The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  What happened first was a riot in Saint Giles’ Church at Edinburgh. At the first reading of the new service book, the congregation answered the bishop with yells and catcalls, and one of the women hurled the stool on which she had been sitting. The Provost and magistrates of the city had to clear the church of the mob, in a free fight which only by chance failed to kill anybody; and the service was continued to a trembling remnant of a congregation, while outside grew a deafening clamour of threatening yells and battering upon the doors and crash of broken windows.

  ‘So you have the fishwives on your side,’ said David Carnegie to Montrose.

  It was not quite clear whose side was whose, for the Carnegies as well as Montrose were now saying England was going too far; and were signing protests to King Charles against the interference of the English Church with the Scottish national worship. But at this time, on whatever side they were, even if it were the same, Carnegie and Montrose would differ, irrationally, irrevocably.

  Elsewhere, one common impulse was binding people together all through the country. All the different classes, nobles and minister, lairds and burgesses, formed themselves into a new governing body, called the Tables; and at the Table of the Nobles sat, not only Montrose, but the Earl of Southesk. So all must be well, after all, thought Magdalen.

  But she did not feel so sure when later in the winter her brother-in-law, Traquair, now Lord Treasurer for Scotland, arrived from London and paid them a flying and almost secret visit of a few hours, in order to leave his wife Catherine at her home before he went back to Edinburgh. It was clear that this was because he feared trouble there.

  All these months, His Majesty had refused to admit to his presence any of the deputations from Scotland, as though by ignoring them he could forbid their existence. Now at last Scotland had broken through this insulting royal indifference; Traquair was to read the King’s proclamation in answer to his Scottish subjects tomorrow in Edinburgh.

  And this answer was that he acknowledged full responsibility for the new Prayer Book, and ordered all petitioners against it to disperse – on pain of high treason.

  Lord Traquair told this at dinner, and Lord Southesk smashed his fist down on the table.

  ‘Did you point out to the King that I had signed that petition?’

  Traquair thought he had, but there had been so much to point out – a place at Court these days was a dog’s life.

  He drank profusely, and his classic sheep’s profile looked the more despondent as he did so. He was one whom wine did not make genial. He was haunted by the dignity of his position, or rather, as the Scots had begun to call it, by ‘that English devil, the keeping of state’. Traquair kept it by half shutting his eyes, pulling out his voice, and climbing laboriously on to a pedestal every time he spoke. For these slight reasons he was fast becoming the best hated man in Scotland.

  ‘He is worn out – completely worn out,’ reiterated Catherine proudly in the withdrawing-room, where the ladies of the family had retired, leaving their lords to their interminable discussions. ‘The King has sent for him sometimes as much as two or three times a day – always changing his mind, thinking of something fresh that he can add to the Proclamation – as if the people would listen to it all! – Or indeed any of it, once they hear that he had refused them. I am sorry for the Queen, I am indeed. She said to me, about King Charles – I think I may repeat it—’

  Further proofs of Catherine’s intimate position in Court circles were produced. Lady Southesk found herself longing to say – Well, I put Queen Anne to bed when she was drunk, and what she said to me then about King James wasn’t fit for anybody to repeat.’

  But she restrained herself, and offered her daughter tea from Montrose’s present of the Chinese tea chest; and admired her complexion, which was smooth as cream from massage and powder; and asked if it were the latest London fashion to have her dress slipping off one shoulder like that, for to her mind it merely looked as though it did not fit very well.

  And Catherine gave a little well-bred smile and did hope her father would not tire out Traquair by telling him all his views; Traquair could see two sides of a question as well as anyone, but what nobody in Scotland could understand, least of all her dear father, was that nobody in London, except those at the very secret centre of affairs, knew or cared anything at all about this uproar of patriotic feeling in the north.

  Disturbances in Germany, France, or Poland were the only subjects there considered worthy of discussion – but as for poor little Scotland, she was not thought sufficiently important for even a tiny paragraph in the Gazette.

  So she said, smoothing out the new watered-silk material of her skirts as she placed her dish of tea on the table, leaving it half full, because her mother had left the water too long upon the tea leaves.

  Magdalen, listening to her sister’s thin tones dropping sharp and brittle among the soft burr of Scottish voices, wondered what it was that women who live in London hold against all others – so that all else beside it, whether of politics or religion or national crisis, loses importance beside the problems that it raises of dress, of speech, of drinking or not drinking tea.

  She had never seen London. Would she ever see it?

  ‘Have you danced in the masques at Court?’ she asked; and at once her vision of those unknown splendours was obscured by yards of silver tissue, by Catherine’s voice, Scottish then, and young and quick and hot in tearful argument, by the memory that Traquair, who was responsible for her present remote glory, had then been to her ‘that bleating bellwether’.

  But the half smile froze on her lips, her eyes became fixed and passive, for she heard steps coming towards the door, and men’s voices, and as they came in, her husband was looking across the room to her, and saying, just as she had known in that instant he would say, ‘I am riding with Traquair to Edinburgh.’

  Chapter Seven

  In edinburgh, Montrose went straight to Lord Rothes, who had evidently expected him.

  ‘We all know what is in this Proclamation,’ he said, ‘but we have our answer ready. I have found a little nonsuch of a lawyer’s clerk who has every statute at his finger-tips from the days of Malcolm the Maiden.’

  ‘Of what college?’

  ‘Glasgow.’

  The Saint Andrews man tried not to look superior.

  ‘Never you mind,’ said Rothes. ‘His law is sound enough to prove all we want and that’s not the best of our Mr Johnston. It’s the passion he puts into it – he tells the Lord Himself what to do about it all – and you may be sure the Lord won’t dare do contrary. But come with me and see him for yourself. He is worth a visit – he keeps a private prophetess in the house, a Mrs Mitchell, who can testify all night on occasion. Sad trial for his wife.’

  They found the lawyer’s lodging down a flight of smelly steps where the keen February wind had concentrated into a draught that blew the dust into a whirlpool of shreds and scraps, rags, straws and rustling onion skins. The two nobles clutched at their cloaks, blew their noses, wiped the dust from their eyes, and peered up at a stone doorway on which had been recently carved the beginning of a text – ‘Except the Lord build the house—’ Here the patience of the inscriber had given out, or perhaps space had, for the letters had got narrower and narrower but were near the end of the lintel.

  Rothes began to heave himself up a winding stone stair, and into a dark, small room, inordinately crowded with women and children, so it seemed, although there were only two of each kind. A gaunt grey woman standing by the fireplace looked like a prophetess; the other must be Johnston’s wife, a good-looking woman with a courageous head, but a harassed expression, deepened by this early arrival of grand visitors. She had a baby in her arms and a little girl of four or five hanging on to her skirts with a vice-like grip of her two crumpled purple fists, which tightened to white as her mother whirled her out of the room in her haste to fetch her husband from his writing-closet.

  ‘Fine woman, Helen,’ observed Rothes, ‘but the
se wives of the men of God get a starved look. It would be a charity to put some warmth into them.’

  The rigid shadow by the fireplace was evidently impervious to any earthly whisper.

  ‘Will she not speak?’ murmured Montrose.

  ‘God forbid!’ replied Rothes – ‘the last time she did, it was from two in the afternoon till three next morning.’

  He stared out of a broken pane of glass at a pole, protruding from the window, on which were hung some damp children’s clothes, slapped here and there by the raw wind.

  There were ‘alarums and excursions without’; a woman’s voice (not Helen Johnston’s), thick and whining, it sounded intoxicated; Helen’s, hurried, urgent, furious, but doing its best to keep low and to hush the other’s; and a man’s voice, though at first it did not sound like it, so high-pitched and complaining was it in anger.

  Suddenly the little girl reappeared, detached at last from her mother, ran up to the prophetess, thumped her on the knees, and cried in eager tones, ‘Marg’ret, Marg’ret, Minnie says come quick and put the fear of God into Lisbie for stealing Anna’s ale.’

  A convulsive shudder passed through the lifeless form of Margaret Mitchell – it stiffened its arms, flung back its head, and stalked after the happy and excited child.

  ‘Does she have to be called so to meals?’ asked Rothes, but checked his Punchinello commentary as a little man bolted into the room like a rabbit out of its hole, and began pouring out his apology, his distress, his indignation with their idle drunken slut, Lisbie, who had with diabolic cunning pierced a hole in Anna’s leather puncheon and drunk all it held, and then denied her fault with lies and oaths, until his wife’s temper, being hasty, had flown away with her, and she was even now, God help him, pushing Lisbie out of the house.

  He seemed to share his anger impartially between Lisbie and Helen, for so rashly ridding them of their only servant, and also God, for sending this disturbance on his household the very moment that his new patron had called.

  Rothes tried to soothe him by introducing Montrose to Mr Archibald Johnston of Warriston with formal courtesy, and then inquiring after his health, to which Mr Johnson eagerly replied with intimate details of the way he felt sick every morning, and his stomach wambling within him.

  ‘Lord, the man must be with child. It is the Protestation breeding within you. Well, Warriston, you shall bring it forth out of your labour in a couple of hours now. Lord Traquair is to read the King’s Proclamation in front of the Tolbooth at twelve o’clock.’

  Air Johnston’s face was contorted with so furious a spasm that Montrose wondered if he were going to give instant evidence of his morning sickness. But it was rage that gushed out against that haughty, self-conceited, lying and malignant devil, the Lord Treasurer.

  Traquair’s empty arrogance, which so bored his wife’s family, evidently gave mortal offence to some. This nervous, touchy creature must have writhed under some probably imagined insult, which he had at once transformed into a national injury.

  ‘The Lord,’ he cried, ‘has put it into the King’s heart to send Traquair to us, so as to show the King intends evil against us.’

  The white face seemed to blaze, though it had not changed colour. ‘It is the eyes,’ thought Montrose, seeing them clearly for the first time, for they had been misty and blurred, with the red rims and heavy lids of sleepless nights, the eyes of a man weak in sight and weak in health. Yet these eyes had now become windows, not merely into his own soul, but the soul of his people.

  This man would take his orders from no man, not from the King himself, not even from God.

  ‘Oh Lord, do it, do it! Show these servile priests that you will not be mocked. Your credit is engaged.’

  And plain it was that he ordered God to do as he himself willed rather than God.

  Suddenly he was conscious of Montrose’s cool, quick glance upon him, shied from it, became at once suspicious.

  ‘But what is he doing here, my lord of Montrose? Is he with us? For he that is not with us is against us.’

  ‘He is with us,’ said Rothes.

  But Montrose had never felt less with them. The white-hot sincerity of the little man convinced but repelled him. And the young noble’s rich clothes, carelessly worn, his curling hair burnished with long brushing, his unconscious health and vigour, all made the little sickly clerk miserably aware that the Lord might have done better for him himself.

  But he must thank God for all his blessings, even including that torture of indigestion, which was beneficial in keeping him awake for prayer, where otherwise he might have sinfully indulged in more than three hours’ sleep. There was the beauty that pleased God, the beauty of holiness, ‘neither delighteth he in any man’s legs’ – and his eye shot down at the red silk stockings so finely knitted, no doubt by some adoring fool of a young lady, on the muscular legs of the Earl of Montrose. Of what good to have a body like a racehorse, if the heart were rotten at the core?

  For all his obvious worldliness, Rothes, just because he was gross, talked bawdily, had pimples on his large blown face, did not frighten and therefore antagonize Warriston, as did this quiet young man that he had brought with him. Beauty and courtesy were things to suspect, to beware of, to fight tooth and nail.

  His wife, Helen, ‘a fine woman’, loyal as well as handsome, who bore him children and did all the work of the house, even when he brought a mad prophetess into it, could never arouse in him that strain of agonized tenderness that he still felt for his very plain little first wife, Jean, a child of fourteen, always ill, and marked with the small-pox. It was a tenderness induced even more by his misery after her death than by the few months they had lived together. He had loved her best and thought her most beautiful when her face was all blotched with crying at her prayers.

  The loved face disfigured with tears – earthly love baulked by death – the love of God tried to its uttermost by anger that He should have snatched his Jean from him – his own tired, tormented body – distrust of even his own sincerity in prayer, unless his eyes gushed forth in weeping – all these things gave him a physical loathing of the easy and pleasant ways of life.

  So with pride he told Rothes how he had been up all night preparing the Protestation. And how he, an insignificant and desperately poor clerk, who had worked his way up without influence, would appear today in public on behalf of his nation, against the King.

  As he turned and twisted his body towards that stout man, who sat heavily at ease even on a rickety stool, his little girl sidled back into the room, and edged her way along the wall up to Montrose. There she stood staring, her eyes round and lovely on either side of a pinched pink nose, with a scarlet drip-line running from it to the open upper lip.

  She drew closer and closer to the young man, until now at last she was near enough to put out her hand and touch the blue stone that shone like an angel’s eye on the cuff of his sleeve. She touched it, and he had not noticed; she held it tight, so that the cool rotundity of the button gradually glowed as though coming to life within her sticky palm, and still he had not noticed; she stared at her small fist crumpled over it, a chilly bluish-red against the dark velvet of his sleeve; and, near her fist, so near that she was all but touching that too, a long strong slender hand, oddly smooth, and of a warm, even brown, instead of rough and chapped with chilblains, as her father’s always was in winter – a very clean hand, with no dirt nor ink even in the finger nails, and those, too, longer than one would expect, and surprisingly smooth, instead of bitten short and tagged with harsh skin.

  And still he had not noticed, or had not shown it, so that now she could look up at his face, and at his eyes, which looked gravely down at hers. All this time he had been looking at her, seeing what she was doing, and had never shown, nor by even a flicker of his eyelid frightened her away. Surely only God looked like that – God or His angels. This beautiful young man was an angel.

  But all in one blinding flash her father had noticed and – ‘Christie, you wick
ed child, take your hand off my lord’s coat, let go of his button, do you hear – off with you to Lisbie’ – (as a loud sobbing howl arose). ‘Oh Lord, Lord, send me patience, and Lisbie turned out of the house only this very moment by that improvident fool – fool – says she minds the house, and turns all the children loose on me.’

  Amidst the weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, Montrose had drawn his whinger out of its sheath with his right hand, and cut the cord that had sewn the gold and sapphire button to his left cuff, without disturbing the child’s grasp on it; then taking her other hand he closed that too over it, and said, ‘That is my Christmas present to you – a little late.’

  The first sound of that low voice stopped her tears.

  ‘What is a Christmas present?’ she asked, staring.

  ‘A filthy, heathenish, popish custom,’ screamed her father.

  ‘The gifts that we still give each other, because three wise men gave gifts to Christ as a child,’ replied the young man.

  His voice was deeper now and sterner; she felt he was angry. When he added, ‘Take this now to your mother and tell her to tie it round your neck,’ she began to cry again; but she knew that her father would not now take the button from her before she left the room. Still it was best to get her mother on her side as fast as she could.

  At her departure, the three men looked a trifle ashamed. It was difficult to get back to the Protestation, which had shrunk oddly in importance.

  ‘All’s well, then,’ said Rothes, rising with an ominous creak from the stool, which his weight must have broken. Nothing to do but ram it home on the crowd as you have to us. Well, James, we must go and hunt out that solemn ass, Traquair, and see what sort of late breakfast or early dinner we can get out of him. Politics go wrong on an empty stomach. And you, Warriston, get some food and warmed claret inside you before coming to the Tolbooth.’