A Clash of Spheres

by P. F. Chisholm

  “Right, fine,” said Red Sandy, not even trying to take Dodd’s hand away. “Tell ye what, brother. I dinna care how sour and thrawn ye are wi’ the Deputy, but will ye not treat us the same, eh?”

  And Red Sandy stared Dodd in the face until he let go of the collar. Dodd didn’t know what to do or say, but in the end he stood up and walked to the stables where he dossed down next to Whitesock who nickered welcomingly to him and then laid his great head down in the straw next to Dodd’s.

  Dodd’s chest felt full as if it was going to explode and for a moment he almost put his arm around Whitesock’s neck. But then he stopped himself and forced his eyes shut against the burning in them and somehow went to sleep.

  In the morning he found that his own arm had betrayed him by creeping around the horse’s neck in the middle of the night when he hadn’t noticed, which made everything worse, not better.

  December 1592 Edinburgh

  For the first time ever, Lady Widdrington found she was enjoying herself in Edinburgh. She made sure Sir Henry had plenty of time to chase Lord Spynie by making herself scarce and she did that by following the King’s suggestion and meeting the ladies of the Queen’s Court, and sitting with them or walking in the gardens of Holyrood Abbey with them or sitting sewing with them or going out on a hawking expedition with them on days when it wasn’t raining.

  She had now met Queen Anne and usually found her with her Danish ladies, playing card games and singing songs in Danish that sounded rude and certainly made them giggle. Queen Anne was a plump fair-haired girl who seemed quite sad and worried about something. She had been Queen of Scotland for two years, but there was no baby yet and of course tongues had already started to wag about it so that was probably the trouble.

  She was a friendly woman, quite informal, with her attractive Danish accent and after Lady Widdrington had made sure she lost to the Queen a few times at Gleek, she was looked for by her and often called to Her Highness’ apartments in the older part of the palace that still looked very much like an abbey, and had beautiful carvings on the walls and in the window niches and Gothic arches. After a little, she was invited to share a bed, sometimes with one of the fatter Danish ladies and sometimes with a pretty empty-headed wife of one of the King’s Grooms, Marguerite Graham. She was more than happy to be in the world of women and save Sir Henry the trouble of thinking up excuses for why he didn’t want to sleep with his lady wife. And it even pleased him a tiny bit, because her being associated with the Queen gave him more status. What could be more unexceptionable than a Danish lady-in-waiting or a Flemish chamberer?

  Often she couldn’t sleep as she lay in bed next to the great pink snoring pillow of a woman, and then of course her thoughts wandered to Carey, which she tried to stop because that hurt her, and then her thoughts usually wandered back to the ugly interview with her husband at Jedburgh.

  They had been in the remains of the once mighty and beautiful Jedburgh Abbey, and the King had not at first been present in the room. Nosy though the King was, he respected proprieties usually.

  Lady Widdrington had been all across the March, into Scotland, back down to Jedburgh and she was still shaking from the encounter with the young Lord Hume on the church tower.

  Her husband had not come up to the tower because he was afraid of heights. The King had arrived in the middle of it all and pronounced that Lady Widdrington must come to Edinburgh and meet his Queen. Of course she had agreed and then gone, her heart pounding, to meet her husband in the old abbey warming room.

  He had been angry with his usual smouldering rage which she had spent such effort and pains when she was younger to understand and find something rational in it.

  “Well, wife,” he had sneered, “what have ye to say for yerself?”

  Elizabeth considered this as an opening gambit. She was long experienced in this kind of discussion. Whatever she said would be wrong, she knew that. If she apologised for going into Scotland without his permission, that would be wrong. If she told him her reasons why she had gone, which she felt were perfectly rational, and excused herself, that would be wrong. Whatever she did or said would be wrong because she herself was irredeemably wrong because she was a woman.

  She also knew that whatever she did or said, at the end of all the words and the shouting, she would be beaten because beating her made him feel better about everything else. She didn’t understand why, but it did. Temporarily.

  So she said nothing. She knew he hated her silence too, but that wasn’t why she did it. Nor was it because there was after all nothing to say. She simply couldn’t be bothered to fight him because not only was he an old man always in pain from his gout, but he was also a man in love with somebody he couldn’t ever have and she felt sorry for him. She probably couldn’t ever have Robin Carey either, so she knew exactly what her husband went through every day of his life, poor man.

  She was careful not to smile at him, though strangely she wanted to. There back in the old abbey warming room with its pungent smell of socks and rarely washed old men, she took off her damp velvet gown, unlaced her kirtle unfashionably down the front and heaved it off over her head, left her petticoat and bumroll, undid the top of her smock and let it fall down so her shoulders and upper back were exposed above her stays and then went and knelt at his feet, so he could beat her and get it over with.

  She shut her eyes and waited for the belt to come whistling down on her shoulders, crushing the internal child that always wailed and wanted to know why. She thought that the last set of welts had healed up but there were scars on her shoulders that often opened up again when Sir Henry felt particularly poisonous.

  He was taking his time and she sighed. She crossed her arms over her chest to protect her breasts and waited for the onslaught. Come on, she thought, you’ve given me time to get nervous, get it done and then I can go home and sleep.

  A draught caught her and a different sweaty smell and she realised that the door was open behind Sir Henry. She looked expecting to see one of the Widdringtons and what she saw astonished her.

  The King was standing there, in all his soft-edged glory, staring with a very peculiar expression on his face. Not lustful, as she might have expected, seeing her smock was down over the top of her stays, but extraordinarily compassionate. She was steadied by that. She stayed on her knees where she was, since she might as well.

  At last Sir Henry turned to see the King, his unused belt dangling from his thick knotted fingers. He bent his neck and said thickly in Scots, “Can I no’ be private with my wife?”

  “I came to say farewell, Sir Henry,” said King James in a reasonable voice, “and this is what I find?”

  He brushed past Sir Henry and raised Elizabeth. “Madam,” he said, “put yer clothes on.” So she pulled up her smock and tied the laces, fought her way into the damp and muddy kirtle and then put the gown round her shoulders. Her hat she had taken off when she dozed and her cap was firmly pinned to her head with a dozen long pins as usual. She sighed because now it was all to do again so Sir Henry could satisfy whatever it was in him that thirsted for her pain. Her skin was shrinking again from the remembered pain of blows, leaking into the future.

  She sighed again and turned to go, found King James there again.

  “Lady Widdrington,” he said very softly, “d’ye mind what I tellt ye of George Buchanan, my tutor?” Yes, she did. She had been shocked. She nodded. “Buchanan liked to beat me too, said it would make a better King of me if all the sin fra my mother had been beaten out of me. My scars are on ma bum, see ye, and it was only when my dear friend D’Aubigny wept over them that it occurred to me there might be any objection to them. I will see what I can do again.”

  “Thank you, Your Majesty, but I’m afraid there isn’t much you can do,” she told him. “I just wish…”

  Sir Henry was still standing there like a post, only his eyes flickering between the King and his wife.
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  “Ay, what d’ye wish?” whispered the King.

  She found her eyes suddenly full of tears and tried to push them back. “I just wish he could have Lord Spynie and be happy,” she said in a rush, not knowing until she heard the words what she was going to say.

  Oh God, Sir Henry was right there in the room. What would he do to her now?

  Suddenly the King embraced her, which nearly knocked her out with the smell. “Och Lady Widdrington, ye’re the kindest woman I’ve ever met. Will ye go ben whiles I speak to your husband?”

  She found her hat with shaking hands and put it on, then went out to the remnants of what had once been a fine set of cloisters and got her shaking knees to walk about until she stopped quivering like a hunted deer and could think straight. She was wrung out. Now what would happen to her? She wondered exactly how angry Sir Henry would be with her at what she had said. Had he heard it? Had he been listening? Would the King be angry with her? Maybe not, since he had said she was kind.

  She was a little surprised about George Buchanan, that leading light of the Reformation in Scotland, that stern beacon of righteousness, though not very. She was old enough to know that the more righteous a man seems the more ugly his private life tends to be.

  So she walked until Young Henry came and found her and walked with her, his head bent and his spotty face grim and strained.

  “If he ever beats you again, ye’re to tell His Highness,” said Young Henry. “By letter or messenger or whatever. Sir Henry isna a Scot and he is the Deputy Warden of the East March but King James says he willna have it.”

  “Young Henry,” she said to him, “I know Sir Henry hates me and blames me for all his ills. So what happens if he can’t vent his spleen on me? Do you think he’ll start to like me?”

  Young Henry stared at the ground for a while. “You should go home to your mother and father,” he said.

  “In Caerhays castle?” she said, “In Cornwall? At the other end of the country, hundreds and hundreds of miles away? Don’t be ridiculous.”

  Even now she still thought it ridiculous, though deep inside her she longed to see her mother again. She had stopped writing to her because Sir Henry read the letters which meant she could not tell the truth. Sir Henry had not the wit nor the acting ability to hide his feelings as she did, he was a constant boiling presence beside her, even when he wasn’t there, of rage and dull fury and somehow she couldn’t help feeling compassion for him in her heart, for how sad and unhappy he must be. She knew this could only annoy him and it did. Yet there it was: she was still very afraid of him, although he hadn’t actually beaten her since Jedburgh. She was afraid of his ire and yet she couldn’t keep the compassion out of her voice whenever she answered him, which made him all the more furious. So generally, as much as she could, she avoided talking at all, or just said gently and humbly, “Yes, my lord,” or “No, my lord,” which he hated even more. If only he could just divorce her. Unfortunately that was impossible short of a private Act of Parliament and they were not peasants just to part and not see each other again. Poor man, he didn’t even know what he wanted from her.

  So at the King’s winter Court in Edinburgh she was more than happy to sleep next to big pillowy Danish girls or silly sweet Marguerite, who was often not in her bed when she should have been. She started learning Danish to pass the time which made the poor Queen cheer up and giggle at her terrible pronunciation.

  Caerlaverock, December 1592

  William Crichton was sitting in a stuffy little wooden box with a grill to one side on a very uncomfortable seat with a thin cushion on it, his breviary open in his lap although he didn’t really need it. There was a lot of noise of someone arriving and then the other door opened and shut and a man knelt down in front of him on the other side of the grill. Despite the darkness, Crichton knew exactly who it was since he was the lord and the lord goes first. As far as Crichton could make out, Maxwell was wearing a black damask doublet with black satin trim and a small ruff and that made his permanent scowl from having eyebrows that met in the middle even more forbidding. He cleared his throat and coughed, which was understandable since the little confession booth was left over from the days before the Reformation when Holy Mother Church had held them all in her hand. Which was to say, it was old, full of woodworm and, as far as Crichton could judge, had been frequently used as a jakes by desperate serving men and probably dogs.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…” intoned the Maxwell and then went into a baroque recital of sins of the flesh, including many instances of fornication, impurity, impure thoughts and actions. Maxwell did not mention killing in battle or on a raid, since to his mind only a fool would call them murders, though he grudgingly included plenty of assaults and two actual murders, if you could call them that since one had been of a Johnstone found alone on the hills and the other had been when he was drunk. When the regrettable tale finally wound itself to the end, Father Crichton wondered what would happen if he refused the Maxwell absolution for the continued habitual feast of sin which no doubt was the same as last year and doubtless would be the same next year. Nothing good, he suspected, and he would shortly be sold to the English authorities.

  He gave a rosary as penance, to be prayed at the Maxwell’s convenience. Then “Ego te absolvo…” he intoned in the sacred washing of the black soul of the Maxwell and tried not to dwell on the more outrageous bits of the confession. Was it really possible to do that to two women or had the man just been boasting?

  After the Maxwell had gabbled through his prayers, crossed himself, and risen from the kneeler, let himself out again, his household came in with the same grubby stories, although his lordship had made a better tale of it. His wife came in last with a prosaic tale of anger and envious thoughts and one beating of a servant girl she suspected, correctly, of bedding her husband.

  George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly, was due to come to Caerlaverock soon and then the two of them would travel to Edinburgh with at least half of their households for Christmas.

  Crichton would rather have stayed at Caerlaverock to receive the first terceiros once the seas calmed down in the spring. But Maxwell wanted him in Edinburgh and as he was Maxwell’s house-priest, that was that.

  The night before they set off they were sitting by the fire in Caerlaverock hall and roasting chestnuts and Huntly said, apropos nothing else, “Well, what if we kill the King?”

  It’s the sort of thing you just don’t say, thought Crichton, unless you’re lord of thousands of acres and an entire clan and regard yourself as a prince in your own right. “I think it would be a bad idea,” he said.

  Huntly laughed at him, said that the King was a pervert and a sodomite as well as being a goddamned Protestant and surely he deserved to die.

  Yes, but he’s the King, thought Crichton anxiously. And he might become a Catholic. Aloud he said to Huntly, “Well, my lord, he showed good favour to ye after ye murdered the Earl of Moray…”

  “Ah didnae murder him, I killt him and he deserved it.”

  “Then killed him.”

  “Ay, the King fancies mah bum, allus has,” explained Huntly, throwing a chestnut in the fire to watch it explode, “and I’m married to one of his precious D’Aubigny’s daughters and he’s aye sentimental…”

  “Ye got away wi’ it,” said Maxwell. “I wish I could do the like to that bloody man, John Johnstone, the bastard.”

  Crichton thought about telling the two lords some of the things Jesus Christ had said on the subject of enemies, vengeance, and forgiveness and he knew he would never do it. It was just as well that neither Huntly nor Maxwell could read since they had spent their teens learning more useful things like swordplay and the names for different groups of animals. It was also just as well that neither knew any Latin except for rote learned prayers.

  The Protestants were so set on everyone knowing scripture, everyone reading and hearing the Bible
in their own language at church, insisting that everyone should know the Word of God. It was foolishness and irresponsibility—the Word of God was like gunpowder, apt to blow up people’s lives if not treated with due care and in particular, kept away from peasants.

  The lords were still sitting by the fire, surrounded by a hairy carpet of wolfhounds and currently discussing the best way to murder the Johnstone without getting caught for it.

  “Ye could do it,” said Maxwell to Huntly, “Ye’d get away with it again, ye know ye would…”

  “Why should I?” asked Huntly as a chestnut cracked like a pistol. “Johnstone’s no’ my blood enemy, he’s yours. Ye do it.”

  “Ay but the King disnae fancy mah bum and I’d get warded somewhere cold wi’ no women…”

  “Ah cannae help that,” said Huntly. “And forebye it wad be a sin for me to kill a man I had nae blood feud with, would it no’, Father?”

  Crichton hesitated and said, “It certainly would be a sin for ye to murder the Johnstone…”

  “There ye go, ye’re trying to get me to commit a sin, Maxwell, so shut yer trap about it, eh?”

  “For God’s sake, killing the King is a wee bittie of a sin,” protested the Maxwell. “Why are ye so fussy?”

  “I’m not gonnae commit the sin of killing the King,” said Huntly. “Somebody else is, isn’t that right, Father?”

  “Well…er…”

  “And forebye somebody else will get the blame,” added Huntly, laughing a lot. “That should make ye happy, Maxwell. That’s funny, is that…”

  Maxwell was struggling to look as if he knew all about this. “Ay,” he said also laughing, “that’s hilarious. Will he greet, d’ye think?”

  Crichton desperately wanted to ask who was planning the outrage but didn’t dare because then they would know he didn’t know. Instead he kept his countenance and blinked down at his hands. Who could it be? Not Spynie, the man was gimcrack, totally dependent on the King and he knew it. The Ruthvens weren’t allowed close enough to the monarch and he couldn’t think of anyone else who would dare. Was it one of the other lords in the association, perhaps? Erroll, maybe?