It was a peculiarly close and sultry mouth, the June of 1488 and on this day in particular the air was breathless, hot, and still. Lowering thunderclouds, through the openings of which; the sunlight shot in sickly flakes, obscured the summer sky. Omens of evil preceded the coming civil war. In the fertile carse of Gowrie the peasantry had observed numbers of field-mice lying dead about the footpaths among the ripening corn—dead without any apparent cause.
A wonderful scorpion had been killed in the jousting haugh of Linlithgow; and a terrible comet—men called it a fiery dragon—passed over the Castle of Rothesay, from whence it was visible between the Polestar and the Pleiads, and for three nights this source of terror floated in the darkened sky. The stone unicorn on the cross of Stirling uttered a cry at midnight; the shadowy figures of armed knights were seen to encounter on the battleground where Wallace defeated the army of Edward I., under the brow of the Abbey Craig; the helmeted or hooded fish, called monachi marini, which never appear in the Scottish seas but as the presage of some terrible event, were seen to swarm in the firths and bays; and, to his great dismay, Jamie Gair had thrice netted an entire shoal of them. The minds of the people (naturally and constitutionally superstitious) became filled with the most dire forebodings of the great events that were at hand; and on the hearts of none did these omens fall more heavily than those of the two sisters, Euphemia and Sybilla Drummond, who were secluded in their father's solitary Castle of Drummond, where no tidings reached them of their missing Margaret, and where they could only hear vague and flying rumours of the great events which then convulsed the kingdom.
Their father's words when he left Strathearn for the insurgent camp had made them aware only of two things:—that he would fight to the death against the false king who had carried off his favourite daughter, and that they—on the rout of James's forces and the destruction of his favourite courtiers—should become, one Countess of Hailes, and the other Countess of Home, or he would never see their faces more.
At this time, it was not exactly known by the king and his court where the malcontent nobles held their tryst, or where the crown prince of Scotland was. Some said they were in Stirling with Sir James Shaw; others said, at Linlithgow; and many asserted they had retired as far off as the Douglasses' Castle of Thrave, in the wild and distant province of Galloway.
Many loyal and gallant gentlemen were now flocking to the royal standard with all the armed men they could muster; and with his most faithful adherents, James held a solemn conclave, or council of war, in the hall of the Castle of Alloa. On this occasion he was accompanied by the old admiral, by Sir Mathieson, Captains Barton and Falconer, than whom there were none present more eager to meet the insurgent lords in battle, that they might have an opportunity of avenging on Home and Hailes their late atrocities at Dundee. There, too, were Sir William Knollis, the preceptor of the Scottish knights of Rhodez; the old Marshal de Concressault; and young Ramsay Lord of Bothwell, with many gentlemen of his band—the Royal Guard—who wore the king's livery—red doublets, faced and slashed with yellow. These crowded around James, and on their glittering arms and excited faces the sunlight fell ill deep broad flakes of hazy radiance, through the grated windows of the old Gothic hall.
The sadness and dejection of James were apparent to all, as the noble Earl of Mar, the captain of Dunbarton—a peer whose family stood proudly pre-eminent in the annals of Scottish loyalty—conducted him to a chair on a dais at the end of the hall, over which hung a crimson cloth of state.
"On this unhappy day," said the Earl, "your majesty is more welcome to my house of Alloa than if you came to me flushed with the triumph of a hundred battles."
"I thank you kindly, my Lord of Mar," said he; "you are one of the few who know that through life I have struggled against an untoward and unhappy fate—or, as it would seem, an irrevocable destiny, which I can neither conquer nor avoid. Gladly would I change my father's crown for a shepherd's bonnet, and this lofty place for the sphere of those happy peasants who, in their narrow world, seem to pass through life without meeting an obstacle, simply because they are without ambition, and have few enemies. I never knew that the poor could be so happy till within these last few days which I spent among the brave hearts of good Sir Andrew's frigate."
"Hard work maketh a light heart at times," said the admiral, as his eyes glistened; "and I can assure your majesty, that never shipmate of mine would turn landsman again, to be bearded by every painted baron, and bullied by every cock-laird and cow-baillie whom he met at kirk or market."
"Are there no tidings yet of Rothesay?" asked James.