“Welcome, Your Grace,” someone else was saying, but it was addressed to James, not to her. Never before had she heard him addressed thus; it was a title for the children of kings and of high-ranking prelates.
“Thank you,” he said, accepting the honorific. “You look well,” he finally said to Mary, staring at her like a little boy who suddenly finds a snake in his path.
“And you,” she said. “Your sojourn on the Continent must have agreed with you.” She did not mean the words to sound sarcastic, but they did. What had struck her was how rested and preserved he looked. He had absented himself during all the crucial moments of terror, and it showed.
Morton, Atholl, and Lindsay came up and flanked him, as if daring her to charge at them. They looked almost afraid of her.
“Come,” said Mary. “I look forward to speaking with you, dear brother.” She turned and led him toward the tower, and then up the stairs. To her dismay, the other three came along and stood there in the main room with James. She cast him imploring looks, but he ignored them and made no effort to dismiss the other men. Lindsay had his usual sneer on, and Morton was repulsive to her. She could not bear to look upon him. Atholl was a cipher.
“My dear sister,” Lord James said, clearing his throat. “I see here that you are well cared for.” He glanced around the chamber.
“Well cared for? I have barely any clothes, nor is there any appointment for me as queen—no canopy of estate, nor even a cloth of estate.”
He gazed at her steadily, still no hint of a smile, still with the peculiar immobility that made him seem waxlike. “I will have clothes sent,” he said. “And as for keeping of a queen’s estate—there is no longer any need of that.”
“If it is indeed possible for me to resign my office, as you”—she glared at Lindsay—“claim, then there is no longer any reason to keep me a prisoner. If it is as a queen that I am being held prisoner, then I should be allowed the appurtenances of a queen. You cannot have it both ways.”
“This is a most troublesome case,” said James. “Although you have resigned your crown, there are superstitious people who may be confused.”
“I am sure you are not among them, nor are your mother and family.”
The more she talked, the more remote he grew, until she felt that he had died abroad and been replaced by a facsimile made of some Italian stone that was the colour of flesh and could pass, except under close inspection, for a human being. Was the real Lord James lying dead of fever in Venice, while this clever copy was sent north to Scotland?
Lord James. She tried to remember exactly what he had been like as a child. Had he laughed, sung, bent? When had this creeping coldness stolen into him and taken away all the warmth?
“… and thus we will take our leave,” he was saying, as the kitchen maids were entering with her food.
“No!” she said. “Please eat supper with me, brother.”
“Nay. I dine with the Lords in the main dining hall.”
“I remember when you served me on bended knee, handing my napkin to me,” she said quietly. “You did not consider that beneath you. And now you will not even sit with me.”
He turned to the Lords. “May I have permission to remain?” he asked. Only when they nodded did he allow himself to sit.
The door clanged shut. The Lords were gone. She could hear their heavy footsteps descending the stone steps. Now James could speak freely.
“Yes?” he said, colder than the waters of the loch, turning his grey eyes on her.
“James!” she said. “Why do you speak so artificially to me? This is not you, but some impostor. Unless the other James was the impostor until now.”
“How dare you speak of impostors!” he snapped, throwing his hat on the floor. At once his face rearranged itself into the lines and planes of a living person. “You, who have raised the art of dissembling to the highest pitch! You, who deceive everyone!”
His fury was strange to behold. “Dear James—” She touched his arm, and he shook it off in revulsion.
“You wanted me alone, so you could bend me to your will. You overestimate your charms. I am proof against them, Madam! When we were children, and you were that pretty, laughing little girl, riding your ponies and playing at hide-and-seek, then I loved you. But France changed you; you came back here steeped in the art of lying and deception. Knox was right about you! He said, after that first interview, ‘such craft I have not found in one so young, no, and if there be not in her a proud mind and crafty wit, my judgement faileth me.’ But I could not see it; I was blind.”
Mary was shocked at his twisting of the truth. “No, you were not blind, just greedy. As long as you could be my chief minister, you cared not if I were a Caligula! You were always ambitious, James, and eager to wear a crown. It was I who was blind.”
Hold your tongue, she told herself. This is no way to ingratiate yourself with him, or win his confidence. He is your only hope of being restored to liberty.
“… George,” he was saying.
“What?”
“I said you are as serpentlike as ever. You have been attempting to make my brother George fall in love with you, so that you can escape, and you so thoroughly inflamed Lord Ruthven that he has had to be removed from office!”
“What? Is that what he said?”
“He said nothing. It was his looks and the way he acted, like a lovesick duck—”
“Let me tell you what really happened with the noble Lord Ruthven!”
“I will not hear your lies! Doubtless you will attempt to make a satyr of him, to say you gave him no encouragement. But nothing you say carries any weight any longer. Not now that the letters have come to light!”
“I do not understand.”
“The letters you wrote Lord Bothwell, in which you revealed that you were lovers and that you went to Glasgow to bring your husband back to Edinburgh so Bothwell could kill him.” James was pacing the chamber, his voice rising.
“I will be honest with you,” she said. “I did love Lord Bothwell, and I did go to Glasgow to see my husband, for private reasons of my own. But Bothwell did not want me to go; he tried to prevent me from it. He did not want me to go near the King, because he was diseased. But I insisted. And, not to besmirch the dead, but it was the King who brought me to Kirk O’Field to be murdered. The choice of site was his, and it was he who packed it with gunpowder. I was grieved that he died by his own method. But I would be as false as you claim if I pretended I wished to have been in his place, however much others may have wished it.”
“You have dishonoured our father’s house,” said James, ignoring what she had just said. “Your actions since the murder have cast shame on you yourself, on your throne, and on all Scotland. An honest person would have caused the murder to be investigated, and would have hidden nothing.”
“If I had investigated it too closely, many of the Lords would have been made uncomfortable. For they are implicated as well. I know there was a bond signed to murder the King. Bothwell showed it to me. It had your name on it, and Morton’s, and Argyll’s, and Huntly’s, and Maitland’s—all the fine Lords of the Secret Council.”
“Where is it? Does Bothwell have it?” he asked sharply.
“Bothwell gave it to me when we parted. Lord Morton tore it up.”
“Ah.” James smiled.
“But the guilty ones know who they are! And—”
“And therefore they are not safe as long as you live,” said James smoothly. “They will seek your death. Indeed they already seek it.”
She gasped.
“But I will not permit it,” he said. “As long as I am Regent I can make that a condition of my office. Should anyone else become Regent…” He left the phrase dangling, threatening.
“And will the noble Lords obey you? There is an old Scottish saying, ‘He who will not keep faith where it is due will not keep it where it is not due.’ I am the King’s true daughter and an anointed queen; you are his baseborn son. If they rebelled
against me—”
“Madam, I will not make your mistakes!”
“No, but you will make others. And now the people are apt to be less and less forgiving of mistakes, like a finicky woman who finds she must reject a dish unless it is perfect, even though she started out able to stomach ordinary food well enough.” He looked uneasy. Now was the time to press her point. “It is not too late. Things can be restored. I have learned much, and neither will I make those mistakes again. Together we can—”
He looked at her, incredulous. “Do you not understand? The people call for your death. It is all we can do to hold them back; that is why you are here, surrounded and protected by water. I can guarantee your life, but not your liberty. And if you were restored, what of Bothwell? No one will tolerate him, and yet you will not leave him. No, there is no hope. It is over for you.”
“James!” She threw herself, sobbing, against his chest. It was hard and unyielding. “I am not yet five and twenty—”
His arms hung down, heavy, by his side. He did not attempt to embrace her or comfort her.
“James, what of Bothwell?” she said, between sobs.
“Always Bothwell!” He pushed her away. “You continue to crave the poison that has killed you. Very well, then—it may please you to know that I have sent a fleet of ships to take him where he is hiding in the Orkneys. The officers aboard have been given jurisdiction to hold a court then and there. What that means, dear sister, is that he will be tried and executed on the spot. Then they’ll send his head, arms, and legs back here—as they have sent back the heads and limbs of his men they’ve already caught. Dalgleish, Powrie, Hay, and Hepburn are decorating the gates of Leith, Haddington, and Jedburgh—or rather, certain parts of them are.”
She glared at him. “So they were silenced before they could implicate the Lords. I suppose that is the purpose of the faraway trial of Bothwell, as well.”
“You are finally becoming politically astute,” he said. “Pity it comes too late.”
“May I remind you of what even your brother the Laird has said? He said you cannot merchandise for the bear’s skin before you have the bear.”
James smiled. “I know nothing of bears, but Bothwell’s flagship is called the Pelican, and we will make him disgorge the fish in his bill, never fear.”
LXI
Bothwell looked out across the sparkling waters of Bressay Sound, where his little fleet lay at anchor. He had eight ships at his command; five had been his as Admiral of Scotland, and another had been on its way to Lord James laden with food and armaments when he and his men had boarded her in Cromarty Firth and taken her. The fact that it had been bound for St. Andrews to succour the Lord James and his men made its despoiling all the more delightful. The Admiral had struck the first blow in their personal battle.
Next Bothwell had sighted a trading ship and taken out a lease on her. The last ship he had acquired was a fine two-masted vessel armed with guns, the Pelican, which he had leased from a Hanseatic merchant at a trading station at the far south of Shetland. He had seen her lading fish as he passed by from the Orkneys, and she had caught his eye.
He had had to make a hurried retreat from the Orkneys. Things had not gone according to plan there. Although he was Duke of Orkney and the descendant of the first Earl of Orkney, one of the Balfour brothers was sheriff of the islands and held the royal castles of Kirkwall and Noltland. When Gilbert Balfour fired on him and refused to admit him to the castle, he suddenly knew why Balfour in Edinburgh had sent that urgent message the night of June fourteenth, urging him to leave Dunbar. The Balfours had secretly gone over to the Lords long before Carberry Hill, then. At the same moment, as he gave orders for the ships to sail on, to the Shetlands, he realized what this meant for Geordie Dalgleish, whom he had confidently sent to the castle to retrieve his papers and goods. He had sent him straight into the viper’s nest.
The ships ploughed on through the churning, choppy seas. This far north it was always cold, and often there were mists on the waters. The northernmost Orkneys were fifty miles north of the tip of Scotland and the Shetlands began sixty miles north of that.
Bothwell was disappointed and alarmed to be driven off the Orkneys. Aside from the fact that he had always had a fondness for the islands, for the varied landscape and the people who spoke a strange tongue called Norn, and who took as their past kings Vikings like Earl Thorfinn the Mighty, he felt as if he were being swept out to sea and away from Scotland.
He had had little luck in his attempts to raise troops to free the Queen. At first he had moved about freely enough, and several lords, like the Hamiltons at Linlithgow and Fleming at Dumbarton, and the ever-changing Argyll and Boyd, had pledged themselves to the royal cause. But when he went north to Strathbogie to consult with Huntly, his former brother-in-law had shown his true colours. He had turned against Bothwell when Jean Gordon had returned home and spoken ill of him. Huntly was no longer an amiable ally, but the outraged brother of a betrayed sister.
Even in his uncle the Bishop’s palace at Spynie in the far north, his enemies had managed to turn things against him. The Bishop’s bastard sons formed a plot to assassinate him, and although he had killed them instead, obviously he could not remain. It was there he had first formed the idea of concentrating his power upon the sea, since it seemed there was no safe footing for him on the mainland, in spite of the upwards of fifty names he had secured for the Queen’s cause, including those of Seton, Livingston, Kerr, Ormiston, and Langdon.
With the return of Knox, the abdication of the Queen, the Queen’s strict imprisonment, and finally his own outlawry, the scales had begun to tip and more and more people deserted the royal cause and made their own peace with the Lords. His servants John Blackadder and John Hepburn of Bolton, whom he had sent south to Dunbar with letters to his friends, were both captured, tortured, and executed. The Lords, in outlawing him, forbade anybody of every estate and degree to “supply the Earl in their houses, or to support him with men, armour, horse, ships, boats or other furnishing by sea or land” on pain of being judged “plain partakers with him in the horrible murder.”
Still he had his eight ships and a company of good fighting men, and the Shetlands lay ahead as a base. If that did not work, there was always Sweden or Denmark or France. He could make for them over the open sea.
* * *
The Shetlands had welcomed him, and their overlord, Oliver Sinclair, had honoured him as a kinsman, as Bothwell’s mother was Lady Agnes Sinclair. It seemed that the sad news about him had not penetrated this far north, and in any case the people liked to think themselves not obliged to follow decrees from Edinburgh. Both the Shetlands and the Orkneys had been Norwegian until 1468, when they were given to Scotland as part of a dowry for the wife of James III, and they had never felt very Scottish. Here, too, they spoke Norn, and on both sets of islands the old longhouses of the Vikings remained. The people here were taller than those on the mainland, and more of them had blue eyes. They were intensely involved with the sea.
Bothwell had been able to anchor his ships and allow his men to roam the island, stocking up on food and water and fitting the vessels for either a fight or a long voyage. His own trusted messengers were able to slip through to the south and bring him both some coveted and hurtful documents: the proclamation naming him Duke of Orkney and Lord of the Shetlands, the commission issued by the Lords to hunt him down, the proclamation branding him an outlaw—and a letter from Mary.
He had descended into his cabin and shut the door before opening the letter. His fingers were trembling; he could hardly believe she had managed to write a letter and smuggle it out, and that it had found its way into his hands all the way here. It seemed almost like an apparition, one of those false sights conjured up by dark spirits to fool people and lead them to doom. Her handwriting, something so commonplace before, and now so precious … He broke the seal.
My dearest heart, my soul, it is now almost two months since I have beheld your face, a thing I neve
r thought I could have sustained. My misery is beyond …
The Lords had completely betrayed her. They had broken all their promises made at Carberry Hill, as he had told her they would.
Mary, Mary! he cried to himself. I should have truly kidnapped you then, and taken you to Dunbar.
He continued reading, devouring every detail of her life under lock and key at Lochleven. It sounded so dreary, so soul-deadening. There was no one there to sustain her, except Mary Seton and some others of her old household, and the island seemed escape-proof—not that any place is truly escape-proof, he reminded himself. And she must have some sympathetic supporter there somewhere, or else the letter could never have got out. Who could it be? She did not say, as was wise.
He ached to hold her, just to speak with her, even if through bars.
We do not deserve this! he thought. For me to be hunted like a wolf, and her to be locked up like the insane Earl of Arran. I am indeed to be hunted like a wolf; that is what the proclamation of outlawry says. Very well, then—they shall see that this wolf has long fangs. I will tear their flesh.
He folded the letter, but did not put it in his locked leather pouch with the other documents, for he knew he would reread it many times before he would finally allow himself to put it away. His heart felt heavier than his two-handed sword. He tried to tell himself that they were still strongly bound, but truly he wondered if he would ever see her again.
Heaving himself up from the cramped, ill-lighted cabin, he went up on deck. The Pelican had only two masts and was not a warship, but at least she carried guns in case of pirate attacks. These were not expensive brass guns, but the cheaper iron, and included port pieces, slings, fowlers, and hailshot pieces, in addition to handguns and harquebuses that he himself had provided for the soldiers to use.
The Pelican rocked gently on the swells of the water where she lay at anchor. Today, late in August, the waters were still relatively calm. That could change at any moment, and the rocks and shoals were always treacherous, even in summer. There were more than a hundred islands in the Shetland archipelago, and many of them were nothing but sharp, dark rocks hungry for a ship to gash open. He was thankful he had been able to procure a number of local sailors who knew their native waters so well.
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