From the beginning, the expedition went well: a good cracking ride down the eastern seaboard through the earldom of March, Albany’s country. Nicholas let Julius make all the early running. Because of his friendship with Liddell, Julius was familiar with the landowners round North Berwick, the Bass and Dunbar, and could count on some sort of welcome from the Earl of Angus and his vigilant colony in the rock-fortress of Tantallon.
Angus, perpetrator of the raid which had broken the peace, had fittingly been rewarded with the duties of Warden of the East March of Scotland on the unspoken premise: you got us into the war, so now fight it. In fact, being determined to guard his own land, he accepted the post as his due; but remained resentful of intrusive authority, and suspicious of any friend of Adorne’s. Julius treated him with easy deference, and gave the impression that he was here to admire, not to examine, the March’s defences. These days, Julius was in the most buoyant of moods, all the disgruntlement of Cologne cast aside.
Nicholas let him have his head, and John, too. Archibald Douglas, Earl of Angus, was just over thirty and used to getting his own way. Ill-advisedly, he had married a Boyd, whose father had been adopted in exile by England. The marriage had not helped his career, and had cast temporary doubts on his loyalty. His loyalty to the King was still questionable, but not his friendship with the King’s brother and sister, or his readiness to invade English soil, to the point of provoking a war. Which would make him popular with the French King as well.
He had a nephew there at the castle: Jamie Boyd, Princess Mary’s young son. Nicholas saw the boy watching him, and sent John over to speak to him. He knew the boy didn’t want John, and that common foresight required that he himself should cultivate both the Boyd children. At the moment, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. He had meddled enough with that family.
Riding away, he quizzed Julius. ‘What do you think? I’d rather see Angus down on the March, but if he’s done all he says he has done, then it isn’t bad.’
‘You heard him,’ said Julius. ‘There’s no movement at the moment in Northumberland. We’ll check the rest as we go. But I think it’s all right. Liddell says he’ll do anything to protect the Douglas estates, and he doesn’t want to share them with Boyd or the other Douglas in exile. He’ll fight for the King.’
‘I suspect he misses Albany,’ Nicholas said. The spring air brushed his face; the horses’ hooves behind him drummed comfortably. Below him on the left, the sea sparkled, empty but for a small fishing-boat. John had pulled off his steel bonnet and his hair, grey and red, flopped about his raw face. He looked contented as well.
John observed, ‘Jamie was saying they heard from his good uncle Sandy only last week. His new wife is pregnant.’
‘That’s the Bourbons for you,’ Nicholas said. He spoke absently. He added, ‘Anything else? How is King Louis?’
‘Oh, recovering,’ Julius broke in. ‘Applegarth was telling everybody that. Recovering, but inclined to dwell on his heavenly future, which might be good news for Rhodes.’ He looked cheerful. ‘Another shift in everyone’s policies.’
John grunted. John had been with Nicholas and their army, working for the Knights Hospitaller in Rhodes. He had helped to build the St Nicholas bastion, which last year had accepted a battering of three hundred stone balls from the Turks. It had resisted. It might not hold out this summer. Sultan Mehmet was to lead the assault himself this time. It was why the Pope was importuning everybody to cease wasting their military resources.
The air seemed colder. It came to Nicholas that there was a conversation with John le Grant which he had been postponing, and which he thought John would prefer to take place without Julius. Tonight, after a ride such as this, they would all fall into bed. But tomorrow, perhaps.
BERWICK-UPON-TWEED had passed through many changes in the four years since Nicholas de Fleury’s first arrival in the house of Tom Yare, and that other, miraculous arrival, of Robin.
In his many subsequent visits, Nicholas had noted them all, and had been responsible for some of them. Latterly, it had been men like Bonar and Cochrane and their craftsmen who had been concerned with strengthening the walls of town and of castle, and repairing gates, and fortifying the buildings and mounting the artillery in the castle precincts. Through all this, Nicholas had formed a good working partnership with Rob Lauder of the Bass, the castle’s Keeper, and with Patrick Hepburn the sheriff, whose wife, hard of hearing but merry, was another of Princess Joanna’s daughters. Aside from these, he got on well enough with the crown representatives, and with the Abbots of the various monastic houses. His other friendships, of the less formal kind, were with the merchants, the skippers, the fishermen of the untidy Tweedside town, with its lumpy waste ground and battered buildings.
Two decades before, a Lancastrian King had handed Berwick to Scotland in return for support against York. And now a Yorkist King wanted it back. It was what Nicholas wished to talk about with John le Grant, who was the only experienced soldier he could trust to help him draw up a profile of what happened when a frontier town was in danger of changing hands. Among other things.
You could see some of the precautionary changes already, walking these hilly streets. The official houses were empty. The Clerk Register, the former Archdeacon had withdrawn their furniture, their arras, their silver, loaded their coffers and paid off their servants, for no ceremonial meetings of the March Wardens would be held this year, or perhaps even next. The hammerers had long gone, as had the coiners with their punches and dies from the castle.
The church possessions in the Ness and elsewhere had also emptied. In the great houses of Melrose, there remained a small group of Cistercians, with their servants, to serve the community while they could. The rest had withdrawn to the mother house, as the monks of Newbattle had retired north.
On the river, the ferries had disappeared, and the King’s boats, leaving everyone to splash over by ford. The merchant ships had also departed: most abroad on their trading, but others to ports further north. The merchant-burgesses of Edinburgh and St Johnstoun of Perth and Dundee—the Colquhouns from Dumbarton, the Prestons, the Bartons, the Sinclairs—had largely returned home as well, emptying their warehouses. The officers and the Keeper of the castle had closed their lodgings in town and retired to the castle. Those who were left were powerful or obstinate enough, like Bertram or Yare, to wait until the last moment, and still be sure of escaping with what they had left.
Others had in mind, perhaps, waiting beyond the last moment. Some were foreigners, although there was nothing here now like the great Cologne and Flemish factories of a century and a half ago, when Berwick was another Alexandria: rich and populous, and earning a quarter of the customs return for the whole of England, it was said. Those who lingered in Berwick now were more likely to be cottars and fishers and herdsmen of no clear nationality who crept back unnoticed after pompous changes of master, and whose skills were in demand. Only a local man knew the whereabouts of the shoals and the fish-pools, or the clay for the pottery, or where the best fowling was. There was always building to be done. Whatever orders were given, those small burghers who had to depart—fleshers and coopers, bakers and brewsters, saddlers and weavers—would first set fire to their houses, and pollute what could be polluted.
Others stayed for reasons they did not disclose. The Browns, for example, still occupied their big house in St Margaret’s district, and that night the three travellers drank with them there, although they slept at Tom Yare’s. For some shipmen, it was clear, trade never stopped, no matter who was in charge. The great scattered family of Browns had a kinsman in Melrose and nuns at St Bothan, all of them served by the wagons from Berwick, bringing their food and their coal and their salt. The Holland family traded with England, even while Dick composed his verse for the Scottish Court. One of them was an outlaw at the horn.
There were others, as well, who had links with the English, but it was not a subject which came up that evening, or not while Julius was there. Julius, f
ull of wine and bonhomie, had been keen to discuss the potential slump in Tom Yare’s own fortunes, but Yare was smart enough to outmanoeuvre Julius on that. Julius had then introduced the name of Anselm Sersanders, and asked if it were true that, twelve years ago, the bright lad had cuckolded Martin Purves the merchant in Berwick, just before he’d gone off to Lille? And was it true that Saunders still blithely called himself Purves’s agent?
Yare had looked surprised, John had grunted, and Nicholas had said with interest, ‘My God, that must be a first. I never heard of anyone getting Saunders to bed without handing over the equal of a half-share in the Great Customs of Hamburg. Are you sure?’
Which perhaps sowed a doubt.
Later, when Julius had gone off to bed, Yare had gathered John and Nicholas for a round of claret, and had laughed over it, wharring away. ‘You lie too well, Nicol. Weren’t you in Lille only last summer?’
‘I couldn’t resist it. She’s a pretty little woman as well, with an indulgent husband and an adored little girl of eleven. Stop laughing. And for Christ’s sake, don’t tell that to Julius. He’s already got one daughter too many.’
John stared at him accusingly. ‘You’re making this up.’
‘I’m not. Ask Antoon. You know Adorne’s son is being given a prebend in Aberdeen? His canonry at Lille is not apparently proof against political pressure, and with the family wage-earner over here, saving Scotland, it seems only right that Scotland should be helpful. And Lille is a good market for us.’
He hesitated, and then decided to say it. ‘Tom, I know Julius was over-curious, but tell me in general. Who stands to lose most if Berwick changes hands?’
‘The King,’ said Tom Yare. His bright eyes snapped round to Nicholas’s, and his burr ripened. ‘The King owns the town. We exported [expohted] eighty lasts eleven barrels of salmon the other day. He exchanges some of it for wine: we imported eighteen pipes of yon through England. And the yield from the Berwick fisheries is his. And the land rents. And quite a good bittie more.’
‘But he pays for defence,’ Nicholas said. John was sitting still.
‘In general, yes. The bailie of the earldom of March would see to the castle. Parliament votes extra, as now, in time of war. But the deficiency is made up by the King. It’s a fair exorbitant business, maintaining a frontier town.’
‘So Berwick isn’t and can’t be a gold mine, so long as it sits where it does. It’s a fortress, and a symbol, like Calais. Therefore James isn’t moved entirely by greed when he sets such store by it?’
‘No,’ said Yare. He got up and refilled their cups, watching what he was doing, and then sat down again. He studied Nicholas. ‘No. It’s a symbol of his success as a king. It came as a gift, not a conquest, but he’s not going to be the man to relinquish it. He was brought to look at it when he was only ten, a wee speug with his big royal retinue. Sandy was haled here as well, when he was just a year or two older. This is your heritage, he was told. This is what your forebears expect you to protect. If England takes Berwick, I, Tom Yare, tine my fees, my perquisites, my position, my easy route to southern markets, but I can retreat and do the same thing in Leith, and I don’t have to help pay for lifelong protection. The only traders worse off than me are those who trade chiefly in England, or who’d lose special privileges. The Bishop of Aberdeen gets his fish duty-free. So do the Knights of St John. They trade with England, of course. They send their responsions to Clerkenwell. And their salmon passes through customs for nothing, eight lasts at a time.’
John said suddenly, ‘They have important salmon rights in the north. Peterculter, and the rest. Free of customs, as well.’
‘Because presumably the money goes to the Grand Master at Rhodes,’ Nicholas said. He had been close to having this conversation once with Adorne, but had backed off. He had not been sure how John le Grant felt.
The engineer said, ‘All right, you bastard.’ Yare looked at him.
Nicholas said, ‘You don’t need to.’
‘Like hell I don’t,’ said the engineer. He looked at Yare. ‘He wants to talk about the Knights of St John, and he knows I’m connected with them. We’re Grants from Aberdeenshire, my family. Bailies, a lot of them, for the Knights. One of them was Administrator for all the Order’s land-holdings in Scotland—and maybe you can guess how much that is. Twenty-eight properties in these parts alone, Duns and Hutton and Whitsome and Chirnside among them. It was a franchise. The holder managed the property and collected and pocketed all the returns, in exchange for a flat annual payment to Rhodes. It used to be four hundred florins, banked in Paris. I don’t know what it is now. You’d need to ask the Preceptor, who has of course taken the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, but has four big sons to my knowledge, and sits among the barons in Parliament as my lord of St John, and trades in England with his big fancy ships. I suppose Will Knollys is the richest man in Scotland, but the loss of his fine house in Berwick is going to be a dead nuisance to the poor man. I like him. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘Yes,’ said Nicholas. ‘Why do you like him?’
‘For his cheek,’ John le Grant said. ‘Also because it’s a huge job, and he’s one of the few men with the brains to do it all. And also because, although you know you can’t trust him, he’s probably doing the Crown much more good than an honest, stupid man might.’
‘Tom?’ said Nicholas. Yare, to his amusement, was gazing at John beatifically.
‘D’ye know,’ said Tom Yare. ‘That’s exactly what I’ve always felt, and I’ve never kent how to express it. Would it be unhealthy to write it all down?’
‘Yes,’ said Nicholas.
He didn’t ask many more questions. He had what he wanted to know: what John and Tom Yare might do, if someone, somewhere, some time ceased to like William Knollys.
HE WAS SLEEPING, later that night, when Yare flung open the door and shook his shoulder. Tom’s face in the darkness was as red as a beacon. His face was as red as the window, which glared with the red of a beacon which, copying its light to another, would leap from crest to crest to crest to the north, waking Scotland.
The beacon that warned, as Tom Yare was trying to tell him, that the whole English fleet was at sea, and was out there, blind eyes in the moonlight, sweeping north to the Forth.
Chapter 32
Thir folk suld be first on the seye, for quhy
Throw waik spreit of thaim that has the cur
Schippis ar tynt, mor than with stormys stur.
OF THE THREE English flotillas in the water that spring, it was the main fleet of three thousand men under their fifty-year-old commander John, Lord Howard, which took this, the first pre-emptive move by King Edward in the war against Scotland. The ships were loaded with bombards and handguns specially augmented from the artillery caches in Calais, of which Howard had once been deputy-governor. Lord Howard sailed on the Mary Howard, his flagship; and the fleet included the Antony, once owned by the late Admiral Henry van Borselen of Veere, which ten years before had brought the King from his exile in Bruges. The Anthony it was named after, of course, was now a wealthy pensioner of King Louis of France.
It was, above all, a well-timed expedition. King Edward himself was demonstrably still in the south. He had given no audience, as yet, to the Scottish herald and pursuivant sent to patch up the truce and, in the event, never would. The assumption was that the King of Scots, while awaiting them, would be inactive. It was correct in one sense: assured by his scouts of quiet on the Border, the King was persuaded to call no general muster but to wait on events. Those in charge of the King’s ships (and their own) followed a different set of propositions.
In Leith, Gelis was roused by the blare of horns and the clatter of drums just before Crackbene’s man banged on her door. Already the wharves were brilliant with lanterns and as she listened, gripping her cloak, she could see the bloom in the sky to the south; the pulsing bloom that was code for a sea-attack, to be followed by the canon-bell: one stroke for each ship.
And Nicholas and John were away. Ah well. All the more fun for those who were left.
In Edinburgh, the Castle artillery thundered its warning to assemble, even before the beacon fire took proper hold. There would be detailed news soon. There were more lookout posts on that coast than there were bloody guillemots.
Robin shook Kathi awake. ‘Listen! It’s started!’ In the children’s room, Hob started to cry, and Margaret cuddled him.
Father Moriz, dressing hastily, wakened Dr Andreas and Archie of Berecrofts, and vanished across the road to Tobie’s house.
In the King’s tiled house in Blackness, Anselm Adorne and his nephew were roused by a man from Jock Ross at the castle. While the port came awake, a fresh rider took the news to the Queen’s fortified Palace at Linlithgow. Long before, the King’s house had been stripped, and its valuables sent to the Palace. There also were stored the costlier contents of the merchants’ homes and their warehouses. Now the merchants themselves would take refuge there. The village of Blackness had no walls, and its thatched houses were mostly of timber. Its place of strength, with artillery, was the fortress; and many, like Adorne and his nephew, made their way there. Others—the boatmen, the skippers—were already down at the pier.
The night was cool, with a strong, gusty wind from the west which showed unco-operative signs, towards morning, of fading and backing. This suited, however, the oystermen of Musselburgh who set off to their scalps at first daylight, although only two boats were sufficiently assiduous to linger in the estuary all day.
Nicholas pitched into Leith in the afternoon, just as the first of the enemy fleet rounded the Bass. John and Julius were with him.
‘Which?’ he said to Gelis. He looked exhausted and drunk, but was probably just exhausted and wild with excitement.
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