1635: A Parcel of Rogues: Chapter Five

    “It comes to something that a man may easier read shite than take one,” Robert Mackay muttered. Getting from the commode back to the bed was no joke, but when a man broke his back, that was what he’d to put up with. There was probably a bloody theologian somewhere blethering something about God’s plan out his arse, and be damned to the prating pederast. All the pain and indignity of being helped to the pot, all the indignity and pain of being helped back, and then the fucking paperwork was still waiting.

    “Will ye haud ye’re noise, ye auld fool? If you’d bided on that bluidy mare ye’d no be led theer greetin’ yer wame in ma lugs, forbye. And will ye bide readin’ an’ no mither me? F’puir auld Meg? So’s I can clean, here?”

    Mackay sighed. She’d a sharp tongue on her, but she spoke sense. Of the nurses he’d hired to mind him while he was waiting to be measured for his last overcoat, this one was the only one who’d not gotten on his nerves beyond all enduring. Largely by trying her damnedest to get on his nerves, as far as he could tell, which made a change from irritating servility or slovenly dullard idleness. And she’d a half-sister who was a grand nurse for the wee boy, and a fair portion of her family had served here in the Edinburgh house over the years. Her closest relative was one of the hostlers down in the mews, if Mackay recalled aright. Of course, it’d been years since he’d been anywhere near the stables. A carriage for long trips, a litter for short ones. And so much arse and elbow he tried to avoid it if he could.

    Which meant he was sat here, a fowl on the water for crap like his chief had sent him. Clan loyalties cut through Scots politics like fault lines, which was to say they only really mattered during quakes. Or if you were mining for something, which Reay definitely was. Oh, he could dress it up all he pleased, but he was after something that Charles Stuart would not like. Of course, what Charles Stuart did not like and what he could do anything about were two different things. The man hadn’t called a parliament in years. Mackay couldn’t recall precisely how long, but it couldn’t be much less than ten years. Without taxes and levies, the House of Stuart was governing from its prerogatives. For a certainty, something had come in from the deal with the French, but how much of that remained in the Stuart’s coffers was a vexed question. Not much, if the reports on his spending on all those mercenaries were right. And there was replacing the navy ships the French had gotten shot to pieces. That had to cost right enough, and a necessity since Stuart seemed dead set on offending the United States of Europe.

    “Something’s no’ so much shite, I reckon.”

    “Aye? And what’d ye ken, fishwifie?”

    “Och, fishwifie, is it, y’aud de’il? I ken ye’re grinnin’ like ye’ve been thievin’ frae bairns.”

    “Aye, just that that idiot Stuart –”

    “Papist — “Meg put in, as though she didn’t even notice she was doing it.

    “– who may have some papist sympathies or at least be willing to tolerate them — is fire and flame for making himself a nuisance to the USE — ”

    “Papists.”

    “Aye? And wha’ wad oor wee fishwifie ken?”

    “They have a cardinal. Papists ha’ cardinals. This is aye weel known.”

    Mackay looked at her. He could tell when she was quoting the blithering idiot of a preacher at her dementedly independent kirk, because she lost her own accent and used his. And the blithering eejit claimed to be a good Scots presbyterian, like he knew any more of scripture than a hungry dog that’d ate a testament. “I’ll remind ye, Meg, that yon bampot ye set store by disnae ken good sense fra’ a pint o’ pish on the subject o’ European politics or any religion he cannae get fra’ the bottom o’ a bottle.”

    “Och, you tak’ that back, ye auld thief! The reverend is a pious man –”

    “Haud yer tongue!” Mackay bellowed. He’d had to learn to put up with a lot since he’d broken his back, compensations like the grandson his bastard son had presented him with notwithstanding. But he wasn’t listening to some rabble of a half-educated excuse for a minister described as a pious man when the nearest he got to piety was sobering up on Sundays, the better to rant a meagre collection-plate out of an ignorant congregation of waiting-women and idlers. After hearing one too many quotes from the man, Mackay had made inquiries. The man was technically no more than a deacon putting on airs as a curate, for all he insisted he was a lecturer after the Puritan style. Even the rest of the congregationalist mutton-heads in the kirk he preached at knew better than to let him make himself out an elder. He was permitted to preach before the main services to a mostly-empty room. Mackay had been amused to discover that there were waiting-women there anyway, there being idiots willing to pay a penny to show that they were pious enough to make sure of their place at worship and rich enough to pay for it done. Which was how the place was on Meg’s regular Sunday-morning round of services, finishing up at St. Giles’s for a Leith warehouse-owner who never turned up anyway. Apparently he thought paying Meg to sit in for him on her creepie-stool and listen to the Word on his behalf would be enough to get him in to heaven. Whatever, the idiot at the independent kirk could spout all the shite he liked but Mackay wasn’t going to listen to it quietly.

    He glared at Meg, who’d adopted the dropped-jaw, shocked stare of the rarely-contradicted. “The USE is not papist. It’s not Calvinist. It’s not Lutheran, for a’ that Gustavus Adolphus is a Lutheran and a pious one from what I hear. And there’s nothing so much wrong with Lutherans, not at all. The worst ye can say is they’re wrong in the matter of religion. And they’re folk for a’ that, ye daft hen. As for the papists, aye, they’ve a cardinal for the USE. Because there’s papists in the USE. And they’re let be as they should be, to be wrong in their ain way. Or would ye seek tae save ’em against their will? Do mair than witness? Get yersel’ tae heaven through good works, will ye? Like these blethering meddlers in the kirk that want tae rule as well as minister?”

    He kept up his glare. Meg sat down heavily on a chair. Mackay was secretly gratified. He’d had a stare that could quell the unruliest private soldier in his day, and it was pleasing to see that being crippled hadn’t taken the edge off it.

    “Didnae think o’ that, did ye? No? Now take yon pot o’ shite oot o’ here, and mind it’ll do ye more good than anything ye hear from a whole regiment o’ divines if ye don’t mind the truth o’ religion, which is to save yer ain soul, no’ rule the world. Out!”

    Meg left in a hurry. Mackay sighed. He’d either got her to shut up with the constant refrain of no popery that was the only bit of her goading he didn’t find refreshing, or he’d lost the first nurse he’d been able to stand at any price.

    Still, yelling at her had given him a few thoughts to reply to Reay with. His chief had been careful to couch his letter in terms praising the merits of the freedom of religion the USE was now practising, and how harmful enforcement of cuius regio, eius religio had proven in the Germanies. It was surely, purely a coincidence that the packet had included some information on the course of the wars of religion from future scholars, and that the pages concerning the Bishops’ Wars were right at the front.

    And then all the material on how Scotland ought, in the future when her soldiers came home from the wars, be best served by a united government that settled secular affairs securely and left the divines alone. That he was entirely silent on how the divines would be involved in secular affairs was surely just an oversight, a matter he had chosen not to deal with at that time. The fact that he had said nothing about whom the government of Scotland might be united under, well, only a fool would see that he was not taking it entirely as read that that meant a United Kingdom under the House of Stuart. To suggest otherwise, well, that would be to accuse Reay of rankest treason. Only the rankest traitor would compass his words in that way, surely?

    Mackay smiled. Donald Mackay, Lord Reay and chief of Clan Mackay might act the bluff soldier, but he was chief of one of Scotland’s greater clans — even in numbers; in quality there was none finer than Clan Mackay — and as such bore a heavy weight of political responsibility. Under such a weight, a man grew cunning or failed, and Reay hadn’t failed yet. He and several of his sons were now senior commanders under Gustavus Adolphus, their estates in Caithness and Sutherland doing well by all accounts and, in the event of clan strife, able to be defended by several thousand veteran soldiers with the latest in modern arms and tactics.

    The Ring of Fire had been an opportunity that the Mackays had been well placed to grasp — not least because it was a Mackay who was the first of Gustav Adolf’s soldiers who’d encountered the Americans. Robert Mackay’s own son Alex, in fact. Who’d found himself a bride into the bargain, now a baroness of Sweden, which was a weight off Robert’s mind. It would not do for a man to leave his legitimate issue short to support his bastard, so seeing young Alex make his own way in the world with great success was a fine thing. And it meant that the fast friendship between Alex and his other sons would never be troubled by vexatious disputes over property. The boy even had his own retainers, when those lads finished their terms of service with the USE. He’d be a credit and an asset to the clan, and none would give him grief over his bastard birth. Not lightly, anyway. Julie’s rifle was a thing of legend from one end of Europe to another, and a man who could treat your death as so minor a matter as to leave it to his wife was nobody’s whipping-boy. As he’d pointed out to several idiots who’d made snide remarks.

    How the Mackays would have fared if their patron had died at Lutzen was a detail Grantville hadn’t brought back, although Donald had backed the losing side in the civil war that would have happened. It looked as though he was minded not to make that mistake again. Or the first time, if a fellow wanted to be particular about it. So, Reay was sending oblique communications. Assuming that your opponent had the intelligence to read your mail was a good one, so you’d to couch it in terms you’d both understand that could be explained away as innocent. Using a cipher was a dead giveaway, of course. There’d be room and time to clear up misunderstandings later, at need. Unless Mackay missed his guess, this fellow Lennox who’d be coming over to Scotland soon, was one of his son’s hard crew of borderer cavalry. A reliable fellow, to hear Alex speak of it.

    Lennox would no doubt have been been briefed in full by Lord Reay. Though he was not a Mackay clansman by birth, but a border reiver who’d decided to take up respectable soldiering, Lennox had come to enjoy the security of a clan loyalty.

    For the time being, though, Lord Reay wrote of curbing the secular power of the divines and uniting Scotland’s leadership. So. Who was most likely the target, here? The trick with Scots politics, of course, was to stand back and squint a little, to get the broad strokes of the picture. Once you started in on the details of clan and family feuding, litigation and lesser disputes, you’d never be stopping. You had two main lots, though: the presbyterians who disagreed with James VI’s dictum no bishop, no king — they were quite happy to do without bishops and treated monarchy as a separate matter — and the episcopalians, who supported bishops in order to support the king. There weren’t many in Scotland, other than the bishops themselves, who regarded episcopacy as a good idea in and of itself. Of course, there were plenty of smaller factions looking for more independence for the various independents, but mostly it was the adherents of the covenant of 1580 against the episcopalians. Call it covenant against royalist, but it was more shaded than that.

    And then you had the highland-lowland rivalry, what with the highlanders still counting plenty of papists among their number. The chances of actually extirpating the old religion in the wilder places were remote at best, whatever the Covenant might say on the matter. And when you got right to it, more than a few of the greater lords of the Scots peerage, Reay of the Mackays included, counted thousands of highlanders among their people, and if put to it could raise fine private armies of savage light troops more than willing to wreak plentiful havoc for the promise of plunder. Of course, that’d have the lowlanders taking up arms against the prospect of thieving, drunken highland savages let loose in their midst.

    Mackay shook his head ruefully. He was letting himself get drawn in. Covenant and Episcopal parties. Stick with that. It was a matter on which everyone had a mind which side he was on, and there were real political consequences to it. Not quite crown against parliament the way the English did it, but close enough. Lord Reay — and who else? A question for another time, that — was looking to add a third faction to the mix. Taking over one or another of the first two or recruiting from both to get bigger than either? From the hints Reay had scattered through his letter, he was looking to unite a new faction behind the idea of loyalty to Scotland first and only. Which was interesting, but any fool could see there was a reason Scotland had ended up the subordinate kingdom after the Union of the Crowns in the person of James the Sixth and First. It wasn’t simply the inability of Scotsmen in the mass to agree on anything no matter how trivial, although that had certainly contributed heavily. It was the plain fact that Scotland, as a country, had no resources save the flower of her manhood with which to make her way in the world. Three quarters of the country was good for hard-scrabble herding and little else. There were mines here and there, but precious few of those, no great ports, no towns with long traditions of manufacture. If you couldn’t butcher it or sell its wool, Scotland produced very little of it.

    There might be a hint in the shape of the digression Reay had made about the value of the Wietze oil-fields, where they were mining the oil that made the fuel for the wonderful machines Grantville designed and Magdeburg built. Was there a source of that under Scotland? If so, there was something reduced the matter to the irreducible. Or irreducible when it came to Scotland, say. The factions. Who to talk to about that? Mackay decided it was time to make some notes, and rang for his secretary.