Child Royal. D. K. Broster
to a man’s figure. His dark velvet doublet was cut down to the waist in front to show the then fashionable waistcoat, all slashed and purfled, and square across the neck, exposing the base of the throat; his jerkin of fine blue cloth was lined and thickly edged with miniver. Even in the immobility of paint, the suggestion of vitality drew the eye, and half the time, aware or unaware, Ninian was looking up at him.
“And now,” Robert finished his diatribe against the English invaders, “now they have established themselves in Haddington!”
“But not for long, we’ll hope,” responded his brother. “Has not His Most Christian Majesty just sent six thousand men to turn them out?”
After asking Ninian for particulars about this force, with which he had come over, Robert passed on to the internal situation in Scotland. Since Cardinal Beaton’s murder at St. Andrews two years ago, things had gone from bad to worse, for his death had been an irreparable loss to the National party. The mention of the Cardinal led him not unnaturally to the subject of his assassins and “the spread of the pernicious doctrines called Reformed.” They were troubled with this in France too, were they not? Though he did not deny that there was much corruption in the Church, Robert thanked God that he himself still stood fast for the old faith in these half-heretical days. . . . But he had great difficulties in his worldly affairs (thus he continued to bemoan himself). There was no one to help him with the estate, even now that he had managed to build it up again after their father’s—Christ assoil him—after their father’s extravagances. James was but seventeen and more bookish than he liked; Henry had this whim for foreign service. If their Uncle John had not died three years ago, he might have been of assistance. As it was, there was no one to whom he could turn.
Ninian expressed commiseration. He was not unaware of what was coming. Sure enough it came. Had he never thought of leaving French service? Had he never thought (if he had put by a sufficient sum) of returning to Scotland, and settling down and marrying? Married or unmarried, there would be plenty of room for him at Garthrose, and a warm welcome to boot.
Ninian read his brother’s mind; a welcome, and the unpaid office of grieve. He smiled, not unkindly. It was something to feel that he was needed in the home which he had loved as a boy. He did not blame Robert for wishing to make use of him.
“I am a soldier, Robert,” he answered, “and know little of any other trade. And though I am a young man no longer, ’tis a thought early to lay down the tools of mine at eight and thirty.”
“Aye,” nodded Robert reflectively, “that’s true. But, brother, I wonder that at eight and thirty you have not thought of marriage? Or are you perchance wed in France?”
The Archer shook his head. “Neither wed, nor thinking of it.”
“You have no fair French demoiselle in mind? You’ll have seen no lack of beauties in these years of service about the person of King Francis!” hazarded Robert, with a sort of heavy playfulness.
Ninian shook his head again. Not to Robert was he going to speak of that grave by the Dordogne which had claimed Béatrice des Illiers so soon after the betrothal ring was on her finger.
“The years go so fast now,” he replied rather sadly, “and a man thinks himself still young, and wakes one morning to see the grey at his temples. I may not be old enough to sit in the ingle-nook, but I’m over old to go a-wooing.”
“Too old! Havers, brother! However, I jalouse you’ll have had your distractions; they would come easily your way over there,” answered Robert, not without envy. “We have no court beauties here, since there is no court worth the name. Tell me, has there been much change in France since the new King came to the throne last year? You wrote that it was thought he would much curtail his father’s extravagance.”
“Aye, he began with some measure of reform,” said Ninian dryly, “but, though he has been on the throne but a year and a bare three months, there is already more lavish spending than ever in King Francis’s day.”
Robert shook his head. “And what of that mistress so much older than himself. We hear he hath not discarded her now that he is King?”
“By no means! Save in name, Madame la Grande Sénéschale is Queen of France now.”
“And what says the Italian Queen to her?”
“Gives her nothing but fair words and calls her ‘Madame Diane,’ as though she were royal. They are good friends enough—to the eye—and Madame Diane tends the Queen when she is ill, and spends much care upon the King’s children, the Dauphin and the little princesses. But what Madame Catherine thinks in her heart I do not know—there is not a soul knows, I believe. She is like . . . like a figure in a tapestry,” said Ninian, suddenly remembering Queen Semiramis in her suspended life upstairs. “Yet some day the wind will blow and she will move.”
For all at once it seemed to him that everyone over there at the court of Henri II was no more than a personage in an arras. But that was absurd, because neither the Grande Sénéschale, nor the Constable de Montmorency, nor Messieurs de Guise were in the least figures woven of threads to which only the wind could give life. The King, perhaps . . . ?
He was roused from his brief contemplation of this flight of fancy. “The talk still goes on,” Robert was saying, “of betrothing our own sovereign lady to the little Dauphin and sending her to France.”
“’Twould be the only sure course to save her from the claws of England,” agreed his brother. “And it is no new notion. But there have been rumours of other matches, have there not?”
“Wild tales, with nothing in them. In January it was to be the young Earl of Kildare; last March the King of Denmark’s brother. But the French match, as we all know, is the match for Scotland.”
“Where is her little Grace now?”
“At Dumbarton, strongly guarded. She has been there since the month of February, when she was brought from Stirling. Before that, save for a few weeks after Pinkie fight, she was hidden in these very parts, as perchance you may have heard—in the Priory of Inchmahome, on the isle in the Lake of Menteith.”
“I had heard something of it. I would she were there now, since it is so near. I might have contrived to get a sight of her,” said the exile.
“Yet if she be taken to France, brother, you will have your fill of seeing the child there!”
“My fill, no. But now and again I may set eyes upon her.”
“Why, Ninian,” protested his elder, “you speak as though you were not ever about the King’s person!”
“Why, so I am, in my shift of duty. But the King’s children are not, and I’m thinking that ’tis with them that her Grace will be brought up.”
And he explained that in France the royal nursery was scarcely ever established in the same place as the Court, and small wonder, seeing how extremely peripatetic was the latter, now at Fontainebleau, now at St. Germain, now at Blois or Amboise—always, it might be said, upon the road. Not indeed that the royal children also did not change their residence from time to time, but less frequently.
He had barely finished when Agnes came in again to say that their mother craved another sight of him before she slept.
“Sleep? Is she disposed for sleep already?” exclaimed Robert. “It is not her wont. Is not that of good omen?”
“Of the best, I think, brother,” replied the girl. “It must be Ninian’s coming that has brought about the change.”
“You see, Monsieur l’Archer,” said Robert, again heavy-handedly, “that it behoves you bide here at Garthrose!”
(3)
Though the eastern windows of the little fourteenth-century chapel at Garthrose were scarcely more than slits, a solitary gleam of sunshine was enough to pale the altar candles for a moment. Soon they would cease