your offer to maintain my daughter, the queen, until she is wed is incredibly generous. It is more than worth an earldom. But remember that she is only five years old. It will be at least ten years before my Mary and Francis wed. Scotland’s purse is not a heavy one. Your offer is a gift from God, and his blessed Mother for whom my daughter is named, is it not, Père Michel?” Marie de Guise’s practical French nature was rearing itself now. “Who can verify your wealth for me, my lord? I mean no offense, but this is a serious matter we have discussed.”
“The House of Kira, madam. They have people here in Stirling and in Edinburgh, Perth, and Aberdeen,” the laird said.
“Send someone to inquire discreetly,” Marie de Guise directed the priest. Then she turned again to Angus Ferguson. “I will accept your offer, my lord. If your worth is proven and I am assured by the Kiras of your ability to do what you say you will do, then the parchments declaring your new earldom will be sent to Duin, and word of it cried throughout the borders. When that is done you will direct your bankers in what they must do, according to our agreement. Will that suit you, my lord?”
“The parchments must have the queen’s own seal as well as yers upon them,” the laird said to her. “And the proclamation posted on the Mercat Cross in Edinburgh.”
“Rest assured that they will, and it will be official,” she promised him. Then Marie de Guise stood and held out her hand to him again.
Stepping forward, he took the hand and kissed it, understanding that he was now dismissed. “I will pray for the queen’s safe journey,” he told Marie de Guise. Then he backed from the room, closing the door behind him.
“A very bold man, but then so many of these borderers are,” the dowager queen remarked to the little priest. “The woman who weds him will have to be a strong lass.”
But Angus Ferguson wasn’t thinking of marriage at that point in his life. By late August, when the little queen departed for France, he had his earldom, and had briefly attracted the interest and envy of his neighbors. But when the gossip that his earldom had been created as a balance to the Hepburns was bruited about, everyone laughed. The Fergusons of Duin, magic or no, were not a match for the earls of Bothwell.
And as Angus had hoped, the slight furor had subsided as the business of survival took precedence. The border wars were over. Henry VIII was dead and buried. His son, Edward VI, was crowned, and while his protector, Seymour, was tempted to follow Henry VIII’s policies toward Scotland, Mary’s removal to France made the efforts futile. The young king died two months short of his sixteenth birthday. He was replaced for nine short days by his cousin Lady Jane Grey, as the Protestants attempted to block Mary Tudor from inheriting her throne. Mary prevailed, but five and a half years later she too died, leaving England’s throne to the now twenty-five-year-old red-haired daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth Tudor.
Elizabeth spent the first years of her reign consolidating her position as England’s queen, and dodging suitors. Her only interest in the poor country to her north was the fact that its young queen, who would be queen of France one day as well, was now calling herself Queen of Scotland and England . Mary based her claim on the fact that her grandmother had been Henry VIII’s sister, Margaret, wife of James IV. Elizabeth, she said, was merely Henry’s bastard by the Boleyn whore. The fact that the English Church had given Henry his first divorce, that Anne had been crowned queen, was incidental to the young girl in France who parroted what her French relations told her.
But then England became less important to Mary, for her father-in-law, Henri II, was killed in a jousting accident. She and her young husband, Francis, suddenly found themselves the rulers of France. France took precedence over both Scotland and