The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  Now a man would as soon be in the galleys as in the King’s Navy, so wretched was the pay and the food, so lousy and rateaten were the ships; and so powerful the Barbary rovers, who sold English mariners as slaves at Sallee to grind in their mills; and so insolent the Dutch herring fishers, who landed without leave to spread their nets on the English shores.

  But for all their bitter shame, the suggestion of paying shipmoney made every Englishman’s blood boil. Let the sea-coast towns go on paying for the Navy. What had it to do with the rest of England?

  In regretful contrast Charles remembered all that his father had told him of the logic and reasonableness of Scottish minds, and longed to revisit his native land. But it took so much trouble, it would be such an expense, the English nobles were always opposing it, and it never seemed to be the right moment.

  Now at last it was all settled, the Coronation was to be held at Holyrood next year, and the King, with a train of Scots and English nobles, would make a tour of the principal Lowland towns, who had been preparing for his advent ever since his accession. Odes of welcome were written in English and Latin; masques were rehearsed; the company of glovers at Perth practised a particularly complicated sword-dance; a pretty young lady in Edinburgh, chosen to represent that city, spent hours before the glass, trying on an immense castellated headdress so as to look like a stone wall.

  And Lady Carnegie organized a fire-screen in appliqué work to be sewn in various pieces by the leading ladies of Scotland and assembled together for the King’s use in his Palace of Holyrood, which had lain empty so long. She worked the centre piece of the Crown herself, together with her daughter Magdalen, and briskly disposed of any feebler clutches on the Crown made by rival female ambitions.

  It was now the autumn, and all expectations would be realized (or not) early in the next year, 1633. Some timid and fanciful spirits added up the numbers that make that date, deplored the fact that they came to thirteen, and demanded why King Charles could not have chosen any other year in which to be crowned in Scotland. But such complaints smacked of that worst superstition, popery. It was the Last Supper of Our Lord and His apostles that had made thirteen an unlucky number; and the Scottish divines were growing more and more disinclined to allow Our Lord any apostles at all.

  Apostles – apostolic succession – the laying on of hands – bishops. Such was the sequence of ideas; and its apotheosis was the next important question (after the tithes) that King Charles did not as yet properly understand, but would be made to do so as soon as he had reached Scotland. He was to give the nobles their tithes, and he was to take away the bishops.

  Of all those who expected advancement at the Coronation, none had better reason to do so than the young Earl of Montrose, the head of one of the finest fighting families in the land, young, good-looking, an athlete and a superb rider – a sure help to Charles’ favour. And Montrose would be splendidly sponsored at his introduction. His brother-in-law, Lord Napier, was arranging most of the details of the Coronation, and would himself be one of the bearers of the canopy over the King’s head in the Procession. His father-in-law, Lord Carnegie, was to be made an earl at the Coronation, and had chosen for his title the broad and placid waters of the South Esk that flowed past Kinnaird and into the estuary by the town of Montrose. One of Carnegie’s three brothers was also to be honoured, so that it was inevitable he should choose the upper river of North Esk. And the new Lord Southesk’s son-in-law, now at Court, who had been first Sir John and then Lord Stewart of Traquair, would also be made an earl, and probably the next Treasurer of Scotland.

  Among all these family honours, what would fall to Montrose? The lion’s share, thought at least one poet in his Coronation ode, who recommended to his sovereign the merits of:

  That hopeful youth, the Young Lord Graham,

  James, Earl of Montarose,

  (inserting an extra syllable into his title for the sake of the line). There were also the merits of his ancestors:

  Whose hearts, whose hands, whose swords, whose deeds, whose fame,

  Made Mars for valour canonize the Graham!

  Mr William Lithgow’s previous publication, ‘Adventures and painful peregrinations of long nineteen years travel from Scotland to the most famous kingdoms in Europe, Asia and Africa’, had been presented to Montrose at college, and rewarded with a large sum of money, but Mr Lithgow had ill rewarded the patronage, for he asked leave to submit his next work in manuscript for his noble patron’s private reading, and it bore this title: ‘The gushing tears of godly sorrow, containing the causes, conditions and remedies of sin, depending mainly upon contrition, and they seconded with sacred and comfortable passages, under the mourning canopy of tears and repentance.’

  But the author abandoned his pious mood in time for the Coronation. Nothing seemed to exist, thought Montrose, except for the Coronation.

  When Napier told him that he, Montrose, was to be one of the King’s train-bearers, his guardian’s pleasure surprised and rather depressed the young man. Were these the aloof ideals of the man whose father had invented the symbols of an unknown quantity of indefinite value?

  What could all this fuss lead to but a place at Court?

  ‘And you yourself are sick of Court life, and only long to retire from it altogether. You are always saying so.’

  ‘That is because I am growing old, and Margaret is not strong, and it is time we had a rest together. But you are young. Have you no ambitions?’

  Yes, he had, overweening ambitions, beyond any Coronation honour. But he was too shy to speak them. He growled instead that he wished to God that sour, sallow, tallow-faced fellow, Archibald Campbell, Lord Lome, was not going to be one of the other train-bearers. ‘If I get the chance, I’ll trip him over it.’

  He was not always so contrary. Sometimes he would imagine the conversations he would have with his sovereign, in which he would convince Charles of exactly what was needed to settle the Scottish question. Walking beside him on the links above Saint Andrews, where of course the King would wish to play golf as his royal father had done thirty years ago, Montrose would describe the pride of his nation in its own peculiar half-religious, half-political creation, the Kirk. Had the King forgotten that England was a foreign country? that his Bishop of London, Laud, who wanted to meddle with Scottish as well as English Church services, was a pedantic Oxford don who had never set foot on a tuft of Scottish heather in his life?

  But then the daydream, floating past him in the hum of the heather bees and the honey-sweet smell of the yellow bed-straw flowers where he lay that hot, late autumn afternoon on the links near Saint Andrews (which was why he could not imagine talking to King Charles anywhere else), would turn its darker side, and he would wonder how he should ever speak so freely, with Lord Lome, who had already been to Court and made friends with the King, looking on, and with him the insolent English lords, despising as a raw country lad anyone who had not been to London.

  All his pride rose in revolt, that this was the best opportunity his manhood should give him, that he should make a good impression on a foreign-bred king. That was not how he wished to prove himself.

  He could talk to none of his occasional uneasiness. Even Archie Napier had found his scruples finicky. Napier was as upright and honourable as anyone could wish, but he was a man of the world, and his world had been built up by royal favour, or at least recognition. So had the world of his father-in-law, so soon now to be Earl of Southesk.

  As for Magdalen, had he confided such fancies to her, he could well imagine her despairing gaze. ‘You do not wish to meet the King – to gain his notice – win his favour?’

  And her eyes would fall on the wooden cradle, wherein she rocked the heir to all her hopes of himself, and say nothing more, but he would feel how he had dashed them. No woman could understand, since her fate was to be cautious, careful of the future, thrifty and watchful of any opportunity that might advance those she cared for with such unceasing patience.

  No woman in t
he world, he repeated to himself – but a wandering thought that had strayed in a direction forgotten of late, answered – ‘Yes, there is one.’ Kat, whom he had forgotten while he worried about the Coronation, and of whom he had had no news for many weeks, Kat would understand his desire not to be dependent on any man’s opinion. And with that there came so sudden a desire to see her that it throbbed in his breast like terror.

  ‘I must ride to Rossdhu,’ he said to Magdalen, and her eyes fell before his. What could she fear or wish to reprove, that her eyes could not tell him? Would she like to bind him always to her side? It must hurt cruelly to be a woman, he thought, stung to an unusual power of perception by his own conflicting desires and perplexities. He held his arms round her as if to protect her, and whispered to her, ‘My dear and only love.’

  ‘That sounds like poetry,’ she said, with her ironic smile.

  Chapter Sixteen

  On his way from Kinnaird, he met Archibald Napier, who was riding to meet him, and only then remembered that he was that day to go with him to Edinburgh for a state banquet with the Lord Chancellor. But he could not, he said, he must go to Rossdhu. Why then? demanded his brother-in-law. Had he had news? No, that was it, he had had no news for a long time, he was anxious, and Archie must let him go. The boy looked oddly, Napier could not think what had come to him.

  ‘Then I can give you news,’ he said, ‘for Sir John is at Edinburgh, and had a letter from his wife only this morning, and they are all well at home.’

  Jamie began to feel he had been a fool. Of course they were all well. But the real factor that reassured him was that Sir John was at Edinburgh.

  So he went there, and rode in the Chancellor’s coach with his gilded state sword at his side; and went to the banquet and there saw Sir John, who drank a good deal and talked more than ever, apparently to cover his nervous apprehension. It was all because of the Coronation, Archie Napier told Jamie with a smile. If he worked himself up into fits like this, months before the time, what would he be like at the actual event?

  ‘That is a sick man,’ said Napier. Colquhoun was eagerly forming a group round himself, breaking off the story he was telling so dramatically to a couple of men, in order to pluck the cloak of a third and draw him into his audience; to whisper a hurried joke into the ear of a fourth as he passed by; to wave, as he did now, in exaggeratedly friendly greeting to his brothers-in-law, the lords Napier and Montrose. He seemed very gay, his roving eyes sought those of everyone in the room, his flexible eyebrows puckered and contracted and one went up and the other went down, as though they could never agree whether to wink or frown.

  Behind him the candlelight slid over the dark panels, cut this way and that by the shadows of men passing.

  Jamie wondered what should have prompted the wise Napier’s remark, and then heard himself say, without intention, ‘What is driving him?’

  And a thin little shadow of fear fell on him for his brother-in-law, who was held to be so brilliant, so popular, so likely to win the favour and success he craved for; and who yet, as Jamie watched him now, the laughing centre of his little crowd, seemed oddly alone, clutching at all who passed as a drowning man might clutch at the twigs that drift down-stream.

  In candlelight, then, in company, ‘man walketh in a vain shadow, and disquieteth himself in vain’. And Jamie considered if he should go over and speak to him, but was discomforted by this glimpse he had had of him, as though he had seen him naked and unaware among the crowd. Sir John’s worries, if any, had nothing to do with him.

  And here was Wigton, whom he was longing to tell of the salmon as long as his two arms – well, nearly – which he had caught with one of the new artificial flies instead of sticking to Wigton’s favourite old ground bait. He would see Sir John next day.

  But next day he had first to call on the family adviser, Sir Thomas Hope, who had been promoted to the proud position of Lord Advocate. A solemn, crotchety old fellow, he recorded his dreams every morning as carefully as he entered his accounts at night, to see if they would not come true, since he had once unquestioningly dreamed in June of the left-hand shoelace that he would break in September – a clear proof of predestination, said Montrose, to tease him.

  The Almighty had condescended to speak to Sir Thomas in the middle of last night, saying in a loud voice, not unlike the sound of the yard-dog barking, ‘I have done it.’ What the Almighty had done, Sir Thomas could not say. But he had made his wife get up and record the marvel, saying to her – ‘Spouse, did you not hear One speak a word?’

  ‘She said one on her own account, I suppose,’ murmured the sympathetic listener.

  His wife, a cross-looking woman, with sagging cheeks and down-drooped mouth, had to show the notebook, muttering that it had been a sin and a shame to trouble the Almighty and herself like this, when a pinch of peppermint in hot water would have settled Sir Thomas’ stomach troubles for the night.

  But her husband, who was slightly deaf, happily followed divine messages with obscene devilry, telling of a hag who had given a young girl a magic trinket, and so enticed her into the embrace of the Evil One, which, according to the report of her confession, she had found ‘very cold’.

  ‘The world has grown too old,’ thought Jamie, ‘it is full of old men grumbling in their sleep.’

  But for all his gossip and dreams and diary of private informations straight from the Lord’s mouth, Sir Thomas showed his shrewd business side as soon as he settled down to the legal business of his patron’s estates. It was indeed the patron who went back to the subject he had despised.

  ‘Can a trinket be made to bewitch its wearer?’ he asked idly; but paid no attention to the answer. Once again, and this time not to be delayed even by a visit to Sir John, he knew that he must go to Rossdhu.

  Chapter Seventeen

  He rode into woods that were dripping with the early November mists. The trees never stirred; the silver trunks of the birches had a naked look through their mesh of purple twigs. The hoofs of his mare, Bess, squelched through the sodden bracken, making the only sound in that drenched red place. All but the birches were red; the bracken a dark crimson, the hillside blood-red in the shadows, wine-purple in the long stretches of wet dead heather.

  This dim and glowing place took possession of him, wrapped him in a cloud of silent obscurity. A squirrel ran across a clearing in the trees, stopped close in front of the steaming horse, scrabbled through the leaves into the brown earth, and there buried a nut. It’s wary glances shot to right and left, more full of alert intelligence than seemed natural in so tiny a creature. All over the mare that stood there so still, up to the human figure that sat on its back as if carved from stone, over the face, and straight into Jamie’s curious eyes, went that intent, terrified and watchful glance, stared, yet saw nothing.

  Then Bess shook her head. Straightway the squirrel disappeared – jerk, flicker, jerk, its rippling brown tail repeating all its movements, as silent as the trees that received it into their midst. Jamie rode on.

  Now he saw the loch through the trees, and realized that he had through his preoccupation missed the way that he knew as well as his own home, and had to follow the curve of the loch along the shore. The outline of the near hills was flattened in the mist as though smudged by a giant thumb against the air. There was no sky, there were no shadows, no distant shapes, only on the water there glistened a faint silver radiance.

  Suddenly Bess pulled up, plunging; he patted her neck to soothe her, and felt that she was trembling. He knew, before he raised his eyes to the rocks on the hillside just before him, that Kat stood there. How long had she been there, watching him coming? His nervous beast throbbed and fussed beneath him, telling him that no human being had a right to stand so still. Even now he could not see that she was looking at him, though her head was turned his way, and that reflection of invisible light from the loch glimmered upwards on her face, making it clear like water in the darkness of her hair.

  As he called and rode up to
her, he saw her eyes on his face, scanning him, and was reminded of that wild creature of the woods that had looked at him just now, and had not seen him. He swung off his horse, threw the bridle over his arm, and held out the other to her.

  ‘Kat,’ he cried, ‘what mischief are you up to, standing there to frighten Bess?’

  She said, ‘Now I have made you come at last. Why did you not come before?’

  ‘I came as soon as I thought of it. You did not make me. Did you send for me then? Why did you want me? I am here now. Tell me.’

  His words rushed over each other. He moved up to her, pulling Bess’s bridle with the one hand, while he pushed the other over Kat’s head, jerked it up under her chin to make her look at him, dropped it on her shoulder and shook it a little in the old affectionate, exasperated way; and all the time the hand was saying, ‘This is my sister Kat, she is just the same as she always was, round head and bushy hair and sharp small shoulders, what is there in her that can make you afraid?’ and all the time his eyes asked more than his hand could tell.

  A flight of crows went skirling up into the grey air, beating on it with the black sweeping strokes of their wings. He watched them helplessly while odd, disconnected thoughts flew into his head and out again – until he noticed that she was wearing riding boots beneath her skirt, which was looped up through her belt as she always wore it when on the moor.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he asked. ‘Where is your horse?’

  He caught a fleeting look, askance – the next instant she was boldly facing him – her horse was a few yards away, she said, and why should she not be riding at twilight, so near home, as she had done often enough before?

  ‘I do not know what has happened,’ he said. ‘We can never meet now without quarrelling. I used to think I loved you more than any of my sisters, but you do not want me to love you, it has all gone.’

  He could not bear to go on talking with her. He turned Bess’s head from her, and began to move away. He heard a sob, but he would not believe she was crying. Only women who were gentle and tender-hearted, cried. There came a rushing movement through the wet bracken, and she was there on the other side of Bess, pulling at the bridle to stop them.