‘James’ absences are apt to be pregnant,’ he remarked.
There were other danger signs. Lennox had moved from Glasgow to Linlithgow, less than twenty miles away; Kerr of Fawdonside, who had threatened and nearly injured the Queen with his pistol, and whom she refused to pardon with the rest of Rizzio’s murderers, was lurking in the countryside and had boasted that there would soon be a change at Court and himself back in favour. And Bothwell did not like the extraordinary insistence of Darnley’s on the Queen staying that night at Kirk o’ Field. He urged her not to go back there early tomorrow morning to escort him here to Holyrood. Traquair added his entreaties. They were appointing extra guards round Holyrood; let her stay here under their eye for the present till they could discover if indeed anything definite threatened her. He went off to see to the guards, leaving Bothwell still arguing with her, or rather commanding.
‘You are not to go back to that house,’ he said, ‘I’ll not have it, till I’ve found out more.’
She was sick of plots and mysteries, and said, life was not worth living if one had always to be warding off shadows.
‘Shadows don’t move of themselves. If they are there, it’s because there’s something behind them.’
‘When I sat up nearly all night at Glasgow, I wrote to you all the time of that pocky fellow, curse him, and there were so many pleasant things I could have written instead. What a waste it is – and whatever happens to us after death, we only live here once!’
She laughed up at him as she spoke, and found herself desperately wanting him to take her in his arms and kiss her, madly, devouringly, as he had done that time a year ago. Ever since then she had been ill or terribly harassed or both; only now in this last hour, while dancing, had she suddenly begun to feel free of the painful effects of her baby’s birth, free to live and love like other women.
But Bothwell’s face was shut; only the scar over the eye showed bluish-red, as it did when he was stirred; but she felt it was not she who stirred him but that sixth sense that he possessed in action.
‘I smell danger,’ he said, and that excited him more than the perfume of her hair. Had he fallen clean out of love with her? Was it Darnley or Darnley’s child had done that, or was it herself, unable all these past months to feel bodily passion?
Before she knew what she was doing, she held out her hands to him. ‘I love you,’ she said, ‘and that I think we have both known for a long time past. But now I love you as once you told me you loved me. Is that gone from you, and has mine come too late?’
For an instant he stared, and still his face did not change; he did not move, nor take her outstretched hands; she wondered if he had heard her. Then he turned and left her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Centaurs and demons were dancing round her, and satyrs who took their tails in their hands and wagged them; and Queen Elizabeth, who sat hidden somewhere in the darkness, cried in the huge Tudor voice of her father and her sister Mary of Bloody memory, ‘They have insulted my Englishmen. The war with Scotland has only lasted two hundred and fifty years. It must go on for three hundred.’ So the demons, and centaurs danced out from behind the gravestones and stormed the fortress, and against the darkness there shot up spears and balls of fire and ‘all other things pleasant for the sight of man’, so then she knew it was only the fireworks display in Stirling churchyard after the Christening, for those words were from the order in the account book. It was a great relief to know that, for now she knew there was nobody in the fortress, which they were blowing up with gunpowder, but what a roar it made, what a heavy rumbling and crash after crash – was there no one in the fortress? Surely Darnley was in it, lying there in his black mask, clutching her ring – or was he galloping away? – thud, thud went his horse’s hoofs, but the roar of the explosion swallowed them, it swallowed everything, the whole world was tumbling about her, and she woke with a cry.
The roar was still going on. It sounded as though a whole house were being blown up into the air and was now crashing in ruins.
The old Provost’s house at Kirk o’ Field was blown up by gunpowder at two o’clock on Monday morning and totally destroyed. Not one stone was left standing upon another; even the arched vaults below the building were ‘dung in dross to the very groundstone’. Only the gallery which rested on the Flodden Wall was preserved sufficiently to save the lives of the servants who slept in it. There were but few of them, for most had been given leave to attend the wedding ball. Among the rubbish-heap of stones and debris only one broken body had been found – and it was not Darnley’s.
His was discovered later in the garden, at some little distance from the house, and with it the body of his valet, William Taylor, who slept in his room. Both were clad only in their linen nightshirts, which were drawn up, exposing their naked bodies nearly to their necks. Taylor also wore a cap and one slipper. It was thought at first that they had been blown out of bed to this distance, but that was soon proved impossible. There was not a mark on either of their bodies, not a hair singed, nor any sprinkling of dust or powder. Still stranger, Darnley’s sable-furred dressing-gown of purple velvet lay close by, carefully folded, with belt and dagger, also a pair of his slippers, a quilt, and, oddest of all, a chair from the bedroom stood upright on the snowy ground beside them under the bare trees.
Bothwell gave this report to the Queen early that same morning while she was still in bed. He had just returned from leading a party of soldiers to Kirk o’ Field to examine the scene of the crime, and had had the King’s body carried to the new Provost’s house. She listened stupefied, asking him again and again what could have happened.
He shrugged: ‘The strangest accident! A thunderbolt came out of the sky, I suppose, and burnt up the King’s house!’
His sardonic flippancy appalled her. She pulled herself together enough to tell him coldly that that was not very likely.
‘Nor is it likely that an explosion that wrecked such a house to its foundations (some of the walls are thirteen feet thick) could blow two men out of an upper room, clean through the falling roof and walls, and with them a chair, quilt, slippers, and neatly folded dressing-gown, and deposit them all perfectly intact on the ground some sixty to eighty paces away! I tell you there’s no bruise or fracture anywhere on him. He’s dead, and that’s all you can say. Better bring it in as “Act of God or the King’s Enemy!” In this case the two should be synonymous.’
She was stunned by his brutality. When she had heard the first bare report, ‘The King is dead,’ her heart had given a great leap, telling her she was free; but the mystery and horror of it all had quickly overwhelmed her, and so now did this rough, casual, almost joking air of Bothwell’s. She tried to think it the result of strain and bewilderment; he certainly looked tired and harassed, he had been up all night, a thing he had done often enough on a raid, but detective work such as this was another matter.
‘After I left you last night,’ he went on, and her face flamed at the recollection of that leave-taking, but he was evidently not thinking of it, nor noticed that she was. How could she have held out her hands to him those few hours ago and asked his love? She could not believe it as she looked at his jaw thrust out like a clenched fist, at his fierce eyes, and heard his caustic remarks go straight to the subject and blast it. It was hard sense, no doubt, uncompromisingly practical, to realize Darnley was better out of the way – but not like this! If he could see nothing of the pity and terror of it, even to her, then he must be cruel as the sea, relentless as the grave.
But he saw nothing of her thoughts. He was busy telling her how he had gone carefully round all the guards newly appointed by Traquair and then began to go to bed, when Paris burst in on him with a piece of news that aroused his suspicions afresh.
Archie Douglas had during that day moved down to Douglas House at Kirk o’ Field with some of his servants – by order, it was believed, of the Lord James, just before the latter’s hurried departure from Edinburgh early that morning. Archie Dougl
as was apt to play the part of hired bravo to his clan; if there were dirty work to do at Kirk o’ Field, he would prove a handy weapon for it. ‘So,’ Bothwell told the Queen, ‘I flung on some clothes and went and knocked up Black Ormiston at his lodging in the Canongate. He was in bed, of course, but belted his gown and came straight on with me to knock up Jock Hepburn and young Hay of Talla who was sleeping at Jock’s house, sturdy rascals both of them, and it looked as though we might have need of several. We collected Wilson and Powrie too and went down to Kirk o’ Field, giving our names openly to the watch-men at the gates.’
The note of rough defiance was again in his voice, and she wondered at it, for of course he would give his name openly while going on his errand of investigation. And why did he not continue?
‘Do speak!’ she cried. ‘What did you see at Kirk o’ Field?’
‘What everyone in Edinburgh heard. We were close to the house when suddenly there was a flash as though lightning had risen from the ground. It gave a roar and blew up into the air. Jock Hepburn ran me back just in time to prevent some of it falling on us. When it was all over we picked ourselves up and counted each other to make sure we were all there. The building was nothing but a rubbish-heap, even the great arches of the vaults beneath were lying in pieces. The house must have been completely undermined, or else a huge store of gunpowder placed in those vaults.’
So Darnley had been murdered within three hours of his having implored her to stay with him that night. It was as though he had begged her protection – in vain.
‘But what protection could I have been?’ she said, pursuing her thoughts aloud. ‘I should only have been blown up too. That must indeed have been the intention.’
‘Of course it was the intention!’ Bothwell burst out vehemently, ‘you, and all the leaders of the Government – it was the merest chance that you weren’t there last night or early this morning, and James and Lethington – not so much chance where they were concerned, I fancy.’
And he fell silent, remembering the message that had come from Lethington reminding her to return in haste to Holyrood.
‘James – Lethington – are you suggesting that they could have known anything of this? And the Douglases gathering at Douglas House – and the light in Hamilton House, are the Hamiltons in it too?’
‘God knows who isn’t in it – half Scotland it seems, one way or t’other.’
She stared at him wildly. The whole thing was like an evil dream, inconsequent and horrible.
‘He felt he was in danger,’ she cried, appealing for some sign of pity from him, however faint. ‘You remember how nervous he was last night, he was almost frantic that I should stay with him.’
‘I do remember,’ said Bothwell grimly.
Margaret Carwood, now Stewart, came into the room carrying a tray, put it down by the Queen’s bed, and began to draw the curtains against the dark February morning and light the candles. She told Mary in firm answer to her expostulations that no matter if she were a bride last night, she’d have no one else looking after her mistress this morning, so let her eat her nice fresh egg and drink her milk before they cooled while she hung the black velvet on the walls in accordance with the rules of royal widowhood.
‘You’ll not play that hideous foolery now!’ exclaimed Bothwell.
‘Indeed, I think we’re all too much in the dark already,’ said Mary, and then wished she had not fallen in with him so meekly. How dared he tell her what or what not to do about her mourning?
Meg did not even hear such havers. A queen was a queen, and a widow was a widow, however she had come by such widowhood, and she proceeded to hang up the black velvet draped over her arm.
There was a timid knock, and Paris slipped into the room with a message for his former master. Bothwell took his leave of the Queen and followed him out of the room.
‘They have arrested Will Blackadder,’ said Paris.
Bothwell swore. What could they have against the sea-captain?
Nothing, it appeared, but that he was drinking late last night with Willie Henderson, ‘Bloody Wits’ to his friends, and ran out into the streets at the noise of the explosion to see what it was. So, as the magistrates had found no one else to arrest, they arrested him.
‘And who – who may they not arrest next?’ stammered Paris, who was shaking from head to foot.
‘Anyone they fancy, I should think,’ said Bothwell surlily. ‘Why should you look so white in the gills when half the nobles and gentry of Scotland stand a good chance to lose lands and life over this?’
‘I have talked with Du Croc,’ said d’Oysel; ‘I will tell you to whom he points as le vrai traître. Who owns the two Provost’s houses at Kirk o’ Field? Who suggested that the King should stay there when he refused to go to Criagmillar? Who alone would know that the houses, the old and the new, were connected not only by the gallery on the wall, but by doors between the cellars of both, underground? It is important, those cellars. For there are fools who say that the gunpowder was carried into the old Provost’s house in a portmanteau and barrel on the back of a grey nag on the Sunday, and placed in the Queen’s bedroom below the King’s, by those who knew that she would stay at Holyrood that night. Now you and I, my friend, who know gunpowder, know that even several barrelsful would not blow up any house to its foundations, certainly not its cellars, unless it were placed in them. An explosion does not go down, but up. Therefore that gunpowder must have been conveyed into the cellars from those of the adjoining house by someone who had the keys of both. And who could that be but its owner, and, as I tell you, the true traitor, Sir James Balfour.’
‘By whose orders?’ asked Bothwell. ‘And were the King and his valet first strangled in their sleep, and then carried outside? Or did they go for a nice brisk walk in their shifts in the snow at two o’clock in the morning, in order to be strangled outside by the tails of their shirts? And in either case, did the murderers, having then finished their job, blow up the practically empty house, just in order to tell everybody all about it?’
‘True. One does not burn a house to roast a goose, particularly when the goose is out of it. Nor does one use gunpowder to kill a man when poison or a knife or even the tail of a shirt, as was probably used in this case, could do it quicker, more secretly and more surely. One can never be certain of gunpowder – even in this case one of the servants escaped alive from beneath the ruins. There could only be one reason – no, two – for employing gunpowder; the first, that it should kill a large number of people; the second, that it should spread panic and so help to manoeuvre a revolution.’
‘We know all that,’ said Bothwell irritably; ‘it was in the account issued by the Council the same morning.’
That first straightforward official account had stated that ‘the authors of this wickedness failed but by a very little in destroying the Queen with the great part of the nobility and gentry in her suite who were with the King in his chamber until almost midnight. And by chance only Her Majesty did not remain there the whole night.’
‘But they did not think of mentioning the chair,’ Bothwell broke out.
‘What chair?’
‘The chair in the garden beside the two nearly naked bodies, and with it the quilt, the slippers, the furred velvet gown with belt and dagger, all neatly placed there in the snow. Nobody says anything about them, they are too trifling to be considered. But a sketch was made of the scene on the morning of the crime, before anything was touched. An artist does not muddle the evidence by thinking whether it’s important or not – he puts down what he sees. And he saw Darnley’s clothes ready to put on – and an oak chair, presumably to sit on while he puts them on. Careful fellow, Taylor, very useful valet – always takes a chair out into the snow at two in the morning when his master has a whim to dress there instead of in his room after a two months’ illness!’
‘You joke, always you joke, till you make the whole world seem mad.’
‘Seem? – it is mad! Or else – something frighten
ed the King so badly in the middle of the night that he ran out of the house without even waiting for his gown and slippers. It frightened Taylor too, but not as urgently, since he stayed to collect all those things. He’d put on a cap and one of his shoes before his master must have yelled to him to come on at all costs.’
D’Oysel leaped from his chair with the effect almost of another explosion.
‘Listen, my friend! Either the King knew there was gunpowder in the house, or he did not. It is agreed, yes? no? Very well, then, if he knew of it, and the two of them smelt smoke, the King would know that the danger was more immediate than that of fire; he would run out barefoot, all but naked. His servant, no! He thinks there is fire, but he does not think an explosion, so he waits to collect these things for his master and follows him more slowly. It is seen.’ His finger shot out:
‘But how does the King know of gunpowder in the house? In two ways only is it possible. First, does somebody warn him? No – for in that case he would have made it public, or at the least he would have moved at once and not stayed to be blown up. There remains only the second way. The King knew there was gunpowder in the house because he himself had ordered – or allowed – it to be put there.’
And having flung round eyes, tufted eyebrows and plump pink hands upwards, he collapsed into his chair again so violently that he bounced. He then observed Bothwell’s face, grinning, not in startled amazement at his friend’s brilliant piece of detective work, but in amused appreciation.
‘Do not tell me you thought of all this before!’ the Frenchman exclaimed in fury.
‘Certainly I thought of it. Remember I saw that chair before you only heard of it. Besides, I have now had some confirmation. All but two of the King’s servants survived, as you know. I wouldn’t have them examined by torture – you can get no truth from a man by that – he says only what he thinks you wish him to say. But they’ve talked. One of them did more than talk. Sandy Durham, you remember, was dismissed for setting fire to his bedding, certainly the quickest way to get his discharge from a house full of gunpowder! The others, who were there that night, tell you the usual things – the pious state of mind of the two victims just before their death; how Taylor sang psalms which proved singularly appropriate. Psalms always are, have you noticed? Then Darnley talked of Rizzio’s murder. It worried him badly that the Queen had mentioned it that evening. Then at last he drank goodnight to them and reminded them that his new horses were to be saddled early the next morning for him to ride to Holyrood. But at what hour and in what place do you think he ordered them to stand ready for him? At five o’clock in the morning – and in the south garden, under the Flodden Wall, where there is the postern gate through which one can ride direct into the open country – without having to pass any of the city guards. That certainly strikes one as the more likely direction for his ride than Holyrood, in the pitch dark of a February morning at five o’clock after a severe illness.’
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