Page 35 of The Changeling

Mary wished to be married again, I knew, but whom she should wed was a constant vexed question. Don Carlos of Spain was quite mad, King Eric of Sweden lived too far away, and the Prince of Condé was French, and the Scots wanted no more Frenchmen. Pastor Knox wanted her to marry a Protestant, and the Pope wanted her to marry a Catholic. The Scottish lords wanted her to marry one of them, as long as her bridegroom was not one of their enemies, and every lord was an enemy of someone.

I escaped the palace as often as I could. Not into the town. Edinburgh was a city of ghosts. Instead, I wandered over Arthur’s Seat, foraging as I went. Usually I picked flowers to decorate a cake or rowan berries to make jelly, but I also gathered pretty stones and feathers and twigs, to put in jars on my windowsill and bring some wildness in.

If I was not out on the hills, I was in the garden, picking lemon balm, linden flowers and meadowsweet to make a tisane to brighten the queen’s spirits. For Mary was pale and listless, lying abed and complaining of headaches. I knew that she too was afraid. Châtelard had said she had bewitched him, and Pastor Knox had said all witches must die.

Was it witchcraft to say a blessing as I stirred the queen’s soup? Was it witchcraft to make knots in thread to keep my true mother from finding me? Was it witchcraft to see glimpses of the future, or to write a wish in blood on birch bark?

I feared Pastor Knox would think so.

One hot summer’s day I slipped out to listen to him preach on the steps of the old Girth Cross in the Canongate. A vast crowd had gathered, but he had a carrying voice. ‘Let none be found among you that makes his son or his daughter pass through the fire, or looks for signs and omens or practises divination or consults a sorcerer or a charmer or a soothsayer, or one who consorts with familiar spirits or a necromancer who consults the dead. For all who do these things are an abomination unto the Lord.’

Such terror pierced me, it was all I could do not to fall to my knees.

Nan was a charmer. She looked for signs and omens in the skies, she consulted her rune sticks and, when greatly troubled, ate toadstools so she could walk in her dreams.

I had to warn Nan. I had to let her know she was in danger, and Mam and Sorcha too.

But I did not know how.

I could not bear to go back to the palace. So I headed past the gate towards the old well at the foot of Arthur’s Seat. I often went there, for it was a peaceful place, the clear spring of water burbling up below the roots of an old hawthorn. It was here that King David had encountered the white stag who had chased him for the sin of hunting on a sacred day, and had given into his hands the holy cross, and the vision that he must build the abbey of Holyrood in atonement.

The sun was sinking behind the hill’s summit, and I could smell smoke and food cooking and hear the sound of music. I walked around the edge of the hill, and saw a travellers’ camp in a grove of trees, centred around a fire with small tents made of tarred linen thrown over bent willow stems. A boy was playing a fiddle, and some girls were dancing, the hem of their skirts tucked up through their girdles. The freedom and joyousness of their dance was entrancing, so different from the stiff stately motions of the court’s pavanes.

I knew the fiddler. His name was Tam, and his family often passed through the valley of the Shaggie Burn on their way to the Highlands. I wondered if he’d be returning that way, and if I could ask him to take a message to my family. But it felt too dangerous to tell him what I wanted to say, and too dangerous to commit my words to paper, or to trust in Tam not to lose it. Crouching in the bracken, Carlin stretched out beside me with her head on her paws, I thought for a long while.

Many shreds of ribbons and rags had been tied to the branches of the hawthorn, like the wishing tree at home, and they fluttered gaily above my head. An idea came to me. I searched about on the ground until I found a fallen twig. Using the knife I wore at my waist, I sliced away the bark on one side. Then I scored a single long vertical stroke into the soft flesh below, with another short horizontal stroke to the left.

Úath, the rune for hawthorn. Known as quickthorn for it grew so swiftly, and mayblossom because every Beltane Eve courting couples gathered the flowers and made them into garlands, and came home in the dawn with dishevelled hair and dreamy eyes. Some said the diaphanous white flowers smelt of desire. Others said they smelt of death and decay. Either way, it was forbidden to bring hawthorn flowers into the house. Cunning folk used its sharp barbs to inscribe words and runes on candles, to pin a shroud, to seal up in witches’ bottles with pins and needles and blood and piss, to stab poppets when casting a curse. And so another name for the tree was hagthorn.

It was the secret meaning of the rune that mattered, however. Úath signified a pack of wolves, the blanching of faces in terror, a spectre, a haunting, the coming of death.

Sliding my hand into my pocket I took out the nettle string the faery queen had used to bind my birth cord. I carried it with me always, for each month on the dark of the moon I tied a knot in it and chanted the old charm for concealment. I was certain it kept me safe from the faery queen. Carefully I cut a length from the end of the string and bound it tightly about the twig, then gave it to Tam and asked him to take it to Nan. He promised he would.

I could only hope that Nan would understand they were in danger.

The wheel of the year turned, and turned again. Pastor Knox married a girl who was only seventeen. I was almost her age, and very much pitied her. It sickened me to think of having to lie with a man so much my elder, a man with a long grizzled beard and scowling eyes and hands clenched perpetually into fists. She must have been forced. Lady Margaret Stewart was the queen’s cousin and looked much like her, with smooth pale skin, red-gold hair and hazel eyes. Why would the preacher marry someone who looked so much like the queen? Did he lust after Mary? Did he seek to break her cousin because he could not break her?

The scandal of Châtelard had frightened the queen, tarnished her reputation, and driven away her suitors, so that her hopes of making a grand match had faded. When her young cousin Margaret began to show a rounded belly, Mary wept secretly. She asked me more than once if my Sight told the truth, that she would have a son who would one day rule England. ‘I dinna ken,’ I faltered. ‘I canna promise … the Sight is never clear …’

It worried me that she spoke of my gift where others might hear. People would think me a witch. So far, the Kirk had been focusing on the crimes of adultery, fornication and illegitimacy, but I was sure that Pastor Knox and the Lords of the Congregation were only looking for an excuse to accuse someone of witchcraft, and who better than someone so close to the queen?

Mary was not pleased at my words. She turned away and sat disconsolately by the window, looking out at the damp garden, her embroidery hoop untouched by her side.

On my seventeenth birthday, I picked a bunch of rosemary from the garden, to lay at the sacred well in honour of the Lady. I was always sadder on that day than any other. I missed Sorcha, my not- twin, so much. I missed Mam, I missed Nan, I missed Robbie, I missed everything. I wondered if they missed me too.

It was twilight, and mist hung over the palace. As I crossed the courtyard, a raven wheeled above me, croaking like some messenger of doom. I was glad when it soared away. I went out the gate and along the rough track to the spring, laid down my posy with a prayer of thanks, and sat on the roots of the old hawthorn tree, thinking of the queen who must marry a stranger and her cousin forced to marry a man as old as her father.

I swear I will marry only for love, I thought, and jumped up so I could knot a length of my nettle string to a hawthorn twig, saying out loud, ‘White hawthorn, wild faery tree, bring my true love here to me.’

The mist swirled and parted, and Robbie rode towards me on his chestnut stallion. I could not breathe, could not move. He saw me, and reined his horse in. We stared at each other. Last time I had seen him, he had been a boy. Now he was a man with a strong jaw and broad shoulders, a sword by his side and a dagger in his boot.

‘What strange magic is this?’ Robbie cried. ‘I’ve been searching for you everywhere, but could not find a trace. I was so afraid of what might have happened to you …’

‘I was here,’ I said stupidly.

Robbie vaulted down, strode towards me, and caught me to him.

His arms were tight about me, my cheek laid against his chest. His heart thudded under my ear. ‘Thank God. I was so afraid … when I heard you had been missing for three whole years …’