Chapter Text
‘...and ye say he yet lives?’
‘Aye, yeir Grace.’
The king turned a little to the side on the richly embroidered cushion of his chair to eye the gentleman standing quietly in the center of the cozy, tapestried cabinet. It was meant to serve as a private study, outfitted with a fine mahogany writing desk, but he rarely used it as such. He preferred to write at a table in the hall, where more natural light came through, and where he did not feel so removed from the goings-on of the palace. Instead, this stuffy little closet had morphed into a sort of intimate drawing room. Not so privy as the bedchamber, so as not to overprivilege the petitioner for his ear, but confined and close enough for a hushed word.
James rested an elbow on the writing table’s polished top as he studied the man. He knew of him well enough, but had never spoken to him so directly. He was an accomplished merchant of distinguished age, a burgess and bailie of the town. His trade was all in books and the printing-press, and like all of his colleagues, he was a firm adherent to the new Kirk and dressed in very sober costume, all in shades of black with brown fur trims like a St Andrews scholar. The man’s name was Henrie Charteris. Still holding his doffed hat at his back with both hands, he smiled a little as he met the king’s gaze.
‘Thir are very weighty matters, Maister Charteris, and so ye maun understand the reasons we question ye on yeir sources. Whence do ye know of this?’
The man’s smile faded slightly under his tidy grey moustache. ‘Yeir Grace, in pairt be the wordis of the preeminent scholar George Buchanan, caim unto mine ear be Robert Lekprevik.’
The name of his late tutor struck a sour note in him, but the king allowed himself no visible reaction to it. His eyes stayed fastened on the printer’s face. ‘Lekprevik, the prentar whae deid some yeiris back?’
‘Aye, yeir Grace. I prentisset under him for some time, and I knew him weill, and Buchanan not so weill but we had met. In the end of the 1560s I tuik it upon me to make revisions of the literary monuments of our country’s greit poets, as the Brucis buik and the Wallace buik. For the proheme of the Wallace buik, Buchanan compossit a very fine Latine epigramme. Lekprevik prentit the poem with the agreement that his name would be left out.’
‘Aye, we can imagine that Buchanan wouldnae want his name in it.’ James knew Buchanan had been fond of the old Wallace lay, but he’d never thought him to have gone so far as to submit a poem for publication in an edition. Still, he had no reason to doubt it. Buchanan had had, like all poets, a temperamental nature, subject to great passions and unexpected turns. Anonymous panegyrics for old-fashioned heroes of olden times would not have been one of the strangest things he had written. ‘Go on with yeir tale, then.’
‘Lekprevik and Buchanan were verray gude friendis. Lekprevik prented the Scots copie of the Detectio for him at near the samin time as my copie of the Wallace buik with his poem was prentit. And that, yeir Grace, was the time that Anderson fled frae Scotland.’
James had only very vague personal memories of those years, but he was plenty well-informed about his mother’s trial and the outcome of the detection’s proceedings. The pressures from Knox, Buchanan, and the other reformers throughout the Privy Council and Parliament must have become untenable without support from Mary. The man’s stipend had probably been cut off, too.
But that had all been so long in the past now. It was 1589, almost twenty years had gone by. He was about to demand more when the man continued on, ‘Lekprevik correspondit with Buchanan ‘til he died. This letter has a bit anent the man Anderson. I caim be it when I was looking through Lekprevik’s papers.’
James took the folded sheet of paper from the man’s outstretched fingers. Buchanan’s assertive, sweeping hand and forthright Latin was unmistakeable and unmissable, especially after having spent so many of his own formative years looking at it: …And as an interesting aside, I heard from trustworthy sources recently that that viper Anderson is doing very well for himself in Rome. He’s found some training to exorcise demons and hunt witches, so I was told. Truly, Rome has lost the way of truth, preferring the shadows of superstition to the light of faith…
The king flipped the paper over to check the letter’s date. 1582.
‘We would keip this, Maister Charteris, if it be amenable to ye.’ James looked up, and seeing no immediate sign of complaint, folded the letter up and tucked it into a pocket of his doublet. ‘If ye hear more of the man Anderson, ye are tae report immediately to me.’ The king turned himself to the desk once more and, withdrawing a sheet of good French paper and dipping a pen, wrote out a note declaring his willingness to give the man audience. He signed it and sealed it with the small personal signet ring he kept for such matters, then passed it back to the smiling, elderly Charteris.
Outside of Holyrood, a distant peal of thunder rumbled in from the north. ‘A sign I best be gaein, yeir Grace.’ James did not respond, other than to nod his thanks. He did not feel it was necessary to emphasize the confidential nature of the situation. Charteris had already been made well-enough aware of that. He watched the man make his exit from the snug little cabinet in a tense silence, then called for a messenger.
It was true that no harm had come to him or Anne in the end, but the call had been so very close, and the news of the Danish trials had left him deeply shaken. He’d heard of them all over the Continent, too, in Allmany especially. Buchanan may have had his doubts, but James knew, factually, that Scotland was awash in strange folk, in men and women that trafficked and consorted with devils, in folk that made dark pacts with the lords and ladies of another court more cruel and capricious than any court of man.
And the man Anderson, he knew from so many sources, had kept his finger on the very pulse of it, bringing his late mother whispers of what went on in the strange corners of her kingdom, each and every wise woman’s arts and wiles, comings and goings. Obediently as a dog, the man would tear some apart on her word, leave others to do their secret doings, and, yea, even quietly slip one through the maid’s passages, secretly, into her chamber when she was poorly and the physicians could effect no cures.
And so very much as James loathed the thought of it, it had come time that he needed such a man in his service, too. For just as Danish witches had stirred a storm to keep Anne from Scotland, so too was it clear that some evil had been acting against his own voyage to fetch her from Denmark. Whilst the other ships had driven forward effortlessly, his alone had been fessled by contrary winds. That, it seemed to him, was evidence enough that he had need of a man such as Anderson, hateful as the thought of it was to have to keep a papist underfoot. In all sincerity, James had little interest in the cleric’s personal convictions, just as he had never cared to see his dear Esmé converted. But back then, the rages of the Kirk’s men had been unbearable, and he had learned that politics simply did not know such things as ‘tolerance’. He was thus not much disposed to suffer the frustrations of allowing an openly-Catholic figure at his court.
That could be dealt with, though, he supposed, with enough money.
The messenger arrived in the doorway of the little chamber, slightly damp around the edges, and said nothing. King James Stewart of Scotland began to set down a short letter in Latin. “Ye are tae bring this to George Young, our depute-secretary. Immediately. He will tak care of the rest.” George was a good St Andrews man, and had already proved himself exceedingly well-versed in questions of the supernatural during their time in Denmark. Not to mention, he was a great deal less fanatical than some of his fellow kirkmen. He could be trusted to know the right channels for pursuing such matters.