Montrose: the quickest to seize a cause by the throat and drag it out to battle, while other men – wiser men – waited for the season to ripen and turn, as it invariably did against Montrose in the end. But always somehow the hour’s darling, a hero regardless. And now the seasons had come full circle, and it appeared after all that he had been right to stand out against them. In the places in the Netherlands where the Scots gathered together, news of Montrose’s coming was heard with silence and shifting eyes. His youthful follies now seemed like their crimes.
William, Duke of Hamilton knew all this, and knew the queasy mix of feelings in himself as he waited to receive Montrose. He chose to do so alone, standing, in the centre of a bare room, a stag at bay.
He looked back further than this last decade of troubles: these two families had been rival centres of power before the name Montrose, before the Hamiltons had been Dukes; before the Stuarts had overstretched themselves and brought English politics to Scotland. It came in the life of every Hamilton, and sometimes more than once, that he must face one of these turbulent reivers over a council table or some marshy skirmish field. This uncomfortable meeting with Montrose was itself a point of duty – of family tradition.
Hamilton’s dark pugnacious face hung fixed, dour. The receiving room had been new-scrubbed, and a blanched acrid reek of soap still sat sterile in the air.
‘Your Grace, I come for your greeting and your blessing.’ An open door and an open mouth and Montrose was off at a canter. ‘The extended hand of Hamilton would be more honour than my cause deserves.’
Hamilton watched this, lugubrious. He seemed to consider the words. Eventually he said quietly, ‘Hullo, Jamie.’ Then, with the same steady sincerity, ‘The cause of Montrose has never needed blessing from me, and I can add you no honour you do not already own.’
Montrose’s face opened further: it was true enough, but pleasant to hear. ‘You are the leader of His Majesty’s interest here, Willie, and it’s my duty as well as my pleasure.’ The smile dwindled. ‘On which account’ – for once, he waited for the words – ‘I offer you my formal condolence for your brother’s murder and my personal. . . I was so very very sorry, Willie. He was so – so very dignified, and he carried it through like a lion, and – and the meanness of their execution of him only showed how much greater a man he was than they.’
Hamilton closed his eyes a moment. ‘Thank you, Montrose. That was. . . nobly said.’
Montrose leaned in suddenly, and the smile escaped its restraints. ‘Shall we now avenge him a little?’
Hamilton smiled slow and a little sad. ‘You’re as hot-headed fighting for the King as you once were hot-headed against him.’
‘But I’ve stayed true since, Willie. And there’s many here, and some back in Edinburgh, who now find my cause and the King’s a little more congenial.’ It was said without offence, and Hamilton merely nodded very slightly. Montrose was hurrying on, the words interrupted only by a flashed smile. ‘If they’d a’ come round a little sooner, maybe, we wouldn’t be skulking and scurrying as we are.’
The words rushed around Hamilton like bees with a bear. He nodded again, accepting the point and indifferent to the style. The royal fortunes would ebb and flow – the tides were a little quicker these last years – but there would always be Hamiltons steady in the flood. And always Montroses splashing around them.
‘Edinburgh begins to remember that its natural loyalty is to the King. And maybe we shall give them a little prod of it first, eh?’
Hamilton frowned, and still the words came steady. ‘Are you sure that you’re not being a little previous, Jamie? Are you sure Edinburgh will fall in as quick as you say?’
‘The King’s advisers have their spurs in me. I go in his name, and that will carry me well enough, I fancy.’ Hamilton’s face started to darken with worry. ‘Oh, don’t waste your time warning me of the politics.’
‘There’s not—’
‘I’m sure you’ve tales of tricks and factions, and I’m sure you’re right. I know your Edinburgh men well enough, Willie; they’ll all have swapped sides again by supper time, and they’ll have their eyes on the spoons.’ Hamilton’s mouth had no time to become a smile or a word. ‘We can wait till Dumgoyne floods and there’ll be no right time. If we wait we lose.’
‘I’ve seen too many good Scots wasted.’
‘And your brother will be one more such, if we do not pick up his flag!’ The Duke flinched. The boyishness was suddenly absent in Montrose and Hamilton stepped back. ‘God’s sake, I am right done with this politics and these plodding two-faced men.’ His head made an irritated shudder, and the long hair swung wild.
But as he re-focused on Hamilton, the impishness sprouted again. ’45, wasn’t it?’ The uncertainty was affected, and the sharp smile was fixed on the gloomy face opposite. ‘I think you were a mile or so short of being able to join your friends at Kilsyth, eh, Willie? I missed the chance to defeat you with them.’
Something like life flickered in Hamilton’s face. ‘Had I been there, Jamie, you might have defeated no one.’
Shay’s departure from the rusty manor lost in the west was like so many others before it: hurried, he not wanting to open himself to the possibility of staying a moment longer and Meg trying to make it easy for him; unemotional and unceremonial. He was a stranger to most of those on the farms around: a spirit glimpsed at certain seasons, or in certain star-stricken years; a grim threat told by mothers to errant children. By the time he was striding out to his horse, on the morning of his departure, Margaret Shay was already the centre of a little whirl of local visitors seeking her help or her wisdom or her judgement. Not for the first time, Shay felt an odd discomfort – even a jealousy: for all my decades of service, am I failing in duty? Braver men caught his eye: a grunted word of respect. Women curtseyed, eyes down.
And in the middle of the bustle, a single accidental moment: Meg hurrying out of the parlour with a purse of coins, Shay turning back to some word from Gareth, a collision. The unexpectedness of the intimacy felt like novelty. He looked down into her upturned face, as it moved from surprise to appraisal. He saw again the strong tight lines of jaw and cheek and forehead, saw the grey eyes watching him, considering him. She glanced towards where her visitors were, then back. She kissed a finger, and placed it carefully on his lips. ‘Be wise as well as brave, Shay,’ she said, and patted him on the shoulder and moved past him.
He was an early harbinger of spring to Astbury, a hundred miles nearer the sunrise. The earth thawed under his boots. Politicians and armies were waking from their enforced hibernation, and he must set to work among them. Shay’s arrival foretold the strangest shoots and blooms among the devices of men.
For the moment, Astbury’s ordered, segregated gardens were so many varieties of barrenness: skeleton regiments of stakes and stalks on the dark earth. But as he rode he could see Jacob moving among the trunks and beds, and soon enough Jacob would conjure life there again.
And I, meanwhile, will conjure death again.
At Astbury, closer to the world, he found news.
Sir,
the Council are pleased with Cromwell’s work in Ireland. His campaign has had enough speed to serve their stability, and enough blood to serve their politics. His popularity among them is untouchable, and they will bid him only continue his efforts as promptly and quickly as possible, for money and soldiers are scarce. Although the Parliament failed to persuade Cromwell to leave Ireland and turn his eyes to Scotland immediately, it is thought that he considers his work in the former nearly done and that it will not be long before he moves on to the latter.
Admiral Blake is commissioned to sail against His Highness the Prince Rupert, thought to be in Portugal. Anthony Ascham is made Ambassador of the so-called Commonwealth of England to the Court of Madrid, an important thrust of the new attempts at diplomatic respectability by this administration. Charles Vane is likewise made Ambassador to Lisbon.
S. V.
[SS
C/S/50/6]
And I too must plan my spring campaign. The tug of home, and the secluded peace of Astbury garden, made it seem rather wearisome.
The house touched him with unease, too. The book was lost to him, and he could only hope that it was destroyed. Its destruction was a little disaster for the history of England and her Kings, but still better than its discovery. Even George Astbury would not have been so mad as to have the thing with him on Preston field, or to leave it to be ransacked in Hamilton’s train. He had lived here more than anywhere, and there was nowhere else he could safely have kept it. He had left no key to it. It was not to be found. In which case, destruction and loss was much the best hope.
Anthony Ascham is made Ambassador to Madrid. Shay tried to remember if he’d ever met the man. So many anonymous silly courtiers. He should have been more diligent. George Astbury would have been more diligent.
Regardless, Ascham would serve.
Miles Teach in the skirmish, eyes narrow and all-seeing, body poised in the crouch for defence or attack or flight.
What forgotten town is it today? What country even? Just a bridge, a tower, and an enemy.
The enemy was filling the bridge now, surrounding the tower, with the stupid jostling of men whose blood is up and who have run out of uses for their energy. The tower would fall soon, and Teach had got well out of it an hour past.
Now he was in the trees, a shadow among the trunks, and the English soldiers were closer and beginning to fringe around the edges. Time to pull back further; no good prospects for a fox in a spinney.
Who is trying to kill me today?
But now another fugitive had bolted into the trees, desperate and stumbling in the undergrowth, and Teach’s whole face swore. Immediately shouts and pursuit, a stray musket shot hustling through the leaves, and soldiers feeling their way into the green gloom in twos and threes.
The English knew they’d won; their voices and movements had the confident cruelty of those who no longer fear resistance. Teach was slipping backwards among the trees as fast as he could manage with discretion and the occasional glance around him.
My God, what have I not deserved from all this chaos?
Then shouts nearer, another stray shot thumping into a trunk, and suddenly two soldiers exploded out of the bracken at him from different directions. One sword, one musket; musket hesitant and skittering to a halt in the undergrowth, sword livelier and hungrier and dancing towards him. Musket starting to swing up level – what idiot tries to use a musket in a forest? – and Teach swerved towards the bewildered soldier with sword swinging, dashed the musket barrel down with a backward sweep of his blade from his left arm and swung his other shoulder into the man’s face; down he went, flailing and stunned, and Teach had already turned towards the other, and swung his pistol up in his right hand, held low, held for the impossible breath that was the difference between a professional’s life and a levy’s hasty waste, and fired at the swordsman’s upper body, now open in the swing, from all of three feet away.
The ball caught the man somewhere in chest or shoulder, and Teach knew it for mortal even as he turned again to the musketeer. The man was pulling himself up out of the undergrowth, angry for the fight, but he was thinking too much, much too much, wondering how the certain victory of two men against one had turned so, wondering whether he should reach for his musket, just there among the leaves like another fallen branch, and Teach had switched hands and sent him staggering back with one wild sweep of his sword and then driven the blade hard and sure into his chest. He kicked the body off the blade and swung round again. The other man was dying, sure enough, but dying noisily. Teach scrambled over and finished him, hand over mouth and knife into heart. Then up on his haunches with knife and sword and looking all around. Now he had the silence he needed. Another glance full around, the narrow eyes searching the trees for threat. Then he checked the ground, checked that he had all his weapons, and drifted quickly away into the darker heart of the wood.
These are the lives of Miles Teach.
TO THE LORD PRESIDENT OF THE COUNCIL OF STATE,
Sir, by horse couriers from the north of Scotland we learn of rumours and reports, diverse enough to be credited, that the Marquess of Montrose is landed in the Orknie Islands and bound for the mainland, here to take up his proclaimed Lieutenancy and raise an army in the Royal interest.
Edinburgh,
March.
‘I confess that I perceive the Orkney Islands much as I do Turkey, or the moon.’ Oliver St John, a walrus of decadence slumped in an ornate chair.
Thomas Scot, hovering: ‘They are wild and primitive peoples in those islands. He may do much mischief among them, with their tribalisms and superstitions.’
‘He may make himself a private kingdom for all I care.’
Cromwell, eyes lost in the Highland landscape of northern Scotland, visualizing a man’s rain-blasted journey by goat track and cattle drove, the God-questioning wildernesses of forest and mountain: ‘He might have made the mainland by the time these words were written. By the time we read them today, he might already be at work among the Catholic peasants of the far north.’
‘As yet the Church in Scotland is against him.’ Scot, feeling his way through the sentence cautiously.
But Cromwell wasn’t listening. Hurriedly and briefly back from Ireland, his mind was between kingdoms. A slab of a hand rose and the fingers rummaged in his forehead. ‘I fear we must soon turn again to Scotland.’
Sir,
from the fishermen of the far north it is heard that a man of great note has arrived in the Orkney Islands with many soldiers, joining a force already there; the host is reputed vast, and the effect on food prices prodigious. We may safely take this to be Montrose, joining the advance force he sent thither in the autumn to secure the place as base. The reports of the size of his force are inflated by mere peasant wonder and the benefit for sellers of fish; by other indications such as number of boats etc we know that his force remains slight, but a few hundred paid men of the German states and a horde of untrained men of the islands. Meanwhile, the clansmen of Ross and Munro, who might have been likely volunteers, are held comfortable for the rival interest, and it seems that this quarter of the Kingdom will be something of a wilderness to Montrose.
U. J.
[SS C/S/50/28]
‘The world looks like a puzzle to you today, Uncle Shay.’ She’d been sitting silently near him, as had become her habit in the mornings when he was in the house and eating or reading. It had started as a provocation, and he had been duly provoked, but now they both found a kind of satisfaction in it.
He was semi-resident at the house now. Sometimes he used a tavern in the district, not too far off on the Ashbourne road, for affairs that he did not wish to link to Astbury. Rachel knew the place, and grasped something of his motives.
Shay was still trying to decide whether he liked the ‘Uncle’ business. ‘The world is a battlefield to me, always.’ I’m not Uncle enough to ignore the pleasure of a pretty young woman nearby.
The fresh face darkened. ‘That’s a terrible way to go through life.’
He was half in a paper. ‘And yet I have found that it serves.’ He looked up. ‘And I think that somewhere you agree with me. Marauding militia men. Gentlemen being stolen and ransomed. And a regime exacting taxes merely for old loyalties. This is not a world that you find comfortable, surely.’
‘But there must be hope.’ Her own voice sounded dead to her.
‘Yes, there must.’ He set the paper down on his lap, and looked at her with an old bear’s discomfort. ‘You – you and people like you – are the hope, Rachel. You are the inheritors of a world that I care about – a world that I inherited – and you will carry it forward, beyond these present upsets. This is the battlefield where I find myself. First I must survive. Then I must win.’
She ran her eyes from the heavy boots crossed on the flagstones, up the legs and the trunk to his iron head. ‘And you have done – yo
u would do. . . evil things, to win?’
He shifted on the hard chair, pulled himself straighter in it. ‘Evil things will always happen. I had rather they were in my control, and not some other man’s. I had rather they served a purpose that I care about, and not a purpose that I oppose.’
She affected lightness in her voice, to mask embarrassment. ‘I had thought there might be a chance for. . . for morality.’
‘And so there will be, for you.’
She smiled slowly. ‘But not for you. Too much of a luxury for Uncle Shay the warrior.’
His face opened, and he looked at her with more of a smile. ‘Too much of a limitation, Rachel.’
She looked down at her hands, folded on her thighs. ‘They say you have led a. . . a very bad life.’
‘They don’t know the half of it.’ His face hardened again. ‘My life has been in the service of other lives, Rachel. In the service of a world in which I’ll never be comfortable. Allow me at least to enjoy it.’
Rachel closed her eyes, and let her head back against the window. ‘Enjoyment,’ she said. ‘I would like that. It seems like. . . like some silly game of childhood, now put aside.’
‘Very well,’ Shay said, and slumped further down in the chair again. ‘We shall fight for enjoyment.’
He read distracted, and she watched him.
Eventually she said, quietly, ‘Uncle George vexes you for some reason.’
He looked up, considering whether to accept the engagement on this terrain. A great breath, and then: ‘Surface-wise, I admit I always thought George a fool. Too concerned to be the gentleman. Too concerned to be the courtier. Some of his habits with. . .’ – he waved the paper – ‘with the King’s business were like. . . schoolboy games.’ She looked sad, and Shay wondered if George Astbury had caught up his niece in some of his enthusiasms. ‘He did not leave these affairs as he should. But he was not a stupid man. No, he was an intelligent, thoughtful man. And that’s why I wish I understood what preoccupied him at the end.’
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