The King’s Daughter. Christie Dickason

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СКАЧАТЬ to call up my wolf. Tried with her help to look through the scene under the Bishop’s window into the vast scoured space below the crags, at the combs of rain scraping the distant mountains. The mist blowing in to cover the dragon crouching in the Firth.

      A second prisoner was pushed up the steps of the scaffold.

      Perched on the Cat Nick, I narrowed my eyes and tried to peer down into the chasm between Edinburgh and the crags, at Holyrood Palace at the bottom of the valley, like treasure sunk at the bottom of a lake. Where I had spent my last days of happy childhood, that short wonderful time with my mother and Henry. All three together for the first and last time, before I was hauled away from my true home and slammed down here in this damp green country where they tore out the hearts of golden young men.

      ‘…Robert Wintour, will you renounce…?’ a voice intoned below me.

      The hearts of the best and most chivalrous men, I thought. The golden heroes. The near-perfect knights, Catholic or not. Henry’s perfection was already turning the love of the people towards him and terrifying our father.

      Wintour was climbing the ladder to the noose.

      I tried to conjure up a wind off the northern sea to fill my ears. My eyes followed the long ascending spine of the Holy Mile up, up, clambering over hard, sharp grey rock to Edinburgh Castle itself, like a jagged outcrop of cliffs at the very top.

      I heard another scream, then the thud of blades on a butcher’s block. The next severed head was offered to the sight of the crowd. The next heart.

      Wintour gone.

      Strident voices from below me drowned out the rush of wind from the Firth. Though invisible through the cloud, the rising sun was warming the blanket of grey that pressed down on London. I must stand through two more deaths to show my father that I could not be broken. My forest sprite had died, but he had protected me. The reflection of a torch flared as a window swung closed. I could smell smoke and blood.

      Another man forced up onto the scaffold.

      The Loch. I tried to see the loch to the north just below the castle. A dark, brooding eye that seldom caught the light, where the trowies emerged at night from their underwater kingdom to steal babies or play eerie fiddles that drew you into fatal dances…

      The third man shouted, ‘It was no sin against God!’

      I could not help looking down at this defiance. Not a demon, a blind man, his face terribly burnt.

      I groped for the memory of the glint of the Firth…

      Solicitously, the hangman helped the blind man onto the ladder. At the top, the prisoner crossed himself defiantly; was pushed off.

      The noose may have killed him, in spite of the haste with which the hangman cut him down to suffer the rest of his punishment. I heard no scream this time, although I was braced for it. I clutched the sleeves of my crossed arms, hanging on. I forgot the man behind me and that he might, even now, be adding my white knuckles to his notes. I tried to remember my hand and Henry’s side by side, two rings…

      Scotland slipped away from me. The carnage below me was stronger than my imagination. My eyes saw with horrible clarity, a butcher’s slab, dark blotches on the butchers’ aprons. Severed joints. Another heart held aloft in bloody hands.

      I’ve hunted, I told myself. I’ve seen blood before.

      But these were men. And the cruellest huntsman did not quarter his prey while it was still alive.

      My hands tightened until my knuckles almost split my skin. As I stared down at the scaffold, the faces of the witnesses changed until they grew so terrible that I could no longer look at them or else my soul would have run away and left my body a hollow shell for ever. I would never find my way out of this dark forest where I was suddenly lost. Would never see sunlight again, never smile, or feel joy. What I saw below me was too terrible. It would darken my mind forever.

      Those men below me in their court robes served my father. With my father’s permission, they had imagined these practices, and conjured them into life. They were trowies, crept out from cold dark unknowable depths of black opaque water. Destroying the young and brave…If this could happen to men like Digby, then who was safe…? And I was captive in their world, trying to swim in their cold black water, where everything lovely had drowned. Cecil. My father…

      I’d seen blood before!

      I shook my head to try to clear my sight. But the faces below me would not change back into men.

      The last prisoner died, after long repentance and many prayers for forgiveness. If my father wanted me to learn from this ‘clarifying sight’, I would. I watched now as if studying the actions of my enemy, in order to overcome him. Already older than my age, I now felt myself growing as ancient and cold as the waters of the loch.

      It did not then occur to me, the First Daughter, the young she-wolf, that it might be safer to be seen as pliable and easy to rule than to challenge. It was not in my nature to understand the safety that lies in weakness. I was enough my father’s daughter to understand his speed of thought, the urge to pounce-and-devour. I was still young enough to believe that you triumphed by proving yourself the stronger.

      In Coventry, I had stared at that padded jacket without grasping its true message. I had listened to Mrs Hay’s tales and learned courage from my father’s childhood but never seen the deeper truth. That the greatest threat grows, not from confident power, but from fear and uncertainty. My father was dangerous, not because he was a king, but because he had once been a frightened, vulnerable boy at the mercy of guardians and violent, unruly nobles. In my ignorance, looking down into Paul’s Churchyard, I determined to defy him.

       10

      I spoke to no one at Combe of what I had seen. Mrs Hay pretended that we had never left Combe. I would look at my lady guardian or at Anne as she chirped away about some small domestic adventure, and wonder if they saw no change in me, or if they merely feigned not to. Although Lord Harington must have known where I had been, he said nothing neither. The most that I could detect was the increased fuss Mrs Hay and the Haringtons now made about my health, asking unnecessarily often if I were chilled or overtired. Even Lord Harington’s habitual civilities, like, ‘How does your grace, this morning?’ seemed to carry weighty hidden meaning.

      ‘I am well,’ I would reply fiercely. I was the First Daughter. I had survived a kidnap attempt and learned that I could be a fool. I had not weakened at the terrible death of my forest spirit. I must believe that I had the strength to deal with whatever waited for me.

      A noble posture is all very well in the intent, and when you are standing face-to-face with a clearly seen terror. But the unknown catches at your feet and steals your breath. I no longer slept but lay all night fretting and fearful in the dark, imagining first this way, and then that way, how things might be, and how they might unroll.

      Henry did not write to say, however guardedly, that he had received my warning letter. Abel White did not return with Clapper, nor send word of how he had fared. After what I had seen in London, I now had little doubt that I had sent my old playmate to his death. A cold worm of guilty knowledge and fear lay coiled in my thoughts, a bump I could always feel even when the surface of my day seemed to be running smoothly.

      With СКАЧАТЬ