They ran downstairs, clatter clatter as they went round and round, faster and faster, the two of them whirling together down that dark spiral stair. Whisht! Here they were at the bottom, she the Queen again, and he the Commander, calling in a stern purposeful voice for Lord Borthwick, and marching off with him to see to the defences of the Castle.
Within the hour a party of troopers came galloping up hell for leather and battered on the gates, shouting that the rebels were after them.
‘We are loyal. Let us in or we are all dead men,’ they called, but Bothwell insisted on having a leisurely look at them first.
‘Just what I thought – young Kerr of Cessford’s among them. That’s the gay lad who helped murder his kinsman, the old Abbot of Kelso, for knowing too much about the Bastard. Well, the Hepburns have always known too much about the Crabbed Kerrs!’
Mary thought his suspicions very harsh, but they were soon proved right. As the main body of horsemen came up under the Earl of Morton, whose huge bulk and orange-coloured whiskers were plainly to be seen in their midst, the Kerrs drew back and joined them, showing that their cry for succour had been nothing but a ruse to enter the Castle.
That having failed, there was nothing for their army to do but fire their muskets in futile attack against those enormous stones; then, coming nearer, they yelled insults at the Duke of Orkney and his Queen. Mary slipped away and appeared on the tower to answer them and appeal to her subjects’ loyalty – to Bothwell’s fury when he found how she had exposed herself to their fire. He himself was even more reckless, for so enraged was he by their taunts, daring him to come out and support his challenge to single combat, that his men had to hold him back from rushing out to pull Morton’s whiskers.
Midsummer madness had fallen on both of them, old Lord Borthwick declared when they at last sat down to eat a ravenous supper after their interrupted dinner. He was a bad-tempered old man, mortally sick of a disreputable disease. Now as he watched these two young things in their hour of danger and desperate venture joking together so light-heartedly, he felt that if his whole life were given to him again, he would gladly throw it all away for one hour of such happiness as now danced like a flame between them.
‘Midsummer madness,’ he growled with some reason later that night when James Hepburn made one of his lightning decisions. The Castle could stand a siege indefinitely, but what use would that be to the Queen? He must get out to raise an army for her, and lead it in the field.
How the devil did he hope to cut his way out through what had now proved to be over twelve hundred men? And Lord Borthwick started counting up the numbers he could take from the garrison, but Bothwell cut him short.
‘One is all I’ll take, if that. But who was that great gaunt hag I saw with a bundle in the courtyard?’
‘Muckle Meg the laundress!’
‘She’ll do. I’ll go out in her hooded cloak, now while it’s raining and pit-murk. I’ve done it before.’
Yes, he’d done it before in Sandybed’s kitchen, turning the spit in Big Bess’s clothes; he’d watched from Borthwick tower before; he had lived through all this before and was living it over again now – but now there was Mary beside him, and for the first time he knew what it was to feel another’s agony as his own.
It had been bad enough for her to see him leave the shelter of the Castle with only fifty men, but that was safety itself compared with this mad escapade, going blindly out into the night alone among all those wolves who had howled for his blood. She touched his chamois-leather sleeve, it felt like a nice horse, much smoother than his hand, and that she dared not touch, not with this new piercing knowledge that the least joint of his little finger was more precious to her than her whole body.
‘Let me be the one you’ll take. I can disguise myself too – I’ve done it.’
He could not let her take so hideous a risk; she must stay in the practically impregnable safety of the Castle till he came with reinforcements to rescue her. She turned away, fighting back the tears and words that might even now bind him here to her: she must again be brave on his account, not only on her own. And she laughed as he swung the old woman’s cloak round him, stooped in admirable disguise of his height, and hobbled out into the darkness.
One of his men went too, at a little distance, and was caught. But Bothwell, though within a stone’s throw of him, got through safely to Haddington. From their prisoner the besiegers learned that the Duke of Orkney was no longer at Borthwick. His absence put them in an awkward position; if they stayed, they could no longer pretend that they were acting only against him and not against the Queen.
So the next morning those inside the Castle saw their enemies raise the siege and march off. Mary at once sent word to Bothwell that they had gone, and she would join him that very night, at a little distance from the Castle, in case of any spies on the lookout for his return there.
But she reckoned without her host. Lord Borthwick swore explosively that she had been put in his charge and should not leave it on any such prank. His ‘duty to his Sovereign’? God’s blood, his duty was to his friend, not to a skittering lass who’d got a man to look after her at last, but too late, it seemed, to learn how to obey him. ‘A pretty time I’d have of it from that mad young fellow of yours if any harm came to you! You’ll stay in your room, Madam, under lock and key if there’s another word on the matter!’
And his thunderous roar was followed by a succession of oaths. Mary assured him smilingly of her complete submission, ran upstairs at top speed, shut the door behind her, flung out her arms and cried, ‘Quick, my girls! Get a suit of young Willie Crookston’s clothes from him. He’s about my size. And tell him not to breathe a word of it.’
That night, when most in the Castle were asleep, there stole out of her room a gallant young page with a big hat jammed down over a face alight with mischief, accompanied by a couple of quaking girls, also in their stockinged feet, and with bundles of sheets in their arms. Noiselessly they felt their way down the turret stair and into the great banqueting hall. This was as far as they could descend without danger of meeting any of the servants or the guards below. The window was twenty-eight feet from the ground, but Mary was not to be daunted by that – Bothwell had jumped out of a first-floor window into a lion-pit for her, and she was quite prepared to do as much by him. They knotted the sheets together and one end of them to an enormous table-leg; then she climbed out of the window down this improvised rope, waved a hand to the two girls above who were drawing up the sheets, slipped through the low postern gate through which Bothwell had escaped, and was soon outside the walls in open country.
Now she had to find the rendezvous she had appointed, the Devil’s Pool, farther down Borthwick Water, about a mile from the Castle; she had thought she could not miss it, she had only to follow the water. But to do so at night, through seeping bogs and tangled thickets, stumbling and scrambling and sinking up to her knees, was harder than she had foreseen, though luckily it was a perfect June night, the long-drawn-out Northern twilight never deepening into real darkness. The twisted trees crouched against it like the black forms of waiting foes; at any point they might turn into them, spring out, and capture her.
Yet she scarcely felt fear, so lovely was the night, so certain was she of finding her lover in it, blown towards him on the shifting summer breeze as naturally and inevitably as the pollen dust of trees to find its mate. Only when at last she saw something stir among them, her heart gave a leap of panic terror. What if it should not be himself?
But it was.
He leaped from his saddle, seized her, hugged her, shook her, swore at her. ‘How dared you do it? I’d have stopped it if there’d been time – there wasn’t. Yet I’ve been waiting here for ever!’
It was the first time she had ever seen him shaken, and she scolded him for it as soon as she could get her breath in his grip – ‘an old campaigner like you to lose your nerve with a bit of night-watching, and here am I on my first trial as a moss-trooper! – woul
d I make a good one for your troop?’
‘It’s what I thought the first moment I clapped eyes on you: you ought to have been a boy.’
‘So my father said, and cursed me for not being one: “The Devil take it!” he said. Has the Devil taken me?’ And she clung to him laughing as he swung her up into his arms, then mounted her in the saddle (a man’s) of a close-cropped cob that he had led with him. He himself was on the Night Hawk.
He had sent word to his hagbutters to meet him at Dunbar with all the men they could muster. And now they themselves rode there together yet again, for the third time.
‘We shall ride together again,’ he had promised her that at Hermitage. And tonight yet again they went a-roving by the light of the moon; they saw it drift in and out of the calm, towering clouds, cast changing shadows down the deep glens, and through its flying formless glimpses moved on together, two passing shadows, conscious that they were one.
The glow-worms were all out over Crichton Moor, innumerable tiny points of greenish light beneath their feet, and the vast spangled sky above their heads. The bright dark was theirs. ‘We’re riding over the stars,’ she said, laughing low in her delight.
They did not speak again till they were clear of this part, where outposts might be lurking. They rode slow and carefully, the creak of their saddles and the thud of their horses’ hoofs making a monotonous rhythm among the wandering sounds of the moorland that followed the fitful outbreak of the wind among the hills, sounds that to the shepherds who lived on these haunted moors were the echo of bells and bridle-rings of elfin riders making
Merry and merry and twice so merry
By the ae light o’ the moon.
No good thing was it to meet such riders. A cow-herd had been thrown into Borthwick Water in spate by the dwellers on the Fairy Knowe. That great mound now raised its head above them, and then the mighty tumulus of the Mote where the Druids had once assembled; the broad brows of the Lammermuir Hills were like snow mountains when the moon shone on them. They rode over their lower slopes, far away now from the Borthwick country and Crichton, where the Lady Jean slept in her curtained bed (‘hugging that Dispensation under her pillow, no doubt’, he thought with a snort of mirth – as if any parchment could divide them now!).
She could not believe that this magic night would ever end; she knew that it would not, that they would always ride together over the stars.
The air tasted salt. They had left the hills and reached the low turf-covered slopes that stretched towards the sea, all silver-grey under the spangling of dew; some cattle stirring in the dawn-mist shone faintly luminous like dim planets moving through the gleaming haze. Birds darted silently here and there in dark flashes, intent and secret.
He spoke of his confidence in subduing Scotland for her, of her hopes of England.
She said, ‘I would not care if I lost them both, so long as I can follow you.’
She said, ‘I’ll not have one man killed to keep me Queen. If they don’t want me, let them go, and we’ll make another kingdom. You have Orkney and Shetland. Let us build our fleet and create an Empire of the Waves – and never see Edinburgh again!’
He scouted the notion; were all the hopes she had had ever since her childhood of three great kingdoms, France or Spain added to Scotland and England, to dwindle now to those wild islands in the far North?
But he shared her pleasure in the thought; as she longed to see his swiftness and desperate will mastering the winds and tempests, so he knew her to be as proper a Queen of the Sea as of the hills. She had a royal quality of freedom. ‘You are free as air,’ he said.
‘And why not King and Queen of that too? My grandfather believed that men could learn to fly, and kept a mechanic to discover how.’
‘Aye, and he nearly broke his neck jumping off the rock of Stirling in the attempt!’
‘That doesn’t show it won’t be made again. Whatever man has dreamed, that he will do. And our dreams will live on after us when we are dead.’
He turned his head to look at her delicate face lifted against the unearthly light.
‘You should make death proud,’ he said. ‘I think you look on it as our marriage night.’
When they looked ahead again, they saw the sea. She checked her cob, rising in her stirrups with a cry. ‘Look! It has come true! I saw it like this in your arms when you first brought me to Dunbar.’
Yes, she had seen it then like this; the solan geese rising and swirling in dizzying tangle about the pearl-white rock of the Bass; while still the sea slept dull and pewter-coloured, their wings caught that light that was over the edge of the world; they turned to fire as the first long arm of the sunrise all but touched the last lingering finger of the sunset.
There before them was the meaning of her strange overword: ‘In my End is my Beginning.’
Chapter Thirty-Three
All that morning he worked, while Mary went to bed in one of his shirts. When she woke, nearly at mid-day, the sun was on her face and he was sitting beside her.
‘You have been here all the time, haven’t you?’
He hooted with indignant laughter and told her all he had done: sending out her royal summons to all loyal subjects between the ages of sixteen and sixty to arm themselves and come instantly to her support; receiving a deputation of burgesses from Edinburgh ‘who hope to keep a foot in both camps till they see which wins’; getting messengers through to Gordon and Balfour in Edinburgh; enlisting the fishermen from Crail farther up the coast to run a service for them in case they were beleaguered here at Dunbar.
She stretched her arms above her ruffled head, the great linen sleeves falling away from their round childish curves, and gave him an odd little important smile and told him that she was certain she was with child.
There was no holding him at this news; he caught her up in that absurd flapping shirt, so much too big for her, and walked about the room with her in his arms, and crowed his triumph as though he were the only man in the world worthy to beget a child on her.
‘Aye, there’s the blood of the proud Guise and the fine, sad Stewart in you, too much so for strength. But now you’ll have Border blood to thicken the brew, and it’s many a grand lad I’ll sire on you!’
But there were to be no more pranks such as last night’s climb from an upper window and roaming the country by herself.
And he cursed the agitation he had given her at Borthwick. From now on she must be calm and placid.
It was a pity that such excellent physician’s injunctions had to be accompanied by marching orders. But they could not leave the rebels to make more headway. These had entered Edinburgh under the Earls of Morton, Mar and Atholl, without much difficulty, and at once issued a proclamation, summoning the citizens to arms. But the people did not join as was expected. It looked as though the rebellion might fade away for lack of support.
On top of this good news came better from Balfour. If Bothwell and the Queen would march at once on Edinburgh, he would turn the Castle guns on the rebels as they marched out of the city gates. But he would have to come to terms with them if Bothwell remained inactive at Dunbar. It was the last thing Bothwell had wanted to do; but now that he knew Mary to be with child, he seriously considered their staying in this sea-fortress. They were safe at Dunbar.
She scouted the notion; a pretty pair of Sovereigns they’d be to stay skulking here instead of marching out to claim their kingdom! He had said it would never do to let themselves be bottled up in a castle instead of taking the field.
He nodded, but frowned, biting his knuckle as he always did when doubtful. Balfour was the crux of the matter. He did not trust him an inch. Might his message be a lure to get them out of their stronghold? But then there was a mysterious move of Gordon’s; he had joined him in the Castle, and must know of this offer, had probably prompted it. Yes, that must be the real reason of the message, that Gordon had established his power over Balfour and would force him to carry out his promise loyally.
So
they rode out of Dunbar with as many moss-troopers as they had collected in under twenty-nine hours, their two hundred hagbutters, sixty cavalry regulars and the three siege guns that Bothwell had installed at Dunbar and made convertible into field batteries. All the way along their line of march, loyalists fell in and swelled their ranks; Border lairds, and Geordie Seton and Yester and old Borthwick, who scolded her ferociously for the trick she’d played on him.
It would not do for her to ride at the head of her troops in boy’s dress, so she had borrowed some clothes at Dunbar: a full kilted scarlet skirt which because of her slender height only reached just below her knees, white linen sleeves tied back in points, and a velvet hat that proved too hot to wear, so she carried it in her hand. The simple dress made her look ridiculously young, not at all like the burgher’s wife from whom it had been borrowed, but rather his tall young daughter riding to school, so Bothwell told her, and chaffed her outrageously for the loss of her snood, that Scottish symbol of maidenhood. She wished she could have made a more queenly show before her hastily mustered troops; Scotland never gave her a chance to show off, she said, thinking of her first entry on a borrowed nag. But he swore that she looked far lovelier without her gauds: she was never meant to be caged up in stiff State robes; and she remembered the French courtiers had thought her ‘barbaric’ Highland costume more becoming than her most exquisite dresses.
‘So you’ll believe me, if a Frenchman said it first!’
That night they halted at Seton House. It was very late and he made her go straight to bed, and there lay with her wrapped in his arms until she fell asleep, her small round head tucked into his breast, the slight body relaxed against his in utter peace, a part of him even more than when awake and fervent with the rapture of his desire. Was it true, then, what she seemed to believe, that in death lay the fullest possession? For the first time he was torn with the poignant mystery of love. He watched the gentle breathing of her parted lips, the dusky gold of her eyelashes lying so still on her pale cheeks. He would not kiss her lest the vehemence of his tenderness should wake her, but stole away from her to rise and dress before dawn.
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