The Queen's Gamble (20 page)

Edinburgh’s High Street looked alien through her fog of misery. The rebels limped through town, bleeding, moaning. Townspeople slammed their doors. Housewives hurled apples at them. Prisoners in the tollhouse shouted curses. A bakehouse in the Cannongate was in flames. Isabel let her horse follow Glencairn on his, both of them surrounded by the straggling soldiers of Knox’s army. They were falling back westward, to Stirling, she heard someone say. She followed . . . nowhere else to go . . . fighting to not think of Tom’s body left behind on the road.

16

Stirling

T
he town of Stirling, thirty miles west of Edinburgh, had held strategic value dating back to the time of the Romans. Its importance lay in its position. It controlled Stirling Bridge, the farthest inland crossing on the River Forth; the land to the west was bog and marshland, making it impossible for armies to cross.

Built on a crag high above the river was Stirling Castle, easily defended because of the cliffs beneath it on three sides. Since the twelfth century it had been one of the principal strongholds of Scottish kings. In 1500 James IV had added a monumental great hall, the largest banqueting hall in medieval Scotland, with two high, elegant oriel windows that bathed the royal dais in sunlight, and five huge fireplaces to heat the space. Forty years later his son, James V, added an entire new palace to celebrate his marriage to Marie de Guise, designed to be as splendid as anything his bride would have known in her much richer home in France. Fifteen years after James V died, leaving his widow as Queen Regent, John Knox was raising the Reformation storm throughout Scotland, and in the summer of 1559 the townspeople of Stirling had welcomed Knox and his army. The Lords of the Congregation had taken control of the town and the castle, forcing Marie de Guise to flee to Edinburgh. When Knox had marched to Edinburgh, she had then taken refuge with her French garrison at Leith.

Now, in the dark January of 1560, the French attack on Knox’s men at Leith had turned the tide of the rebels’ success. The rebel army, reeling from the French assault, had beat a retreat to Stirling. Edinburgh was now in the hands of the French.

For hours, rebel soldiers had been straggling across Stirling Bridge and in through the castle gates, many of them stumbling from their wounds. Bleeding, numb from the cold, dazed by the disaster, they barely looked up at the towers that flanked the gate, their conical turrets shining with gilded stone lions and unicorns. Plodding in through the castle’s central door, they took no comfort in the emblazoned royal coat of arms, the Lion Rampant, displayed above it. They crammed the banqueting hall and collapsed on the stone floor in exhaustion after their long and miserable march. The floor was iced with muck tramped in from the snow-packed courtyard. Torches on wall brackets flared in the cold drafts. Moonlight from the high oriel windows blanketed the men with a thin sheen that gave no warmth.

“Can you lift your head?” Isabel was on her knees, offering a tin cup of water to a man whose left arm had been hacked off to the elbow. He lay on the floor surrounded by other wounded. She slipped her hand under the back of his neck to lift his head, and he gulped the water, parched from his ordeal. Too eager, he gagged on it. His head lolled in a delirium of pain. Isabel gently lowered his head, but she could not hold back a shudder. The filthy bandage wound around the stump of his arm was soaked with blood. Her hands and skirt were already stained with other men’s blood.
Some of it is Tom’s
. Every thought of him brought a stab of grief.

She sank back on her heels, and with the back of her hand wiped sticky strands of hair off her damp forehead. The misery all around her was overwhelming. Women and children were doing their best to tend to the injured, but the suffering was awful. Men lay moaning, weeping, dying. It wasn’t just their injuries that had felled them. It was the devastating sense of defeat. No one was more devastated than Isabel. She knew now what the French were capable of. These simple country Scots had no chance against such a war machine. Knox had been right.

“Yes, get some rest,” she murmured to her patient. Futile encouragement, for she doubted the poor man would survive the night. He did not hear her, in any case. He had sunk into unconsciousness.
Futile,
she thought,
like this whole desperate enterprise
. The rebels’ cause was hopeless.

She heaved herself to her feet. Bone-weary, she longed to lie down on the floor, too, though it was fetid with bloodied rags of bandages. A man grabbed her ankle, and she turned. His lips were moving but no sound came. He was so weak his grip on her slackened and his eyes closed. She wished she could help him, but his gashed chest had been bandaged and there was nothing more she
could
do but pray. She stared at his bloodied shirt, and her thoughts shot back to Tom, dear jesting Tom, left dead on the road. Her last sight of him had been of retreating rebels tramping past his body, blood still oozing from his side.
He’ll be lying there still. Alone. Abandoned. No burial.
She thought of him sprawled under the moonlight. Had his body been rifled by corpse robbers? Mutilated by carrion? The thought made her sick. She balled her fists, digging her nails into her palms to dam the sickness and force back the tears.
Knox was right. If I had believed him, I would not have ridden out beyond the walls. Tom would still be alive.

A murmur came from many throats. Isabel turned to see the three earls—Glencairn, Argyle, and Ruthven—moving through the crowd of maimed men. Prostrate soldiers were feebly calling out to them. The commanders moved slowly, offering a word of encouragement here, a nod of pity there. Glencairn made his way to Isabel. “Come with us,” he told her. “Master Knox wants words with you.”

Why? she wondered. To give her the receipt she needed for the Queen’s gold and then send her on her way? Or—a terrible thought—were the French coming? Was Knox planning a further retreat? Or even surrender? Whatever it was, she would be leaving Scotland, and that gave her a twist in her stomach. She had done what the Queen had asked, and had every reason to flee this place of death and defeat. Yet something in her balked at flight, a voice inside her murmuring that what she had come to do was not yet finished. She followed Glencairn and the other lords out into the frigid night, and went with them across the street and into the church.

It was packed with men, the able-bodied of their army, all in dirty, sweat-stained clothes, their tired faces streaked with grime. Had they been mustered here or had they come to the church on their own? There were so many they stood elbow to elbow, and Isabel read expectation in their faces. They’re waiting for something, she thought. She stood at the rear, flanked by Glencairn and Argyle.

“Has the whole army been called here?” she asked Glencairn.

“What’s left of it.”

She understood his grim tone. Their ranks were so depleted. “So many casualties,” she said in pity.

He grunted. “And worse. Deserters.”

A coldness slid down her spine as she remembered the bearded deserter under the bridge jamming his knife into Tom’s ribs. Remembered the frantic moment when she had plunged Tom’s dagger into the man’s back. The dull crunch of metal on bone . . . his gaping, uncomprehending look at her. She had committed murder. But it had not saved Tom. That guilt tore at her. It felt like
she
had murdered Tom.

Knox was climbing the steps to the pulpit. He looked out at his soldiers with sunken eyes red-rimmed from fatigue. The men watched him and their voices hushed. The church fell silent.

Knox cast his eyes toward heaven. “O shepherd of Israel!” he called out, his voice quivering with emotion. “Thou that leadest Joseph like a flock, stir up thy strength and come and save us. Turn us again, O God, and cause thy face to shine, and we shall be saved!”

“Eightieth psalm,” Argyle murmured, watching Knox, as rapt as the lowly soldiers.

“O Lord God of hosts,” Knox cried, “how long wilt thou be angry against the prayer of thy people? Thou feedest them with the bread of tears, and givest them tears to drink in great measure.”

“Aye, tears!” a man called out in a raw voice. Men around Isabel nodded, and groans of agreement rumbled from all parts of the church. They knew their desperate situation.

Knox stretched his arms heavenward. “O Lord God of hosts, look down from heaven and behold the branch that thou made strong for thyself. It is burned, it is cut down. They perish at the rebuke of thy countenance.”

“Aye, we perish!” someone groaned.

Knox’s tone suddenly changed from a lament to an urgent plea, vibrant with fresh energy. “Let thy hand be upon the man of thy right hand. Quicken us, and we will call upon thy name.” The men quieted. Their hard faces softened with hope. “Turn us again, O Lord God of hosts,” Knox beseeched, “and cause thy face to shine, and
we shall be saved!
”

Isabel heard breaths slowly sucked in around her, as though these men were filling themselves with Knox’s vigor.

“We began alone!” he thundered, looking down at his soldiers, his eyes ablaze. “We have suffered. We have lost brave men. God has tested us, and has not found us wanting! We began alone—many thought so. But we
never
were alone. God was with us. He is with us still. And He will deliver us to victory!”

Every face was upturned to him, thirsty for his words. He launched into a fiery sermon, his voice ringing loud and confident as he called the enemy weak with sin, called the loyal men of Scotland strong with righteousness. He switched between biblical quotations and his own muscular exhortations, never pausing, his energy infectious. Many men were smiling now. One man wept, smiling.

“God is with us!” Knox thundered in conclusion. “And He will deliver us to victory!”

The men cheered.

Isabel watched them and marveled. Knox had turned these weary soldiers around. He had transformed their despair into euphoric determination. “They will follow him anywhere,” she said in awe as he came down from the pulpit to be mobbed by his men. “Follow, and fight.”

“As will I,” said the Earl of Argyll, his eyes shining with joyful tears. “Fight on, even if only twenty horsemen ride with me!”

“We must,” Glencairn muttered, no euphoria in him, just grim resolve. “Or else each take our turn with the hangman.”

Another cheer from the men around Knox. He was grinning, slapping backs, grabbing hands as he moved among them. They pressed in tightly, eager to be close to him.

Isabel marveled at how he had kindled fire in them. For months they had slogged and gone hungry and slept on snow. Today under the French onslaught they had fallen and bled and seen kinsmen die. Yet they were not giving up. Knox’s words had drilled into each man, down to a core of fortitude. To endure what they had endured and still be so keen to fight on—it amazed her. Why did they do it? For God? No, men did not feel God in their blood. They called on Him for the strength to fight, but He was not what they fought
for
. Did they do it to put a Scot on Scotland’s throne? No, most would return to hack out a living from their stony fields no matter who won this lethal contest. Did they fight for their kin? That was it, she realized. They were risking their lives for brothers and fathers and cousins and sons who had fallen or who still stood beside them. For wives and mothers and daughters who kept the hearths warm for their return, and would perish if they did
not
return. The bond of blood.
Nothing is stronger
. It humbled her.

Knox had kindled a spark in her, too. Was it possible that if they fought on they could actually
win?

The meeting took place in Knox’s lodging, the high-ceilinged second floor of a coal merchant’s house that overlooked the River Forth. Eleven men, summoned to strategize. And Isabel, summoned for she knew not what. The room was gloomy, lit only by a candelabra whose candles guttered in the draft. No one had come to dine or relax by a fire. Some of the men stood, some sat on chairs turned away from the barren dinner table. Hamilton, the Duke of Châtelherault, was the ranking nobleman, and all the others present were lords, but plain master Knox was clearly the leader. Isabel sat on a stool near the cold hearth, listening in silence to their talk.

“This dishonor will not stand,” said the duke’s son, James Hamilton, the hotheaded Earl of Arran. He was pacing before the cold grate, his narrow face pinched with anger. Isabel had heard that the rank-and-file men thought him arrogant, for he never mixed with them. She remembered that Queen Elizabeth had secretly met with this young nobleman to discuss marriage. Isabel’s mother had arranged the tryst. But nothing had come of it, for the Queen was not impressed. Nevertheless, Arran had a reputation as a capable fighter in the months of skirmishing that Knox’s men had been engaged in with the French. He often rode out with Lord James, the illegitimate son of the late king, another daring fighter, although to Isabel the two seemed very different. The dark-haired Arran was intense and quixotic; fair-haired Lord James, leaning back in his chair across from her, was all quiet coolness. “No, by God,” Arran said, thumping his fist on the hearth mantel, “we will not let it stand!”

Knox ignored the young man’s outburst. “News first,” he said to the others. “The French have recalled their ambassador to London. Monsieur de Noailles has been replaced by Michel de Seurre.”

Glencairn groaned through his thick black beard. “That’s a weathercock.”

“Aye,” Lord James grimly agreed, “it shows who’s in control at the French court. The party of the Constable Montmorency is out, and the party of the Duc de Guise is in.”

“A weathercock that blows us more ill,” said the duke, rubbing his red nose on a dirty handkerchief. “Their boy-king’s a spindly puppet and his Guise uncle is the devil that jerks him.”

“And every day he and his brother the bishop burn scores more of our brethren in Christ,” said Lord Ruthven, one of the youngest there, his beard mere downy fuzz.

“What’s most significant about it,” Knox said sternly to pull them back from these side paths, “is that the Constable’s party always insisted on steady relations with England, but not so the Duc de Guise. He is bent on having his niece make good her claim to the English throne. This may stiffen the will of Elizabeth of England to lend us more aid.”

They all looked at Isabel. It gave her a shiver of suspense. Was this why Knox had called her in? She understood the politics. The Duc de Guise’s niece Mary, the sixteen-year-old Queen of France, was also Queen of the Scots and stood next in line to inherit the English throne, too, because of her Tudor blood. Pressed by her powerful uncle, she was publicly claiming her right to take that throne immediately, since Catholics everywhere considered Henry VIII’s divorce from his first wife invalid, his marriage to Anne Boleyn illegal, and therefore his daughter Elizabeth a bastard. It was a threat that Elizabeth could not ignore. And Knox is using that, Isabel thought with a touch of awe at his shrewdness. He was hot passion and cold calculation in one focused force. No wonder men followed him.