The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  But even this admission was too much for his nerves; he checked it to drink greedily, spilt his wine, gulped out that he acquitted Her Majesty freely of the unfortunate circumstance of his mother’s beheadal, wiped his bespattered lips with a simple gesture of the back of his hand, rolled his eyes round his company to see how they were taking all this; and then added that he intended to write his thanks to Her Majesty very shortly – though whether this were, belatedly, for his mother’s beheadal, or for what other reason, was not quite clear in the confusion of his loyalty to Queen Elizabeth and his desire to see his cup replenished.

  ‘I have spilt more than the half of it, Davie, the more’s the pity, for your wine’s better than your daft talk.’

  King James’ panic, though unpleasant, was not unreasonable, for in his train was Mr George Nicholson, English agent in Scotland to Elizabeth’s minister, Cecil; and Mr Nicholson wrote that evening a lively account of the conversation to his master.

  But for all his protested hopes to the contrary, within the year King James VI of Scotland and I of England was on his way south to his new kingdom. He wrote to David Carnegie, entrusting him with the care of ‘our said dearest bedfellow’ (for so he referred some four or five times to his Queen) and her children, on their journey down to London. This letter was preserved in the new French cabinet that Carnegie bought in London; it stood in the newly furnished and newly named with-drawing-room, to which the ladies of Kinnaird now withdrew after meals in the correct new London fashion.

  Thus did David Carnegie win his first title; he was knighted for his escort of the Queen and royal children to London, and richly deserved it, considering the trouble given him by those princely young rascals, Henry and Elizabeth – for the task of keeping them out of mischief and danger was far harder than even his subsequent work as one of the Commissioners appointed to consult on the ‘perfect Union of Scotland and England’. For which he was, some twelve years later, created Lord Carnegie of Kinnaird.

  His public life grew steadily in importance; he was never out of office, always on the bench or in the Scottish Parliament, or a Commissioner, or one of the Lords of the Council or Lords of the Articles. And in the latter semi-ecclesiastic function, he stood up fearlessly for Scotland’s rights; protested that there could be no freedom of speech or voting in the General Assembly ‘with the King’s guard standing behind our backs’; and objected to the King’s Acts of Parliament when they actually dared attack some of the Protestants as well as the Papists.

  But this courageous independence did nothing to impair his friendship with King James; and when the home-sick monarch, after thirteen years of England, confessed to his ‘salmon-like instinct’ to revisit his native country, he stayed once more at Kinnaird.

  Very different was this visit from his last, as the royal guest reminded his host, nudging him in a most unkindly manner and giggling over his own discomfiture – ‘Eh man, Davie, but do you mind the fright you gave me with your bold talk of forty muskets, and Geordie Nicholson sitting there with his lugs flapping open to catch every word ?’

  Nor was security its only difference. King James I of England and Scotland was a far more important guest than King Jamie of Scotland; and the Lord Carnegie a greater and richer man than the Laird of Kinnaird. The entertainment had to impress English nobles as well as a Scots king, a high standard to live up to, for at one great English country-house a bed had been furnished at the cost of eight thousand pounds for King James’ visit. Kinnaird could not equal Knowle. But Carnegie provided some very stately hunting and hawking parties, and three or four poets who furnished rhymes in both Latin and English on all the entertainments and all the virtues of their monarch, including even his appetite, and the gusto with which

  He gladly drinks the heart-comfórting wine.

  A grave little girl of four years old watched the proceedings, and was not impressed. King James was very like his portrait among the cherubs and strawberries and butterflies, but now at last she saw he was not God. He was a greedy and foolish old man. He pinched her cheek, asked her name, and told her that a learned college at Oxford had been called after her. Magdalen did not believe him.

  She had to dance on to the new-made lawn before the house together with her five elder sisters and the three eldest Graham girls; and she held tightly, not to say stickily, on to Dorothea Graham’s hand. The nine girls represented the nine Muses, and wore new dresses of silver tissue which were very expensive and could not be worn afterwards because they were so fantastic, nor used as bed curtains because they were so flimsy. For weeks Lady Carnegie and her daughter Catherine argued this problem, which was somehow connected in Magdalen’s mind with a mysterious occasion when Catherine burst into tears and said that Sir John Stewart of Traquair was a bleating bellwether.

  Sir John, a pompous, elderly young man, was made Lord Stewart of Traquair as a direct result of the royal visit, and next year Catherine married him, and nobody seemed to remember that she had once called him a bellwether, least of all her mother, who had then answered her by boxing her daughter’s ears.

  But now they were in close accord over house linen and baby clothes, for there is nothing like matrimony for drawing a mother and daughter together, particularly when the matrimony is not entirely to the daughter’s taste. So Magdalen observed in the dry note-book stage of priggishly critical adolescence – that stage that frightened young Ogilvy from his courtship of her.

  All the sisters married men of political importance, furnished their houses in the most modern and comfortable manner, and bore healthy babies. They talked in a knowledgeable way of their husbands’ activities, entertained those who would help their careers, and discussed the problems of the public good.

  When wives become politically minded, it is a sure sign that the world has settled down; and so it had, for there was scope in it for a man to increase his property and advance his family without murdering his neighbour and raiding his possessions to do so. The stages by which David Carnegie became Earl of Southesk showed that Scotland had well advanced from the age of lawless banditry and desperate chivalry into that of modern statesmanship.

  He was now a magnificent old man; his sense of growing importance defeated his advancing age, and his eye grew brighter in command as his beard grew patriarchal. For Magdalen he had an old man’s weakness for the youngest; she was not as strong as her sisters, nor as assertive, and this increased his tenderness. He worried more over the births of her two children than he had done over any of the ten born to Lady Southesk and himself. Anxiety has a wonderful way of stimulating affection – and exasperation.

  Which was why Lord Southesk was so often angry with his young son-in-law of Montrose, whom he loved, reluctantly, and without admitting it, more than any of his own sons. Why could not Jamie be more like those four stalwart, swarthy young men, who were so like himself? He was as good at games as they, as keen a swordsman, a better rider, had as much fire and spirit – too much, that was it. There was something unaccountable about the boy; one never knew what he would be up to next.

  Nothing had ever aroused in him such baffled fury as he had felt when Jamie absconded just before the Coronation. His experience would have been of such use to the boy at that profitable function. The family had certainly done well at it, with earldoms all round, but it gave him little pleasure that his rather heavy son-in-law, of Traquair, should be ‘climbing like a mule’, as he unkindly put it; when his son-in-law of Montrose, for whom he wished most, had deprived him of any chance to help him to advancement.

  No, none of his own sons had ever given him such pain, he told himself; and did not know that it was because none of them had ever given him such pleasure.

  And now the boy was coming home, having made a mess of things at Court, probably, or he would not be leaving in such a hurry. ‘But anyway the girl will be happy’ – so he excused his own feelings.

  For all that there was of youth in his veins (and there was still a surprising amount) tingled in anticipat
ion of hearing again that note of merry affection, half teasing, half respectful – and also of challenges and storms to come, advice, rebellions, scoldings – and even of that far-off, visionary hope, that can beset the wisest of old men, that one day young Jamie would acknowledge him to be in the right.

  Chapter Two

  Three years Jamie had been gone.

  For three years Magdalen had helped her mother count the linen and embroider it with the new Earl’s coronet, and spin fine wool on her small spinning-wheel while her foot rocked the heavy wooden cradle for the baby, James, and she crooned lullabies, to which the wheel sang a thin, whining accompaniment, and the bobbin on the floor danced on and on, now in the sunlight, now in the shadow, and the tabby kitten watched, and dared not pounce.

  Oh can ye sew cushions? And can ye sew sheets?

  And can ye sing Ballaloo when the bairnie greets?

  She could and did, putting infinite and exquisite labour into darns as fine as lace, in sheets so old they could only go to the wash once or twice more before they were torn up for polishing cloths.

  ‘But she has no sense of time,’ Lady Carnegie, now Lady Southesk, complained of her daughter – and it was true, for time would race by her, while she stood motionless in eternity, her hand on the heavy iron latch of the door of their room.

  The latch clanked up, the door opened, the latch clanked down; and all the silence in the big house (so much more silent since Jamie had gone) surged back on her again, as she stood looking at a bole, or knot, or the grain of the tree in one of the boards, listening for the sound of a step or a voice she could not hope to hear; stood until she had to walk round the room, look into the cupboard, open the pretty painted marriage-chest that had been bought for her from a Dutch merchant, before she could remember what errand it was that had brought her here.

  She walked in the walled garden and picked poppy-heads and thyme for her mother’s famous sleeping pillows, which had cured even poor Mr Henderson, the minister, of insomnia, and called to Johnnie and James, who could now trot quite well (though not as sturdily as Johnnie at his age) for it was now three years since Jamie had been gone, and the kitten that had watched the bobbin dance beside James’ cradle was now a sleek stout cat, flying precipitately from its sunny corner at the yells of the pursuing boys.

  There was no silence when they were about, making murderous attempts to pick off the heads of the flowers, pulling like puppies at her skirts, uttering little greedy cries of supplication as she stood beside her mother at the stillroom table, and pressed apples or damsons through a sieve for cheese, or preserved in dry yet succulent sweetness those delicious plums to which the French queen, La Reine Claude, had given her name more than a century ago. That simple queen of the most gorgeous of the Renaissance kings, in her passion for bottling and preserving, had bequeathed plums to the world, where François I had left palaces and a race of perverse and diseased kings.

  ‘Plums are the better,’ said Magdalen, dropping one into each of the gaping mouths beside her.

  ‘Better than what?’ said her mother.

  ‘Better than cherries – bigger,’ said her elder son.

  Johnnie she loved because he was bold and held his head like his father, and James because he had a tiny pale face and clung to her side. He was never called Jamie, because only his father had that name, and no other. He should not go to school with Johnnie, she resolved. All her family said that though he was three years younger, it would be much better for them to start together, it would bring him on, and teach him not to be so much the baby.

  But Magdalen, who had no sense of time, knew that James was older than Johnnie in some ways, and always would be.

  If she could, she would keep him at home with her and Master Forrett for at least two or three years after Johnnie had gone to school. Only Master Forrett was on her side in this matter, and ‘the others’ were such fools as to think that his own interest and desire to stay on as tutor prompted his opinion. She must get Jamie on her side as soon as he came home.

  ‘As soon as’ was now so soon that her mother’s words to her across the kitchen table thrilled through her blood like the sound of trumpets.

  ‘They will certainly be here for dinner,’ said Lady Southesk.

  She said ‘they’, because Mr Henderson was coming up too from his remote parish in the marshes of Leuchars – and Lady Southesk could remember that, though Jamie would be at dinner. She could even talk about vegetables too – and the honey sauce she was making for ‘that new vegetable with the outlandish name I can never remember. Run out between these storms to Daniel yourself, and choose the best.’

  So Lady Southesk commanded from the pastry-board – for let her be made countess or duchess or queen itself, she would trust nobody else with the short paste, and was telling all within earshot of the fact. Maidservants scurried round her, eddying like a whirlpool, their skirts of coarse homespun flying out round their bare feet which pattered on the stone floors as fast as rain upon the leaves, their faces red and flurried, hot with the anxious certainty that whatever their mistress told them to do next, they would do wrong.

  A groom tramped in with a game-bag of woodcock, and unloaded them on the table by the great fireplace. One of them had only been stunned, and as soon as it was out of the bag, shot up to the low, blackened ceiling, skimming and bumping round and round like a gigantic moth.

  It might have been the devil himself let loose, by the commotion it caused among the maids. The grinning groom chased the bird past the flushed faces of all the flustered busybodies and over the fluttering white clothes on their heads.

  ‘Let it fall in my pastry and I’ll wring your neck with the bird’s,’ Lady Southesk warned him, proceeding imperturbably with her operations on the slab of white marble that made her pastry board. But he caught it without that dire result, knocking it down from the ceiling with a broom, killed it with a turn of his wrist, and laid the limp body on the heap of game.

  Their feathers were stained with blood – Tray heaven she does not remember the ostrich feathers again!’ breathed Magdalen. For her mother had already told her three times to fetch out the bunches of precious ostrich feathers, dyed red and purple, to tie at the top of the four posts of the bed in which Mr Henderson was to sleep. Lady Southesk had a great regard for Mr Henderson, who had been their minister down in Fife at the parish of Leuchars for over twenty years, and the one man that they all thought as wise as Lord Southesk, and still more good – an opinion shared by Lord Southesk himself. And Lady Southesk perversely insisted on showing their regard by treating the minister to all the favours he was most likely to despise as worldly vanities.

  Ostrich feathers therefore were essential to Mr Henderson; but his hostess had given so many directions to everybody, including herself, that she often could not remember what they were; and so now she could not think what resting-place, safe from dust and mice, she had chosen for the feathers; and Magdalen could not think either, and half the maids were in tears – but at that Lady Southesk briskly measured out as much cheerful encouragement as she had formely dealt scoldings, declaring that anyway it was a great thing the Italian brocade coverlid had been found and placed on the bed, for that was the first thing that anyone would notice, and it was only later that the eye would travel upwards to the four top corners of the bed, adorned (or not, as the case might be) with red and purple feathers.

  And mustering her troops together, she launched them on some fresh objective, with the happy light in her eye of a general who is hard-pressed, but accustomed to conquer.

  So Magdalen left the community humming like a hive behind her, and the fierce, strong-smelling heat of the kitchen, and went out into the rabbit-warren of cold passages, where the stone floors sweated with damp, and all the old white-wash was darkened with age, and the heavy doors rose up on either side of her, opening into the larders and the pantry and the store-room and the cellar and the still-room and the preserving room; and in the cold gloom of that sunless half-
light there glimmered the huge, pale curves of bowls and jars and pans of cream, and bags of corn or meal, made of plaited rushes; and the dark, pendulous shapes of hams and joints hung heavily from the ceiling in sacrifice to the appetite of man.

  She felt her way along to the white gleam of daylight round the corner, and ran out into the sunlit courtyard.

  Chapter Three

  Now she was in the little wood, stopped, picked one of the many wild hyacinth pods that rustled round her feet, pinched it in half with her finger nail, and looked intently at the seeds that lay like pearls in their three green cells. She thought of a secret place further down in the wood, where the sunlight slanted like thin spears through the green latticed depths and struck on the dark ground-ivy in points of polished steel.

  As she had once nursed a stump of wood or scrap of leather under the table, so these were now her treasures, close-guarded from her family. Only Johnnie and young James were sometimes allowed a glimpse.

  The seed pearls dropped from her fingers, she walked out from the trees up to the stone garden walls that her father had built. Field daisies and poppies had sown themselves on the top, and waved like a row of banners from their castle wall. Magdalen entered those tall gates of wrought iron and was once again within her fortress. The fruit trees were splayed against the walls; outside them, leaning over them, trees were tossing and blowing, as big and dark as thunder-clouds; above them, huge clouds, white and black, were riding like galleons high up in the blue sky.