She rode back to the Palace of Holyrood in an exquisite late April evening of bird-song and budding daffodils in the gardens of the Canongate, a sky washed clear by showers, and wet roofs gleaming in the last rays of the sun. A child flung a bunch of primroses to her, she caught and kissed them and waved them, laughing as she rode on. A stump of rainbow made a splash of iridescent light low over Arthur’s Seat as she turned her horse into the gates of Holyrood, and the pear tree outside her turret was in blossom as on that evening a year ago when Davie had sung for the last time. Yet even that did not sadden her now. Whatever had happened, or might happen, even to the law she had just appointed, nothing could alter the fact that the desire for goodwill among all men had been expressed in the law of her land.
‘Madam!’ cried Seton in awestruck tones when she saw her, and burst into tears. ‘You look so – so happy!’
‘And is that a reason for crying?’ Mary kissed her, laughing, and added, ‘Yes, I am happy, and I am going straight to bed, and tomorrow down with you again to dear Seton.’
The Queen had looked so radiant, Seton told Fleming later that evening, ‘it was as though a star had passed. I fear she’s not long for this world.’
Fleming scoffed; happiness never killed anybody; the Queen had taken one of her sudden turns for the better, that was all. ‘You know how it is with her, she changes in a flash, one moment in the depths, and the next like all the birds in the air. I wish she could know some real happiness, God knows! There’s one bold fellow who I swear is longing to give it her.’
‘The Lord Bothwell?’ murmured Seton, shocked – ‘but you know they say – and indeed it looks very like—’
‘Indeed and it does – and so it does for at least a score of others. It’s my belief there’s not a man among our nobles who didn’t plan to kill the King, and that’s why they made such a mess of it, all jostling up against each other. So unless the Queen takes a foreigner, she’ll have to stay a chaste widow for ever.’
Poor Seton, shuddering, hid her face in her hands. These ghastly weeks were proving too much for her, to the more robust Fleming’s annoyance, for what possible help could it be to their darling to creep about like a frightened mouse instead of heartening her by a pretence that everything was normal?
So she spoke more flippantly than she felt when Seton asked, ‘How can you joke about such a thing?’ and replied, ‘I dare say the men who did it can. Listen!’
She opened the shutter and leaned from the window-seat where they were talking. The night was mild. A soft rain fell pattering in the garden. In the wall of the opposite tower a window blazed with yellow light, open to the warm night, and from it came the sound of men’s voices, many of them, loud and jovial, with every now and then a great burst of laughter.
‘What a noise!’ said Seton, leaning out beside her. ‘I hope the Queen can’t hear them from the other side. She wanted to sleep early. She’s not slept properly for so many nights. Someone must be giving a great dinner-party, but I’d heard nothing of it, had you?’
‘It’s a man’s dinner only. Lord Bothwell is feasting his friends to celebrate his “jolly acquittal” – twenty-eight of them, Morton and Argyll among them, and a large sprinkling of bishops to give a smack of religion to nine earls and seven barons.’
‘Argyll – Morton – bishops those aren’t his friends!’
‘Friends or foes, he’s keeping them all in hand. Give them pause to think how jealous they are of him, and they’d all be at his throat. But he strikes too quick for them. The Galliard does things in grand style!’
‘How do you know all these things?’ Seton was admiring but a little uneasy, for Fleming had grown very worldly-wise since she had married Lethington. Of course that was why she knew so much; she seemed indeed to know rather more than she told.
The party grew noisier; snatches of song came rolling out into the night, and long shadows of moving figures passed across the shining spears of rain illuminated by the window. They could distinguish Bothwell’s deep voice singing a verse from the song of the Outlaw Murray,
‘I’ll own no king in Christendie,’
and it was followed by a roar of laughter from them all, so huge and inconsequent that it frightened Seton.
‘They sound very drunk,’ she said disapprovingly.
‘But on the best French wines, trust the Galliard for that!’ murmured Fleming on a pensive note.
‘I cannot bear your Galliard,’ her gentle companion broke out with sudden passion. ‘And I thank Heaven the Queen comes down to Seton tomorrow I know she hates him too.’
‘Do you really, my little nun?’ Fleming’s tone was maddeningly amused.
‘You don’t know her as I do. They are always quarrelling, they have done so from the very beginning, and sometimes he is so brutal he makes her ill. I found her in a dead faint after he had been with her on Monday.’
‘Oh, but she has always been subject to fainting. Remember how frightened the doctors in France were about her.’
‘This was different. She could do nothing but weep after it.’
‘Ah, but you don’t know her as I do,’ said Fleming.
In that proud and fond belief each had put her finger on the secret of Mary’s charm, both to her friends and enemies. Just as no painter could ever produce a portrait of her that was in the least like any other portrait of her, so no one who ever thought of her, either with love or hate, either in her lifetime or long years after she was dead, could ever believe that anyone else knew Mary Stewart.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mary Seton’s thankfulness was short-lived. The dinner-party followed the closing of Parliament on Saturday. The Queen went down to Seton with her bodyguard of hagbutters on the Sunday morning; Bothwell followed that evening. They had just finished supper in the great hall when he arrived and said at once he wished to speak to her alone. His friend Geordie Seton unfolded his long limbs from his chair like some angular mathematical instrument and cocked a grizzled eyebrow at him as he led off his silently indignant little daughter.
Mary went over to the fireplace and sat warming her hands, though the evening was very mild. She had not spoken with him, except formally in public, since their quarrel six days ago, and wondered if he had come to apologize – ‘for the first time in his life, I should think!’ He seemed ill at ease, but she would not make it easy for him. He followed her and stood leaning his arm against the chimney-piece, looking down at the fire.
At last he said in a harse, constrained voice, ‘This can’t go on. I’d have given you more time if I could, for the look of things, but it’s too dangerous. Separate, we’re vulnerable. Together, we’d be twice as strong. If you would consent to marry me now—’
‘If I would what?’
She could not believe she had heard him correctly. For so practised a lover, James Hepburn was showing himself singularly maladroit. He squared his shoulders and repeated, ‘I said, marry. Has it so strange a sound? I’ve served you well enough, haven’t I? All this last year I’ve established order and peace for you in Scotland.’
That indeed was true. ‘One man worthy of the name has worked this miracle!’; she had glowed with pride in that opinion from France. He was still speaking.
‘Who else has stood by you? Fleming and Geordie Seton here whom you’re so fond of, and Livingstone jollying you as if you were a kitten, all damned fatherly’ – he savaged the words, but clipped them off and added dryly, ‘but they’ve not a tenth part of my power, nor has the Gordon, for all he holds the key to the Highlands and worships the ground you walk on.’
Again there was that contained rage in his voice. How dared he think he had the right to show jealousy? Yet before she realized she was doing so, she sought to appease it.
‘I? But it’s you he worships – his mother and everyone says he’s “at your entire devotion”.’
He muttered, ‘Aye, devotion this and that! There’s been enough of it by all accounts. I’ve been at yours and your mother’s
devotion since I first drew sword, playing the faithful watchdog, as you once were pleased to fancy your precious brother in the role. Has it never struck you I might ask my reward?’
‘What then do you want?’ There was a cruel scorn in her voice. Nor did it spare herself. ‘There was a night not long ago when I would have given myself gladly to you, but you paid no heed – you walked away and left me without a word.’ He made a quick turn towards her, but she put up her hand with a forbidding gesture, as royal as it was unconscious. ‘That’s all past. I’m now an eternity more old. And I cannot make merchandise of myself. You could have taken me then of my free giving, but you cannot claim me as a reward.’
‘What – that night? There was no time.’
She gave a laugh that stung with contempt, and he swore. ‘Madam, are we to talk of philandering now? The case is too desperate – as it was then. Was I to be made blind and deaf by your love that night when danger lurked all round you? – as it does now. To make common headway against it we must marry.’
‘Must? Marry? I think you have gone mad.’
The Queen who had had the greatest Princes in Europe suing for her hand was speaking now; her candid amazement, more potent even than her scorn, reminded him of it; but to no good purpose.
‘It would not be the first time you married beneath you. What if Darnley had a Tudor grandmother – are the Hepburns to count themselves lower than those tainted Welsh upstarts? Or Robert Dudley, brand-new Earl of Leicester? At least I know myself the better man.’
She had fallen silent. What the devil was she thinking?
At last she raised those strange level eyes and looked at him, and her voice came very low. ‘Did you kill the King?’
It was the last thing he had expected. But he answered quick and loud, ‘No. By the faith of a Borderer, I can swear to that.’
‘You’ve no need to. I know you would not lie to me.’
He turned and kicked at a log. ‘I’m not lying,’ he said sullenly.
Yet there was something she was unsure of; was he keeping something back from her? He had spoken to her with such brutal frankness the morning after the crime – but his very brutality made her doubtful; he could never mention Darnley except as a snake that any man had a right to trample.
He turned on her again and said angrily, ‘You ask that only to put me off.’
‘No,’ she said gravely. ‘Only to show you how impossible it is, what you suggest. For if even I can ask that question, how many others through all the world are asking it?’
‘God’s blood, I’ve stood my trial, haven’t I? and been acquitted, and got an Act of Parliament to forbid anyone to charge me with it again on pain of death!’
‘So did Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, but Elizabeth did not marry him.’
‘No, she’s kept him instead all these years as her tame stallion to give her such pleasure as she’s capable of. But I’m no woman’s game, nor Queen’s either, for that hole-and-corner business. What I take, I take in the open, nor do I think would you yourself do otherwise. Well then, will you not marry me – Madam?’
The familiar belated ‘Madam’, the very poor attempt to make it sound humble, was no longer amusing; it was insufferable. ‘You seem to have forgotten one objection – your wife.’
‘Oh, that!’ He sounded relieved. ‘She has consented to divorce me.’
‘On what grounds?’
‘Adultery last summer – with Bessie Crawford, the blacksmith’s daughter,’ he said with a grin. To her it was deliberate effrontery.
The whole thing was ridiculous. He could not be even intending her to take it seriously. She said so, dismissing the subject without giving as much as a glance at him. It was as well she did not, or she would have seen his clenched fist. He could not trust himself to speak. He put his hand in his doublet and pulled out a folded paper and handed it to her. There was a great deal of writing on it, and a very long list of signatures.
‘What in the world is all this?’ she asked wearily.
He did not answer. She gave him a startled look, but his face was now black against the firelight and candles behind him. She read on. Earls, barons, bishops, a great many of them, had signed some document declaring themselves ready to uphold James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell, ‘and maintain his innocence by the law of arms, remembering the antiquity of his house and the honourable service of himself and his forebears’.
So Bothwell, the lone wolf, had entered into one of the ‘bonds’ he so despised; what desperate impulse had driven him to it? She read on; that the Queen was now ‘destitute of a husband, in which solitary state the common weal may not permit her to remain. In case the affectionate and hearty service of the Earl of Bothwell may move Her Majesty so far to humble herself as (preferring one of her native-born subjects unto all foreign Princes) to take to husband the said Earl,’ then the undersigned would swear to ‘further the marriage, hold its adversaries as their own enemies, spend life and goods in its defence, or else be accounted in all time hereafter as unworthy and faithless traitors’.
‘When did you get this done?’ she asked with dangerous quiet.
‘Last night at Holyrood.’
‘At the dinner you gave to your friends – I heard some echoes of your revelry. It must have been indeed a merry one to induce them to sign – this!’ and she crumpled the bond in her hand and stood up, her face flaming. ‘So you discussed this marriage over your wine with all these men! The compliment is too vinous for my taste – or for your security. Do you really think the half of them will stand by you when sober? Your enemies would never allow this match. Nor would my friends.’
‘Who are your friends?’
‘The Cardinal of Lorraine would scarcely welcome you as his nephew; nor the King of France call you brother.’
‘Much help have they been to you ever since you came here!’
‘I have borne your insults too long, my lord. Go, and never speak of this again.’
As always, she looked glorious in a rage, taut and vibrant with life, her eyes as bright as swords. He suddenly remembered that there was only one way to convince a woman. He swooped on her and caught her up in his arms, his kisses striking against her, stifling her as she tried to cry out, his arms crushing her furious struggles.
But in that same instant there came a growing uproar outside, the clank of armed men hurrying nearer. He thrust her back into her chair, and turned to face a body of the hagbutter guards who were noisily pushing one of their number before them into the hall, encouraging him with cries of ‘There he is’ – ‘Say it now’ – ‘Say it!’
The ringleader, a big fellow, red in the face, with the hot indignant eye of a hen, shouted very fast, ‘Give us our wages! Not a penny’s pay have we seen for eight weeks! Give us our rights or—’
He got no further, for Bothwell had leaped across the hall and taken him by the throat, shaking the burly soldier as though he were a rat and forcing him down on to his knees. The men thronged round, afraid to interfere but crying mercy for their comrade, who seemed on the point of being choked to death; but Bothwell neither saw nor heard them. The Queen sprang up and cried out to him to let go. He heard that. He had lowered himself to attack one of her soldiers in her presence with his naked hands – out of anger at the interruption. Only as he loosened his hands did he recognise the hint of mutiny.
‘Let that teach you to thrust into the Queen’s presence to demand your wages,’ he said, trying to give the proper judicial touch to his insensate fury.
The man was tenderly feeling his throat and in no eagerness to resume the theme. His fellows took it up in muttered growls of indignation; they were only demanding their rights, their pay had been in arrears for two months.
Traquair was in command of the foot soldiers, so that it was no affair of Bothwell’s, who commanded the horse. The Queen, however, was in no mood for such masculine subtleties. She asked how much was owing to them, and when she heard, said sharply, ‘Then give them two crowns apiece
from my purse and let them go.’
She stood by the window as they shuffled out, mumbling their shame-faced thanks; she saw them pass below in the late April dusk, shadowy figures talking low among themselves and chuckling, and heard one say, ‘Small wonder the Earl was black angered that we spoiled his sport.’
She was trembling with rage, but saw to it that her hands were still before she turned and looked him in the face and said, ‘I shall do my best to forget this insult. At least I can thank you for making it clear that I could never love you.’
‘You lie, and you know it. You loved me that night you asked my love.’
‘With your experience, my lord, you should know even better than I what such love is worth. And such as it was, it is over – for ever. Now go.’
She turned again to the window. The room was very silent. When she looked round again she found that he had gone.
Little Mary Seton came running into the hall. ‘Oh, Madam, he has gone already! I am so glad! Madam, there is the first cuckoo we’ve heard, on the other side of the Castle. Do come and hear him before it gets quite dark.’
Chapter Twenty-Six
She could not stay at Seton. She left the next morning to pay a private visit to her baby son at Stirling, and would only take a small escort of about thirty horsemen, with Gordon and Lethington in charge. No, she would not take Mary Seton as she begged. ‘What odds?’ she said. ‘I shall be back in Edinburgh on Wednesday.’ She wanted to escape from everybody, even her best friend. Thank heaven there was still her baby, who could not talk and turn her affection to irritation, as did Seton’s anxious solicitude; or to hatred, as did Bothwell’s abominable behaviour.
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