Queen & Country (23 page)

‘There is no helping it, Jock,' the keeper of the inn did not meet the mercer's eye, but answered him obliquely. ‘It isna up to me.'

‘Leave it, Faither,' the young boy urged, tugging at his cloak, and struggling to connect through his impediment of pans. ‘Dinna fight it now. Or ye will mak it worse.'

‘How can it be worse?' his father snapped. ‘It does not make sense. I should let it be, if there were any reason to it.'

‘I have telt you the reason,' the innkeeper said. ‘Now, it is out of my hands.'

‘Do you not know me, Jim? Have I not come here, for years? Have I not slept, in your best feather bed? Summer an' winter, for seventeen year. Before this young snapper was born?'

The innkeeper shrugged. ‘It vexes me too. What can a man dae? It's no up tae me.'

‘Then who is it up to?' asked Jock.

‘It is the law, you see. I canna serve an Englishman, nor hire to him a horse.'

‘What Englishman?' the mercer roared. ‘We are come fae Peebles, man! And, at the last account, Peebles was in Scotland. This boy is a Scot.'

‘He may be, by troth. I do not say, he's not. But you came fae a place that was south o' the border, afore ye did marry your lass. That maks us enemies, Jock.'

‘Twenty years since!' The mercer spat, disgusted, out into the dust.

‘It is a pity, Jock. I do not say that it is not a pity. But I cannot gie ye a horse. And ask where'er ye will, an ye will hear the same. My advice to you now, as a friend, is leave your stuff here and go home,
as swift and as shy as you like. Let your boy do the talking, and you are found. For if you care to linger here, ye will be strung up.'

‘Aye, very like,' the mercer said bitterly. ‘And how should I do that, without I have a horse?'

‘You will have to walk.'

The mercer looked about to speak, and then, this glimpse of human nature finally defeating him, he picked up what he could, and slung it on his back. Hew was moved to ask, ‘Sir, can I help you?'

‘You can sell me your horse,' the mercer answered back.

Hew hesitated then. He caught sight the innkeeper shaking his head, and knew that if he did, he could not have another one. With regret, he said. ‘I cannot, sir. I would, but I must go at once to the court.'

‘For certain, sir, you must. Why should it be otherwise? For no doubt this whole city has to go to court today. We should be thankful, I doubt, ye rebuff us politely, and do not kick us down, to crawl off in the dust,' the mercer said to that.

The young boy whispered urgently, ‘Whist, will you, Faither, we
should.'

The keeper shook his head to watch them straggle off, hampered by their load of trinkets, jingling in the dust, a wry, discordant trail. ‘That man has been coming here for nigh on twenty years. I count him as a friend. God speed him safely home. He will not come again.'

‘Then why, in God's name, did you treat him so harshly?' asked Hew.

‘Because, when I woke up this morning, I found this was pinned up on my door. “A letter to be borne abroad, by traitors harboured here”.'

The innkeeper opened his hand and showed Hew a small piece of paper crushed in his palm. Wrapped up inside was a noose, made from a thin cord of hemp. On the paper was written a verse.

‘To jezebel that English whore

Receive this Scottish chain

As presage of her great malheur

For murthering of our queen.'

‘I cannot have them think I let my rooms to Englishmen. Or else, I am undone.'

Chapter 15

The Lion's Den

The king was in the deer park of the Douglas family, at their castle at Dalkeith. In mourning clothes, in Lent, his band of men and dogs were sorely out of place. His servants warned his Grace, for he had grown beyond the bairn who might have been refused. The keeper of the Douglas game was grieved to see his startled does drop out their lifeless fawns. ‘All things have their season, sire.'

James could not be swayed. He knew that this perverse anomaly of men, cloaking nature's greenery in uncouth swathes of black, was moving to the time. What was that compared to the killing of a queen, where God's rule was reversed, and natural law sent spinning, burled upon its head? Dark, portentous times, when storm clouds would eclipse the cold conflicted skies, and split them from the earth, overturning nature by those cruel events.

His people would have frowned, to see him at the hunt. They would not have understood. For that reason, he had left the King's Park, and come to Dalkeith, where the walls were high, and the walks obscured. He put on sombre dress, reflective of the mood, and a convenient mask, hiding from the world. Mourning clothes were conscious, clever in their kind; the wearer wore his heart pinned upon his sleeve, or as he preferred it, buried in his cloak. Those who were the closest to him did not know his mind. It was not want of purpose that drove James to the field. It was not distraction from affairs at hand. It was not that he yearned for the taste of fresh meat, not that he had wearied, so early on in Lent, of the fish and fowl his cunning cooks prepared for him. Nor was it his
intent to deplete the Douglas stock, which he would replenish gladly from his own. But the sharp morning air, the crisp wind of March, the sliver of bone and the necklet of blood, that circled the throat of the delicate hind, the droplets of dew on its gingerline hair, all of those cooled and stilled in his mind the tremble of passion, and power and excitement, the leaping and flux of his own beating heart. An exaltation clarified, and helped to hold his mind in that place of balance where his course was clear, where he kept his nerve.

‘Enough,' he told the gamekeeper. ‘And sin it is the Lent, this deer shall feed the dogs.' He walked back to the house, his carnage left behind.

At Dalkeith, he had assembled with a small band of men. Maitland, the foremost in his government, secretar and chancellor, rarely left his side at this exacting time. There was set up a council chamber in the hall of the castle, where the lords could meet, and where Maitland read and attended to the business of the court. Beyond that were more private chambers, reserved for the use of the king, for what purpose could console him in his present grief. Here the king retired, to rest and change his clothes, which were a little spotted from the bleeding harts. On an ordinary day, he would not have cared. But he had lately learned, from a lady at the court, that the kings of France wore purple mourning dress,
‘pour encourager les pauvres
, your Grace. A king should be solemn; he should not be sad.' He was struck by the idea to adopt it as his own, and his new velvet suit had only just arrived. He trusted it would lift him high above the crowd, and send a flutter of dismay to the English Queen Elizabeth.

Maitland came in, with papers in his hand, and if he was disturbed by the king's display of plumage, he was practised not to show it. ‘We maun answer, your Grace, to the English queen's ambassadors, whether we will meet with them at Berwick. As I contend, we must.'

‘We must, of course,' the king agreed. ‘Not yet. This smart is too sore, too poignant and too raw to us. Tell them, we are thrawn by it, that we are compelled to settle the unrest it stirs up in our people, who marvel that a queen and mother of this house, thrown upon the
mercy of a foreign state, should be captive there, and murdered by its prince, against the laws of nature, and of hospitality. Say, willing though we are to hear Elizabeth's excuse – for none shall be condemned,
by us
, without a proper trial – we cannot read her letter, at the present time. Nor, in good conscience, can we see her ambassadors, or allow them to pass, where we cannot vouch for safety of their lives.'

‘Do I dare to ask,' the chancellor enquired, ‘how long you intend to refuse the queen her letters?'

‘As long as shall seem strange to her, and good enough to us. An envoy will be sent to the border in due course. But we shall not be quick to come to terms. The people would resent it, for one. And while their hot blood cools, her Grace shall have more time to think upon her fault, and how she may amend her broken trust with us,' the king replied, aloof. He was at that moment in complete control.

‘Very good, your Grace.' Maitland hesitated. ‘They tell me that the man is here, you were keen to see. I have the picture, too, sent down to us from Holyrood. But, sire, I cannot help but fear you think too much of it. It is a thriftless, trifling thing, of no import or consequence. Ye mauna be distracted by it, at this present time.'

James said, ‘Believe me, we would not. But it is a thing that creeps into our mind, and causes the distraction there. And, as I believe, it cannot be assuaged, until the cause is found, and forcibly removed. You tell me, tis of no account. And yet, you cannot give me any explanation for it, to dispel the doubt. Your investigations, all of them, are worthless in this case, and your pleas are trumperous.'

Maitland said uneasily. ‘We have tried, your Grace.'

‘I did not say you had not tried. I said that you had failed. Wherefore, I have called a man who has a searching intellect, more acute than yours. Please me. Show him in.'

Hew was shown at last into the presence of the king. He had waited for three hours at the castle at Dalkeith, before he was admitted there. At the close of each hour, he was taken further in, and allowed
to come a little closer to that place where he would be received if the king allowed him audience. It did not make a difference that he had been called.

He understood, of course, that this was more than he deserved. It was nothing untoward, and was not meant as an expression of the king's displeasure at his time away. It was not, in fact, to do with Hew at all, but simply the reflection, rather than reminder, that he was there to await the king's will, outranking any pleasure of his own. He was left to stand, and no one spoke to him, after he had passed through every level of obstruction, and cohort of defence, between him and his goal.

At the West Bow inn, he had dreamt, the night before, of a trance of doors, through which he had passed, endlessly and on, each one with a lock in which a key had turned, and each key had turned with a single sound that he had strained to hear, like a beetle's click that moving further off came quieter and quieter, until the key clicked soundlessly, but left an echo still, when all the doors were closed, and all the beetles gone. And where he came at last, he had found the king, standing on a box. The king had been a puppet, worked by Francis Walsingham.

This dream came back to him, so vivid in its shape as he knelt down to his lord, that he was grateful for the floor to swallow up his smile. He waited for the king to speak, to beckon and to welcome him, to offer him the wafting air around his hand to kiss, or to call in the guard, to have him clapped in irons. What happened next was none of those things. For it was Maitland who spoke. ‘Mind me, your Grace, who is this man?'

The chancellor had come to power after James had freed himself from the lord enterprisers, and from Gowrie's governance. Most of the court was under his control; he would not lose his grip, nor permit a danger to pass by undetected, at this taxing time. The council was at best an uneasy coalition, on the brink of fracture; now it had been driven to the brittle edge. Maitland kept the whole intact, never lax or absent, so that nothing was put past without his seal or ken. It had
brought him to exhaustion, wrung out in the interests of his country and his king. Then it was little wonder he suspected Hew.

‘Your Grace maun have patience wi' me. I was not in office when this man defected. I have no understanding, what were his crimes.'

‘He committed no crime. It was a misunderstanding. He was indicted on a false charge brought by John Colville. It was not maliciously meant. Since I have pardoned Colville, I have pardoned those lords who overstepped their mark to assist the earl of Gowrie, I have pardoned the irksome and unruly presbyters, and I have pardoned Hew. We have moved on,' the king said, and Hew, as he knelt on the cold of the stone, found his heart leapt at the words.

‘Not without a trial,' Maitland insisted. ‘None has been restored, without examination. He must go to trial. Or, at least, must give an account of himself, before the Privy Council.'

The king dismissed this, with a wave of his hand. ‘Aye, I shall consider it, at some other time. My lord, and I thank you, you must go home. I fear you will fall ill for lack of rest. Go, and I pray you, good Maitland. I will do nothing, you maun ken, without your counsel. Our minds are alike, be assured.'

‘As your Grace commands. I will wait without, for I shall not leave your side.' Maitland, as he bowed, turned his eye to Hew, critical and sceptical. ‘Tell me, sir, were you one of those who followed after Ruthven, or one of those who threatened the episcopacy?'

‘He was neither,' smiled the king. ‘He is a lone adventurer, who follows his own heart, and is no one's man. He has shown himself full of spirit and courage. He has a knack of finding things out. And I mistook for treachery, what was the perplexity of a searching mind.'

Maitland said dryly, ‘I look forward with some pleasure to hearing his adventures, in the council chamber. Where, I have no doubt, he will illuminate us all.'

As the chancellor departed, James regarded Hew, kneeling on the floor, several feet in front of him.

‘Well. Here you are,' he said. Will you not rise up, and let me see your face. You mauna mind Maitland. He is perplexed, at this vexing
time. As to whether you will go to face him at your trial, that must be a question for another day. I have something first that I would have you do. I ken no other man that shows himself as fit for it.'

The king had grown up from the bairn that Hew had known before. He had seen him last, a scared boy of sixteen by the lion house at Holyrood, cowering from the lords who harried him like crows. Now he sat in the house they had called ‘the Lion's Den', when Morton had command, strategy, not cowardice, marking his retreat. He had grown through the years of frustration and rebellion to a shrewd, patient prince. He was nervous, slight, fair and slender still. Yet this was a young man on the verge of flight. The nervousness in him was no longer fear, but the pulsing of excitement. In three or four months' time, he would come to his majority. The queen of Scots was dead. He was owed a debt of conscience by Elizabeth; he saw the world ahead, tantalising, glinting, just beyond his grasp. If he kept his nerve, his confidence, and waited, it would come to him.