Chapter 53
‘ICAN’T LOOK AT YOU.’ BEATRIX’S voice trembles with anger, her red, blotchy cheeks stained with tears. ‘How could you? How could you stand up there and lie like that?’
Elspet sits slumped in a chair by the fire, watching the scene unfold in stupefied silence, all pretence at the erect posture and composure of Lady Alvah Gordon forgotten.
The situation has slipped completely from her grasp.
This terrible, reckless plan is unravelling before their eyes, and the victim is a poor young woman she feels responsible for.
She wants to walk into the sea and let the guilt and shame and grief take her.
Dorothea sits in front of her daughter, returning her gaze evenly, a woman with a clear conscience. ‘I had to. You gave me no choice, Beatrix. You are taking the most unspeakable risks with your good name.’
‘You have betrayed the Queen,’ Beatrix spits back. ‘You have betrayed me.’
‘You are so na?ve,’ Dorothea whispers.
Beatrix takes a step towards her mother but Margaret puts a gentle hand on her friend’s arm and looks forcefully at Dorothea. ‘Everything Beatrix has done – everything we’ve all done – has been in the service of the Queen.’
Dorothea turns to Margaret, a fiercer look on her face than Elspet has seen before.
‘I must say, I’m surprised and very disappointed with you, Lady Margaret Livingston – going along with this insanity.
First you bring a peasant, a woman from the northern isles you know full well would be considered a witch under any definition the King believes, right into court under his nose.
’ She waves a hand in Elspet’s direction with distaste.
So that’s how you really feel about me, Elspet thinks. I pride myself on seeing whether folk speak the truth, and I did not see that.
‘Then,’ Dorothea continues, ‘you ask me to take an even more disreputable woman into my own home, a home next door to the King’s palace. And you plan the most audacious, the most ridiculous plot to switch this degenerate’s bastard child with the heir to the Scottish throne.’
Margaret looks on in stunned silence as Dorothea continues her tirade.
‘I was as surprised as anyone when you and my most foolhardy daughter struck up this unlikely alliance, but I thought at the very least, some of your caution and prudence might rub off on her. Instead, you have allowed yourself to be pulled along into a greater lunacy than anything I could have imagined. I ask you, what was I supposed to do?’
‘All this time . . .’ Beatrix says quietly. ‘All this time, you’ve been falling in with our plans, pretending to help, pretending to support us. Have you known you would betray us all this time?’
‘I’m not betraying you, Beatrix. I am saving you. And saving the good name of our family.’
‘But you let us believe you were helping.’
‘You had to think I supported your plans so I could know the full extent of the madness you were planning.’
‘And what is it you want, Mother?’ Beatrix spits angrily. ‘What did you hope to achieve?’
‘To put a stop to this insane plot once and for all.’ Dorothea sounds tired now.
‘I couldn’t tell anyone about what you were planning without ruining your reputation and that of our whole family.
You would not be persuaded. You don’t know what it means to struggle, to fight, to keep your family from being consumed by the tidal wave of bad reputation. ’
Beatrix is stunned. All trust and faith in her mother slips from her face, and Elspet’s heart breaks a little for the young woman, to see her growing older, wiser – jaded. She stows this moment into the back of her mind, a lesson to never to make her children feel like this.
Margaret moves her hand to Beatrix’s shoulder in an awkwardly nurturing gesture.
‘I have come to learn,’ she says, addressing Dorothea, ‘that there are worse things than a bad reputation. I used to think as you do – that the most important thing was to avoid being the subject of court gossip, to stay above the fray. You call your daughter foolhardy. You call Mistress Balfour a peasant. But some things matter more than status or respectability. I pity you, Lady Dorothea, that you still have not learnt that.’
Beatrix stands. ‘I won’t stay here, Mother. I can’t stand the sight of you.’
She walks out of the room. Elspet hurries after her, followed by Margaret at a statelier pace.
‘Beatrix . . . Beatrix, come back here this instant.’ Dorothea’s pleas follow them from New-Frater House. But her daughter is gone.
‘Poor Kitty.’ Beatrix’s head is in her hands.
They sit with the Queen in the Holyrood garden. The sun is bright but the air is sharp. Margaret paces back and forth in front of the bench while Beatrix and Elspet sit on either side of Queen Anna.
‘She is a woman broken,’ Elspet says. ‘Nothing of her fight and spirit remains.’
‘We have some time, though,’ Beatrix says. ‘They will not execute her while she is with child.’
‘Not long,’ Elspet says, looking at the Queen’s swollen belly. Kitty is even closer to her time. These bairns will be born in a matter of days.
‘Will they allow her any assistance in birthing the child?’ the Queen asks.
Margaret nods. ‘We have seen to that at least. I bribed the Tolbooth officials. They have agreed to send word to Martin Schoner. He will attend the birth himself and send for Mistress Balfour when the call comes.’
‘What have you told them will be done with her child?’ the Queen asks.
‘Schoner has placed motherless bairns with suitable families before,’ Margaret says. ‘When a woman has died in childbirth it often has to be done. I suggested to them he could do the same for this unfortunate. They were relieved someone offered to take that inconvenience off their hands.’
‘But then . . .’ Beatrix breaks into a sob, ‘but then Kitty will be executed. The blow struck by my own mother.’
‘I will intervene in her case,’ the Queen says. ‘I will insist that she is freed, that my husband revokes this barbaric campaign.’
Margaret shakes her head. ‘I fear what could happen if you were to protest too strongly, Your Majesty. It would draw attention to you, and your interest in Kitty Muirhead. If you still wish for our plan to succeed, if we are to have any chance, then I fear we must let Kitty’s sentence take its course. ’
‘What are you saying, Margaret?’ Beatrix stands, her voice rising. ‘We’re talking about an innocent woman’s death. We can’t just sit back and allow this to happen.’
‘We don’t have a choice,’ Margaret says, her voice catching with emotion but firm. ‘Surely you see we can’t change Kitty’s fate once it has been decided in the open by men in a court of law. Anything we do will just draw suspicion onto ourselves.’
‘What about escape?’ Beatrix says. ‘What if we deliver Kitty’s baby and then help her escape, somewhere she would never be found. The plan was to give her a new identity. Couldn’t we still do that?’
Margaret shakes her head sadly. ‘She’s not an aristocrat with the support of the Earls. This isn’t Bothwell we’re talking about here.’
‘She has our support,’ Beatrix says, her face defiant. ‘You have plenty of money – surely we could arrange . . .’
‘It is not the same!’ Margaret says, hitting the stone bench with her fist, her voice rising in anger.
‘Yes, I have money. Yes, I have a friend in the Queen of Scotland. Perhaps I have as much power as a woman can have. But if anyone were to find out I freed a woman sentenced to death for witchcraft from her prison, what would happen to me? I would be next. We would be next. You must see, no woman is safe from these accusations.’
It’s a terrible and cruel thing that Margaret says, but Elspet understands immediately that it’s also true. She pulls her cloak more tightly around her shoulders; the caal is getting into her bones.
Margaret speaks again, more quietly. ‘If Kitty, a peasant with no resources, were to mysteriously disappear before her sentence can be carried out, do you think the King would just let it go? Do you think they wouldn’t investigate?
And what would they find? A group of women doing disreputable things in the shadows.
About as disreputable as it’s possible to be. ’
There are tears in the Queen’s eyes as she looks at her friend.
Margaret’s voice falters. ‘I am not without sympathy. I feel for her predicament. But anything we do now in support of Kitty risks this whole plan. What we’re doing is fraught with danger – we’d be fools to increase an already enormous risk.’
Beatrix shakes her head. ‘If we do nothing then we’re no better than my mother.’
‘Perhaps that’s true.’ Margaret twists her hands together. ‘What she did was dreadful – she betrayed our trust. But she thought she was protecting you in taking that action. Perhaps we’re all hypocrites – most people just don’t admit it.’
Elspet looks up at the misty grey crags of Arthur’s Seat.
‘It’s these witch trials,’ the Queen says bitterly. ‘They turn woman against woman. We can’t support each other without becoming figures of suspicion ourselves.’
Margaret nods. ‘We have a choice to make here: cling to the last vestiges of hope that this plan to switch the babies can succeed, or show support for Kitty Muirhead.’
Something else occurs to Elspet. ‘What about Lady Dorothea? She did this because she wants to put a stop to our plan with the bairns. What else will she do?’
The Queen scowls. ‘You can leave Lady Dorothea Ruthven to me. The position of the Ruthven family is precarious and I could make it much more so if I decide to. Lady Dorothea will find her actions today have precisely the opposite consequence to the one she intended. Sorry, Beatrix.’
Beatrix shrugs. ‘I don’t want anything to do with her.’
‘She cannot go to my husband directly,’ the Queen says. ‘He would never believe her. She’d be incriminating her own daughter and, for all her faults, she won’t do that. I think it is time for her withdrawal from court for a while.’
‘Meanwhile, we press on,’ Beatrix says firmly, wiping the tears from her eyes. ‘Our plan remains the same. We will see these babies exchanged.’
Deep sadness washes over Elspet as she prays furiously that God will forgive her for abandoning Kitty to this dreadful fate.