In High Places

by Bonny G Smith

  Her life at the French court had seemed charmed; she was loved and doted upon by all. Her Guise uncles, the king of France, and most of all, her beloved friend and childhood companion, the Dauphin François, had all made much of her. It was a rare royal marriage that was also a love match, but she had loved François, and he had loved her back. And then she had lost her beloved François to an early death when they were little more than children. No more was she the charmed little queen whom everyone loved and admired. With the death of François, she had been stripped of the brilliant future she had been vouchsafed as Queen of France. Hard on the heels of the death of her husband had come the news that her mother was dead. And so she had been torn from everything she had come to love in France to face life in barbarous Scotland as its reigning queen. Her fate had seemed set; she was to have graced the refined French court as its queen, an ornament to François, whilst regents ruled in her name in her native land.

  But with the death of her mother, she was needed in Scotland, and no longer wanted in France. The malice that had shone from her mother-in-law’s eyes the day that she had been informed that there was no longer any reason for her to remain in France, and that there was every urgent need for her to return to Scotland, told its own tale.

  Still, she was young, she was beautiful, and she was a reigning queen. She went to Scotland where again she was envied for her seeming blessings. But she had never been taught to rule. But what awaited her in Scotland was only more heartbreak. The betrayals, first of her bastard brother, then Darnley, then her own people, had been devastating. She had lost Bothwell to exile, and finally to death. But it had not stopped there; Elizabeth, her cousin and fellow queen, had also betrayed her. Once more she had been forced to flee her realm, and instead of the support and assistance she had been promised…yes, promised! …by Elizabeth, she had been placed under house arrest and had languished there for ten long years now.

  Mary swung her legs over the side of the bed and held her head in her hands. Seton could tell by her irregular breathing that she was weeping.

  “Oh, Your Grace,” she said, kneeling at Mary’s feet. “I beg you, do not despair. We have come too far to give up, have we not?”

  Mary lifted her head and drew a ragged breath. The fire was burning low; the room was becoming chill. She stared into the waning flames. The yellow and orange of the fire blurred as her eyes filled with tears.

  She had been riding high ever since George Douglas and Archbishop Beaton had stolen their visit with her at Wingfield Manor; the intervening two and a half years had flown by much more quickly than had any of the years of her incarceration. The waiting for events and the news that followed them was irksome, but there had been hope, real hope. In January, Don Juan had won a decisive victory over the Dutch Protestants at Gemblours. Things were finally happening; all seemed fair fit to succeed. Don Juan would finally complete his conquest of the Low Countries and the Protestants, and then Philip would send the promised reinforcements to invade England, and depose Elizabeth. She and Don Juan would marry and rule a united England and Scotland, and together they would restore the Catholic faith to the land, saving its people from heresy and hellfire.

  Hard on the heels of her fiancé’s resounding victory came heady news from Scotland; James Douglas, 4th Earl of Morton, Regent of Scotland and her poor bairn’s gaoler, had been deposed by the opposition party in her kingdom, under the auspices of Colin Campell, 6th Earl of Argyll, and his henchman, John Stewart, 4th Earl of Atholl. Both were good Catholics and loyal to the Queen’s Party in Scotland. Along with Alexander Erskine of Gogar, the men had forced Regent Morton from power. The Regent had surrendered Edinburgh Castle, Holyrood Palace, Stirling Castle, and most importantly, James himself.

  She knew from reports she received from Archbishop Beaton that James hated and loathed the Mortons and claimed that he was ill-treated by them. She had no difficulty believing it. Morton was a despicable man who had risen to power on the ruins of her own disastrous reign. He and his fellow traitors had rooted at the trough of poor Scotland for years now. And had Scotland not suffered a bevy of regents since she was forced to flee her realm to England after the disaster at Carberry Hill? The people of Scotland shared her disdain; her brother, the Earl of Moray, had been assassinated, ending his brief reign; and he James’ own uncle! And then the Earl of Lennox, her father-in-law and James’ grandfather, had been fatally wounded trying to defend his regency. John Erskine, the Earl of Mar, had fared no better; Regent Mar had died in suspicious circumstances, many believed of poison at the hands of the ambitious Earl of Morton. For six long years, James had suffered under the tender mercies of Morton and his countess.

  And then the brilliant news of Mar’s surrender and ouster had come. She had triumphantly issued an edict through Archbishop Beaton that Prince James himself was to be invested with the regency on her behalf, although he was not yet twelve years old.

  But Philip had failed to send either funds or additional troops, and Don Juan was unable to hold his gains. Little by little, the Netherlands once again began to slip from his grasp. And with this change in Philip’s fortunes, her own waned. Don Juan languished all but powerless in the Low Countries; and then news came to inform her that Morton had retaken Stirling, had James back in his clutches, and that this odious man was once again in the ascendant. There had been a brief glimmer of hope in August when civil war threatened to oust Morton a second time, but an accord had been reached. Morton was now President of the Council, and the Queen’s Party in Scotland neutralized once more.

  While this was disturbing news, there was still the hope that Philip would change his mind and supply Don Juan with the sinews of war once again, and that he should be able to proceed with their plans. But like so many before him, he had been struck with the tertian fever so prevalent in the marshes and swamps of the Netherlands. He had died there a broken, disillusioned man, leaving Mary devastated and her brilliant plans for restoration in Scotland and usurpation in England in shreds.

  Mary sighed. She leaned down and reached for Seton’s hand, which she had raised in supplication.

  “Ah, dear, dear Seton,” she sighed on a ragged sob. “I wish there were even the most tenuous shred of hope to which to cling. But alas, I can see none.”

  Seton searched her mind for something, anything that she could offer to gainsay the queen’s dire assessment. But try as she might, she could think of nothing.

  Richmond Palace, January 1579

  The Twelve Days of Christmas had been very cold, and London had even seen some significant snowfall. But as January began to slide downhill towards February, the days became remarkably warmer. It appeared as if London might be in for an early spring. That suited Elizabeth; otherwise, it would have been too cold for the joust and some of the other outdoor activities she had planned to impress Simier. As it was, the day was fine, with a bright sun and a breeze from the south that had all the colorful pennons and banners of the tiltyard fluttering, snapping and flitting like butterflies. The noise of the crowd rose in a collective sigh as each opponent made his way in full, colorful panoply down the length of the tiltyard to his place at the bar. The cheers would reach a crescendo as the men made their thunderous charge, then die on the air as one or the other shattered a lance or sent his challenger crashing to the ground.

  Ah, Simier. She stole a sideways glance at him. Such a handsome man! Most men at his age…she guessed him to be in his middle thirties…either took on a sculpted aspect that finely chiseled their features, or they became puffy and began to run to fat. Like Robert! She gave a snort and a mental shrug. She allowed her gaze to wander in his direction. Nowadays, his eyes were always trained on her; in their liquid depths she fancied she perceived a desperate longing that was now never to be fulfilled. For while they were both free there had always been just that hint of the possible. Now he was married, and forever beyond her reach. For a fleeting moment she experienced all the old fierce hunger, but she fought it back. Love, she had de
cided, was a subtle form of madness. It made one deaf as well as blind. That was an acceptable thing, if inconvenient, for any normal person to endure; but it had the potential for disaster in a queen. Had not her sister Mary’s marriage to Philip of Spain demonstrated this more than amply? No more! She would never love again, and she certainly had no intention of ever loving a husband.

  She shifted her eyes again and they happened to light upon Sir Francis Knollys. He nodded acknowledgement that the Queen of England was looking at him, but his face reddened and he quickly looked away. And well he might, the knave! For he was doubly in her bad offices now. He deplored the possibility of her marriage with Alençon, and he hated and distrusted Simier; but more than that, he had insisted in the fall of the previous year that Robert and Lettice, who was after all his daughter, marry publicly in the sight of all to lay to rest the rumors that they were not, in fact, already married. Such was the very nature of secret alliances; such were forever open to speculation and doubt.

  She had been very upset by the news, which had been kept from her by her ladies and the men of her Council for as long as possible. But the fact of this second ceremony could not be hidden from her forever. In the end, it was Simier who had given the game away, and she knew why. He hoped to curry favor with her on Alençon’s behalf; and he strove always to discredit and separate her from Robert, whom he viewed as anathema because of the hope of a match for her with his master.

  After a halcyon Summer Progress with Robert by her side, she had become ill with an abscess of the gums at the turn of the season. All of October and November she had experienced the terrible, nerve-racking pain of toothache. When December came she was practically out of her mind with the constant throbbing and the agony she was suffering. There was no help for it; the tooth must be pulled. She had never had a tooth pulled before, and the dread such a thing engendered in her breast was second only to the days when she had feared for her very life. It was absurd, she knew; there was more danger in delay that there was in proceeding. But bring herself to face the ordeal she simply could not. By mid-December, the surgeon had been summoned no less than four times, and been sent away as many, his task unfulfilled.

  “Your Grace,” said Dr. Aylmer, “the procedure will not be painless, but the relief it affords, the release from this perpetual pain, will be well worth it.”

  Her face swollen and her eyes wild, Elizabeth had lashed out mercilessly. “That is easy for you to say, my lord, who do not face such a nightmare!”

  Dr. Aylmer was an old man; he was old enough to have been the queen’s grandfather. Respect for the crown and the person of the queen aside, he felt as protective of her as if she had been his own child.

  “That is true,” he conceded. “But what if I were to demonstrate to Your Grace that the procedure is mercifully swift? One tug, and soon over.”

  “Oh,” she exclaimed sarcastically. “And how, pray tell, does one plan to make such a demonstration? Shall we tug out one of your own molars, then?”

  She reached out a hand as Blanche wordlessly proffered the hot plaster that Elizabeth kept pressed to her cheek. It did not relieve the excruciating pain she was experiencing, but it helped to mask it somewhat. But inevitably the plaster would lose its virtue as it lost its heat and once again the queen would shake her head like a perplexed bloodhound and bite her fist in agony.

  Dr. Aylmer regarded the distressed queen with genuine sympathy.

  “Your Grace,” he said, “the lord knows that I have but few teeth left; but if the sacrifice of one, or all of them, would serve to convince Your Gracious Majesty of the simplicity of the procedure, gladly will I make such a sacrifice. He beckoned the barber surgeon and the apothecary who assisted him. The man approached holding an evil-looking tool with a relish that he hoped the queen was too preoccupied to notice. “How now,” he said. “Watch, Your Grace.” With that he opened his mouth and without hesitation the surgeon chose his quarry and yanked.

  Elizabeth’s competitive spirit rose in her breast, as Dr. Aylmer had hoped it would. “Oh, God’s Teeth,” she exclaimed. “If it must be done, then let us do it before the revels commence!” She opened her mouth, the barber surgeon pulled, and it was over in a trice. She blinked. It was true that the pulling itself had been unpleasant, but not intolerable; the miracle was that the intense, throbbing pain she had been suffering for so long ceased immediately, to be replaced by a more subtle discomfort. And that abated with every moment that escaped to add to the distance between herself and the pain of the past months. She held the now lukewarm plaster to her face, but the terrible sensitivity had gone.

  She smiled for the first time in months, and held a long-fingered white hand out to Dr. Aylmer. “My thanks to you, my lord,” she said. She made a mental note to have Cecil bestow a manor upon the man.

  A collective groan from the crowd brought her back to the here and now; one of the jousters was unseated by his opponent and had hit the ground with a ringing of metal. Simier laughed and clapped his approval.

  “You are a brutal one,” she simpered, showing only her eyes to him above her elaborate peacock feather fan. Elizabeth was aware that her hands were very beautiful, and unusual with their long, white fingers. Holding and handling a fan, even though one was certainly not needed in January, drew attention to them. Genuine peacock feathers had been clipped to make the fan; it opened into a perfect replica of a peacock’s tail at the flick of the royal wrist. The diamonds that adorned it winked and sparkled in the sunlight. Simier only smiled, showing even teeth that seemed startlingly white against his dark complexion. There were none left to tell her that such a ploy was her mother’s, who used to fondle a rose to draw attention to her own lovely hands, once the deformity in her finger was hidden by her trailing sleeves.

  Her remark about Simier’s brutal nature was not an idle one. When it was known that he would be coming to court to present Alençon’s conditions for their marriage, Walsingham had conducted his usual thorough enquiry. What he found was chilling, but then it was not Simier that she was going to marry, it was Alençon. The story had intrigued her when she first heard it, but when she had met Simier for the first time, what he had done made perfect sense.

  It seemed that Simier had done what men had been doing for time immemorial; he went off to war leaving at home a young, beautiful wife. During his lengthy absence in the Netherlands, his wife had had an affair with his younger brother. Simier had had his brother murdered and his corpse hung from the iron gates that graced his estate. His wife had died shortly afterwards, ostensibly of a broken heart; but dark rumors also swirled about poison. Ironically, Elizabeth did not hold these ruthless acts against Simier; had she not felt exactly the same compulsion when she was informed of Robert and Lettice’s betrayal? Had she been able to, she would have killed them both with her own hands. But even her threat to throw Robert in the Tower had been, essentially, an empty one.

  She would never forget the day that Simier arrived at court from France; he was accompanied by an entourage as impressive as if he himself were the prince he came to represent. Alberto Gondi, the French ambassador, brought him to court to be introduced to the Queen of England. She had been in a mood of desperation and indecision regarding the upcoming marriage negotiations, which left her irritable and fractious. Instead of the warm welcome she meant to display to Alençon’s man, she had exploded in rage at Gondi. She had accused the two men of complicity in seeking to fob Alençon off onto her, for she knew that Queen Catherine and King Henri no longer wished the duc to remain in France; she accused them of secretly taking the part of Mary of Scotland, who, she said, was the worst woman in the world, and whose head should have been cut off long since. She assured them that the Queen of Scotland would never be free as long as she was Queen of England!

  The accusation was ironic, considering that Walsingham’s spies had gleaned the information that Mary actually approved of a match between her royal cousin and Alençon. François had been only six years of age when Mary
left France for Scotland, and the little boy had been a particular favorite of hers. She hoped that once married to the Queen of England that Alençon might advocate for her, perhaps even talk Elizabeth into freeing her and allowing her to rule Scotland once again.

  Gondi was a career diplomat and took the berating stoically, but Simier had knelt before her most disarmingly, and with tears in his eyes had begged her forgiveness for anything that might prevent him from basking in the glow of the company of the Queen of England. Simier was well aware of Elizabeth’s weakness for flattery, and he exploited that weakness most successfully, whilst her Council looked on in disgust. By the time Simier bowed himself out of the queen’s presence, he had received the signal honor of a royal nickname; she called him her monkey, a clever play of words on his name and his dark good looks.

  As she watched his retreating back, with shoulders so broad and hips so narrow, she experienced a most unusual sensation of longing that bordered on naked lust. She had waited all her life to marry, always demurring at the moment when a final commitment must be made. Did they not realize, these men of her Council, that she was constantly afraid? She was like a tightly wound spring that occasionally exploded in a fit of temper so fierce that it often left grown men in tears. Such prolonged reticence followed by violent fits of rage were not good for her health. The strain was taking its toll. If she truly wanted to marry, Alençon was her last chance.

  She glanced fondly at Simier, who was once again engrossed in the tilt. The negotiations with Alençon could take months; in the meantime, she intended to take full advantage of Simier’s presence. He made love to her constantly under the guise of representing Alençon, but the two of them were daily growing more and more enamored of each other. Simier had already expressed his undying love for her, and his regret that their stations made a match between the two of them impossible. His eyes smoldered when he looked at her, when he kissed her hand, when he sat beside her in his favored place on the royal platform every evening.