Four years later she was still as much of a fool as ever, still burned to her core by nothing more than a glimpse of him caught as she dismounted in the street. She had accepted punishment from her husband for her loan to Robin of his horses the previous month, accepted it because ordained by God. But to be beaten for no more than a look, accused unjustly of cuckolding her husband and nothing she said believed…
I am wasting my time, she thought, trying to be firm. Besides, Robin has very properly abandoned his suit to me, look at how he was paying court to Signora Bonnetti…
Her stomach suddenly knotted up with bile and misery. How could he so publicly abandon me, he did not even try to speak to me at the dance the day before yesterday? (Ridiculous, of course he wouldn’t, Sir Henry was standing guard over me.) How could he dance with the vulgar little Italian in her whore’s crimson gown? (Whyever should he not, since he could not dance with me?) How could he disappear into the garden with her and what had he done there…(What business is it of mine, what he did, and do I really want to know?) How could he, the bastard, how could he…?
I will go for a walk outside, Elizabeth Widdrington said to herself, and escape this ridiculous vapouring. Anyone would think I was a maid of fifteen. I will not allow myself to hate Robin Carey for doing exactly as I told him to in my letter (bastard!).
She slipped her pattens on her feet and ducked out of the little alehouse. It had been very crowded with her husband’s kin, various cousins and tenants but now the place seemed half-empty. Her step-son Henry was lying asleep on one of the tables with his cloak huddled up round his ears, his pebbled face endearingly relaxed. He seemed to get broader every time she looked at him: his father’s squareness reproduced but almost doubled in size. Roger was nowhere to be seen. Because she was looking for sadness, she found more there. She had brought them up as well as she could and now they were growing away from her, abandoning her for their father’s influence.
Stop that, she commanded herself and walked briskly down the wynd that led behind the alehouse, past a couple of tents filled with more of King James’s soldiers, past three drunks lying clutching each other in the gutter, whether in affection or some half-hearted battle, past the jakes and the chickens and the pigpen and the shed where the goat was being milked, into the other wynd and back down the other side of the alehouse. Inside she still found no sign of her husband or half his men and climbed the stairs.
A boy was sitting swinging his legs on the sagging trucklebed she had been using, a rather handsome boy with cornflower blue eyes and a tangled greasy mop of straight blond hair, the beginnings of adult bone lengthening his jaw already. Despite his magnificent black eye, she recognised him at once.
“Is it Young…Young Hutchin?”
The boy stood up, made a sketchy bow and handed over a small piece of jewellery. It was a man’s signet ring with a great red stone in the centre, carved…Robert Carey had shown it to her at court.
The scene burst into her mind’s eye, the Queen’s Privy Garden at Westminster in 1588, the clipped box hedges and the wooden seat under the walnut tree, Robin peacock-bright in turquoise taffeta and black velvet, the day before he rode south with George Cumberland to sneak aboard the English fleet and go to fight the Spanish. “If ever you see this away from my hand,” he had said in the overly dramatic style of the court, “then I am in trouble and need your help. Do not fail, my lady, I will need you to storm and take the Tower of London, for the Queen will have thrown me into gaol for loving you better than I love her.” She had laughed at him, but she had also shown him the small handfasting ring with the diamond in the middle that had been her sole legacy from her mother, and told him the same thing. That had been one of her narrower escapes from dishonour, she had rashly let him kiss her that time.
So she took the ring, her heart beating slow and hard. She examined it carefully for blood or any other sign of having been cut from a dead hand, sat down on the bed with it clasped over her thumb and looked at Young Hutchin.
“What’s happened to him?” she asked as calmly as she could.
He told her the tale quite well, with not too many diversions and only a small amount of exaggeration about how he had climbed from a roof. So that was what her husband had been up to all night. She made Young Hutchin go through the whole thing again, listening carefully for alterations. Young Hutchin mentioned handguns; she made him tell her about them and more of her husband’s activities became clear to her. The rage she had stopped up for so long, which had killed her appetite and kept her dry-eyed through all her husband’s accusations and brutality, suddenly flowered forth in a cold torrent. She sat silent, letting it take possession of her, using it to form a plan.
“Sir Henry and Lord Spynie are old allies,” she said at last. “Sir Henry knew Alexander Lindsay’s father years before he was born. Take it from me, Young Hutchin, King James knew nothing of this outrage.”
She dug in her chest and found paper and a pencase, which she opened and scrabbled out pens and ink. She waited for a moment for her hands to stop shaking and her thoughts to settle. Although she was only a woman, she had influence if she chose to use it. Her husband was not the only one with friends at the Scottish court. She began with a letter begging urgent audience with the King.
“Take this to the Earl of Mar,” she said, folding the first letter and sealing it with wax from the candle. “Where is Sergeant Dodd?”
Young Hutchin spat expressively. “Run fra the town, mistress, I hope. He said he’d try the Johnstones.”
“Good. When you have delivered the first letter, come back to me here. Don’t speak to any of the Widdringtons except me, do you understand?”
“Ay, mistress. Will all this writing free the Deputy?”
“It might. Off you go.”
The lad whisked out of the door and pelted down the stairs. Elizabeth took up her pen again, though her hand was starting to ache and wrote another letter to Melville, King James’s chancellor, who had stayed in Edinburgh. They were old friends for she had fostered his son at Widdrington for a year, at a time when Scotland was too hot for him and he had been afraid of his child being used against him. In it she set down a precise account of what she guessed or knew about her husband and his activities, which she folded up, sealed and put crackling under her stays. Then she went downstairs again, face calm as she could make it. The few other men who had been sleeping there had woken and gone out to see to the horses. Her step-son had also woken up at last, and was sitting on his table, scratching and yawning and gloomily fingering yet another spectacular spot that had flowered on his nose in the night.
“Good morning, Henry,” she said sedately.
Henry coughed and winced: blood-shot eyes told her the rest of the tale.