‘Indeed yes, since it’s my Lord Bothwell’s advice,’ she called back, but then turned to Bothwell and suggested that young Borthwick should, instead of accompanying them, ride straight to Edinburgh to warn the authorities of the rising, and call the citizens to arms. He did not seem to welcome the suggestion, though it was the obvious thing to do, but he did not gainsay it, and Borthwick started off. Captain Blackadder spoke a few words to him, low, before he rode away, and then the whole little army swung into the route for Dunbar, with Mary, Bothwell and Blackadder at the head of it, and far away, near the end of the long line of eight hundred horsemen, Lethington and Gordon and her thirty soldiers, with Bothwell’s men guarding the rear.
She was full of eager questions, to which Bothwell replied somewhat surlily; but that naturally did not surprise her after her dismissal of him at their last meeting. When had he heard of the rising? How was it he had been able to come so quickly to her aid? Where had he and his men been last night? He told her, at his house of Calder close by here.
‘But why Calder? That was no use for a raid into Liddesdale.’
‘You’re in the right of it, Madam. But it turned out very handy for watching your route from Linlithgow!’ He had some right to that sardonic tone, she thought, in echo from her last night’s repentance. She was in danger, so he came and rescued her, as he had done again and agan. She began again tentatively to speak her thanks, but he cut her short with amazing rudeness, saying that her thanks were the last thing he wanted of her. She had thought she hated him; now she wondered if she had made him hate her.
But for all his scowling face beside her, she could not quite believe it; he must feel, as she did, how natural it was for them to be riding off together on another adventure. And the evening was so lovely; as they passed Edinburgh Castle, perched up on its rock, now just within a mile of them, it looked like a fairy city that had floated down from the flaming sunset clouds. The Common Bell clanging within the city, summoning her loyal citizens to arms in her defence, chimed absurdly with the cuckoos shouting near her. The very birds of spring had joined in this adventure and were singing in concert with her heart.
A roar, a puff of smoke, another and then another came from that fairy city on the great rock. The guns of Edinburgh Castle had opened fire on them.
They hit no one; it would be luck if cannon nearly a mile off managed to hit a moving target. And the target was quickly moving out of range. As they galloped past the city they looked back and saw the Town Bands hurrying out through the city gates after them, but as these were on foot they would have no chance to catch up with the horsemen.
Bothwell rode apart a little way with Captain Blackadder.
‘What the devil did you say to young Borthwick?’
‘Why, that all was being done with the Queen’s consent – but it’s plain he doesn’t believe it, since he’s got them to attack us.’
‘Who gave you leave to speak that lie of the Queen’s consent?’
The muttered tone was so enraged that Blackadder edged his horse away. He had only thought to ease matters, ‘and anyway,’ he argued, ‘if she’s not yet given her consent, she’ll soon have to.’
The two men rode on together, still talking in low voices. Mary had nothing but the moss-troopers now close round her, and no chance to ask any explanation of the extraordinary conduct of her loyal citizens of Edinburgh. The sky darkened as the clouds marched across it, trailing their long grey skirts over the hills, and now a spurt of rain fell, stinging her face. The wind had turned colder; it would be a long ride to Dunbar. Why did Bothwell not come back to her? Why did he leave her so long alone, and why had he separated her by the whole length of his column from Gordon and Lethington? Was he deliberately preventing them from coming up to her?
Fear grew – but not of the citizens of Edinburgh. They had been warned of a rising; but it was on Bothwell and his troops that they had fired. What reason had they to take him for the rebel? Was he – could he – after all his loyal service – become a rebel? It was not possible. But she had thought so many and such violently contradictory things of him in the last three days that now almost anything seemed possible. Were his enemies right about him after all, and Sir Thomas Wyatt all wrong?
Night came down on her, but not at the exquisite lingering pace of yesterday, the sun setting, the moon rising as if to slow music in the formal measure of some gracious pavan of the skies. Now it was driven in scurrying gusts of wind and rain, and the moon went in and out among the clouds like a hunted thing. ‘Thou’rt safe if thou canst reach Dunbar.’ Would she be safe at Dunbar?
At last, far off, she heard the roaring of the sea.
It was midnight when they reached Dunbar. The soldiers held up torches on either side of the drawbridge, her horse’s hoofs clattered hollowly over it, and those roaring waves, now very near, came thundering and crashing on the rocks below the Castle. She had none of her women with her, but one of the garrison’s wives took her upstairs to a room that had been hastily furnished as a bedroom for her, put out her things and helped her out of her wet riding-dress into a loose gown. Some hot broth and cold chicken, bread and wine, were laid out on a little table.
She was very tired, but could not go to bed until Bothwell, and Gordon and Lethington too, came and told her what was happening. She told the woman to let them know she was expecting them; to which however she only shook her head, and said she could not say what was the Lord’s will.
It was an uncomfortable reminder that Bothwell’s power was absolute in his own fortresses, where the Sovereign herself was regarded only as the Queen of Fife and Lothian. Dunbar was Hepburn to the very bone of its blood-red rock; it was known as Lord Patrick’s Stronghold ever since Bothwell’s great-great-great-grandfather had defended it with the widowed Queen of James I against his subjects. She had died here after a few weeks, the chronicle did not say how or why – nor if Lord Patrick had been her lover, though she remembered Bothwell telling her something of the sort years ago – yes, at breakfast at Crichton, the morning after his sister’s wedding – and asking her with an impudent cock of his eyebrow how had she slept in Queen Joan’s and Lord Patrick’s bed!
How young they had all been then! He had been so found of Johnnie, and surely of herself too in his odd mocking way. He could not turn against her now. But why did he not come?
Why did none of them come? She looked round her at the massive stone walls; the terrifying question flashed into her mind: Did Gordon and Lethington not come because they were his prisoners? Was she herself his prisoner? Suddenly she remembered his coming towards her down the long gallery at Holyrood, coming in answer to her call for aid. She had seen then that he had changed; thought something that she had not thought of since – that those who called the devil to their aid had sooner or later to pay a price.
She shook herself: she would not get worked up by these foolish fancies; this was a dismal flight compared with her last to this place, but that was all. She drank her broth, warming her feet by the fire.
She heard a man’s tread on the stone stair; there came a knock on the door, and Bothwell stood inside the room, stood still by the door, not advancing to her, but staring, almost as if he had not expected to see her there. A stranger had entered the room.
She tried to shut out her fear; she exclaimed, ‘What does it all mean? Have you had fresh news? But this is the strongest of your fortresses.’
‘Yes,’ he said, and still stood there by the door: then, slowly, as though talking to himself rather than her, ‘I have loved you too long, I think, and now I’ve nothing left to say of it, I’ve said it so often in my mind. I’ve been dazed with love of you and could not think clearly. You’ve stood between me and sleep – the only woman who ever did that – when absent.’
She scarcely heard his words, only that twisted laugh at the end of them. Her voice came sharp and angry with the fear she tried to control. ‘Why aren’t Gordon and Lethington with you? Why have you brought me here? You said
an enemy, but there’s been no sign of one – unless it’s yourself!’
‘I’ve never been your enemy. Don’t make me so now. You know I love you.’
‘What use to talk of love—’
‘None! You don’t even listen.’
‘Not to a rebel – if you are that.’
Their voices clashed like swords. His eyes were narrowed to slits of angry light. He brushed his hand across them and still did not move from the door; he said, ‘I’ve been blind mad for you. I don’t want to be now. I blundered at Seton and spoilt it all. Now I’ve had to do this.’
She gave a gasping cry, ‘Then this is all a trick! You pretended a rising in order to carry me off yourself – you – whom I thought my most loyal servant!’
‘Is it disloyal to love you – crave you – as you’ve shown you do me, for all you’ve gone back on it! There’s been too much of this havering.’
And suddenly he was across the room and had caught her up, kissing her, not roughly as at Seton, but with a bewildering intensity that made her forget everything but that she was in his arms, as she had longed to be last night. But tonight she was his prisoner. That came back into her drowning consciousness, and with it a furious and desperate pride. She would never be a willing captive. She struck out at his face and tore herself away and shrieked for help. He let her go, and waited that she might hear the echo of her voice die away and none answer.
‘Who’s to come to your help in “the strongest of my fortresses”?’
She saw how she had maddened him, and now made a wild attempt to plead.
‘There is yourself – my faithful friend.’
‘Am I to come to your rescue again, even against myself?’
He was laughing, with the laughter that his men knew well, for they had heard it often enough in battle; she knew only that it was the laugh of a stranger, and a devil. It roused her own fighting spirit again. Even now her astonished pride could not believe that her subject would actually dare to force her body. Not even her husband and royal cousin Darnley, when sick and craving for her, had dared attempt it.
His hands came down on her, and she stood quite still under them, so certain was she of the mastery.
‘You will get nothing of me but of my own will,’ she said, her voice small and cold as a stiletto.
His answer was to seize her. In the shock of his attack all her newly reawakened love of him now turned again to hatred, and she fought with frenzy to defend herself, tearing his hard hands with her teeth, trying to tear his lips too as they crushed down on hers, not to kiss but to batter resistance out of her. She roused all his brutality, his determination to conquer. At last he conquered.
He looked at her lying only half-conscious, at the bruises on her delicate throat and breasts that were still round and small, her body still immature in spite of childbirth. He forced some wine between her lips; it revived her, but was strong and made her choke, and she asked for water to mix with it.
‘No, drink it as it is, you need it – and will again,’ he told her grimly. She flung up her arm in a wild weak gesture and sent the cup full in his face. He laughed with delight that her spirit was still unbroken, even while he forced more wine down her throat.
Spluttering, she told him, ‘I will have your head for this. I will send for the Provost of Dunbar tomorrow and tell him of your treason.’
‘Send for him, then, and your tame cat Lethington, and see what succour they can give you!’ And he poured out wine for himself in the same cup, singing,
‘Go seek your succour where ye paid blackmail,
For, Ma’am, ye ne’er paid money to me!’
Her head fell back on the pillow. ‘And I doubted less of you than any subject that I have!’ she said in a low voice.
That did not move him, except to some amusement. ‘What reason had you to doubt any man, who know nothing of them?’
But there he stretched his mockery too far, and a sudden pity caught him unawares. He knew that he loved her helplessness even while he abused it, that her frankness and trustfulness had worked against her and always would, with others as well as himself; and that he would not have it otherwise. He walked away from her to the window and stood staring, seeing nothing; thinking how he had first seen her in Paris, and said that night at dinner that she was too young for him – and so she was still.
He did not want to think of that now when at last after all these years he had her at his mercy; it was better to be angry with her, fighting her. She had had good use of him; it was her turn to pay.
‘I paid high enough for intent to ravish you when I had none,’ he said, ‘a sort of Jedburgh Justice that I should now enjoy the crime for which I went into prison and exile!’
And he turned back again to remind himself and her of his new mastery. But when he reached the bed and lifted back the tumbled hair that had fallen over her face, he saw that she had fainted outright. He was not much surprised, for she had fought so furiously and he must have hurt her badly; he made sure that he had not actually harmed her, then set to work to bring her round, first to consciousness, then to ease and quiet and to acceptance of him. He did not speak nor let her do so, but used all his practised cunning as a lover that had made women follow him blindly; used it cynically, almost mechanically, knowing that he could make her ‘like her pleasure as well as another’.
But this magic gentleness after cruelty, so new to her after Darnley’s boyishly clumsy and selfish notion of love-making, aroused something new in her – and in him. His deliberate intention to win her over was forgotten in a strange new pleasure, that of watching her bewildered delight in his caresses. She turned to him with the wonder of a child and the rapture of a woman, giving him all the ecstasy of her body in undemanding, unquestioning gratitude, giving as utterly, as royally, as she had just now withstood him, her greatness of spirit as clear in surrender as in conflict. He was abashed and conquered by it. All his artifice, his clever tricks learned from a score of women, seemed cheap to him, a base coinage which this royal creature accepted in her ignorance, but still more in her generosity, as pure gold.
So it was that now, when he had made her his prisoner, his victim, literally since he had conquered her – at the very moment when with others he would have shrugged, amused, ‘She is like all the rest,’ he was instead brought for the first time in his life to real humility and tenderness, and wished he had coin to give her that had not been debased ever since his dissolute boyhood. His peacock father, his sensual old uncle at Spynie had made his upbringing; and all his life, though he despised them, he had followed the lines they had laid down.
He knew that he would be proud of having subdued her so easily and so soon after her furious repudiation of him, that he would even tease her with it, gently; yet it was not till now when he had utterly subjugated her that he himself knelt to her in spirit. So he did now in act. ‘My Queen,’ he said, and kissed her hand.
It was the first time he had ever truly done her homage.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
But he found next day that she would not consent to marry him. Her denial was no reaction from the violence of passion the night before; it was clear and considered. He was astonished at the coolness with which she kept her head when physically and emotionally she had been swept off her feet; her lifelong political training in France had taught her to keep her thoughts free from her passions, years before those passions could be roused.
He admired it even while it infuriated him. All through that day he coaxed, pleaded, finally bullied, and still she said it was impossible. His fellow-nobles had been blackly jealous of his power before this; there was not one of them who would stand him on the throne; they would at once combine together to pull him down. Even the men of the Border, who had followed him so devotedly as their own overlord and lieutenant, would bitterly resent him in the position of that age-old bogy, their hereditary foe and tyrant, the King of Fife and Lothian. He had given her many instances in the past of this jealous instin
ct against the authority of even their legitimate monarch; she used them against him now with damnable logic. How coolly she faced him, telling him that! He knew it better than she, and for that very reason wanted to shake the breath out of her body before she should finish saying it.
But he was certain he could override all such jealousies and enmities; he had got his lambs feeding out of his hand, they’d never turn against him. As for the nobles, they’d bite if they got the chance, of course, but he’d not give them that chance. He knew that France and the Catholic Powers would never support the match, that England would seize the chance to stir up all the trouble that she could against them – were they to be downed by that?
She took fire from his defiance; yet still that cool brain of hers went on reasoning; she saw, what his furious impulse had ignored, that dangerous as it was in any case for them to marry, it was madness to do so after he had kidnapped and carried her off. Either he would be regarded as a criminal ravisher (for which the punishment by law was death) who had coerced her by brute force into consent to the marriage; or she would be suspected of having connived at the whole scheme, perhaps instigated it, in order to save her face in marrying so soon after her husband’s death.
‘They will say you were my lover all along. Already they say you murdered him; now they will say you did it in order to marry me, and that I approved.’
‘“They say – what say they? Let them say!” Do you care what the rabble shouts?’
His towering arrogance could not believe that he alone was not a match for the whole pack of them. It made him say the worst thing he could have said to her: ‘There’s no need for all this talk. You’re my prisoner. I’ve sworn to marry you, whoever will or will not – yes, whether you yourself will or will not.’
The Galliard Page 52