The Galliard by Margaret Irwin Page B

Arran.
    ‘But he,’ said Bothwell, with a sudden glint of amusement ather, ‘had the disadvantage to lose his wits for love of his Queen.’
    ‘You are wrong, sir, it was Monsieur Calvin who unsettled his wits. My lord of Arran paid him a visit at Geneva and came back raving that he was damned, or that everyone else was. Monsieur Calvin must be an unsettling person. He has eleven diseases, but none of them succeed in being fatal.’
    ‘Your Grace knows a deal about the Father of the Reformed Religion.’
    ‘I can just remember his patroness, my husband’s great-aunt Marguerite, the sister of King François I. That is her pretty daughter over there, Jeanne d’Albret, with her husband of Navarre – can you see her?’
    ‘I can see,’ said the uncompromising Scot, ‘that the King of Navarre keeps a grey mare in his stable.’
    As his Queen stared bewildered, he explained his native idiom by another: ‘I mean, it’s she who wears the breeches.’
    She laughed at such frank criticism. ‘Certainly Queen Jeanne is more of a managing Reformer. But it was her mother, La Marguerite des Marguerites, who sheltered Calvin for years at her home in Meaux, to prevent his being martyred for his doctrine. Yet he has remained a martyr, and made everybody else one, to his digestion. He was always scolding her. He even quarrelled with Monsieur Rabelais, the most good-natured of men, who was also in her protection.’
    Again Bothwell felt that half-unconscious pang of wonder and envy at this glimpse of a life beyond the scope of his own.
    ‘I would give all France,’ he had often said, unthinking, to express the quintessence of wealth. Now for the first time he had some perception of that wealth in the terms of civilization and the beauty prepared by men’s minds; all these fair châteaux whose images glimmer in the smooth waters of the Loire; all the songs of these new poets, Ronsard and du Bellay, weaving fantastic arabesques in praise of her woods and sedate gardens, and of this young girl whose shy beauty they watched unfolding like the petals of a flower; the stored wit and wisdom of Rabelais and Montaigne; the humanity of such spirits as La Marguerite des Marguerites,whose power of love was wiser than all learning; a country that had been the spiritual as well as the material heaven of the Scots through the preceding centuries.
    ‘They say,’ he said, apparently inconsequently, ‘that good Scots go to Paris when they die.’

Chapter Six
    It was the first of several conversations between them, sometimes in her mother’s language, sometimes her father’s. ‘Do I talk Scots well?’ she asked, preening herself for a compliment, and he told her, grinning, ‘With a braw French accent, Madam.’
    ‘It is too bad, I am always the foreigner. When I came here I could not speak a word of French, and they took my Maries away from me so that I should not chatter Scots with them.’
    He liked her, especially when her eyes flashed at some tale of adventure, daring or absurd, such as that of Dickie o’ the Den who drove off a flock of sheep and disappeared with them, until the bloodhounds stopped dead at an enormous haystack where they scented the whole flock, and Dickie, completely covered with hay.
    ‘Ah, but that’s the grand lad! He’d lift anything that wasn’t too hot or too heavy. It was only the lack of four legs to it that kept him from driving off the haystack itself.’
    The sympathies of her Lieutenant of the Border (and his Queen’s) were all with the robbers that he had sometimes to ride down and suppress. He told her of a respectable matron who at dinner would put a dish before her son, empty of all but a pair of spurs, as a hint that the larder needed replenishing and he must ride again on a cattle raid. ‘Ride, Rowley, naught’s in the pot,’ was the maternal injunction given by the Lady Graham of Netherby.
    These Border women were of a piece with their men, gay with silver brooches and bracelets to show