Queen & Country (24 page)

‘I am glad to see you here,' he said. ‘For you have the wit to solve a certain matter, troubling to my mind. Run boy,' he told a little page, who waited on his word, ‘and bid the Lord Chancellor send in the picture.'

‘What picture, your Grace?' Hew felt a shiver of fear. He could not have explained it. This was a calmer, more confident king, whose demeanour did not cause alarm.

‘You shall see it, when it comes. Tell me, sir, is it not strange, that a queen take the life of an anointed monarch, trusted to her care?' the king turned back to him. ‘They tell me, she will plead her innocence in this, that though she signed the warrant leading to the death, her council went against her, for it was not meant to be acted on presumptuously; it was but an assurance, to secure herself. So it is reported, for I have not found the time to attend to her ambassadors, to hear in her own words, how she might defend the singular unkindness of this wicked crime. You were in England. What have you heard? This wound is fresh to me. They telt me, they severed her neck, at the blow of that English queen's axe. Can it really be so?'

Hew could not meet his eye. ‘I do not know, your Grace. It grieves my heart, to think it. When I was in England, I met with her Grace.'

‘You met with Queen Elizabeth?'

The king's interpretation showed his true intent, where his thoughts had strayed, to that greater prize. And Hew did not know how to answer him.

‘Not the Queen Elizabeth.' He thought, but could not say, I could not meet Elizabeth, for she moves in such spheres so far above my own – and yours – that I should be eclipsed by her, or dazzled by her sun, for such a frank confession would not sit well with the king. Hew had once caught a glimpse of the queen of England's barge, sedate and gilded paragon, gliding down the Thames, and that was bright enough. ‘I was never,' he excused himself, ‘at the English court.'

‘But you served her, did you not, in the Netherlands? We had despatches sent, from her Secretary Walsingham. Will you tell me now, you never met with him?' James demanded then.

This was awkward too. But Hew could answer truthfully. ‘I met with Frances Walsingham. He did not like me much.'

His answer pleased the king. ‘Shall I confess a secret to you? Nor does he like me. Then we shall bask together, in the glare of his displeasure, for we do not like him. So. You did not meet Elizabeth. Who else did you meet?'

‘Your Grace . . . the queen of Scots.' Hew stumbled with the words. He could not think how to style the dead queen to her son. He had begun to say, to mean, ‘Your Grace's lady mother,' when he realised that he could not call her that, that
mother
was too rude, too intimate a word, to say to such a king, of someone he had never loved, and barely ever met. He was twenty years old. His bairnly affections had grown, to a young man's indifference. His callousness had reached its prime; he had not been so hard before, nor would be again.

It was reckless, he knew. The king did not want to hear his mother's name, to fill the empty letters with her flesh and blood, not kenning her before, would want it all the less, now that she was dead. But Hew could not forget the shadow on her face, the shape of her voice
as she spoke of her son. And James, despite himself, was readily enthralled, with a kind of horror, easily drawn in. ‘Tell me.' All men follow ghosts, when they do not want to see, when they do not want to hear the whisper of their breath. They cannot help themselves. Hew felt that queen's hand, puffy, soft, on his. He felt upon his head the blessing she bestowed on him.

‘It was at a place called Buckstanes, where folk go to take the waters. She had come there for her health. My employer, William Phillips, was afflicted with a palsy, and he required of me to take him to the baths. The guest house there belongs to the earl of Shrewsbury, who at that time had the keeping of her. I met her at the bath. She saw my name in the book, and asked to speak with me.'

‘And I suppose,' James scowled, ‘she made complaint to you. For what she wrote to us, was fulsome in complaint. Did she complain of me?'

‘No, your Grace.' Hew was at a loss what to tell the king. He could not say, ‘For when I saw her there, she still had hopes of you.' There seemed no tactful answer to the question. He answered therefore with another kind of truth. ‘She asked after the health of your Grace. If you were well, and grew strong. She said she had your picture in a glass, but it was very old, and she would like another.'

‘Did she say that?' James reflected, ‘That is oddly pertinent. We had pictures made last year. As I believe, she asked for a copy through the French ambassador. I do not recall if one was ever sent. We had one of her. It was done some years ago, when I was a bairn. But no one seems to ken now where it might be kept. Put away, perhaps.'

His cool indifference to it moved Hew to remark, ‘My mother died when I was six. I have no picture of her.' He could see that queen still, vivid in his mind.

James raised an eyebrow. ‘So?'

‘They say my sister Meg is the living image of her.'

‘
Well
, then.' James did not say, I do not care about your mother, or your living sister. For he did not have to. ‘This is better than I thought. Since you have seen the queen, more recently than most
who are present at the court, you can offer an opinion on a matter of contention.'

He beckoned to his page, who had returned with a packet tied round with string. ‘This is how it came to us. Take it up, and look. It was sealed with a small lump of wax, that bore no impression, and was broken off. All else about it was exactly as you see.'

Hew turned the packet over in his hands. A smudge of the wax remained still, daubed like a thumb prick of blood. Besides that, the paper was clean. It bore the direction, in a clear neat hand, ‘To his mjty the king, in hansell for this good new year'.

‘It came to us,' the king explained, ‘as a New Year gift. The picture was left at the gatehouse at Holyrood, among a parcel of confitures and sweetmeats collected by the people who dwell by us in the Canongate, to be given out among the poor folk in the town. It was found by the guard, who brought it in to us. Open it.'

Wrapped up in the paper was a pleated picture, painted on a board a foot or so in length, furrowed into folds of lines of dark and light. Hew turned the panel side from side, yet could make no sense of it.

‘And you would have perspective on it, gave it to the child,' said James. Hew passed the picture back to the little page, who lifted it aloft, and tilting it aslant a little turned it to the left, with an ease that demonstrated he was practised at the trick. The pleated strips of paint were smoothed into a plane, and a woman's face appeared, pallid, stiff and strange, but clear and unmistakable. A dark red coif of hair, a painted flush of colour at the cheek and lip, a fleshly jowl descending to a crisp starched ruff.

‘Now,' said James, ‘the other side.'

The child turned the panel smoothly to the right, so slick and sly a turn Hew scarcely saw the trick of it, as though the little boy had been the only conjuror. Before his captive gaze, the face became a skull, the ruff a piece of mantle cloth, the woman's velvet gown the board on which it sat. There were hollows in the place of those sad and knowing eyes, a jagged rope of bone in place of her prim smile.
The pictures were effected with a stark economy, that made their statement blunt, though none the less ambiguous.

‘It is a turning picture. Of a woman and a death's-head. Is it not ingenious?' The king let slip a smile, no more than a flicker at the corner of his mouth, masking at its heart a hard core of distaste. ‘And we should like to have the man who made it here at court, that we might try his wits, and find out what he meant by it. It appears quite singular, as a New Year's gift.'

‘Most singular,' Hew agreed. ‘You do not ken who sent it?'

‘The sender and the painter of it we should like to ken, most dearly, I confess to you, for we are in the dark on it, and ignorant of both. And so, sir, to the question. Since you saw her last, and have her image printed freshly on your mind, is the likeness hers?'

Chapter 16

Perspectives

There was nothing in the portrait, sparse as it was, that led him to conclude it could not be the queen, though coarse and crudely drawn. The white of the skin, the height of the brow, the length of the nose, the slight fleshly sinking below the right cheek, could well be hers, as could the clear sad gaze, though stripped of any headpiece, artefact and ornament. And if she looked in truth a sober sort of Puritan, that was but the measure of the pleated picture, which would brook no brightness to inflect the skull. The palate was a simple one, the image plain and stark. Yet, for all its plainness, the meaning was obscure.

‘I do not think,' Hew said, ‘that this can be an image of the queen,
taken from the life
. It is hard to say, for any likeness there is thrawn by the device. There is no mark or sign identifying her. But that is not to say, that though whoever painted it never saw her Grace, it was not meant for her.' Its appearance at the court, he thought, made it more than likely. For even if the painter never had intended to depict the queen, her image was imprinted on it, irreversibly, by whoever brought it to the notice of the king.

The king was pleading, almost. ‘Tell us what it means.' The picture had exerted an uneasy force on him, upsetting the resolve that settled in his mind. It made his heart unsure again.

Hew recalled the rings that he seen in Heriot's shop. ‘Could it be, perhaps, a
memento mori
gift, offered to your Grace in mourning for the queen? That nothing might be meant, but a kindness there.'

Aye, but at the New Year, she was not yet dead,' James reminded him.

Hew considered this. The queen, though not yet dead, was certain then to die. Seen in such a light, the painting might become a premonition, or a warning sign. What struck him most of all was its effect upon the king. Taken from its sphere, the picture spun eccentrically. It was not like a cipher, or a riddle to be read. Its meaning was impossible, opaque. In one sense, it was endlessly, essentially ambivalent. Should it be perceived to be a threat, a comfort or reproach? That depended solely on the colour of his mind, the spirit of the heart that was reflected in it. Then the painting was a glass, that held no other conscience but the one that looked in it. Yet in another sense, it was unequivocal. The message there was plain. It said simply, this is all you are, and all that you will be. Flesh and bone and dust.

‘You wish me to find out, who sent this to your Grace, and with what intent,' he said. ‘I will do my best.'

‘Our fear is, there is witchcraft in it,' James confessed. ‘For the strange effects it works upon our mind. We pray it is not so. And, we have been told, you have had some practice in unfolding strange events. For we have heard a story of a bleeding hawthorn tree, that they say was planted by this fated queen.'

The king knew in his heart the picture was bewitched. Or how could it prick and unsettle his conscience, when he knew that his mind was quite stern and fixed? And how could it awake him, clinging to his sheets, with the whistle of an axe, sheering through the white stem of a mother's neck? When it was nothing but a board, of paint and blood and bone.

Hew had caught a glimpse of the fragile bairn in him, surfacing again, and did the best he could to put his mind at rest. ‘That was human mischief, sire. There was no witchcraft, there. And I will contend, there will be none here. Whatever is the source of this, I will find it out. Tell me, have you shown this to the painter at your court? Bronckhorst, is his name?'

‘Bronckhorst?' James frowned. ‘Why do you mention him? That was a man that painted here once, when I was a bairn. We have another now. And, as I believe, this was shown to him, but he could
give no help. Maitland will inform you, and give you a paper, that will give you leave to act upon on our will.'

It was clear enough that the king's part in this was not to answer questions. Nor did he expect them. ‘Take the picture too. Do it, for our thanks, and whatever gift that we can grant to you, to recompense the years when you were lost to us,' he offered in return, gracious in release.

‘Your Grace,' Hew dared to say, ‘there is one favour, I would ask of you. I hope to have a wife.'

‘Aye, indeed you should. They tell me, wives are grand.' The relief upon the king, of the removal of the picture, was palpable to Hew, as though he had passed on some vicious threat or curse. Its transfer lightened him.

‘She is the niece,' Hew went on, ‘of a customer of wool.'

And what is the niece of a customer of wool, to do with us?'

‘She is an English lass, your Grace.'

James shook his head. ‘Absolutely not. We cannot have that, now. Now, at this present time, that would be disastrous. It would cause an outrage, if we made a law, and another, just for you. Put that thought from your mind.'

‘Then you maun call your guard, and have me put in chains. For I love her, sire.'

‘You are,' sighed the king, ‘a very stubborn loun. Is that your only price? You will not have a title, or a piece of land? I can make you deputy to Sir Andrew Wood.'

‘Your Grace is kind, but no.'

‘You will understand, we cannot grant you licence at this present time,' James said. ‘But when you have resolved the matter in your hand, then we may consider it. You can look upon it,' he was merry now, relieved of the trouble he had passed to Hew, ‘as a kind of quest.'

Hew departed there, hopeful in his heart, that leapt upon a mystery. He felt an old excitement that had not been stirred in him since he came from London, wiping for the moment all his other cares. Before he quit Dalkeith, the chancellor Maitland gave to him
a paper with a seal confirming he was acting as an agent for the king. This should smooth his path, when he knew what path to take. The painter to the court seemed to him the place most likely to begin. Maitland was no help, and in no way had relaxed in his suspicions towards Hew. He drew up the document without a word. Only once he had ratified it, with the king's seal, did he condescend to interrogate him.