The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  It was justified, for the need for his service was awaiting him.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Before going on to Kinnaird he spent a couple of nights with Lord Napier at Merchiston, just outside Edinburgh.

  The grim houses of the Canongate told him he had come home again; there was John Knox’s house butting further and further out over his head, tall enough to totter on its narrow base, but stark enough to hold good for centuries yet. The upper window which had served so often as a pulpit, the text carved on the lintel of the door, made him pull in his horse to look at them once again, with the smile of sudden understanding that comparison can give. Here he was back again in the religion of words. In France, the pretty blue-and-white image of a lady would have taken the place of that austere carving, with its appeal to the mind only, and not the eye.

  The thatched cottages of England were snug as furry field-mice; those tall harridans, the Italian houses, painted red and white with green shutters, had flaunted themselves against the unreal blue. But this ragged outline of roofs, towering against the stormy sky, was his familiar friend; and he was almost as glad to see it again as to ride through the gates of Merchiston, past Queen Mary’s pear tree in its fading blossom, and see Archie Napier come down the steps towards him.

  It was eighteen months since Margaret had died; and Napier looked as though he had not begun to get used to her absence. To Jamie she had given more than anyone else of what a mother is supposed to give, certainly more than his queer fleeting memories of his own mother could have promised. It was strange to come into this house without her running to greet him, generally with some piece of sewing in her hand, and her hair a little ruffled, as she pushed it back with that delightful gesture she always used when startled. Her quiet voice, that spoke seldom enough, had left a disproportionate silence.

  Napier led him after dinner into Queen Mary’s room.

  It was very satisfying to sit once again in his own familiar shabby chair, with the leather peeling off the back, and look upwards at the bearded faces of David and Alexander Rex, moulded in the plaster ceiling.

  There was the small casket of gold filagree that Archie’s famous mathematical father had been given by the Doge of Venice – a piece of work so exquisite that one could never find anything precious enough for it to contain.

  ‘What have you got in it now?’ he asked; and laughed delightedly on discovering the same broken seal-ring and old coin with a hole in it, that had always been there when he had poked into it as a child.

  For the first time he was noticing all these things, as for the first time he noticed Archie’s face before him, with the domed forehead under the flowing hair, that had grown a little thinner, and the pointed beard and gallant upward twirl of the moustache, that had grown a little greyer. Elegant and precise, he looked as finished a courtier as ever, but there was a new gravity that must have been growing on him ever since Margaret’s death.

  They both dreaded to talk of that, and spoke of public troubles.

  King Charles, said Napier, was in the same position as a poor descendant of a wealthy and powerful family. The Tudors had been high-handed, and succeeded; Charles tried to be, without their backing. The mood of England had changed; it no longer was submissive to sovereignty; the King, as well as everything else, must prove his value, or be disregarded. And no occasional violent gesture would prove it, such as he had attempted here just after the Coronation.

  At the Riding of the Parliament after it, he had looked like Charlemagne and Alexander rolled into one; he wore feathers on his head, and James IV’s robe royal of purple velvet, furred and laced with gold, hanging over his horse’s tail and borne by five grooms in a line; and Rothes had carried the sceptre, and Hamilton was on his left hand, and the whole magnificent train rode out of Abbey Close, in front of Holyrood Palace, and up to the Castle, and there marched into the Banqueting Hall, and seated themselves under the wooden roof, painted red and gold, to hold King Charles’ first Scottish parliament.

  But once there he was badly heckled over the tithes. So he rose before his Scottish parliament, and held out a list, with these remarkable words – ‘Well, gentlemen, I have all your names here, and I can see well enough from this day who are to be counted as my friends and who my enemies.’

  There it was, done; too late for anyone to prevent it, since no one could foresee an action so foolhardy or so pitiful. And it seemed to Archie Napier that the stout ghost of old Harry of England had stood behind that slight wavering figure. For such a threat from King Harry would have made men tremble for their heads, but from Charles, standing there, not quite sure whether to go on or to sit down – ‘Eh, Jamie, but it made me tremble only for himself!’

  ‘And what happened the next day?’

  ‘Next day he went in a coach, and walked back, and so fast as to make all his foot-guard sweat. In a royal rage, but with all the wrong people.’

  ‘Has he no judgement?’

  ‘A very fair one, if only he would use it. But he distrusts it, and takes that of others – Hamilton’s for choice. One never knows who is behind his actions.’

  And here Napier’s private troubles peeped out; some tangle of a plot against him at Court, that had led to his resignation of his Orkney estates. He had had to clear himself to King Charles’ impassive face (‘a wax image of a face,’ Jamie muttered, and had the mortuary fancy of a death mask) – to wonder how much of what he had said had penetrated behind it.

  Since Margaret’s death, he cared little for his public life, and would be glad to retire from that hectic and artificial turmoil to the quiet of Merchiston – a few books, some good wine, and his own private hobby-horse – he would tell Jamie of that in a moment. Yet that secret undermining of his power had galled him badly; the furtive sneers, just not out of his hearing – as on one occasion when certain gentlemen of the Court were coming slowly down the stairs behind Lord Mar, who was lame, and one sniggered softly to another, ‘This is like Lord Napier, who is going down by degrees.’

  Through Jamie’s angry sympathy went a thrill of pride; Archie was telling him for the first time of his personal difficulties, as to an equal in age and experience. And selfishly, it was some relief to hear of them before he told of his own failure at Court. Where a high official of Napier’s standing could have his armour pierced by impertinent thrusts, it was no wonder that himself, raw as he was, should have met with disfavour. Perhaps that disfavour also had been the result of meddling from others?

  ‘I was told to mind my Scots accent,’ he remarked with a rueful smile, remembering how little chance he had had to expose it.

  ‘Sound advice,’ replied Napier – and Jamie for the first time felt an uncomfortable suspicion that his own proud temper might have helped towards his failure at Court. Well, if it had, he could not help it, nor change himself. Archie might advise his speech, but he was damned if Hamilton should.

  Napier did not see what was making his young kinsman so thoughtful. He was busy telling him what good reason the King had to dread these youngsters from Scotland, who were apt to thrust their way into Court as if it had still been King James who sat on the throne. The keeping of state, said Archie, smiling at his fancy, was like committing adultery – both parties must consent to it. These thrusters could always succeed in pushing to the King’s side, however much he disliked them, and thus help their credit by the appearance at least of a confidential talk with him.

  ‘Did you ever hear when you were in Rome of the ignorant but intelligent young man who stuck beside the Pope when he was visiting some Italian city, so as to give wrong answers to all His Holiness’ questions? What did that matter? The Pope was just as well satisfied as if he had been told the truth – and the young man had the honour to be seen in close conversation with him – whereas, at the first “I don’t know”, he would have been replaced by someone else. So it is with the men about King Charles. It is their business to be knowing and effective – But to talk of them gives one a sour taste.
Let us drink instead.’

  He unlocked the Flemish wine cupboard of inlaid wood, where knights chased a stag over a high curved bridge towards the pointed roofs of a little town. The doors were opened, the scene disappeared, instead there darkly glimmered a row of squat, round-bellied bottles.

  He poured out some Burgundy in the thin Venetian glasses that Jamie had brought him, handed one to his guest, and held the other up to the fading daylight from the window – a long, faintly opalescent bubble on a twisted stem. Jamie had a contrasting memory of Colquhoun’s feverish dartings at his new picture, a poor thing to drug a man’s lost happiness – he had been too contemptuous even to notice it at the moment. He was startled to hear his former guardian speak in echo of his own thought.

  ‘We need salves to our wounded pride,’ he said. ‘My compensating vanity is that of the author. I am baulked of directing the times as much as I wish, and so I am writing a history of them.’

  He pulled some sheets of manuscript from a table littered with papers, and the two men bent their heads over the curling flourishes of his handwriting. A Latin quotation caught Jamie’s eye; he read it aloud, translating – ‘How often is it to the interest of four or five ministers to combine together to deceive their sovereign!’

  He had seen such men pressing on King Charles on every side, like hunters on their quarry. Their quarry – their prisoner – whose eyes looked out from their midst, helpless, yet unaware, the eyes of a man sleep-walking on the edge of a precipice.

  ‘He is a fool to trust such men,’ he cried. ‘What is Southesk doing, and Carnegie? We must all get together and prevent these men from harming Scotland, while there is yet time.’

  But the son of the man who had invented logarithms smiled at that last phrase.

  ‘I met an astrologer in England,’ he said with apparent irrelevance, ‘who believes that the world will last a great time yet. He told me that Saturn is now in the ascendant, and will be so for the next three hundred years. Saturn, as you know, is Lord of Death. So that there will be great wars, and, what is perhaps even worse, ceaseless strife, apart from wars.’

  ‘Do you believe him?’

  ‘I believe what I have already seen. I do not like the way the world has turned in this century. We have had more than thirty years of marvellous inventions and discoveries – but of what use is that, if all that this vast new power and wealth is used for, is to enrich clever and greedy men? The world is growing too clever. More and more books flood into it—’

  ‘And you too are now guilty!’

  ‘No author will ever admit that. His book is always the one book that the world needs. But mine, as it happens, is not to be published.’

  ‘And so you will prevent others from knowing as much as yourself?’

  ‘Knowledge does not bring wisdom, especially when it is cheaply and easily come by. There was peace in the learning of the past, because men earned it slowly, absorbing it into the very stuff and pattern of their lives. Now any glib fellow can get a smattering of it, and be none the less a fool, only the more dangerous. For his object will be neither wisdom nor peace, but the vulgar determination to make good his own ends, at no matter whose expense.’

  The afterglow of a sunset they could not see, shone primrose down the deep angle of the window seat, where Margaret used to sit. Only their lace collars were clear beneath the darkening faces of the two men – a cobweb transparency that would last long after their eyes had been darkened for ever. To Jamie, in this protracted northern twilight that he had missed so long, time itself had stopped, and held them there; as their empty glasses caught and held the reflected colours of the invisible sky. He could only see the hollows of Archie’s eyes, and the white blur of his forehead, as he heard the quiet tones of his voice.

  ‘There is a new kind of man in the world today. The knight-errant gave way to the adventurer, and now he in his turn to the fortune hunters. The men who stumbled on gold in America have engendered an insane new greed of money – they have given hope to every man, whatever his station, that he may make a fortune. It is that that I fear may destroy the world, more than wars. For the love of an insensate metal, that is death.’

  ‘This is the wisest man I have known,’ thought Jamie, a little dashed, for it is startling to make such a discovery on one’s return home after three years of seeing the world. His recognition of it burst from him in an odd form, prompted by a memory of a mathematical lesson that Napier had once tried to give him from the works of his father, that abstruse inventor.

  ‘Did you not say once that the letter “e” in logarithms is an unknown quantity, expressive of an indefinable value? What is that value that men must attach to life, if they are to live indeed – a value that you are more aware of than any man I know? Whatever it is, if the world is losing it, no knowledge, power or wealth that it gains will avail, until it is won back.’

  The colours had died from his glass; it was now a ghost. He heard the steps of servants bringing candles. The moment that had held them in the past and future as much as in the present, was going from them. In the bright light they would speak of more practical and immediate matters, ask after So-and-So and Such-and-Such.

  If it were true that the world, instead of drawing to its end as everyone supposed, were to last another three hundred years under the rule of Saturn, Lord of Death – what difference would it then make that they two sat here tonight and talked? They could not change the course of the stars, roll back time, and bring a nobler age to the earth. So his mind said.

  Yet because he was young, and loved and admired Archie, and was shocked at what he had been told of the self-seekers who ruled the King, his heart refused to agree with his mind, and he believed that they could do this.

  Book II

  THE LEAN YEARS

  1636–1644

  Chapter One

  Magdalen’s favourite picture as a little girl was on the scroll of parchment which lay in the big oak chest in the library. As a treat it would be taken out for her, and unrolled on the table; and herself lifted up to see it on her father’s warm knee, his beard bristling against her hair as their two heads leaned over it and his big hands spread over it, flattening down first one part and then another.

  There in the top left corner was the cross little old man who looked as though he wanted to ‘shoo’ away the two cherubs that buzzed just over his head. And then, moving along to the right of the parchment, though her finger must not touch but only point at its beauties, was the bird as big as the old man, with pink wings and long blue striped body like a fish, and the butterfly almost as big as the bird, and the cherries and cornflowers and the thistle with a crown over it, and the honeysuckle and strawberries and bees and a tiny blue beetle, going all round the edge till they came up again to where the peevish old man sat in his corner.

  In the middle of the parchment was a lot of writing, and that was the part her father liked. It was a long time before Magdalen understood that this picture was the patent of King James I’s creation of her father’s nobility that had been given to him a year or two after her birth – and even then she was apt, not unnaturally, to confuse King James and his angelic attendants with God ‘who sitteth among the cherubim’; and to believe that King James had created all the fruit and flowers and insects that rioted round those dry words that had created her father Lord Carnegie of Kinnaird.

  Because he had ‘unobtrusively exhibited singular prudence, sound judgement and zeal towards the King’ – Yes, but is the bird going to eat that butterfly? She refrained from the question; for she learned early to adapt herself to her family’s opinion as to what was and was not a matter of importance; and there could be no doubt what that was in this case. There was the new Lord Carnegie as the centre of this creation.

  For some generations the Carnegie family had shown a higher and more complex standard of civilization than many of their neighbours. They had played the part of statesmen, combining loyalty to their cause with a rational perception of their ow
n interests, at a time when the barren ambitions of most Scottish nobles were those of isolated robbers.

  David Carnegie’s father and grandfather had conducted embassies to France and England on behalf of Queen Mary, and her mother the Queen Regent. And of the same type of faithful public servant with a well-balanced brain, was the first Earl of Southesk, formerly Lord Carnegie, formerly Sir David Carnegie, formerly plain David Carnegie, Laird of Kinnaird.

  Only once did his ‘zeal’ outrun his ‘prudence’, and that was when King James VI of Scotland came to stay with him at Kinnaird a few months before he became King James I of England. It was an excusably exciting, even upsetting occasion. The old Queen of England was undoubtedly dying in her palace at Richmond; and half her ministers were sending secret protestations to King James to assure him of their support to him as her successor. And yet she was a wonderful woman, you never knew what might happen next with her – at any moment she might spring up again as though she had only been shamming dead like the fox in the fable, and then what a fury she would be in at any whisper of a successor! Had she not refused again and again to appoint her heir, regarding as treason the implied suggestion that she was mortal?

  And as treason now did her subservient heir regard it when his host, David Carnegie, actually dared at dinner to drink to his health as the future sovereign of England as well as Scotland.

  ‘And,’ added the tactless fellow, ‘I have forty muskets ready at hand, should your Majesty have need of them.’

  ‘For all sakes, man!’ spluttered his sovereign, so purple and incoherent that Carnegie at first mistook his agitation for a fit of choking, as was frequently caused by his way of eating, and leaned forward to pat His Majesty on the back. But King James started from the impious hand, and like a restive pony chafed and foamed at the mouth; he could scarcely slobber out fast enough his passionate protestations that all he desired was that Her Majesty should live at least twice as long (‘She could hardly do that now she’s hard on seventy,’ muttered Carnegie), that he regarded himself as her subject in everything and never desired anything else – unless in the due course of time, and without the lifting of a finger in the matter, let alone forty muskets, God should see fit in the inscrutable workings of His Providence to appoint him as His deputy in England as well as Scotland.