Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [3]
Heralds:
WILLIAM FLOWER, Chester Herald (England)
ADAM MACCULLO, Bute Herald (Scotland)
ROBBIE FORMAN, Ross Herald (Scotland)
Part One
THE SALTIRE AND
SUPPORTERS
I: Mother’s Baking (Catslack, October 1548)
II: Hough Isa (Crailing, May 1549)
III: Joleta (Flaw Valleys, May 1551)
I
Mother’s Baking
(Catslack, October 1548)
ON the day that his grannie was killed by the English, Sir William Scott the Younger of Buccleuch was at Melrose Abbey, marrying his aunt.
News of the English attack came towards the end of the ceremony when, by good fortune, young Scott and his aunt Grizel were by all accounts man and wife. There was no bother over priorities. As the congregation hustled out of the church, led by bridegroom and father, and spurred off on the heels of the messenger, the new-made bride and her sister watched them go.
‘I’m daft,’ said Grizel Beaton to Janet Beaton, straightening her headdress where her bridegroom’s helmet had knocked it cockeyed. ‘And after five years of it with Will’s father, you should think shame to allow your own sister to marry a Scott. I’ve wed his two empty boots.’
‘That you havena,’ said Janet, Lady of Buccleuch, lowering her voice not at all in the presence of two hundred twittering Scott relations as they gazed after their vanishing husbands. ‘They aye remember their boots. It’s their empty nightgowns that get fair monotonous.’
Being a Beaton, Will Scott’s new wife was riled, but by no means overcome. The war between England and Scotland was in its eighth year and there had been no raid for ten days: it had seemed possible to get married in peace. Creich, her home, was too far away. So Grizel Beaton had chosen to marry at Melrose, with the tarred canvas among the roof beams patching the holes from the last English raid, and the pillars chipped with arquebus shot.
Duly packed like broccoli into lawn, buckram and plush and ropes of misshapen pearls, she had enjoyed the wedding, and even the cautious clash of plate armour underwriting the hymns. Lord Grey of Wilton with an English army was occupying Roxburgh only twelve miles away, and had twice emerged to plunder and burn the district since October began. If the wedding was wanted at Melrose—and Buccleuch, as Hereditary Bailie of the Abbey lands, had fewer objections than usual to any idea not his own—then the congregation had to come armed, that was all. The Scotts and their allies, the twenty polite Frenchmen from Edinburgh, the Italian commander with the lame leg, had left their men at arms outside with their horses, the plumed helmets lashed to the saddlebows; and if there were a few vacant seats where a man from Hawick or Bedrule had ducked too late ten days before, no one mentioned it.
For a while, standing next to her jingling bridegroom, her gaze averted from his carroty hair, Grizel had thought the other absentees had escaped his attention. Then, as alto and counter-tenor rang from pillar to pillar, the red head on one side of her leaned towards the unkempt grey one on the other and hissed, ‘Da! Where are the Crawfords?’
And Buccleuch, the bride saw out of the tail of her eye, sank his head into his shoulders like a bear in its ruff, and said nothing. For by ‘the Crawfords’, Sir William Scott meant not Lord Culter and his wife Mariotta, or even Sybilla, their remarkable mother; but the only man in Scotland Will Scott had ever obeyed without arguing: Francis Crawford of Lymond.
And it was then, as the Bishop bored on through the pages of print which were making these two man and wife, that the Abbey’s chipped door-leaf moved and a man entered, in the blue and silver livery of Crawford, to speak quietly to one of the monks. From bent head to devout head, the word travelled. Lord Grey of England, guided by a Scotsman, renegade chief of the Kerrs, had burned Buccleuch’s town of Selkirk to the ground, despoiled his castle of Newark, and was advancing, destroying and killing along the River Yarrow, through the trim possessions of the Scotts and their friends.
The wedding ended, hurriedly, on a surge