The Raven's Heart

by Jesse Blackadder

  I learn through the court gossip why Bothwell’s trial will not be held. Lord Arran howls like a dog and shrieks of devils and witches from his cell below the castle. But though he is clearly insane, his family is so close to the throne that the Queen cannot risk the scandal of having to execute him for bearing false witness. For the moment it is simpler to hold him and Bothwell without trial.

  I send word to William to meet me. With Bothwell imprisoned, he has returned to our underground rat hole for safety, coming and going through Edinburgh’s hidden tunnels, creeping out to eat and drink at Katy’s Tams.

  I wait for him there and when he meets me, his face is winter-pale, his jaw set.

  “It is Hume’s doing,” he says without preamble. “Hume and Lord James together. Can’t you speak to the Queen?”

  “The Queen will not hear of it,” I say. “Bothwell made a bad enemy in Lord James. He has the Queen’s ear and I can do nothing.”

  “I am bribing half of Edinburgh to get him out,” William says.

  “There is not enough money to grease the key to his cell.” I lean across the table. “You must flee, William. It’s too dangerous. Bothwell is an earl. If Hume has played a part in this, then dealing with you will be nothing.”

  “I have sent word to my cousins,” he says. “They’ll be here in a few days. It will take more than some henchman of Hume’s to get past Edmund and Jock.”

  “Can’t you sail with them? Wait in France until it’s safe?”

  He stares at me. “Bothwell would not leave me in prison without help.”

  “For once, listen to me!” My voice rises a little and William looks around. He leans forward.

  “For once, listen to me,” he says and his voice chills me. “I’m not leaving while Bothwell is in there. Don’t speak of it again.” He sits back. “What are you going to do?”

  “I need to regain the Queen’s favor. There are rumors that John Gordon, son of Lord Huntly, also boasts about taking the Queen by force and compelling her to marry him. Perhaps Arran mixed up Bothwell and Gordon in his mind and there lies the real plot,” I say. “If I can find out more about it, get enough evidence to have Gordon arrested, it could clear Bothwell and help our cause all at once.”

  He looks at me with hope on his face. “I will find out what I can.”

  “Stay hidden,” I say. “Leave it to me. When I have proof, I will go to the Queen.”

  “Very well. Leave word here with Sophie. It’s too dangerous for us to meet again.”

  “Be careful,” I say.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  “I have heard it with my own ears this night past, Your Grace.”

  I am close to her side in the presence chamber and I lean down to speak softly in her ear. It is the nearest I have been to her for many weeks, while spring has lengthened into summer and I have gone about Edinburgh as merchant, sailor, carpenter. I have missed her. I have ached for her, knowing that Chastelard has been ever at her side. But at last I have something to offer.

  She waves away the women sitting nearby so we are alone. “He would ravish me and force me into marriage?” she asks, her hand on her throat. “Just like Lord Bothwell?”

  “John Gordon said it himself last night in front of witnesses who will testify. Likely he will say it again tonight when he drinks at the White Hart.”

  “Treason,” she says. “Again.”

  I nod. I will not mention Bothwell, not yet. Time enough when John Gordon is arrested to suggest that Arran has muddled the two men and there is only one plot.

  She sends for Lord James and talks to him for some time in a low voice. He leaves the presence chamber, his mouth set. The Queen does not speak to me again during the evening, but as she rises to prepare for her sleep, she asks me to accompany her into the bedchamber. Seton, as always, comes to unbraid her hair and La Flamina helps ready her for bed.

  “You have done well in this, Alison,” she says as Seton releases the tight braids and her face relaxes. “I have missed your company here in court, but thanks to your devotion, another danger has been removed.”

  La Flamina finishes unlacing the stiff bodice and lifts it away. The Queen sighs. “What is it, do you think, that makes Scotland’s nobles so disrespectful of their ruler? I cannot imagine such a thing happening in France.”

  “Most have not had a queen in their lifetime, Your Grace,” I say. “They expect you to marry, and while you do not, they speculate.”

  “I do not believe Elizabeth is treated so,” she says.

  La Flamina laughs. “She cavorts openly with her master of horse.”

  “Hush,” the Queen says. “Do not speak of my cousin so, even here. We have need of her goodwill.”

  “You must punish John Gordon without mercy,” Seton says, her mouth tight.

  “He shall be punished,” she says. “My brother is firm on such matters.”

  “You should marry,” La Flamina says, lifting the softly woven nightgown over the Queen’s head. “That will be the end of such foolishness among your nobles.”

  “Don’t you start on this too! The Privy Council reminds me at every opportunity. I’ll be happy to marry a man to whom I can give my heart. Unfortunately there are few to choose from. My Marys will all find husbands before I do.”

  “Why, we have vowed not to marry before you.” La Flamina smiles. “So you must hurry, lest we all become old maids.”

  “I have said I will not allow you to make such a promise,” the Queen says.

  “You cannot force us to break it,” Seton replies, and draws the brush down the length of the Queen’s auburn hair.

  I have been away from the palace too much to step into the banter of her familiars. Too many hours wandering Edinburgh as a spy and too few as a lady-in-waiting in her dressing room. I have risen high as an informant but fallen away as a confidante. It is quite some time since I helped her prepare for bed and I have missed the closeness of it.

  There is a knock at the door and La Flamina goes to it. The captain of the guards enters and kneels.

  “We arrested John Gordon, Your Grace.”

  “Good. Lord James and I will discuss him in the morning.”

  He coughs. “Your Grace, we took him to the Tolbooth but he managed to escape.”

  She stands, agitated. “How?”

  “I do not know.” He hangs his head low.

  She walks closer to him. “Have you searched his father’s house?”

  “We went straight there, but Lord Huntly has gone too. We believe they must be fleeing north. I have sent men in pursuit.”

  “Recall them,” she says. “Go and tell Lord James what has happened and bid him come to me in the morning. My cousins the Gordons will find more than a posse of guards on their trail. I will go after them myself.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  I have never been into the Highlands. My heartland lies south, and the north of Scotland has no interest for me. But I have promised to serve the Queen and now it means turning my head away from the castle and riding with her in pursuit of the Huntlys.

  She has said to her court and to her people that this is a progress; she would meet the people of the Highlands for the first time in her reign. But it is the Gordon family that she goes to challenge, riding down Lord Huntly and his son.

  She carries a secret that the Gordons do not know. As Angelique told me, the Queen has made Lord James the Earl of Moray, handing over wide stretches of land in the north-east, thinking to tighten the bond with her half-brother through this great gift. But Lord Huntly has held that land for the Gordon clan for years and now she must find some queenly way to take it back from him.

  The Queen has put on her dress armor, gold and exquisite, and let her long hair loose, and she rides astride like a warrior to show her strength to the northerners. Her glistening armor is in deadly earnest and hidden in her finery is a pistol, loaded and dangerous. This is not a disguise; it is the Queen showing her people that she is Diana the huntress and we are her handmaidens of war.


  We travel into wild country, inhabited by rough men and ghosts, crisscrossed with bogs and sheep and mist and impassable mountains. The streams are so cold that our throats ache to drink from them and Lord James must ride with a guide by his side to pick out our path. We shiver through the nights and wolves howl in the hills around us.

  The Queen comes alive in these rough conditions, like some contained creature finally set free. Instead of being trussed like a game bird each morning, she rises clear-eyed from her bed, dresses in leggings and breastplate like a man, and stamps around while the camp is dismantled, impatient to ride. I believe she would charge into battle like one of the ancient Amazons whose stories have carried across the world. When our spies ride back with the news that Lord Huntly waits with fifteen hundred soldiers, her eyes brighten and she laughs. She rides out with Lord James at the head of the army, ready for confrontation.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  “You must wait here, sister,” Lord James says as we halt on a hill near Inverness Castle.

  “I will come down with you,” she says, pulling up her horse’s head. “I have not ridden this far to watch you challenge the Gordons from a distance.”

  He spins his horse in a tight circle and brings it close to her side. “Lord Huntly has fled. He has left orders that you are not to be admitted here. Do you understand?”

  “I understand he is a coward,” she says. “And guilty of treason already. Why do we not pursue him at once?”

  “Because then any lord in the country who holds a royal castle will think he can bolt the door on his Queen and act like its owner. We will take back this castle by force. Men will die, my sister. Your gold armor may glitter, but you are a woman and this is a battle.”

  He spurs his horse into a gallop, down to the castle to join his men. The Queen’s horse won’t stand still. She pulls the reins and it dances on its toes and tosses its head. Her eyes are alight, as if at any moment she will thunder down the hill to that windswept castle below and hack her way inside with a sword.

  It takes three hours for the Queen’s forces to fight their way into the castle. When it is done, Lord James comes for us. The Queen and her ladies and I ride behind him down the hill and into the courtyard entrance, which is littered with bodies.

  “Lord Huntly’s captain,” Lord James says when the man is thrown to the ground before her, his wrists tied, his face bloody. The Queen looks at him and the soldiers fall silent.

  “You held Inverness Castle against your anointed Queen,” she says.

  He knows better than to beg for mercy. He keeps his head bowed and says nothing.

  “No lord is higher than your Queen.” She surveys them all, her own soldiers and those of Huntly’s who have survived the skirmish. “Do you hear me?”

  They drop to their knees, all of them, and she looks at her half-brother and lifts her finger in a gesture toward the hapless captain.

  Lord James nods in satisfaction. “I have let some of them escape.”

  They smile at each other. “Good,” she says. “Huntly should know what comes his way. Send for more men from Edinburgh. We will show the Cock of the North who rules here.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Lord Huntly, hearing that his castle is taken, his captain hanged, and another two hundred harquebusiers are on the way from Edinburgh, plays hide and seek in the mountains of Badenock. The Queen’s scouts ride out each day searching for him and reinforcements arrive daily, uniformed harquebusiers with their harquebuses, shot, powder, and swords.

  In the midst of it, the Queen rides out for pleasure, hunts, dines in the great houses of the north, and wins these men to her side. The enemies of the Gordon clan take their chance to emerge from the surrounding hills and join the battle against them, and thus reinforced she builds a small war.

  I have learned to examine her without seeming to stare and I spend many hours watching her now. She did not touch Huntly’s captain, but he died at her hand nonetheless, swinging and kicking at the end of a rope hung down from the castle battlement. The Queen’s own men cheered when he stopped moving, as if they had forgotten any of us could die so easily, obeying an order that the Queen does not like.

  She has been blooded in war—has she changed? She laughs and converses with the men around her as if she has not sent their comrades to their deaths. In the evenings, when we go to her chambers in whatever great house we are lodged and help her prepare for bed, she is tender with us. No one mentions the dead captain or the men killed in that skirmish.

  But I cannot stop thinking of him when I lie down at night. My father is just such a captain, in service to a lord who has displeased the Queen.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  At last Lord Huntly sends a challenge. He will meet the Queen and her army at Corrichie.

  The Queen does not argue with Lord James this time, but makes her preparations to watch the battle from the hillside. She and the Marys are mounted at the front, we lesser ladies behind. She has ordered all of us dressed in our female finest so that we decorate the hill above the bloody ground like iridescent game birds.

  I cannot see the Queen’s face, only the wiry tension in the set of her shoulders as the battle unfolds below us. The Marys gasp and turn away when it becomes too gruesome, but she never falters. I shut my eyes against the sight, but I cannot block out the sounds. Lord James and Maitland are experienced in battle and Lord Huntly’s army cannot match them. The Queen’s army forces Huntly’s men down into a bog at the foot of the hill and hacks them to death.

  When it is over, Lord James and Maitland begin picking their way back across the battlefield. They lead Lord Huntly, captured and tied to his horse. Halfway across he sways, falls from the saddle, and hits the ground heavily. Men gather around, talking and gesticulating. Eventually four of them manage to heave him across the horse’s back but he lies there like a load of chaff, unmoving.

  The Queen sits still and, though I have seen my share of convenient killing, it is I who sway and feel the cloud of blackness press in. I pitch forward in the saddle, dimly aware of my face against the horse’s neck. A servant takes the reins as Lord James and his party approach, and I am taken away. I slide from the saddle into a darkness where I cannot hear the screams any more.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Lord Huntly’s heart failed at the moment of his defeat, but I do not witness the presentation of his unmarked body to the Queen. The Queen’s French physician, Arnault, takes me back to our lodgings and, in the excitement of the Queen’s victory, I am forgotten. I roll myself into a heavy sleep and by the time I awaken the next morning, Huntly’s son John, he who boasted of marrying the Queen, has already been sent to Aberdeen for his punishment. Within a few days he is beheaded in the market square.

  There is a feast to celebrate the Queen’s victory over the Gordon family, but I do not attend. I stay in my bed, staring at the wall. I cannot drink to the beheading of John Gordon when I have played no small part in putting him on the block myself.

  I have wanted our castle returned and justice done. But in striving for the Queen’s favor, I set a trap for John Gordon that has seen dozens of men die, in a battle tracing back to a lad who drank too much and boasted too loudly one night in Edinburgh.

  I hoped to show the Queen that Bothwell was innocent. But Bothwell’s name has not been mentioned and it seems everyone has forgotten what set us on this progress in the first place.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  “Have you recovered?” the Queen asks me, as servants bustle around the room, packing her belongings to return to Edinburgh.

  “Forgive me, Your Grace. I do not know what came over me.”

  “I thought I might faint too,” says Beaton, giving me a sympathetic smile. “It was a grim sight.”

  “You thought the battle was grim,” Lusty says. “Two strokes of the ax to sever John Gordon’s head is something I will never forget.”

  “I closed my eyes,” says Seton.

  “I too,” says La Flamina. “But the sound o
f it all. I still cannot get those battle screams out of my ears.”

  The Queen is standing by the window, looking out over the town of Inverness. “You can trust that I will never forget it,” she says softly. “Elizabeth is right. A woman must have the heart of a man to be a ruler.”

  “But she should not forget she is a woman either,” says Lusty.

  The Queen turns. “You think I have been cruel, that it has not hurt me to act thus. But men understand the language of blood. They will treat me differently now. You will see.”

  She walks into the center of the room and holds out her hands. The Marys go to her and she nods for me to join them. We take hands, all of us, in a circle.

  “This is a country where the ties of family and loyalty are stronger even than death,” she says. “Having seen death, I pledge my loyalty and my life to you. And in return, I ask for yours. Do you make this same commitment to me? Do you become my family, as I have neither father nor mother, husband nor child? Will you stand by me?”

  “You do not need to ask,” Seton says. “We are already your family.”

  Her eyes fall upon me. “What of you, Alison? You warned me of the Gordons’ disloyalty, but you could not watch their punishment. Do you still pledge your loyalty? If you cannot, speak now and I will release you freely from my service. I will not keep you against your will.”

  I want justice for Lord Bothwell and our castle returned. And there is the matter of my heart, which I have given to her and cannot easily take back.

  “I am yours, as always,” I say, and she squeezes my hand.

  She looks around us all. “We are no longer girls. Scotland and I have taken the measure of each other now.”

  She releases our hands and we stand back. Before she returns to the window, she places the palm of her hand against my cheek for a moment. “You did well, my raven,” she says.

  I don’t dare mention Bothwell.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  We will ride home to Edinburgh in full glory, victorious, dangerous, flanked by an army of thousands. The people will line the roadways and tracks and now there will be respect in their eyes as well as wonder.