The Galliard (4 page)

The thin lad, cheerful, disreputably shabby, with a nose as pert as a sparrow’s beak, and a sallow, pock-marked but not ill-looking
face, swung round at the question with a squawk of laughter which he instantly checked at sight of the stranger.

Incredible! Did the foreign lord not know Charles de Guise, the great Cardinal de Lorraine, ‘the Red Phalaris’, the ‘Tiger of France’?

The soubriquets shrilled higher and higher off his tongue in a crescendo of national pride. The Galliard took his measure at a glance, balancing the wiry strength of the fellow against his high voice – a lively rascal, nervous, but all the quicker for that, should be useful in a tight corner. Master Cock-up-Spotty (so he named the talkative youth) was telling him that the Cardinal and his eldest brother, the great soldier, Duc de Guise, were known as the Pope and King of France; and ‘the Pope’, that suave, scholarly courtier, had been the fiercer of the two in quelling the Huguenot rising this summer – ‘such a rage he flew into, he tore the biretta from his head and trampled it underfoot!’

My lord was unimpressed. ‘The more fool he,’ he remarked in easy French, but with a strong Scottish accent, ‘hadn’t he his brother’s hat within reach?’

But if a man must wear the long robes of a woman, it was something that his blood should burn like a man’s inside them. He liked also that the Tiger minded the hatred and gossip ‘no more than the barking of a dog; he collects all the lampoons against him and keeps them with his rare pictures – and some of
them
ought to be rarer, they say!’

It gave the Scot a twinge of patriotic jealousy that ‘the Cardinal’s Niece’ seemed here a prouder title than Queen of Scotland in her own right, and even of France by marriage; ‘La Petite Sauvage’ they were actually calling her, though with a chuckling admiration. ‘Ah, she’s bred from barbaric stock on her father’s side!’; so Cock-up-Spotty told him with a grin that split his face and was instantly wiped off as the Scots lord stiffened, for this was not the way for a French gutter rat to talk of the Stewart Kings. But his Border blood answered with a throb of amused sympathy when he heard that the Little Savage’s wild blood was not to be tamed even by her severe mother-in-law. Catherine de Medici’s own children were
terrified of her, but nothing could make La Reinette afraid, she only tossed her proud little head, despised the Medici for her lack of breeding, and even said in one of her naughty fits that she was only the merchant’s daughter of Florence.

‘Damned careless of her,’ grunted the Scot. La Reinette’s mother had fondly told him of the Medici’s glowing praises of her daughter-in-law; ‘this bewitching child,’ she had written, ‘has only to smile to turn all heads.’ With any sense, she’d have smiled at her mother-in-law most of all; but he could not help liking the spirit of the lass, for he had no love for people who remembered to smile in the right direction – as he must now do himself!

And at that the Galliard shrugged and grinned mockingly at the Parisian youth’s instant compliment on the shrug, that Monsieur had the air of a true Frenchman, a Gascon
par exemple
. It was inconceivable that Monsieur should not know Paris as well as himself, but if by any chance he required the services of a guide through the streets, he, Hubert, would be enchanted to render them.

‘Hubert of what?’ It might be useful to know of this fellow some time.

‘Hubert of Paris,’ replied Cock-up-Spotty with a superb air, and was rewarded with a short laugh like the crack of a pistol.

‘Of all Paris, are you? Get out of my way, fellow. I don’t need a guide to the Tuileries,
nor
your introduction to the Queen Dowager!’

And thus unashamedly answering boast with boast, the splendid stranger pushed past the street loafer into the mean inn where he was lodging; pulled up his soft leather boots and roared to his page to fetch a brush for them, picked up a pair of gloves embroidered in seed pearls by his latest mistress, and swaggered off to the interview he had been promised with Catherine de Medici, Queen Dowager of France.

He had to save on his lodging, but his clothes were fine enough to bear comparison even with her courtiers, or had been, though perhaps they were getting a bit worn-looking. But his bearing carried that off; his hat was cocked triumphantly on the side of the
dominant head; his doublet was rather shabby, but that did not prevent his swinging his short scarlet-lined cloak far back in gay insouciance as to what it might reveal; and his gloves, the only new and perfect garment, he flicked against his knee in rhythm to the tune he was whistling, as though he were urging his horse to the gallop instead of strolling through the streets of Paris.

His stride showed the born horseman, the long, lean-flanked, slightly bowed legs and the easy swing of the long arms from the broad shoulders. His reddish-brown eyes were the colour of bog-streams on a sunny day, alert and quick-glancing, as they had had to be from childhood against sudden danger; but now alight only for the women, scanning each that passed in cool, arrogant appraisement of her points, as he had just now scanned those of a young Queen.

And would he need then to be afraid of an old one? Not he! Here he was again in Paris, which he had not seen since he had finished his education as a boy; he had gone far since then; he would go farther, and Queens, young or old, would be the pawns to help him on his way. His father had tried to work that line, and bungled it, but his father had been a bit of a fool and more than a bit of a traitor; he himself knew better. He had shown he could not only win a Queen’s trust, but deserve it.

For that reason he could now be tolerably sure of a good reception from Queen Catherine. The Medici’s only possible game at present lay in subservience to those great brothers of Guise who ruled all France between them. And it was their sister, Mary of Guise, Queen Dowager and Regent of Scotland, dead these two months past, who had proved this young man to be the most audacious and loyal of her servants. She had given him the highest office in the land, to guard against England, and this two years ago when he was still only twenty-three. And early this summer, when Mary of Guise lay sick to death and besieged in her castle of Edinburgh, she had sent him to Denmark to enlist the services of the Danish Fleet, the most important at that moment in Europe, against her enemies of England and those of her subjects who were in league with them against her.

Her new Lieutenant of the Border had carried out her mission with as much success as a diplomat as he had shown as a soldier; he had drunk deep with King Frederick of Denmark, undeterred by the three-litre capacity of that monarch’s wine-glass, and discussed with him the breeding of horses and bloodhounds; the King and his brother had been so taken with him that they had gone out of their way to escort the young Scottish Envoy across the sea from Copenhagen to Jutland on his way to Germany.

It was on that journey that he heard of his Queen Regent’s death in Scotland; heard too that both Scotland and France were now signing a treaty with England. There was therefore no further use in his mission, and he travelled direct to France to lay his sword at the service now of the daughter, Mary Stewart.

Of all this, Catherine de Medici, Queen Dowager of France, showed due recognition when James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, Hereditary Lord High Admiral of Scotland and Lord Lieutenant of the Border, was presented to her that evening. She was walking in the midst of a little group of courtiers and ladies and her favourite dwarfs in her gardens of the Tuileries. The sun had not yet set, but slanted behind the late blossoming rose trees and monstrous forms of giant toads and diminutive dragons of green majolica; they threw their squat shadows on the path where that tall stout lady in black walked up and down between two hunchbacks not three feet high.

As she walked, a fretted gold ball containing a pomander, suspended from her girdle, bounced up and down against her stomach – her sporran, the Scot instantly dubbed it in his ribald mind. Her cold and glassy eyes, brown, blank and opaque as chestnuts, took with shrewd accuracy the measure of this tough weather-beaten young adventurer, the swaggering self-confidence of his splendid chest and shoulders and sturdy horseman’s stance, as she turned to him with a dirty jest about his amorous career.

It brought back to him with a flash of amusement the gossip he had so lately heard: ‘banker’s daughter’, ‘shopkeeper’s daughter’? – what was the epithet given by the girl who should wear three crowns to the lady whose family emblem was three gold balls? Whichever

it was, it fitted this stout Florentine dame as snugly as her own tight black brocade as she cushioned her beautiful hands in the yielding flesh of her hips in the determined gesture of commercial
bonhomie
, and asked him if it were Scotland, France or Denmark that had most contributed to his reputation as Don Juan. And she followed this compliment with a loud, purposefully jolly laugh.

He’d no love for shrinking modesty in woman, God knows, but there was something in the coarse-grained fibre of that hearty matron and mother of ten that struck him as more unnatural than even the chastity of a nun. Of this he was not really aware, but thought her repellent because her chin fell away like a rat’s beneath the sensual lips. But he found himself no whit at a loss in answering her badinage; they exchanged one or two low stories of an ancient pattern, and the Scot was certain that his was the less hoary.

The heavily robed figure pushed its way on through the humming sweet-scented air of the rose-walks, out on to the open squares of chequered marble, her erect head and wide skirts making a wedge-shaped block of shadow, narrow at the top, wider and wider at the base, cleaving its way so purposefully through the late evening sunlight.

Yet she had no fixed purpose; she changed her mind a dozen times a day even in quite small matters; she valued common sense above all things, and was fond of saying that the end justified the means; but she had no end, no aim, except first to win the love of her husband, and second to get power for herself. The first aim had died with the death of her husband a year ago; the second – well, that remained to be seen.

She was a clever woman, she knew how to be all things to all men, she studied medicine, mathematics and astrology because she liked them, but Greek and Latin because they were the fashion. She had encouraged the Reformed religion because it was the fashion, said rude things about the Pope, who was ‘no more than a man’, and had liked to sing the Huguenot Marot’s psalms with the late King Henri II, her husband, perhaps because his mistress Diane de Poictiers had been a staunch Catholic. But, like everyone else, she had to obey the Guises; and though the tastes and interests of the
Cardinal de Lorraine all leaned towards these new experimental ideas (he had even attended their prayer meetings for a bet), his policy was firmly Catholic.

Queen Catherine took trouble to explain this to the young Protestant from Scotland; she even, as though she were one of his warmest admirers, quoted the Cardinal’s very words on the subject, warning them that the true danger of these new doctrines was that they struck ultimately at the root of all government. And for proof of that, the Lord Lieutenant could furnish only too many instances, since nearly all the other nobles of his faith had banded themselves together as the Lords of the Congregation, in league with England against their Regent.

‘But you, my Lord Bothwell, almost alone, have contrived to reconcile your advanced ideas in religion with a loyalty that is alas now old-fashioned.’

‘Madam, my ideas are no more advanced than my boyhood’s lessons, where I learned them – such as they are,’ he added deprecatingly as he shot back in his mind, trying to remember when he had last attended any service. ‘We of the Border ride light, we don’t take more religion than we can carry with comfort’ but no, that was not too safe even with this old pagan. He was on surer ground as he went on: ‘But loyalty is my true creed, as it is the motto of my house – “Keep Trust”. I cannot see why men should not worship as they choose and let others do so.’

It was a bold remark to make to the lady who had signified her approval of the executions at Amboise this summer by watching them from the Castle balcony; and so she hinted, with a glance at him from her blank eyes as they rolled round in her fat, flat face.

But he answered the challenge as coolly as he had provoked it. ‘Those executions were for rebellion, not for religion. If the Huguenots plan to murder the rulers of the kingdom and kidnap King François your son, what can they expect but to lose their heads?’

She winced very slightly at his reference to the Guises as the rulers of her son’s kingdom, but agreed enthusiastically: ‘No one can call me a bigot. I have brought up my own children in the
doctrine of the Huguenots, and have always said that anyone of intelligence must think much as they do. But one must be practical. It is results that count. “By your fruits ye shall know them,” as Saint Paul said, I believe, and if he did, it is magnanimous in me to quote an apostle who paid scant regard to my sex.’

‘Madam, you are right. In Scotland, at any rate, religion is being used by rebels chiefly as a decoy duck.’ (‘And much Saint Paul would care for being quoted by you, you ugly old bitch!’ he added to himself.)

Yes, it was good to walk out from that interview, to take a deep breath, remember that he was going to sup with a couple of men, and look round him in free solitude on the familiar town which now looked fantastically beautiful in the September dusk. A single star hung over the piercing loveliness of the spire of the Sainte Chapelle; Notre Dame lay like a couched lion in the dark mass of little buildings round it; the river flowed broad and pale and gleaming under the quiet sky. After this hot day its smell was as exotic as its beauty. ‘Edinburgh is as strong but not so rich,’ the Scot decided. In the capital of his native land the predominant smell was of stale salt fish; here, of rotting garlic.

But it was for the cool pungent smell of bog moss, of heather and bracken after rain, of dew on the tough hairgrass in these misty September dawns, that his finely cut nostrils were longing. All this summer, and longer, he had been away; what had happened since then at home? What raids had been ridden in spite of the treaty? What mischief had his rascals been getting into?