The Galliard (3 page)

‘And they’ve left Captain Forbes and fifty hagbut men in charge until they carry out their orders,’ John Somerville finished on a dour and heavy note.

‘Where are the Bastard and Arran?’

‘Gone back to Edinburgh, sir, and none too soon for them. D’Oysel took the opportunity you gave him by their absence to lead a sortie from Leith against the rebels and drive them back to Edinburgh. They put up hardly any fight.’

‘Why, where were the rest of their leaders?’

‘In church, listening to a “comfortable sermon” by Mr John Knox.’

‘He’ll need to make it a deal more comfortable after that repulse,’ his lord remarked, ‘the more when he knows they’ve no money to pay their troops.’

‘He knows it – “deadly news”, he called it.’

‘Well he may. Their men are beginning to desert already; if it goes on they’ll never be able to hold Edinburgh.’

‘Your Lordship won’t give up the subsidy to them, then?’

‘Don’t be a fool, Somerville!’

The Captain, a gaunt man with a bleak nose and grizzled grey hair, looked at his master in some perplexity. This young man was as tough a customer as many of the robbers that he was privileged to hang, yet he had no second thoughts about flinging his property to the flames, since he could thereby preserve the spoils he had won for the Queen Regent instead of letting them fall into the hands of her enemies. ‘Ah well, it’s a great thing to be only twenty-four,’ the Captain finally summed it up to himself.

Aloud he said, despondently pulling his long nose, ‘It’s little luck Your Lordship has got out of the bag.’

‘Has Bess handed on that nickname, then?’

‘Bess? I have not the full list of Your Lordship’s wenches.’

Somerville sounded mortally offended, but relented enough to add, ‘It’s your own men are calling you “Luck i’ the Bag”.’

His Lordship for all answer flung himself out of his chair and was marching up and down the room, running his fingers through his rough black hair, tugging at it, his hot reddish coloured eyes bright with anger.

‘Curse the Bastard!’ he burst out. ‘As to that sickly wheyfaced mooncalf Arran, if he dares set a finger on any of my goods I’ll send him a challenge to mortal combat.’

‘He’ll not accept it,’ said the older man dryly, but his master looked so black at this that he tried to cheer him by telling him that d’Oysel had written of his raid to the French Ambassador at the English Court, and told him to tax Queen Elizabeth with her double dealing in subsidizing the Scots rebels.

‘She’ll deny it of course, she’ll deny anything, and her Envoy is trying to make the Lords of the Congregation deny it too –
much they care if her face is blackened, when they never mind the grime on their own!’

The Earl of Arran, son of the Duke of Hamilton and Châtelherault, and the heir to the Scottish throne most favoured by the rebels and their English party (there was considerable talk of marrying him to the young Queen Elizabeth), was put in charge of the punitive expedition on Crichton, with three hundred horsemen to carry off all that could be carried, and to destroy the rest. Only the walls and the work of the French stonecutters would outlast the flames.

John Somerville, grimmer and gaunter than ever, came back again with news of it; and he and his master went up on the tower of Borthwick Castle where they could see the dun clouds of smoke rising in huge columns, flame-reddened at the lower edges, and spreading on the wind for miles round.

‘They’ve taken all the furniture except the big beds,’ said Somerville with the sour relish of one who knows and tells the worst; ‘and those they’re burning with the rest. The oak coffers and treasure-chests are halfway to Edinburgh by now.’

‘And the charter-chest?’

‘Aye, sir.’

‘I wonder they didn’t use the title-deeds and family papers to light the fire!’

‘They didn’t do that’ – Somerville never perceived irony – ‘but the rare glass that the Fair Earl brought from Venice has all been smashed by the troopers. It’s well he didn’t live to see it, for he set great store by those toys.’

The present Earl, who was anything but fair, knitted his black brows together, seeing again those opalescent goblets, light as bubbles, and fantastic ships and dragons, that his father had packed and brought home from Italy with such infinite care, and which he himself as a boy had never been allowed to touch.

‘What odds?’ he broke out roughly. ‘My father lost more in his time than a little glass too brittle to use. And it’s like enough I’ll lose more than a houseful of gear. I’m not an inland Scot to sit snug at home and never smell the smoke of my own barns.’ He suddenly
burst into a roar of laughter, and told his astonished Captain, ‘It’s your face, man, squinting down your long nose at that smoke! What are you looking so glum for? Am I to yelp like any old wife for her cow or the three coverlids off her bed? The Black Douglas was right, “It’s better to hear the lark sing than the mouse cheep.”’

Those odd reddish eyes were gleaming with an excitement strange to Somerville. Yet the Captain had borne the loss of his own house and goods more than once; it was the common lot of those who lived on the Border.

‘Aye,’ he said, ‘but I had thought to see the end of that in my time. The last King worked hard enough to make the furze bush keep the cow, but it’s little use to hang the robbers and reivers, if rebellion is fostered by the highest in the land. It used to be cattle raids, but now it’s civil war.’

And he let a groan out of him (‘like a sick bullock,’ the Galliard remarked in exasperation); he was past fifty, and tired, and his wife was expecting her tenth, and what was the use of bringing more and more children into a world that never seemed to get any nearer to a breathing space of peace – no, not for all its new laws and new religions and new books of the gospels to make every man feel he was as wise as the priest – aye, and discoveries of new countries filled with gold, and new weapons to make war more deadly and therefore more certain. But people were just as poor, property as insecure, life as difficult and unsafe. ‘The world changes damned little,’ he mumbled in conclusion to his thoughts.

His master was not listening to the monotonous growl of his Captain’s voice. He was leaning on the parapet of the tower, looking out over the wide rolling hills, and those clouds and wreaths of smoke that darkened the horizon of this bright autumn sunshine. His blood still tingled with that strange exultation – let them take his goods, burn his house, batter it to the ground if they care to waste so much powder on it – what odds did that make to him? He’d have the less to worry over!

In this moment of loss and defiance he was at one with the host of his fellow-countrymen on the Border, known only by their nicknames in the songs that were sung and never written down,
such names as the Galliard and Luck i’ the Bag, more his own than any of the hereditary titles in his charter-chest, since they had been won by himself. He was the Queen’s Lord Lieutenant on the Border, the highest office to be held by a Scottish subject, with absolute power to send letters in the name of his Sovereign to command his neighbours on pain of death; yet he was part of that remarkable commonwealth of the Border, hardly to be distinguished from his men in battledress, and now, like them, made to realize that his castle, like their cottages, was a thing to be left quickly and without care.

A fat horse and a fair woman,

Twa bonny dogs to kill a deer —

that was as much property as a man could wish, if he would ride light in the saddle, and only so could he ride light of heart.

Nothing of this came out in words, even to himself, only a sudden whoop of rage against Arran that rang out on a note of fierce joy. ‘By the faith of my body, I’ll get my pleasure yet of yon straw-coloured tatter-boggart – I’ll pull his house about his long asses’ ears and himself inside it! Let Arran slug it in bed while I take to the heather – I’ll wake him yet to defend his life – aye, and I’ll light my candle at the flames of his house to lead me in the darkness better than moon or star.’

‘Your Lordship cannot,’ came the dry reminder, ‘for he has my Lord James Bastard’s armies behind him, and you have only your own men.’

‘You are right as usual, damn you!’

And he rattled down the winding stone stair of the tower to write instead his challenge to single combat ‘armed as you please, on horse or foot, unto the death’.

But there too John Somerville was right. Arran sent back a dignified reproof that it was the ‘deed of a thief to beset a gentleman’s road and rob him of his goods’, and promised to uphold it by force of arms ‘the next time I come that way’.  But he wrote this from as far away as Stirling, where he was well guarded,
and seemed in no hurry to come out of it by any way.

The bag of gold safely reached the Queen Regent, and the effect was what its captor had hoped: the rebel troops besieging Leith, short of both pay and food, deserted in ever larger numbers; the next attack of the Regent’s troops broke their ranks; and within one week of that ‘dark and dolorous night’, as their preacher, Mr John Knox, always referred to that night of All Hallows’ E’en, the army of the bastard Lord James Stewart had to retreat from Edinburgh to Stirling.

They made the move at midnight in a disorder that was all but a rout, the rabble of Edinburgh, risen from their beds to run after them, throwing stones, flouting and hooting at them. ‘The sword of dolour passed through our hearts,’ as Mr Knox lamented, even while he contrived to lay the blame of it on his allies, telling his noble leaders, the Lord James and the Duke of Châtelherault, that they were nothing but ‘a bragging multitude’. It was not a comfortable sermon.

Yet he too had his moment of exultation in loss, when he told them in that same sermon that ‘whatsoever shall become of us and of our mortal carcasses, I doubt not but that this cause, in despite of Satan, shall prevail’.

But for the moment Satan, the generic term for all who opposed Mr Knox, prevailed; the siege of Leith was raised, and the Queen Regent able to march out of it and back into Edinburgh. She owned to the luck the bag had brought her, and told her Lord Lieutenant to name his reward.

He asked for eighteen hundred men to lead against the rebels at Stirling, with leave to pause a few hours on the way to burn and loot a castle of Arran’s.

This happened in 1559, just over a year after Queen Elizabeth had come to the English throne, half a year before the Queen Regent of Scotland died, and while her daughter Mary, Queen of Scots in her own right, was away in France, married to the little French King, François II.

Part I

FIRST MEETING

Chapter One

He first saw her walking down a street in Paris, swift and shining in the sunlight as though made of Venetian glass. Her tall childish figure so glittered with jewels that it seemed translucent to the hot rays of the evening sun behind her; a halo of pale gold shimmered from the loose threads of hair round her bare head, fine as spun glass. She wore a tiny mask of black velvet which did not conceal the fair skin and broad forehead, nor yet the direct untroubled eyes.

Beside her walked the scarlet figure of a young-looking man, fair and slender like herself and very tall; so lithe, soldierly and arrogant in bearing that it gave a slight shock to the traveller, watching from the doorway of his inn, to perceive that those gorgeous robes were those of a Prince of the Church, and that it was a Cardinal who was swinging down the street like a young Captain of the Guard.

‘Who is she?’ he demanded, though he had known even before he saw her, from the cries of the people who came running down the street, out of the narrow doorways, thronging round her, throwing up their caps, shouting ‘La Reinette! La Reinette!’

So this was their ‘little Queen’, and his; Queen of France for the last fifteen months; Queen of Scotland for the whole of her short life; Queen of England to all who admitted the bastardy of Queen Elizabeth. He had known her too from the sight of her, for she had some likeness to her mother, whom he had been proud to account his friend.

That gallant Frenchwoman, Mary of Guise, Regent of Scotland, he had seen for the last time this summer, stricken down with the illness that was to be her death, yet still with the splendid physique, broad shoulders and erect carriage to balance her unusual height, which had led stout Henry of England to offer her marriage, ‘since he was so big himself, he needed a big wife’.

‘But my neck is small!’ she had answered.

Would this girl ever fill out to the same sturdy quality? He doubted it. At this first glimpse, for all she had the height of her mother’s family, there was more trace in her of her Scottish father, that delicate racehorse of a king, with fine golden hair and a smile for any lass, but tragic eyes. He too used to walk boldly through the streets among the common people and talk familiarly with them, just as his pretty daughter, whom he had never seen, was now doing, attended only by her uncle of Guise, the Cardinal de Lorraine.

She was wanting to stop and talk to the people who pressed about them; she held out a hand to a ragged woman who had dropped on her knees crying out that she was an angel from heaven. The Cardinal flung a coin to the woman and scattered a few more among the crowd, whereupon a thin cheeky lad, going one better, shouted, ‘It’s either Jesus Christ or the Cardinal!’

Her uncle hurried her on, perhaps because the sweating, chattering crowd was none too pleasant in this dusty heat. She swung easily into step with his stride; she walked like a boy and as though swift movement were a delight to her.

‘A nimble filly,’ thought the young man in the doorway of his tavern, ‘though still a long-legged foal. If she be anything but a virgin yet, I know nothing of women.’

But the Galliard knew women nearly as well as he knew horses. And he knew Mary Stewart, and a good deal about her, as soon as he set his bold eyes on her. But ‘Who are they?’ he asked again, for it amused him to play the ignoramus abroad, one got a deal more information that way.