The Raven's Heart

by Jesse Blackadder

  I have never forgotten how he struggled and I have thought of him and prayed for him every day of my life since then. I know my priest, when he hears this, will believe it is a great evil and perhaps my soul will never recover from it. But perhaps it is what I did afterward that was the greater evil.

  At first I thought such an injustice as the Humes carried out could not last long and Hume would be forced to relinquish what he had stolen, in weeks or perhaps a few months. I believed you would be safe at Tulliallan and before long you would be back with us again.

  But I was wrong. I underestimated the Hume clan’s power and their determination to keep the castle. I was married to David Hume within a day and with child in a matter of weeks. By then I knew enough of him to realize he would never relinquish what he had gained.

  I discovered too that he knew of you and knew of my subterfuge. He knew I had murdered to try to keep the castle and in this I was no better than he. He threatened to reveal it and have me hanged.

  I could not protect you myself and that was when I decided what to do. I found a way to send word to Glasgow to Robert Blackadder the Archbishop and, with his royal connections, he arranged the charter that wiped you of your birthright. I made it as public as I could, having it lodged in the church records, sending it to Tulliallan, and making sure that David knew it existed. “The child is nothing but a bastard. Leave him be,” I told him. In reply he said, “Let us hope he never needs reminding of it.”

  I sent money to Tulliallan for you and asked your uncle to make sure you had an honorable living. I preferred you alive, even as a bastard, to being dead with some idea of honor.

  William, I have learned something about this castle. The desire to possess it drives men mad. My own actions to keep it have brought great suffering, and I wonder if that is the reason the Blackadders have never been able to regain it. A punishment for my sins, perhaps? I knew what a burden it would be upon you to carry the family’s expectation. I knew that after Hume children and their children were born here, it would never be possible for the Blackadder family to regain it and I did not wish to see your life sacrificed for such a thing.

  I hope you understand that I gave you freedom to make what honorable life you could. I wanted you to marry and have children without fearing they would be lost to you, as you were lost to me. It is too great a price to pay.

  Now David Hume has been dead for many years and I do not have long to live myself. Beatrice’s son Alexander is the next owner of Blackadder Castle. Do not regret its loss—in the end it is just stone. I traded your birthright for your life and in my mind it was a fair trade. It has brought me some comfort, in the nights when the loss of you was a hole inside me.

  With love, my son.

  This Thursday 17 March 1541, at Blackadder.

  Alison Douglas

  I stagger at the end of the letter and I put my hand out to take hold of something steady in this crumbling world.

  Sixty-seven

  I fold up the parchment with shaking hands. Someone brings whisky and I raise it to my lips, but the stench of it makes me gag, and I put the cup down again. Damn Beatrice for having told me that such a letter exists.

  “Leave me,” I say to them, and I turn my back.

  My voice brooks no argument. Even Isobel dares not speak to me. They leave the room quietly and close the door behind them.

  I look out into the High Street, at Edinburgh, the pride of Scotland, seething with hatred, and I let my heart join it. The black running water is inside me. If William had seen such a letter earlier, he could have carved out a life as a ship’s captain with quiet honor and I would never have had to know the depths of the Blackadder family’s treachery.

  It is an evil thing, that castle, extending its long shadow over our lives. It has driven men and women to deceit, betrayal, and murder for the chance to own it. I thought we had a sacred bond with the land and the water, but perhaps the bond my family made was nothing more than greed.

  I stay still and the roar of the evening gradually dies down into the silence of the night, broken by scattered yells. Sophie and Isobel have long since retired, the household has bedded down and still I sit here.

  Up on the High Street, the Queen awaits her fate, and down below its surface this same night my father is in a cell, imagining what awaits him.

  I rise from my seat, find my cloak and slip out into the night. I will keep vigil with them. I do not care any more what befalls me.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  It is a summer night in Edinburgh and her wynds and closes stink like carcasses. But her High Street, the pathway of lords and kings, runs broad and open down the spine of the hill, connecting the castle to Holyrood Palace, passing through Saint Giles and the Tolbooth. All the instruments of power in this land—the monarchy, the nobility, the church, and the law—all strung out along the city’s backbone.

  I creep like a spy to a shadowed corner where I can watch Black Turnpike. There is a light burning in the front room upstairs. The Queen will be keeping her own vigil tonight, on her knees praying to her Catholic God to release her from the grip of her Protestant lords.

  If I leave her, what shall I have left?

  She has been everything. She has been the light that shone on my days, and the shadow cast over them. Like Alison Douglas, I have murdered, sending boy after boy to Darnley, for the good of the Queen and for my own gain.

  What deluded creatures we are. God, Protestant or Catholic, must laugh bitterly when He watches our furious machinations, our arrogant belief that we hold our own fates in our hands. What hope do the ordinary men and women hold, if even our Queen cannot rule her own destiny?

  Sophie says I can’t help the Queen any longer, but a queen is not overthrown so easily. There will be those gathering even now to support her. There will be plans and counterplots, diplomats sent and communiqués written from church and state all over Europe. The Confederate Lords have struck a decisive blow in the battle, but they have not yet won it.

  And the Queen, our brave Queen, will even now be planning some daring escape. She has triumphed before, against great peril. I could stay by her side, help her, comfort her.

  There is a movement in the shadows nearby and I freeze. Someone else watches. I hear a muffled sob that I recognize.

  “Seton?” I whisper, and cross to her side.

  “While she is awake, I shall stay awake,” she says.

  “But why out here?”

  “They will not let me in with her. They know I am no danger. They do not even bother to confine me. So I shall pray for her out here, where at least I can watch for her light.”

  I crouch beside her. “Will you go back to your family?”

  She shakes her head in the dark. “Why do you ask? You know I will never leave her.”

  I lean back against the rough stone, and Seton bows her head in prayer again. After a moment I stand and touch her shoulder in farewell.

  I creep farther up the street and come into the market square. It is easy to press into a shadow against the walls of Saint Giles and watch the Tolbooth. A lantern burns at the door and two guards yawn and scratch.

  There will be lords still plotting now how to free the Queen, but there is no one planning how to free William. The only one who might, Bothwell, is a fugitive himself.

  My father sits deep in the Tolbooth, under my very feet. I crouch down, then kneel. Then I prostrate myself on the ground and press my ear to the stones, as if I could hear him. I strain to listen. The cold rises into me.

  Edinburgh is a city of stone, and stone is too old to care what human hands touch it and press it, what human blood is spilt upon it, what tears rain into its cracks. The stones do not speak of William. They do not speak of kings or queens. They do not speak names. They speak of stretches of time I can hardly imagine. They speak of sea and earth and heaven. They speak of stars tracing their mysterious lines through the sky. They speak of human lives forgotten and human lives unborn.

  I press my hand
s to them, as if some trace of warmth might make its way through them and find William. I press my hands to them as though I could become part of them. My heart is a stone already. If I lie there against the stone long enough, my whole body will harden.

  It is close to dawn by the time I make my way back, shadow to shadow, down the High Street. A breeze has sprung up, whispering of a summer day, and there is a slight chill in the air.

  Isobel is waiting, sitting outside the door, a cloak wrapped around her. I do not see her and I jump when she speaks softly.

  “I read it,” she says, getting to her feet.

  My hand is on my dagger. “You had no right.”

  “She was my grandmother.”

  “And mine, for all the good it has done me,” I say bitterly. “You should have let me die in the river. It would have been kinder than knowing what I know of this family.”

  She steps forward and grabs my shoulders with both hands, taking me by surprise, and before I can fight her off she shakes me. I do not expect such strength from her. My teeth knock together, my head snaps back, my bones seem to loosen in their sockets.

  “You’re always so angry,” she says.

  Were I a man, I would stab her, but I am a woman and instead I start to cry. She accuses me of just what I see in William: a life burned up in useless rage.

  When she stops, my bones have turned to water and I stagger against her. I put a hand out, I grip the fabric of her cloak. She brings me close slowly, as though I am a wild animal that might turn on her and, in truth, I am trembling with the fear of what I will do to her. Don’t unleash the river, I want to beg. Not the black running water, not the danger of such feeling, not the risk of drowning, not that.

  Then I am against her and she is at once river and land, ocean and earth, solidity and melting. How could all that be contained in one body?

  She knows nothing of love between women, but she brings her lips to mine and my blood thunders in my ears. She does not know the art of kissing, she is no experienced courtier, but her lips are raw feeling, rushing into me, her lips are waterfalls and rapids beating on the rock of my heart. It is not stone after all, in the face of such a deluge. It does care what human touches it.

  At the end she draws back a little to look at me. The light is changing. I can see her face as everything moves from black to gray and she looks at me. She touches my cheek again with a trembling hand.

  “Alison Blackadder,” she says.

  Sixty-eight

  This will be the manner of his death if he does not confess.

  For murdering the King, a man is drawn backward on a cart through the city to the Mercat Cross. There he is hanged by the neck until the life is almost choked from him. But his neck is not allowed to snap and he is cut down while the flame of life still flickers. Then a sword is drawn across his belly and his insides dragged out with a hook, while he yet lives. At last he is quartered like the carcass of some beast.

  Once it is done, not even his bones will lie in peace: arms, legs, body, and head will be separated in death, nailed up like carrion at the entrances of four towns—Glasgow, Stirling, Perth, and Dundee—with his head left on a pike here in Edinburgh, food for the kites and ravens.

  “They won’t torture him to death,” Sophie says. “They need a public execution for this. They will offer him a chance to confess and be killed by hanging only. But such a promise cannot be trusted.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  The stench, of vomit and excrement and urine, is like a solid thing in the air, and the dark is full of groans and whimpers and the scuttling of rats. If the priests ever wanted to show us hell, they need only step a few feet away from Saint Giles into the Tolbooth.

  Prisoners are not allowed visitors, but Sophie’s gold in the hands of the lawyer has bought me a little time with William before his trial, and one of his gaolers leads me down the corridor, hewn out of bedrock, past rows of cells from which the sounds of agony and madness emanate as we pass. Once I hear a cry, a familiar voice as we pass a set of bars, a scuffle. “It is Jock here,” a voice calls. “I beg you, help us. Help us!” The last rises to a near shriek and I shudder, but I do not turn around.

  William is on the floor and, at first, as the lantern light slants across him, I think he is dead. His eyes are half-closed, only the whites showing, and all his limbs are splayed unnaturally. The gaoler enters the cell and shoves his foot against William, who stirs and moans.

  “I’ll be back for you shortly,” he says to me with a leer.

  “Will you at least leave me the lantern?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady.

  “No lights allowed here,” he says. “You’re breaking the rules anyway. Have to sit with him in the dark. You’ll be ready to leave when I get back.”

  He clangs the door behind him and his footsteps retreat and in the silence that’s left I hear the steady sound of dripping. I get down to my hands and knees and start to crawl in William’s direction.

  “William?” I say, resisting the urge to whisper. When there’s no answer, I try again, louder. “Father?”

  The sound of him stirring, the ragged catch of his breath. “Alison?”

  I feel something soft against my fingertips and find my way to his chest. “I’m here.”

  He makes a sound of such agony that I recoil in horror, thinking it is my touch that hurts him.

  His breath is ragged, coming in great sobs. “No, no, not my daughter. God no.”

  I reach forward again. “It’s all right, Father. I’m not imprisoned here. I’ve come to see you, that’s all.”

  His breathing eases a little, but I realize he’s weeping. I cannot bear the sound of it.

  “I don’t want to hurt you,” I say, leaning close. “Where can I touch you?”

  “Head,” he says.

  I move around the strange shapes of his limbs on the floor until I find his head. I put my hand on his hair and then bend down and kiss him on the brow, and there is a sound like a broken sigh. I feel around his neck and shoulders but they are shaped all wrong and I dare not lift his head to lie in my lap.

  I bring my own body down flat and put my face close to his, so close our cheeks are touching in the dark and I cannot tell where the wetness comes from. I rest my hand on his chest again and I can feel the rise and fall of his breathing and the thudding of his heart against my fingers.

  “I have something to tell you,” I say.

  “And I you,” he says, labored.

  “I’ll stay with you.” My voice breaks. “I’ll be waiting and watching over you, Father.”

  “No,” he says. “Promise me. Leave Edinburgh. Promise me, do not watch when they bring me out. Wherever you were going to sail, go.”

  “For once, let me be with you!”

  His face moves and, although his voice is ragged, it is tender. “You are with me, my girl. They can never take you out of me.”

  I bring my other arm around until I am holding him.

  “I was so afraid they’d hurt you,” he whispers. “I tried to make you run away. Why didn’t you go?”

  I am glad of the dark. The cold of the stone presses my belly and my heart cracks a little. “I couldn’t leave you.”

  “Go to France, find your mother’s family. Go anywhere. The castle is nothing.”

  “You’re right,” I say. “But you must know. I saw Beatrice. She gave me a letter from your mother.”

  “Good,” he says.

  “Shall I tell you what it said?”

  “No,” he says. “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “I never meant to hurt you,” I whisper.

  He is silent a long time. “I would have liked to see the river,” he says at last, so faint.

  “Here it is,” I whisper, my face close. “I have carried it to you.” I hold him and weep silently, as if tears could wash him away.

  Up in the corridor I hear the clang of the gate, and see a glimmer of light. “I will have to go, Father.”

  He whispers softly,
“There’s money, behind a stone, near the fireplace. Take it.”

  I press my lips to his cheek. “I don’t want to leave you.”

  “You must,” he says. “My love.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  It takes a sizeable number of William’s coins to buy our passage on a ship to Denmark. It pulls out of Leith with the tide on the morning of the summer solstice, a clear day when the sky and the sea are both blue and the wind smells of nothing except empty ocean. Sophie, Red, Isobel, and I, bound for a new life.

  It is less than six years since I sailed into this port with the Queen and the promise of life and color and joy was enough for me to pledge my heart to her. Now she waits, imprisoned in Loch Leven on an island where none can reach her easily, for a change in her fortunes. She promised light and wonder, and along with them came murder and betrayal.

  She stood here on the deck of the ship with her four Marys around her, five pretty maidens against the might of Scotland. If I had not been so young myself, I could have foreseen her fate that day. She had no hope against the nobles of this country, who would never in truth tolerate a woman ruling over them. It is an ancient, blood-soaked country and six years in the hands of a woman has not been enough to change it.

  Isobel is beside me, staring back at the land. I expect her face to be somber as she walks away from a noble lineage and all its privileges, but a smile creeps around the corners of her mouth. She leans close, the wind rushing around us. “Sophie has told me that in Sweden there is a whole army of women dressed as soldiers,” she says. “Shall we go and find them?”

  I look at the shoreline as it draws away from us, and then back at Isobel again. Her red hair blows across her forehead and her eyes are the exact green of the ocean. I shrug, and spread out my hands.

  Can I love her?

  My heart struggles and beats like a trapped bird as the space between me and the soil of Scotland widens. I have left the Queen to her fate, I have left William to his death. I have left the Blackadder Water to flow from the heather of the Lammermuir Hills, down, down, past a castle that will one day again be a collection of stone, past the villages, into the waters of the Whiteadder and down into the sea. The Hume clan will live and die, babies will be born, men will grow old, women will dance and plow fields, the stars turn in the sky, the rocks crumble and fall, and still that river will run, no matter who claims it.