After the fruits and nuts and fancies were served, the king formally touched Murdoch and Macbeth’s other men on each shoulder with his sword, naming each of them earls — the first that Scotland had ever had — giving them precedence over every thane in all the land.
Murdoch strode to me afterwards, to where I sat above the salt now, as one of the queen’s ladies. ‘Will you dance with me, kind lady?’ he asked, bowing, his eyes already dancing.
‘I will only dance with an earl today,’ I said demurely. ‘Can you find me one?’
He looked around, then down at himself. ‘Why, perchance, there is one here. Will you take my hand, my lady?’
I smiled, stood and curtseyed. ‘Most willingly, my lord.’
‘And may I keep that hand, to have and to hold?’
‘Yes, my lord,’ I said. I didn’t know if this was a proposal, not when our marriage had been arranged for us. But the women on either side smiled and laughed, and the men held up their tankards in a cheer.
My heart beat as loudly as the drums as he held my hand lightly to the dance floor. We moved into the set with the other dancers. Mistress — Lady Margaret had taught me many dances, but this was the first time I had danced with a man as my partner, and with the whole court looking on.
We formed a line. Suddenly I realised Murdoch and I were at the head of it. He was an earl and I was a queen’s lady now, the most important dancers on the floor. And I was in a golden dress, or nearly. He smiled at me. ‘It seems we are to lead, my lady.’ He took my hands.
It was a simple dance, thank goodness, designed to be a courtly display for royalty to watch rather than a way to pass a long winter night. He and I skipped down the line, one of my hands taking the hand of every man in turn, while he took the hand of every woman, while my other kept hold of his.
At the end of the line he kissed my hand. ‘You dance most beautifully, my lady.’
His lips were warm. I flushed, unsure what to say. He laughed as the next couple skipped towards us. ‘As your hand is mine, I may kiss it whenever I like.’
‘Of course, my lord,’ I said, blushing.
‘Perhaps we should rename Greymouth. For how can it be Greymouth when my lady’s lips are rose?’
I tried to think of a witty answer, but luckily we were swirled into the dance once more.
He kissed my hand again as he handed me back to my seat.
‘My lady’s hand is almond white
Her lips are like a rose,
Soon I the luckiest of knights
When my knight her nights knows,’ he recited.
More cooing and applause at his cleverness. He smiled modestly. ‘Until tomorrow, my lady,’ he promised. I watched him stride back to the top of the table to talk with the king. He always said ‘my lady’, I realised, had never once used my name.
‘My name is Annie,’ I said softly. But even those on either side were applauding the music, and no one heard.
Autumn sent the trees shaggy with gold and red, like banners proclaiming the new king. The rains cleared enough to bring in a harvest, but the rivers still ran high. No other thanes arrived to kneel to King Macbeth in fealty. That must wait till spring.
The days limped past at the palace. My time changed little. There were more stairs to climb in Inverness’s Cawdor Castle than Glamis; a stronger stench from the town chamber pots, mixed with the salt of the sea. I would have liked to climb along the coast and see the endless blue reach to the horizon, or explore a proper town and take a basket to the markets, but of course each day I must attend the queen. I still helped dress her in the morning, and again at dinner time and evening, grander cloth and jewels every day, but still much the same to pin. We brushed her hair and sewed at tapestries, sitting quietly on our cushions below the throne, as colourful in our silks as tapestries ourselves, when she was holding an audience with petitioners or the king.
I had thought Macbeth would be triumphant, striding the corridors of the palace. But affairs of state weighed heavier than any battle. His eyes looked smudged with coal; his cheeks sank like a village crone’s in a hard winter. It seemed that winter sprinkled his hair with grey snow too. There was no time for hunting or tournaments this season. Macbeth had harvested a kingdom, and now must tend it, sending messengers and gifts to woo the families who had not attended the coronation. Murdoch was his chief messenger. I hardly saw Murdoch after the coronation feast where he had claimed my hand. King Macbeth sent ambassadors to England too, to demand the princes be returned and tried for their crime; to Paris and Rome, making or sealing allegiances I tried to understand.
My lady . . . Her Majesty stayed at her husband’s side even during audiences, offering him soft counsel for the petitioners that came to him to decide between two claimants for an estate, or who should have the grazing rights to a field or half a mountain. Even when the king met with the chancellor she was there, gracious, charming, keeping the threads of Scotland in her hands as easily as she’d sewn her tapestry.
The king needed her there, though none dared say it aloud. Time and time again he hesitated, or did not seem to remember what a petitioner had said a short time before. It was as if part of him were elsewhere, at Glamis, perhaps, or reliving the tragedies that had led him to his throne. Perhaps, indeed, he was made to lead troops, and not to govern a kingdom.
But not the queen. She seemed to have been made for a high estate, wise in judgement, seeming tireless as she judged the owner of the piglets that one man’s sow had born, but another’s boar had sired. She was not ambitious for her husband now, but for the whole of Scotland, to be a land of plenty and of peace — and no rebellion should mar the rule of King Macbeth.
At night, she had bad dreams.
I slept in the truckle bed next to her every night now. The first night she had woken, screaming, Lady Margaret had been with her, and made such a fuss calling for a posset and lavender oil to calm her that half the castle waked, and wondered at the noise. The next night, Her Majesty asked for me.
I had slept next to Mam, on the bracken bed at Agnes’s, when she woke, sobbing from her dreams where Da strode in, smiling and alive. I knew warm arms and a soothing voice would frighten nightmares, because Mam soothed me too, when memories of that winter when our only food for three days was a frozen turnip flooded back to me in dreams.
I did not dream of frozen turnips now. There would be no starvation for Lady Anne, attendant to the queen, nor the Countess of Greymouth when the queen decided Lord Murdoch and I should wed. Daggers decorated my dreams instead, oozing blood; the headless grooms walking the ramparts of Glamis Castle; Duncan roaming the halls, gore dripping from his wounds.
Often when the queen woke it was a relief for me to wake too. I kneeled on the floor, holding her hand, making myself smell the sweet apple wood of the castle fires instead of smouldering peat; listen to the bells toll the hour and the watchman cry ‘all’s well’.
And all was well, I told myself. Macbeth was king. The story was complete, or would be when I was wed, the birth of my children and grandchildren the only adventures still to come. All the horrors had been back at Glamis . . .
It almost made me wish that we weren’t going back there for Christmas. But, as I shared the queen’s litter again, every step the bearers took seemed to make me more myself again, as if a shadow inhabited my skin at Inverness, a stranger called Lady Anne.
It felt so deeply right to be back in the village again, to feel Mam’s arms around me, to have Paddock purring on my knee and expecting to have her ears stroked. Even Agnes’s glares seemed comfortable. Somehow the village was still the centre of the world for me, far more than the palace of all Scotland in Inverness. It was as if my life was a tapestry that had hung hooked on the wall all my time away.
Rab had cared for Mam and Agnes just as he’d promised. The thatch was newly mended, the peat dried and stacked under the eaves. The baskets they received from the castle had been more lavish than the other pensioners got too, with meat every week
and cheese as well as butter. Mam looked almost plump, and even Agnes looked less like a black-clad broom. The queen repaid loyalty.
She even gave me permission to spend the entire feast day at the cottage. I brought Mam a bolt of red flannel from Inverness to make petticoats. Agnes scoffed at the colour, but later during our visit I saw a flash of red under her dress. She stewed the goose from the castle with herbs that tasted far better than Old Man’s Bottom, and I brought butter cake, which needed the castle’s oven to bake, and marzipan fruits.
I laughed as Mam wondered at the tiny apples, plums and quinces. I sat there on the bracken-stuffed wool cushion, happier than I’d been for half a year, even though I dressed in velvet now, and had a fox fur cloak to shield me from the cold with a silver brooch to clasp it, a gift from my Lord Murdoch.
He wasn’t with us this Christmas, but on an embassy to France. I wished him safe on the winter seas and counted the days till his return. No date had been set for our wedding, nor had the banns been read. ‘I do not want to lose you so soon,’ the queen had told me frankly. ‘And I would, as soon as you were breeding.’
Murdoch had kissed me when we said farewell — my first kiss, and I’d liked it. There were no scenes of passionate adoration between us, like in the stories Lady Margaret read to us as we stitched. Lord Murdoch paid me compliments, and kissed my hand, and taught me new dances most kindly, not laughing when I lost my place. This, it seemed, was what the highborn expected of a marriage. My lady hadn’t even met Macbeth when they were first betrothed.
‘More goose?’ offered Agnes, piling it into my bowl. ‘You’re a wisp of a cloud still. And your head still in the clouds too. You need some fat upon your bones.’
‘My bones do well enough,’ I said. ‘Oh, Mam, I wish you had seen the roast ox at the banquet for the French ambassador. It took ten men to carry it in, and its hide was polished and its horns gilded. The king cleft it with his sword and out fell sausages!’
‘Never say you’ve met a Frenchman!’ said Mam.
‘Lots of them. They talk strangely, but they are most polite. The queen has a French cook now to make her sauces.’
‘What’s a sauce?’ asked Agnes.
‘A covering for plain meat, like gravy in a stew but made separate.’
‘The best of meat is in the bones. Why would someone want the gravy made separate? Foreigners have funny ways.’
‘I’ve seen a monkey too,’ I said.
‘What’s that?’ asked Mam eagerly.
‘A small animal, much like a man but covered in fur, and it capers on the ground.’
Mam looked dubious. ‘Sounds heathen. Does a monkey go to kirk and say the prayers?’
‘Well, no.’
‘Then it’s heathen,’ said Mam firmly, not looking at Agnes, who went to kirk but twice a year and that just to stop the whispers getting too loud.
The door darkened with Rab’s bulk.
‘Come in!’ cried Mam. ‘There’s a good goose stew in the pot, and bannocks hot on the hearth.’
‘Your bannocks or your Annie’s?’ asked Rab. He sat on the cushion beside me, the flames dancing on his face. ‘It’s good to see you, Annie.’
‘And good to see you,’ I said.
He’d written every week, as he’d said he would, but not the kind of letter I’d expected, as long as Murdoch’s poems. Rab’s were just three words, All is well, scratched on scraps of paper with old accounts on the other side. But it had comforted me to get them, to know that, indeed, all was well.
‘I made you all gifts,’ he said, and produced them from his kirtle: three finely wrought iron cloak pins. Mine was a five-petalled rose; Mam’s a deer; and Agnes’s a thistle, not the flower, but a thorny leaf.
Agnes laughed. ‘You’ve got me right, lad!’ She fastened it to her dress. ‘The hag of thistles. That’s me.’
I’d taken my cloak off, thanks to the warmth of the good peat fire, and was glad Murdoch’s silver pin was hidden in the folds. ‘It’s lovely, Rab.’ And strange to think his big hands could do such fine work.
‘A change from swords and ploughs and horseshoes.’ He took the bowl of stew from Mam. ‘Smells good.’
‘Better than your Maggie Two-Teeth could make,’ said Agnes. ‘The secret’s in the herbs.’
‘Not such a secret,’ said Mam, ‘for I know it now, and so does Annie.’
‘A secret between three is still a secret,’ Agnes said, giving first Mam and then me a sharp eye. ‘Eat up, lad. There’s butter cake as well, and if we don’t eat it the cat will get at it, and he’s fat enough already.’
Mam laughed. And I sat next to her, and to Rab, warm by the fire, as Mam showed him the marvel of marzipan fruits, and I knew this was a jewel of a day that would glow bright for my whole life, brighter than any ruby in Macbeth’s crown.
Chapter 11
We laboured through snowdrifts back to Inverness. The day was fine when we set out, but the grey clouds grew heavier and, finally, the snow fell. I felt guilty to be warm inside the curtained litter with the queen while the men who carried us stumbled through the drifts. The queen spoke little, though she had been gay all through the Christmas revels. I listened to the men’s leather-clad feet tramp and slip, all other sounds lost in the snow, and tried not to think of all the bloody deeds crammed into the past year. Instead I contemplated the year to come.
I had hoped that the king would recover his spirits at Glamis, where he had been boy, man and thane. But he started at every shadow as the torches flickered in the corridors, and shuddered each time winter’s wind moaned and rubbed against the castle, as if it were a dragon ghost sent to snare us.
But he would be better when summer came, I told myself. Many felt dark-spirited in the short dim days of winter. When summer spread its gold across the land, our king would smile once more too. Good harvests and, God willing, no raiders from the north.
‘A good snow means a good harvest,’ said the queen.
I stared at her. Had she heard my thoughts? But what else would a queen be thinking of at the beginning of a year?
‘And with my husband king, no raiders will attack our land,’ she added. ‘The Norsemen will be afraid to face a warrior king.’
‘Scotland is lucky to have such a one,’ I said.
‘And hopefully this year all will acknowledge it.’
It was hard to read her expression in the dim light.
‘Don’t worry, ma’am. Surely the thanes will come to swear allegiance when the passes are clear once more,’ I said.
She smiled at that. ‘No one except you and the chancellor presumes to give advice to a queen.’
I flushed. I’d spent too much time with Agnes.
The queen laughed. ‘No, I like it. Words can be angels to a listener’s ear. You are discreet enough to talk when only I can hear.’
And the men carrying the litter, I thought. But that was gentlefolk: they never saw the man who carried the water, or the foot soldier who was one-armed because of battle.
‘You miss Lord Murdoch?’ she asked.
‘Yes, Your Majesty.’ I might not love him as Mam and Da had loved each other, but he brightened the long days. ‘But I am grateful for the honour of the king sending him as ambassador to France.’
‘Let us pray that he succeeds.’
‘He didn’t tell me why he went, ma’am.’
Her mouth quirked, amused. ‘I am glad to hear it. His mission is for the ears of the French king alone, not a big-eyed chit who prompts her queen for answers.’
‘I’m sorry, ma’am.’
She laughed. ‘You don’t look it. Of course you’re curious.’ She paused, then added, almost to herself, ‘And I do trust you. Murdoch was sent for this: to give assurances to the French king that the old alliance stands firm. Scotland will not attack the lands of France, nor France look covetously on ours.’
‘The French king will agree to this, ma’am?’
‘Of course. He gains nothing by denying it. But Murdoch
had another quest: to ask the French to aid us should attack come from England. In turn, we will offer our assistance when they next fight the English.’
‘Do the French fight the English often, ma’am?’
Another laugh. ‘As regularly as we sing matins.’
‘Then the French king must agree.’
‘It is not so simple. France’s power is great, ours small. It is said their army is so vast it reaches to the horizon, a city full of knights on horseback, a forest of spears behind. Their help to us would be an elephant striding down the hills; ours but a bee that buzzes near its foot.’
I tried to imagine an army as big as that. I’d seen Macbeth’s army march away, so many men it took half the morning to watch them pass. And I knew the king’s army held a score of legions just as large, if all the lords answered the call to bring their men and swords.
Suddenly I grasped the import of her earlier words. ‘England, ma’am? Do you think they will attack us?’
‘Duncan’s son, Malcolm, is at the English court,’ she said flatly. I noticed she did not call him prince.
‘And Donalbain too?’
‘It seems Donalbain had an accident on the road. A dangerous country, England.’
‘You think Malcolm is asking the English king for an army to attack us?’
‘I am quite sure of it. But if France announces that it will fight for Scotland, the English will be deaf to Malcolm’s pleas.’
‘If he deserved the throne, he should have stayed and claimed it,’ I said.
She nodded. ‘His flight proclaimed his guilt. Malcolm must have scarce blood enough in all his sickly veins to give a sheet a stain. If I were him, I would have galloped to each thane, convinced them of my innocence and gathered in the harvest of their men. Instead he fled, a puppy battered by a broom.’
I remembered the strong-eyed young man watching Macbeth on the morning of his father’s death. He did not seem a coward. ‘And if the French refuse to help us, ma’am? Could we defeat the English?’
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