After Flodden (36 page)

When at midnight the party gathered in the courtyard to raise a toast under the stars, the season’s first snow was falling. Louise and Crozier lifted their faces to the night, and felt the
cold kiss of flakes on their cheeks. They reached for each other’s hands, and stared into the flurrying sky long after the others had retreated inside.

As the night gathered pace the couple left, noticed by none. Before they had reached the staircase the pipes and singing were muffled. When the door to Crozier’s rooms was closed, the only
sound was the crackling fire.

By its ruby light, Crozier undressed his wife. As he unbuttoned her dress and raised it over her head, her hair fell out of its net, tumbling around her shoulders and down her back as if to
cover her. Soon her chemise lay on the floor, a pool of white that mirrored her skin. She stood before him smiling and shy, but not about her nakedness. She reached out her hands, and drew him to
her. His heart was beating so hard she could feel it through his shirt as if it were her own. Which, in many ways, it now was.

CHAPTER TWENTY

25 October 1513

In a boarding house on the road to Leith, Gabriel leant over his table. There was no need for secrecy, and tonight his candle burned by his hand as he wrote.

‘Dearest mother, star of my soul,

‘I am returned safe from the battle, as I promised. Soon I will join you, and I hope to bring with me a woman I am most eager for you to meet, who will be a good daughter to you, and a
fine wife for me.

‘Before then, I have business to conduct which will take me out of the capital for some days. As soon as that is seen to, I and my beloved will be at your door, to bring you back to
Edinburgh with us where at last we can live like a proper family. Pray tell Mamie to pack your winter clothes for the journey.

‘I am desperate keen to see you once more, but until then, I remain your only and most loving son.’

He sanded and sealed the paper, for the morning’s courier.

Shortly after the letter had been dispatched, Gabriel too rode out of the city. He had been there a week, awaiting the return of his horse from the innkeeper’s stable. When the stallion
arrived, it was plain he needed more rest. The courtier could not afford to hire another horse, and besides, this creature not only anticipated his every wish but could gallop as fast as the
incoming tide. The delay was galling but unavoidable and, he reasoned, if Benoit had taken refuge in the Borders with his lover, as Madame Brenier had suggested, then it was not likely he would be
going anywhere soon. Gabriel amused himself with the thought of the young Frenchman playing house with his girl, unaware that while he dallied, retribution was closing its net around him.

A north wind drove the courtier out of town and across the Lothian plains. Pressing his hat low over his eyes, he cursed the wintry air and prayed he would reach Benoit sooner than the snow.

Mile by mile, the road south passed in a canter of muck and grass. Heartily sick of this route, which he felt he could ride blindfold, the courtier vowed that once he had brought Benoit back to
the capital to face justice, he would never pass this way again. In the meantime, he must suffer long hours in the saddle, and longer nights in whatever hostelries he could find. His saddlebags
were stuffed with food and spirits, but he expected no comfort on this journey. The only certainty was that he would not be stopping at the flea-ridden Lammermuir inn. Even the thought of the place
made him want to scratch.

Over the days that followed, Gabriel was wind-blown, rain sodden, and chilled. In the few short weeks since he had set out to find Louise, the Borders had been transformed. Chestnut brown and
bonfire yellow had been replaced with sere green and grey, as if the land had been scraped clean of paint and redrawn in charcoal. The going was muddy and slow, and it took twice as long to cover
the ground as before. His impatience mounted, stoking itself like a fire beneath turf, growing hotter for lack of a vent.

As he rode, he thought of his mother. Soon she would be a respectable lady, given the honour and place she had always deserved. He tried to picture her pleasure in her new life in Edinburgh, but
his thoughts kept wheeling back, as if to show him who was master. More vivid than the road beneath his feet, the Home appeared before him, timbers buckling beneath a crooked slate roof as it
stared out across the river while Glasgow milled past its gates, unaware of who lived here, and in what condition.

When as a boy Gabriel had first knocked on the door, Mr Henderson had opened it no more than a sliver, as if afraid of fresh air. Gabriel squeezed through, and kept close to Henderson’s
slippered heels as they passed through unlit corridors, behind whose doors he heard mutterings and cries, and smelled the sickly sourness of women whose bodies were as unruly as their minds.

‘They’re not all mad when they come here, laddie,’ said the keeper, shuffling ahead, ‘though most often they end up that way. But your pretty mother, ken, she was a
lunatic frae the start, God bless her soul.’

His mother’s room was small, the window too high for her to see anything but a handkerchief of sky. She would sit sewing all day at her table, stitch after stitch on the same blessed
sheet, until it was as solid as armour. Her sister Mamie spent part of each day with her, but even as a child it had been apparent to Gabriel that his mother kept her own company, that of the
people in her head.

He was told she had not always been this way. Before she met the baron, she had been a beauty with a quick wit, whose conversation kept admirers enthralled. But when she caught the eye of the
Scottish lord, she was like a linnet that is netted and caged. After a period of cheerful trilling, she drooped, her feathers fell out, and after she had battered fruitlessly against the bars, she
lost her mind.

The baron was a married man, but in her infatuation Valerie had not cared. They met in Bristol, where he had shipping interests. His wealthy wife was in Glasgow, so far off as to be
unimaginable, and they had a fine year together, his lordship parading his mistress around the town and its parties without a thought for propriety. Valerie was the daughter of a yeoman farmer from
the west country. Years later, she would tell her wide-eyed son tales of smugglers and wreckers from her homeland, of the day the king came riding through their village in an ermine cape and threw
her a coin. ‘He knew I was special,’ she would murmur, patting her own cheek and preening before his long-gone eyes.

The idyll with her lord ended when she found herself with child. She was delighted, envisaging a happy family home. The baron was appalled. First he abandoned her, then he returned and flung
himself at her feet, pouring out his apologies into her lap. She must know he loved her, and only her, but he could not leave his wife. She could have the child, and he would provide for it, but
nobody must know it was his.

Already Valerie’s senses were weakening under the strain. If it had not been for her sister, she might have become one of Bristol’s desperate women, found wandering the quayside
taverns in search of a farthing, however hard earned. Mamie, however, was her father’s child, square of shape, and indomitable. She made a deal with the baron, and obliged him to sign his
name to it. Valerie, she promised, would never trouble him so long as he found her a house in his home city, and made her a settlement that would keep her in comfort for the rest of her days. There
would need to be enough money for three, since Mamie would also be coming north.

The baron understood at once the threat implied by her insistence on living on his doorstep. At any time she might demand more money. Yet reluctantly he agreed. The house was bought, and a
servant installed. By the time Valerie arrived in Glasgow, in hysterics after a journey that had threatened to dislodge her baby a month before its time, her sister had furnished the house, and
made a home. Had Gabriel’s mother kept her wits, theirs might not have been so bad a situation. But the ordeal of a long labour and difficult birth was too much for her enfeebled mind, and
while Mamie did her best to keep her sister in her care, it was soon clear that the young woman was mad.

The baron never visited, though his estate was only a few miles out of the city. Mamie would have preferred never again to meet the man who had destroyed her sister, but when Gabriel was old
enough to learn to read, she hired a mule, found the estate, and in the tapestried hall, which was as far as she was allowed, she importuned his lordship for school fees. Horrified at her arrival,
and fearing any minute the appearance of his wife, the baron agreed to her conditions and hustled her out of the door, muttering that any further such encounters would result in him cutting them
off entirely.

But he kept his word, and Gabriel was sent to the Glasgow Grammar School, where he mimicked the refined accents of the pupils, and then to the city’s university, where he adopted the
mannerisms of the highest-born around him. To his aunt’s distress he lost all trace of the family’s Wiltshire burr, but what he did not lose was his love of his mother’s country.
As soon as he could talk, Gabriel considered himself an Englishman, and was encouraged to do so.

Valerie and her sister spoke ceaselessly of their childhood home, its people and their habits. They liked nothing about Glasgow, or Scotland. The place was noisy, dirty, the Scots uncouth. Jamie
III, his aunt told him, was a tyrant, with fewer brains than his valet. When James IV was crowned, she denounced the boy king as a mere tool of the most vicious court on God’s earth. That the
baron sat in parliament added an edge to the sisters’ loathing. ‘Dimwits, the lot of them,’ they said, stitching as if their needles were winkling out these gentlemen’s
eyes. ‘If we’d more money, we’d be back off to Bristol,’ sighed Mamie. ‘There’s no finer or more honest country than ours, and why we ever left it I do not
know.’

Brought up by his aunt, with weekly visits to his mother, Gabriel immersed himself in the history of what he considered his true homeland. By the time he was at university, his love of the south
was a source of private pleasure. His sweet-tempered face concealed growing contempt for the rough and backward nation around him.

Such fervour might have remained nothing more dangerous than a pastime had the baron not died when and as he did. During the Michaelmas term, a letter from him arrived for Gabriel. The delivery
boy handed it over with care, for it was wrapped around a small parcel, which fell to the floor when the ribbon was untied.

The baron wrote that he was failing fast, and wanted to make amends. He enclosed a letter of recommendation for Gabriel to the Scottish court, where he would find a position, though he begged
him never to reveal his relationship with his father. It was clear the man knew nothing of his son, for whom the shame of his birth was a stain on his honour. It was a secret he would reveal to
no-one, and it was on that day that the Irish viscount began to take shape in his mind.

The parcel, the baron informed him, contained an emerald ring he had received from his own father and worn since that day. The pale band it had left on his finger would remind him hourly, until
his death, of the able son he had fathered.

When he died, the baron continued, a final consignment of money for Gabriel’s mother would be delivered, but after that he could do no more for her, or any of them. He trusted Gabriel
would soon find an honourable occupation and provide for her as she deserved. After some pious maunderings, in which the ailing man showed more concern for his immortal soul than for the welfare of
his hidden family, his lordship signed himself off, and out of this world.

Gabriel’s tutor could teach him nothing that day. The lad stared out of the window, twisting the enormous ring on his finger. He had no intention of using the baron’s letter to
further himself. He could make his way alone. The professor, assuming the boy had fallen for some wench, dismissed him with a weary flick of the hand, but the passion that consumed the young man
was far more fierce than that.

*    *    *

An arrow of early sunlight speared the bed-chamber. In the darkest corner, where Crozier’s boots stood to attention, there was a glint of light. Louise bent, and found
Gabriel’s emerald ring, kicked out of sight and long since forgotten. It sat in her hand, heavy as guilt, bringing with it unfinished business, and the promise of trouble. Rubbing the dust
from it, she took it to the window, where its gleam brightened.

Some time later, when Crozier found her with it, her face was sombre. He took the ring from her, twisting it in the light, where it flashed as if with temper.

‘The courtier’s finery,’ he said. ‘How come you have it?’

Louise sighed. ‘He gave it me for safekeeping before he went into Durham castle, in case he ran into trouble. In the panic afterwards, I forgot about it.’ She did not mention that
Gabriel had tried to use it as a token to seal their betrothal, but Crozier guessed it brought unwelcome memories. ‘I found it on the floor,’ she continued. ‘It’s probably
worth more than everything we possess. I will have to give it to him when I go to Edinburgh. He was very attached to it.’