“I have committed many errors, upon no evil meaning, for lack of the admonition of loving friends,” she had said. “As I know, courtiers flatter princes, and will never tell them the truth, because they are afraid to lose their favour. But you—you will not be so. And you will never lose my favour. Unless you go and kiss Master Knox during one of his sermons! So pray restrain yourself!”
Now Melville must exercise this heavy duty. For the Queen, of late—
“James Melville, pray enter.”
A guard gestured him into the audience chamber. He stood and waited.
“Dear Melville!” Mary came forward, emerging from her private chamber, her arms extended.
“Your Majesty.”
She smiled and took her seat in her chair of estate, with its royal canopy. Yet she settled on it like a woman merely entertaining a friend.
“Good Melville, thank you for coming to me.” She continued to smile, and he saw that the smile was different, coming from something happy deep within, something self-sustaining.
“My most beloved Queen, you asked me to come to you when I perceived anything that might hinder your standing with your people. Of late—of late—”
“You are so agitated, dear James.” She stepped down from the chair of estate and seated herself next to him. She had put on a heavy perfume and it was cloying. “Now, what is it?”
He wanted to wave his hand to waft away the perfume. It smelt like dying violets.
“Your servant, Riccio,” he said.
“What of him?”
“He has become, of late—so people perceive—more prominent than ever. They see and hear of him everywhere. For your own sake, and his, I must advise you to keep him more in the background.”
“I do not know what you mean.” She stiffened beside him.
“The common people perceive he is a spy, a Papist spy. They are using that deadly word to describe him, a word that bodes ill to a Stewart: favourite.” He managed to make the word sound like a curse. He took a breath and went on. “The royal Stewarts are a great dynasty. Their courage and beauty and devotion to their people is unparalleled. Yet they have a fatal flaw: they choose lowborn favourites. James III, with his favourite, Robert Cochrane, the architect of the Great Hall at Stirling, incurred the hatred of his nobles. And, begging your royal pardon, your own father’s devotion to his favourite, Oliver Sinclair, was in large part responsible for the failure at Solway Moss. The nobles would not follow him.”
She said quietly, “And they think David Riccio is my Oliver Sinclair?”
“I fear it, Madam.”
“But he merely attends to my foreign correspondence.”
“That is not how it is perceived.”
“I am closeted with him only to give him instructions!”
“Again, that is not how it is perceived.”
“Ohhh!” She stood up and clenched her fists. “Is every hour I spend to be scrutinized? What matter what hours I confer with him?” She began pacing the room.
“It is not just the common people. As you spend more time closeted with him, conferring with him, those who have served as your principal advisers are increasingly shoved aside. They view this with alarm. Madam, this is no secret. You have long known that your own councillors harbour ill will toward him.”
“Oh. You mean, of course, the Lord James and Maitland.”
“There are others as well,” he said quietly.
“Oh! I am so tired of being misunderstood!” She stood still for a moment, as though she would calm an inner sea. Then she spoke. “It grieves me that people have misperceptions. Truly, Riccio is only—”
“You need not convince me, Your Majesty. It is they whom you must convince, the great nameless they who populate the land and plague all rulers who do not suit them. And in England, your sister Queen is sending ever more strident messages about your lack of interest in her ‘dear Robin.’”
“But not to me. Never directly to me.”
“Reportedly she has at last declared her intentions about ‘dear Robin’ and the succession.” He was pleased to see the curiosity on her face, but it was an oddly impersonal curiosity, as if the outcome did not concern her. Suddenly he noticed her unusual amount of jewellery, and the fact that her gown was scarlet. She was out of mourning. “Spies reveal news at least a week earlier than the official couriers, but it is not always accurate. Nonetheless, as a first reading it is instructive.”
“Well?”
“She has said that although it would please her greatly if you would take her beloved and most highly esteemed Earl of Leicester as a consort, she feels herself unable to declare a successor until she herself is either married or has decided never to marry.”
“Ohhh!” Mary exhaled a long low sigh. “So in the end she declares nothing. Thank God I did not marry him!” She walked over to the window that overlooked the forecourt, as if something of great interest was below. “So I am free to do as I like! I need not consider her at all. Nay, I shall not! Nay, I would not! What a fool I have been even to entertain the idea!”
“No, no, it was politically expedient to consult her. But as I told you when I returned from her court, I perceived neither plain dealing nor upright meaning in her, but only great dissimulation, envious rivalry, and fear.”
“Hmmmm.” She smiled as though all that were welcome news. “Envious rivalry, you say? Well, I care not.”
Indeed she did seem careless of what she had so eagerly sought earlier and for so long: recognition by Elizabeth, approval by Elizabeth.
“One plays a better game that way,” Melville conceded. “It can be a winning tactic.”
“Hmmm.” She continued looking out the window, and he realized she was awaiting something—or someone.
“Marriage seems to be in the air, though it is scarcely spring yet.” Lumps and mounds of snow lay everywhere, piled against gateways and plugging up the drainage channel in the High Street. “The first of the Marys has wed, and John Knox enjoys his honeymoon just up the street,” said Melville.
“John Knox!” She laughed. “And with my distant kinswoman, too!” She laughed even harder, so tears began to stream down her face. “His little Stewart is only seventeen! Someone my age is too old for the fifty-year-old widower, I see! His first wife must have died of a surfeit of Scripture-pudding, and now his new one must perform the duties of Abishag and lie on his feet to warm them—and the angels only know what else!”
“Your Majesty!”
She gave a wild laugh. Then she turned back to the window and continued to keep watch.
Melville took his leave, backing out of the audience chamber. The high doors were closed behind him, and he turned and descended the wide staircase leading to the ground floor. He emerged into the forecourt, with each cobblestone a little island in the March slush, and began treading his way carefully across it. What had come over the Queen? She seemed possessed, not herself.
Riding through the gateway was Lord Darnley, on his big pale horse. He was flipping an hourglass.
“Now Master Knox will have to trim his sermons!” he cried. “I have switched it for one with less sand, by the pulpit at St. Giles.” He grinned and spread his black cloak like a magician.
From her window, Melville saw the Queen waving at Darnley.
XIX
Mary and Darnley kept to themselves, in front of all the others, as they trotted along the road leading from Edinburgh to Stirling. It was a bracing March day, clear and haunting, with winds that seemed to have raided winter’s larder and found it empty, triumphantly proclaiming an early spring. Already the hawking and hunting would be good at Stirling, and even if they were not, Mary felt that she must escape the confines of Edinburgh.
Edinburgh—where Knox all but reigned, where the houses huddled darkly together like gossiping women, where her spirit felt stifled. The Lords of the Congregation were the true lords of Edinburgh, and their hands were heavy upon it.
But outside, away in the countryside, ah! wh
at space, what colours, what clean wild wind. Stirling lay some thirty-seven miles to the northwest of Edinburgh, if one followed the Firth of Forth until it became just the River Forth. As the river became shallower, it turned silver, and reflected the March sky with all its shades of grey-blue and racing clouds. The land around it was just shedding its mole-coloured winter coat, and an iridescent shade of green was already visible in certain lights.
“The hawks will be waiting?” asked Darnley. “I had a wonderful falcon in England, but I had to leave her.”
“These are from the Orkneys. You will be pleased with them.” She turned around in the saddle and saw the rest of the party a hundred yards back, all strung out in a brightly coloured line: the three Marys, Riccio, Melville, and the Lord James. The servants, musicians, churchmen, and chamberlains had gone on ahead to prepare the royal quarters.
“Will they obey me?” he asked.
“Of course. Will they not recognize a true prince?” She leaned across her saddle and kissed him.
Ah … his kisses … We must be married soon, she thought, or I shall surely fall into sin. I think of him and his body even in my sleep, when I am supposed to be resting.
“How much farther?” Darnley was asking.
“It is not far until we reach Stirling Bridge. Where—”
“Where Wallace defeated the English in 1297. Pray do not give me another history lesson. Just because you have felt obligated to memorize every fact about Scottish history, pray do not bore me with it.”
His flip words annoyed her. And what of his speech about feeling Scottish? “It is your history too, or so you claimed. And if you are to be King—”
“King of the present, not of the past.”
“Still, you should learn the rudiments of Scottish history,” she said.
“Ah, you sound like a schoolteacher.” He frowned and put on a begging aspect. “’Tis true you are three years older and a queen, but I am loath to be your pupil.”
“What would you be, then?”
“Your husband, your lover, your lord, your friend.”
“All these … can one person be all?”
“In an ideal world. Which we will make.”
They approached Stirling Castle, rearing two hundred and fifty feet from the plain like a gigantic mushroom. The sides of the cliff served up the castle like an offering. It was massive, grey, an apparition from Camelot. There were battlements, bastions, portcullises, and cannon; there were royal apartments, a ceremonial great hall, a lady’s lookout bower, formal knot gardens, a royal park for the breeding of deer, and jousting grounds: a self-contained dream world of knighthood.
“I spent my childhood here before I left Scotland,” Mary told Darnley. “It was not safe for me to be anywhere else. King Henry VIII’s soldiers were invading our land and trying to kidnap me.”
“You had to take refuge here? You could not live anywhere else?” He sounded incredulous.
“Yes. I was born at Linlithgow, the palace we passed on our way here. But within a few months I was brought here, to Stirling. I was crowned Queen here, in the Chapel Royal, when I was only nine months old.”
“Which, I take it, you cannot remember.”
“No. Of course not.”
“What a pity. To be crowned a queen, and not remember it.” He frowned.
“We stayed here all the time, my mother and I, and the Marys. And some of my half brothers and sisters … James was here, and Robert and John Stewart, and Jean Stewart. And while we played, and rode our ponies, and had our lessons, Henry VIII was destroying our land. At one point the English came within six miles of Stirling, and so my mother and I fled to a little island in the Lake of Menteith.”
“How boring.”
“No, it was lovely. There was a monastery there, and—” And it was a special time, a private time I cannot describe, even to you. I am not sure it all really happened as I remember it.
“Monks!” He made a face. “But then what happened?”
Could he really not know? “Henry VIII died, but it was no release for us. His successor, Edward VI, let them continue plaguing us. His foremost general, Edward Seymour, led troops right up near Edinburgh. There was a big battle, the Battle of Pinkie Clough, and the Scots lost. Then my mother and everyone knew that the Scots could not withstand England on their own. We had to sell ourselves to France.” How ugly that sounded. She had never recited all these things out loud before, had never heard their ominous, leaden inevitability. “So I was promised as a bride to the Dauphin, in exchange for French protection. The French King sent a royal ship for me. And so I went to France. And there I grew up, married the Dauphin—”
“And ended up back in Scotland,” he finished. “Thirteen years later.”
“But the whole world changed in those thirteen years. Two new rulers for England—”
“And a new one for Scotland. The Reformed Kirk,” said Darnley. “It rules with a heavy hand.”
“Aye.” Its hand was sometimes heavier than she felt she could bear. “But its hand lies mainly in Edinburgh. Here we are free of it.”
“Yes. Except for—” he jerked his head toward the Lord James, far in the rear. “Why ever did you bring him along?”
“He wished to come. And he works hard. ‘Yet the labourer is worthy of his hire.’”
Darnley made a face. “I do not like Bible quotes, even in jest.”
They passed through the outer defences and over a ramp leading to the gatehouse with its huge, drumlike towers guarding the entrance to the castle, and attained the height of the rock. The wind tore at them. Mary Fleming’s hat blew off and tumbled quickly across the paved stones before being sucked out over the battlements and disappearing.
“Oh!” she cried, astonished at the speed with which it happened.
“Gone to grace some townsman’s wife,” said Lord James. “An act of charity.”
* * *
Mary assigned Darnley to the King’s apartments, which caused the entire company to whisper, as she had known it would. But she could not help herself. Why should she place him in the crowded west wing of the royal apartments, when the gracious and well appointed King’s apartments stood empty?
Stirling boasted a fine set of double apartments for the Queen and King, with adjoining bedchambers. James V had built the facilities only two years before his death, and he had been proud of all the fashionable features: the series of three chambers in increasing degrees of privacy, leading to the conjoined bedchambers in the eastern wing, the private closets off each bedchamber, with work quarters and bathrooms, the high ceilings in the King’s Presence Chamber, decorated with carved roundels. The view from the Queen’s apartments showed all of the countryside out beyond the castle, and let in the morning light.
Marie de Guise had kept the King’s apartments shuttered and silent, and had let no one pass into them. It was her way of mourning. Mary remembered that she had once ventured into them and received a scolding all out of proportion to her offense. The rooms had been dark and filled with dust, and the big carved heads on the ceiling had looked like monsters. She had not wanted ever to go there again, but had harboured a secret fear that her father’s ghost or skeleton was there. But upon her return to Scotland, she had ordered the King’s apartments opened, aired, and painted, and today they were sumptuous and inviting.
They settled into their assigned quarters. Mary ran through hers, finding all in order, and hesitantly knocked on Darnley’s connecting door. He flung it open.
“No spies,” he whispered, taking her in his arms. “Is it not a miracle?”
* * *
Alone, after dinner, the royal party having said its good nights, Darnley felt safe when he closed his door. He looked around the room, with its gilded furnishings and its high bed with elaborately embroidered hangings and valances fringed in gold. This was the King’s room, and he, Henry, Lord Darnley, was soon to be King. King of Scotland. That for Queen Elizabeth and her mouldy old court!
He
sat quietly for a few moments, listening for any noise. Had everyone truly settled down for the night? Mary was not likely to come seeking him; she had looked almost apologetic as she told him how tired she was. Still, he waited. Then he got up and made his way across the chamber to open his travelling bag. Inside was something he wanted very much.
He felt around his other personal belongings, his ledger, his writing materials, his medicines which his mother had packed for him (“Never be without them!” she had said sternly) for his coughs and rheums, his sleeping mask to combat his insomnia, until he found it, gurgling as sweetly as a babe in its swaddling clothes. He drew it forth: it was a flask of whisky, the legendary drink up here. Oh, how he had longed to try it! Now he had managed to obtain a bottle from the accommodating Earl of Atholl.
Eagerly he twisted off its cap and took a giant swallow of it. It was so much stronger than the wine he was used to that he felt as if a fist had smashed into his chest, and he coughed. He could not believe a liquid could have such strength; even poison would be gentler, he thought.
Neither was he prepared for the fact that the whisky seemed to race from his stomach into his brain. It felt as if he had poured it directly into his head.
I might as well have poured it into my ear, he thought. The idea struck him as extremely funny. He took another large gulp. This one did not burn so much as it went down.
Your fellow has already left a path, he thought. His head was starting to feel as if it were lifting off his shoulders, and he was getting that lovely feeling he got from nothing else. It was a feeling he looked forward to, a feeling of peace and being where no one could touch him, where he did not have to answer to anyone. His mother faded as if he had left her behind in another room, as he had. This room was his private room, the spinning one in his head that he sought as often as he could.
Mary Queen of Scotland and the Isles Page 36