The Maid, the Witch and the Cruel Queen (2 page)

“No, your lordship!” Sir James squawked. “Look at the badge on his coat.”

“Shut up, man,” Lord Scuggate snapped without taking his eyes off the messenger. “I'll have you hanged by the neck and I don't care who your master is…”

“Mistress,” the shocked messenger mumbled.

“Who your mistress is!” Lord Scuggate snorted. “I see by your badge you wear the sign of…”

He stopped. Everyone was looking at the floor. Even the dogs that chewed their bones stopped crunching.

The only sound was Lord Scuggate spluttering as if someone had stuck a needle in his pig-bladder face. “…the sign of … er … the sign of…”

“Her Majesty Queen Mary Tudor of England,” the messenger said quietly. Lord Scuggate grinned weakly showing his broken and yellow teeth. “And you are very, very welcome to Bewcastle Hall, my dear young friend!”

Chapter Two
The Cruel Killing Queen

The messenger had said that the queen would be passing through Bewcastle on a tour of the Scottish Borders. She would stop at Scuggate Hall for lunch the next day.

When the young man in red and gold had gone, the Bewcastle men muttered over their wine cups as the invisible maid heard their terrible talk.

“Down in London, they call the queen ‘Bloody Mary' because she burns anyone who doesn't worship at a Catholic church,” Sir James Marley of Roughsike said quietly.

“She'd burn us if she found anyone who doesn't go to church,” Father Walton of Catlowdy Church warned them.

Lord Scuggate looked at him sharply. “It's your job to make sure people go to church,” he said.

The priest in the velvet cloak spread his hands and smirked. “My lord, it is you the queen will blame, and you the queen will burn.”

Lord Scuggate's blotched face turned pale. “Everyone in Bewcastle goes to church… Well … they go at Easter and Christmas anyway, don't they?”

The men brought their heads closer together.

“We could get all the Bewcastle folk together and have a march through the town to the church, just as Queen Mary arrives,” Father Walton said.

“All carrying crosses,” Sir James Marley added.

“And singing hymns,” Lord Scuggate put in. “The queen will love that!”

“Would the town people do it?” Father Walton asked, and his bald head shone yellow in the light of the torches.

“They will if we promise them a few barrels of beer!” Lord Scuggate chuckled.

The men laughed, and held out their wine cups for me to fill.

“Old Nan doesn't drink,” Father Walton said.

Lord Scuggate sighed.

“Who's Old Nan?” Sir James asked as he cleaned his fingernails with his knife.

“A wise woman who lives out at Butterburn in the hills,” Lord Scuggate snapped. “Some say she is a witch. But the truth is she just mixes herbs and cures made from the plants on the moors. I use them myself,” he said. “But you wouldn't get her into a church or singing hymns.”

“Perfect!” Sir James cried and waved his knife. “Queen Mary likes to see her sort burned.”

“So?” Lord Scuggate growled.

“So … burn her! Tomorrow at noon in the market square. Queen Mary will thank you for the rest of her blood-soaked life!”

“Perfect!” Lord Scuggate chuckled. “Tomorrow at dawn we find Old Nan.”

“She could be out on the moors, collecting herbs at this time of the year,” the priest reminded him.

“We'll track her down. That's what my hunting dogs are for,” he said, and threw a scrap of meat to the snapping hounds on the floor.

Lord Scuggate raised his wine cup and clashed it against the raised cups of the other two.

“Here's to good Queen Mary … and a death to all her enemies – especially Old Nan!”

Chapter Three
The Cottage in the Heather

I cleared the tables after their lordships had staggered to their beds. Then I crept back down to the main hall and found the two shaggy hounds asleep by the guttering fire.

I fed them with plates of meat till they could eat no more. They groaned, rolled over and slept.

But I couldn't sleep. I had work to do.

I took a black woollen cloak from the stables and slipped out into the cool light of the quarter moon. Rats scuttered out of my way as I padded across the yard in my bare feet and on to the dusty road.

The church clock creaked and chimed one. Dogs barked at me but no one lit a candle or looked to see who was passing their door. At the edge of the town I turned off the road and on to the trails that led over the moor to Butterburn.