The Galliard

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘I am the happiest woman in the world. I once wrote and told my mother so – did I never tell you that?’

  ‘No. When was it?’

  ‘On our wedding day.’

  ‘Oh, Mary –!’ he sighed, and then, ‘what did you tell her?’

  ‘Only that, the happiest woman in the world, because my husband loves me so much that I can wish for nothing more than to live and die in that love.’

  She had written that because of him! He could not speak. Her genius for love awed him.

  She took his hand in her strong warm clasp. His was very cold for all the heat of the room.

  ‘You have a headache again,’ she said; ‘it is only because you are growing so fast. You always said it was unfair my being nearly two years older and taller, and that you’d never catch me up, but now you’re doing it so quickly that I shall have to wear high heels!’

  He looked at her with the shy adoration that he had felt ever since his father had led him up to the ‘most lovely child I have ever seen, and one day you will be her husband’. The Duc de Guise had given him a toy suit of armour on his fifth birthday, and François had challenged him to single combat in the hope of winning the favour of ‘a certain beautiful lady’. The children had played together and quarrelled, and in the middle of some assembly would trot off into a corner by themselves to whisper some secret plan together, the little boy frequently interrupting the conclave to fling his arms around the older, stronger child in a fierce hug. And eighteen months ago they had been married in Notre Dame under a golden canopy, and she had moved to music beside him, high up on a platform above the vast swaying, roaring crowds of Paris, moved in the dazzling radiance of her dress like a lily swathed in gossamer.

  But still he had had to wait before he could be her husband, ‘only a year or so,’ the doctors had said, as though a year or so were so short a time, and so it was to them, slow old fellows with their fifty, sixty, seventy odd years, all too many and too long; but to François, who could never go fast enough for his wishes, who tired out his companions, far bigger and stronger than himself, by the fury with which he rode to hounds as if determined to prove himself a man before his time – since later there might not be time – to François II of France ‘a year or so’ spelt a lifetime, as indeed, deep down in his inner self, he knew that it would prove.

  Marble supper-tables were carried into the hall by innumerable pages in white and scarlet. Bothwell found himself seated near the high table; he watched the Guise brothers as they ate and talked, their rings and earrings flashing as they moved, their teeth smiling in their fair pointed beards (‘Aye, there’s the grin of the fox,’ he thought as his eyes fixed on the Cardinal de Lorraine); he listened to their crisp French accents, sharp and light as the clapping of hands in the Branle, certain as commands. Every now and then they turned towards their niece, drawing her into their conversation, smiling at her, petting her.

  ‘Yes, tell us, Madam. Who should know, if not “the Little Savage”, how it is pronounced, that cacophony?’

  ‘Ker – ker – ker – nochs? Is it possible? All their names are alike – you have only to imitate water hissing on hot iron.’

  ‘But of whom are you speaking?’ she asked.

  ‘Why, of your countryman, the Scottish preacher who gave your mother so much trouble. It is he, we have just discovered, who was the author of that anonymous pamphlet from Geneva.’

  Bothwell’s ears, as well trained as the mountain deer’s, listened acutely. They must be talking of ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’, which John Knox had written to prove that it was against nature and the laws of God and man that any woman should have the supreme rule of a nation.

  ‘“Woman,”’ the Cardinal’s soft ironic voice was quoting, ‘“having been accursed of God, is to be for ever in complete bondage to man and daily to humble and subject herself to him.”’

  ‘He must be very ugly to hate women so,’ said the Queen’s grave childish voice.

  They all laughed, and the Duc de Guise said, ‘Hate rulers rather – ever since he was embroiled in that English plot to murder Cardinal Beton, and served a couple of years in our galleys for it.’

  ‘Then why was he ever let out to plague my mother?’ she demanded indignantly.

  No one could remember at first; then one of them said it was through some negotiation of England’s.

  ‘Ah, then England acknowledged him as her agent!’ she cried triumphantly.

  ‘Very right.’ The Cardinal de Lorraine smiled with pleasure to hear her talk politics so wisely. He held the floor with light graceful gestures of his beautiful hands. ‘This particular agent was even acknowledged so far as to be made King’s chaplain to the boy Edward VI. He took the chance in his sermons to abuse all the chief councillors to their faces under the thin disguise of Biblical names!’

  ‘A bold fellow!’ There was a note of admiration in the deep voice of the Duc de Guise.

  ‘Bold as brass – while under royal protection. The moment the Catholic Mary Tudor was on the English throne he bolted and left his friends to burn.’

  The Cardinal’s amused eyes glanced at Queen Catherine to see how she took his account of the Reformers, her former protégés. But she was busy capping the classical quotations of the Lord Rector of Orléans University; she was also busy eating, ‘shovelling all the food she can into her mouth’, as Mary noticed – and without any discrimination, although she was worried by her growing stoutness; no doubt she would outwalk all her courtiers after this in order to counteract it!

  The Bottle Cardinal remarked that all Reformers were treacherous to their friends, and the Duc de Guise said, ‘Because they are so to their foes. If a man cannot keep faith with his enemy, then he will do so with no man, nor with God.’ (‘This is as great a man as I’ve heard,’ thought Bothwell, but he was staggered the next instant by de Guise’s example of the Reformers’ lies.) ‘Their Bible is supposed to be the book of the gospels, written fifteen centuries ago, and yet today I saw a copy, and the date in the beginning was only last year’s!’

  There was a second’s hushed gravity in respect to the head of their house; then, it was irresistible, all his brothers began to laugh, until he, puzzled at first, suddenly saw his blunder and laughed too.

  ‘We simple soldiers, sir, should leave these matters to the clerics,’ René de Lorraine, the Marquis d’Elboeuf, said to him, grinning with the impudent delight of a younger brother.

  ‘Got it wrong, have I? Well, anyway, I’d have got it right in the galleys and let the traitor sit on there till he’d worn through his – breeches.’

  ‘If it is any consolation to you, brother,’ said the Cardinal de Lorraine, ‘I am told that his session was long enough for him to contract a certain distressing complaint.’

  ‘Ha, ha, undermined his constitution, hey?’

  ‘But,’ said the Cardinal, turning yet again to that tall pretty child, taking, as Bothwell noticed, any chance to hear her clear voice, ‘you have still not told us, Madame la Reinette, how is one to say that name – K-N-O-X?’

  ‘You do not say the K at all, sir; it is pronounced “NOX”, like the Latin for “night”.’

  ‘Then may night never fall on you!’ he answered, smiling, and Bothwell was hastily suspicious of so lewd a gallantry from an uncle. But she took his remark literally and gave him a bewitching, rather tired little smile.

  ‘My crown is so heavy,’ she said. ‘May I take it off?’

  She lifted it from her head and put it beside her, although she saw her mother-in-law give an involuntary gasp. The Medici was so superstitious with her astrologers and slavish belief in dreams and omens, she was always afraid, thought Mary with the irritation of one who is never afraid. She pushed up the, damp reddish tendrils of hair that the crown had pressed down on her forehead, and gave her head a little shake to free it from the sensation of that weight.

  As she did so she caught the eye of a young noble at a neighbo
uring table, and recognised the Earl of Bothwell. She was so tired that she gave him exactly the same bewitching shy sleepy smile before she remembered that she had dismissed him in anger at their last meeting. But why should she bother about that? It was tedious to go on being angry; and her mother had told her she would be wise to make friends with this young man.

  So, for she did things thoroughly, she beckoned him to her side after the banquet and introduced him to her uncle the Duc de Guise, ‘who has heard so much of you.’

  De Guise was gracious, his keen eyes sweeping the strong figure before him, the alert head and great shoulders. ‘My sister the Regent has told me something of your doings, my lord, and so has our Ambassador to England. You have not only done some very pretty work for Scotland; you have actually brought a blush to Queen Elizabeth’s maiden cheek!’

  ‘No man could have the face to do that, sir!’

  ‘At least you gave her an awkward moment when you robbed her baggage.’

  ‘And gave your Ambassador the opportunity to call her one,’ was the instant retort.

  De Guise chuckled at his impudence. ‘Yes, you forced her underhand dealings into the open.’

  ‘Wars nowadays,’ said James Hepburn, ‘seem to be less a matter of men and weapons than of the lies told by their governments.’

  He spoke quickly, forcibly, as if he were dealing strokes in battle, for he knew that the greatest captain in Europe was summing him up, and he might only have a minute or two in which to give a decisive blow for himself.

  De Guise’s next words were obviously designed to give him an opening: ‘What did you think of our cannon? Do you believe in a future for that weapon?’

  ‘Its best effect, sir, is no doubt in siege, but I firmly believe there is a great future for it, though we may not live to see it.’

  ‘I hope not. For I have heard it said that with improved artillery the individual soldier will make precious little odds.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it, Your Highness! What counts, as always has and always will, is the kind of man you’ve got behind the big gun, as behind the musket, behind the bow and arrow or the stone in the sling.’

  ‘Personal leadership – and well you’ve proved it, young man! The Galliard has made war gaillardement.’

  So he even knew his nickname. Bothwell saw why the Guise’s men worshipped him. And the great man gave him his best chance by asking how he had combined with his French allies.

  ‘I fought side by side, sir, with the Sieur d’Oysel all through that last siege of Leith this spring, and ask nothing better. There was a sortie I led of French men-at-arms and my own light horse which swept the English trenches clean – and I never saw better work done in unison by horse and foot, though more than half could not speak each other’s language. But French and Scots are a grand mixture.’

  ‘We have good proof of that,’ said the Duc de Guise, with a smile at his niece.

  Bothwell did not want any distraction in the way of feminine compliments; he hastened to tell of the night sorties he had led, riding down with his prickers from Edinburgh Castle under cover of darkness to cut off the English supplies as they came up from Berwick – ‘We Borderers have a good nose for plunder’; how he and Geordie Seton had led the sally last Easter Monday, the hottest bit of fighting in the whole siege; they had succeeded in spiking the enemy’s guns, and Bothwell in his furious charge had himself unhorsed and wounded the two best leaders on the English side – ‘we cracked their Easter eggs for them hard enough,’ he said gleefully, with no trace now of the regret for his own men that had enraged d’Oysel.

  ‘Easter,’ said de Guise thoughtfully, ‘when discipline was slack, the men drinking and gaming in their trenches. Then All Hallows’ E’en and wasn’t there a Christmas raid of yours which startled London into reinforcing her northern garrison?’

  ‘Yes, he told me,’ murmured Mary, but neither paid attention, and the Guise was saying:

  ‘You have the secret of guerrilla warfare, a sense of the season, the right moment at which to strike a surprise blow.’

  He turned again to the girl who had been content to stand and listen, though accustomed to be the whole centre of attention: ‘Take note of that, my Reinette, to think always what your enemies may be thinking. But why are you not dancing? It is dull for you to hear of sorties and surprise attacks.’

  ‘It is what I like best in the world,’ she answered, and her eyes were shining. ‘I wish I had been in Edinburgh with my mother this spring’; and it was plain she saw herself fighting for her, riding down from the Castle at the head of Bothwell’s light horse.

  Her uncle smiled at her indulgently, then told Bothwell, ‘You must have a talk with my brother the Cardinal de Lorraine about the situation in Scotland. I gather that my sister’s death has left the Protestant lords in charge of affairs there.’

  ‘Of whom I am one, Your Highness, though no longer in charge.’

  ‘Hey, what’s that? You a Protestant? I thought you a loyal man.’

  ‘So am I, sir, to my Sovereign and to my faith.’

  ‘Warning me not to try and change it, hey?’

  ‘I have too much respect for the value of Your Highness’ time.’

  De Guise gave a short laugh. ‘I’ll take the hint. But I don’t like your creed.’

  The young man stiffened. ‘Loyalty is my creed. It is also my line of action. I’ve no other to fall back on.’

  ‘It has done you no good with the bulk of your co-religionists.’

  ‘No, sir, they are my enemies, because of my allegiance to the throne. For that reason they sacked my house at Crichton; and for that reason I am unlikely to find further employment in Scotland.’

  ‘Humph, yes, and your diplomatic mission to Denmark pulled up in full course. Short of cash?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘We must see to that. If you are still at a loose end later on, there’s always employment in France for men of your calibre. Remember that I should be glad to see to it, and if I’m not handy, I’ll leave word with my brother the Cardinal.’

  He left them. ‘There!’ said Mary. ‘He is thinking of the Captaincy of the Scots Archers in France – I thought he would,’ and she nodded to Bothwell like a benevolent fairy godmother. He suddenly remembered that he owed this interview to her, and gave her a smile of real friendliness.

  ‘Your Grace has been kinder to me than my deserts.’

  ‘Now, that you know to be nonsense,’ said she, snatching at her momentary tactical superiority. ‘You do not honestly rate your deserts as lower than the last Captain’s!’

  The last Captain of the Scots Archers had been the Earl of Arran.

  ‘But he,’ said Bothwell, with a sudden glint of amusement at her, ‘had the disadvantage to lose his wits for love of his Queen.’

  ‘You are wrong, sir, it was Monsieur Calvin who unsettled his wits. My lord of Arran paid him a visit at Geneva and came back raving that he was damned, or that everyone else was. Monsieur Calvin must be an unsettling person. He has eleven diseases, but none of them succeed in being fatal.’

  ‘Your Grace knows a deal about the Father of the Reformed Religion.’

  ‘I can just remember his patroness, my husband’s great-aunt Marguerite, the sister of King François I. That is her pretty daughter over there, Jeanne d’Albret, with her husband of Navarre – can you see her?’

  ‘I can see,’ said the uncompromising Scot, ‘that the King of Navarre keeps a grey mare in his stable.’

  As his Queen stared bewildered, he explained his native idiom by another: ‘I mean, it’s she who wears the breeches.’

  She laughed at such frank criticism. ‘Certainly Queen Jeanne is more of a managing Reformer. But it was her mother, La Marguerite des Marguerites, who sheltered Calvin for years at her home in Meaux, to prevent his being martyred for his doctrine. Yet he has remained a martyr, and made everybody else one, to his digestion. He was always scolding her. He even quarrelled with Monsieur Rabelais, the most good-nat
ured of men, who was also in her protection.’

  Again Bothwell felt that half-unconscious pang of wonder and envy at this glimpse of a life beyond the scope of his own.

  ‘I would give all France,’ he had often said, unthinking, to express the quintessence of wealth. Now for the first time he had some perception of that wealth in the terms of civilization and the beauty prepared by men’s minds; all these fair châteaux whose images glimmer in the smooth waters of the Loire; all the songs of these new poets, Ronsard and du Bellay, weaving fantastic arabesques in praise of her woods and sedate gardens, and of this young girl whose shy beauty they watched unfolding like the petals of a flower; the stored wit and wisdom of Rabelais and Montaigne; the humanity of such spirits as La Marguerite des Marguerites, whose power of love was wiser than all learning; a country that had been the spiritual as well as the material heaven of the Scots through the preceding centuries.

  ‘They say,’ he said, apparently inconsequently, ‘that good Scots go to Paris when they die.’

  Chapter Six

  It was the first of several conversations between them, sometimes in her mother’s language, sometimes her father’s. ‘Do I talk Scots well?’ she asked, preening herself for a compliment, and he told her, grinning, ‘With a braw French accent, Madam.’

  ‘It is too bad, I am always the foreigner. When I came here I could not speak a word of French, and they took my Maries away from me so that I should not chatter Scots with them.’

  He liked her, especially when her eyes flashed at some tale of adventure, daring or absurd, such as that of Dickie o’ the Den who drove off a flock of sheep and disappeared with them, until the bloodhounds stopped dead at an enormous haystack where they scented the whole flock, and Dickie, completely covered with hay.

  ‘Ah, but that’s the grand lad! He’d lift anything that wasn’t too hot or too heavy. It was only the lack of four legs to it that kept him from driving off the haystack itself.’