Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [8]
Henry had sent force after force over the Border into Scotland to harry them into submission. He had taken hostages; offered inducements; granted pensions; offered high positions to the discontented, impoverished great and, in the very month of Mary’s birth and her father King James’s death, had snatched as captives to London half the Lowland Scottish peerage at the disastrous battle of Solway Moss, and had there extorted from them as the price of their freedom a written promise to help him achieve the marriage between his son Edward and Mary.
Now Henry was dead, and a child sat on the English throne too: Edward VI, for whom ruled his uncle, Edward Somerset, Protector of England and avid adherent to Henry’s policy for the marriage, who also burned and pillaged and put to the sword, and seduced the Scottish nobility with other weapons; for King Henry in marital and concupiscent frenzy had severed his country’s church from the Pope; and there were many in Scotland who looked away from the French Queen Mother and their old ally, Catholic France, and toward the Reformed Religion instead.
None of that, however, concerned Buccleuch who was little troubled, if ever, with matters of right and wrong. He thought occasionally about religion when it appeared to be taking too close a grip on politics and therefore on the future of the Scott family, but this latest upheaval was nothing to him. The Bishop of Rome was no paragon, but old Harry of England had damned nearly overrun Buccleuch’s home of Branxholm, and that put him anyway in the bottommost pit with the heretics. When your nation has no standing army, there is nothing for it but to defend it yourself, with your tenants at your back, and hired swords and foreign mercenaries to eke out, depending on what the privy purse can afford. Buccleuch liked fighting. Having received his orders, he turned westward ready to explode into militant activity, and digressed on his way home to call at Boghall, a castle placed on its malodorous peats in the centre of Scotland and owned by the Flemings, a family uniquely loyal to the Queen, whose head Lord Fleming had himself married a lively and illegitimate daughter of the royal house.
Lady Fleming, who was governess as well as aunt to the baby Queen, was away, but the honours of Boghall were done by her goddaughter Christian Stewart.
She was a favourite of Buccleuch’s. Comely and tall, with hair of fine dark red and a decisive air to her, she was pleasant and positive to talk to, and it was impossible to tell that she was blind from birth. Familiar with every inch of Boghall, she stood chatting to Sir Wat after his necessary talk with Fleming, and it was she who told him Lord Culter was upstairs.
“Culter?” said Fleming, overhearing. “I thought he had left?”
“Not yet,” said Christian unemotionally, and followed slowly as Buccleuch, losing no time, took the stairs for all his fifty-odd years like a sheared ram.
Richard, third Baron Culter and Sybilla’s older son, was not only upstairs; he was on the roof. On the main parapet the sun slapped at the face off turrets and battlements, and far below, the castle rose from the bog like a lighthouse on its circling strands of barmkin, park and moat. The great dusty apron of the courtyard, the outbuildings and stables, the bakehouse, the brewery, the barns, byres and domestic offices seethed with foreshortened life. Buccleuch walked forward and the girl followed, sure-footed, the red hair lifted about her shoulders with the wind.
Lord Culter watched them come. There was about him none of the mad abandon of the bridegroom. A sober, thickset