Jock eyed him curiously for a moment, then likewise dismounted. Carefully he took out his own sword and approached Bothwell.
“You are from another time,” he said softly. “Do you see yourself as one of King Arthur’s knights? Single combat!” He laughed roughly. “Or is there a sin you wish to expiate? No matter—I will help you punish yourself.” He rushed at Bothwell brandishing the great sword. Bothwell barely had time to duck and recover his own balance.
He spun his sword arm out and his sword whizzed by Jock like a whirling blade, snagging his plaid. Jock pulled back, then took aim again, parrying for Bothwell’s shoulder. The tip of his blade touched the padded leather and nicked it, but Bothwell did not flinch. Instead he lunged forward, startling Jock, pressing the edge of his sword against Jock’s chest. Jock stumbled and then fell backward, dropping his sword. Bothwell covered him and forced him onto his back, making him helpless. He laid his own sword with meticulous care across Jock’s neck, where the Adam’s apple bobbed up and down.
“Now,” Bothwell whispered, as if there were others who might be listening, “do you surrender?’
Jock, who still looked more surprised then frightened, said, “Yea.” But had he understood what he was saying? Or was it just a trick?
“Will my life be safe?” Jock asked. “Will you guarantee my safety?”
“You must stand trial when the Queen comes to hold her justice court,” Bothwell said. “But if the hearing clears you, I shall accept it and stand content. You shall go free.”
“The Queen!” said Jock. “What does she know?”
“She knows of mercy. Too much for her own good, the good of the realm, and her own safety, perhaps. But in her mercy lies your safety.”
“I accept it, then.”
“Very well.” Bothwell slowly took away his sword and released Jock from the hard grip in which he had held him.
The outlaw stood up as if his dignity had been trampled, and brushed himself off.
“You must return with me,” said Bothwell. “I shall not do you the dishonour of binding you, for your word must suffice.”
He sheathed his sword and walked back to his well-trained horse, who had been patiently waiting through all the scuffle. When he swung up into the saddle, he turned and saw that Jock had mounted and was galloping away, fleeing.
A liar. A man who betrayed his own word.
Calmly Bothwell took out his pistol and shot Jock, knocking him out of the saddle. The outlaw was lifted up with the impact of the blast and then, clutching wildly at his horse’s mane, tumbled down beneath his hooves. The horse kept running, but Jock lay in a hollow, his legs sticking out of the heather and bracken. One foot was twitching and jerking.
“A man who breaks his word is lower than an animal,” said Bothwell, riding over to the plaided huddle.
There was no sound, and the movement had ceased. He must be dead, or dying.
Cautiously Bothwell dismounted and made his way over to the heap, alert for any movement. But there was nothing but the abnormal quiet of eternal stillness.
Closer now, he could see blood staining the green and red plaid; it was hard to distinguish the new red from the red in the pattern.
The fool. Why did he not return with me? The Queen would have pardoned him, most like. She’s yet to order an execu—
With a shrieking yell, Jock rose up swinging his sword and hit Bothwell in the arm, knocking him over a mossy, slippery stump, exposing him belly-up like a beast to be slaughtered. A further slash to the underside, tearing through the padded leather and ripping into his entrails …
A red tide of anger and shock and revenge took possession of Bothwell, running just before the pain, and he grabbed his own short, sharp dagger in his right hand, wrenching it out of its belt.
The face of Jock was right up in his own, grinning its death’s-head grin, breathing its foul breath directly in his nostrils. Then with all his strength, a tiny second ahead of his own incapacitation, Bothwell plunged his dagger into Jock’s chest, piercing through the cloth and deep inside, then pulled it out and managed to thrust it into a second spot. The grin faded from Jock’s face, drained away like a water-bag emptying, and blood gushed from his mouth and spilled into Bothwell’s face, blinding him. He felt Jock rolling off him, tried to stab him again and found only air, then suddenly a blinding, slicing force crashed across his head. Lights exploded inside his eye sockets, sending showers of sparks, different coloured and shaped ones, cascading like the fall of sparks from a blacksmith’s hammer forging metal.
All sound dimmed, feeling receded, and only taste remained: the rusty, hot taste of blood pouring down his throat, drowning him, choking him, rising in a tide to carry him away, down a black, swirling chute.
There was no air. Bothwell’s lungs were filling with blood, and he had no strength even to turn over to drain them. Blood gurgled and overflowed out of his mouth, like one of the thousand trickling burns, making its own well of crimson liquid, submerging his face.
XXXVI
“Lord Lieutenant Bothwell is dead,” said the soldier, standing before Mary. He was tired and dirty from the twenty-five-mile ride from the Hermitage, so near the English border, to Melrose, where Mary was on the first stage of her journey to Jedburgh.
When the Queen did not speak, the man went on, “He was killed by Jock o’ the Park, an Elliot. He rode on ahead of us, giving chase to Jock, and caught up with him out of our sight. By the time we got there, he was lying in his own blood, dead.”
Dead? Bothwell, dead? No, it was impossible, unthinkable. He could not die. She heard herself saying to the man, “You must be weary. Pray refresh yourself,” and nodded to the only servant in the room.
I should summon Lord James and Maitland, she thought. No, not yet. Not yet.
She seated herself gracefully and waited, hands folded, while the messenger—one of Bothwell’s men, perhaps one he had spoken of earlier—drank two goblets of fresh-pressed cider.
I will see thee in Jedburgh.
Now, never.
“They took his body back to the Hermitage. I came directly here,” said the man.
Body.
“Is he … has he been buried yet?”
Had they just given him a soldier’s burial, shovelled him in? Or was there to be formal interment in a family vault somewhere? Bothwell would have preferred the former, she somehow knew.
“I did not go with them back to the Hermitage. I do not know what they have done with the corpse. Oh, I beg your pardon, I did not mean to offend you. If you have instructions—”
Corpse.
“I assume … Lady Bothwell’s wishes should be followed.” She had almost forgotten about Lady Bothwell. “Yes, you should go directly to his … widow, and inform her straightway. She must not hear it from others.”
Dead. Quite, quite dead?
“How did he … in what manner was he mortally injured?”
“He was badly cut in the face and belly, and his left arm was both slashed open and broken, evidently from the force of the attack with a two-handed sword. But we’ll never know from Jock. We found him dead a half-mile away, shot in the thigh and stabbed twice in the chest. Bothwell got him,” he said proudly. “He just crawled away to die. He was slumped over a mossy stump, his blood still warm. Of course, so was Bothwell’s,” he added.
These details suddenly made it true. The broken arm, the warm blood—
“O God!” She burst into tears, and impulsively embraced the young soldier. He had seen him, had come directly from his side. There was blood on his sleeve—Bothwell’s? She clutched at the spot. It was black and had a hard sheen to it.
She swallowed hard and pulled herself away. “Pray call my councilmen,” she said to the attendant.
“What is it, dearest sister?” asked Lord James, as he entered the room a few moments later. He was all solicitation and hard eyes.
“Yes, what is it?” echoed Maitland, close on his heels.
Bothwell is gone an
d once again I am in your hands, with nowhere else to turn, she thought.
Now his loss, simply as a military and political ally, as he had started out, dropped like a weight into the net of despair where her love for him as a man already lay dead.
She held her head high and gestured to the messenger. “He will tell you.” She did not trust herself to speak; and besides, she wanted to hear it again. Oddly enough, she wanted to hear it over and over.
The lad—he was little more than that—cleared his throat. “Lord Bothwell has been killed in a fray with Jock o’ the Park. ‘Little Jock,’ they called him. Because he was so big.” He laughed nervously.
Lord James and Maitland shot looks at each other.
“God grant him rest,” said Lord James mechanically.
“What now?” asked the practical Maitland.
“We must proceed to Jedburgh as we had announced,” Mary heard her calm voice saying. “The outlaws and reivers our loyal Lieutenant has arrested must not go free because of his death. That would be a mockery to his memory.”
“Tomorrow, then, we proceed?”
“Yes.”
She turned to the messenger. One was supposed to hate the bringer of bad news, she thought, but I never want to let him out of my sight. He is my last link to the living Bothwell. She looked again at his bloody sleeve. “Pray stay with us until morning.”
* * *
There was no sleep for her that night. She was afraid she would dream of him again; nay, she knew it. And the anguish of having him alive in her dreams would only intensify her despair upon awakening again. It was better to stay awake, held in the very hand of pain, then to swerve from it and make it worse.
But lying awake was horrible, too. She felt his presence in the room, and feared to open her eyes, lest she would behold an apparition, all bloody and mutilated.
“I fear you, Lord Bothwell,” she whispered, “and in doing so I know I wrong you, for you have never wished me harm. But you are another now, different … forgive me, I fear death and its changes, even to those I love.…”
With the dawn, the presence seemed gradually to fade.
* * *
The ride to Jedburgh should have been soothing, for there was beauty in the yellow October sunlight and in the lingering warm touch of the parting summer. They rode past the ruined Abbey of Melrose, its skeletal arches pointing toward the sky like slender ribs.
All dies, and is ruined by violence, Mary thought. The monks came here when Scotland was still wild and beyond the edge of civilization, and built their church, stone by laborious stone. But English violence destroyed it in a day; and if they had left it untouched, Knox’s violence would have done their work for them. Bothwell tried to bring order to the Borders, but has been killed by an outlaw.
It seemed, on that golden day, that darkness, chaos, and disorder would always prevail, that sunset would always come early. The pale ribs of the ruined Abbey testified to that.
* * *
They were to lodge in a fortified stone house, a “bastel house,” in Jedburgh, rented from the Kerr family. Jedburgh itself was a pleasant enough town, considering where it lay. It had been attacked numerous times by the English and had always picked itself up from the dust, like a village wrestler, set itself in order, and begun again.
There were three large rooms on the first floor of the three-storey house, with two on the next floor. The opposite-turning spiral staircase between the floors entertained them, they were so used to the normal kind. That night, lying in the cold, straight bed, Mary slept, and dreamed no dreams. There was no longer anything to dream of. She awoke thankful that the night had been blank, like being put in a locked black box.
* * *
The Court of Justice was to begin on the morrow. One by one the criminals would be brought forward, bound with rope or chain, before her for sentencing.
“Hang them,” Bothwell had said.
Maitland had cautioned about the shortage of gallows and hangmen and advised mass drownings as more economical. “They are just as dead with water as with rope,” Maitland had said.
“You are too merciful,” Lord James had said, raising one eyebrow. “Just make sure there are executions.”
* * *
She sat in a high-backed chair with a cloth of estate over her head: a makeshift throne. The first person to be brought in was the notorious Willie Kerr, the father-in-law murderer.
“William Kerr, Laird of Cessford, you have been accused of killing your wife’s father in the most heinous way, smiting off his head and arms by the axe. In addition to violating your marital duty and the Fourth Commandment—to honour one’s father and mother—you have violated your spiritual duty, for the man was an abbot as well, and had even baptized your sons,” recited the secretary, reading off the accusation matter-of-factly. “Judgement and sentence now rest with your sovereign Queen.”
The man looked so ordinary. His shock of brown-and-grey hair stood up as if in fear, and his lined face was resigned, as it had been resigned to border reiving, warfare, burnings.…
“Mercy, Your Majesty!” he cried, flinging himself to his knees. “I sinned, I committed murder, but I repent! And my wife … she hated her father, he beat her and misused her, until she was so in fear of him she trembled at the sound of his voice, or even upon hearing his name. And besides—what business does an abbot have fathering children?” He stood up and his spine grew straighter and straighten “He was a sinner, and I punished him! He was a stain on the Church! Do you wonder why John Knox and his mob have prevailed? It is because the Church has been besmirched by such as the Abbot!”
The man spoke true. The Church of Scotland had been undone, not by the greed of the King, as in England, but by the greed and ineptitude of its own leaders here. Cardinal Beaton, this Abbot of Kelso …
“I but struck a blow for honesty and justice, Your Majesty!” he cried. “Honesty in place of hypocrisy, abuse, and cruelty! And I stand ready to die for it! My death will not have been in vain.”
“You shall not die,” Mary said. “For you speak true.”
She heard Maitland and Lord James snort with disgust.
* * *
Mary retired at midday to take some nourishment. Ten prisoners had been brought before her, and she had listened to their pleas. Not one had been sentenced to death.
Lord James and Maitland were so disapproving they withdrew into their own chambers and would not eat with her, although if she commanded them, they would have obeyed.
How can I sentence anyone to die who upholds his conscience? Mary asked herself. Kerr was right in what he said about the Abbot. But he was wrong to take the punishment into his own hands. It is hard to refrain; God is very slow to act, if we leave it to Him, as we are told to do.
She began picking at her platter of roasted partridge and cabbage. She had no appetite, not since the news from the Borders.
A knock on the door.
“Enter,” she said.
A burly man, so heavy that his own flesh warmed him and therefore he had no need of mantles or capes, came in.
“I am one of Lord Bothwell’s men,” he stated. “There is glorious news! The Earl lives!”
“What?” Mary stood up, shaking.
“The Earl lives! We brought him back in a cart, all bloody and cold … so cold, the blood on his wounds had congealed, and he seemed not to breathe. But before we reached the Hermitage, he stirred. His wounds were not mortal.” He threw up his hands. “And today he opened his eyes and inquired whether Your Majesty had been informed of his death. When we said yes, he ordered me to go immediately to tell you he lived. He seemed to care for nothing else. At least, not first.”
“He lives?” The man must be imagining it.
“Aye. He lives and mends, on the hour.”
“Is he—himself?”
The man laughed. “Indeed. He joked about Jock and was delighted he had not escaped. ‘Ah, there’s something to be said for the lowly dagger,’ he said. ‘
When pistols and swords fail you, it’s nice to lay hold of a dagger in your belt.’”
“Then he must be allowed to take his own time to mend. We shall come when the justice court is over.”
* * *
For nine days she stayed at Jedburgh, administering justice. Daily she received bulletins about the progress of Bothwell. He had his arm in a sling. He ate three full meals. He went out in the forecourt of the Hermitage and talked to his men. He directed them on their raids.
At last all the malefactors had been paraded before her for sentencing, and she had not condemned anyone to death. Lord James and Maitland were clearly worried about her decisions, and kept insisting that only violence could cure violence.
“A fire is used to put out a fire,” said Maitland. “These men understand nothing else. Your mercy is misplaced.”
“You did not hesitate to avail yourselves of it,” she said pointedly. “Why should the standards be different at court?”
“There is a difference between political disagreements and just plain pillage and murder,” said Lord James.
“Riccio’s murder was bloodier than what happened to the Abbot of Kelso. I see no niceties of difference, for all that the King’s dagger had jewels in its handle.” She did not wish to continue this conversation. “You have my leave to depart on the morrow. For myself, I will go to the Hermitage. There is much business to discuss with Lord Bothwell, if he is able.”
“It is nigh thirty miles away,” said Lord James. “You must start out early.” He again raised that questioning eyebrow. “So you mean to ride over sixty miles in one day?”
“Why ever not?”
“Even in your flight to Dunbar, which was marvelled over, you only went twenty-five. And now sixty, just to cheer a sick man?”
“I go not to nurse him, but to receive and give reports!”
“Of course,” said Lord James. “Then we shall accompany you. That is, if you will allow us to.”
* * *
The dawn came up fair, but with an icy edge to it. They were in the saddle just as the sun was breaking over the tips of trees that were fast shedding their leaves.
Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles Page 56