They had ordered trout baked in cream and chickens stuffed with mushrooms; meanwhile here were some sardines pickled in red wine, and plenty of the crisp fresh white bread of Paris. Lord Seton was wolfing it as a schoolboy would cakes.
‘You find this better than our dry oatcake,’ said my Lord of Bothwell.
‘Horses’ fodder!’ murmured d’Oysel on a soft note of horror; ‘strange how you Scots can gnaw oats and barley, even drink them in your barbarous whisky.’
‘A deal better than a ragoût of baked horse and vol-au-vent of roasted rats, anyway, mon capitaine,’ Seton remarked quickly before Bothwell should bristle, and d’Oysel responded with a wheezy chuckle.
‘Aye, this lucky dog missed all that,’ and Seton turned to Bothwell, ‘ – and a queer sight it was when the truce was settled, to see all the soldiery feeding together, friend with foe, on the sands of Leith, the Scots and French with their siege rations of horse or rat, and the English with their bacon and beef and chickens. I will say, though, they shared handsomely with our fellows.’
Bothwell showed little pleasure in that. ‘All over by June,’ he said; ‘and I need never have lost the half of my stout fellows in that foray I led on Easter Monday.’
The Frenchman blinked his little blue eyes but still seemed too comfortably placid for the effort of speech. It was Seton who protested:
‘You caused more than double that loss to the enemy.’
‘And what of that? When those that were left were all sharing their chicken and rats together in three months’ time! But old Toppet Hob o’ the Main got an Englishman under him that never got up again – but nor did Toppet Hob. And young Kirsty, who was learning to be a handy fellow with a horse, will never go home again; and Jock o’ the Lamb-hill will have to sit like an old woman at his door from now on, since the marrow of his shinbone ran down on his spur leather.’
D’Oysel’s solid calm suddenly exploded. He bounced up on his seat in a bubble of fury. ‘Never have I heard such impractical sentiment! Do you hope to make omelettes without breaking eggs, or battles without breaking bones? This Border warfare makes you Scots too soft; you think, of war as of a raid in which you all know each other by name, even the enemy, and carry off what loot you can with as little loss of life as possible. It is a ridiculous convention – and most dangerous.’
The younger man cocked an impudent eye across that palpitating bulk at Geordie Seton’s ironic grin. It was the first time James Hepburn had been accused of being soft. But his chief amusement was in seeing the fat hot Frenchman blowing up with excitement. He watched him delightedly, murmuring, ‘Up he goes again! No restraint!’
‘An amateur soldier!’ d’Oysel shrilled, then broke off abruptly. ‘It seems I make you laugh.’
‘As any Scot would,’ the Galliard replied airily, ‘when he hears a squeak like an exhausted bagpipe.’
It was a bad start for a pleasant evening. Seton wished his frugal mind hadn’t suggested a Dutch party for this supper; if he had agreed to d’Oysel’s wish to invite Bothwell, who was notoriously short of funds, as their guest, then both would have had to behave better. He quickly turned in a conciliatory way to the Frenchman, talking in his most deliberate fashion, determined not to be interrupted by either of them.
‘You think, Monsieur, in terms of the new artillery and massed armies, where we, as you say, think of our men as persons known by name and generally nickname; it is a habit due to generations, no, centuries of fighting between those who can be friends, and even of the same family, when they are not enemies. But you know well how heartily my lord of Bothwell believes in the modern methods of warfare, the value he places on cannon in siege—’
‘Aye, well he knows it!’ broke in the irrepressible Galliard in spite of him, ‘seeing I led off Harry Percy’s forces on that Christmas wildgoose chase at Haltwellsweir and thought Monsieur d’Oysel and his highly professional soldiers would take the opportunity to besiege Norham Castle. Maybe he’ll tell us now why he didn’t – if it isn’t beyond the comprehension of an amateur!’
‘Lad, you are incorrigible!’ growled Seton in deep annoyance as d’Oysel, with fat hands, fierce blue eyes and tufted eyebrows all upraised together, went off into a stream of Gallic oaths, explanation and abuse. If they got through this supper without the Galliard flinging down one of his challenges to mortal combat, he, Geordie Seton, would need all his wits about him – and just when they were all hoping for Court favour!
But thank God the stuffed chickens had appeared and – ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ he protested, ‘if you must quarrel, leave it, I beg you, to the end of this course, and not let these mushrooms, the first of the season, cool on your plates.’
The poignant appeal went home, d’Oysel admitting with reverence that it would be a crime to spoil their flavour by letting them congeal in the grease of the gravy.
Bothwell laughed and said, ‘Aye, we should keep our breath to cool our porridge, not to fan such tender morsels as these,’ and filled his mouth with them.
Seton knew better than to hope for any sort of apology from him, and got on to politics as soon as d’Oysel showed signs of ceasing the really important discussion of the evening. (‘C’est bon, ca, hein? A suspicion more of the garlic vinegar in the sauce perhaps. – It is possible that the nutmeg has been applied a thought too freely.’)
They questioned how long the peace would last between England and the allies, France and Scotland; and Bothwell, what odds that would make, since the new Queen Elizabeth would work against them whether in war or peace. Or at least her minister, Sir William Cecil, would do so.
‘And our precious new Secretary of State for Scotland, Master “Michael Wily” Maitland of Lethington, is hand in glove with them, I’ll swear.’
‘Aye, I’ve heard him described as a sort of Scottish Cecil,’ said Seton, ‘and the English Queen calls him the flower of the wits in Scotland.’
‘Then the flower bears a rotten dry husk for fruit,’ Bothwell remarked sourly.
He had once caught a glimpse of Elizabeth before she was Queen – a fine upstanding whippy young woman with a wary eye. She would be rising twenty-seven by now, and still too soon to see how she’d shape on the throne; besides, as was to be expected at her age and yet unmarried, she was too busily engaged in making a fool of herself over a man.
Wave after wave of scandal about her and handsome Robert Dudley had been going on for the past eighteen months and had just broken in a storm over the news that Dudley’s inconvenient wife, Amy Robsart by birth, had been found dead at the foot of a staircase in extremely suspicious circumstances. Ambassadors who had been making delicate investigations on behalf of their masters, anxious to know whether they were indeed wooing a Virgin Queen, were now talking openly not merely of immorality but of condoned murder. Her Ambassador in Paris, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, was nearly beside himself with shame. ‘There are too many people here,’ he had burst out, ‘asking what religion is this, that a subject shall kill his wife, and his Queen not only bear with it, but marry him?’
Bothwell’s roar of disagreeable laughter followed the question with another: whether Elizabeth had lost her virginity at thirteen to her stepfather Admiral Seymour, or had waited for Dudley. But unchastity was a slight matter, marriage a serious. If she married her lover, the general view in England was that she would go to bed with him as Queen Elizabeth of England and rise the next morning as plain Mistress Dudley.
A most blessed conclusion, in all their opinions, since this would leave the English throne in the undoubted possession of their young mistress Mary, Queen of Scotland and France and (since Elizabeth had been doubly declared a bastard) of England. The late King Henri II of France, her father-in-law, had insisted on Mary bearing the Royal Arms of England quartered with those of Scotland and France, and had sworn to lead a crusade to win her rightful kingdom.
‘He wished to be young again, a knight errant, a champion of old, for the sake of that charming child – but what would you?’
D’Oysel’s hands outspread in gentle despair; his voice, now loosened and tender with good wine, rocked on mellifluously: ‘He was killed by his valour, his chivalry, his desire to shine before the eyes of his mistress, his wife, his daughter-in-law.’ (D’Oysel’s own eyes were moist at his touching picture of the royal domestic circle.) ‘And so, the sport, a tournament, the chance thrust of a lance in his eye, ended all hope of his championship of this unfolding rosebud.’
‘And what of her?’ asked Bothwell, unbuckling his belt and leaning back in his chair to drink his wine and stare under drowsy lids at the steel-dark river under the purple sky; even here under the dusty plane trees of the little inn garden it was stuffily close.
The gossip his friends repeated bore out his fleeting impression of that tall, grave, glittering child. She was seventeen and a half, and ripe therefore to be a wife, but most people about the French Court doubted that the marriage had ever been consummated, for King François, nearly two years younger than herself, was wretchedly backward and delicate, and had grown far worse in the eighteen months since their marriage, shooting up into a sudden height that overtaxed his already feeble strength.
And as for other affairs, there was still – it was really very odd, almost scandalous, d’Oysel seemed to think it – no hint of them. No doubt she was too closely guarded by her six magnificent uncles, and it would be a rash man who would dare to brave the fury of the Guises. Sheltered, pampered, treasured as an infinitely precious jewel from infancy, hers had been an utterly different upbringing from the smeared, scared girlhood of Elizabeth of England.
Elizabeth had been branded with bastardy by her own father, had struggled with the drab dangers of her over-familiar step-father, Admiral Seymour, of her slyly sensual brother-in-law, Philip of Spain, of her bitterly jealous half-sister, ‘Bloody Mary’.
But Mary Stewart had been the First Lady of the Land since her birth, the object of passionate care from every one of her relatives. The Cardinal de Lorraine watched over her with far more careful intimacy than over his own bastard daughter (‘Devil doubt him! That’s easy seen!’ muttered Bothwell); the late King’s elderly mistress, Diane de Poictiers, had vied with his wife Queen Catherine in supervision of her education and appointment of her governesses, showing that strict perfection of respectability that is only to be attained by a French royal mistress; and the little Queen on the whole spent less time at Court than in the remote country home of her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Duchesse de Guise, an old lady of severe charm and shrewd sympathy, as much a saint as an aristocrat.
Yet even as d’Oysel sketched these extenuating circumstances in a slow trickle of words like the dropping of sweet oil, he evidently found it a grievous oversight that in all this chattering Court, where it was only paying a woman her due compliment to tell tales of her lovers, there were as yet no such tales to tell of its young Queen.
‘But she’s not a woman yet, nor will be for many a day,’ observed Bothwell, with a grunt at the obtuseness of the French gallant, for he himself knew as well as any, and rather better, that women do not all grow up at the same age.
The Frenchman, unheeding, spoke hopefully of ‘a certain foolish fellow we all know, who they say is in serious danger – but yes, literally – of losing his wits for love of her.’
This was the young Earl of Arran, who had lately been Commander of the Scots Guard in France. Bothwell’s knowledge of the family history of that pale gaunt young man with the eyes of a startled hare led him to remark that the loss of his wits would make small odds to him.
‘Well, he’d wit enough to answer your challenge from a safe distance,’ Seton said with a grin at his companion’s strong long arms and nervous fingers that curved inwards in their instinctive grip – a grip that tightened at mention of Arran and memory of his sack of Crichton.
So Arran was losing his head over the Queen, was he? What chance was there that he might work against himself, Bothwell, with her? But Arran, no, that gawk, with the lank untidy hair, he was too futile, Bothwell decided, to have any effect on his fortunes.
Those fortunes were surely at the crux of his career. His chances in his own country, on the face of it, were pretty small, with the Lords of the Congregation in power. The Regent had been his only powerful friend, and his faithful and forcible service of her as faithfully rewarded –
‘And well it might be!’ he suddenly broke out, as the wine glowed more and more warmly in his stomach, and the comfortable dusk dimmed the faces of his companions, so that d’Oysel’s seemed only that of a large pink moon rising through the early autumn mists, and Seton’s the sharp profile of some distant rock; ‘it’s not only Scotland, it’s France, Denmark and Germany, aye, and England, to her cost, who have recognised me as the handiest servant of the Scottish Crown. But now that the Regent’s dead, all that that will do is to make me a marked man for my enemies. And they are now running the government of Scotland!’
‘You don’t suffer from too small an opinion of yourself,’ came in a growl from the distant rock.
‘It is known,’ came in soft agreement from the moon.
But the young man was hot on his career, that career of such enormous, glorious importance that it was inconceivable that the others could be with equal eagerness considering theirs. Nor could anything be strong enough to down it.
‘If Scotland’s finished for me, who cares? There is the rest of the world. My ancestors travelled to Egypt and the Holy Land, my father lived in London and Venice. And I’ve clinked glasses with the Danish King, and his was big enough to float a turbot; I’ve seen the sun at midnight and chased pirates up the Norwegian fiords. That’s a good life, a pirate’s.’
‘I’ve no doubt it would suit you fine,’ said Seton, with a wink at d’Oysel.
‘It would,’ said Bothwell simply. ‘There’s an old Roman writer in my library at home’ – he paused for the effect this should have on his companions – ‘who says of them: “The sea is their school of war and the storm their friend; they are sea-wolves that live on the pillage of the world.”’
‘I take it the book is a translation,’ came that dry, exasperating voice again.
Bothwell ignored the challenge. He tilted back his wooden seat till it all but overturned, and sang, in a powerful though somewhat husky and not entirely sober voice, the refrain of a song by the poet king, James V, father of the young Queen he had seen today:
‘So we’ll go no more a-roving
So late into the night,
We’ll go no more a-roving, boys,
Let the moon shine ne’er so bright.’
‘Well, I’ve no objection to roving farther. The world is widening. It’s a grand thing to live these days and hear every month or so of some fresh discovery on the other side of it. Why should the Spaniard and Portuguee have it all their own way there?’
‘They would not have had,’ said Seton, ‘if that stout ruffian Henry of England had had his way.’
‘Oh, he set about building a navy, but his miserable children have let it all go.’
‘Little King Edward and Bloody Mary did. We’ve yet to see what Elizabeth will do.’
‘Damn Elizabeth! I’m Lord High Admiral of Scotland and I know what I’m talking about. The English navy’s finished. There’s no reason the Scots fleet shouldn’t start again. And I’m the man to do it.’
D’Oysel still kept silence, but Seton took warning from various soft shiftings and heavings of his bulk on the hard seat. He had no wish to have to act as peacemaker again. He gave him a friendly nudge with his elbow to show his amused irritation with the young braggart, and said in a humorously sensible voice, ‘Man, you are clean daft to talk so. It’s bad luck for me as well as you that the Regent died just as we’d convinced her of our excellent qualities – but the Galliard is not the lad to think he can’t convince her daughter of that fact!’
‘If only she weren’t so young!’ the Galliard remarked pensively.
It was the last thing they expected from
him, even in this winewarmed and unguarded mood, and their roar of laughter stopped any explanation from him, though they demanded, even begged it. He was too soothed and complacent by now to be furious at their laughter, but he felt he had made a fool of himself and fell into sullen silence.
But his remark had been perfectly genuine. That girl he had seen today was young even for her age, which was bad enough. He found no attraction in young girls, had no experience of them, since he had always preferred older women, and in his rough and dissolute boyhood, deprived of his mother when nine years old by a peculiarly cynical divorce suit of his father’s, he had had no chance, as well as no inclination, to meet any such delicately nurtured and guarded specimen as now awaited him in the person of his Queen. He would do nothing to precipitate his meeting with her, but await his chance for an introduction. He planned this as policy, but in fact felt a most unwonted and uncomfortable shyness at the prospect, a sensation that would have astounded his companions could they have known it.
They were even at this moment twitting him with the latest scandal about him – what was this tale of a young woman of good family who had followed him from Denmark? Where had he tucked her away? In some country corner of France, or in Flanders on his way here through that country? ‘The farther the safer, hey? Wouldn’t help you to turn up at the young Queen’s court with a foreign mistress in tow!’
But he rapped out a surly answer, and neither was such a fool as to wish to cross his temper again.
He lounged deeper into his chair, stretched his legs out farther, enjoying his hopes, the warm night, the wine that was again benevolent, the stars that seemed brighter and bigger in this velvet sky than the stars at home, the distant harsh foreign voices, even the foreign smells. But behind this mellow present mood, and the eager visions of his future, there stood in his mind an unwilling picture of the girl of whom his companions had reminded him, Anna Throndsen, the Norwegian Admiral’s daughter.
The Galliard Page 4