The Galliard

by Margaret Irwin

  So that the cheers that greeted Johnnie’s performance were complimentary as well as derisive, and the rude comments were in pleased recognition that the great man was human like themselves. The pipers started playing and the crowd singing:

  ‘The minister kissed the bonny kail-wife

  And couldna’ sleep for thinking o’t.’

  They rocked uproariously as Johnnie took the hint and embraced d’Elboeuf, addressing him first as ‘Mother-in-law’ and then as ‘Mamselle Châtelherault’.

  ‘Why should the men have all the fun?’ Mary whispered to Jan. ‘Let’s see what we can do!’

  They went back into the Castle with the two Maries on the excuse of warming themselves.

  A little later, four gallant youths galloped on to the haugh, two from either side, and rode a tilt against each other, but fortunately none of them got their lances within striking distance of their opponents. It was seen at once that they were girls and –

  ‘God’s blood, the Queen!’ shouted Bothwell as he dashed into the ring to part the jousters, in imminent danger of a thrust from their unpractised weapons. D’Elboeuf and Johnnie were hot on his heels, the Lord James followed, all four horses were firmly held, and the girls leaped from their saddles, laughing and excusing themselves, pushing up stray curls underneath their manly caps.

  Bothwell swore at Jan for this fool prank that might have brought the Queen into danger, Mary declared it was all her doing, and the two looked at each other and laughed like a couple of mischievous urchins. Both made likely lads with their long slim legs and narrow hips, and knew it, swaggering with jaunty gestures, but Beton and Fleming were too plump for the part and looked self-conscious. Bothwell, moreover, perceived that the beautiful Fleming, his ‘pick of the bunch’, was not only short-legged but knock-kneed, a discovery which made him thoughtful for a few minutes.

  Mary swung her short blue cloak over her shoulder and clapped him on the back with manly camaraderie, reminding him that it was not only his sister’s wedding day but the 6th of January and Twelfth Night: ‘So kneel and he dubbed my Lord of Misrule,’ and she drew a dagger whose agate hilt flashed with jewels in the now faint and slanting sunlight, ‘or will your Protestant conscience protest also against heathen mummeries?’

  He looked at her as she stood there mocking him, flaunting her cloak and dagger – at her teasing smile, her provokingly pretty figure pretending to be a boy’s – and forgot the repartee he meant to make. He dropped on one knee, and her dagger tapped him on the shoulder. He rose, Lord of Misrule, whom all the rest must follow whatever he did, and called the guests round him back into the Castle, Mary darting after him at the head of them like a dragonfly with her green silk legs flashing out under the flying wings of her cloak.

  Soon they were all careering out of it again, astride on hobby-horses of broomsticks and coloured rags, wearing whatever absurd disguise they could find to put on their heads, bunches of cocks’ feathers or rabbit skins or hats cut out of painted paper, and all playing some instrument, beating drums or tin cans or humming on jews’ harps or combs covered with paper, or blowing on trumpets made of cows’ horns or whistles of elder stems. The whole mad procession came clattering and whooping after the Lord Bothwell, who rode his hobby-horse at a gallop, hung all over with bells and flying ribbons, and blew a bugle that made every bloodhound in the place bay furiously in the belief that he was raising the Hot Trod. He led them through the crowd on that now darkening hillside and down through the little bare church and into the churchyard. There the villagers waited to hand him cheesecakes and ale, which he ate and drank, and then knelt again before his Queen in her boy’s dress, who solemnly placed a crown of silver paper on his head.

  For an instant the figures in that dim scene were still. The frosty mist hung over the whitening ground; only a dull and smoky red light in the west showed where the sun had sunk. But soon those goblin forms with the fantastic heads leaped into wild movement and noise again, for now, at the moment of his crowning, the rule of the Lord of Misrule was over. He had to dash back to the Castle, chased by the company, and when they caught him they tore his crown from his head, and his bells and ribbons, and cried out that he was deposed, that he must die, and once again he had to kneel, this time to Johnnie Stewart, who struck off his head with a sausage.

  Then, hot and panting, they all pulled off their mummery and looked at each other, laughing. Bothwell said low to the Queen, ‘Is it true you sometimes go about the streets of Edinburgh dressed like that?’

  ‘Yes, why not? I keep my cloak over my face. My father was always going about in disguise.’

  ‘You’re a woman.’

  ‘So is Queen Catherine, and most respectable for all her gross stories, and she used to walk about the streets as a burgher’s wife, in Paris of all places.’

  ‘And that’s different too. Is no one ever going to show you what it is to be a woman?’

  He spoke in impatient exasperation and regretted it the same instant. ‘I did not mean to offend you,’ he began, but she was quick to take his apology before he made it.

  ‘And you have not. Nothing could spoil this day, the day I have enjoyed most since I came to Scotland.’

  Yes, she was generous, she gave with both hands, he’d say that for her.

  She had brought an exquisite dress for the banquet that evening, of silver tissue, and a wing-shaped coronet of pearls. When they cut the Twelfth Night cake before they went to change, the bean was found in Jan’s slice, which meant that she was to be Queen for the evening – ‘And so you shall,’ said Mary mysteriously, leading her away, and when they came down into the great hall, Jan was wearing Mary’s dress and crown. Never had Jan seen anything so lovely, and never had Johnnie seen her half as lovely; his face as he looked at his bride gave Mary her reward.

  That was a banquet. Bothwell’s preparations had been thorough; for days past he had kept his men busy hunting to stock the larder, and nearly two thousand wild does and roes had been slaughtered to provide venison, as well as so many plover and partridges, ptarmigan, herons, cranes and wild geese and wild duck, moorfowl and rabbits that nobody could keep count of them.

  ‘Aye, there’s enough to eat,’ he assented grudgingly when Mary exclaimed at the vast quantity of dishes.

  For the first time he felt a personal regret for those glass toys his father had brought from Venice, which Arran’s men had smashed. They would have been the right thing to have put before this dainty little French Queen. And, also for the first time, he saw his familiar home as barbaric and uncouth; it struck him how chill and draughty this vast stone hall must be to her, its mighty walls steaming with damp in the heat of the feast, in comparison with the small snug painted rooms of Fontainebleau, and all the curtains and rugs and cushions to give them warmth.

  At least a score of logs six or eight feet long were piled fanwise on his huge hearth, their burning noses all meeting together in the red centre of the fire; their flames roared up the great chimney, sucking all the draughts towards them so that the wind blew in icy gusts from the shuttered windows and along the floor under their chairs. Mary had been glad to forgo her gossamer dress for one of pale grey velvet and white fur. Like a winter fox in the snow she looked, in its pale winter coat but keeping the reddish tinge in her shining hair – he wanted to tell her so, but of course he could not.

  Did she think it all very restless and noisy? – the servants clattering about so clumsily, the shrill mew of the hooded goshawks and merlins perched high above them on the great oak beams, flapping their wings and shaking their bells and feathered jesses in answer to the barking of the staghounds that wandered about in search of bones, and above it all the pipes playing,

  Noble Lord Bothwell he dwells on the Border.

  He saw the warm enjoyment and interest in her delicate face, and with a very new shyness he said hesitatingly, ‘I can’t turn the tables into gardens with green lawns and flowers and singing birds as I’ve seen you do in France. I wish I could.’<
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  ‘I don’t want this to be like France,’ she answered him, ‘I am in my own country now. I had rather look at the faces of my friends than at a garden on the table.’

  And she raised her silver flagon to drink to him with as airy a grace as if it had been any Venetian goblet. He drank to her, put down his cup, and with his eyes still fixed on her, said, ‘There are tales here of magic that will make some broken-down shieling seem a palace, and the cobwebs on its walls fine tapestries. I think you have that gramary, to transform this rough feast to a royal banquet of France. You’ll do it with all Scotland and make her a fief of Elfland, like the Eildon Hills near here.’

  She was amazed, even disconcerted. The Lord Bothwell had paid her a compliment! She had to cover her surprise like any bashful schoolgirl by asking about the Eildon Hills. Bothwell’s answer was an order to the minstrels, and one of them sang how True Thomas had kissed the Queen of Elfland and followed her to her realm through a door in the side of Eildon. It was a charming fairy-tale, but Mary wished she had not interrupted her conversation with her host by asking for it; she never seemed to do the right thing when with him; no one else had so much the power to put her at a loss.

  And was her hope of reconciling him to James being furthered by this festivity? She was not at all sure. James was looking rather glum. It might be merely that he was having to eat and drink more than his weak digestion would stand.

  But that was not the reason. James had not taken part in the mummery of the Lord of Misrule, but sauntered chillily about the Castle by himself and in a spirit of dispassionate inquiry strolled down a dark passage and opened a door into another world – the world of kitchens and domestic servants all busy over this gargantuan feast. For a second or two he stood spellbound; he saw women running in all directions, their bare red feet slapping the stone floor, their loose hair streeling behind them, their faces scarlet with furious intensity; he heard the screeching of feminine voices and the sizzling of fat; he smelt the raw meat, and meat roasting and feathers burning.

  And then, feeling slightly sick, he side-stepped into another passage through another door, and saw more salt beef hanging up than he could have believed possible. This time a scullion perceived him and asked what he wanted; James admitted to having lost his way, but inquired at the same time about the salt beef.

  ‘Martinmas cows,’ replied the fellow; ‘every parish pays a cow to the Lieutenant at Martinmas to be salted for the winter.’ Grinning familiarly, he added, ‘Puts you in mind of Jedburgh Justice, don’t it, to see ’em all hanging there!’

  His grisly wit got no response from James, who, as the man most responsible for ‘Jedburgh Justice’, should have appreciated it; he was reflecting that, as he had superseded Bothwell as Lord Lieutenant of the Border, he should have been the recipient of the Martinmas cows this year. It was a comparatively small matter; his increase of wealth this autumn made a drove of cows equivalent to the loss of a few shillings; but no matter was small to James that made him feel he was being deprived of his rights.

  He was still brooding on salt beef, looking down his long nose, even when the supreme dishes were carried in to the applause of the guests – the boar’s head, tusked and holly-crowned, surrounded with miniature banners of the host’s baronial colours and achievements, and the roasted peacock, reinvested in all the glory of its plumage with spread tail, and fire coming out of its beak from the sponge it held there, dipped in spirits of wine. In old days knights used to vow to do some chivalrous deed within the coming year ‘before the Peacock and the Ladies’.

  They now revived this custom with modern frivolity; d’Elboeuf vowed never to refuse a drink; Johnnie to entertain this same party at his house at Coldinghame next New Year’s Eve, and Bothwell that he would claim that hospitality even if he were not asked. James with a determined effort flung off the cloud of salt beef, and vowed to discover a wooer to whom the Virgin of England would say ‘No’ – a piece of malice that delighted his sister. Only George Gordon reverted to the earlier spirit of the custom, and dropping on one knee before Mary swore that her will should be his, whatsoever it might be. The passionate quiet of his earnestness made an odd shy little hush in the midst of all the noise and laughter.

  The minstrels had reached the complimentary stage; they sang Bothwell’s most famous raids, and even the events of a fortnight since in Edinburgh, when, as they triumphantly proclaimed –

  ‘We gar’d the Hamiltons hold their jaw.’

  They praised their lord as more skilful than any moss-trooper on the Border, to lead them through the fords of Esk or Liddel on the Solway sands or Tarras Moss. Quiet days were on them now, but

  ‘We shall have moonlight again!’

  The feast was finished; the servants cleared away dishes and tables and trestles to leave the hall bare again for dancing.

  Mary asked where all the rest of the men were that had gathered in hundreds on the haugh that day. Bothweil ordered the great doors at the end of the hall to be flung open, and she had a brief vision of the darkness outside, torn by the leaping flames of a huge bonfire in the courtyard, of dark forms strutting with the pipes or jumping and dancing, of faces suddenly aflame in the red firelight. Fierce shouts rent the night, men were calling the names of their clans as though they were music –

  ‘Hoo for a Hepburn!’ ‘Fye Tyndale, to it!’ ‘Bide me fair!’ ‘A Gordon! A Gordon! Bydand!’ And then the queer growling mutter of a chant that rose louder and louder like the howling of wolves:

  ‘Little wot ye wha’s coming!

  Hob and Tam and a’s coming,

  Dick’s coming, Jock’s coming—’

  With a blood-curdling yell the kilted Highlanders joined in:

  ‘Colin’s coming, Donald’s coming,

  Mony a buttock bare’s coming’

  She seemed to be looking on the war-dance of savages.

  Then that wild scene was shut outside again, and the company gathered round the fire in the hall.

  Johnnie was singing now, some ribald verses of his royal father’s:

  ‘“Oh, kind sir,” she said, “be civil, or ye’ll waken my dada.”’

  The older men there nodded together and said how like he was to the late King; too like, that was the pity, he had the same flushed look of delicacy even as he stood and sang so uproariously, waving his wine-cup in rhythm to the tune and calling to the rest to join in the chorus:

  ‘He cadgily ranted and sang,

  “She’s off with the gaberlunzie man!”’

  Yet he never seemed to tire, not even when at the end of this active day he danced flings and reels one after the other without any pause, leaping higher than anyone, snapping his fingers, yelping against the fierce music of the pipes. Never was there such mad music and dancing; to Mary it was as though the cries of the curlews and the sea-birds had joined with the storm-wind to play the tunes.

  But the music changed; fiddles and harps were now playing the stately music of the Galliard, and this time she had no doubt as to whether Bothwell had asked her to dance, and sufficiently respectfully; he bowed low before her and together they swept into the measure of the Dance Royal. It was the first time he had danced with her; he danced well, and she was the best dancer of the day. In her grey and white dress she moved like a shadow in the flickering light of the fire and torchlight, and he like the red flame of a torch beside her.

  To many who watched among the retainers and rough ‘ledcaptains’ of the house of Hepburn, the formal grace of that measure to the old grave music was the loveliest thing ever seen in that hall. To the young Highland lord, George Gordon, who watched with the blank blind eyes of one who sees other scenes from the past or future behind the present, the beauty of that dance did seem indeed unbearable, for before it was finished he turned his head away.

  The music paced on to its last long note, the red dancer and his shadow were still, then smiled at each other without a word, and Bothwell led her back to the fire. She stood with one foot on a log, ta
pping the white wood-ash that had blown back from the fire over it so that it fluffed up in a little whirlpool. Her knees were being roasted while her heels and the back of her shins were icy; one needed to sit on a turning-spit to get warm all over in Scotland. Her finger traced an inscription carved in the stone of the chimney-piece:

  They have said – What

  Say they?

  Let them say.

  ‘Who had that done?’ she asked.

  ‘My father,’ her host answered. ‘There was a deal said against him, so he put that up. I don’t know why he troubled.’

  So the father had made the gesture to show he didn’t care – and did. The son would never care enough to think of the gesture.

  She stole a sideways glance at the rugged powerful face. He was too sure of his power, that was the danger; he thought he could stand alone against everyone.

  ‘Do you then think me a coward?’ she asked him, ‘that I could not take the course I wished at Christmas and order the Hamiltons to leave the city instead of you? But I cannot follow my own road yet. I am in my kingdom on sufferance, and barely that. Until I am strong enough to speak myself, I have to listen, to what others say.’

  He glanced at Lord James huddling his cold hands in his sleeves as he talked with forced geniality to Lord Gordon.

  ‘For “others” read “brother”,’ he remarked.

  ‘As you will.’ She gave him a subtle smile. He began to realize that his warnings against Lord James had not been entirely in vain. It was not so much now that she refused to believe anything against him as that, whatever she believed, there was no way as yet in which she could take action.