Nigel Tranter - The Courtesan

His blank face was eloquent enough answer.

'It is so hard to explain. But I think that I have come to understand him. By looking deep into my own mind, perhaps. Patrick is not interested in hurting people. In especial he would not seek to injure poor people, ordinary folk – although many innocent folk may come to be hurt in the working out of his plots. He is a better husband than most, a good master, and one of the ablest rulers this realm has ever known. But he sees statecraft as a game, a sport. And all that influences the rule of the state, in power, position, even religion, as but pawns in that game. He is a gamester, in more than cards and horse-racing. His greatest sport is this – the game of power. As Moray excels at the glove and the ball, so Patrick excels in this greater sport. He knows that he is better at it than is any other. Any that cross his path in this, he must remove. It is a challenge that must be met, and overcome. It is not the man that he fights, or the woman, but the challenge. Do you not see it?' Urgendy she put it to the young man, so urgently that she gripped his arm, all but shook it. 'Do you not see it?'

Doubtfully he eyed her. 'It is difficult, Mary. I see a little, perhaps. Patrick is not as other men, I do perceive. But this bringing down of others, so many, to their ruin, even their deaths – that is evil, surely? Only evil.'

'I know! I know!' she cried. It was seldom indeed that Mary Gray raised her voice thus. 'I do not say that it is not evil. But Patrick does not see it so. You asked me why he hates Moray. I do not believe that he does. But Moray has crossed his path, with the Queen. Moray's folly with the Queen could harm the realm. So Moray must fall. There may be more than that -1 do not know. But that is enough, for Patrick.'

He shook his head. 'You are too deep for me,' he said. 'Too clever – you and Patrick both.'

Strangely enough that remark seemed to strike home at her. 'So clever,' she repeated, dully. 'Yes – too clever. I could be too clever. I was, before. I hope, I pray, that I am not being too clever. This time. But… we must do something, Vicky. We must do something.'

He nodded. 'That we must. And this appears the wise course. What you now propose. I shall see to it. Never fear.' He kicked at the floor with his toe. 'I am sorry, Mary. I did not mean… that you thought yourself too clever. Never that' 'I know it, Vicky. But it is true, nevertheless.' 'The Queen?' he asked, changing the subject abruptly. 'How

is it with her?'

'All is well. Mistress Cunningham is curling her hair. Moray is there – but so are Lady Kate and your good-sister, the Lady Beatrix. All is well, for the moment.'

He sighed. 'I wish, Mary…!'

She completed that for him. 'Methven Castle will wait for you, Vicky,' she assured.

Although in the past King James had cared nothing for weather, so long as the hunting was good, this season his heart was not in hunting, and the November rain drove him back to Edinburgh. Bothwell seemed to have lain suitably low since his escape from ward, and it was to be hoped that he had learned his lesson at last. Even the Master of Gray seemed to consider that it would be safe enough to return to the capital. There was some talk of going back to Craigmillar Castle for security, or even to Edinburgh Castle itself; but none of the Council seemed to think that this was necessary, not even the cautious Maitland. Since Moray had been packed off to his northern fastnesses at Darnaway, a certain aura of peace had descended upon the Court. There was no denying it. The Queen was less upset than might have been expected. After only a day or two of sulks, she consoled herself readily enough with the Duke of Lennox and the Master of Gray – which allowed her husband to get on with the all-important issue of his book and his warfare with the Devil.

In this connection there was a grave, a shameful matter to put right. One of his special courts for trying the witches had actually acquitted the woman Barbara Napier – after he had forfeited her lands of Cliftonhall and bestowed them upon young Sir James Sandilands of Slamannan, his latest page, who was an extremely talented youth in certain ways, even if the ladies did not like him. In righteous wrath James had had the entire jury responsible arrested, brought to Falkland, and themselves thereupon tried on a charge of bringing in a false verdict, in manifest and wilful error, the King himself presiding. Faced with a fate exactly similar to that they should have imposed upon the high-born Mistress Napier of Cliftonhall, the jury sensibly and humbly confessed their fault, and clearly would not so err again. James was magnanimously pleased to pardon them. But others might do likewise, and it seemed clear that Christ's vice-regent should return to the centre of affairs forthwith – for it demanded eternal vigilance sucessfully to counter the Devil. The Justice-Clerk was instructed peremptorily to have the woman Napier re-tried and condemned, without further delay.

So to Holyroodhouse they all returned. The Queen, in lieu of the fascinations of house building and plenishing, fell back upon the cosy winter-time delights of possible pregnancy, and set her ladies to much making of baby-clothes.

Satan was not backwards in seeking to overturn King James's godly campaign. By a most unhappy coincidence, the same young James Sandilands, in an excess of youthful spirits, had the misfortune to shoot and kill a Lord of Session, Lord Hallyards, in the street soon after the return to Edinburgh. This greatly upset many of the judicial fraternity, some of whom even went so far as to demand that James should have his new page tried and punished. The King's indignant refusal undoubtedly had a deleterious effect on the witch-trials, which he had ordered to have precedence over all other matters juridical. He came to believe that the entire legal profession began to drag its feet in this vital issue – indubitably to Satan's glee.

As if this was not enough, there came a complaint from, of all people, George Gordon, Earl of Huntly. Although banished to his own countryside, he was still Lieutenant of the North -since there was nobody else up there powerful enough to control that barbarous land – and while besieging the Laird of Grant in Castle Grant, for some reason or another, had been attacked by the Earls of Moray and Atholl, coming to Grant's aid. No doubt only the fact that Moray was the King's cousin had produced this petition of protest from Huntly in place of a much more drastic and typical reaction. James was annoyed, justifiably. A plague on them all!

Mary no sooner heard of this than she imagined Patrick's hand behind it somewhere, pursuing Moray even two hundred miles into the Northland. He was in constant secret touch with Huntly, she knew. Atholl, a weak and unstable character, was married to the Lady Mary Ruthven – the same who was suspected of playing Leda to Patrick's swan at Falkland, and his full cousin as well as the elder sister of Ludovick's new wife. Patrick had used Atholl as his tool before this. Or it might have been a trumped-up clash arranged through Huntly himself…

In deep trouble, Mary Gray looked within himself. To such a state of suspicion, of irrational fears and dark imaginings, had she come. She saw Patrick's shadow everywhere, suspected his every action, sensed mockery behind every smile, tainting her love. It could not go on, thus. Either they must come to terms, or one must yield and go. And she did not see the Master of Gray conceding the game, the game that was his very life, to his unacknowledged daughter.

ONLY five days before Christmas, with Queen Anne planning Yuletide revels on a Danish pattern and scale, something new and therefore suspect in Scotland, Patrick Gray surprised his wife and Mary by announcing that it would be suitable and fitting that he and his family should celebrate Yule in their own house of Broughty, not in this rabbit-warren of a palace. To Marie's protests that it was late in the day to think of this, that the journey at this season of the year would be most trying, and that Broughty Castle was indeed the last place that she would choose for festivity, her husband made laughing reply that she was obviously getting old and stodgy, and needed shaking up a mite; that the weather was excellent for the season; and that Broughty Castle was somewhat improved since last she had seen it. Moreover, would she not see her beloved Davy Gray?