Bond of Passion Page 2

  He now took up her hand, kissing it with just the proper amount of respect. “I am honored to greet Scotland’s dowager queen Marie, of the great house of Guise.” He addressed her in perfect French.

  Both Marie de Guise and her companion, a young French priest who served in her household, were surprised. “Your speech, monsieur, is excellent. How is it you speak my mother tongue so well?” she inquired of him.

  “My own mother was French, madam, from Brittany, and I had the good fortune to study in France briefly with my friend Jamie Hepburn. I have several languages at my command.”

  She nodded. Aye, she thought to herself, he was totally unlike any border lord she had ever met, being fashionable, mannerly, and educated. “How may I be of service to you, my lord of Duin?” she asked him, switching to Scots English. She sat down in a high-backed chair now, the priest by her side, the page having silently disappeared.

  “Nay, madam, ’tis I who would be of service to ye. It is not often that I admit to it, though it is widely suspected by my neighbors, but I am a wealthy man. Despite my youth I am aware that wealth is useless unless ye can use it to yer own advantage. Ye will, of course, be sending Queen Mary to France shortly.”

  Marie de Guise grew pale. “That is not common knowledge,” she said. “Where have you heard such a tale?”

  “It is what I would do were I in your position, madam,” Angus Ferguson said, ignoring her question and smiling at her. “The little queen must be protected at all costs, and the English will not stop until they have her. If she is gone from Scotland to France, they must cease their efforts to obtain her, and hopefully their destruction of the borders. Forgive me for being blunt, madam, but I suspect yer purse is not as full as you might want it to be. I realize yer brothers in France will see to the little queen’s best interests, but I imagine they will be relieved not to have to bear the expense of their niece’s household and personal needs. King Henri as well, and while gifts from these gentlemen would be graciously accepted, wouldn’t ye prefer not to have to rely on those gentlemen entirely?

  “I am prepared to open my purse to the end that my queen might be maintained in the manner a queen should be maintained. My bankers in Paris, the House of Kira, will see that all of the queen’s expenses are paid promptly, quarterly, until the day she weds the dauphin. This would, of course, include her wedding finery and trousseau. I ask only that my part in this endeavor remain secret. The Fergusons of Duin are private people,” the laird said. “I do not wish to bring any attention to myself or to my clan.”

  Marie de Guise was at first speechless at the laird’s offer. Then, quickly recovering, she inquired of him shrewdly, “What is it you do wish then, my lord? Your offer is more than generous, but you speak to me like a Breton fisherman bargaining with a goodwife on the quay, Angus Ferguson. What will you have of me in return?”

  A brief flash of humor lit his handsome face, but it was quickly gone. “I want Duin created an earldom,” he answered her candidly.

  “You ask a great deal of Her Highness,” the priest sputtered, outraged for his lady.

  Marie de Guise, however, laughed, for she completely understood what the young man standing before her was requesting. “Nay, Père Michel, the laird requests virtually nothing of me. He does not wants lands, for he has them. Nor does he seek high office, for he prefers his anonymity. Gold he has in abundance, else he should not offer what he has. What he wishes is a title he may pass on to his heirs and the descendants following them. ’Tis nothing more than a piece of paper and a seal.”

  She looked at Angus Ferguson. “This will cost you dearly, my lord. Maintaining a queen, even a little one, and her entire household does not come cheaply. Remember that my daughter will reign over two great countries. She must be kept in a manner befitting her high station,” Marie de Guise said quietly.

  “And she will,” the laird promised. “She will be sustained royally. Let the French king and the powerful among the Scots lords accept credit for all of this. If you will allow me this great honor, madam, I will gladly accept it. All I ask in return is that Duin be created as an earldom in perpetuity.” He paused. “And perhaps yer permission to build a castle, a small castle, of course.”

  The dowager queen’s eyes twinkled. “Why is it that I suspect, my lord, that the castle, the little castle, already exists?”

  He shrugged in very Gallic fashion and smiled. “’Tis naught but a rather large house,” he explained, “though some might say otherwise, which is why I ask yer permission to have a castle. I cannot therefore be said to be in violation of the law. We Fergusons of Duin do not like drawing attention to ourselves.”

  “Yet will not your becoming the Earl of Duin raise questions among some?” the dowager queen asked him.

  “Not if it is believed that ye wished to balance the power in the west away from certain other families, and raised the Fergusons up with that in mind,” he answered her cleverly. “There are some who have taken yer favor and misused it, yet ye are still kind.”

  They both knew he spoke of Patrick Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who had gained this interview for Angus Ferguson. Though it was known that the fair earl, as he was called, loved James V’s widowed queen, he was not always loyal to her or to Scotland. Still, he was a very fascinating man, and Marie de Guise had a weakness for him. She had never, however, allowed that weakness to rule her judgment or common sense.

  Her mind turned back to the matter at hand. “You are very clever, my lord of Duin,” she told Angus Ferguson. “Aye, it will please many if they think I am attempting to dull the Hepburn influence in the west. And your offer to maintain my daughter, the queen, until she is wed is incredibly generous. It is more than worth an earldom. But remember that she is only five years old. It will be at least ten years before my Mary and Francis wed. Scotland’s purse is not a heavy one. Your offer is a gift from God, and his blessed Mother for whom my daughter is named, is it not, Père Michel?” Marie de Guise’s practical French nature was rearing itself now. “Who can verify your wealth for me, my lord? I mean no offense, but this is a serious matter we have discussed.”

  “The House of Kira, madam. They have people here in Stirling and in Edinburgh, Perth, and Aberdeen,” the laird said.

  “Send someone to inquire discreetly,” Marie de Guise directed the priest. Then she turned again to Angus Ferguson. “I will accept your offer, my lord. If your worth is proven and I am assured by the Kiras of your ability to do what you say you will do, then the parchments declaring your new earldom will be sent to Duin, and word of it cried throughout the borders. When that is done you will direct your bankers in what they must do, according to our agreement. Will that suit you, my lord?”

  “The parchments must have the queen’s own seal as well as yers upon them,” the laird said to her. “And the proclamation posted on the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.”

  “Rest assured that they will, and it will be official,” she promised him. Then Marie de Guise stood and held out her hand to him again.

  Stepping forward, he took the hand and kissed it, understanding that he was now dismissed. “I will pray for the queen’s safe journey,” he told Marie de Guise. Then he backed from the room, closing the door behind him.

  “A very bold man, but then so many of these borderers are,” the dowager queen remarked to the little priest. “The woman who weds him will have to be a strong lass.”

  But Angus Ferguson wasn’t thinking of marriage at that point in his life. By late August, when the little queen departed for France, he had his earldom, and had briefly attracted the interest and envy of his neighbors. But when the gossip that his earldom had been created as a balance to the Hepburns was bruited about, everyone laughed. The Fergusons of Duin, magic or no, were not a match for the earls of Bothwell.

  And as Angus had hoped, the slight furor had subsided as the business of survival took precedence. The border wars were over. Henry VIII was dead and buried. His son, Edward VI, was crowned, and while his prote
ctor, Seymour, was tempted to follow Henry VIII’s policies toward Scotland, Mary’s removal to France made the efforts futile. The young king died two months short of his sixteenth birthday. He was replaced for nine short days by his cousin Lady Jane Grey, as the Protestants attempted to block Mary Tudor from inheriting her throne. Mary prevailed, but five and a half years later she too died, leaving England’s throne to the now twenty-five-year-old red-haired daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth Tudor.

  Elizabeth spent the first years of her reign consolidating her position as England’s queen, and dodging suitors. Her only interest in the poor country to her north was the fact that its young queen, who would be queen of France one day as well, was now calling herself Queen of Scotland and England. Mary based her claim on the fact that her grandmother had been Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret, wife of James IV. Elizabeth, she said, was merely Henry’s bastard by the Boleyn whore. The fact that the English Church had given Henry his first divorce, that Anne had been crowned queen, was incidental to the young girl in France who parroted what her French relations told her.

  But then England became less important to Mary, for her father-in-law, Henri II, was killed in a jousting accident. She and her young husband, Francis, suddenly found themselves the rulers of France. France took precedence over both Scotland and England.

  In Scotland the Reformation was in full bloom. In no other country in all of Europe had Protestantism taken hold as hard as it did in Scotland. The clans in the north, and certain families, like the Gordons of Huntley and the Leslies of Glenkirk, held fast to the old faith despite the fact that the Reformed faith was declared law, and Catholicism outlawed under the influence of Master John Knox. Marie de Guise, a broad-minded woman who had allowed all faiths to flourish, even sheltering English Protestants from the Inquisition of Mary Tudor, was suddenly reviled for her faith.

  Weary with the responsibilities she had shouldered for twelve years, Marie died, leaving Scotland in the hands of her daughter’s half brother, James Stewart, the eldest illegitimate son of James V. In France the frail Francis died at the end of the same year. It seemed to Mary Stewart, now Stuart, that her mourning would never end. France’s new ten-year-old king was a figurehead behind which his mother, Catherine de’ Medicis, stood. She wanted the young dowager queen gone to her French estates, in obscurity. Instead Mary Stuart returned to Scotland to take up her throne there.

  Elizabeth would not give her cousin safe passage through England should her ship founder coming from France to Scotland. The lord high admiral of Scotland, James Hepburn, the fourth Earl of Bothwell, had come personally to escort his queen. John Knox preached virulently about women rulers being against God’s law, and he preached against Mary Stuart in particular. But Mary came home nonetheless, the swiftness of her passage surprising everyone, so that nothing was in readiness for the queen’s arrival. The fact that the port of Leith and all of coastal Scotland was shrouded in a thick fog, a fog that lasted for several days, but gave weight to John Knox’s words of doom.

  Mary, however, took for her closest advisers her half brother, James Stewart, whom she remembered with great fondness. Marie de Guise had wisely gathered her husband’s bastards into her own daughter’s nursery. James, the eldest, had been the big brother to whom the tiny queen turned in her troubles. Now he stood by her side as her chief minister, murmuring in her ear along with the man who had served her late mother as secretary of state, William Maitland, the laird of Lethington. Mary had chosen to reappoint him to serve her in the same capacity.

  While Mary persisted in maintaining her own Catholic faith, she proclaimed the law of the land to be freedom of worship for everyone in Scotland. It was a clever move, for it robbed John Knox of a major complaint against the queen, although her persistence in worshiping in the old Church infuriated him almost to apoplexy. Mary, unlike her predecessors, traveled Scotland visiting the Highlands, the Lowlands, and the borders, getting to know her people as no king since James IV had. The only place she did not journey to was the lordship of the isles.

  Angus Ferguson met her when she spent a single night at Duin one autumn. She was hunting and it was grouse season. He was astounded by her beauty, charmed by her intellect and wit. She rode astride, something she had learned since her return to Scotland. The Scots, it seemed—John Knox in particular—were shocked by her show of leg when she rode sidesaddle. The hunt had been successful, and the roasted birds were served for the evening meal.

  “You are indeed the handsomest man in the borders,” the young queen told him. “What a pity you have no royal blood in you, my lord, else I should consider you for a husband. Unlike my cousin Elizabeth I am eager to wed again, and have bairns.”

  “I am, of course, devastated by my unsuitability,” Angus Ferguson answered with a smile, “but a simple border lord such as myself could never be worthy of such a queen.”

  She laughed, but then she grew serious. “Who in Scotland is worthy of me, my lord?” she said softly. “Mayhap I should seek love instead.”

  “Remember, madam,” the Earl of Duin told her, “that it is yer son who will one day rule Scotland, and more than likely England too. Elizabeth loves her freedom, I think, too much to put herself into any man’s keeping, so choose wisely when ye marry again.” Then he smiled at her once more. “If truth be told, madam, I doubt there is any man anywhere who is truly worthy of ye.”

  Mary Stuart laughed softly. “You are a dangerous man, my lord,” she said. “And when will you take a wife for yourself so Duin may have an heir?”

  “I shall wed a wife when you wed another husband, madam,” he told her teasingly, and they both laughed.

  The queen had departed the next day, and he had not seen her again. Now here it was, several years later, and his friend James Hepburn, the fourth Earl of Bothwell, who stood high in Mary Stuart’s favor, had suddenly appeared at Duin. As he was not a man to just visit, Angus was curious, but he waited for Jamie to state the purpose of his visit as they sat in the hall playing chess and drinking the rather excellent French wine Duin always seemed to have.

  “The queen is getting married,” Bothwell finally said. “She’s chosen badly, I fear, but there seems to be no stopping her. No one can reason with her. Not James Stewart, not Maitland. No one.”

  “Who is it?” Angus Ferguson wanted to know.

  “Henry Stewart, Lord Darnley,” Bothwell replied. “He’s her cousin, and a Catholic, raised in England. Elizabeth Tudor suggested him, and her horsemaster, Dudley. She didn’t expect our queen to pick either. Dudley, of course, was an insult, and I’m not certain Darnley isn’t either.”

  “What’s wrong wi’ him?” Angus asked. “He’s obviously got the proper amount of royal blood, which makes him suitable. Wasn’t his mam Margaret Douglas, daughter of James IV’s widow, Margaret Tudor, by her second husband, Archie Douglas, the Earl of Argyll? And his sire Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox?”

  “Aye, that traitor,” Bothwell snarled irritably.

  “What’s wrong wi’ him then?” Angus repeated.

  “He’s a weak-kneed pompous fop with a lust for power,” Bothwell said. “A tall, gangling lad with golden hair and blue eyes. He’s younger than she is too, but she’s besotted by him. He has the brain of a flea, and a crude wit.”

  “Be careful, old friend,” Angus warned. “Ye sound like a man in love who has been overcome by a rival.”

  To his surprise James Hepburn flushed guiltily, but before Angus might say another word, Bothwell spoke. “Enough of the queen’s folly,” he growled. “That property ye’ve been trying to purchase from the laird of Rath, I think I have a way for ye to get it, Angus.”

  “How?” The Earl of Duin was curious. The land in question bordered his, and when its previous owner had died he had attempted to purchase it from his heir, a laird whose lands were in the eastern borders. Robert Baird, the laird of Rath, would not sell the property, despite the Earl of Duin’s offer to name his price. For several years now he
had been trying to obtain the land, which was particularly good pasturage.

  “It’s time ye wed,” Bothwell said. “Would ye agree to that?”

  “Aye,” Angus said slowly, “I’ll be thirty-five come August.”

  “Rath is married to a Hamilton. They have a son and four daughters. The eldest lass is twenty. Robert Baird won’t let the others wed until she is wed.”

  “What’s wrong wi’ her?” Angus asked bluntly.

  “It’s the damnedest thing,” Bothwell said. “Her mother is a beauty. Her three younger sisters are beauties, but Annabella Baird is as plain as porridge.”

  “She’s ugly then,” Angus said.

  “Nay, not at all. Her face is oval in shape. Her eyes fine. She has a straight nose and a nice mouth, but there is nothing to commend her but her hair, which is the color of midnight, long and thick. It is her finest feature, but ugly, nay. She is not ugly,” Bothwell tried to explain. “But while her sisters are beauties they are ordinary lasses. Annabella Baird has wit and manners. I was introduced to her at a summer games last year. I liked her.”

  “Ye didn’t seduce her, then?” Angus teased his friend.

  James Hepburn laughed. “Nay, not a proper laird’s daughter. She needs a husband. Ye need a wife, and ye want that land her father possesses. I will wager I can get Robert Baird to give his daughter that property as her dower portion, along with whatever else he was putting aside for her.”

  “I’ll take her for the land,” Angus Ferguson said. “I don’t like having unprotected acreage on my borders.”

  It was then that another man in the hall spoke up. “Ye can have any woman ye want,” Matthew Ferguson said. He was the earl’s bastard half brother. Matthew had been born six months after Angus. His mother had been in service to the earl’s late mother, the lady Adrienne. “I have made inquiries, Angus. The girl is respectable, but as Lord Bothwell has said, she is plain of face. Ye could have a great beauty as yer countess.”