I am so pleased at how well the One Year Anniversary Competitions held here went! Thanks so much to all who submitted their Reviews and Short Stories. Now, the winner of the Short Story Competition is…..drum roll…..Roseanne Lortz! Here is the wonderful short story she submitted titled The Promise Given:
THE PROMISE GIVEN
By Rosanne E. Lortz
“It’s a bonnie day to ride for Calais!” said Lord James, stepping up into the saddle. A spring wind broke up the closeness of the city air, tousling his dark hair with playful fingers. His chin stood out firmly from his high collar, and his limbs sat easily in the saddle. Looking around to confirm that all his men had mounted, he urged his horse forward with a gentle slap.
“And a bonnie day to leave Paris behind,” returned his manservant Andrew. The old man snorted like an irritable donkey. God knows, this city had been no friend to their embassy. As soon as they set eyes on the Seine, their luggage had been beset by pickpockets and thieves. Lord James’ two squires had come to fisticuffs with the rabble, and Andrew’s hand had grown accustomed to fingering his rapier hilt.
James smiled ruefully and ran a hand through his short, clipped beard. “Aye, the people of this place are not as welcoming as the lodgings that we’ve enjoyed.” He glanced back across the courtyard at the sculptured walls of the Louvre, a project begun two rulers ago and still unfinished. But though the structure as a whole was incomplete, the lavish quarters in the West Wing still outshone anything the Scottish lord had ever seen. Scotland’s rugged beauty had nothing to compare with the sensuous opulence of these palace apartments filled with paintings, statues, tapestries, and furnishings of marble and gold. A pity they were also crammed with images of saints and popish idolatry, thought Lord James. He grinned wryly. He had only just reached thirty, and every day he saw himself turning more into a copy of his crotchety friend Knox.
“A grand sight, to be sure,” said Andrew glumly, “but a veritable den of iniquity. Do you not mind the treasure box that was stolen from your very room? If you had not thought to put some coin in your purse, we’d be rowing like galley slaves to pay for a passage home.”
“The work of some ill-natured servant,” said James, shrugging off the theft with determined lightheartedness. It was no use to dwell on all the indignities they had suffered. He had known from the first that this embassy would be as appetizing as a mouthful of sand, but nonetheless, he had resolved to undertake it. And—God be praised!—the mission had not failed.
Andrew was unwilling to take such a sanguine view of events and refused to abandon the matter of the stolen box. He rubbed his red nose with a gnarled finger and urged his horse closer to his master’s. “Do you not ken that this thievery is but another one of their ways to harm you? The last time you were here, they tried poison!”
“We cannot prove that,” said Lord James levelly.
“Canna prove it?” shrilled Andrew. “Every man-jack of your company died, and you were sick beyond all measure! Can you deny it was so? Mark my words, milord. They’ll do their best to stop you from leaving France alive!”
“You are awash in conspiracies!” said Lord James. “How much ale did you drink this morning?”
“Half a mug—half a mug!” protested the old servant, though in truth, he had indulged far more liberally than that in the Louvre’s lavish cellar. “I’m telling you, y’are too trusting, laddie,” said Andrew, lapsing into the familiar speech of a retainer who had known his lord since childhood.
They passed the strong scent of the fish market, and James raised a hand to signal his men; abandoning the path by the river, they turned north on the road that led out of the city and on to Calais. Almost away from Paris! Lord James reached his hand up to his breast and reassured himself that the item he carried was still secure. Inside his tight-fitting doublet nestled a sheet of parchment with his sister’s promise.
Many of the Lords of the Congregation had urged him not to go. “Let her wear her widow weeds in France!” they said. “She’s grown up there—she’s more French than Scottish! And besides, she’s a papist through and through. She’ll never accept the changes we’ve made.”
Lord James had answered those objections easily enough. “I shall talk to her and make her understand,” he said. “If she will not allow the Reformation here, then she will not be queen—and yet, I think she is of sound enough mind to see that it is too late to return to Rome.”
Other objectors had been harder to answer. The week before James left, the preacher John Knox had come to visit him and quaff a cup of wine. Knox was a short, fierce man with a voice like a trumpet. His great, gray beard came down to his waist, half covering the front of his black preacher’s garb. The two men had first met in England six years ago, before Elizabeth had replaced her sister Mary Tudor on the throne. At that time Lord James had only a mild interest in the doctrines of Luther and Calvin, but the enthusiasm of Knox had lit a fire in him that continued to burn brighter every day.
Now, with the work of the Reformation established in Scotland, Lord James was threatening to undo it all by inviting back a papist queen. “Jamie,” Knox had said, looking him squarely in the eyes, “You know that neither myself nor the other Lords of the Congregation would cast a sideways glance were you to take the crown of Scotland for yourself.”
Lord James looked down in distress. It was useless to pretend that the thought had never crossed his mind, but always—almost always—he had been able to persuade himself of the dishonor in that step. “The crown is not mine by right,” he protested. Although he was eleven years his sister’s senior, she was the child of wedlock and he was not.
“Faugh!” said Knox, “Let the sins of the father be visited on his own head. Your bastardy matters not one whit—and every man knows that you are more worthy to rule than the daughter of Mary de Guise.”
“But would you have the Reformers become the revolutionaries?” demanded James. “Do you intend to overthrow and shatter the institutions of our society as well as the idols in the churches?”
“Nay, we Scots are true to the monarchy and to the Stewarts,” responded Knox. “But we must have a king who rules according to the law of God!”
“And my sister Mary has done nothing that shows her incapable of ruling thus.”
“She is a papist,” said Knox in frustration. “Have you not heard that she celebrates the Romish Mass daily!”
“She is young,” said Lord James soothingly, “and has been raised in foreign lands by those whose hearts are blind to truth. Only let her come to Scotland and escape the influences of her mother’s family. Let her see what wonders the Lords of the Congregation have done. Let her sit under your preaching, even as I have.”
At this point, Knox had leaned forward scanning the young man’s face with his piercing eyes. “You would rather that she should sit on the throne of Scotland than you?”
“Aye,” Lord James had said. “I will not usurp what is not mine by right.”
Putting down his cup, Knox had and stood up to leave. “Well, God grant that you are right, Jamie—I have my doubts! You paint a lovely picture of a pliable lass that needs only to be shepherded into the true fold. But how if she be as stubborn as you and bent to a different mold? God help us then, for we shall have sore need of Him.”
Knox had been right to be suspicious, thought James. But Knox’s suspicions had also been wrong! The paper in the breast of his doublet confirmed that, did it not? With pen and ink, Mary had promised to respect the Reform in Scotland. She had agreed that her own religion would only be exercised privately, behind the closed doors of her own apartments.
The first day that he waited upon his half-sister Lord James had experienced some pangs of nervous trepidation. The supercilious servants at the Louvre had made him feel as uncouth as a Highland farmer. Mary, although widowed only five months, had little of the widow’s look about her. The gauzy veil around her face and neck framed the round bosom that peeked over her low bodice, and the dark fabric of her gown highlighted the soft whiteness of her skin.
“Enchanté, mon frère,” she had said as he kissed her hand, though her pouting lips looked far from enchanted at his visit.
James stepped back to behold a young woman whom he scarcely knew. She had the long nose and high brows of the Stewarts, features which James himself shared. Lord James was considered a tall man, but Mary’s slender body towered over him. The Mary he remembered was the six-year-old he had escorted across the channel more than a dozen years ago—sweet, smiling, delightfully spoiled little Mary with the rosebud mouth. She had held his hand as they watched the craggy shore of Scotland recede into the fog of the North Sea.
Their father had died immediately after her birth, making Mary a queen before she was a week old. Her mother, a Frenchwoman named Marie of Guise, had assumed the regency of Scotland. Determined that her daughter would not be raised in the Scottish heaths and highlands, Mary’s mother sent her away to the cultured and Roman Catholic court of France. Before she had come of age to rule her own people, the little princess had married the French dauphin. The fleur-de-lys proved more enticing than the Scotch broom, and when her husband succeeded his father, there was no reason for Mary to return to the little land that was hers from birth. But now that her husband was dead, and she was no more than a foreign dowager in France, she might look on the throne of Scotland with more interest.
“Your people are longing for your return,” James assured her.
She arched an eyebrow. “That is not altogether what I have heard, mon frère. There have been changes in Scotland since I was there, n’est-ce pas?”
“Changes, yes,” admitted James. “But nothing has changed the people’s loyalty to the house of Stewart. They wish you to return and receive your rightful place on the throne of Scotland.”
“I am young,” said Mary evenly, “but I am not without intelligence. My mother’s letters often spoke of the struggles that she had with you, and with the men of your party. She fought you with words, with law, and with armies—and yet, it seems in the end the Reform had its way with Scotland. I am my father’s child, but I am also my mother’s daughter. Are you sincere in wishing me to return to take the reins of power?”
Lord James cleared his throat and fingered his dark, pointed beard. “There are some guarantees that the Lords of the Congregation wish you to make before they allow you to assume the crown.”
“Before they allow me,” echoed Mary coldly, but before she could say more, a gentleman interrupted their tête-à-tête. Lord James recognized him, from the curious scar on the side of his face, as Mary’s uncle, the Duke of Guise. And though the Duke feigned surprise at seeing a man in Mary’s company, the Scottish lord suspected that he had been eavesdropping on their conversation all along.
“What is this, ma petite?” asked the Duke. “An ambassador from your homeland?”
“This is my half-brother, Lord James,” said Mary with veiled eyelids.
“Ah, you are fortunate, monsieur, to share at least one parent with our belle Marie,” said the Duke with a thin-lipped smile. “A king’s son got in a hedgerow has every advantage over a commoner’s son got at home.”
James reddened at the allusion to his illegitimate birth. He had overheard sneering remarks about the matter from other French courtiers, but none had dared to cast it in his face like the Duke of Guise.
“So,” continued the Duke with barely a pause, “They say you mean to take my darling niece away from us?”
“Her Majesty’s subjects desire her return to Scotland,” said James stiffly.
“But not unconditionally,” said Mary. She looked at him with flashing eyes, daring him to state what those conditions were.
“Here are the guarantees,” said James, a little roughly, as men will do when uncomfortable in a beautiful woman’s presence. He unfolded a finely written page and passed it across to the hostile pair.
The Duke of Guise took the paper and clucked his teeth in concern. “But what is this? My niece must become a Protestant?”
“Not so,” said James hastily. “It says only that she must make no law forbidding or restricting the exercise of the Protestant religion in Scotland and that she must not reinstitute the religion of Rome in any way.
The Duke snorted. “Aye, so, in effect, if she goes to Scotland she must become a Protestant.”
Mary looked back and forth between the two men, pursed her rosebud lips and began to cry, a gentle rain of tears that did nothing to mar her beauty. She dabbed a linen kerchief at her welling eyes and began to pace the room distractedly.
A man who knew her well might have seen something calculated in her distress, but Lord James only ascribed to her the guileless simplicity of the sweet six-year-old he once knew. “Madame, I am truly sorry for your discomfort,” he said haltingly.
“It is no matter,” said Mary, “I have been a foreigner in a strange land all my life, and I see that it shall be no different if I return to Scotland.” She pressed a hand to her heart and sighed mournfully.
Embarrassed by Mary’s tears, James forbore to press the point and demand her signature. It took several more audiences before they came to terms. Mary insisted that she be allowed to attend Mass privately, and James had conceded that a priest might administer the Roman Catholic rite within the secrecy of the queen’s own apartments. But nothing smacking of popery must be done in the open!
The Duke was with her again on the day that Mary signed the guarantees. Lord James was surprised at how passively Mary took pen in hand and placed her signature on the parchment. The Duke himself had seemingly resigned himself to the inevitable. He had even recommended that Mary appoint her brother regent in her stead until she could make the preparations to travel to Scotland.
“That will make the people happy, will it not?” said de Guise. “A Protestant ruler at last upon the throne of Scotland. I think you will enjoy being king, Lord James.”
“Regent, not king,” said James, sensitive to the insinuations about his own motives and desires. He saw the Duke’s eyes watching him intently. “I shall hold Scotland in trust, ruling in my sister’s name and keeping her best interests at heart.”
“Yes, yes,” said the Duke smoothly, “I am sure that you will.”
James quartered the signed document in neat, crisp folds and placed it in his doublet. Mary gave him her hand to kiss, and the Duke acknowledged his imminent departure with a perfunctory bow. “Godspeed to you, Lord James,” said de Guise, his thin lips pulling back to reveal sharply chiseled teeth, “though which God I will leave it to you to decide.”
As James turned his back to leave Mary’s sitting room, he missed the silent smile of complicity that his sister and the Duke exchanged. Perhaps they were simply pleased to see the last of the dull Scottish ambassador. Perhaps they knew what Lord James did not, that a prince never lacks legitimate reasons to break his promise.
Whatever the reason behind their smile, it is certain that as soon as Lord James had left, the Duke also disappeared down the corridor and, commandeering a horse, rode to the wharfs of the Seine. There, he met a grubby, unshaven dockmaster, with whom he had had dealings in time past. A handful of coins left the Duke’s purse and made its way into the horny palms of a dozen idle dockhands. With a finger to his lips, the Duke disappeared while the lowlifes of Paris gathered staffs, clubs, and any blades they could lay hands on.
Oblivious to these happenings, Lord James made his own preparations to leave the Louvre. He ordered Andrew to pack their kit, and, with his mission so successfully accomplished, refused to complain over the small matter of money stolen from his room. They would ride north for Calais, take ship for the port of St. Andrews, and set the letter with Mary’s seal before Knox and the Lords of the Congregation. The Stewart queen had sanctioned the Reform!
As Lord James and his company of men neared the outermost gates of Paris, a commotion rippled through the street surrounding them. “Shove off, you!” shouted one of the market women at several rough fellows who had pushed their way through her piles of summer fruit. One of the men snarled at her, but the rest of the motley mob continued their advance toward the company of Scotsmen. Their lips curled menacingly and their manner screamed mischief.
“Master,” said one of Lord James’s squires, a short, curly-haired fellow wearing the green livery of Lord James’s house. “Have a care! They’ve quarterstaffs in hand and basilards in their belts!”
“Stand close,” said James, controlling his horse with a tight rein as he signaled the gate master to let them pass.
“Huguenots! Huguenots!” shouted one of the troublemakers, the French term for Protestants. It was not hard to ascertain the Scotsmen’s religious inclinations. Each of Lord James’s retainers bore the crest of his master’s house embroidered on his livery, a pelican feeding her young with her own blood and beneath that a scroll that read Solus Per Christum Redemptorem. There was no mistaking it—it was a Reformed motto through and through.
Though there were many Huguenots within Paris, they were a hated class by the rest. The malignancy of the dockhands soon spread through the surrounding marketplace. Forgetting her annoyance at her fellow Parisians, the fruit seller snatched some rotten fruit from beneath her cart and hurled it at the mounted foreigners.
The mob was pressing closer and closer. Dirt clods flew, and angry hands tried to pull the squires off their horses. Andrew, the old manservant, drew his rapier and fended off blows from the poles and clubs. “Open the gate!” thundered Lord James at the hesitating gatekeeper. He had his own rapier out too and was guiding the group toward the tenuous safety of the gate tower.
“Listen, fellow,” said James, crowding his horse against the tower and dodging the sharp missiles that followed his every move, “Turn the winch to open that gate, or by my head, I’ll come in there and spit you through!”
Grumbling, the gatekeeper set his shoulders to the winch. He had no love for Huguenots either, but a massacre outside his tower might be frowned upon by the king. Slowly, the portcullis began to rise. Soon the metal grating cleared the heads of the horses—and not a moment too soon. Two ruffians had darted out of the neighboring tavern with billhooks in their hands, long, bladed poles that the rapiers could scarcely defend against.
Clinging to the necks of their horses, the Scots darted beneath the rising gate. The Parisian mob continued to hurl insults and stones, but with no horses at their disposal, they could not hope to catch the fleeing Protestants. When they saw that no one pursued them, the riders’ furious gallop turned into a more measured pace.
Lord James began to laugh in relief, and the squires joined in, shouting several ribald insults of their own at the disappearing walls of Paris. “Aye, laugh away,” said old Andrew grimly. “We’re not out of this God-forsaken country yet.”
But though his earlier premonition had proved correct, this new pessimism fell to the ground unfulfilled. Lord James and his men reached Calais without any mishap and embarked on a ship for their homeland.
“Just think!” said Lord James to Andrew, as the soft swell of the Channel gave way to the more vigorous surf of the North Sea, “We have done what they did not think possible! John Knox, the Lords of the Congregation—no one thought Mary Stewart would countenance the Reform in Scotland. Yet here it is,” he said, rubbing the breast of his doublet, “her promise to respect the new religion. We shall have our queen and we shall have the Reform! Praise be to God!”
Andrew snorted, and shook out a damp shoe, drenched from an overeager swell. “I’ve always said that you’re too trusting, laddie. But,”—his face broadened out into an unaccustomed smile—“over and against the chance that you be right, I’ll shake your hand. Whatever chances after, that was a job well done, and I’ll blacken the eye of any man who says otherwise!”
The cog sailed on, gaining a regular rhythm of up and down motion in the choppy water. Just before dark, Lord James caught sight of the craggy cliffs of Scotland, and—by a few pinpoints of light—recognized St. Andrews. His hands closed tightly on the rail and he looked down at where a six-year-old girl had once stood. “Will they send me away for long?” she said, her little red lips round with concern.
“I do not know,” said Lord James, as he took her hand. “But however long it takes, always mind that I will be thinking of you, and when it’s time, I promise I’ll come to bring you home again.”
* * * * * *
Three months later, Mary Stewart arrived in Scotland to take her rightful place as queen. Five days after that, she ordered the Roman Catholic Mass to be reinstituted in Holyrood Palace. Lord James was sorely surprised at this betrayal. His friend Knox was not. Perhaps, as Andrew had said, Lord James was entirely too trusting. Or perhaps Mary simply knew what Lord James did not, that the promise given was a necessity of the past: the word broken is a necessity of the present.
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Thank you so much for this wonderful short story! I really enjoyed reading it! I loved that you focused on a character (Lord James) not usually focused on in Tudor literature.
If you would like to know more about Rosanne, she has sent me the links to her blog and website. Here is the link to her blog Read Room, and here is the link to her website. She has recently published a novel titled I Serve: A Novel of the Black Prince. You can read the first chapter on her site! I have added these links to the “links” column on the right hand side of the blog!
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Thanks again to all who submitted!
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In the traditional "B" or any other letter!
