‘He’s climbing like a mule,’ was Bothwell’s comment.
A triumph over James enemy was sung in St Giles’ pulpit next Sunday, when Knox demanded of his congregation, ‘Have you not seen one who was greater than any of you, sitting where you now sit, pick his nails and pull down his bonnet over his eyes when idolatry and such vices were rebuked? Did he not say, “When will these knaves finish railing, when will they hold their peace?” Have you not heard me tell him to his face that God would avenge that blasphemy? Now God has punished the Earl of Huntly even as he and you heard me foretell.’
James had more solid reasons for triumph than the divine punishment for picking nails in sermon time. In the last few months he had crushed the heir to the throne, all the Haughty Hamiltons, together with the Queen’s boldest and most loyal supporter, the Earl of Bothwell; and now he had destroyed the only strong Catholic power that she could count on in her kingdom – ‘And all in the Queen’s name, that’s the beauty of it!’ Bothwell exclaimed to Janet Scott on her next visit, as they walked by the rocky burn that tossed and foamed in spate through the heather just beyond the huge ramparts of Hermitage Castle. ‘He has no need to attack his enemies to destroy them – he gets them to destroy themselves.’
‘He is eating the artichoke leaf by leaf,’ said Janet thoughtfully, ‘as Caesar Borgia did with the states of Italy – destroyed them one by one. Go quick to the Queen before that happens to you – as soon as ever she is back in Holyrood.’
And to her he went with a strong force at his back, at the end of November when it had turned bitter cold. A mysterious new disease was striking down one after another in Edinburgh, running through the town as fast as the plague, and yet there were no such definite symptoms as in the plague, only aching limbs and a rheumy nose and a great cough and a sore stomach and above all a high fever. People were calling it the New Acquaintance, and the doctors the Influence. It influenced Bothwell’s fortunes, for the Queen was seriously ill in bed for some weeks and could see no one. Lord James, though reported to be sneezing his head off, was, however, more active; he sent out an order to the Earl of Bothwell to return to prison in the Castle of Edinburgh on pain of treason.
All his good behaviour had been for nothing; if he didn’t go back to prison he must flee the country. He chose flight, borrowed two thousand crowns from his sister and went to say goodbye to his mother at Morham.
That dark, uncompromising Highland woman stood very stiff and straight as she gave him her blessing and bade him beware of a knife in his shoulder-blades, poison in a friend’s cup and the kiss of a woman, ‘for there is nothing else you need fear’.
Just like her, he thought, admiring, amused, but slightly subdued, as he left her house for that of his mistress Anna Throndsen. He found her with their son Willie, a sturdy champion not yet two, engaged in playing ‘Willie Wastle in his castle’, that is to say, in shoving his playfellow, the son of his nurse, down the steps of the house. Willie was already so unruly that Anna despaired of managing him. In fact, she had given up any project of it for the time, for since the decline in her lover’s fortunes she was planning to pay a long visit to Scandinavia as soon as the winter was over, and the weather safer for sea-travel.
‘I want to go home,’ she drawled plaintively in her deep seductive voice. ‘You will be leaving me all alone in this strange country. My sister, who is married to a Scot in Shetland, will be home next year to see all the family, so why not I – who am not even married, hélas?’
Why not indeed? Since she was ennuyée here, ‘Hélas!’ repeated Bothwell fiendishly.
She intended to take her furniture with her, even a fine carved bedstead. It seemed a lot of truck to take on a visit. She had already made inquiries about her passport and had learned that she would have liberty to return to Scotland whenever she wished – ‘but that will depend on if you still wish it,’ she said yearningly.
‘More likely on what you can make some other man wish,’ he growled.
At that she flew into a rage; did he dare suggest she was going husband-hunting?
‘Looks like it, when you take your furniture and leave your son behind.’
He found to his annoyance that he was furiously jealous. She was a damned fine woman and his property; how dared she take it for granted that she was free to transfer herself to anyone else? But he choked back his unreasonable emotion; he knew he would be thankful to be rid of her so easily at this awkward time in his affairs, and forced himself to say:
‘Why not? I’m no use to you now I’m making tracks for France.’
She answered indignantly that she had always been faithful to him, though he had not been true to his promise. He laughed, she boxed his ears, and he flung her, on the bed. They both enjoyed a quarrel, and she looked her handsomest when angry.
Afterwards, when she was twisting up those magnificent great coils of black hair, she showed some sympathy for his misfortunes, but this he did not enjoy; there was something strained about it, and she got a few scratches into her stroking. ‘I may be able to raise money for you abroad,’ she said. ‘It will not be the first time I have helped you with a loan.’
Which he had not repaid, though he had had the value of it several times over in this comfortable house at Morham and its furniture, of which she was taking the best part away with her. But he did not choose to point that out, though his careless glance did fall on the things that she had collected together, and he began to whistle a tune. She flung herself on her knees before him, swore she cared nothing for the ‘dirty money’, all she wanted was himself. She would leave everything again, her baby son here, as she had left her home and parents in Denmark, if only he would marry her and take her with him on his wanderings, through the whole wide world if need be.
She looked beautiful with her hair tumbling again all over her splendid white shoulders; but her appeal made him shudder. What a clutch this woman would get on him if she could! He suddenly discovered that he was immensely relieved at what had at first piqued him – that she had of her own accord decided to put the North Sea between them.
‘You’ll be much better off at home,’ he said.
She did not cry, as he had feared. There was an expression in those lustrous dark eyes that he had not noticed before. Perhaps he had not noticed her much all along. He had taken her for granted, as he had taken her body; and how much did he really know of her? At this moment he felt he was looking down, not at the Scandinavian Admiral’s daughter that he had met among a crowd of jolly sisters, not at the voluptuous Spanish lady that she loved to be told she was like, but at the black elflocks and white strange face of a Lapland witch.
Chapter Ten
In the last days of the year there was that unusual thing, an ice-storm: the rain as it fell ‘froze so vehemently’, complained Knox, ‘that the earth was but a sheet of ice’. He blamed it, as he had blamed all the bad weather since her arrival in that dark haar, on the Queen; she, the daughter of ‘mischievous Mary’, was proving to the full as mischievous, especially in the matter of bad harvests, floods and frosts and all occasions when ‘neither sun nor moon have performed their appropriate offices’.
After her long illness and convalescence, and a Christmas which she was too sad and listless to enjoy, Mary went at the end of December, informally with very few attendants, to ‘make merry’ at the New Year with her brother Johnnie at his house at Coldinghame, as she had promised a year ago. She was the only one to keep that promise, for d’Elboeuf had long since gone back to France, and nobody, not even Jan, knew where Bothwell was.
There was one other that Johnnie had vowed should be there – a fine boy a few weeks old, whose arrival had transformed Jan into a preternaturally wise and mature person. She smiled indulgently on the pranks of her husband and his royal guest as though they were a couple of children. All her awe of Mary had gone; how could she feel awe of this girl who went tearing along the frozen shore with Johnnie, dressed in an old suit of his and a pair of long riding-boots t
o keep out the sea-water – which they didn’t? Jan even found herself scolding the Queen.
‘Your hands are freezing even in those gloves. Your feet will be wet through again, and you must remember you’ve been ill.’
‘Why should I remember? I’m not ill now. I shall remember nothing here that I don’t want to remember, nothing, nothing!’ she cried in such passionate answer that Jan flung her arms round her and exclaimed, ‘Nor you shall, my bairn.’
‘Bairn! How many months older are you than me?’
‘Years and years,’ replied Jan profoundly, ‘but I beg Your Grace’s pardon.’
‘Ah, leave “Your Grace” – I’m sure I’ve none in these breeks!’
‘The sea-water’s freezing on them too – come, off with them and into your furred gown; it’s spread in front of the fire in your room, and your bath is there – we’ll have up a cauldron of boiling water.’
‘Jan, Jan, we saw a gull walking on an ice-floe as big as this hall and half a mile or so out to sea – and all along the top of the tide-line there are thousands of poor frozen crabs no bigger than prawns, lying thick as pebbles, all stiff and stark – should I have brought them in for you like a clever housekeeper? How you’d have thanked me, wouldn’t you!’
She was chattering all the way upstairs and while Jan took off her ice-wet things and bathed and dressed her: ‘Oh I’ve been dead, dead,’ she said, ‘but now I’m alive again.’
Jan knew she was not thinking only of her illness, but had the sense to ask no questions. Mary was too much alive, her eyes and cheeks aflame, her whole slender body taut as a bowstring; what would happen to her if she did not soon get a good steady sensible husband to look after her? Johnnie, of whom Jan demanded this, replied airily, ‘Oh she’ll find one, you’ll see. She’s a likely lass. I’d ha’ married her myself if I hadn’t been her brother.’
The north wind howled and rumbled in the chimney, and the huge fire on the hearth went roaring up to meet it; outside, the sea crashed and thundered on the shore. ‘God help the sailors!’ they prayed. But each was thinking, not of the sailors, but of Bothwell, who most probably was even now on the North Sea, since the last news of him was that he had been seen some days ago making inquiries among the ships in Leith Harbour. But they did not speak of him lest they should increase each other’s anxiety; they told stories of ghosts and bogles as they sat as close as they could to the fire, and roasted nuts and watched the ice-blue flames leap up among the red, for the logs were driftwood washed up from some wrecked ship, encrusted with salt and sputtering sea-spray, though blazing all the more fiercely for that. ‘New Year’s Eve and what will the New Year bring, and I was twenty last month,’ thought the Queen, watching for pictures in the fire that should tell her her fate.
She heard a door bang, a quick step outside. Jan sprang up with a joyous shout and with her the dogs, barking madly. A voice rang out, ‘Hey there, you rascals! I’ve kept my vow – now for yours!’
Bothwell swung in through the doorway, the dogs leaping round him, Jan flinging herself on him, the quiet scene flaring up into life and movement, a hundred questions and exclamations – and then he saw the Queen. There was an instant’s pause, he gave a quick glance at her face, then swaggered up and dropped on his knees before her in an exaggeratedly penitential attitude.
‘This is a bad shock for you, my lord of Bothwell,’ she said severely.
‘On the contrary, Madam, I am here only to give myself up into your ward again!’
Jan cried impetuously, ‘Oh, but Your Grace will never keep him prisoner!’
Mary said sternly, ‘I condemn him to imprisonment here in my loyal brother’s house, for as long as it is safe for him to stay.’
He kissed both her hands, and sprang up with a shout of laughter. He was half frozen, ravenous, and in tearing spirits. He ate and drank enough for ten men as he told his adventures with as much gusto as if they had been a triumphal progress, instead of his attempt to fly the country in disgrace. He had played stowaway on a boat leaving Leith Harbour, but it had been driven back by storms on to Holy Island, which was garrisoned most inconveniently with English soldiers, so he had made his way across the sands at low tide – ‘they were safe enough’, he answered their alarmed exclamations, ‘frozen hard for the most part’ – and walked the twenty miles or so across the Border to Coldinghame.
‘Had you not even money to buy a horse?’ wailed his sister. ‘What’s become of the two thousand crowns I lent you?’
‘Here, in bills of payment.’ He thrust a bundle of papers into Johnnie’s hand. ‘Keep ’em safe for her. I know what Jan’s like with papers – she can’t believe they mean money. I mortgaged more land through Barron before I left Edinburgh. Poor old Barron, his wife’s left too; run away across the Border, and the ministers in hue and cry after her, Knox writing to all the English bishops to send her back again. Nothing to do with me, I tell you, Johnnie, so it’s no use your eyeing me. I’ll take Barron’s money, but not his wife.’
‘Then why no horse?’
‘I’d no mind anyone should see me who needn’t.’
‘Had you no servant?’
‘Only my French lad, now hogging it in the kitchens as I’m doing here. So here I am at your New Year revels, uninvited as I promised – and where’s the new guest? Are you calling him James after me?’
‘Not I! I’ll not be reminded of my precious elder brother every time I call my son. We’re giving him your father’s name, Francis.’
And Johnnie insisted on showing Bothwell his sleeping nephew – a queer dark elf with pointed ears.
‘Has it got its eyes open yet?’ the uncle solemnly inquired, to the indignation of the proud father.
‘Do you take it for a pup, my lord?’ he demanded furiously, then joined in the roar of laughter against himself.
Mary said very little, but laughed as much as any, and watched and listened with shining eyes as if she were drinking in new life with all that careless merriment. As the bells rang out at midnight they all drank to 1563, clinking their cups together, ‘and may the luck turn for you’, said Johnnie to his brother-in-law, ‘as the tide’s now turned on the shore outside – listen to it coming roaring in!’
‘As you will, when your luck’s in!’ said Jan.
Mary cried, ‘Let’s go and greet the rising tide and pray that your luck rises with it, my lord!’
She seized the painted fool’s bauble that they had been tossing in the hall earlier that evening, and declared they should launch it in honour of his coming voyage. In breeks and boots and the thick woollen scarves of Border warfare muffled round their heads and necks, the four of them ran out from the hot fireside and warm smells of meat and wine, into the breathless glittering night. The wind had gone down, the moon was up, the frosty stars were crackling like white fireworks overhead and –
‘The night’s enchanted,’ cried Mary. ‘Look! There are spirits of fire joining battle in the sky!’
Far in the north, spears of fiery and bluish light shot upwards through the dark.
‘The Merry Dancers are out,’ said Bothwell; and Jan, ‘The spirits are riding the Northern Lights.’ Mary, who had never seen the Aurora Borealis before, still believed that it was a portent of victorious war.
She had been hushed and silent in the house, a smiling shadow in the background; she was another creature out of doors, a wild young Maenad, drunk on the iced wine of that stinging air, now rushing along the shore away from them, her head back to see the stars and those strange lights in the north, her hair flying out from under her scarf; now leading them headlong over the frozen shore and the pools of ice that glinted between the rocks, down to the very edge of the huge silver-hollowed waves that came rolling and roaring up under the moon. Her bauble went bobbing darkly over them, the wind caught it and drove it this way and that, while they cheered it on, laughing at its vagaries. The tide came up, rushing round the great banks of crusted wavy ice that had frozen in its pattern; it broke over them and
broke them up, washing them off the shore so that the sea was dark with floating ice for a long way out.
Mary led her company to help launch the floating islands and push them into the swirling silver-dappled water; they scrunched and splashed through ice and wet, played ducks and drakes with flat pieces of ice, and Mary tore bunches of frozen seaweed off the rocks, so encrusted with ice that each brown globe was only a seed in the heart of an enormous crystal grape. She danced madly with them, tossing and clattering them together like castanets, holding them up for the moon to shine through, calling to the others, ‘Come and suck my crystal fruits! or will you only tell me that the grapes are salt?’
This mad laughing creature was something that Bothwell had never seen in her before; it was a shame, he thought, even to coop up such a wild thing in woman’s dress, let alone a Queen’s stiff robes of state. Well, she had flung all that now to the cold winds!
Next day he was up before the late winter sunrise, and out on the shore to see what promise the sea gave for his further voyaging; and there she was by herself, standing looking out to where the dawn light was gleaming on the nearer water, while the distant sea was still iron-dark.
‘Have you been out all night?’ he asked. ‘I can almost believe it, for I hear Your Grace is an old campaigner now, and asks nothing better than to make the heather your bed and ride all day on the march. It is your turn to tell your adventures.’
But the face she turned on him was no longer that of the spirit of freedom he had seen last night. ‘The adventure of hounding a fat old man to his death,’ she said. ‘It was a brave one, wasn’t it!’
He said, ‘Well, Huntly fought against your mother for his own ends. You’d already a score to pay.’
But she never heard him. ‘I saw him lying there on the cold stones,’ she said, ‘with only a cloth of rough Irish frieze flung over him, and stockings of coarse hodden grey. They had taken all the finery he loved so. Do you know that he would have avoided that battle at Corrichie – he had meant to retreat that morning – but they could not wake him before it was ten o’clock? They say his spirits were weighed down with his corpulence; it made him clumsy, helpless – and nervous, since he knew he could not move fast. It’s hard to understand that, isn’t it, when one’s body is light and free to move quickly, and so one’s mind too.’
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