When they lifted Mary from off the horse, she stood dazed and rubbed her eyes. ‘But it’s all quite different,’ she said. ‘Just now I saw that rock clear, like pearl, and birds flying up round it with wings of fire.’
Joy and awe had swept her up, exalting her, dizzying her; but now that wave had flowed past and she did not know why she had felt it; it did not belong to this drear moment at all as she stood before the empty castle and the rain-drummed sea, and the rain fell on her.
A closely serried line of redshanks stood at the edge of the surf below, fishing for bits of flotsam with their black bills; they had nothing to do with those birds of fire that she had seen proudly soaring and floating round the Bass Rock, now grown invisible in the advancing rain. She felt very near tears.
They went into the hail, which was quite bare and very cold.
Anthony Standen came slowly down the stairs towards them, looking sheepish and indignant. The King, he said, had never drawn rein till he got here, drank a half-pint of whisky, and was now dead asleep, rolled in his cloak on a bare bedstead upstairs.
‘Good,’ said Bothwell with satisfaction.
They gathered round her, he and the other leaders who had ridden with him and whom she now saw clearly for the first time: Gordon, and the fathers of three of her Maries, the grave kindly Lord Fleming, jolly Lord Livingstone with his red face and bushy grey beard, and Bothwell’s old friend, lean and lantern-jawed, the chief of the Long Setons.
‘And now there’s but one Mary to do duty to three fathers!’ she said, smiling up at them as they hovered, anxious and rather helpless, not knowing what could be done for her beyond lighting fires everywhere, as the soldiers were already doing. The place was almost entirely unfurnished, and Margaret Carwood, exhausted by her constant anxiety of the last three days and nights, was distracted to find herself the only woman in this grim fortress, and no doctor, ‘and anything may happen any minute,’ she muttered, wringing her hands. Her mistress ought to be got straight to bed, but where were the blankets? They would all be damp and must be aired.
‘So they will be very soon,’ said Mary, who was sitting on a bench by the now crackling fire in the hall, ‘and I can tell you I am not going to bed till I have had some breakfast. I am ravenous, as you all must be. What can we eat?’
Some dry oatcake was discovered and kegs of ale, and a grinning soldier brought in his helmet full of eggs that he had found in the hen-roosts, and thought would be more to the fancy of a breeding woman than the salt beef which was all there was in the larders.
But who was to cook them? for Carwood was upstairs routing out the bedding. Mary cried that she would make omelettes for them all. There was a procession of the lords and the Queen into the kitchen; frying-pan and bowl and wooden spoon were found and wiped, and she set to work as chief cook with a zest that amazed them when they thought of it afterwards. At the moment they were so thankful to have reached the fortress safely and to find her not desperately ill as they had feared, that they were all in the highest spirits and it seemed quite natural that she should be too. She chaffed her three fathers and set them, most undutifully they declared, to beat the eggs and chop some herbs that yet another enterprising soldier had found at her command in the herb plot. The omelettes were delicious, and she heated the oatcake and stirred the ale with a red-hot poker – it wasn’t in the Court of France she had learned that trick, so where was it? they demanded, laughing.
‘This very night in the blacksmith’s forge, so you see how good it is for queens to go among their people.’
She was not her father’s daughter for nothing, they told her.
‘No, and in more ways than one, for with your help I have escaped from my captors as he did, and shall wake up to find I am indeed Sovereign of Scotland.’
She looked at Bothwell, who three years ago in the winter sunrise at Coldinghame had given her courage by telling her of that. He was astounded by the happiness in her face.
She was using herself to the uttermost, and glorying in it. This was to be alive: to find what she could do, and do it – and to do it beside the man who had done more than any other to show her how. The comforts and refinements that she had been taught to look on as necessities mattered no more than a straw blown away in the wind; her hair was a tangled mass of elf-locks and her face unwashed and unpowdered, but that did not matter, as it would have done with Darnley. But not with him.
As he took the frying-pan from her hands, the man who loved courage more than anything looked at her with worship in his eyes. She would always rise to the occasion in danger, he knew. But to be able to joke and cook and cheer her waiting-maid after these three days and nights, and with such simple, carefree gaiety, was even better.
The roughest of his men would not have treated a foaling mare or cow as her enemies had treated this delicate pampered girl from the Court of France – shut her up alone to die of a miscarriage, untended. But she had survived their brutality, outwitted and escaped them, travelled thirty miles on horseback at night, and was now cooking their breakfast.
Chapter Twelve
Bothwell also rose to the occasion. This time it was in just three days that he mustered four thousand fully armed men round them. On Tuesday morning they arrived at Dunbar; by Thursday night there was their army complete, drawn from the dalesmen and rank-riders, besides four companies of trained infantry and a substantial backing of artillery. Cattle too had been driven in, the larders stocked, and it would be as hard to assail their position with their backs to the North Sea as to ‘ding down Tantallon or build a brig to the Bass’.
The effect of his army was as quick as its muster. It encouraged all the nobles who were hesitatingly watching the course of events to come riding up to Dunbar at the head of their retainers; Atholl descended from the hasty retreat he beat into the mountains over the weekend; Hume, who at that same moment had been escorting the Lord James back to Edinburgh, now rode up to serve the Queen; the Earl Marischal, though father-in-law to the Bastard, the Earls of Caithness, Cassillis, Crawford and Sutherland, all followed suit; and the Hamiltons sent word from Edinburgh that they and all the town were only waiting to give the Queen a right royal welcome on her return to her capital.
And that was by no means its chief effect. The band of conspirators in Edinburgh saw at once that the game was up. They saw it really from that first moment on Tuesday morning when they returned to Holyrood with their Act of Pardon all ready but for her signature, to find that the Queen had neither died nor miscarried but had escaped from their power, with her husband – that took some time to swallow, even by those who knew their Darnley – and had fled, no one knew where.
Very soon they heard that she was at Dunbar with Bothwell in command of an army whose force increased hourly with every fresh report. That settled it. The most conspicuous of the murderers, Morton, Ruthven and Lindsay at the head of them, fled precipitately over the Border to the safety of England and the very same quarters at Newcastle that James and his fellows had left for Scotland in such high hopes a few days before.
‘So they’ll find their nests kept warm for them,’ chuckled Bothwell.
He roared with laughter when those lords that were less conspicuously incriminated came riding up to Dunbar to crave their pardon from their ‘justly incensed Queen’.
‘Here comes the first flock of turtle doves,’ he said; ‘all the carrion crows will now be of the same feather.’
Sure enough, the Lord James, while keeping a safe distance, sent assurances that he had broken off all connection with those who ‘had committed the vile act.’ Darnley was hurt that James had sent no message to him.
And Knox, once again finding that absence makes the heart grow stronger, hastily disappeared until people should have forgotten his last Sunday’s sermon in praise of those who had executed ‘just punishment on that knave David.’
Mary’s spirit and Bothwell’s strength had saved her throne and given her complete victory. She rode back in triumph into the ci
ty from which she had fled so desperately just one week before. Beside her and her husband rode Bothwell at the head of his Borderers and professional infantry; behind them, all the lords who had flocked to her at Dunbar, with their troops; the Hamiltons, with the warlike Abbot, Gavin, at their head, rode out from Edinburgh to meet her and joined their forces to her army; all the townspeople poured out into the street, and roared themselves hoarse in her welcome. They were all her loyal and devoted servants, and once again an upward glance at that overhanging upper window in the house at the foot of Netherbow showed her that she was no longer ‘overlooked’.
The cavalcade stopped in the High Street in front of the house of the Bishop of Dunkeld which had been prepared for her, for she could not face those haunted rooms in Holyrood. She would move up to the Castle as soon as it was got ready for her, and await her baby’s birth in the security of that mighty stronghold; in the meantime, Bothwell did his best to turn the episcopal mansion into a fortress by placing his field-guns before its doors and billeting his soldiers in all the nearest houses.
Mary was now living in the very heart of her capital, and made to feel every moment how her people adored her for her courage and resourcefulness, and with that mixture of amusement in their admiration that is more endearing than any holy awe. There was a lass for you, who could stand up to a murder when seven months gone and not miscarry, outwit even the Great Bastard, steal away under his very nose, long as it was (and not for the first time either!), and come riding back before a week was out at the head of an army! Her bairn should have the spirit of Wallace.
Sympathy also came from England. Elizabeth wrote at once to express it, and her admiration for her cousin’s magnificent spirit. That was sincere; a wistful envy peeped out between the lines from the older woman, whose lifelong struggle to fortify her position and her kingdom held no such spectacular adventure. Her indignation with Darnley was sincere enough too; she flatly refused to believe the protestations he wrote to her of his own innocence of the murder plot. ‘Damnable liar!’ she roared. ‘If I’d been in my cousin’s place I’d have snatched his dagger and stabbed him with it myself.’
Cecil, more consistently, still tried to wring some advantage by spreading the scandal that ‘a deformed and base menial’ had been killed ‘in her arms’.
Elizabeth’s practical sympathy showed itself in fact far more on behalf of the chief murderers who had taken refuge in her country; she refused to send them back for their trial, as requested. One never knew when Scottish rebels might come in handy – a consideration that weighed more than the Bastard’s secret intercessions. For James, while declaring in Scotland his complete dissociation from them, wrote to England begging protection for his ‘dear friends’ who ‘for my sake have given this adventure’. So Morton and Lindsay stayed on safely in England; but Ruthven’s liver and kidneys quickly paid the price of his over-exertions; he died convinced that he was one of the Saved, by a vision of angels descending from heaven to bear his soul thither. His death-bed greatly encouraged his friend Morton in Calvin’s doctrine that by no sin of his could the sinner lose his place among the elect.
The charges against the criminals were read in court: of gathering five hundred men ‘armed with secret armour in the silence of night’ within the Palace, who ‘reft the keys of the porter, closed the gates, and slew the late Secretary David Rizzio in the presence of our Sovereign Lady; and put violent hands on her most noble person, held, detained and pressed the same most awfully and treasonably – giving to Her Majesty occasion by the sight of the said cruel slaughter and by the thrusting of her person in violent manner, to part with her birth.’
Only two of the most active ringleaders were executed. Darnley, zealously blackening others in order to whitewash himself, thought this insufficient, and succeeded in bringing two more prisoners, both safely obscure, a saddler and a merchant, to the foot of the gallows. But Bothwell called the Queen’s attention to the matter with his usual vigour.
‘Is it your wish, Madam, that the small fry should be sacrificed while all the big fish escape? It is not? Then give me your ring, quick.’
And he rode up with it himself in token of their pardon, just in time to save their lives.
He also saved from outlawry three fellow-lairds from Lothian; true, one of them, though a neighbour, was an old enemy, no less than that John Cockburn whose clinking money-bags from England had echoed so strangely in the crises of Bothwell’s life these last seven years – ‘But he gave me the best raid of my life, for all it’s given me the most trouble ever after.’
And so, not very logically, Cockburn also escaped the net. But when it came to the big fish, Bothwell’s intentions were ruthless enough, though his opportunities were slight. The exiles in England were outlawed in their absence, that was all that could be done about them. And Darnley was an impossible case. Mary had used him to effect her escape; without him she could not have contrived it, and she insisted that he should not therefore be made to suffer by it. This was also politic, since to accuse him of the murder, was to strengthen the scandal that he had killed Rizzio out of jealousy of his wife’s lover, a scandal that aimed, of course, at throwing a doubt on the legitimacy of her child and its right to the succession. It was for this reason as much as for the hope of a miscarriage that the murder was planned for when Rizzio was with her – if possible alone, but Bothwell’s stern warning to her earlier had prevented that.
Darnley cooperated heartily by declaring before the Council that he had known nothing about the conspiracy and ‘never counselled, commanded, consented, assisted or approved the same’. He thought it would be a good idea to have that down in writing, and posted his signed declaration of innocence at the Market Cross. It was very annoying that just after he had done this his former confederates placed in Mary’s hand a copy of their bond to secure her Crown for himself, at the price of her dishonour and possible death. And there was his name topping the list. Luckily she didn’t seem to take much notice of it.
He was quite unprepared for this spitefulness on the part of his former friends. Even his father, now in exile on his Lennox estates for his share in the plot, was furious that Darnley had left him behind in Holyrood on the night of his flight – he might at least have warned him, he said. He swore a solemn oath that he would never look upon his son’s face again.
‘Lepers don’t care to look in the glass,’ was Bothwell’s comment.
Darnley’s high hopes of getting all he wanted out of Mary now Davie was out of the way were badly disappointed. He found himself farther off from the Crown Matrimonial than ever; he did not even have the authority he had had before all this fuss: she allowed him no share now in the practical administration; he was being pushed further and further into the background.
‘John Thompson’s man’ who has to do as his wife bids, that was the servants’ name for him, as Anthony insolently let him know. Even Anthony had turned against him; he kept on making sneering reminders of Darnley’s ‘superb horsemanship’ on that cursed night when he made such remarkably good going.
The nobles at Court showed even more openly their contempt for his cowardice and treachery, and Mary did not seem able to bear him to come near her – it was monstrously unfair, when after all it was he who had helped her to escape.
Since everybody avoided him he tried to avoid them, pretended to be ill and went to bed so as not to have to greet the new French Ambassador, Philibert Du Croc; but even that would not do, for Du Croc came to him instead, reproached him for his behaviour, and then wrote home: ‘There is not one person in the kingdom, from the highest to the lowest, that regards him.’ He added, on the other hand, that everywhere ‘the Queen is beloved, esteemed, and honoured.’
It was the secret fountainhead of the conspiracy that Bothwell longed to quench. The Bastard’s head was already forfeit two or three times over, he told the Queen, and begged her to remove it. She had a horror of condemning her half-brother to death in cold blood, he knew that, but she ow
ed it to herself, her throne, and her unborn child. James was skulking in the Highlands, along with Lethington and Argyll, powerless and discredited, but that would not last long.
‘This is his second open attempt to dethrone you,’ he warned her, ‘and within the past year. He’s failed this time, as he failed last summer. The third time he may be lucky.’
James had kept most discreetly in the background of the plot; his name did not appear in the list of conspirators, but Bothwell could procure definite proofs of his guilt from George Douglas, the other bastard, now in exile in England, who proposed to buy his pardon by the evidence he could furnish that James and Lethington too, together with ‘others that the Queen knew not of, were the designers and purpose-makers of the slaughter of David.’ It would not be easy to get George Douglas back into Scotland, as Elizabeth, terrified of a full exposure of the plot, had ordered her Warden of the Marches to prevent it by putting him under a strong guard.
‘And do you hope to bring Elizabeth to book too?’ asked Mary, with that ironic flicker of her eyelids.
‘No, but I can bring her servant James,’ he answered doggedly. ‘That mad fellow Jack Musgrave would help me, I know. He’d have smuggled me across the Border if I’d agreed to break parole; well, he can smuggle George Douglas instead. We’ll manage it.’
But she still showed indifference, and he lost his temper. ‘I wish to save your throne, perhaps your life. Are you unwilling to attend to so slight a matter?’
‘Very,’ she replied with a strange smile.
He found her face inscrutable, especially now she looked so tired. Her eyes were veiled; she seemed to be brooding over some secret.
They were walking on the battlements of Edinburgh Castle, where she was now lodged. High up on that towering crag she could see the smoke of Auld Reekie rising far below in blue wreaths in the windy sunshine of early May. The blossoming fruit trees in the orchards were no bigger than dandelion clocks. Away in the distance, with the white foam flecking its blue, and here and there the flash of a white sail, the wide Firth of Forth broadened out towards the open sea.
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