The two young earls looked at each other, and then wee Patrick spoke for them both. “You are correct, Mam. We did not understand; but tell us; please. Where does our duty lie if not with our country?”
“It lies first wi yer family, Glenkirk,” she told him. “Ye must both grow to manhood and produce sons that our family may continue. That is yer duty, my Patrick! I will nae always be here, and so ye must learn from me now if ye are to survive. We are fortunate in our isolation, for neither the English, nor the powers of Scotland will trouble themselves wi us.”
She was, of course, correct. Scotland was now seriously divided both politically and religiously. Only the French could help, and the price for that help was high. The little queen of the Scots was to be sent to France to be raised. She would eventually marry the Dauphin. In exchange the French sent a battle-trained army to Scotland who defeated the next English invasion. The English suffered further in France as well. By treaty, Boulogne was returned to France, and the English were forced to retire completely from Scotland.
With peace, normalcy returned to Glenkirk and Sithean. The young men of the family went off first to Aberdeen, and then to France to complete their educations. Their sisters, at home, prepared themselves for the business of marriage, learning not only how to run the homes to which they would one day go; but how to please their husbands in the marriage bed. A match was made for Glenkirk with Margaret Stewart, a granddaughter of James IV, whose father had been one of that king’s many bastard sons. It was a good match linking the royal house with the Leslies of Glenkirk, for the royal Stewarts never denied their bastard offspring and were a close family.
Despite her life as a respectable Scots matron. Janet’s ties to her old life remained through her correspondence with Esther Kira. The old palace where she had once lived in Istanbul had caught fire, and been badly damaged. Khurrem, Esther wrote, had taken immediate charge and moved the harem into the Yeni Serai. There were no plans to rebuild the Eski Serai at the moment. Janet’s granddaughter, Mihribahn, had been wed to a brilliant young man, Rustem Pasha, who was appointed Suleiman’s grand vizier. Here at least was one lesson remembered by her son, Janet smiled to herself.
The years seemed to fly now, and her grandchildren and Adam’s began to marry. Mary of Glenkirk to Patrick, the earl of Sithean, in June of 1551; Patrick, the earl of Glenkirk, and Lady Margaret Stewart after Michaelmas in that same year. Heather would soon wed with young Jamie Hay, and Grayhaven would once again have a family within its walls.
In the spring of 1553 Aaron Kira arrived at Glenkirk with news from Esther that he would have rather not brought. For it was so terrible that Esther had not dared to write directly to her beloved friend.
“My son?” Janet demanded, realizing his visit portended something of a more serious nature.
“The sultan is well, madame, but the news I bring, the great Esther would entrust only to me,” master Kira said, and immediately launched into his tale. “In the autumn of last year, madame Valideh, the sultan and his eldest son, Prince Mustafa, were on campaign in Asia. Relations between the two have not been good for some time. Khurrem Kadin forever exerts her influence in favor of her eldest son. So when Prince Mustafa was called into his father’s presence, his friends begged that he not go. There had been rumors, but the prince would not heed them, He replied that as the sultan had given him life, it was fitting that he take that life back.”
Janet made a small sound of distress, and Lord Hay put an arm about his wife.
“The plain truth is,” Aaron Kira continued, “that Prince Mustafa could not believe that his father would really kill him. They disagreed as old and young have ever been wont to disagree, but the prince loved his father, and thought that his father loved him. He had done no wrong. Indeed, he was a most beloved prince. However, he had misjudged his father, madame. Prince Mustafa entered the sultan’s tent to find the executioners awaiting him.
“They say the struggle was fierce, but that in the end, that brave and noble young man was bowstringed. In Brusa, his home, Prince Mustafa’s young son, his daughters and his women were already dead on the orders of Khurrem Kadin, who completely controls the sultan now. Your son grows old, madame, and Khurrem Kadin, afraid of losing her prestige and wealth should he have predeceased her and Prince Mustafa reigned, grew desperate. The Laughing One grows old too, and is well hated. She is a wicked woman who would dare anything now that her eldest son will inherit. There are many who fear for the sultan. They fear an assassination of Suleiman that would permit Khurrem Kadin to rule through her own wretched offspring.”
For a time the room was wreathed in deep silence, and then Janet, shaking off her husband’s arm, said, “I want Khurrem dead! Do not tell me how well guarded she is, Aaron Kira. Well guarded, perhaps, but well liked? Nay! Use poison. Esther will know which one. I would have it a slow-acting poison that will give her pain. I want her aware that she is dying, but can do nothering about it. I want her helpless in the face of death! I want her dead!
“I raised that viper from nothingness! I asked nothing of her but that she make Suleiman happy and give him the other children poor Gulbehar could not. And what has my reward been for my kindness? Khurrem has succeeded in driving me from my home in my old age! She broke Gulbehar’s soft heart! Killed Ibrahim! Destroyed my daughter’s happiness, orphaned and murdered my grandchildren! She has seen to the murder of a brilliant future sultan, for I am certain she played on Suleiman’s fears in order to turn him against Mustafa, the bitch! And now! Now What is the future of the empire to be? It will be ruled by that fat, drunken fool of an eldest son of hers. Selim! Janet spat the word scornfully. “Named after my dear lord, and nothing like him at all.”
She fixed Aaron Kira with a sharp eye. “You think I do not know what they say about my grandson, Selim? He is called Selim the Sot! A public drunkard who defys the Koran to imbibe forbidden wine. My God! My God! What shame he will bring upon the Ottoman! And all for his vile mother’s unbridled ambition! Kill her! Wipe her memory from the face of this earth before she does any more damage. With luck, Selim will drink himself to death before Suleiman dies, and my grandson, Bajazet, will rule after his father. He is a good boy despite that she-devil who spawned him.”
“It shall be as you order, madame Valideh,” Aaron Kira said quietly. “I will personally journey to Istanbul with your instructions. Esther still has complete freedom of the haremlik, and will arrange everything with her usual dispatch; but before I go I must give you further bad news. Prince Jahangir is also dead. He died, they say, of a broken heart upon learning of Prince Mustafa’s death. You know how he loved his half-brother, poor crippled boy.’
“Another death at Khurrem’s door,” Janet said bitterly. “Her own son, God curse her! I shall never be free of the damned Ottoman family until that woman is dead! And dinna call me madame Valideh ever again, Aaron Kira! That part of my life is long past, and I would nae go back!”
Christmas of 1555 was particularly festive at Glenkirk, for Janet’s granddaughter, Heather, was wed to Colin’s oldest grandson, Jamie Hay. It was a great love match. Their first son was born on New Year’s Day, 1558, but James and Heather Hay, as delighted as they were by their son’s birth and the siblings that followed, seemed to need no one else but each other to be content with life.
At last, in that summer of 1558, came the news from Istanbul that Janet had awaited. News both good and bad. Sarina and Firousi had died, having attained the ages of seventy-eight and seventy-nine respectively. Janet wept quietly, but not so much for the loss of her two friends. They were old, and it was their time even as it would eventually be her time. She wept with the memories of what had been, and for a time and a place now lost but for her memories.
The good news was that four and a half years after Prince Mustafa’s murder, Esther Kira had succeeded in once again serving her lady. Khurrem Kadin was dead. Esther, whose secret hobby was poisons, as Janet well knew, had been ingenious. The dose of death had not been introdu
ced into her food, for then Khurrem’s food taster would have died and the plot been known. Rather the poison was introduced gradually into Khurrem’s bath water through means of a rare Patchouli bath oil that was Khurrem’s favorite, and only obtainable through Esther Kira. It had been easy for Esther to poison her product. There was no change in the oil’s texture, color, or scent. It was not a poison to which one might build an immunity with small doses over time. Best of all it was not necessary to involve anyone else in their plans. The plan was foolproof.
Slowly, over a period of three years, Khurrem’s skin daily absorbed the poison until it could absorb no more, and so she died. Since she had appeared to be sickening during the last year of her life, her death seemed quite natural, and no one thought greatly about it. Khurrem, however, had perpetrated one final atrocity before her demise. She had, in order to protect her favorite and first-born son, seen her second son, Prince Bajazet, accused of treason against his father. The last of Suleiman’s best and brightest sons was executed. Janet wept with bitter tears for Bajazet, even as she rejoiced in his mother’s death.
Publicly, Esther wrote to Janet, Suleiman had given no evidence of his great grief at Khurrem’s death. Privately, he was inconsolable. He buried her in a tomb close behind his marvelous great new mosque, and he ordered built a smaller mosque near the women’s market which was called Khasseki Khurrem. To the mosque he attached a school and a hospital for the mad, generously endowing both.
“He has raised a church to honor the memory of a devil! Allah in his heaven! God’s nightshirt!” Janet shouted indignantly. “He never built a mosque to honor my memory, and I was his mother who never betrayed him; but for that Russian bitch who many times broke faith wi him, a mosque! Suleiman, my son, ye were ever a fool where that woman was concerned, and age has made you a bigger fool! At least ye may live the remainder of your life in peace, though I truly fear for the future of the empire.” She sighed. “It is no longer my concern. I am free of ye all now!”
But then as she sat by her fire thinking, she saw great humor in the situation. When she had staged her death those twenty-five years ago in order to depart Turkey; it had amused her that Khurrem did not know the truth of the matter. Now, however, wherever she was, Khurrem did know. That thought caused Lady Hay to laugh. “By God, I’ve won the game, you bitch! I raised you from the dust, and ye repaid me with treachery. Now. when ye thought me dead all those years, ye have learned I am alive. I have reached out to return ye to the dust!” And she laughed all the harder. In retrospect, Janet knew her victory came a quarter of a century too late for all those Khurrem had hurt, but the Laughing One would hurt no one else.
In 1559 John Knox returned to Scotland bringing with him religious dissent, and fresh bigotry to a land where toleration barely existed. Thoroughly incited by his rousing sermons, the people sacked the monasteries of the Carthusians, the Black Friars and the Grey Friars. An army was raised by the dowager queen to quell the rebellion. The newly Protestant earls raised the Army of the Congregation of Christ to oppose her. However, until the English decided to intervene and cause mischief, there was virtually no fighting.
That spring the Reformation came to the Leslie’s lands, and the abbey of Glenkirk was burned; its gentle inhabitants who had taught the children in their school, fed the poor in times of famine, and nursed the elderly, were murdered. The miscreants were caught by the earls of Glenkirk and Sithean, and their followers, tried and hung. At the moment the last condemned man was executed, a clap of thunder from an approaching storm echoed across the hills.
“Jesu!” swore Janet. “Now every fool will be interpreting the thunder as God’s will.”
“For, or against the Reformation?” asked Glenkirk.
“Both!” she told him.
Laughing, he escorted her back into the castle.
“God help you all, nephew! I’ll nae be here much longer, but there will be trouble wi these Calvinists. If all they wanted was freedom to worship as they chose, ’twould be naught; but they truly believe they are right, and all other forms of worship are wrong. They want us all to pray as they do. If some of the more powerful nobles decide to use these fanatics to climb to power, then God have mercy on Scotland!”
Her foresight had always been such that he did not put her words down to the ravings of an old woman. “Ye think it will be that bad, Mam?”
“Aye! If the two factions clash, ’twill mean civil war.” She settled herself by the fire in the great hall, and the young men of her family gathered about her. Her green-gold eyes glowed with life, and Glenkirk suddenly had a glimpse of the vibrant young woman she had been, and why it was men were willing to be her slaves. “Listen to me, lads,” Janet continued. “I kept this family together and intact after Solway Moss. I have lived to see you all grown, your inheritance saved. I have seen you wed, and a new generation of bairns born to this family. I have known five generations of this family, and I have survived much.
“When the wrangling and the warring begins, stay far from it, my lads. Follow whatever faith with which you are comfortable, but never be fanatic about it. God rewards no man for needlessly throwing his life away.” She pierced Father Charles Leslie with a sharp look even as he raised an elegant eyebrow at her.
“What if we are forced to choose sides, Mam?” asked the earl of Sithean, her grandson.
“Then go wi the Stewarts unless they are so wrong that ye canna in good conscience follow them. As long as they are our rulers, ye canna be faulted if ye ape them. Remember, however, that the survival of this family is our first law, my lads. Remember yer wives, yer sweethearts and yer bairns should ye ever be tempted to folly.”
They listened, and nodded, and believed her, for she had ever watched over them. And each wondered what would happen when she was no longer there to guide them. Could they survive? They would if they learned their lessons welt.
In the south the dowager queen’s French troops were too few to stop the situation; and the Army of the Congregation, too amateur to make headway. The Protestant lords and their adherents confined their activities to pillaging friaries in Dundee, Linlithgow and Sterling; wrecking churches in their path, and occupying Edinburgh. The French in return fortified the port of Leith; and the English sailed up the Firth of Forth to blockade the French in Leith.
The French retreated, and the Scots lords arranged a treaty with the English whereby the English would undertake the preservation of Scotland’s Freedom. Elizabeth Tudor, England’s queen, feared her cousin Mary, for in France Henri II had died, and his son, Francois II, Mary of Scotland’s young husband, took the throne, Mary Stewart was now queen of both Scotland and France. Elizabeth was cautious, but she nonetheless had the Duke of Norfolk sign a treaty with the earl of Arran to oust the French from Scotland.
In March of 1560 the English crossed the border into Scotland and renewed the siege of Leith. The French fought bravely, but unable to reinforce their garrison, decided to talk peace. It was at that moment that the dowager queen of Scotland, Marie of Guise-Lorraine, chose to die. Her death removed the last obstacles to peace. In July of 1560 both the English and the French agreed to remove themselves from Scotland and cease hostilities against each other.
In December 1560 Francois II died, and his eighteen year old widow decided to return to her native land where she was queen in her own right. Elizabeth Tudor, however, at first refused her cousin a safe-conduct through England. By the time she had thought better of it and changed her mind, Mary had already put to sea for Scotland.
On the 19th of August, 1561, Mary of Scotland arrived home. The fog in the Firth of Forth was thick, and John Knox saw in this natural phenomenon God’s displeasure at Mary’s return. In Edinburgh the queen was greeted with psalms and the gift of a bible. When her priest celebrated mass for her privately the following Sunday, a mob tried to break into the queen’s chapel and kill the priest. The Protestant Scots were as fanatic as the Spanish Catholics. In the previous year before the queen’s return, t
he parliament had made the Confession of Faith the law of the land. The Pope’s authority and jurisdiction were abolished. The mass was forbidden with death the penalty for the third offense. The sacraments were reduced to two. Baptism and the Eucharist. If the Confession of Faith did not approve of something, then it was roundly condemned.
Mary refused either to approve or to recognize the Confession of Faith. She would, she told her people, practice her religion, and they were free to practice theirs. It was a generous gesture, and had men like Knox been content to accept it, things might have been different for Scotland. At Glenkirk the dowager countess of Sithean and her growing family followed the queen’s example, safe for the moment in their isolation.
In December of that year Heather gave birth to her second child, a daughter, who was baptised Catriona Mairi, but from the first the infant was called “Cat”, for her baby blue eyes quickly turned to the leaf green of her great-grandfather’s, and she had the habit of narrowing them like a cat. Colin Hay adored the child.
“By God,” he chuckled, “she will gie every man she meets trouble! I wish I could be here to see her grown. If we had had a daughter, I know she would have been just like Cat.”
“Hay!” Janet snapped at him, “yer in yer dotage!”
“Ye know it to be true,” he answered her with a chuckle.
“My thoughts are my own,” she said with a small smile, but they both knew she agreed with him even if she would not say so.
Little Cat Hay was thoroughly spoilt and cossetted by her doting great-grandparents. Even the young queen, making a northern progress in Cat’s second year, agreed the child was a charmer when she stopped at Glenkirk Castle. Mary, Queen of Scots, was a beautiful woman, but she could not bring stability to her kingdom. She had made this journey into the north in hopes of drawing the northern earls and clan chiefs to her side. The Queen was most astounded to meet Janet.
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