The Night Side

“Bonjour
!” called a softer, sweeter version of the voice that had hailed him earlier.

Dark hair had slipped its modest arisaid and now whipped about in the wind. The lady skidded to a halt only a handsbreadth from Colin’s outstretched arms. Delightful eyes, the color of Highland whisky, moved over his face. Colin noted that though the woman wore a traditional leine, the delicately pleated garment was fashioned of silk rather than linen or wool, and it draped most gracefully over her bosom. Her embroidered kirtle was long, but not so great a length as to drag upon the ground—a sensible precaution as the rough terrain would quickly shred the delicate material.

She said breathlessly: “We did not expect you so soon.”

“We’ve had favorable winds,” Colin answered. “Colin Mortlock, at your service, Mistress Balfour—your new master of the gowff.” And so much more.

The king sits in Dumfermline town.
Drinking the blude-red wine: O
‘O whare will I get a skeely skipper,
To sail this new ship of mine?

—
“The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens”

Colin Mortlock sat at his table in his private study in York and read the messenger’s missive a second time, trying in vain to make some sense of it. It was not that the letter’s words weren’t straightforward enough. The sentences were all simple statements and arranged logically, though penned in a very ill fist by someone obviously not often given to scrivacious pastimes.

The difficulty came with comprehending the context in which the message was written, and in certain absences of comment when some remark would have been normal.

Colin shook his head. He did not for one instant suppose that the brief interregnum in the north isles had made the new laird of Skye any less intelligent or capable of looking after the clan’s demesnes than his ruthless and half-insane father and uncle had been before him. But Colin was still uncertain of precisely what the MacLeods wanted of
him
in this instance, and whether he should be wary of answering this intriguing familial summons.

The letter even began interestingly, using both Latin and the Christian calendar. This was certainly a change from the style of the previous laird, who had disowned Colin’s mother when she married a Catholic sassun and moved south to the lands of the enemy English—
might the French pox rot them!

To our cousin, Cailean Mortlach, at the season of the mellowing moon, in the year of our Lord 1544

Greeting Dear Kinsman!

Sorrowful tidings we have had of the death of the fifth king of the Scots called Seumas. Many brave lives and things more precious were lost at the rout of Solway Moss. But such must be expected after the dissolution of the treaty of perpetual peace.

The Treaty of Perpetual Peace designed by Henry VII and James IV had lasted a mere eleven years and had ended at Flodden Field when the flowers of Scottish nobility—and King Henry’s own brother-in-law—were all mowed down in one bloody battle. The Solway Moss debacle was rather more recent. It was an exaggeration to say that there had been heavy casualties at Solway, unless one counted the death of pride among the fatalities. If that were added to the score, then the battle’s losses reached tragic proportions—at least among those who hadn’t been there.

The facts of the battle were either amusing or horrible, depending on which side you were on. A great many border Scots had been cheerfully captured by the stunned English army, apparently deeming arrest by the sassuns preferable to fighting under a Scottish
king whom they believed had persecuted them in their own land.

Colin shook his head again, this time in bemusement. Such a scandal would have been unthinkable under James IV. Colin did not know what had happened to Scottish pride. The Scots, Highland and Low, had always hated the English. The dislike was obligatory, part of the received truth that arrived with baptism in the cold peaty water, and possibly through a mother’s milk. So this event at Solway was unique in Scottish history. All Colin could imagine was that this Lowland enthusiasm for the English monarch must have stemmed from what had happened at the battle of Soom Moss that previous year.

At Soom Moss, King Henry—sometimes called Harry—had taken twenty-one Scottish nobles as prisoners, fed them a Christmas feast and then let them go again. It was one of the eighth Henry’s splendid gestures—less excessive than his Cloth of Gold feast with the French monarch, but still quite memorable to the Scots. There had not been such a fete between the two opponents since the Yuletide wedding of Alexander to Margaret, when Henry III had put on a resplendent Christmas feast and the guests drank three tons of wine in five days. The Archbishop of York had provided 600 oxen, drawn and quartered, some of which had come from Colin’s ancestor at Pemberton Fells. Even then, his family had been in faithful service to the crown.

Colin snorted and then allowed himself a small smile. He might sometimes be baffled by the Scot Lowlanders, but he knew the northern Gaels’ minds very well. They were very like the Norse mind, and this show of wealth and magnanimity on the part of the
English king, while popular with the Lowland masses, doubtless infuriated the MacLeods and many other Highland lairds. They hated their king for allowing the shameful incident to have come about. They believed that, had James lived among his men, as a good king should—fought side by side with his troops as the lairds did—then his men would not have indulged in such cowardly behavior, and all of Scotland would not have been disgraced and left in the hands of an infant queen and her inept mother.

No, if the new Laird of the Isles was actually sorrowful at James’s passing into the afterlife a few weeks after this disgraceful battle, it was the first that Colin or anyone else knew of it. There had been only an uneasy truce between James and the Lairds of the Isles, with the current times leaning more often toward the side of unease than truce. Solway would have been the final stone in the cairn of their faltering relations. James should probably be happy that he was already dead. Things were about to get ugly in the North. Civil war was possible.

Colin most certainly didn’t envy Scotland’s regent, Mary of Guise, the task of knitting up the unraveled politics of the North and in the Isles for the infant queen. It would take great skill and cleverness to keep the throne for her daughter. Fortunately, this was not his problem anymore.

Colin went back to his letter, squinting at the nearly illegible text.

Sir Michael Balfour and his thirty sons were also recently lost to this world. There remains only his daughter and a young nephew at Noltland Castle near our kin on Orkney.

This was where the letter began to get obscure. Everyone had heard the amazing tale of the deaths of Michael Balfour and all of his sons in one battle—leaving only his daughter as heiress to his fortune and a distant kinsman, a lad of twelve, to inherit the title—but Colin had not the slightest notion what it had to do with the MacLeods of Skye. MacLeods were descended from the Vikings who had settled in Orkney, but Noltland was now in the territory of the Keiths and Gunns and MacKays, and it was very unlikely that these others were going to stand aside if the MacLeods made a grab for power.

“Cousin, cousin, what do you intend?” Without indulging in offensive pridefulness, Colin knew that he was accounted as being an astute man. But though he could sense that his cousin was steeped in some purpose in regards to Noltland, what this project might be, Colin could not yet see.

Not truly expecting enlightenment, Colin read on.

Reports of a favorable nature have reached us, and we have need of you in Orkney. You must for a time forsake the lands of this King Eachann and return home at once to Dunnvegan.

We hope that you have not forgotten your
gowff.

Yrs with great affection,

Alasdair, MacLeod of the MacLeods

Now, this was the puzzler, the contradiction that could not be explained. The MacLeods were panophobic of all foreigners—which, sadly, Colin was considered to be, in spite of his mother being sister to the last laird. And this reference to his boyhood training
in the game of golf—a sport he actually detested and played most ill—was frankly beyond his comprehension. He could only conclude that one or the other of them was suffering from a distemperature of the mind.

It would be reassuring to know that it was the MacLeod whose humor and reason were so disturbed, but unhappily Colin could not place his oath upon the ailment resting with his Scottish cousin. His own nature had lately been excessively troubled by odd humors, which he suspected had begun affecting his judgment.

Colin had for a long while been vaguely unhappy and restless, and he knew that his night wanderings along the long corridors of the east wing were the cause for some concern among his small entourage at Pemberton Fells, and for restlessness among the ghosts. Even his faithful MacJannet was worried about what these noctambulations might mean.

The reasons for his discontent were not easily explained to his people. Certainly, he led a lonely existence and was often long from home and in the company of hostile strangers. But that had not been his difficulty lately, for he was always at home. He had, in fact, had a surfeit of his beautiful but empty estate. And, left to his own devices, he had lately had begun to see himself as a human failure. He had no real friends, aside from the faithful MacJannet, no lover anymore, not even a wife or thankless child.

By all common measures, he was a success. His father had done well in his chosen calling, as had his father before him, finding favor with both Henry VII and Henry VIII—and being granted extensive tracts of land for information about enemies they had gathered for these monarchs. Colin, too, had served in the
capacity of eyes and ears for the crown, and been rewarded for his time in the Netherlands and France.

But this was no longer enough for him. King Harry was growing old, and his political embrace of the Protestant faith had left a country still very uneasy with its religion and monarch. No one had much confidence that the sickly Edward would survive to take his father’s place—and that left the Catholic Mary as next in line for the throne. Already there was talk of it. Many in the North actually supported her claim. Colin knew this because he was supposed to be of the True Faith, as his father and grandfather had also been, and he wisely kept abreast of these affairs.

Rencontre seemed inevitable now. Colin did not doubt that he would survive the political machinations of those who struggled for the throne—after all, he knew far too much about everyone in power for any faction to risk touching him—but still, he did not relish the lonely, wasteful fight ahead. Religious struggles were so futile and uninteresting. They lacked subtlety, something that appealed to him when he stooped to indulge in politics of his own.