The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  ‘Is this because you met with a snub at Court?’ she inserted in a thin little voice through his eloquence.

  He stopped dead, his face flamed, he looked younger now than in his portrait. Anguish assailed her, she wanted to cry ‘Go on, go on,’ and knew she could never make him. Why did she ever speak? Passionately now she was on his side, for when her stiletto had pierced him, her father and brother brought out their bludgeons.

  What was all this nonsense against the ruling authority of the King? There were always corrupt men at Court, and there had been squabbling at the Coronation, but that was to be expected; as long as one played one’s own part well, that was all that need concern one.

  The trouble in Jamie’s case, said his father-in-law, was that he had not played his part there at all. No wonder His Majesty had been offended at so pointed an absence, after odes of introduction had been written for him too, by half a dozen truckling poets. All those odes. Odes. Verses. Wind and hot air. It was not quite clear whether the Earl of Southesk was the more annoyed with the odes for being written, or with his son-in-law for not fulfilling their occasion.

  Suddenly his son David, who had been glowering since his father shut his mouth for him, broke into a rush of hot, thick talk, his lips showing savagely in his black beard, for he was a man whom anger affected with a kind of greed; he seldom gave way to it, but when he did he could not bear to forgo the pleasure of tasting his bitter words.

  ‘You talk big of the King and his false advisers when you have flung away your only chance to remedy it – you have made a mess of it, as you will always of everything.’

  The blood surged to Jamie’s head, to his hands; he stared at David’s face and longed to smash his fist into it.

  ‘As big as I talk,’ he said, ‘I will make it good. The King shall not crush our liberties. If I failed at Court, I will not fail in the camp, and you shall have reason to know it.’

  He hated the threat in his own voice. Words had gone as far as they could. He could not fight his wife’s brother.

  Magdalen did not dare look at her husband’s face. ‘And I began it,’ she told herself, and – ‘so this is his home-coming.’

  Once she was alone with him she would tell him everything that was racing through her thoughts, once they were upstairs, safe and alone together, with all these faces left behind. Families were horrible things—

  My mother has killed me,

  My father is eating me,

  My brothers and sisters sit under the table

  Picking up my bones,

  And they bury them under the cold marble stones.

  They were all at it, tearing her in pieces, first with their scoldings of him – and now their soothings.

  Southesk had recognized a deadlier quality in this, the latest of the young men’s quarrels. The time had gone past for them to fight it out with their fists. For the moment they were enemies – but he thrust the knowledge away with such phrases to himself as ‘lads’ quarrels’ and ‘young blood is hot’, and belatedly sought to make the peace.

  ‘Give it time to settle down—’

  Behind all he said, Magdalen could hear his accustomed, comfortable phrase. If only other people would ever give it time to come true.

  But everyone was rushing along on his own little path – Jamie wanting to prove himself to David – David wanting to contradict and cross him before he even began – Lord Rothes greedy for his tithes – Mr Henderson anxious for the Kirk – Lord Napier for the country – King Charles and his archbishop for ‘the perfect unity of worship throughout the kingdoms’ – how, in the circumscribed space of Scotland, were these conflicting aims to agree, not only with each other, but with all the hurtling ambitions, private and public – of ministers who loved to hear their own words – and patriots who could not bear to hear those of an English bishop – and nobles who wanted to keep their extra pocket money – and peasants who thought a surplice hung on the same peg as an inquisitor’s robe?

  Let them once start pulling the bricks out of the wall, each of them clutching at just his own particular brick, and down would come the whole vast interwoven structure of the state, and each little individual home within it.

  Her father could see that. ‘Add or emend,’ he was saying, ‘but never destroy, for there is no end to destruction.’

  Could no one else see that, would they none of them give anything time to settle down?

  But looking at Jamie’s face, that had now grown so still, Magdalen mocked the hopes that rose in her whenever her father talked in that majestic, equable voice that had made her feel safe ever since she could remember.

  Whatever he might say, Jamie would never settle down – never, except when asleep and safe in her arms.

  The table melted away, the glow of the candlelight on pewter plates and the silver rims of leather drinking-cups, on faces reddened with food and argument.

  Jamie was looking at her now across the table, he was sharing this new shy thought of hers, perhaps had lit it in her mind, and was watching it burn there, still and shining, ‘for his eyes are bright enough to light anything,’ she thought, and shivered in an excitement that touched on fear.

  The voices round them became a blur, meaningless, unimportant, the voices of men talking politics.

  Chapter Five

  The voices had been left behind downstairs. There was silence here in their own room; and there, like an inner room, was their private citadel, the great bed that had been made for them with their interwoven monograms carved on its roof. This was their territory, that none of those voices, critical or argumentative, so like hers and yet not hers, could invade.

  If she were always out of hearing of them, then would she be always as free to love Jamie as she was now, free as his own love, that bore him as on wings across the room to her? She had wanted to tell him she was sorry for that thrust she had given him, but he had forgotten it, she was forgetting it. All thought was shut out of his burning eyes; before them, her mind also fell silent at last.

  Through curtains of tapestry, green as a forest, they entered their domain. She had woven two blankets for it while he had been away. In a laughing, trembling whisper, she began to tell him this, to taste ecstasy the deeper by postponing it – ‘A green one for me, a red one for you – do you still love the brightest colours, Jamie?’

  His arms were round her, as when he had lifted her into the bed; his body was stronger, his shoulders were broader than when he had last so held her; he was now a full-grown man, and his strength crushed her against him, a blind force, even alien – so long was it since she had felt it, so imperative and furious it had grown, like a gale of wind lifting her, or a wave of the sea overwhelming her; she was lost in it, and all her thoughts and fears and fancies, all that made up herself – only this remained, that he was a man, and she a woman, whom after three years he now possessed again.

  But when his passion was spent, there was his head under her hand again as it had lain so often before; once again her fingers could feel the long, sweeping curves of the skull beneath the soft thickness of the hair; a boy’s head still, a proud and lovely head, and tenderly she brought it down to the curve of her shoulder, where it nestled in its accustomed place under her chin.

  ‘So you are home again.’

  ‘Where I would always be.’

  ‘You lie, dear love, you lie. You would be roving from me all the time.’

  ‘A part of me stays here always.’

  She felt his lips in the hollow at the base of her throat. It is true, she said to herself, there is his head, it has lain there all these three years, it will be there always, no one can take it away. But at that last thought, defiance crept in, and with it fear – ‘no one can take it away,’ she repeated to herself, and her hands closed round it, clutching it to her.

  He felt the convulsive movement, the shiver that ran through her.

  ‘Dear love, you are trembling, what are you afraid of?’

  ‘I am afraid of nothing, n
othing. You are here with me, always.’

  It was a cry, lost in the night. The thick darkness of tapestried curtains, of shuttered windows, of stone walls, four feet thick, panelled inside with wood, all shut it in to the room where they lay. Her husband’s mouth came down on hers and closed it with kisses.

  Yet outside the castle where the wind blew and the clouds raced across the sinking moon, Daniel stood within the high walls of the garden, to cut the sprig of the Dutch plant at the turn of the moon, and lifted his head from staring down into the blackness of the earth, and looked up at the overhanging blackness of the castle, and heard a cry that was not from owl or night-jay, and prayed heaven it was not from the wraith of Kinnaird.

  But even as he prayed he knew that his mind had heard what his senses could not – that it was Magdalen who had cried her love and terror to the night; and his prayer turned towards her, that such love and such terror should not in itself forbode disaster.

  Chapter Six

  Montrose’s old college friends were eager to rally round him once again, and tell him all that had happened to their company since he had left. They chaffed him on his foreign appearance, and showed how much it secretly impressed them by asking for the addresses of his tailors and hairdressers in Paris against the time when they too should make their tour. Were lace collars really as broad as that now, and curls as long? They took an infernal amount of brushing to keep smooth – and did he put anything on them?

  His hair lotion, his new Andrea Ferrara sword, his French book on fencing from the School of Arms, all came in for as serious an attention as his impressions of the slavish state of Protestants abroad, and his warnings lest Scotland might also find the clock put back on her. To ardent spirits fresh from college no worse indictment could be made than that of an old fashion.

  And yet to Montrose these progressive young men seemed all to have remained just where he had left them. The only change he could see was in poor Patrick Graham of Inchbrakie, who had scarred his face in an accident with gunpowder, and was known now by the nickname of Black Pate.

  ‘A good thing it was I and not you,’ said his cousin, as they went round the stables together, looking at the horses.

  He said it with so jolly a grin that the disfigurement on his check seemed only an extension of it. ‘Just think of the loss of employment that would have caused to all the young ladies who write you verses and Arcadian compliments! – What did you think of the Italian women?’ he added, seating himself on the stable-yard bucket, and looking up at him with a knowing air, for he was not going to be outdone by his young cousin now he had come back so elegant and Italianate.

  Montrose grinned back at him, teasing his curiosity, then replied with preternatural solemnity, ‘They have to be very young to be pretty. They wear black headdresses, and walk with a stately, swinging step as though they were dancing.’ He forgot that his purpose was merely to annoy old Pate, and added, ‘There always seems to be music in’ Italy, even when none is to be heard.’

  ‘That sounds very poetical,’ said Black Pate, ‘and all I can make of it is that you are not going to tell me anything worth hearing of the Italian women. No doubt I am too young,’ he snorted, pulling the ears of the old black setter, whose head rested on his knee.

  It was true that Montrose, on meeting his old friends again, became suddenly aware of having changed and learned so much in his three years abroad that he sadly told his wife how Travel ages a man’ – and could not think why she laughed so much.

  David Drummond of Madertie had not yet married, and hinted to Montrose that he was still brooding over the time when Kat had amused herself with him for a little – largely, as her brother suspected, because Madertie had first begun to be attracted by her little sister Beatrix.

  ‘Who is worth ten of Kat, as any fool could see,’ Montrose told him, angry at Madertie’s obtuseness, but more at his own perception, reluctantly forced on him at last.

  How callow these unmarried youths seemed after the catalogued experience of their foreign contemporaries!

  Young Kilpont had some time ago fathered a bastard on the wife of a college pastrycook. Wigton was no longer romantic about Queen Mary and her thorn tree in Saint Mary’s College. Her religion would not now fit in with this new enthusiasm for Scottish independence.

  ‘It may come to a struggle with England yet,’ he told Montrose with sparkling eyes.

  At the first mention of England they were all off again like a pack of hounds on the trail of the Coronation; and Montrose was told for the fiftieth time that he ought to have been there, instead of lounging in a gondola.

  ‘You should have heard old ForLorne asking after you,’ Lord Wigton told him, between puffs at his long clay pipe – ‘and as stealthy a sneer as ever I saw looking out of one eye and into the other, for his squint gets no better.’

  Lord Lorne was all but Earl of Argyll now, for his old father was slowly dying in exile in Spain. His son was showing himself a coming man; had been sent for to Court to advise King Charles on the Scottish question; and was rapidly clearing all the debts on the estate by foreclosing mortgages on his neighbours’ lands. His sister had married the extravagant Marquis of Huntly, and was producing children as fast as rabbits, ‘and with every fresh brat,’ cried Kilpont, ‘Huntly mortgages another bit of land to Lorne, so that it is worth his while to encourage copulation – you should hear him preach to his sister on her wifely duties.’

  ‘What side will he take, if it comes to a struggle?’ asked Black Pate.

  ‘The winning one,’ said Montrose.

  They drowned their opinion of the coming Campbell in red Burgundy. They drank confusion to the bishops and their white petticoats and their retrogressive measures. And not only among these young hotheads, as Southesk called them, but among Southesk’s own generation, did Montrose meet everywhere with anger and determination against the Book of Canons.

  ‘This book is a bombshell; the peaceable Scots are not used to such cannon fire,’ said the jolly Lord Rothes, rolling his little white elephant’s eye in the vast circumference of his cheek.

  Where Henderson was the spirit of the protesting party, Rothes was its brawn and fat. No visionary man of God this, so he emphasized his position, but a sensible fellow, who was not going to have England play any of her old pranks on them. Books of Common Prayer, indeed! Prayers his foot ( – or a less elegant portion of his anatomy). These canons were really the first broadside of England’s attack on Scotland’s national liberty.

  A remarkably broad-minded man, for he could appreciate another man’s joke, and even another man’s character (were it as different from his own as that of the young Earl of Montrose), Rothes was the most popular man in Scotland. Southesk looked on his growing friendship with his son-in-law with less alarm than it deserved, for even if Rothes held advanced views, it would be with shrewd, practical sense and no flyaway notions, and he would keep the boy from taking either them or himself too seriously.

  A more alarming ally was his terrible old friend, Lady Anne Cunningham of Glencairn, whose maternal shadow had so overclouded the Marquis of Hamilton from birth. Small as a wren, with the nose of a hawk and the appetite of a wolf, she had a tireless energy and a wild temper, danced reels as gaily at seventy as she had done at seventeen, swore like a trooper, smoked like a sailor, and flouted Southesk, who had admired her and fumed at her and called her ‘Daft Annie’ since their childhood.

  She adored Montrose – ‘that boy of yours, Davie Carnegie’ (for she never would remember his new title, nor for that matter any of his titles – ‘how can I keep pace with all these skippings from laird to knight and baron to earl?’) – ‘is worth all your sons put together, and mine too. Given you trouble, has he? And what pleasure could a tough old pair like us take in anything that did not give us trouble? My eldest boy, rot him, is so anxious – that nothing and nobody should give any trouble, that he succeeds only in doing nothing and being a nobody.’

  Her nostrils snuffed battle, s
he stamped her foot like the war-horse when he sayeth ‘ha, ha’; she cried that the Scarlet Whore was winning back all the ground she had lost. That little vixen, Henrietta Maria, meant to shove the Roman Church in on them again after Laud and his Prayer Book had opened the door to it. Laud was a rank Cardinal at heart, ‘rank as a fox’ – Lady Anne was as sure of it as she was that that foolish doll, Lord Holland, was the Queen’s lover – and in that case who could answer for the succession?

  ‘Lord Holland, apparently,’ said Southesk’s driest voice; but instead of accepting the rebuke to her scandal, she let out a laugh like the hoot of a hunting owl, and raced on with undiminished vigour.

  ‘Only mark my words – we shall be under Rome again before we know where we are – and where will you be, then, you cautious old courtier!’ (for she loved to insult Southesk, and it was her last relic of the coquetry of girlhood that she could still enjoy rapping him over the knuckles:) – ‘No use then to sit on the fence – it’s on the rack you’ll be, for I’ll say this for you, if it comes to persecution and martyrdom again, you’ll stand by your faith as staunch as any.’

  And she took a pull at her pipe, and spat, with no relic at all of coquetry. ‘But you think you can stave it off by fair words and fair play,’ said she, ‘and you’re wrong, I tell you, you can’t see further than your nose, and for all it’s as long as mine, that’s not enough. That boy there sees twice as far as any of us.’

  With that singular ill-judgement of time which made King Charles do everything, good or bad, either too late or too early, the Book of Canons had been published so long before its accompanying Prayer Book that the nation had time to work itself up into a fever. Nobody dared make plans nor cared to decide anything nor go anywhere, since nobody knew what would happen when at last the Prayer Book should arrive.