“No, Madam,” he says, in a voice as cold as the castle. “Your honor hangs in the balance. Even I may not be able to retrieve it from this. He will be tried at Saint Andrews and, if he is found guilty in law, he will pay the price.”
Chastelard moans in despair. As I look down at him, his face against the stone floor, I feel sorry for him. His passion for the Queen has made him mad.
I turn my head to look at her. I remember the morning before the battle at Corrichie and the way she set her jaw after she had watched the captain hanged and was preparing to send hundreds more to their deaths. She looks the same at this moment, her eyes like the Atlantic Sea, lips pale, knuckles white.
≈ ≈ ≈
Saint Andrews, the university town, prides itself on being an intellectual place, somehow above the veniality and mire of Edinburgh. But as if to make up for its high-mindedness, its citizens take an inordinate delight in torture and death. Chastelard’s sentence—beheading—has barely been announced when people begin gathering in the square to watch it carried out.
Lord James comes to fetch the Queen from the chambers where we waited during the trial. When she would demur, he lays his hand on her arm. There is no more pressure in his touch than Seton might make while helping her undress, but it carries a menace that makes me shiver.
“Do you understand what he has done to your honor?” he asks.
“He has done nothing to my honor,” she says, her measured tone matching his. “I have never been alone with him. He was apprehended by guards in my bedchamber, in front of witnesses. How can my honor be tarnished by his crime, when I am innocent?”
“This is Scotland, sister, not France where you may fawn over your courtiers and no one will blink. You have brought it on yourself with your encouragement of him. Now you will come and watch his punishment, and try to retrieve what little remains of your reputation.”
He gives me a cold glance as he draws back. “Make your mistress ready. Do not let her swoon or weep. You women know how to turn such things on and off at will.”
The people gather, jostling, grinning, elbowing to the front for a better view. The square is humming with the buzz of voices. When the Queen appears on the platform, the sound builds quickly to a roar. Her face is set, her expression hard. Gone is the shining Queen who beams upon her people. Come instead, the Queen of stone, who will send a man to his death rather than suffer a stain upon her reputation.
When Chastelard is brought out, the roar abruptly falls, and an eerie silence settles over the square. He listens when the charge and conviction are read out, then turns to look at the Queen across the crowd. Next to her, Lord James says without moving his lips, “Look at him; do not falter.” But she does not need the reminder. I can sense from beside her that she has severed any kind feeling she held for him.
Poet to the last, he refuses priest or minister and falls to his knees to recite the poem “Hymn to death” by his countryman Ronsard. When it is done, he cries out, “Adieu, you most beautiful princess. Adieu, most cruel princess in the world,” and lays down his head.
With a poet’s calculation, perhaps he knows that even as the ax falls the words are being repeated in the hearts of the people in the square. They will ripple outward like a great tide, making their way surely across the land, reaching into every last corner of it. Ah, cruel Queen. Queen almighty, Queen worthy to rule us, Queen to be feared as well as loved.
When his head falls, a cry goes up from the crowd and the gathered gulls on the building tops all take fright and rise, wheeling across the square and out toward the sea, their mournful cries drifting back to us, their feathers light on the wind.
Sixteen
The rain pours down on our passage home from Fife. The sleet bites our faces, our fingers grow numb on the reins. The Queen rides in a litter, but the rest of us must continue on horseback. I do not care. I do not wish to ride close to her.
In life I hated Chastelard, but in death I feel a kinship with my rival for her affections. A wrong choice could see me laying my head on the block too. I have bound myself to her with ties of love and service and reward. I am trapped.
The Queen tries to make our arrival at Holyrood as ordinary as possible, with a plain meal and some music. I eat nothing and sip only a little wine. I can feel Angelique’s gaze upon me, but I ignore her. As soon as it is late enough, I slip away from the great hall. I walk through the palace grounds in the moonlight, watching the frost glitter on the ground. The bare twigs and trunks poke from the earth, the beginnings of the Queen’s French garden trying to survive the Scottish winter.
The moon is silver ice, and I can hear the lions that some dignitary has sent from Africa, grumbling and snarling in their winter house. Poor wretches, the cold will surely kill them before long, as it is killing the French roses and lilacs that the gardeners try to nurture in the shelter of the stone walls. But on a night like this, the frost’s fingers reach into every corner and no French exotic is safe. Even the air smells metallic, like blood.
My chest hurts. When I can stand it no longer, I make my way inside and to my bedchamber. I open the door quietly so as not to wake Angelique, but her eyes are open wide. She has kept the fire burning and the room is warm. When she sees my face, she slides out of bed and comes toward me.
It is her touch that undoes me. I do not know what it feels like to cry, having not done so since my mother was murdered. It is only when she reaches her hand to my shoulder and I feel the weight of human comfort that my heart lurches like ice-melt. Something cracks. I take a breath and what comes out is a sob.
Angi draws me close and presses my face to her neck. When my body begins to heave, she knows how to muffle my sobs and hold me. The fact that I have never been held thus makes it all the more terrible.
When the sobs are wrung out of me and my breath has quietened, she takes my face in her hands and looks at me in the half-light. I flinch under her gaze, exposed.
She puts her lips against my forehead and her kiss speaks of everything my heart has longed for. There is no ownership and no power and no life-or-death in it, nothing but this moment, her neck wet with my weeping, the fire dying down, our bodies next to each other. Then she draws me into bed and I fall into an exhausted sleep, facing her. When I wake the next morning, she is gone.
≈ ≈ ≈
I have spent most of my life in disguise, never letting anyone close enough to touch me and find out the truth. I applied the strictures to myself as well. I have been as pious as any religious woman. I have never gone seeking what made me a woman, never discovered the source of that ache.
All day I am useless at my tasks. I ride out in a small party with the Queen, but even as we canter through the park, all I can sense is the longing in my body. I am both dreading the night when I must face Angi again, and desperate.
“You don’t seem yourself today, Alison.” The Queen rides close without me noticing.
I try to cover my start. “I feel a little strange, Your Grace.”
“Are you ill, perhaps?”
“I think it is just my monthly time.” I take a breath. “Perhaps I could be excused from your chambers this evening?”
“You may,” she says. “It has been a tiring few days.”
≈ ≈ ≈
While the rest of the palace attends dinner, I pile the fire in our tiny bedchamber with more than the usual allowance of peat and a few sticks of wood I have smuggled in. I take off my clothes, put on my nightgown, get into bed. I then get up and pace the room. I lie down again, force my eyes shut and wait, trembling.
I know nothing of love and eventually it is too much. I cannot remain here in such a state. I have misunderstood Angi’s kiss. I don’t even know what I want to do. I have seen couplings between men and women in the dark corners of taverns and laneways. I cannot do that to her and I do not know what else there may be.
I am half dressed again in my breeks with no clear idea of where to go when I hear her at the door and my heart is despair
and hope. She steps inside and turns to me. I freeze, clothes in disarray and she must understand it all in a moment, for she closes the door behind her and comes to me and when she puts her hand on my arm, I start to tremble all over again.
Angi knows, somehow, about everything of which I am ignorant. She takes my face in her hands and brings our lips together. I am shaking so I can barely stand as she slides her lips against mine until they part and then it is like she has found some secret place inside me and set it alight.
She draws back so that I can unlace her. For the first time, undressing a woman from her layers of finery is not a task, but something delightful, and I have wit enough to draw it out and remove her garments slowly. She smiles and tilts her head for me to reach, and when my finger trails the bare skin of her shoulder her breath catches and she sighs. Then, somehow, I know what to do. I bend my lips to her skin, I follow her sighs to the parts of her I dare to touch—her arm, shoulder, neck, back.
When it is done and she is undressed, she slips me out of my half-fastened clothes and draws me to the bed before I can feel ashamed of my nakedness. For the first time there is skin pressed all the way along my body and I gasp with the exquisite shock of it. She smiles and then moves her hand down my neck and along my breastbone. Her mouth finds my breasts and strips them free of the years of hiding.
As my body arches, she catches my fingers and draws them down her body, to a place I have hardly let myself imagine. My fingertips touch moisture, slipperiness, and it is so unexpected I gasp and she laughs. Then she pants as my fingers become bold and the heat rises in my own body from the same place. Her hand moves to me; how is it I have never known this? I’m moving without plan, gasping, clutching her and then it moves through my body and I have never imagined such a feeling could exist.
I have no idea if three heartbeats have passed or an hour. She laughs, soft and low, and kisses me. “You learn fast,” she whispers. She takes my hand again and brings it down to her and now I have some notion of what to do and her body tells me the rest, arching and moving as she makes soft cries. When she stiffens and clutches me, the feeling rises in me again without even her touch and I find myself pressing against her and she grabs me and rolls me on top, and then there’s no careful touching but instead rocking and thrusting and sweating until the storm sweeps through me again and we muffle the sounds of our delight in each other’s mouths.
≈ ≈ ≈
What a strange creature is the heart.
You think you have it tamed and obedient, like a horse, so that you may ride it when you please, urge it to gallop or rein it in and keep it stationary. You think you know its moods and longing, you think its needs are simple.
It had not occurred to me to love someone other than the Queen. But the stroke that killed Chastelard severed something inside me. It cut the reins keeping my heart in control and it bolted like a horse in panicked flight. And then, waiting with steady hands and soft words, was Angi. She brought me to a halt and calmed me, soothed me. When my heart thought it was safe, she kissed me and any safety I’d known was gone.
Without such a kiss, the Queen could have kept me as her own, for the promise of a lover’s kiss, the desire for it without ever knowing it, is a powerful bond. But now that Angi’s lips have been upon me, I can no longer be satisfied with my chaste longing for the Queen.
Thus I find love, in our tiny room in the cold of late winter, and I want to explode with it. I want to gallop up Arthur’s Seat and stand at the top and breathe in the cold air. I want to run through Edinburgh’s streets at night as a boy and skip and shout.
Instead I dress demurely. I keep my face down. I make sure I do not look at Angi in another’s presence. I keep my breath shallow, I make myself invisible. I act as if there isn’t a furnace inside me.
Angi says that in the French court, love between women and love between men is not so unusual. It is part of the courtly games. Kisses and tantalizing touches are everywhere, the only constant is surprise, half the court may be other than they appear. She tells me that when the Queen was tutored in the royal household of France, even she was taught to recite the poems of a lover of women, the Greek Sappho.
“Surely you know of her here?” she asks, and I shake my head, amazed.
She forbids me to speak any language other than French in our bed. “It is the language of love,” she says. “Scots is the language of secret plots and bloodshed. Leave it outside.”
“What would she do, if she knew?” I whisper.
“I do not know.” Angi is thoughtful. “There were two women in King Henri’s court who were lovers. I think it amused him. Once he ordered them to kiss in front of us all. His mistress Diane de Poitiers laughed while they were doing it, and he laughed too. Mary was there, but she was young. I do not know what she thought. This is Scotland and Knox is ever on the alert for ways to bring her down. No one must know.”
I am used to secrets. When I dress in the winter darkness each morning, I bind my unruly love as firm and tight as I bind my breasts under my boy’s clothes.
Late at night, when our passion is slaked, I hold Angi and I whisper to her of the fortress that will keep our love safe. I whisper of how I will bring her to Blackadder Castle and we will be free of the Queen’s court, with its strictures and demands. When she falls asleep, I lie awake and think of how I might persuade the Queen to speed her promise.
≈ ≈ ≈
Now that I am a lover, I listen intently when the conversations around me turn to love, as they inevitably do, from the kitchen to the great hall and everywhere in between. I listen to the jokes and sneers and laughter, trying to find some clues. Is it the same when men and women couple? Surely it must be, and yet some women roll their eyes and talk as if it were a chore like cleaning out the kitchen fire. Others blush, and as the color rises to their cheeks, I’m sure they know the feeling I am so curious about.
Angi says in France there is more care for the art of love between men and women, and she whispers of secret books with drawings of dozens of different ways a man may enter a woman to bring her pleasure. But she says in Scotland the men are more brutal and do not care so much for giving pleasure, while women know less of the pleasure to be had.
The Queen does not know about love of this kind, I can see now.
She orders a small morning concert by her court musicians, for her own pleasure and to try and speed up the wait for the season’s change. Her best singer, David Rizzio, stands slightly to the front, his resonant bass swelling to fill the room. He has been rehearsing a new part and this is its first performance. He is not a beautiful man, with his hunched back and swarthy face, but his voice can drive an audience to tears.
Afterward, the Queen takes her inner circle through to the bedchamber and orders her best French wine to reward Rizzio. She calls a toast to him.
“To spring, to music, to love,” she says, raising her glass. We drink.
“Randolph was watching you, Beaton,” Lusty says.
A smile creeps across Beaton’s face.
“He is too old for her,” Seton says.
“Older men are more experienced.” Lusty’s smile is wicked. “Besides, it might be politic for Beaton to wed the English ambassador.”
“You cannot trust an ambassador,” La Flamina says. “I would be careful, Beaton.”
“Perhaps a dalliance, then?” Lusty says. “Find out if an older man really does know more about women.”
“Hush.” Beaton glances at the Queen.
The Queen puts down her sewing with a sigh. “I wonder if I shall ever find a man to love as I loved Francis.” She rises to her feet.
“Of course you will.” Rizzio stands to join her. “Love blooms more fully the more adult you become. You have barely tasted it yet.”
She looks down at him. “I did not know you were an expert, David.”
He shrugs. “One does not need to be married to know this.”
Lusty laughs. “What think you then, Rizzio, about olde
r men? Do they know more of women?”
He looks from Lusty to the Queen and back again and then winks. “It has been said that learning to love a woman well is like learning to play an instrument. It takes years of application and practice but the noise you can draw out of it will show your proficiency.”
They break into scandalized laughter. I see Rizzio glance at me and I join in to cover my sudden blush. The Queen is laughing too, but I can see beneath the smile she is perplexed.
“You and Francis were children,” he says to the Queen. “Your next husband will be a man, and he will show you the joys of mature love.”
“Unless she must marry Charles of France, who is but twelve,” Lusty says.
“It was not such a terrible thing, to be married to a young man,” the Queen says.
“But was it a pleasure for you?” Rizzio asks.
The room falls silent and I find myself studying the floor.
“It is time for our ride, and enough of this nonsense.” For a second there is shame on the Queen’s face. It is not the hot shame of lust. Shame instead, I surmise, that the rumors are true and that the young and sickly Francis did not have the strength or the knowledge to consummate their marriage.
She looks up to catch me watching. “What is wrong with you all?” she snaps. “You are like girls about to be wed. We will ride in a quarter-hour. Get my clothes ready.”
As I turn, Rizzio grins at me. I can see that he knows pleasure all too well and in ways he will never divulge to the Queen.
≈ ≈ ≈
The winter of the dearth is so harsh that it leaves the country stripped bare. Storms dash ships against the rocks up and down the coast of England. Word comes to the court that one of them was carrying Lord Bothwell. He was shipwrecked upon the Northumbrian coast, captured, taken to London, and imprisoned in the Tower.
“But what of William?” I demand of Sophie, blundering into her chambers the evening I receive the news. “They left here on his ship, did they not? With his cousins?”
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