‘Their leader – their interests! Is that how you interpret my brother and his motives?’
‘How else, Madam? My memory can stretch as far as a year ago.’
‘The circumstances are clean different.’
‘The characters are not.’
‘You are a severe judge of character, my lord – in other people.’
‘Christ’s blood, Madam, how am I to take that?’
‘Do you use oaths to your Queen?’
‘If my Queen were the one your brother serves, she’d use ’em herself.’
‘How dare you say the Lord James serves Elizabeth?’
‘I dare say more – that now, while he’s applying for the arrears of his pension from the French Crown, he’s also drawing pay from the English.’
‘This is intolerable!’
‘Then do not tolerate it.’
‘Is nobody honest but yourself? Am I to trust nobody but my Lord Bothwell?’
‘Precious few.’
‘It is ridiculous. You have warned me against nearly everybody in Scotland. You don’t like Lethington because he can make you look foolish—’
‘I’d make him look foolish if I got my hands on that canny old tabby-cat!’
‘That is your one idea of dealing with people. To you everyone clever is false. But I know my brother is honest; he may be blunt, you call it “dour”—’
‘No, Madam, I call it dyspeptic. Would you trust Calvin too on account of his sour stomach?’
‘I know more about my brother than you do. Blood is thicker than water.’
‘It’s stickier. I know more about blood than you do.’
‘I will not join the Worshipful Guild of Backbiters. I will not believe that if anyone shows honour or kindness it is either from self-interest or stupidity. I had rather die from trusting too much, than kill my soul by never trusting at all.’
He stared at her passion that had suddenly burst through long years of restraint in the dry disillusioned air that Queen Catherine breathed all around her, that jocular blight in which Mary had felt her tenderness for François, her devotion to her uncles, withering as though discovered to be ignoble.
As he dimly guessed, for he said, ‘But, Madam, you are not thinking of me?’
‘No-o-o,’ she breathed in a long sigh. ‘I believe I was thinking of my mother-in-law. And now,’ she turned on him, ‘I find you of her company.’
‘God forbid! I don’t ask you not to trust – only not to trust the wrong man.’
‘In fact, to trust only you.’
‘I can naturally answer best for myself. Why are you so angry, Madam?’
His voice was gentler. To her horror, she found that tears were mounting to her eyes. In another moment she would be telling him that she was angry because she had trusted him with her verses on Francois’ death while he was disporting himself with a woman in Flanders.
So she cried instead, ‘I think the Devil’s been let loose in the world. Don’t you think it’s the Devil’s work to sack churches and monasteries? Mr Knox is commanding them all to be destroyed and so “keep the rooks from returning by pulling down their nests”. And me too – he preaches openly against the return of the “idolatrous Queen”.’
‘Well,’ he said coolly, ‘and are you going to be deterred by that?’
‘No. I mean to return, and teach my subjects their duties.’
He nodded with an approving smile. ‘But you’ll not bring in the Inquisition to teach them their duty to God?’
‘I’ll not meddle with their religion – nor let them meddle with mine. You’ll find my constancy to my faith a deal less dangerous than Queen Catherine’s sympathy with yours.’
‘Devil doubt it!’
‘But if I give my subjects freedom, they must give freedom to me.’
‘They’ll never do that. The first Mass you hold at Holyrood will be the signal for an organized riot.’
‘My brother swears I shall hold it, even if he has to guard the chapel doors himself.’
‘The trusty watchdog, hey? Growls, but faithful. And you’ll set him to guard the door against his own allies! The thing’s plain enough, Madam – you’ll always trust the wrong man’
‘Go!’
As soon as they met and talked again they quarrelled again. It annoyed her intensely that she had to discuss her plans with him: her plans for the voyage, or rather his; even her plans, or rather those of others, for her marriage, for these too had to be submitted to his approval. So the Countess of Lennox had evidently thought, that termagant niece of King Henry VIII, for no sooner had Bothwell been given the governorship of Dunbar Castle than she had written to sound him as to his views on a royal match for her handsome long-legged lad, Henry Lord Darnley: ‘a baby face on top of a pair of stilts, is that your Grace’s fancy?’ Bothwell asked his Queen, laughing at her attempts to make him tell her what he had written in answer to the fond mother’s hopes.
He would not tell her; he stood with his legs apart, his hands on his belt, his eyes narrowed, mocking her. A mere Border ruffian, as her brother James plainly thought, but would not descend to his level by saying so; while Bothwell had no such gentlemanly scruples; he decried everybody she wished to hear praised, first her lords, now her lovers.
The King of Sweden? An erratic giant three parts mad.
The King of Denmark? A sot who sagged in drink to the pattern of his own heavy jowl and buttocks.
King Antoine de Navarre? A nincompoop; that jolly young rascal his son Henri was already more of a man than he.
My Lord of Arran? That zany!
But his breath failed him at the Prince of Spain.
This was the match she most desired. It was much the greatest. Queen Catherine, having secured the father, King Philip, for her eldest daughter Isobel, was now busily intriguing for her youngest, Margot, to marry the son, Don Carlos. It did not at all suit either her policy, or Queen Elizabeth’s, that Mary should make any important continental alliance. Mary saw them, not unfairly, as the wicked stepmother and stepsister, determined to thwart her chances. Their antagonism greatly stimulated her ambition.
There were other, more tender reasons, though these did not include the bridegroom. It would be thrilling to go to Spain, yet it would not be at all strange, for she would be going to her dearest schoolfellow, François’ sister Isobel, the gentle dark-eyed girl who had set off to Spain two years ago, at fourteen, to be King Philip’s third wife. She and Mary had done their lessons together with over thirty other noble children of France, had written their Latin exercises in the form of letters to each other, had acted their favourite romances of Launcelot and Amadis de Gaul in the little wood above the castle at Amboise, where Mary, the elder and taller, had always been the adventurous knight and Isobel the distressed damsel. If she married Don Carlos, she told Bothwell, a little intimidated by the look on his face at mention of the plan, she would be again with her former sister-in-law.
‘Who would now be your stepmother-in-law. I quite see that the relationship is more important than that of a husband!’
Why should Don Carlos not make her a good husband? His father, King Philip, had been kindness itself to Isobel; he had sent her cloth woven from the gold and silver of the Indies for her trousseau, and underwear of the finest Flemish linen, and silk stockings from Grenada, some red, some blue – he had even sent Mary some too, of turquoise silk.
Bothwell remembered the hunt at Fontainebleau and the glimpse he had had of a slender leg in a turquoise silk stocking. The discovery that it had been sent her by King Philip most unreasonably augmented his anger against the Spanish marriage.
‘You’ll do well to remember, Madam, that we Scots are not the tame cats of England to stand a Spanish Prince over us as they did when their Bloody Mary married Philip. And I swear he never gave her any stockings,’ he added inconsequently.
‘Well, she adored him all the same, and so does Queen Isobel. All his three wives have done so.’
‘Because
women like a man to be a brute.’
‘You are mistaken, sir. They may like the steel hand, but only when concealed by the velvet glove. I think you ride bare-handed, sir.’
He was furious. It would need his whip to teach her manners! He longed to break the icy quiet of her voice. He burst out ‘Carlos – that sickly abnormal boy! He makes the Goblin of France here a fine healthy lad by comparison! But I forgot there’s an alternative plan to marry Your Grace to him too – I beg pardon, instead. Are you never to have a man in your bed to teach you what marriage really is? Are you always to think of it as a matter only of treaties and alliances, and have no care who is to sire your sons, who are to be Kings of Scotland?’
Her hands trembled, she gasped out, ‘Never, never speak to me again!’
But he would not take her command. ‘You shall understand what you are doing,’ he said, and gripped her hands in his furious determination. ‘Do you know that that boy is stunted, almost deformed? That he roasts hares alive for his sport, and goes into such rages that he foams at the mouth? Have you thought what it would be to give your body to the sickly frenzied lust of such a boy – as if it weren’t bad enough to give it to a boy at all?’
‘Stop!’ He was making everything come back – her fear of François’ feeble passion, her relief and gratitude that she had never had to endure it, her tenderness that gave her remorse for both emotions. ‘Your foul mouth blackens everything. It’s true what Lord Arran says of you – you hurt both body and soul.’
He dropped her hands. ‘I didn’t know I was hurting you – or holding them. I beg Your Grace’s pardon. What is Arran’s complaint of me? I’d best hear it.’
‘I don’t remember.’ She was nursing her fingers, and her voice sounded sulky and tearful.
He looked at them in disgust; he hated a woman you couldn’t touch without bruising. ‘Will you find the Spaniard gentler, do you think?’
‘You are never to mention any plan of my marriage to me again, do you understand? No one has ever dared speak of it as you have done, not even my grandmother, and oh!’ she burst out, suddenly remembering the delicate reticences and austere humour with which the Duchesse had prepared her for matrimony, ‘You are utterly unlike my grandmother!’
She laughed wildly as she heard her own words, and his hearty roar echoed her on a distinct note of relief.
‘Last time we quarrelled you confused me with your mother-in-law, and now you compare me with your grandmother!’
‘We quarrelled!’ Was there ever such impertinence! But she could not rebuke him with dignity while she was sobbing with laughter.
A haze of blue forget-me-not was spread at their feet, shimmering in the late sunshine as though it had dropped from the sky; it spread up to the delicate Renaissance staircase of the miniature castle. They were walking in front of the modern house built by the Duchesse Antoinette’s husband in their youth, as a peace-offering after some love-affair with a peasant girl. Mary looked up at its slender turrets.
‘Do you know what this house is called? It is the House of Love Repented. That, I think, is what you are telling me to avoid.’
‘Madam, I am not presuming to tell you anything of the sort. I am not so foolish as to imagine you would ever repent of love with Don Carios, since it would be impossible for any sane woman to feel it.’
Now he had made her angry again, he simply could not help doing it; besides, she looked so pretty in a rage, her very hair seemed to flame up, along with those curious light eyes, opalescent eyes, whose colour you could not determine even when they flashed open.
He took his leave abruptly without waiting for the lofty dismissal that she was evidently preparing.
Was this an earnest of the way her nobles would treat her in Scotland? If she were married to Carlos, she would at least have the safety of formality, so barricaded with the stiff Spanish etiquette that it surely would not much matter what her husband was like.
She tried to sound her brother on the subject, but could not do so without giving away the fact that she had discussed it with Bothwell, and of this he was so disapproving that she felt she had been grossly indelicate. The Earl was no fit counsellor for her – ‘a violent and dangerous man,’ he called him, ‘whose power depends solely on his leadership of all the thieves of Liddesdale and Teviotdale, reckless and impoverished younger sons of the nobility.’
‘At least he used that power to his utmost for my mother,’ she answered, fixing innocent eyes upon him and wondering if he would blush – which he did not.
But James’ dignified presence, his austerity, even his disapproval, was rather comforting to Mary; it showed his deep concern for her, she thought, as he stood looking down at her and laid his hand on hers in tender reproof. Excited, a little frightened by the prospect of her great new adventure, she felt that his solid respectability promised her something of the restraint and spiritual security she had always found in her grandmother’s home.
The Cardinal, who had handed over the guardianship purely from a policy of prudence, would have been astonished if he had realized how the impressionable girl of eighteen interpreted it.
Bothwell’s plans for the voyage were completed, though not to Mary’s satisfaction. Everything ordered by him she wished to flout, for even if he were her Lord High Admiral, she was his Queen, and how dare he give his commands so plainly? She had set her heart on returning to Scotland as she had come, that summer thirteen years ago, by the far Northern route first adventured by her father two years before her birth. It was only right, she told Bothwell, that she should now visit those remote islands, since her father on that voyage of discovery had annexed their Lands and Lordships.
It was an unfortunate reminder, since Bothwell’s forefathers had been Lords of Orkney and the Shetland Isles. But a gleam in his eye was the only sign of his feelings about that.
He said dryly, ‘One thing is plain, Madam, that you are a remarkably good sailor.’
‘And you are not, I understand, since you oppose my wishes.’
‘It doesn’t need a bout of sickness, Madam, to determine me that you shall not show your fear of the English Queen so far as to travel all round the Northern seas in order to avoid passing near her coasts.’
He had no trouble after that about the route of the voyage; only the difficulty of getting it to start. France, it seemed, could not bear to let Mary go, nor Mary to leave her. All her friends and relatives were planning fêtes to detain her. Would there never be an end of the mummery and dressing-up, thought the impatient young Scot, eager for the new adventure in his own country when he should make himself chief adviser to the young Queen, overbearing all the sly counsels of these ‘Scottish Cecils’, Master ‘Michael Wily’ of Lethington and the good Elder-bastard-brother James with his down-dropped glances and admonishing pats of the hand (‘the best that one dares do with a woman!’).
But he had to wait while mermaids hailed Mary as their Queen, and Venus abdicated in her favour, and all the poets in France sang their farewells to her. That was the homage she was used to: the hands that he could not grip without hurting were poems in the mouth of Ronsard; she was a puppet of the State, a pretty doll for courtiers to praise respectfully, a subject for painters and poets and the letters of Ambassadors to foreign Princes who had never seen her, but were nosing hot on her track like dogs on a scent! Was there anything of her that belonged to her alone, and to the man who would ever be fool enough to love her?
So he grumbled to himself, furious with impatience at this delicate, crisp yet pensive culture that was holding her from the real business of living in the land where she belonged.
It was mid-August before he at last succeeded in getting her away. The packing alone was a tremendous business; all her favourite books, French and Italian romances, English historical chronicles, collections of poems; most of the Latin classics and some of the Greek, with which she meant to continue her education; a sprinkling of theology, Luther’s works and Calvin’s Institutes, so that even
Mr Knox would have to admit that she had studied their side of the religious question.
There were rich carpets from Turkey, thirty-six of them where her mother had only had two; forty-five great carved and painted beds, five times as many as her mother’s; and her jewels, the finest in Europe: the diamond called the Great Harry from Harry of England; a set of black and white enamelled buttons given by Diane de Poictiers, with her crescent moon in diamonds; an agate-hilted dagger, studded with diamonds and emeralds, with a huge sapphire in its head, a present to her father on his first brief marriage, from his father-in-law, François I.
She gave away quantities of parting presents: a necklace of rubies and diamonds to the young Duchesse de Guise, a huge emerald ring to the Cardinal, silver-plate to her friend the enemy, Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, so beautiful that he thought it advisable to say nothing about it to his own Queen.
Bothwell insisted that the final day of departure be kept secret till the last moment. The Lord James had left in advance to prepare for her arrival. The Duc de Guise saw her aboard at Calais, the scene of his greatest conquest. She cried and clung to him, but young René de Lorraine, Marquis d’Elboeuf, cheered them up with his absurd jokes as he stood by them, a rare blue-ruffed pigeon chained like a hawk on his wrist. He had brought it as a present for his niece, but not a parting one, for he and two more of her younger uncles were to accompany her, Claude Duc d’Aumale, and François de Lorraine, Knight of Malta, Grand Prior and General of the French war fleet, leading the noble escort. Three uncles, four Maries, and the Chevalier Bayard’s nephew, Châtelard, and all the rest of the gorgeous young company went on board the Queen’s galley, which was all white, with white flags bearing the arms of France.
It was true then, she was really leaving France; nothing, after all, had happened at the last moment to keep her at home. Her life there was over. The Duc de Guise stood on the shore that he had wrested from England, the tears running down his scarred cheek. His farewell had been the last.
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