Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles

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Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles Page 35

by Margaret George


  “Our mutual great-grandfather, Henry VII—how simple his world was,” she said. “One faith. Only Europe to take into account. No Protestants. No New World. No Russia or Turks. He had only the Yorkists and Lancastrians to settle. We have Protestants, preachers, heathens, heresies, the common people and their representatives, John Knox—”

  “We?”

  “Yes,” she said calmly. “We.”

  * * *

  Henry, Lord Darnley, was warmly welcomed into the castle where the Queen had withdrawn to have a retreat of sorts. It had a holiday air, a feeling of shoes being replaced by soft slippers and jewel-stiffened bodices by soft wrappers. Mary often took these retreats, staying in merchants’ houses and dispensing with her servants and even the trappings of a queen, as a person will shed his clothes to take a restorative medicinal bath in the curative springs.

  The Marys were in holiday spirits, as they treasured these times they had their mistress away from protocol and strictures. Then they could pretend to be—and could even be, for a precious space—simple maidens together. The nineteen-year-old Darnley entered into their midst easily, himself fleeing from duties and the future, playful and at ease.

  On Valentine’s Day there was a private celebration: an old-fashioned drawing of names for Valentines, singing and dancing. The Great Hall—although it was not a great hall but a small one—of Wemyss Castle was prepared for the event. Red ribbons were threaded in and out of the wall sconces, and the floor was cleared. Musicians were sent for from Dunfermline, as the castle lacked cittern and viol players, and music was selected.

  The ancient legend was that birds chose their mates on this day, and so must humans. Accordingly two Valentine’s baskets were festooned and all the men’s names put in one and all the women’s in the other. The company was to draw names and pair themselves. Accident and nature would assure the correct pairing.

  But human needs intervened. Mary miraculously drew Darnley’s name, and Mary Livingston, John Sempill’s. Mary Beaton and Mary Fleming, their suitors being too much a part of the government to be present at this retreat, had to content themselves with the sackbut player and the master of the castle.

  Darnley slowly unrolled the name he had drawn from the decorated basket. It said, “Mary Stuart,” not “the Queen.”

  “Do I dare?” he asked.

  “Shall I be left matchless on this day?” Mary laughed. “’Twould be an insult.” She turned toward him. “Well met, Valentine.”

  She looked at his handsome face. He was like a knight from a dream, so straight, so tall, so intelligent, so golden.

  They danced. He danced exquisitely. Then he insisted on playing his lute, and to the astonishment of all, he was expert. Even Riccio, hugging the corner and sitting out the Valentine’s festivity, nodded in approval. When all was over, Darnley sat before the fire and sang. His voice, a silky tenor, trod each note with surety and passion.

  “What harvest half so sweet is,

  As still to reap the kisses grown ripe in sowing?

  Kiss then, my harvest Queen,

  Full garners heaping:

  Kisses ripest when they are green

  Want only reaping.”

  Mary, lounging at his feet, was caught in the golden net he cast. Within that net, all was youth, beauty, understanding—a homecoming in her alien land.

  At the end of the celebration, when the weary company betook themselves to their chambers, Darnley motioned to Mary, whose eyes were nodding from the spiced wine and the warmth of the fire. “I have a gift for you,” he said. “Come see.”

  Behind the arras there was a bulge, and Darnley went behind it and pulled something out. It was an elaborate birdcage, made all of wicker and painted with delicate gold patterns.

  “It is a pair of songbirds,” he said. “Chaffinches, captured before the weather grew cold. A hen and her mate.”

  When she looked puzzled, he said, “Valentine’s Day is when birds choose their mates, is that not so? Thus it seemed a fitting present for me to make to you, my Valentine.” He knelt and presented it to her.

  She peered at the birds. “Will they sing?”

  “It is only the male who sings,” said Darnley. “As I do when I am with you.” He grasped her hand.

  “You sing extraordinarily well,” she said, extracting her hand.

  “Will you be my Valentine?” he said.

  “I am that already,” she said. “We drew names.”

  “I mean—beyond tonight.”

  He seemed sculpted out of a maiden’s secret dream, and he had appeared at exactly the moment when her yearning was at its highest pitch.

  “I—I do not know,” she replied.

  “Oh, tell me that I may hope!” he cried, grabbing her hand again and covering it with kisses. His head was a gleam of gold as he bent over her hand.

  “As I may,” she said. “As I hope for—” What did she hope for? So many things. But at that moment, that someday she could kiss his hair, his lips … “—happiness.”

  “Let me make you happy!” he murmured. She slipped her hand out of his and cupped his jaw in both her hands. She bent to kiss him, and as her lips touched his he rose and stood taller and taller, until her head tilted far back. His lips were like sweet jelly, and she wanted to roll on them, crush them, bite and taste them.

  “Ah. Mary,” he breathed, and clasped her to him. His body was lean but hard, slender, and trembling slightly beneath his thick velvet. “I wish to say something we can remember always, but only ‘Mary’ comes to my lips,” he said. He kissed her in many ways: lightly, like a schoolboy; hungrily, like a woman-starved soldier; slowly, like a sated man savouring the last morsel of honeycomb.

  “So much for poetry,” she finally said, pulling away to catch her breath. “It is never to hand when we need it.” She attempted to laugh, but he put his fingers to her lips.

  “Sssh,” he said. “We do not need it. We need no poetry.” He kissed her again. “You have not answered me. Will you be my Valentine?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, yes.”

  * * *

  Mary returned to Edinburgh a week later, and Darnley followed. There he was reunited with his father and formally welcomed by Lord James and all the Lords of the Congregation. James held a large banquet at Holyrood for Darnley and Lennox to meet Randolph and all the Scots noblemen present in Edinburgh. Mary laughingly sent word that she felt excluded, to which her brother sent back word that it was her own palace and she was free to do as she wished. Whereupon she invited the entire company to come to the royal apartments at the end of the evening. They did, crowding into the audience room and overflowing into her bedroom, where they drank more wine and used up all the cherry logs in her log basket, which she had been saving to burn some special evening, as she was very fond of their scent. Riccio and Darnley led the singing, their bass and tenor voices twining round each other.

  “I wish I were where Helen lies,

  Night and day on me she cries;

  O that I were where Helen lies,

  On fair Kirconnel lea!

  “O Helen fair, beyond compare!

  I’ll mak a garland o’ thy hair,

  Shall bind my heart for evermair,

  Until the day I die!”

  Mary was lost in a reverie induced by their voices when she became aware of Mary Livingston and John Sempill holding hands next to her. Even their arms were intertwined and for the first time in years she did not feel lonely and excluded at the sight of lovers holding hands.

  Darnley was singing just to her; he lifted his eyes and looked straight at her. Almost imperceptibly he tightened his lips, and at once she was awash in a surge of memories and desire.

  His kisses. From those first kisses on Valentine’s Day, to all the kisses he had given her during their private meetings at Wemyss, each seemed different. Each seemed to touch her in a different place, as though there were invisible threads between the lips and all the secret places in the body, and each place trembled
in a separate way. And once each place had been touched, it hungered for further touching.

  Why did no one tell me of this hunger? she thought.

  “Your Majesty,” said Mary Livingston. “I—we—” She leaned close and whispered, “John has asked me to be his wife. And I have told him I wish to be.”

  “Oh!” Mary said. “Why—you will be the first—the first of my Marys to wed. Yes, of course—I release you from your vow. With all my heart.”

  Livingston kissed her mistress gently on the cheek. “Thank you, kind Queen.”

  “And I insist you be married here at court. It will be the first wedding festivity at Holyrood. Oh, Lusty! This is the beginning—the beginning of happy times, weddings, and love, and births … for all of us.”

  * * *

  They were married on Shrove Tuesday, in a Protestant ceremony, and afterward there was a banquet and dancing at Holyrood. Mary had combined the masquing and elegance of a Shrovetide ball in France with the grandeur of a wedding feast. By the light of thousands of candles, silver-masked dancers moved in stately measure to the sweet music of psaltery, archlutes, and recorders.

  Mary, dressed in a gown of silver tissue with a ruff of lace-edged lawn and a mask of white and black feathers with diamond-studded streamers, danced with a variety of fantastical partners: a knight from King Arthur’s court, with antique armour, which limited his dancing ability (his voice betrayed him as Melville); a green and yellow cockatoo whose headdress was three feet tall (Randolph); St. Giles Cathedral, complete with crown-shaped spire (the portly Earl of Morton); Julius Caesar (Lord James), with woollen hose and sturdy boots peeking out from under his toga; a Highland chieftain, whose sword clanked and dragged across the floor (the French ambassador). Then Darnley, dressed as Goliath because of his height if not his breadth, took her in his arms.

  “Queen of mystery,” he said. “From across the hall I could see you, glittering in black and white.”

  “Colours that are no colours,” she murmured.

  “Because you have no colours?”

  “Because they are mourning colours.”

  “You are not in mourning.”

  “Not formally. But my late lord—”

  “Your ‘late lord,’ as you style him, is gone for four years. Convention does not demand mourning of such length.”

  “Convention does not know the heart,” she maintained.

  “The heart is a living thing, and yours, surely, is above all a living, and loving, thing.”

  He held her close to him, and his scanty costume pressed his bare flesh against her silver gown.

  “Will you love again, Madam? Nay, I know it. You have, you do, you will. But publicly, will you lay aside your mourning? I am well aware that mourning carries its own voluptuous beguilements—the cocooning, the reveries, the delicious recitations of memories and guilts. Also the feeling of accomplishment: I’ve loved, I loved well, it’s done.”

  “How dare you?” She pushed him away.

  “Because I love you.” He grabbed her, fending off the hovering solicitations of the Earl of Argyll nearby, awaiting his chance in his dolphin’s costume. “I love you, I love you, I feel I cannot live without you. And to see you pouring your love, your present, your future, offering it all to someone who is gone and cannot partake—nay, it breaks my heart! Though I may well be unworthy, offer it to someone more worthy; that I can applaud. But do not take the fairest flower of all the earth, and lay it in a tomb!”

  Tears trickled down his cheeks, and she gently wiped them away with her handkerchief. “Why, Henry,” she said, so surprised she was at a loss for words.

  “We go so soon to our own tombs,” he cried. “Do you not see that? To keep company at one out of season is an abomination.” He stopped dancing and clasped her hand. “Marry me, Mary. I would ask that of you if you were Mary the chambermaid and I Henry the groom. Let us cheat the tomb while we can, for we cannot cheat it long. But for now there are sweet-scented fires and verse from Ronsard, Bordeaux wine in Venetian goblets, and masks with peacock feathers. There are even diamonds on the ribbons and a Riccio to sing for us. Be my wife, Mary, and I promise you we will revel in all the beautiful things, the brief things, that earth offers us. Together we will romp as if we were in the Elysian Fields, along with Helen and Paris, Antony and Cleopatra … oh, they will envy us, the happiest mortals on earth.”

  “‘Happiness’ and ‘mortal’ are not two words that can be linked,” Mary replied. She began dancing again, to distract attention from them.

  “Not permanently, no, but ah! what a flare they can make upon this earth whilst they blaze.”

  “And extinguish themselves shortly thereafter.”

  “Why, you are afraid! You are a coward—this great daughter of the Stewarts, so brave in battle, so willing to risk shipwreck and bullets—you are afraid of this! To snatch happiness, if only for a moment, from the gods—”

  “‘The gods’? Are you not a Christian, a Catholic? Who are these pagan gods you invoke?”

  “Fate, Madam. For we all have a destiny, Christian or no, and creed has little to do with it whilst we live. Only afterwards … but why talk we of ‘afterwards’? Be mine now, upon this earth, in the palace, in my bed—” He kissed her as they danced, bending her head back, until her mask fell off.

  “Yes, I will,” she murmured. She retrieved her mask. “But I pray you”—they resumed dancing—“it must be our secret, for now. Powerful people will try to prevent it. Not fate, but certain people.”

  “I will slay them,” he said.

  “In this court there are many little Davids with accurate little slingshots,” she said. “Dear Goliath—let us keep our secret from them for our own safety, for now.”

  “Then you will be my wife?” he whispered.

  “And you will be my king,” she said softly, and he smiled in disbelief.

  A hulking black bear made his way toward them, recognizable through his costume as Lord Ruthven.

  “Here comes the jawbone of an ass,” said Darnley, laughing wildly. “Keeping to the Biblical theme.”

  The black bear came slouching up to them, growling. He lifted up a furry paw—accurate in its details even to the claws neatly sewn on each footpad—and raked at the air.

  Mary backed away; what was he doing?

  The bear took a swipe at Darnley, and a guttural, “Go back to your dam, you jackal,” issued from the muzzle. Darnley looked alarmed; the beast was uncomfortably real.

  “Why, how now, is it not Lord Ruthven?” he said, his voice unusually high.

  “It matters not who I am; it only matters that you return from whence you came, and right speedily.” The bear made another swat at him, and this time the claws caught on his costume.

  Mary said, “I command you to cease this provocation, whoever you are!” But she knew it was Lord Ruthven: his topaz-coloured eyes were showing through the costume’s eyeholes. Those eyes … she remembered hearing that he was a warlock with supernatural powers, and thinking, Yes, he had those eyes, yellow like the Devil’s.…

  Abruptly the bear turned and shuffled off.

  * * *

  John Knox shook his head as he let himself picture the masked wedding ball at Holyrood, with all its Whore-of-Babylon associations: Shrovetide, the annual Catholic excuse for overindulgence; men and women dressed in immodest costumes; lascivious dancing. Regardless of James Stewart’s assurances, the Catholics were regaining a foothold in the kingdom. Not only had the Protestant lords grown lax in their vigilance against the Papacy—as shown by a certain disinclination of late to attend Knox’s sermons at St. Giles—but the Lennox Stuarts had crept back into the land and even into the graces of the Queen. A foreigner, a slick, deformed Italian Papist spy, Riccio, now had insinuated himself into service as the Queen’s secretary for French affairs, and trotted after her everywhere, like a lapdog, panting and wagging his devilish tail.

  Knox felt tired. I am fifty-one years old now, and no end of this battle in s
ight, he thought. For a while it was going so well, and You were at my right hand, O Lord. But now my arms grow weary, and they droop, and the battle begins to turn. Pray You, send someone to hold them up when I falter. Send me an Aaron and a Hur.

  He shuffled over to his work desk. He did not feel like writing, he felt like lying down. But he flung off this lassitude and pulled his thick journal toward him.

  March 5, 1565: It is well known that shame-hasted marriage betwixt John Sempill, called the Dancer, and Mary Livingston, surnamed the Lusty …

  He sighed.

  What bruit the Marys and the rest of the dancers of the Court had, the ballads of this time do witness, which we for modesty’s sake omit.

  Why were people always so attracted to cavortings? Why so many ballads of lust and violence, and so few of God’s love?

  In the meantime, there is nothing in the court but banqueting, balling, and dancing, and other such pleasures as are meet to provoke the disordered appetite; and all for the entertainment of the Queen’s cousin from England, the Lord Darnley, to whom she shows all the expressions imaginable of love and kindness.

  Darnley. Knox slumped back in his chair and remembered the blank-faced lad who had come to St. Giles only once, in tow with the Lord James. He had sat in the area reserved for royalty and nobility, had come dressed in choice robes and furs, and had left before the sermon—on tithing—was over.

  Wherefore had he come? He was a Catholic—at least his mother was a notable one. Out of genuine desire for the Gospel? At first Knox had thought, had hoped, so. The Holy Spirit called forth from strange quarters. But looking at Darnley’s altogether innocent and empty face, his dusky eyes that held no depths or intellectual searching, he had realized it was either a completely spontaneous and meaningless accompaniment of the Lord James, or else it was a calculated political gesture, meant to disarm his Prostestant critics. The Lord Darnley was not a seeker after the truth.

  But then, who was? And among them, who would stay the course?

  Knox pushed his bound journal out of the way and laid his head on his arms. He was so tired.

  * * *

  James Melville strode into the audience chamber of the Queen with a certain amount of confidence. In the very beginning she had asked him, after all, to act this part, to be her private monitor. He had, at first, been puzzled and reluctant to accept this strange position, which, as she made clear, consisted of pointing out to her her errors made from ignorance of local custom and manners. He had assured her that her natural judgement and her experience in the French court would suffice, but she had demurred.

 

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