Past Master mog-3

by Nigel Tranter

  'Aye, but there is. That's where you're wrong, Mary – there is. Patrick said to say that it was life and death. For the King. Aye, and for yourself, my lord Duke. Because you're near the throne. He says both your deaths have been decided upon.'

  'Vicky!' The girl stepped close, to clutch the Duke's wrist with her free hand. 'Sweet Jesu-no!'

  'Heed nothing, Mary,' Lennox told her, encircling mother and child with a damp arm. 'Nobody is going to kill me. It is but one of Patrick's alarums. My death would serve no cause, benefit none. I take no part in any of their affairs, neither Catholic nor Protestant. Besides, no one would dare…'

  'Not even the Earl o' Bothwell?'

  'Bothwell! But… Bothwell is of the Kirk party. A Protestant.'

  'Patrick says that Bothwell is about to change sides. To turn Catholic. And Bothwell, like yoursel', my lord Duke, is the King's cousin – though on the wrong side o' the blanket. A right bold and fierce man!'

  'By the Powers – Bothwell!' There was no doubt about the Duke's perturbation now. Yet he shook his head. 'I do not believe it!' he declared. 'Bothwell has always been a Protestant… if he has any true religion at all. Devil-worship and witchcraft, perhaps. But to turn Catholic-no!'

  'If religion matters little to him, and this changing could give him the sure rule of Scotland, think you he'd scruple? Patrick says that he is changing – and have you ever kenned Patrick Gray wrong in his information?'

  Mary Gray had, but not often – and she was in no state to contest Restalrig's claim. 'Why should he, Bothwell…' She swallowed. 'Why should he seek Vicky's hurt? Or the King's?'

  The other shrugged. 'It's no' me you've to ask that, lassie -it's Patrick. I'm but his messenger in this, see you. To bring the Duke to him.'

  'It is but a device. This threat to Vicky. To entice him to Fast Castle. To seek to entangle him once again in Patrick's evil affairs. Do not go, Vicky. Even if it is true about Bothwell, if you stay quietly here at Methven, far from Court, you can be of no danger to him. Why should he seek your death?'

  'But James, Mary – the King? Is my duty not to the King? If he is threatened? Am I not sworn, as a member of the Council, to defend him, my liege lord, with my life? If Patrick has discovered some desperate plot against the King, am I not in duty bound at least to hear of it, for James's sake?'

  'He canna come near to the King himsel',' Restalrig pointed out. 'He is banished the realm. Oudawed. He needs an ear close to Jamie's. That the King will heed. If his warning is to be in time. And there's no' much time, he says…'

  Lennox took a few paces away from the girl, and back, staring at the floor. 'I believe that I must go, Mary,' he said, at length.

  She emitted a long quivering sigh, but inclined her lovely head.

  'I shall hear him – no more. Do not fear that he shall cozen me, carry me off my feet, Mary. I know Patrick for what he is…'

  'Would that I could come with you, Vicky! Two heads are even better than one, in dealing with my father! But… Johnnie, here. Nursing the child, I cannot leave him.'

  'Nor would I let you ride ninety miles through a winter's night, lass…'

  'I could, Vicky. You know that I could.'

  'May be. But you will not. This is not for you.' He turned to Restalrig. 'When do we start, sir? I have fresh horses.'

  'The sooner the better. Give me an hour, my lord. It will be full dark by then…'

  'You will be careful, Vicky? Oh, you must be very careful! Watch Patrick. Do not let him deceive you, charm you, hoodwink you…'

  Chapter Two

  For fully an hour none of the three men had spoken – save to curse their weary drooping mounts when the all-but-foundered brutes slipped and stumbled on the rough and broken ground, benighted and water-logged. Coldingham Moor was no place to be in the dark, at any time – but especially not at four o'clock of a winter's morning, with a half-gale blowing sleet straight off the North Sea in their faces, and after having ridden across five counties.

  Though he had no fondness for Logan, Ludovick Stewart's opinion of the man's toughness and vigour could hardly have failed to have risen during those past grim hours. Although of middle years and notorious for gross living, he had led the way, and at a cracking pace, right from Methven in Strathearn, across South Perthshire, Stirlingshire, the three Lothians and into Berwickshire, on a foul night, and having already ridden the entire journey in the opposite direction. Not once, despite the thick blackness of the night, had he gone astray to any major extent.

  The last lap of that long journey was, as it happened, the most trying of all. Coldinghamshire, that ancient jurisdiction of the once princely Priory of Coldingham, thrusts out from the rest of Berwickshire eastwards like a great clenched fist, where the Lammermuir Hills challenge the sea. At the very tip of the resultant cliff-girt, iron-bound coast, amongst the greatest cliffs in the land, Fast Castle perches in as dizzy and savage a situation as can well be imagined, an eagle's eyrie of a place – and a particularly solitary and malevolent eagle at that. No other house or haunt of man crouched within miles of it on the bare, lofty, storm-battered promontory.

  Even high on the moor here, amongst the whins and the outcropping rocks, Ludovick could hear the roar of the waves, a couple of miles away and four hundred feet below. Heads down, sodden cloaks tight about them, soaked, mud-spattered, stiff with cold and fatigue, they rode on into the howling black emptiness laced with driven sleet. The Duke imagined that hell might be of this order.

  He was jerked out of what was little better than a daze by his servant's beast cannoning into his own, all but unseating both of them. He had been aware that his horse had been slipping and slithering more consistently, indicating that they had been moving downhill. Taking a grip on himself, and shouting at the groom, Ludovick brought his black under control.

  Only a short distance further, Logan halted. Indeed it appeared that he had to halt, poised on the very brink of nothingness.

  'Care, now,' he announced, having to shout above the sustained thunder of the seas which seemed to be breaking directly below them – but notably far below; as though all before had been the merest daunder. 'Dismount and lead.'

  Himself doing so, he picked his way along a narrow twisting ledge of a path, steep hillside on one hand, empty drop on the other. It was a place for goats rather than men and horses.

  They came to a naked buttress of the cliff, a thrusting rock bluff round which it seemed there was no passage. Down the side of this their path turned steeply, and then abruptly halted. They faced the abyss.

  Logan pointed in front of him, eastwards, seawards – but in the almost horizontally-driving sleet Lennox could see nothing. Then the other drew a small horn out from his saddlebag, and blew a succession of long and short blasts on it. Waiting a few moments, he repeated this, and at the second summons a faint hail answered him from somewhere out in the darkness. This was followed presently by a creaking, clanking noise, and the rattle of chains.

  'A drawbridge!' Ludovick exclaimed. 'I faith – it is here?' He was peering into the murk. Vaguely, monstrously, something loomed up there, he believed, blacker than the surrounding blackness.

  With a rattle and thud the end of a drawbridge sank into position almost at their very feet. This seemed to be little wider than the path itself; never had Lennox seen so narrow an access.

  'Hold to the chain,' Logan shouted. 'The wind. Bad here.'

  That was no over-statement. As they followed their guide out on to the slender gangway, which echoed hollowly beneath their feet, the wind seemed to go crazy. It had been blowing gustily hitherto, but consistently from the east; now it seemed to come at them from all sides – and especially from below – tearing at them, buffeting, shrieking and sobbing. It was presumably some trick of the cliff-formation and of this detached projecting pinnacle on which the castle must stand. Certain it was that without the single, swinging guard-chain to hold on to, the men would have been in grave danger of being swept right off that narrow cat-walk. Even t
he horses staggered and side-stepped, having to be dragged across in their nervous reluctance. Although Ludovick did not make a point of looking downwards, he was aware of a paleness far below, which could be only the white of the breaking seas which roared in their ears and seemed to shake that dizzy timber gallery. The salt of driven spray was now mixed with the sleet and rain which beat against their faces.

  At last they lurched into the blessed shelter of an arched and fortified gatehouse, with solid level rock beneath their feet, and a relief from the battering of the wind. Rough voices sounded, hands took their horses' bridles from them, and flickering lamps were brought. The bare dark stone walls of Fast Castle may not normally have spoken of kindly welcome, but that night they were as a haven of peace and security for the reeling travellers.

  Lennox; shown to a draughty small chamber in the main keep, where the arras swayed and rustled against the walling and a candle wavered and guttered, throwing off his wet clothing and donning a bed-robe, bemusedly considered that he had seldom sampled a fairer room. When Logan himself brought in food and wine, his guest partook of only token portions before collapsing on a hard bed and sleeping like the dead.

  It was nearly noon before Ludovick awakened, but even so he did not realise the time of day, so dark was it still in his little chamber, with its gloomy hangings and its tiny window only half-glazed, the lower portion being closed by wooden shuttering. The storm still raged apparently, and little of light penetrated the small area of glass, not only because of the heavy overcast sky but because the air was thick with spindrift.

  When the young man had prevailed upon himself to rise, and went to the window to peer out, he could see nothing through the streaming glass. Opening the little shutters, he stooped and thrust out his head – and all but choked in consequence; it was not so much the violence of the wind that took his breath away – it was the prospect. He hung directly over a boiling cauldron of tortured seas, riven and torn into foaming, spouting fury by jagged reefs and skerries just about one hundred and fifty feet below – hung being a true description, for the masonry of this tower rose sheerly flush with the soaring naked rock of the precipice, which itself bulged out in a great overhang, sickening to look down upon. Ludovick's window faced south, and by turning his head he could see, through the haze of spray and rain, the vast main cliff-face that stretched away in a mighty and forbidding barrier three hundred feet high separated from his present stance by a yawning gulf. In other words, this castle was situated half-way down that cliff-face, built to crown an isolated and top-heavy pillar of rock that was itself a detached buttress of the thrusting headland, on as cruel and fearsome stretch of rock-ribbed coast as Scotland could display. How anyone could have achieved the task of building a castle here in the first place, apart from why anyone should wish to do so, was a matter for uneasy wonder. How many unhappy wretches had dropped to their death on the foaming fangs beneath, in the creating of it, was not to be considered. Lennox well remembered King James himself – who, of course, had only viewed the place from the sea – saying once that the man who built it must have been a knave at heart.

  Noting, however, that despite the grim aspect and evil reputation of this robber's stronghold, not only had he survived a particularly heavy sleep therein but that while he had been thus helpless his clothing had been taken, dried and brought back to him, along with adequate wherewithal to break his fast, Ludovick dressed, ate, and went in search of company. Descending two storeys by a narrow winding stone stairway in the thickness of a wall-corner, wherein chill winds blew at him from un-glazed arrow-slits and gun-loops, he came to the Hall of the castle on the first main floor. It was a small poor place compared with the great hall of Methven, bare and stark as to furnishings but better lit than might have been expected by four windows provided with stone seats, and with a great roaring fire of sparking driftwood blazing in the huge fireplace which took up most of one wall. Here he encountered the Lady Restalrig, Marion Ker, Logan's frightened-eye young second wife, whose nervous greeting to her ducal visitor and swift self-effacement thereafter, seemed perhaps suitable behaviour on the part of the chatelaine of Fast Castle.

  Ludovick, gazing into the fire, was wondering at the reactions of any young woman brought to live in such a place, when a voice spoke behind him from the doorway.

  'My dear Vicky – here is a delight, a joy! On my soul, it is good to see you! It was a kindly act indeed to ride so far to see me, through so ill a night. I hope I see you well and fully rested?'

  The young man swung round. He had looked for this, been prepared, anticipated the impact of the Master of Gray, knowing so well the quality of the man. Yet even so he was somehow taken by surprise, confused, immediately put at a disadvantage. This was so frequently the effect of Patrick Gray on other men -although on women it was apt to be otherwise. The Duke found himself mumbling incoherencies, not at all in the fashion that he had decided upon.

  It was partly the complete contrast of the man with his surroundings the so obvious unsuitability of everything about Fast Castle as a background for the Master of Gray. Exquisite without being in the least effeminate, laughing-eyed, friendly as he was entirely assured, vital and yet relaxed, the handsomest man in all Europe stood in that harsh, sombre, savage place, and was somehow almost as much a shock to the beholder as had been that plunging, throat-catching prospect from the bedroom window. Even his cordial, courteous and so normal words, spoken in light but pleasantly modulated tones, seemed as much at odds with the true situation as to be off-putting.

  Smiling, hands out, the newcomer stepped forward to embrace Lennox to kiss him on both cheeks, French-fashion – for Ludovick had been brought up in France, and it was the Master who had brought him as a boy of ten from that country to Scotland, on his father's death. The younger man coughed, stiffened within the other's arms, and found no words adequate to the occasion.

  'Eighteen months it has been, Vicky? Twenty? Too long, at any rate. Too long to be separated from my friends. How often I have thought of you, sought news of you, wished you well. In strange and foreign places. But, heigho – that is now over. A happiness, I vow, a good omen indeed, that the first man that I should meet on my own native soil again, apart from my host and cousin Restalrig, should be my good friend Vicky Stewart, Lord Duke of Lennox!' Patrick Gray had stepped back a pace, though still holding the other by the shoulders the better to smile upon his friend in warm affection.

  That was such an astonishing misconstruction of the situation as to set the younger man blinking – and to make his protest sound even more abruptly ungracious than he had intended. 'Dammit, Patrick – I am here only because Restalrig dragged me, under threat of God knows what dire disasters! As well you know.'

  'Ha, lad – ever the same forthright, honest Vicky! It does me good to hear your plain, frank candour again. After all of these months with dissemblers and sophists in half the Courts of Europe. Now I know that I am home again, in truth!'

  Helplessly, Ludovick stared at him. He knew that he was being unreasonably, unprofitably boorish – and knew too that part of this boorish hostility stemmed from the very fact that this man was so devilishly and winsomely like his own Mary. He had tended to forget just how alike they were, and marvelled anew that so beautiful a man could be so essentially masculine, virile, while his daughter, so similar in looks, bearing and calm assurance, should be all womanly woman. Patrick Gray, clad now, as ever, in the height of fashion but less spectacularly than sometimes, as befitted a courtier on his travels, had reached the age of thirty-four, although he looked even younger – certainly too youthful-seeming to have a grandson like little John Stewart of Methven. Yet the Duke saw the resemblance even to his child, with a sinking heart. The man was of medium height, of a lithe and slender grace of figure and carriage, his features finely-moulded and clean cut, enhanced by brilliant dark flashing eyes beneath a noble brow. His black wavy hair was worn long, but carefully trimmed, and the smiling lips were somewhat countered by a wicked curve
d scimitar of moustache and a tiny pointed beard.

  'You are home, Patrick, only in that you have somehow managed to set foot on this outlandish doorstep of Scotland,' the younger man said harshly. 'You are still banished the realm under pain of death. Nothing is changed. And you must know that, in insisting that I come here to meet you, my head is endangered likewise!'

  'Tut, Vicky – you are too modest, as always. No one is going to have the Duke of Lennox's head, for any such small matter -least of all our sovereign and well-beloved monarch, your cousin! He loves you too well, my friend, as well he might. And secretly, you know, I do believe that he in some small measure loves me also! Poor Jamie is ever a little confused in his loving, is he not?'

  'What… what do you mean by that?'

  'Merely that our liege lord is apt to be pulled in different ways than more, h'm, ordinary mortals! A matter which his enemies seldom forget – so that it falls to his friends not to forget either.'

  'And you count yourself that? A friend of the King?'

  'Why yes, Vicky – to be sure. Albeit a humble one. Is that remiss of me?'

  'After… after all that you have done?'

  'After all that I have done,' the Master nodded, easily. 'So much done, or at least attempted, for the weal of James Stewart and his realm. So much endeavoured, over the years, to guide and draw the frail ship of state on a sure course through the perilous seas of statecraft – with alas, so many failures. But, heigho – my small successes also, Vicky. You will not deny me them? When His Grace was away in Denmark winning himself his bride, we ruled Scotland passing well together; you and I, Vicky. Did we not? You acting Viceroy. I acting Chancellor.'

  'I did what you told me, Patrick – that was all. No more than a tool in your hands. And who gained thereby? You, and you only.'