Queen & Country (15 page)

In the year of plague the dead kists were tipped out, and were filled again; the dead were left to moulder naked in their shrouds. Despite his best beliefs, the ravage of the peste had worn the doctor down. It had left him changed. The magnitude and scale of it was hard to understand. Yet the toll of that flood, counted in drops, insubstantial and small, did not amount to the loss of that queen,
whose departure from life had been more than a death; more, to Giles Locke, than its sum.

‘She was killed at the command of the English queen, Elizabeth. Her head was cut off from her neck. This news took a week to come to the king. Patrick says, he marvels at it greatly. Yet I have no doubt he must have expected it.'

‘Once she was convicted, there could be no hope for her,' Hew said.

The doctor shook his head. ‘Does Frances know,' he asked, ‘what horror you have brought her to?'

Frances washed and dressed. She had no chest of clothes, no scented smock or shirt, so could do little more than shake her gown for dust, combing out her hair, and tucking it away into a linen cap, as wives were meant to do. Her shoes were worn out to the soles. On the stairway to the hall, she encountered Canny Bett, who put to her a question, and gave her some advice, at which she smiled and nodded, understanding none of it. Her heart was in her mouth as she entered the great hall. She understood at once that there was something wrong. ‘What is the matter, Hew?'

‘Ah, my love,' he said, ‘I fear the queen is dead.'

Her hand flew to her face.

He realised his mistake, and hers. ‘I do not mean Elizabeth. I mean the queen of Scots.'

Frances cried, ‘Thank God!' and opened up a gulf between them in that room.

They were good, gentle people, and they did not leave it long, however deep the cracks they plastered over privately. Meg was the first to break into the awkwardness. ‘We must eat. We have a kippil of cunyngs with mustard, and beef in a broth, and a tart, and marchpanes the children have made.'

Frances said, ‘Kippil of . . .?'

‘It means a pair of coneys,' Hew explained. ‘What the French call, lapin à la moutarde.' Giles did his best to recover his sangfroid, and
came back with a quip, ‘or in other words, cunning as mustard. It is Hew's favourite, and we are obliged to him, for not coming home on a fish day. Soon it will be Lent, with all the deprivations that entails. In the meantime, we are blessed with a surfeit of fresh meat, and I would call upon you both to help us make the most of it.'

The leprons had kept their sweet delicate flesh, their sauce refined and fragrant, with a subtle heat; the beef had been cooked on the bone, melting with its marrow to a mellow broth, sticky, dark and unctuous. The tart was filled with custard, laced with spice and quivering. There were brittle oatcakes, baked upon a skillet pan, that crumbled in the throat, but also good white bread, that Frances had been told was scarce enough in Scotland. She ate a little of the manchet, dipped in mustard sauce, and a little of the meat, and nibbled at the edge of a sliver of the tart. She sipped at the claret which was deep and dark, and the more of it she drank, she more she felt adrift, floundering in talk. Though Meg was kind in her attentions, and gentle in her speech, the words she used were singular, and hard to understand. Giles had travelled further, and had lived abroad, and had the content of his speech not been convolute and tortuous, she might have hoped to follow, but she found the language heavy, and the argument abstruse. Even Hew himself, whose gently tempered tones had lulled her from the start, was sometimes falling now into a deeper dialect, and she felt left behind; however long and patiently they broke off to explain to her, she never quite caught up. It was not just the words, but their world that was strange.

They were speaking of the college at the university where Giles Locke was the principal. One of the professors there, a man called Bartie Groat, had perished in the plague.

‘What? Bartie gone?' Hew wailed.

‘Bartie was the first,' Giles said. There came on him a weariness, wiping out all energy and weathering to quietness. ‘The peste takes first the faltering, the fragile, frail and old, and sweeps them from its path, careless as the wind. He remained behind when the college was evacuated. Where else should he go? His life was at St Salvator's.
He had decided that his time had come. But you may be assured, Hew, he did not die alone.'

Frances dared not show the pity that she felt; their grief was closed to her. Far across the table, Meg reached for her hand. ‘That was a hard time. The men from the college, who had nowhere else to go, came here to us. We were quarantined, and those who could afford to, fled the town. But Giles did not leave. He remained at the college, tending to the sick, and doing all he could to rein the sickness in, and to stop its spread. It was not long after Martha was born, and we did not see him for almost a year. Paul, who was our servant then, brought letters back and forth, together with supplies, which he left by the wall, not daring to enter the town. And we sent our herbs to them, and waters from the still, to help them where we could. Four hundred people here died in the plague. But were it not for Giles, it could have been four thousand.'

The doctor cleared his throat. ‘Dear me. This a sad thing, to speak of on your first day home. If you will call in at the college, Hew, anytime you will, we can talk of matters, that we do not touch on now. Indeed, I think it best.'

Hew nodded. ‘I can come tomorrow, if you like. For I have in mind to see my man of law.'

‘That seems to me, a practical idea.'

Frances saw the men exchange a look she did not understand. ‘I should like to see the town, very much,' she said.

Hew hesitated, ‘And of course, you shall. Tomorrow, I expect that you will want to rest. Your journey here was long.'

‘No longer,' Frances said, ‘than it was for you.'

Meg said, ‘They do not allow women in the university, Frances, for fear we will distract, and turn them from their books. Leave them to their law, and to their dead philosophy, and stay at home with me. In the summer, when the students have gone, you and I will go and look around the college. By then the pictures will be done.'

Hew latched upon this quickly, grateful for Meg's help. ‘What pictures are those?'

‘Did I not tell you? Giles is having his portrait painted, in recognition of the work he has done to help the town.'

‘Stuff,' protested Giles. ‘It is a piece of foolishness. The provost is persuaded that I saved his son. And in honour of the boy – a graduate of ours – he has paid a man to decorate our dinner hall, insisting that a likeness should be made of me. I do not count it much.'

‘It is quite a lot. You will need one of those panels, that folds in three parts,' Hew teased, and the two of them fell to their old style of flyting, quite baffling to Frances, lifting the mood for the rest of the night.

Chapter 10

Ars et Natura

Frances woke up to a cold bed beside her, and lay a moment frozen in the stillness of the house. At Leadenhall, the markets would be coming to their close. She would have awoken to the raucous crowds, the greening herds of cattle and their doleful calves, the clamorous cacophony of birds. Except, she thought, the sounds would not have woken her, for she would not have been asleep. Never in her life, except when she had suffered with a mild strain of the small pox, had she stayed in bed beyond the waking hour. She felt, through slats of windows closed off to the sun, the fingers of a frost, that kept the world outside her prisoned in its clasp.

There was nothing in that bed that was left to her of Hew, but a stiffness in the sheet, and on her smock, a stain. She heard a light knocking, and Hew's sister Meg came into the room, with her arms full of cloths.

‘I did not want to wake you, if you were asleep. But I thought you might be lying, fretting here alone. I brought you some towels, and clean linen smocks, and some of the rose water made in our still. It is meant for a kindness, and I hope won't offend you. Hew said you did not have so many things.'

‘Thank you.' Frances sat up in the bed. Her instinct was to leave it at once; she felt ashamed to be found there so late in the day. She remembered the stain, and shrank back.

Meg said, ‘It is cold in here. I will send someone in to make up the fire. Your servant, Robert Lachlan, has been quartered with the
grooms. He has made friends with one of the kitchen maids. That is not a good thing.'

Frances felt a shiver of alarm. She wondered if she was expected, in Hew's absence, to effect some kind of discipline. She knew that Robert Lachlan was far out of her control. ‘He does . . . he is . . . Hew is fond of him. But, as I confess, I do not understand anything he says.'

‘That may be for the best,' said Meg. She set the things down on top of a chest, and stood back to watch what Frances did next. The fragrance of the rose seeped into the room. There was water in a bowl that the servant must have brought while Frances was asleep. Or maybe it was Hew. She had felt his touch, gentle on her cheek. The water would be cold.

‘I shall not want a fire, for I will soon be up. I did not think I should have slept so long,' she said. ‘But we were on the road so many days and weeks, and the places where we lay were sometimes very ill. I never had a mattress that was soft like this. In London, I sleep in a bed with my cousins. There are five of us, sometimes.'

As she spoke, she understood that she would never share a bed, or fall out with them, again, and her face fell in a cloud, which Meg observed at once. ‘You must love Hew very much, to have left your friends to come with him so far.'

Frances was afraid of her. Meg dealt in natural remedies, and had, her brother said, a skill to bring to life the stubborn force of nature, and tame it to her will. She had suffered from the falling sickness since she was a child. ‘For that reason, my father quit his work as advocate, at its very pinnacle, retiring to the country, for the sake of the reclusion that was wanted for her health.' Frances did not see how anyone with hair as dark as Meg's could have been Hew's sister; Hew was fair, like Giles. Meg's infant child, Martha, shared that same darkness; her curls were permitted to stream in a tangle of wildness, not combed, as they should be, and pinned. Frances was afraid that Meg might be a witch, an apprehension that she did not dare admit to Hew. She was fearful too of Doctor Locke. Hew insisted that he had a most loving generous heart, the kindest of his friends. But
Frances felt his gaze upon her searching, sharp and critical, his language was opaque and by sheer force of his bulk, a massiveness of intellect, of spirit, and of flesh, she was overwhelmed.

In spite of all these feelings, she confessed to Meg, knowing that without her, she was quite alone. ‘I have loved him, I think, from the first day that he came to our house at Leadenhall. He told me things then about you and your husband, and of his home here, all of them true. But somehow, none of it is quite as I expected.'

‘It must seem quite foreign to you. But you will get used to it.'

‘So I hope. For I cannot go back.' The words sounded hollow, forlorn.

‘He must love you too,' Meg, said, so kindly Frances was encouraged to confide in her.

‘He did not seem to notice me, at first. He was taken with a woman by the name of Audrey, with open voluminous thighs, and a warm simple heart, who did not stake a claim on him. I fear, it was for pity that he took me.'

‘That is like him,' said Meg. ‘And it was clever of you, if you gave him that cause.'

‘What you mean?'

‘Pity is the way to move my brother's heart, where nothing strikes to terror quite as much as love. He must be caught obliquely in it, else he shies away. You will forgive the question, Frances, but are you with child?'

‘No. I do not think so.' Frances hesitated. ‘I have not known him long – that is to say, we have not been married for long. The truth is, there was no time to discuss such matters with my aunt, or my sister-in-law.'

‘Then please do not forget, you have a sister now.' Meg smiled at her. ‘The men have gone to town, and will not be back for hours. Matthew has his grammar lesson; Martha is with Canny Bett. We shall have some time to come to know each other.'

‘Your little boy is young, to be put to school,' Frances said.

‘He is his father's son. When you are dressed, I will show you the
garden. You will say, that nothing green can come, from those beds of frost so obdurate and desolate, but I shall prove to you, that there is nothing further from that case.'

Hew spent the morning with his man of law. The consultation, as expected, did not go so well. The man had told him what in essence he had known already, had concealed from Frances, and did not wish to hear. His marriage, which under English law, had been lawful under extraordinary circumstance, was unlikely to be recognised in Scotland, under any circumstance at all. And even if it could be proved as lawful, it would never be accepted by the Scottish Kirk.

‘You will not mind my saying, but you could not have chosen a less propitious time, nor a more contentious contract. Do you say, that she brought you no portion at all, no kind of tocher, that will secure her in case of your death?' the man put to him bluntly. He had dealt with Hew, and Hew's father too, as his father before him had done. That gave him the right to express himself forcefully. ‘My advice to you is to call the banns in your parish kirk – that is St Leonard's, is it not? – and marry her again, as quickly as you can. That may not be as simple as it sounds. This contract was ill done. But you are a lawman. Ye ken that. And were your late father with us . . .'

Hew interrupted quickly, ‘I will think upon your words. Can I be assured that you will keep this close?'

‘As always,' the man sighed.

There was better news relating to the land, and the funds that had accrued from Hew's father's last investments. At the height of his career, Matthew Cullan had loaned a large sum of money to the Edinburgh council, at the common rate of ten per cent a year. Upon Hew's indictment on a charge of treason, the profits had been frozen by the Crown, but now that the attainder was removed, the funds had been released, and with the rents from several properties let out in the capital, had risen to a sizable amount. ‘Indeed, if you would draw upon that capital,' the lawyer had advised, ‘the council would
be sorely pressed to meet the debt. You can be assured of relief in kind. Your credit there is sound.'