The Mer- Lion Read Online Free

surrounded by many-windowed walls. In the comer, there was a round tower, beneath it, their destination—the castle kitchen* For four pieces of silver, Seaforth on Dun Dearduil had bought itself an assistant to the spitdogs in the kitchen.
    ' But not for long..Mer-Lion or no, Seamus refused to do dog's work. Within twenty-four hours, he had made his first attempt at escape. He had not reached the castle gate before he was brought back, whipped thoroughly, and set to spit-turning again. He was not deterred. On his next attempt, he made it all the way to the drawbridge before being stopped by the captain of the guard. Back he went, his bottom a mass of welts, to his place before the fireplace. Not for long. Again and again he tried. Eventually, he made it all the way down to the docks and was seeking passage back to Ireland when caught by the earl's men. Brought home, totally unrepentant, and looking the earl—the old one, a man in his fifties—straight in the face, Seamus vowed to continue to run away until he escaped the hated kitchens. The earl took this defiant boy at his word, for Seamus was set a new task—shoveling dung in the stables. The boy stopped running away. Once the earl discovered Seamus could clean the stalls of the famed home-bred gray destriers without needing to have these notoriously short-tempered animals removed, he was confirmed in his role of stableboy and the grays were made his special charge. Nobody envied him his new responsibility, but Seamus was happy and remained so for the next five years.
    When the old earl died in 1508, his son, also a James Mackenzie, became the Fourth Earl of Seaforth ... and promptly married the only acknowledged bastard daughter of King James IV, a woman almost half the earl's age. Seamus, the new assistant head groomsman, came forward to steady her stirrup when she dismounted within the Fountain Court of Seaforth on Dun Dearduil. One look upward into her eyes, so dark blue they seemed almost purple, made him hers for life; his allegiance unofficially but incontrovertibly changed from the Earl of Seaforth to his Countess.
    It was Seamus who personally groomed her jennets ... who con-, trived when she rode to be by her side ... who was there to give her a leg up or a hand down when she hunted in the countryside. And when, within the year, she bellied up in pregnancy, Seamus devised a small basket-cart within which she could continue to ride out, himself riding alongside or handling the reins of the pony.
    When in early 1509 the heir was born—James Mackenzie, Master of Seaforth, Viscount Rangely, Baron of Alva—Seamus managed to find an excuse to be absent from the festivities. And when the family went to Edinburgh to present the child at court to his grandfather, James IV, Seamus contrived to stay behind. His excuse was the gray destriers; his real reason was a mixed bag of emotions—love, jealousy, fear—all dominated by an illogical dislike of the child. Over the next several years, Seamus seldom saw the child since noble-bom men-children in the sixteenth century stayed within the women's quarters while they were still dressed in feminine long gowns.
    Although 1509 was remembered by Seamus as the year his rival was born, the Scots remembered it as the year King Henry VII of England, father to the young Queen of Scotland, Margaret Tudor, died. The honeymoon peace was over and the stage set for a major confrontation between two brothers-in-law: eighteen-year-old Henry Vm and a man twice his age, James IV.
    James IV was a good king and a man Henry VIII might well have been wise to emulate in certain respects. James was a builder. The palace he designed at Holyrood, next to the Abbey of the same name, effectively turned Edinburgh into an exciting capital city with pomp and pageantry, tournaments, processions, and pilgrimages the order, of the hour. Henry stole the ideas, even the buildings, of others.
    James was innovator his royal navy—the first Scotland could