibility.

Cecil said: ‘Failing your assistance, she may ask her French relatives to help her. And we don’t want a French army in Scotland.’

‘God forbid.’

‘Amen,’ said Cecil. ‘And let’s not forget that when she was married to Francis they called themselves king and queen of France, Scotland, England and Ireland. She even had it on her tableware. Mary’s French family have ambitions without limit, in my opinion.’

‘She’s a thorn in my foot,’ Elizabeth said. ‘God’s body, what am I to do?’

Ned recalled his encounter with Mary seven years ago at St Dizier. She was striking-looking, taller than Ned and beautiful in an ethereal way. He had thought she was brave but impulsive, and he had imagined she might make decisions that were bold but unwise. Coming to England was almost certainly a wrong move for her. He also remembered her companion, Alison McKay, a woman of about his own age, dark-haired and blue-eyed, not as beautiful as Mary but probably wiser. And there had been an arrogant young courtier with them called Pierre Aumande de Guise: Ned had disliked him instantly.

Cecil and Ned already knew what decision Elizabeth must make. But they knew her too well to try to tell her what to do. So they had taken her through the available choices, letting her rule out the bad ones herself. Now Cecil assumed a casual tone of voice as he put to her the option he wanted her to decide on. ‘You could just incarcerate her.’

‘Here in England?’

‘Yes. Let her stay, but keep her prisoner. It has certain advantages.’ Cecil and Ned had made this list together, but Cecil spoke as if the advantages had only just occurred to him. ‘You would always know where she is. She would not be free to foment a rebellion. And it would weaken the Scots Catholics if their figurehead were captive in a foreign country.’

‘But she would be here, and the English Catholics would know it.’

‘That is a drawback,’ Cecil said. ‘But perhaps we could take steps to prevent her communicating with malcontents. Or with anyone else, come to that.’

In practice, Ned suspected, it might be difficult to keep a prisoner totally incommunicado. But Elizabeth’s mind went in a different direction. ‘I would be quite justified in locking her up,’ she mused. ‘She has called herself queen of England. What would Felipe do to a man who said he was the rightful king of Spain?’

‘Execute him, of course,’ said Cecil promptly.

‘In fact,’ Elizabeth said, talking herself into doing what she wanted to do, ‘it would be merciful of me merely to imprison Mary.’

‘I think that’s how it would be seen,’ Cecil said.

‘I think that’s the solution,’ she said. ‘Thank you, Cecil. What would I do without you?’

‘Your majesty is kind.’

The queen turned to Ned. ‘You’d better go to Carlisle and make sure it’s done properly,’ she said.

‘Very good, your majesty,’ said Ned. ‘What shall I say is the reason for detaining Mary? We don’t want people to say her imprisonment is unlawful.’

‘Good point,’ said Elizabeth. ‘I don’t know.’

‘As to that,’ said Cecil, ‘I have a suggestion.’

*

C
ARLISLE WAS A
formidable fortress with a long defensive wall pierced only by a narrow gateway. The castle was made of pinkish-red local sandstone, the same as the cathedral that stood opposite. Within the wall was a square tower with cannons on its roof. The guns were all pointed towards Scotland.

Alison and Mary were housed in a smaller tower in a corner of the compound. It was just as stark as Loch Leven, and cold even in June. Alison wished they had horses, so that they could go for rides, something Mary had always loved and had missed badly at Loch Leven. But they had to content themselves with walking, escorted always by a troop of English soldiers.

Mary decided not to press her complaints to Elizabeth. All that mattered was that the queen of England should help her regain her Scottish throne.

Today they expected the long-awaited emissary from Elizabeth’s court. He had arrived late last night and retired immediately.

Alison had managed to get messages to Mary’s friends in Scotland and as a result some clothes and wigs had arrived, though her jewellery – much of it given to her by King Francis II when she was queen of France – was still in the Protestant grasp of her half-brother. However, she had been able to make herself look royal this morning. After breakfast they sat in the mean little room they inhabited at the castle, waiting to hear their fate.