Until I saw her, I believed I hungered only for the lost castle of Blackadder. If I were a court poet I would scribe a verse praising her as the first stream of sunlight to strike the slate-gray stone of the castle on the rock. I am no poet, so it is only my imagination’s parchment where I scratch down that she has exploded into me like a gunpowder flash and I am still half-blinded, ears ringing.
Two
Edinburgh, the fortress. At its highest point, Edinburgh Castle broods over the city, dark and ancient. It crowns the Flodden Wall, which was built to keep the citizens safe but now encircles the streets so tightly there is nowhere to go except up. Some of the tenements rise twelve floors from the ground and waste is thrown down past the windows day and night. Edinburgh is sprouting upward like a crop of mushrooms in a bed of slop.
Holyrood Palace, built in the French style by the Queen’s own father, lies far away from the tenements at the city’s lowest point by the rocky rise of Arthur’s Seat. Set into green gardens, it is wantonly decorative with its round towers, wide windows, and the soaring spires of its abbey. The Queen will live here as if there is no danger in the land, while the rest of the city huddles inside the wall with guarded gates and night-watch patrols.
She returns to the country of her birth speaking French, married, orphaned, and widowed by the age of eighteen, and the nobles do not know how to greet her. We have spent much of her life under a regent elect where the real business of majesty was the redistribution of wealth and power among the nobility, and there have been no pageants to draw attention to that.
But while the lords and nobles prevaricate, the ordinary people light bonfires every night and sing in the streets in their hundreds. It is not so long since they were Catholics like the Queen and just three months past they rioted against the reformers and held the May revelry in defiance. Robin Hood and Little John walked the streets as of old. The reformers condemned one of them to hanging but the crowds rose in fury and rescued him from the gibbet. The people do not want such joyless lives and the Queen brings with her the promise of delight.
Almost a fortnight after she rides into Edinburgh, the Lord Provost finally holds the first formal reception to welcome her home. My father and I manage to be included, dressed in the finest garb we possess, almost blending in among the lesser nobles. Once our name would have put us closer to the monarch but now it is by Lord Bothwell’s grace we are here at all, included only as men in his service. We stand at the rear of the room with him, while the other nobles jostle close to the door where she will enter.
The musicians strike up a welcome, there is a ripple of excitement, and I crane my neck to see her. She appears: we drop our heads and sink low and then she bids us rise in her clear voice. As she begins to move, a hum of chatter breaks out.
“She needs a man,” Bothwell says from the side of his mouth. “Look at her. Ripe.”
For this evening she is dressed in a gloriously embroidered gown of simple white, while her ladies are her foil, garbed in shades that hurt my eyes. In reformist Scotland we have forgotten such colors exist.
“Those French idiots married her to a child.” Bothwell gives a sly grin and drops his voice. “She’s a beauty. I could give her an education.”
“She’s a girl.” William almost spits the words. “Better for Scotland if she carried a sow’s face. What good will it do us to have a pretty child Queen and a coterie of giggling maidens? We need a strong ruler.”
The Lord Provost has set a raised chair for the Queen in the middle of one wall and she moves past us, making her roundabout way to it so that she may greet the guests. She favors Bothwell with a nod and when she catches sight of me she smiles. I smile back at her until William jabs my back and I drop to one knee and bend my neck. I stare at the stone, my knee hurting and my face burning, until she is seated to receive her nobles.
Bothwell winks at me as I rise to my feet again. “Another one to fall under Robbie’s spell. You can even charm a queen, lad.”
“You’d better learn some manners,” William says.
Bothwell shrugs. “I’ll bet the Queen is sick of manners. You should send Robbie to plead your family’s cause.”
“Robert is too young.”
I straighten. “I’m not. I could persuade her, William.”
He turns to look at me as though he has only just noticed I’m no longer a child.
Bothwell claps a hand on William’s shoulder. “Our sailing days are over, my man. I’ll be here in the city, serving her, and your cousins will have to run your ship for now. Why not try getting Robbie into the royal household and see what favor he can find?”
My father narrows his eyes but before he can answer, Bothwell nudges him and jerks his head. “See? Already he honeys her ear.”
William clenches his fists when he sees who is addressing the Queen, and I ease away from him.
“Look well, young Robbie,” Bothwell says, his voice dropping so none can overhear. “There is your foe.”
I turn to take my mark of Lord Hume, chief of the Hume clan with its rich estates and castles. His cursed cousin forced William’s mother, my grandmother, into marriage and his cursed clan has held fast to Blackadder Castle for more than forty years. He is one of Scotland’s leading nobles. William is but a sea captain and I thought by all to be his lowly nephew.
As Hume and his wife bow and step away from the Queen, William hisses, “Do not stare,” and I lower my eyes. But this is the first time I have seen the head of the clan that stole our birthright and I tilt my head to observe him.
He is born of men who have fought for their wealth and, unlike some of the Queen’s lords, he is strong and battle-scarred. He smiles at the Queen, but it is the smile of a warrior, not a flatterer. With his fortress, Hume Castle, providing early warning of English invasions, Lord Hume controls much of the lower corner of the country where it abuts England and the sea, and he has not gained such lands and men by fawning.
“How will you win her favor?” Bothwell asks, so quietly I can hardly hear him. “Hume is already making himself popular. You must act quickly.”
“Let me try,” I say to William. “She has noticed me.”
William says nothing and I turn my gaze back to the Queen. All around, the faces turned toward her are hungry. Not only the men, whose desire is more naked, but the women too. She is a fire roaring in a hearth that has been ashes for all our living memory.
There is a shift and a stir down the length of the hall. The musicians play a few notes and then strike up a galliard. Men and women shuffle and move into long lines, and the Queen rises to her feet to join in. In a few moments the floor is a swirl of color. I put aside thought of Hume, step up, and partner a pretty noblewoman, taking her by the waist and swinging her around in a practiced sweep. She smiles at me.
I glance up to see the Queen dancing her way toward me. She is easy to see, being a good head above the women and many of the men too, and none of us can keep our gazes where they should be. Under its bindings, my heart starts pounding. By the time she has progressed down the line and come to face me, my cheeks are hot.
“Welcome to Scotland, Your Grace,” I greet her in French, my mother tongue. At its familiar tones, her half-smile becomes a full one.
“My Edinburgh messenger. I thank you for your hard ride and your fine mare.” She looks me over unashamedly until my cheeks are even hotter. I concentrate hard on my step and skip, step and skip.
Our eyes meet as the final turn comes. I put my hand on her waist and spin her around. She moves easily. “I do not know your name,” she says.
I lean in as close as I dare. “I am Robert, from the family of Blackadder.”
She wrinkles her forehead. “I have heard that name,” she says, before moving to the next man.
After the dance, I steal away to hold the words we have shared close to my breast. But no sooner have I settled back against a pillar than a hand falls heavily on my shoulder.
“I have it now,” my father says, le
aning close. “Bothwell was right, though he knows not why. It’s time to put your sword away, my lad. A boy will never get close enough. But a lady-in-waiting could become a confidante. Such a girl could win the Queen to her cause.”
I try to pull away, but he has me firmly by the shoulder. “She already has girls,” I protest. “The four Marys never leave her side.”
“The Marys have been away as long as she,” William says. “She needs a woman who knows how Scotland works. I don’t see that person here, Robert. You could make her need you. It’s time to unbind yourself and return to womanly ways.”
Since I was eight years old I have known how to use a dagger and sword, how to pitch my words low and cock my hips forward. For half my life I have pulled on my boots and walked or ridden as a boy.
It is so simple for him to turn my world in a moment. Unbind yourself and return to womanly ways, he says, as though it is simply a matter of loosening the bands of fabric that have constricted my breasts for so long they are part of me. As simple as unlearning the wide-legged stance, the turned-out walk, the set of the jaw, the lift of the eyes when challenged.
“She already knows me as Robert,” I say. “Anyway, I have no courtly ways. I will stammer and faint in those choking frocks. I will forget myself and spit, or look upon her too boldly.”
William drops his hand from my shoulder to my arm and closes his powerful fingers until I wince and grit my teeth. “You are getting too old for this disguise,” he says. “Did you think you would run about as a stripling forever?”
“Even if a captain’s child could come to court, Hume will find out that your daughter lives,” I say.
“A Tulliallan Blackadder is noble enough for such rank. You will come as John and Margaret’s daughter and pose no threat to Hume.” William’s fingers grind deeper into my arm.
“If you would have me a woman, then unhand me,” I say.
He stares down at me for a moment, then abruptly loosens his grip. There will be a band of bruising around my arm, and not for the first time.
“Get home,” he hisses. “Tomorrow you ride to Tulliallan.”
≈ ≈ ≈
I remember the cold touch of the Blackadder Water, the black running river that carries my name, the river that holds our fate. I have never laid eyes on Blackadder Castle, but I have traced that river to its source, gone on horseback and foot through the Lammermuir Hills, pushed through gorse and bracken and come to the place where the water gently rises. There, at that soft moment in the heather, it is not black at all, but clear across my hand and as cold as death on my fingers. It burns like ice, water that doesn’t know its own history yet, water that knows nothing but having fallen as rain on the hills, water that has been floating as mist, water insubstantial.
William is nearing half a century of years and he has lived all of those he can remember without walking on the land that carries his name. When he was carried on horseback for two nights to the safety of his relatives, the clan chief Sir John Blackadder did not want the might of Hume hammering at the defenses of Tulliallan. He kept William only a few days before sending him away to the west in secret. A poorer branch of the family took him in and for a time he disappeared among a rabble of brawling cousins, another dirty boy in a tiny holding.
The powerful men of the family set about winning back the castle and freeing William’s mother and sisters from David Hume and his brothers. But the Humes were not known as the Spears of Wedderburn for nothing. Robert Blackadder, Prior of Coldingham, was slaughtered along with his entire hunting party by Hume men on the Lammerton Moor, shouting his curse on the Hume family as he died. Patrick Blackadder, Archdeacon of Glasgow, was ambushed on the way to meet Lord Hume in Edinburgh and killed in the swamp of Nor Loch. Sir John of Tulliallan, father to my foster father, the current Sir John, was beheaded, ostensibly in punishment for a crime, but the family believed Hume had a hand in it.
We believed the land would protect us as we protected it, that the very river itself would rise against those who stole it from us. This land was granted to us by a king, and is not a king second only to God? King James II stood by the riverbank and a battle-weary man knelt in front of him, head bowed, hands resting on the hilt of his sword, its tip buried in the dark earth. And when that man rose again, the name of the river was his name: Blackadder. He nicked his arm and let his blood drip into the water to signify his bond to it.
But as the Humes continue to prosper, Blackadder Castle stands strong. The river has not washed them away and the stones do not dislodge themselves in outrage.
When William was old enough, John Blackadder the younger, by then the family’s head, bought him a small ship, a livelihood that would keep him far from Tulliallan. William lived a sailing life, taking his ruffian cousins Edmund and John (known as Jock) on board the Avenger as crew. He found himself a French wife on one of his voyages and brought her back to Edinburgh. They were a captain’s well-to-do family on the middle floor of a tenement in the Grass Market. He carried goods for some of Edinburgh’s greatest merchants and his cousins plied a fruitful trade in piracy.
But William never forgot what was his. To his wife, and to me his daughter, he whispered night after night of the castle so that I fell asleep with the stories of it echoing in my head. His words painted a picture of our lost home, its turrets rising from the bank of Blackadder Water. He whispered of his plan to petition the young Queen of Scots when she returned to Scotland from France, where she’d been sent for safety. He whispered that she would be our salvation.
Somehow those whispers reached the ears of the Hume family.
My mother, large-bellied with her next child, was murdered on Christmas Eve when I was eight years old. William had taken my hand and walked me to market to buy me a ribbon. I remember that day, the feeling of his big hand engulfing mine, the sound that came from his lips when we returned home and found the door swinging and the blood on the floor. He pushed my face into his belly so I would not see what they had done to her. And then, when a sound revealed an assassin still waiting, he swept me onto his shoulder and we fled, twisting through the secret ways of Edinburgh that he had made it his business to know.
≈ ≈ ≈
I run through the dark streets, slipping down the wynds and lanes, keeping my footfalls soft on the cobbles, my breath a mist on the air. A woman’s voice rises in invitation from a doorway. A cur snarls at my heels until I kick out and hit soft, yelping flesh. Men spill out of a tavern. It is the Queen’s welcome after all, and the whole city will dance and drink around such an event.
I slip into the darkness of the wynd, glancing around to make sure no one sees. I unlock the heavy door set low into the stone wall and step inside, locking it behind me. I know the long fall of these steps, down, down below the level of the city streets. Another locked door in the pitch-blackness, which I open by feel and pull closed behind me. I take out my tinder and flint and strike until I can light a candle, the light flaring in my eyes.
We have come from noble blood, but now we live in the city like rats, without daylight, knowing every escape route. We have made fast our own corner of it to keep out the drunks and condemned men who live in this subterranean world, and we can escape by the network of tunnels that crisscrosses beneath the city. Thus far, our enemies have never found us here.
I climb into my bed but my heart refuses to slow. I cannot sleep. The Queen has noticed me. She has danced with me; she has heard my name. After a life spent waiting for her return, at last I have the chance to regain our castle. Perhaps it will be I who wins back our lands and the family honor. If I can befriend the Queen and win her to our cause, it will not be long before I sleep in a castle of my own, without fearing that my enemies will find me in the dark.
I have seen the Queen through the eyes of a young man, widestanced, scabbard strapped to my waist, loose shirt over my small, bound breasts. I long to see her again, but to do so I must give up the life I know and take again the name that has always meant danger:
Alison Blackadder.
Three
To make me as a woman, I must be unmade as a man.
There is one perfectly suited to this task. Margaret Halkerstone, the wife of Sir John of the Tulliallan Blackadders, who has railed against my disguise since the day my father first put me into it and she was forced to foster me.
“Who in God’s name is this?” John had said, all those years ago when we stumbled into his great hall, William dressed as a serving woman and me a ragged-haired boy.
William pulled his rough cloak back and tore off his wig. “Someone betrayed us,” he said. “Hume has murdered my wife in my own house. We barely escaped.”
Margaret came across to me. “What have you done to the child?” she asked, running her hand over my close-cropped head.
“She’s alive, at least,” William said. “My customer Sophie disguised us so we could flee.”
John shook his head. “I am sorry for it, but you cannot stay here. If this is true, you bring too much danger.”
William’s hand gripped mine as though he would crush it. “I will go to sea,” he answered, his voice tight. “Word has gone to my cousins to bring the ship to Saint Andrews. But I cannot take the child and Hume will kill her if he finds her.”
“It’s not killing her that Hume wants,” John said. “She’s the youngest heir. If he gets your daughter, he’ll marry her to one of his spawn and then the theft is complete.”
They stared at each other in silence. I looked at the floor. In the days since my mother had been killed, I had already learned not to cry.
“Keep her in disguise,” William said. “You have enough sons here. She won’t be noticed.”
“You can’t!” Margaret said. “She’s a girl, for God’s sake.”
“Then what?” William snapped.
“Let us have her,” Margaret said. “Not as yours, but as our own. A Tulliallan Blackadder. I have longed for a daughter. She’ll be safe as one of us.”
The Raven's Heart Page 2