A shriek, piercing and agonized, from behind him was strangled as Lord Lindsay thrust his hand over the Queen’s mouth. Then Darnley closed the window. This time she fainted again in good earnest.
When she came to at last she was quite alone. The guards marched up and down outside, but there was no one with her in the room where that night David had been murdered. She was light-headed for a time, for she had found herself whispering to him, telling him she would avenge him. Then she grew afraid that she heard him answer her. How foolish to be afraid of Davie’s ghost, who would never harm her, as would all these living men about her door. She crawled to the bed and lay there, hour after hour. At first she shrieked wildly, but nobody came. Then she lay silent.
Some time next morning Lord Lindsay brought her food, but she would not touch it. She gasped out that she was very ill and must have her women.
‘Aye, and pass out from here in their clothes!’ he snorted. ‘Do you think I don’t know your tricks?’
Her answer was a cry with her hands at her side, and he flung away from her.
Again there was silence, on and on, it seemed for ever. Was she to be left here alone to miscarry and die? She began to scream with a sound that frightened even herself.
And again Lindsay came back, but this time there was someone with him.
‘Now mind,’ he was saying, ‘no woman is going to come out of here muffled up to the eyes; whoever comes out shall show her face, and if it’s the Queen’s, so much the worse for her. No, there’s a better way than that!’
And closing the door, he stood there in the room, leaning against it, while Lady Huntly ran over to the bed and took that crouched figure in her arms, soothing her with her plump hands.
‘My bairn, my bairn,’ she murmured.
Mary clung to her but could not speak.
Lady Huntly bathed her face, asked if she had had food. It was now four o’clock on Sunday afternoon, and Mary had had none since supper the evening before. Rounding on Lord Lindsay, Lady Huntly demanded to know if he meant to starve the Queen to death.
‘I brought her food,’ he said sullenly, ‘and she’d have none of it.’
‘Very likely, from such hands as yours.’
She bustled out, and presently came back with a servant bearing a tray. Lord Lindsay, still on guard, insisted on examining all the dishes. Then Lady Huntly, paying no more attention to him than if he had been a doorpost, coaxed the Queen to eat and drink, chatting away as if there were nothing abnormal in the situation.
‘And now we must get you to bed,’ she said cheerfully.
Mary shuddered. ‘Not here – in this room—’ but Lady Huntly pressed her arm and she was silent.
Even now it was difficult to get rid of Lord Lindsay, but the old lady told him roundly that if he insisted on staying to watch the Queen undress, she would bring a charge of attempted rape against him. At that he hurriedly departed, telling them he would give them five minutes and no more.
As soon as the door shut on him, Lady Huntly whispered very fast as she undressed the Queen, ‘I’ve been trying to get in here ever since last night. My son and Lord Bothwell escaped from the Palace and came and told me. Now they’re planning to rescue you. Lord Bothwell gave me a long rope to smuggle in to you on a covered dish, but you saw how it was, they are examining everything that comes in. Luckily I waited to see if that would be so.’
Mary’s heart had given a great leap. So Bothwell was not a prisoner. Hope, life, anything now was possible. She asked what the rope would be for, and was told that Bothwell planned to lower her in a chair from the clock tower. So different was the change in her mood since she had heard of his safety that she began to laugh unsteadily.
‘How like him! He climbed down the Castle rock in the dark, so he thinks a woman seven months gone with child can swing down from a clock tower!’
‘Yes, I told him it was impossible. But he has so great an opinion of you he swore you’d manage anything.’
‘So I will, I will!’ Her heart was soaring now. She would prove herself to him. ‘That’s impossible, the guard anyway would make it so. But I’ve another plan. I’ll tell him. Give me a scrap of paper from that writing-desk – there’s the ink – quick!’
Lady Huntly brought them to her just as Lord Lindsay began to thump on the door.
The Dowager gave the usual formula. ‘Wait one moment,’ she called impressively: then, as he presently banged again, she went to the door and said in a lower voice through the keyhole that the Queen was on the chaise percée. Mary took the hint and seated herself on that article of domestic furniture while she scribbled her note. She was in her bed-gown by now. Lady Huntly hurried back to her, put away the pen and ink, and just had time to shove the note inside the neck of her dress before Lord Lindsay, disregarding their exclamations, pushed into the room.
‘How dare you enter at this moment?’ exclaimed the Dowager.
He was somewhat disconcerted to find that the Queen actually was on the chaise percée, and roared back, ‘How dare you stay here muttering and whispering long past the time I gave you? You’ll go now, whatever excuse you trump up, and you’ll not come back.’
She helped the Queen into bed, speaking the while as though she were continuing a conversation – ‘and as I was telling Your Majesty, the King has dissolved your new Parliament, at midday today. There was a proclamation read at the Market Cross telling all the members of Parliament, only just assembled, to leave Edinburgh within three hours, on pain of death.’
She plumped up the pillows and coolly confronted Lindsay. ‘Yes, my lord, and it’s no treason to tell your Queen what everyone in Edinburgh has been told by order of you and your fellows. Nor is it treason to tell her that Lord James is back in Edinburgh, with the rest of the exiles. Oh, and yes, Madam – did I mention that the proclamation has declared that there will now be no trial of your half-brother and his fellow-rebels, and no danger either to them or their property? So now you see why they have returned.’
And she marched out past Lord Lindsay and went back to Huntly House, where she found her son and Bothwell secreted in a back room, having disregarded the decree of banishment ‘within three hours on pain of death’. The Earl of Atholl had taken the hint and made for the safety of the hills with his followers.
They sprang up demanding news of her before Lady Huntly was inside the room. She began to unbutton the neck of her dress as she replied that the Queen was a deal better than she’d any reason to hope, ‘but for all that, my lord, your plan will never do, as indeed I told you. But she has another, which she tells you of in this note. Read it quick and tell me what it is.’
He snatched it; it looked absurdly short, too short to tell any plan. ‘What in hell does she mean?’ he exclaimed as he scanned it, frowning. ‘She says nothing here of how she means to do it. Has she gone mad?’
‘Small wonder if she had!’ exclaimed the old lady. ‘But for pity’s sake, what is in the note?’
‘There’s nothing in it, nothing! She tells me to wait for her at the village just before Seton, tomorrow night, from midnight on.’
That evening Mary obtained leave from her jailers to send for her half-brother. Waiting for him, she grew so restless that she rose and dressed herself again. At last, after some hours, the door opened and she saw the familiar impressive figure, the long grave face in its fringe of sparse beard.
The faithful Mordecai had returned.
Chapter Nine
In that moment a strange thing happened.
James’ hour of triumph had come at last, after all his waiting and plotting; his open rebellion; defeat and humiliation. But he had worked against his half-sister while away from her, used others to do his dirty work while he himself abstained from personal violence, which he disliked. He had only to make a dignified appearance when everything had been carried out according to plan.
This time there had been no hitch anywhere. For weeks past, messengers had carried constant secret communications between him at Newcastle a
nd the conspirators round Ruthven’s sick-bed in Edinburgh; as also between Randolph, still lurking on the English side of the frontier at Berwick, and the English Queen and her Ministers in London. Cecil had already informed ‘Countess Meg’ Lennox of the plot of her son’s approaching triumph.
For this was an arrangement between the two gangs of plotters, formerly enemies, now allies. At the head of the old gang was the Protestant James, who had opposed Darnley because he feared ‘he would do little to forward the cause of Christ,’ but who now swore to procure him the Crown Matrimonial, and ‘to spare neither life nor death in supporting his quarrel against all his enemies without exception’. At the head of the new gang was the Catholic Darnley, the hope of his religion throughout England and Scotland, who now swore to establish the Protestant religion and restore James and the other rebel Protestant lords to their full powers and estates.
There was also, in case of accidents, which seemed only too likely to those who knew him, a Proclamation all ready to hand, signed by Darnley, in which he took all the responsibility for the murder of Rizzio ‘though it were in the very presence of the Queen’. That presence was insisted on as the main objective, since her probable miscarriage and death would leave the ground clear of all obstacles to all the parties concerned.
And this elaborate conspiracy, whispered of in London, Berwick, Newcastle and Edinburgh, had been kept secret and proved successful. The Queen was still alive, but Rizzio was as dead as fifty-six stabs could make him. Her Dominican friar, Father Black, had also been murdered in the Palace that same night. The Parliament had been dissolved, its members banished, and Mary was a helpless prisoner.
It only remained for James, who had arrived, as planned, several hours after the actual killing, to tidy up things and give them an air of respectability. And then he would be – as he had seen himself in his dreams ever since he could remember – the Regent of Scotland, all-powerful, with no one, certainly not a drunken young fool calling himself King, in his way.
But it is not quite true that nothing succeeds like success. There is a core of weakness in it. James in exile, disappointed, afraid, could scheme against and slander the half-sister who had loaded him with honours and riches, and feel no more remorse for it than if he were a devil.
But James in his complete triumph, with nothing to fear from her, seeing before him this white piteous wraith who looked as though she might indeed die before his eyes, was taken unawares. For perhaps the only time in his life he was conquered, for a moment, by that insidious power, pity. His eyes filled with tears.
Mary saw it and flung herself into his arms. ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘if only you had been here, you would never have let them treat me like this!’
And she too was sincere, although she knew that he must be in the plot.
But for a moment their minds had ceased to work; their arms were round each other; he was stroking her hair, calling her ‘little sister’; she was clinging to him, sobbing; the same blood was in them both; he, who could remember their father so well, had seen it again and again in her likeness to that strange, fair, laughing King, and though it had never moved him before, it did now. And that same blood was pregnant in her now, to produce another Stewart King – if this last night’s work did not prevent it. For the first time he felt some horror at that thought; it was true, he told himself, if he had been here he would not have let them treat her like this – not quite like this.
And he told her he was gravely displeased with Lindsay, he would speak to him very strongly, and that she should have her women with her.
The strange moment was past. He was pretending he had had nothing to do with the plot that he had instigated; she must pretend to believe in his pretence. There was more that she must do.
‘And Harry,’ she said tearfully; ‘he has not been near me all day. Perhaps they would not let him come to me. Please tell him, dear James, that I should feel easier if I might see him for a little – but not with those others!’ she added with a violent shudder.
So by James’ consent, indeed order, Darnley came, very sheepish and unwilling, to see his wife, and at last she could speak with him alone.
‘I’ll tell you what it really is,’ said Darnley, ‘you never thought my rank good enough for you. I know the scorn you have for the baseborn. Queen Catherine, the daughter of Lorenzo the Magnificent, is only the banker’s daughter to you!’
‘Oh God,’ sighed Mary, ‘that silly thing said by a pert child in a temper over her Latin lesson – is it always to be remembered against me?’
‘And you’ve called Elizabeth the alderman’s granddaughter.’
‘But, Harry, you’ve said things like that about her too. Anne Boleyn, the alderman’s daughter, was no relation of yours.’
‘Oh, it’s not just the Boleyn blood you sneer at. You Stewarts look on us Tudors as a pack of greedy Welsh upstarts, I know.’
Bewildered, she wondered where all this family pride was leading. ‘It’s only your grandmother, and mine, who was a Tudor.’
‘There you go again, rubbing in now that even my Tudor claim to the English throne doesn’t amount to much. I dare say it doesn’t. I dare say I’m a nobody and that you’re the daughter of a hundred kings on the one side and go back to Charlemagne on the other. I dare say you only took me because you couldn’t get anyone better – your two merchants’ daughters saw to that! But suppose I am of mean degree – all the same, I am your husband, and you promised that I should be your equal in all things. And look how you kept your promise! You gave me a lot of honours, it’s true, revived the royal title of Duke of Albany for me, made people call me King, and so forth. But what’s the use of giving me the name of King if you don’t give me the power of one? I’ve said it all along, I ought to have the Crown Matrimonial, with full powers as King, and to continue as King if you—’
‘If I die as a result of this last night’s work?’ she finished quietly.
He went crimson. ‘It wasn’t my work,’ he mumbled; ‘at least, it wasn’t I who thought of it.’
‘I can well believe that,’ she said in the same soft tone.
He was deceived by her apparent gentleness and dropped down on his knee beside her chair. ‘Oh, Mary, why has it all gone wrong? It was all Davie’s doing. You – so proud and superior to all the Medicis and Tudors – no one good enough to be your husband – and then you could take up with that little rat from the Genoese gutters!’
‘A servant is not a husband, Harry.’
‘Damned near it at times, I’ll be bound,’ he muttered.
‘I cannot believe that you mean it when you talk like that,’ she said wearily.
‘No, but, Mary – Mary, listen! It was Davie this, Davie that, from the very beginning. Davie got us married. Davie worked up the Pope and Spain on our side, Davie got in touch with the English Catholics, discovered James’ plot to kidnap us—’
‘But, Harry, he did. You’re not denying it, are you?’
‘No, but I was sick to death of hearing it.’
She looked at him with a slow, new amazement. She had thought there was nothing left for her to learn about Darnley, but only now did she begin to realize where the ingratitude of a mean nature could sink. The haughty youth of whom the nobles complained that he ‘seemed a monarch of the world’ had not been too proud to toady the Italian gutter-rat, play tennis with him, share his bed, and use his help to win his Queen, even sing the love-songs Davie wrote for his purpose – as Harry had let out with his usual naïvety.
But he was too proud to remember all this afterwards, except as an excuse to murder him.
He looked up at her and saw her face like stone. Was she still thinking of that wretched little fellow? Why must she go on thinking about him now he was dead? That white mask-like face began to worry him. He had made himself master now; it was absurd that he should feel nervous with her. Yet his hands would keep twitching; he twisted them together, he felt for the dagger that he always liked to fidget with, and found it gone a
nd then saw her eyes following his hands.
‘What if it was a murder?’ he broke out. ‘Not that I had anything to do with it, I’ll swear that to you, on the Cross if you like. But suppose it was – well, it’s not the first murder in Scotland, and it won’t be the last – not by a long shot! It saved the trouble and uncertainty of a trial. It’s a sort of justice. Davie was getting too much power. It was best to get rid of him. It’s a sharp form of politics, that’s all. Assassination has always been a weapon in politics – not pretty, but then politics aren’t.’
She wondered who had taught him all this. She thought she could detect a rather cracked echo from that mellifluous-sounding politician, James.
‘And to commit the murder in front of a pregnant woman,’ she said, ‘handling her roughly the while, so that with luck it may be not one murder but two, or rather three – does it make it right to call that, too, a sharp form of politics?’
She was too clever for him. He should never have let her argue. He had a better way in the old days of their courting – take her in his arms and kiss her. But somehow that had not outlasted their marriage. He got up and began to wander about the room, baffled and unhappy.
She saw that it had been no good talking to him. How silly to waste time! Involuntarily she looked at her watch. It was close on midnight. Tomorrow at midnight, or soon after, was the time she had appointed to keep tryst with Bothwell. And how much time, if any, would she be able to get tomorrow with Darnley? She had encouraged him to talk because she had got to find out what was in his mind before she could put what she wanted into it.
He saw her look at her watch. ‘You’d best go to bed,’ he said, glad of the excuse to go. ‘So had I. There’s a Council Meeting tomorrow morning, and I promised the old Bastard I’d be there.’ (A glance at her to see how she took this news, but she showed nothing.) ‘And today was pretty full, I can tell you – arranging the Proclamation at the Market Cross, and then the public meeting with James and the rest of the exiles to show we were all friends together.’ (That would rub in how he was being recognised as King, and carrying out all his kingly duties.) ‘And we all went to one of old Knox’s endless sermons – and Lord! if you think murder wrong, just you go and listen to the Man of God! He called it a “most godly deed” and “worthy of all praise”, and he ought to know what’s godly, oughtn’t he?’
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