Her passion of pity took him by surprise; he had expected it for Sir John Gordon, a young man accounted the handsomest in Scotland, who was reported to have said on the scaffold that ‘he died for love of his Queen’, though it was difficult to see how he had expressed it by stabbing a private enemy, breaking prison and raising rebellion.
But her restless sadness was not for him, nor, Bothwell suspected, only for Huntly. She told him her pride in setting out on that campaign, thinking that now at last she had a chance to prove herself the true leader of her people, putting down rebellion with equal justice and no favouritism to those of her own faith – ‘A Scot first and a Catholic second,’ she said, ‘as I had determined to be all along, but no one here will recognise it – though I have been blamed for it by my own Church again and again. The Pope keeps asking me what I have done here for the Faith, and I have to fob him off with excuses. But here, that horrible old man, Knox, tells all my people that I am only waiting my chance to put the Catholics in power and persecute all the rest. So when James told me all that Huntly was working against me, I was glad, glad – fool that I was! – that now they would see the truth. But do people ever see the truth?’
‘They see what they want to see. It’s not often it happens to be true.’
The white dawn now had spread into the upper sky. The long curved white-crested waves were rolling in at as regular a succession as the march of troops, their foam blown forward like white hair. The curve of a gull’s wings flashed against the dark headland towards which they were walking briskly to keep warm.
Mary laughed sadly at his answer. ‘That is true of me too,’ she said. ‘I saw the tall pines standing like black sentinels against the stars when I slept out, wrapped in a great plaid, and smelt the sharp spiced smell of the pine needles and the heather and the bracken, and I thought how the night brought out the star of the Guise, and how you had always fought best in the bright dark – and that now I too was a soldier. I proved it too when the clans came flocking to me at Inverness and stormed the rebel castle; Mackintosh and Fraser and the Graham of Montrose – it was for me they fought, and not the Bastard.’
Bothwell drew in his breath sharply. It was the first time she had ever given the Lord James, now Earl of Moray, the title he had borne from birth. But she did not notice; she was busy telling him of the assault at Inverness, so swift and resolute that the castle yielded almost at once and not a man in the attack was killed, ‘and their pipes playing them into action as though it were a dance, and those mad kilted Highlanders singing, yelling – do you remember showing me them singing in the courtyard of your castle a year ago, and that wild chant –
Little wot ye wha’s coming!
Colin’s coming, Donald’s coming’,—
‘Mony a buttock bare’s coming!’ he joined in.
‘Yes, they came to me then! They charged the castle high above the town, and I marched in to the music of the pipes, with the river glittering below and the distant mountains all purple in their pride. I dined in the great hall that night, and they told me stories of the chief, Macbeth, who slew his King there. You are too fond of killing your King’s in Scotland.’
‘Well, we’ve not killed a Queen yet. And won’t get the chance if you’re so stout a warrior. You weren’t at Corrichie when Huntly was killed?’ he asked, with a sharp return to seriousness.
‘No, thank God!’ She hit her thickly gloved hands together and broke into a run, then turned and walked soberly back to him. ‘It need not have happened,’ she said, ‘I’ll swear it. He only fought at Corrichie because he believed that half James’ army was on his side, and would desert to him as soon as the battle was joined. What had led him to believe that?’
‘The Lord James’ agents,’ said Bothwell boldly.
‘Do you know that?’
‘No, but I can guess. His spy work is excellent, and the chief work of a spy is to give wrong information to the enemy.’
‘Oh God, is war as foul as that?’
‘It gets fouler every year, I fancy. But I’m only a rough Borderer. I’m not civilized enough to appreciate the modern methods.’
‘Need none of it have happened? Was James all along engineering trouble for his own ends? – Sir John’s private brawl, old Huntly’s wish to put the Catholics in power, with himself at the head? That was true, but I don’t believe he meant to go to war for it. Though James has found papers of Sir John Gordon’s proving all sorts of plots against the Government.’
‘James is gey good at finding papers to justify what he’s already done. I wonder he troubles, seeing that he’s now destroyed the only family left in Scotland who might dispute his power.’
She cried in anguish, ‘And it is I who have done it! I have put him in power. I have set him up to destroy my friends – and if he ever wishes to take the chance, to destroy myself.’
Her cry, in echo to his suspicions, moved him unbearably. He flung his arm round her shoulders, hurrying her forward in a yet faster stride. At that moment she was to him only what she appeared in her man’s clothes, a very young, sexless, friendless creature, cruelly perplexed, and his only thought to give her heart – as he would if she were indeed a lad who had been worsted by his enemies.
‘You will win through,’ he said. ‘It’s true Scotland’s not kind to her Kings, but by God what a race of ’em she’s bred! Think of your own father when he was younger than you by four or five years; what chance did he have, would you say? A Flodden orphan, seized in his boyhood by the Douglases. Yet he broke away from them, and when he was still only a lad, stole out of Falkland Castle when they thought him in bed, rode all night to Stirling, fell asleep there, and woke to find himself King. What a Stewart King has done, he can do again – a Stewart Queen I mean, and I beg Your Grace’s pardon for gripping you! You’re shivering under all that wool and leather – let’s run to our porridge before they cool.’
As they ran back, the deep red sun came up over the rim of the North Sea, balanced itself on it, flattened at its base like a bubble, and the whole vast sea burst into flame.
They had no more serious talk after that; all that day and the next were spent in what Mary called the chief business of Scotland, the effort to keep warm. The frost was of course too hard for hunting, but they skated and played at curling on a pond near by, and when the short winter daylight died they danced flings and played ball and battledore and shuttlecock and blindman’s-buff and hunt-the-slipper and a dozen other noisy romping games.
Mary was in mad spirits, refused to be treated as Queen or called Your Grace, put on a short blue kirtle and a scarlet apron, and showed Jan how to cook French dishes in the kitchen. Some Spanish oranges had been stored there, and she made a new sort of preserve – called after herself, as she told them proudly, for the cook at her grandmother’s château of Joinville had made it to tempt her appetite when she was ill; ‘Marie est malade’, he had muttered again and again as he racked his brains to invent something new for her, and ‘Mariemalade’ they had called it ever since. They ate the bitter orange jam in her honour, but preferred honey.
She sang them the latest songs from Paris, all new and piping hot, brought by young Châtelard, who had left Scotland with her uncles a year ago, but had just returned, since he could not endure life away from her. Mary had been enchanted to see him again; he could bring her all the latest gossip of Catherine and her Court that he knew how to make so vivid and impudent. And in the delicious pantomime of the elaborate Court dances, half mime, half ballet, there was no one whose steps and gestures so perfectly matched her own. So they danced and chattered, sang his own poems, dressed up and acted impromptu charades in which she played the husband and he the wife and both the fool, so extravagantly that she did not dream his devotion was serious and might be dangerous. Yet even the insouciant Johnnie had seen it, and warned her against flirting with him so openly, to which her indignant reply had been that it was safe just because it was so open – ‘Besides, even James has said nothing. What a s
taid old married man you’re growing, to outvie James in prudery!’
She spoke of the young Frenchman now with friendly easy freedom to Bothwell, as she told him the news Châtelard had brought of her uncles. It was disturbing, for there had been a Huguenot attempt to murder the Duc de Guise. The man had been caught and brought before him, and when asked why he had done it, replied, ‘for his religion’.
‘Well,’ said the Guise, ‘if your religion teaches you to murder one who has never injured you, mine teaches me to forgive you’; and he let him go free, to the fury of his followers.
‘If the Guise is killed,’ they threatened, ‘then all France will flow with blood.’
Mary begged Bothwell to make her uncle understand the danger his death would bring to France, since he could never make him regard it for himself. And to her uncle she wrote a long letter on behalf of Bothwell, that he should give him the Captaincy of the Scottish Archers. The Guise had a great liking for what he had both seen and heard of Bothwell and would be only too glad to make use of him, as he had told his niece more than once. ‘So at least my mother’s country will repay you a little for the service you gave her, though my father’s has shown you such ingratitude,’ she said as she gave him the letter.
The next day after that sunrise walk along the shore, there came another unexpected visitor. Lethington, returning from a diplomatic visit to London, and hearing that the Queen was at Coldinghame, broke his freezing journey there, and sufficiently late in the day to ensure his lying there the night. He rode into the courtyard in the frosty blue twilight when all the company were snowballing each other, so it was too late to hide the fact that Bothwell was present. But Lethington was very friendly to him, and as long as he remained at Coldinghame there was no way in which he could work against him. So his hosts and the Queen were most pressing in their invitations, and he was well content to stay, settled comfortably before the fire in a big armchair, with cushions at his back and a rug to keep off the draughts from his feet, and allowed to wear his cap before his Queen to keep off the draughts from his head, ‘which is none so thickly thatched as I could wish’, and a cup of warm mulled wine in his hand, his furred cloak drawn close about him. He gave himself these elderly invalid airs quite shamelessly, not only for the sake of his comfort, but for his enjoyment of the exasperation they caused in the younger men. Moreover, they enhanced his privileges; he spoke indulgently to his Queen and his hostess as if they were a pair of pretty children, while with leisurely enjoyment he told them all the gossip from England.
Elizabeth was still insisting that her dearest wish was that she and Mary should meet, though she had put off the proposed meeting at York last summer.
Mary declared, ‘I don’t believe she intends to meet me, or ever did intend it.’
Console yourself, Madam; if she does not meet you she will scarcely sleep for curiosity. I had to answer a thousand questions concerning your height, complexion, the colour of your hair, your accomplishments, and all in comparison with her own. Judge how precarious was my balance between truth and courtesy. But I compromised. You dance more gracefully than she; this, translated into the language of the English Court, means that she dances ‘more high and disposedly’ than you. Your Grace is taller than her Grace, and therefore too tall for a woman, I am sorry to inform you, since her Grace is exactly the right height – I have it from her own lips.’
He had had to notice each different dress she wore; it entailed a fresh start of rapture three or four times each day – and more rapture, punctuated by her coy scoldings, when allowed by a courtier to surprise her playing the virginals.
‘But she is close on thirty!’ exclaimed Mary incredulously.
‘Ah, but a Virgin, you must always remember. Her ways in fact were more virginal than her instrument; they left me well satisfied to serve so staid a dowager as Your Grace.’
‘Did she ask if I too played the virgin – and the virginals?’
‘The latter instrument – yes; and how well? I told her, “Reasonably well for a Queen!”’
‘Monster! I’ll have you hanged for that!’
‘She’d have me hanged if I’d made it warmer.’
His mission to London had been on the question of Mary’s marriage. If she did not marry according to Elizabeth’s wishes, Elizabeth would refuse to admit her as her successor. But it looked as though no one that Mary could choose would be according to Elizabeth’s wishes.
Obviously the English Queen would not encourage a match for her with any great Continental power that would make Scotland a dangerous neighbour. Lethington had held only secret interviews with the Spanish Ambassador in London to discuss the proposals for Mary’s marriage to Don Carlos. But Knox’s spies had discovered the matter and he had preached openly against the marriage with ‘an infidel: for all Papists are infidels’. So the secret was out, and Mary had only shown how helpless she was when she summoned Knox to the Palace for an angry scene; she had cried so with rage that she had to send her page for more handkerchiefs; and he had summed up their respective positions by assuring her that her tears gave him no more pleasure than those of his little boys when he whipped them.
‘What have you to do with my marriage?’ she had stormed, ‘and what are you in this realm?’
‘A subject born within the same,’ was his superb answer.
The word ‘subject’ seemed to have a different meaning in Scotland from in England, where a Puritan writer had had his right hand cut off for expressing his opinion against Elizabeth making any foreign marriage. It was the opinion of Elizabeth herself; but that did not lessen her punishment of his impertinence in daring to discuss her marriage at all. Nor did his punishment lessen his loyalty: the instant his hand was cut off he waved the bleeding stump round his head and shouted, ‘God bless the Queen!’
‘It seems,’ Lethington now said slyly as he told this tale, ‘that one Queen may steal a horse, where another may not look over the hedge.’
Mary had had to climb down, and profess entire obedience to Elizabeth over her marriage: she had declared she would only take a suitor of Elizabeth’s own choice; and Lethington could now tell her what that choice had been.
He amused himself by tantalizing the company with their questions and guesses and his own ambiguous replies, finished his mulled wine, put down his cup on a stool near by with his usual precise care, placed the tips of his beautiful manicured fingers together, glanced at the eager faces of the two girls, whose combined ages did not quite equal his own, and said, ‘The Queen of England has paid Your Grace the tenderest compliment in her power by proposing to give you the man that she loves best herself – though “as a brother”, she was careful to assure me. That is, Robert Dudley.’
There was an instant’s speechless astonishment. Bothwell’s hand flew instinctively to his sword. ‘Christ’s blood!’ he burst out; ‘is this a joke of yours to insult the Queen? Robert Dudley – that kept stallion of Elizabeth’s!’
‘Your Lordship’s known eye for horseflesh,’ drawled Lethington, ‘should judge whether the stallion or the grey mare be the better horse.’
‘Is this true?’
‘My profession, my lord, obliges me to lie abroad for the good of my country. But not at home.’
‘Why, he’s not even one of her nobles,’ exclaimed Johnnie Stewart.
‘Her Majesty noticed that omission,’ observed Lethington, ‘and has supplied the remedy. She has created him Earl of Leicester, and signified her pleasure in honouring him by tickling his neck during the ceremony.’
There was a crude hoot of mirth from Jan. Mary clenched her hands till the knuckles showed white. At last she said very low:
‘He was believed to have caused the murder of his first wife, Amy Robsart. Is that the reason for the choice of his second?’
Jan gave her a startled glance and flung her arm round her.
‘It’s monstrous,’ she cried. ‘Everybody says the English Queen was enceinte by him this last summer and that was why t
he skirts at her Court have suddenly grown so wide.’
‘An admirable instance of petticoat government,’ murmured Lethington.
‘And you, I suppose,’ sneered Bothwell, ‘told your good friend of England that it was an admirable notion to pass on her lover as a husband for our Queen?’
‘I did indeed,’ was the smooth answer, ‘and with such grateful consideration for the value she set on him, that I suggested she should first marry him herself, so as to have the enjoyment of him during her lifetime, and then leave the reversion of him in her will, along with her kingdom, to our Queen.’
There was a roar of delight from Johnnie. ‘You said that to her face, and left England alive!’
Mary clapped her hands. ‘No wonder she calls you the flower of the wits in Scotland! She’s proved your thorns sharper than any on her Tudor rose. Oh how I love you for that, dear Michael Wily!’
For the rest of the evening she gave all her attentions to him and none to Bothwell, in rebuke for his rough attack on her most able servant. And Bothwell only made matters worse for himself by returning to the attack once or twice in vain attempt to prick his precious complacency – by which he only called down on himself the light but deadly shafts of his opponent’s sarcasm. They pricked him, probed him, made rings round him in which he felt like an enraged bull, longing to charge but bewildered as to his direction. And all the time he had to conform to the polite fiction that this was only a friendly piece of back-chat, when he was itching to get his hands round the scraggy neck of that elderly pussy-cat, with his tabby hair growing grey and his thin ironic lips and his cunning half-sarcastic sympathy that now began to show itself to his Queen, stroking her like a soft paw while underneath one could feel the claws.
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