The Proud Servant

by Margaret Irwin

  They were swooping and curling in a little cloud, round a figure in front of him in a white-and-blue dress, who stood throwing crumbs to them on the edge of the water. It was Kat, bare-headed, with her face upturned to the sun, smiling. Small dark freckles dotted her nose and chin; she wore earrings that shook and quivered in points of light. The prow of a gondola stood up from the water beneath her; a pigeon balanced itself on it and fed from the hand she held out to it. A young man stood behind her, smiling at her.

  Jamie blinked furiously, half sprang from his chair, opened his eyes again. There was nobody there, and no gondola. Only the pigeons still wheeled and fluttered, stepped towards him and bowed, cooing. ‘It was the heat,’ he said aloud, so that he might believe it.

  The innkeeper came forward to tell him that his lunch was ready. Savoury smells of hot pasta and cheese, of cold garlic sausage, of a great bowl of bouillabaisse, wherein floated mussels and tiny lobsters and strange red fish of the Mediterranean, conquered all other senses. He sat at the table, suddenly aware that he was starving.

  It took him till next day to run Sir John to earth; and that afternoon he came to the house where he lodged. As his gondola came round the corner, he saw three workmen noisily engaged in dragging a great flat package out of a barge, and up the marble steps of a house like a palace. The waters of the canal lapped lazily, lispingly against the marble steps, in ironic undercurrent to the shrill shouts and curses that hurtled above them. The group made the only stir in that shining afternoon; they staggered up the steps under their burden, disappeared through the doorway, and left the canal to its silence of little whispering sounds.

  Jamie’s guide told him that this was the house of the English milord. He went up the steps and through the doorway where the men had so lately passed, and now he heard their voices on the stairs above him, and then another voice, giving directions, querulous, indignant.

  At the sound of it, the blood came rushing into his head, and his hand went to his sword. Tray God I shall find him alone,’ he said to himself. He had parted from Kat in anger and horror; he did not want her to meet him now in his bloodthirsty rage against her lover.

  He entered a vast, cool, green-shuttered room, blinked his eyes against its sudden darkness, saw the men undoing the package, and Sir John, leaning over it, saw that his sister was not there.

  ‘Tell your fellows to go,’ he said.

  The tall man who was fussing unhappily over his new possession, spun round, straightening his back, stared, then made a panic-stricken movement away from him, towards the window, pushing back the shutter, so that the blinding sunlight flooded in, cutting off that end of the room.

  Montrose was astounded. He knew Colquhoun to be no coward, yet his stare had been one of terrified agitation, and his first movement that of flight. He had checked it, however; he now came back to the men and ordered them to leave the package as it was.

  They expostulated, waved their hands, looked suspiciously at the new milord who had entered so mysteriously, unannounced, and did what they were told with as much protest as possible. Sir John took refuge in watching them go, in calling after them some slight, insufficient order, in patting and glancing at the top corner of his half-unwrapped picture, wherefrom, beneath a rag of dirty sacking and a splintered lath, there looked out the pale head of a girl, her hair bound with coral.

  Montrose saw that this was a beaten man before him, who had been so before he himself encountered him.

  ‘Where is Kat?’ he demanded in fierce exultation, knowing the answer before the other could be made to confess it.

  Colquhoun walked up and down the room, trying every now and then to make a gesture, to induce an ironic tone into his voice, to show that he was still at least master of himself, if no longer of the situation, as he answered his young kinsman’s stern questions. He had been abandoned a week ago. Kat had not deceived him; she had told him she was tired of him, that she intended to leave him for a young French gentleman, with whom they had been pleasantly acquainted for the last three months. Not all Sir John’s grief and rage could move her – here he forgot his attempt at aloofness, and sobbed.

  Montrose asked the Frenchman’s name; he could learn little else of him – the lad was a son of a noble family, and had seemed a nice intelligent fellow – Colquhoun had had no suspicion of his treachery until the blow fell on him – and then how cool they had both been about it, how shameless, heartless! He did not understand these modern young people, they had no passion, nothing but cold calculation – and yet Kat had been so mad that she had refused to take any of his presents, or even the clothes he had bought her; she had just stepped into a gondola one day last week, and gone off with nothing but the blue-and-white dress that she was wearing.

  ‘She had been feeding the pigeons,’ thought Montrose.

  Had she projected that image of herself, serene and careless, so that he should know her happy? The young man who had stood and smiled at her, proud, tender and amused, gave greater promise of her happiness than any she could have had with this pricked bladder of a man.

  He looked for the first time at the room round him, dim and cool as a cave, except at the end where the sunlight struck upon a table, painted with goddesses in chariots drawn by leopards, its shadow falling on the white floor in a pool of brilliant violet light. Colquhoun had flung open that shutter in his instinctive desire to escape him. Well, Colquhoun had escaped him, he told himself bitterly.

  ‘What of Carlippis?’ he exclaimed suddenly. His worst fears were over when he learned that Carlippis had left Sir John months ago for the more amusing and profitable service of a great merchant. So this new escapade had at least not been engineered for his own ends by Carlippis. He had used Colquhoun and left him, as indeed Kat had too. She had never been in love with him; Carlippis had been the true seducer, with his talk of adventure and travel, experiment and freedom, and with the deadly enchantment of his hypnotic powers.

  Colquhoun had merely been her gateway to adventure, a makeshift, as he had been to Carlippis. No one had found it worth while to stick to him. His vanity had been so cruelly wounded that no other punishment could hurt him. He would have welcomed death, if it could have been death as revenge on the successful seducer. Now not even death could save his face. That pleasant slippery polish of his was all rubbed off. He had lost his place in the world; and would go on losing it, rather than face the shame of returning, a poor cuckolded lover, to ask the pardon of his wife and community.

  Helpless, rudderless, he drifted about the room, coming always to anchor in front of his purchase, as though it contained his single claim to self-respect. It was the first work of art he had dared to buy without the advice of Carlippis. Mantegna was not a fashionable painter, but King Charles of England, a noted connoisseur, had been buying them – and he had thought it very pretty – and the subject, a Roman triumph, had appealed to him. That girl’s fair head, peeping out of the top corner, was that of a captive virgin. If ever he made love again, it would only be to fair women; they were docile, gentle, faithful; to love them would be a sort of loyalty to his poor wife, to whom he could never now return.

  But at the thought of Lilias among her pretty, modern furniture at Rossdhu, stitching at her embroidery picture of Queen Margaret and the Robber – and then of Kat sitting before the fire in a still circle of enchantment that had drawn into it his unwilling soul and chained it so that it had hung quivering in expectation of her voice or glance – at that, his last defence fell from him, he sat down suddenly, and his head flopped forward on to the cold, shiny surface of the painted table.

  He never knew that Montrose, who had come to kill him, had left the room; he knew only that he had lost Kat, and had never won her.

  Montrose went down the water steps to his gondola, and told the man to go wherever he liked. The honey-white houses drifted past him, the curved shadows of bridges trembling on the water. Sounds came sleepily towards him through the silence of this city without traffic, in the hour of its
siesta – the rhythmical swirl of the oar behind him, the lapping of the ripples on the marble steps, the occasional long cry of a gondolier, ‘ohé, ohé!’ as the prow of another gondola glided round a corner.

  ‘I am seeing Venice,’ thought Montrose, reminding himself of the dream of all would-be travellers in his country; he could have laughed at the emptiness that the satisfaction of that dream had brought him. And suddenly, as the triumphant bells pealed out the hour, he asked his gondolier what day of June it was. His guess was right – this was the 23rd, the day King Charles was being crowned in Edinburgh.

  On this iridescent shimmer of white heat there impinged a scene of gaunt grey houses huddling into narrow streets, staggering up against the grey sky, of faces peering from all the tiny crooked windows, bunched together under the gables, of people standing in the streets wherever there was or wasn’t room to stand, in mud, in rain-puddles, on each other’s toes, all crowding, craning, straining to see a little company of men who rode out of the gates of a huge grey castle, their cloaks teased and tossed by the wind that always whistled round that corner.

  In their midst rode a man with the ancient crown of Scotland on his head, under a canopy borne by men who were all of them Jamie’s friends, and one of them was his brother-in-law, and one of them should have been himself. He had thrown away the greatest opportunity for his ambition, to pursue a sister so wanton that she could not even stay six months with her first lover.

  ‘I have ruined my career,’ he thought, and for perhaps four minutes was sunk in the rich, egotistic despair of youth.

  So had Colquhoun, and his home, country and reputation as well, but his case naturally did not strike Jamie as so tragic. On a wave of passionate homesickness he longed to go straight back to Magdalen and put his head down on her breast, and tell her how unhappy he was, and what a fool he had been. But there, alas, she would agree.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  He was right. Magdalen agreed with him, so did Napier, so did everyone who knew him. He was right, too, about the weather. It was raining in Edinburgh; the procession might have just missed the rain if it had started in time, but it was half an hour late – ‘as well as seven years late,’ Napier reflected. Later on, he was apt to say – ‘It all began with the Coronation.’

  For everything went wrong after it, and yet nothing went wrong at it. King Charles made a fine show on horseback and the towns welcomed him with roars of loyalty. At Perth, the house of Montrose’s maternal uncle, the late Earl of Gowrie, whose wizened head still adorned the front of the Tolbooth in Edinburgh, was prepared as a royal residence; the glovers did their sword-dance in green caps and white shoes with silver strings and red ribbons and as many different steps as possible.

  Old William Drummond’s masque of Endymion was performed, and young Drummond of Madertie told everyone the poet was his cousin, and much better than the English poets Ben Jonson or Shakespeare. Endymion, dressed according to the stage directions, ‘like a shepherd’, in a long coat of crimson velvet with gilt leather buskins, was as splendid as the King himself.

  The expense everywhere was enormous. All the town’s soldiers in Edinburgh had to be put into white satin doublets and black velvet breeches and silk stockings, with gilded pikes, to form a royal guard to the King. The provost and bailies in furred red robes, attended by the town councillors in black velvet, gave the King a gold basin worth a mint of money, into which the provost shook out a purse of a thousand gold pieces.

  ‘The King,’ wrote Napier to his absent ward, ‘looked gladly upon speech and gift, but the Marquis of Hamilton, Master of His Majesty’s Horse, hard beside him, meddled with the gift as due to him by virtue of his office.’ Which was not what the loyal townsfolk had intended when they scraped the sum together.

  The King had brought five hundred English nobles in his train, as well as Scots, and Scottish hospitality, poorer but prouder than its neighbour’s, was in a fret not to be shamed before them. The city gave them a banquet, a great success, as the whole town could see, for after it they all came dancing down the High Street, provost and proud English nobles, bailies and councillors, all holding hands, without their hats, tripping and frisking like lambs, ‘with music and much merriment’. In such a mood it was blissfully clear that Scotland and England were one nation.

  But there was always next morning.

  And more mischievous in effect than all the pride and greed of the nobles was a single small conscientious English priest, the former Chancellor of Oxford and present Bishop of London, whom the King had brought to conduct the Coronation service and set the crown on his head. All bishops were suspect, but worse than a Scots bishop was an English bishop, and worst of them all was Bishop Laud, with his fussy respect for his cloth – ‘of the cloth clothy, and doubly so’, Rothes had discovered, since he was the son of a clothier and a clothier’s widow. The Scots took his low birth as an insult to themselves, aggravated by his conceited Oxford voice and tactless remarks. He had referred to the English Parliament as ‘that noise’. He now gave it as his opinion that there was ‘no religion in Scotland’.

  No religion, was there? Let him wait and he would see! Certainly he ‘knew not the stomach of that people’, as Charles’ father, King Jamie, had surmised in one of his many flashes of pawky native shrewdness. King Jamie would never have been so mistaken as to make this earnest, honest, restless, provincial-minded little man the chief figure next to the King in the Coronation.

  But did King Charles ever see what was happening round him? (and Napier scratched the imprudent question out of his letter to Montrose) – did he ever see, except in a glass darkly, any motive or impulse that was not his own?

  And his own intentions were admirable. He looked on his journey to Scotland as a sacred pilgrimage to the home of his forefathers, and his own most precious infancy; on the eve of the Coronation he prayed all night in the chapel at Edinburgh, in the spirit of a young knight of old, that God might fit him for his high task as King of this his native land.

  But the vigil did little to fit him for next morning’s squabbles as to whether the Lord Chancellor, Kinnoull, or the Archbishop of Saint Andrews, should go first in the procession. Everyone was waiting to start, when an insulting message reached the King from the old Earl of Kinnoull, that he would resign his office as Chancellor, for ‘never a stoled priest in Scotland should set a foot before him, so long as his blood was hot’.

  His tired sovereign, heavy-eyed from lack of sleep, merely answered – ‘Well, let’s go to business; I will not meddle further with that old cankered, gouty man, at whose hands there is nothing to be gained but sour words.’

  So off they set, more than half an hour late, and by then it had begun to rain; and in the Chapel of Holyrood the English bishop, Laud, set the crown on Charles’ head, while the Scots nobles fixed their resentful eyes on him more often than on their King.

  Napier, seeing this as he bore the canopy over the King, turned his eyes in sadness from that watchful, suspicious congregation, and caught a glimpse behind him of the long sallow face of Archibald Campbell, Lord Lome, who bore the King’s train.

  And his fear for the King became coupled with fear for Montrose. It was wrong that Montrose was not here, not merely on his own account, but to help counterbalance this pack of greedy wolves that howled round the King. It was wrong too that the heir to Argyll was here when Montrose was not, that he was one of the train-bearers, talking to the King whenever possible, with that soft, slightly halting, hesitating voice, that must make a welcome contrast to the truculent tones of all the aggrieved nobles, all furiously concerned with their tithes and their dignities and their properties.

  Lord Lome had been careful to inquire from Napier, in King Charles’ hearing, for news of the absent Montrose, and whether he had found his sister and brother-in-law – ‘A nasty business that, to have in a man’s family – sorcery and incest,’ he had added, with pursed lips and an oddly feminine relish, while one of those crooked eyes flickered round to
watch the effect on Charles’ fastidious moral standard.

  And Charles seems to like him, ‘as he likes any food that is set before him,’ observed Napier, with a connoisseur’s irritation at a duller palate.

  But now Napier’s disquiet went deeper than the moment.

  Whatever game fate intended those three to play – the King, the man who would be Scotland’s most powerful noble, and the youth whom Napier loved as his own son – it was a wrong move that so early in the game placed the future Earl of Argyll by his sovereign’s side, while it absented the Earl of Montrose.

  On the happy news of a birth of a second son (but on the unlucky date of 13 October) Charles hurried back to London, the Queen, and her new baby, James, Duke of York.

  The Coronation was over, and the royal progress through Scotland. One relic of its pomp remained. That was the show of a camel, belonging to the King, which was led by tuck of drum through all the cities of Scotland, except on the Sabbath day. So the contemptuous beast continued the procession, shuffling through the grey, chilly little towns, as crowded at the sight of him as at that of the King.

  Other results of the Coronation did not give so much satisfaction. Everybody was in debt, and nobody had got all they hoped for. The waters of the South Esk had dried up, and it was thought to be a bad omen both for Scotland and the family of Carnegie. The old Earl of Kinnoull died of a fit of gout, brought on by a fit of temper. So that hot blood of his was cold within a year of his quarrel with the Archbishop of Saint Andrews; and the ‘stoled priest’ he had then thrust behind him now stepped forward into his shoes as Lord Chancellor.

  It was another step to disaster in the State.

  The one happy aspect of the appointment, in Napier’s slightly malicious eyes, was that Lord Lome had applied for it, and was sulking at this disappointment. Otherwise they all, as much as old Kinnoull, hated to be led by a priest in affairs of state. No churchman had held the office of Chancellor since the Reformation. This appointment then was a step ‘Back to Rome’.