by Alex Dylan
Three of Pentacles. Building something lasting, a realm, not just a single country.
Two of Swords. Crossed swords symbolising the Saltire cross of Scotland. A blind eye and a heart symbolising the secret deal done with England’s queen. Painful choices, a legacy that required the sacrifice of the border, the very thing that defined Scotland as separate from England.
Ten of Swords. Betrayal; of so many, the reivers, of those Scots and English nobles whose lands were in the Borders.
The Tower. Sudden change, so sudden she hadn’t seen it coming until it was too late.
Queen of Cups, reversed. A queen overturned; deceitfulness. Elizabeth had been betrayed by her own ministers. Her beloved England, her people, all lost. James Stewart would be king of them all.
Chapter 14: Gunpowder, Treason and Plot
Border Ridge, Drover’s Trail
No birds sang as Heughan rode past parched river beds, where only moss flowed freely over scattered branches and broken rocks. For a long hour, the rock-strewn path climbed steadily upwards in silence. Heughan loosed the reins and let the horse pick his own way. They both knew the Thief Road well and had smuggled cattle along it many times. Hooves struck rhythmically across shale. Shards slid in all directions with the sharp cracking sound of breaking pottery.
When the climb became too steep, Heughan dismounted to lead the horse cautiously over the upland marsh. Wiry sheep moved aside for them with disinterest, fading in and out of the uneven landscape. Heughan pressed on, making for a shieling he knew to nestle in the leeward crest of the hill. As the mist and drizzle combined forces to produce a sloping curtain of rain, he picked up the pace anew.
At last he reached the rough wood shanty and lifted the firm bar from its latch to lead Aluino inside. The hut was a summer refuge for the mountain shepherds, and there remained a small amount of sweet hay. Heughan was glad that there would be both fodder for his horse and a place for him to rest in relative comfort. He unsaddled Aluino and let him feed before pulling off his boots and stuffing them with straw to help remove the worst of the dampness from the leather.
Mindful of the need for concealment, Heughan forbad himself the comfort of even a small hearth. He made do with some brown bread and leathery sheep’s milk cheese from his pack before settling down in the straw for the night.
* * *
The solidity of Newcastle made James feel more comfortable with his surroundings. His injured shoulder ached and the journey by carriage had been far from pleasant. He was glad to rest and gather his men to him, sharing a cup of Malmsey wine with them.
Mark was engaging in a discrete conference with George Home, Master of the King’s Wardrobe, when James asked for an account of what had happened at Carlisle. He smiled as Mark described how he had manoeuvred around Ambrose Middlemore. Even in Newcastle, the man’s avarice was remarked upon.
“So it’s all true what they say about Middlemore?” James asked.
“That he’s a shallow, venal man, lacking in morals, Highness? Yes,” replied Mark A’Court.
“Oh well, I wouldn’t hold that against him,” smirked James. “I like shallow men,” winking to the page as he passed his wine-cup for refilling. The young man laughed nervously.
“And the witch?” he continued.
“Witch, Highness?” replied Mark.
“Don’t play games with me, Mark,” reproached James, waggling an elegant finger at him. “Did you find me a witch?” he asked, rubbing his hands together in anticipation.
“Highness, I know this is something of a personal interest…” Mark began.
James interrupted him, “Personal? Is God’s work personal?”
Mark A’Court knew when to hold his tongue and bowed submissively.
“Did I ask to be king?” James continued stoutly. “I have been placed here by divine will. Years of entreaty, a throne not mine, a murdered mother…” he reached out for the nearest hand to steady himself, overcome with emotion.
Mark noticed the accommodating page ease to the king’s side to hold his hand tenderly. He murmured soft assurances, exchanging sympathetic, sidelong glances. He had a whore’s cunning eyes that slipped and slid before they once alighted. Then they would flit away again slyly as a blowfly on a sheep’s carcass.
Not for the first time, Mark found himself speculating how many of the rumours of intimate relations between the two men were true. He disliked the king’s catamites and mentally planned how he was going to manage the situation. Perhaps he could persuade the London Court that their relationship was biblically more akin to the friendship of David and Jonathan than Sodom and Gomorrah. Perhaps not. Those seasoned courtiers, like Robert Carey, who had attended Elizabeth as well as James’s Scottish Court would know the truth. He could achieve damage limitation by doubling up the Scottish and English courtiers so they could spy on each other. Then he would have to eliminate the old guard; Carey, Ralegh and the others who knew too much. One problem at a time, he thought, his eyes on the king.
James, meantime, had found the strength to continue, “I have been ripped between Scotland and England, lectured by Presbyterians, bloody Presbyterians, I hate the dour bastards, Protestants, Puritans, Catholics and Jesuits, who are just puritanical papists, and I say enough of it. No man has suffered more than I,” he said, allowing his head to droop.
Mark nearly clapped at the pitiful piece of theatre and caught himself just in time. James held the rapt attention of all the other men. Only George Home winked at Mark and rolled his eyes to show what he thought. Mark sighed to himself. He wondered why the king felt the need for these affectations of manner. He was a shrewd and clever man but did so seem to enjoy the drama of an audience.
The king was speaking again, “God has raised me high, like Job after his tribulations, and I know what I have to do. I have to bring His holy word to the land. Unite the land. One people; one king. One law; God’s law,” he shrugged. “My law. It’s all the same.”
Mark A’Court ignored the garrulous speech and bowed, “As you say, Highness.”
James looked sternly at him.
“Come, come now,” he chided. “See here, today I have been given one thousand pounds as a loan from the good people of York,” he gestured to a money chest, iron-bound and padlocked. “One thousand pounds mark you, from a town that alleges it is ‘very poor’, in the words of Alderman Askwith.”
He turned to the quiet man, astutely observing from the corner. “Whit do ye say, George? Can ye procure me princely raiment now?”
Mark raised his eyebrows just a fraction but George Home had already perceived what being asked. “Highness, I shall be happy to have the management of it, but I fear it will put my young page Robin Kerr out on the street if he does not have Your Highness’s stockings to darn.”
The King looked at the young man serving him wine with assiduous attention as though he had noticed him for the first time. He smiled unevenly. "I’ve had the loan of his stockings before now when the Duke of Rohan came calling. Perhaps we will both be better suited elsewhere. If Robin has other talents, we can find another role for him in our household. He can’t use that rough border name any more though, George, I won’t have hoodlums around me.
“I would be magnanimous and there will be no more frugality. Manage this small thing I ask of you, and you shall not find me ungrateful. If you cover me well, I might even put you in charge of the Exchequer when we reach Whitehall,” James teased.
“Your Highness is generous to a fault,” Home bowed gratefully.
“The people all shall know of my generosity,” James said brightly. “Let it be known that it is our wish that all prisoners except those held for treason and murder are to be released immediately.”
“Highness?” rumbled Mark.
“No, Mark, leave the Borders scum where they are. You can deal with them at your leisure. They offend me. They love me not, any more than the papists do. Make sure the papists stay in gaol too,” he added as an afterthought.
�
��Your Highness could exercise some leniency,” Mark suggested tentatively.
James cut him off, waving a sheaf of papers in a clenched fist.
"Nae, nae, good faith we have no need of the papists now. Absolutely not. Do ye know whit these are? Petitions requesting reforms; petitions requesting me to root out evil, to cleanse the corruption. I will write to the Privy Council and ask that they announce it is my earliest intention to hold Parliament at Westminster.
“In the meantime, you can write to Cecil and tell him that the funeral can take place before I arrive at Whitehall Palace. I’ve seen enough mourning to last me a lifetime.”
He shuddered at a childhood memory. Himself as a small boy trapped between the cold, immoveable palms of death, black sheets pinning him mercilessly to a bed of nightmares. He was constantly haunted by whey-faced women.
First, there had been Elizabeth the Glorious, she of the Byzantine leaden countenance. Sweet cousin, his terrifying cousin, whose sneering disapprobation of him reached out across her letters, her borders and even at last, her death. Then there was his mother. He had no recollections of her; he’d been much too young when he had been taken from her. She lived only in his imaginings, her ghost pale face floating transiently across the slit of sky between wakefulness and sleep wherever he couldn’t screw his eyes quite tight shut to keep her out. Finally, there was his wife; an empty head in an empty bed.
Bloody women. Full of sinfulness, for which he was made to suffer and remember. Those bastard Presbyterians determined he wouldn’t have any sympathy for his mother and the old religion. Relentless George Buchanan, bully and tutor, who had hectored him from a young age with the five doctrines of grace: first tenet, we are all totally depraved. He had the right of it.
George Buchanan, chief tormentor, whipping his back and buttocks, softening the ground to plant the tulip of Calvinism: first and foremost, the people are unlikely of their own inclination to love God…
“The people love me, Mark. Did you no’ see the unalloyed delight in the faces of the welcoming crowds? I must show that I am a king who has English interests at heart, not just those of Scotland.”
Second tenet, unconditional election…
“I must consolidate from London and show that I am a king for all people, for the relief of everyone’s grievances. We must be united.”
“But the Borders, Highness,” Mark A’Court tried again.
Third tenet, limited atonement. Not all can be saved…
James rounded angrily on him, “I don’t give a turd for the Borders. Miserable, ill-begotten place, full of miserable, ill-begotten misfits. They can all burn in hell!”
He paused, breathing zealously.
Fourth tenet, irresistible call. Bring the sheep into the fold…
“Find me the witch, Mark. There has to be wummin’s heretic meddling somewhere behind all of this. Nothing but the wickedness of wummin could persuade good men away from the fear of God and the love of their king. I have heard tell of a Borderers’ witch. Find her. Get Middlemore to help you. Find her and burn her.”
James relaxed and smiled, calm once more.
Fifth tenet, perseverance of the saints. Eternal security…
“Then we shall be at peace.”
* * *
If the Borders weather had had any decency, it would have rained a steady grey sleet for the next week. As it was, the next morning the sun rose just the same and mocked the day by blazing brilliantly in a blue sky.
The death carts were heavily burdened as they rolled over the drawbridge and through the raised portcullis. They brought the bodies to the West Tower and hurried them into the old dungeons, where it was suitably cold.
Rodrigues brought with him the Poor Clare nuns and their Minoress. It was an astute choice on his part; as a contemplative order, they had nothing to say to Melisande and so they managed to work alongside each other in the spirit of a truce. Melisande was able to supply them with the herbs, salves and linens that they needed for their grisly mercies.
Then the women had come for their kin and acknowledged their own. Every sad reunion cut Melisande with a pain that was physical.
At the end of an interminably long day, there were just the two of them left to bear witness to the scale of the tragedy. Melisande lifted the shroud to look at the cold corpse face. The stranger stared back, as though he expected her to recollect him. She lifted the cloth further. The man was dressed in the rough jack of a reiver. Tears burned behind her eyes. It could have been Heughan, if she hadn’t been in such a hurry to turn him out of her bed.
The thought chilled her. She had believed that Heughan had come to her of his own choice, but what if he had been sent? What if someone had intended for them to be found together? It would have made his capture so much easier, and she would have been humiliated, perhaps even implicated. She gnawed at her thumbnail, recollecting the sequence of events at dinner. It had been Ross who had acquiesced to the request for dancing, Ross who had granted Heughan’s suggestion. After she had given Heughan the slip, she had lingered a while in her servant’s disguise, eavesdropping while Mark A’Court discussed matters of state with Ross, before he had waved her away. In spite of her snooping, she hadn’t heard the end of their conversation and couldn’t be certain whether either or both of them had colluded to trap Heughan or whether they had used her as the bait.
She thought then of the song with which Heughan had seduced her, the flowers that he had brought to her. Only one person knew her in such detail; Rodrigues. She could scarcely believe that he would use her as a means to bring down his own heidsman. Then she recalled his mockery of her when she had asked after Heughan, realising with a start that Rodrigues had been as surprised by her reaction as she was herself.
She wondered where Heughan had vanished to. He had a knack for eluding trouble, except when it came in the form of a buxom wench. She remembered the small flowers she had picked from his hair, the rosemary she had found misplaced in the hay barn. She was fairly certain now that Heughan had been passing the time playing ‘tickle my pickle’ with some obliging piece of skirt, probably Lettice. Melisande had to ask herself was that before he had spent the night in her bed; or was it both before and afterwards?
The Chariot. Pulled apart in different directions. A man who turns his back to pursue his own desires.
Looking back with fresh eyes, she could see that perhaps she had misinterpreted. If she wasn’t the object of his affections after all, she had been as much deceived by him as he had by her. She hated to think herself so stupid.
Heughan had turned his back on the city? That must have been why Rodrigues was so certain that he was safe, he knew where he was. They had planned this deception from the beginning. She wondered if Heughan’s men would have such a high opinion of him if they thought that he had knowingly abandoned them to their fates. She looked at the corpse in front of her and felt a flicker of pity. She didn’t know the man. No one seemed to know him. Moreover, no one seemed to care. He was just one anonymous man; a nameless man.
That jarred with her. The atrocious evil had begun with men being denied their own names. It wasn’t right that this man should lack his.
Curiously, she started to look more closely at him, trying to pick up some small clue as to his identity or his life. She stopped herself. She didn’t need to pursue the matter any further. The man was a reiver. How many of the women she had seen today had suffered from him and his kind? She poked a finger into his lifeless chest.
“Bastard,” she said.
She looked at her finger and frowned. He had bled. After she turned him onto his side, it took her a while to find the slim knife wound beneath the ribs where even his jack, damp and rimed with salt, could not protect him. She looked at his neck tentatively. It was bruised but there was no rope mark, so he hadn’t been hanged. He was badly bruised about the face. When she looked closely, she thought she could make out the impression of a hand across his mouth and nose. She fitted her own hand into the purpli
sh palm. A man’s hand, she thought, much larger than her own. Was that the mark of a ring, a thumb? Perhaps if she could find out, she would be able to give a better account of him if anyone came to claim him. Rodrigues wanted her to believe that the man would be giving an account of himself to his creator. She dismissed his belief scornfully. He was a godly fool.
She thought of Rodrigues. She would be able to find some proof to settle one of their old arguments and show him that the man’s soul wasn’t in his body at all. Whoever this reiver had been in life, he wasn’t a tall man in death. She reckoned that she could manage him by herself. The old dungeons weren’t often used; not since the last reiver escape, back when she had still been saddled with a husband. Was it really so long ago?
Everyone knew her story. Ross had been beyond the Debatable Lands, negotiating with James’s intermediaries from the Scottish Court during the Truce Day that saw his son Walter capture the infamous Kinmount Willie Armstrong. Walter and the English Warden, Lord Scrope, brother-in-law to Robert Carey, had imprisoned the Scottish reiver in Carlisle Castle, against the strict observances of Truce Days. As far as reivers on both sides of the Debatable Lands were concerned, that was unpardonable behaviour. Walter Scott, the ‘Bold Buccleuch’, Keeper of Liddesdale, on whose lands the arrest had been made, protested impotently to the English Warden. When Scrope refused to release Armstrong, the Bold Buccleuch himself had led a daring raid on Carlisle Castle. No one quite knew how but a party of men secretly entered the Castle, rescued their compatriots and escaped across the river by the water gate at the West Tower. There had been only one death. No one spoke of it, and no one acknowledged it, even after all this time. The whisper was that Walter Middlemore had been singled out for reiver revenge. When the Scots had completed their rescue, they had unceremoniously tossed him to his death from the ramparts.
Ross had returned to find his son and heir dead, his prisoner gone and the full ire of the queen turned upon him. James Stewart hadn’t escaped entirely unscathed either, since the queen had wanted his assurance that he hadn’t sanctioned the whole episode in an attempt to foment border discord. He had blithely blamed Ross in order to exonerate himself. Ross’s alibi was more treasonous than other explanations, and so he was forced to suffer both the wrath of the queen and the ridicule of the Scottish Lord Wardens. As a further insult, the ballad singers didn’t even mention him.