‘Then indeed there’s no need for more talk,’ she said in that low, ice-cold voice that she could use like a whip.
He felt his anger rising, his hands went out – to do what? He had ravished her; he might kill her; he could never force her to submit. He went quickly out of the room, out of the Castle, knowing only that for the moment he must leave her.
Left alone, Mary’s high courage collapsed into frightened sobbing. His look had terrified her, and his silent going from her.
If only she had stayed safely in France! She even found herself longing for James’ unalterable respectability, for Lethington’s suave manners. And it was just then that Lethington with precise delicate steps came into the room. There was no time to be lost, and he had left the door open for a speedy retreat. Quickly yet unhurryingly, with a quiet matter-of-factness that sounded unbelievably reassuring, he told her that he had contrived to get a message sent secretly to the Provost of Dunbar to arrange for her rescue – if she indeed desired her freedom. The implied doubt stung her; it was just what she had pointed out to Bothwell, that her consent to him now would look like her connivance beforehand.
‘Indeed I desire it,’ she cried indignantly. But what could be done? Dunbar was impregnable, the key of the East Coast from Leith Harbour to Berwick-on-Tweed, defended by the sea on three sides of it, and now by close on a thousand men as well as some cannon. It was impossible for the Provost to raise men to attack it, nor would she have a civil war. ‘A boat under the Castle walls—’ she said it at the same moment that Lethington was making the same suggestion, and he smiled with gentle humour.
‘It is no wonder that we think alike, since the poets seem to be the authority for our plans. Many Queens have made history, it is left for you, Madam, to make romance.’
Here was the modern gentleman, to whom it was as unthinkable to ravish a Queen as to get a divorce for her through the medium of a blacksmith’s daughter. The reminder he gave her of the civilized world that she seemed to have lost for ever was too much for her; she laughed and began to cry again at the same moment. She looked so pretty in spite of her tears that he felt really sorry for her and patted her shoulder, then stroked that shining head bowed over the arm of her chair. He had always wondered if her hair felt as soft as it looked; it did.
‘There, there,’ he murmured somewhat fatuously, ‘it will be all the same in a hundred years’ time.’
It struck his speculative mind that Elizabeth’s smirched, shrewd childhood had learned more of men at thirteen than Darnley’s widow knew even now; the English Queen could exploit her love-affairs to her advantage, where the Scots Queen was taken by surprise, perhaps to her own ruin, as well as to that of the men who loved her. So headlong a career as Bothwell’s must shortly crash in disaster; the sooner he helped to dissociate her from it, the better for himself.
Suddenly the Queen leaped from her chair and thrust him away so violently that only the wall prevented him from falling. Before he had recovered his balance she dashed in front of him, and he saw Bothwell’s murderous eyes above her head, and his hand raised to strike with his whinger.
With his other hand Bothwell seized her to drag her away from Lethington, but she screamed and flung herself on the arm that held the knife, crying, ‘I have seen a man murdered – don’t, don’t let me see it again!’
He dropped his arm; through the choking red mist before his eyes some sense came to him that he must not do her more hurt.
‘I’ll not kill him in front of you,’ he said.
‘You shall not kill him, or your life will pay the forfeit, I swear it, as soon as I am free.’
‘Aye, he was plotting your escape, I know that. And you’d trust yourself to that double-dyed traitor rather than to me! You’ll get no more chance of that.’
He went to the door, called to the guards, and told them to take Lethington away and keep him in his rooms under lock and key. Lethington wiped his forehead with his fine silk handkerchief as he was led away.
Bothwell turned to Mary. She had fallen back into her chair and was trembling violently from head to foot. He could not speak to her, and his eyes were clouded as though he saw her not as herself but as part of his rage and hatred. His hand was still gripping his whinger, the knuckles white, and she gave a little moan of fear ‘Your hands – they are murderers!’
He rammed the knife back into its sheath, and walked away from her and then back, up and down, restlessly, ceaselessly; would he never stop prowling up and down, never speak, never turn and look at her? She had given herself body and soul in the night to this man, and now awaked to find him ‘the two-footed beast’ that his enemies called him.
At last she had to ask it. ‘You will not kill him?’
‘No, I will not.’
He came back and stood before her, with desperation in his eyes, and yet there was also a proud humility.
‘I have made you hate me. I would give the world to undo it, but what’s the use of that? I go mad with rage, it comes up hot in my throat, choking me, and hot like fire in my eyes, and hot, hot in my hands with the longing to stab and smash and kill, and then I know and care for nothing but that. It’s made me blunder and do things to my own hurt, and that just lately. Now I must win you. I’d fight the whole world to do it – but what’s the good of that if I make you hate me?’
It was the appeal that he had flung at her only ten days ago, after the night she had sat up praying in the chapel, and it had haunted her ever since; now it rose to her own lips – ‘Oh don’t let us hate, or it will be the end of us both.’
He was on his knees before her, his arms round her. ‘Hate or love, or both, as I think it is, you cannot, you shall not escape me now. Swear to me you will never try to again. Don’t you know you cannot? You are mine. You know it.’
Her voice came small and frightened. ‘I think you would kill me to possess me. Did your ancestor kill Queen Joan – here in his stronghold?’
He sprang up with an oath, ‘Who told you that fable?’
‘No one. I never knew there was a fable, only that she died here—’
‘A hundred years ago! What have their old ghosts to do with us?’
The stories, based only on conjecture, of Lord Patrick’s Stronghold, had never troubled him before, but now he could not bear to think there was any possibility of their truth. He wished he had brought her anywhere but to this grim fortress. He would get her out of it. He did not, even now, trust himself to stay here with her after that access of unsatisfied rage. Nor did he want to win her by drugging her senses with pleasure as he had done last night.
A new pride had come to him and a new honesty, though he did not recognise it as that; he thought it was only what he now said: ‘For God’s sake, let us get our heads clear on the hill!’ And he caught her hands and swung her to her feet. ‘You’ll not stay mewed up in these old stones, my falcon gentle. Will you come out with me?’
‘Chained to your wrist?’ she asked, with a little desperate gasp of laughter in her relief at his change of mood.
‘Aye, as a falcon gentle should be. Do you think I’d dare let you out of my grasp now? I’ll carry you on the Night Hawk, as I did when I brought you here before – if you will come,’ he added humbly, for she was hesitating, and he saw her exhaustion and her fear. ‘You can trust yourself to me on my horse better than in this room.’
She felt that he too was helpless. What could they ever do to escape each other?
‘We may ride to the ends of the world, we’ll find no outgate from ourselves.’
‘No, but we’ll find fresh air and a cool forehead,’ he said with a sudden return of his practical common sense.
So she rode again in his arms through the long twilight of the Northern spring, with the North Sea glimmering before them. The sight and sound of that grey stormy ocean was art and part of all his homes, as was the bare hillside on which they rode, the wind whistling in their faces, the thud of his horse’s hoofs beneath them, throbbing through her body
and his, the very pulse of his life and hers. For more than an hour they did not talk at all, but heard only the long rippling cry of the curlews and scream of the gulls, then, as they neared the cliffs, the shouting and the shattering of the waves below. The sky faded but did not thicken; the huge rocks of the Bass and Tantallon stood up like storm-clouds in that strange dark light, pure and cold, that seemed of the distilled essence of sky and water.
When at last he spoke he told her of his forebears, the Vikings who had come to Scotland in ships painted like dragons from over the North Sea, pirates who had discovered the Americas long centuries before Columbus, and had voyaged in their frail galleys among the outland terrors of the Curdled Ocean.
‘You speak as if you had been of them.’
‘Well, I expect a man is what is in his blood.’
She too could remember the immense open solitude of those Northern seas where the islands lay very near the edge of the world. Some kind rough sailor voice had told her that, when she had sailed to France at five years old on the Northern route, all round the coast of Scotland, the Orkneys and Hebrides.
‘Do you remember how I wanted to travel back that way from France and you would not let me? It was almost our first real quarrel!’
He drew in his breath sharply at her return to the old intimacy. She never noticed it out here on the hillside where it was so natural for them to be together.
‘What is it?’ she asked.
‘I thought I had driven you away for ever, but I don’t think now that that can be. You are myself, and I am you. It’s true there’s no outgate, for I cannot escape myself, nor can you. Do you still wish it?’
‘I wish only that we were on a boat together alone, to sail out over the sea at the wind’s will.’
The next day, which was Saturday, the doors of Gordon’s rooms were unlocked. Bothwell came in. His friend stood up and faced him. They both looked older.
‘I have won her consent,’ said Bothwell. ‘Your guards are dismissed. You are free. Will you go, or stay with me?’
‘I will go,’ said Gordon, for once the more practical of the two, ‘and get Jean to hurry on the divorce.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
They had ten days in peace at Dunbar; that was the length of time that it was reckoned afterwards, and they shortened even that, saying ‘it passed in a moment’. But a moment, or a thousand years, both were true, and they knew it.
The little gold-starred watch, that Etienne Hubert had made years ago for her in Rouen, lay on her table now at Dunbar; so it had lain at Holyrood, ticking out the agonizing moments till Darnley should come in, late and drunk, for the dinner in his honour; so it had lain at Glasgow when she had sat writing through the night in his sickroom, hearing that procession of minutes trip by her in the silence, seeing their faces all turned towards her, and not one look back. That army of ants was carrying away the world piecemeal; Darnley was dead, their enemies were gathering together against them at Stirling; soon they would have to go to Edinburgh and face the outside world.
But it could not carry away the life that was now, had been, and would always be their life together. That lay behind time, beyond the world, outside their bodies; never to be invaded by chance or enmity; no more to be measured by her watch than happiness by the false measure of possession, whether of wealth, of power, or even of the loved person.
All their earlier friendship, growing into love, was with them now, and made part of this rapture of sheer living that swept both spirit and body into a white-hot flame of ecstasy. In that flame there shone out precious things that had lain hidden in the secret unconscious life that they had shared. ‘You are myself,’ he had said, and she had known it long before, when she rode to him at Hermitage and spoke to him with a dozen others standing by, and rode back to Jedburgh to pass through the gates of death, and they opened the window to let her spirit go free out over the moonlit hills. She had passed then beyond the agony of dying, into the bliss of death, deeper than sleep, making her one with all that she loved in him. And he, so nearly dead of his wounds, had then found that same release of spirit, clouded since in his furious passions of baffled desire and fear lest he should never get her; but now, in this sudden breathless calm, remembered.
He saw with new eyes the miracle of her body and of his, and of the happiness he gave her. With new eyes he saw the spring, as she wandered to and fro discovering fresh buds in this windblown garden above the yellow seaweed and wet rocks; and the wind tossed her song towards him:
‘Thank love, that list ye to his mercies call!’
Her hands were full of early forget-me-not found in a sheltered corner below the red sandstone wall; she came running to him, and in both their minds there rose the vision of a garden in France six years ago when all the ground before them had shimmered with those pale blue flowers. There too they had had ‘almost their first quarrel’ (they could never decide which was really the first) there in the Jardin de l’Amour Repenti.
He took her hands with the flowers in them between his own, and said, ‘I swear you shall never repent my love.’
That trust was kept, for she never did repent it.
Chapter Thirty
He led her horse into Edinburgh himself, on foot and bare-headed, and all his men had laid aside their pikes to show she was not now a prisoner. That was on the 6th of May, and the date of their wedding was fixed for the 15th, the Thursday of the following week. The banns were to be called on Sunday at St Giles’. But Mr Craig, the minister there during Mr John Knox’s continued absence during these dangerous times, refused to read them. Instead, he publicly charged Bothwell from the pulpit with ravishing the Queen and keeping her in captivity; with adultery; arranging a collusive divorce with his wife; and finally with the murder of the King, ‘which this marriage will confirm’. He was sent for to the Castle, and repeated his charge to Bothwell’s face for as long as he was allowed to speak; at last the Earl cut him short and sent him away, but in full liberty. Craig’s courage was great, but it was obvious that he had no need to fear tyranny.
After that it was plain that the position must be cleared, and Mary made a public statement that though Bothwell had abducted her against her will, yet she had now come to give her free consent to the marriage. Bothwell advised her to write this too to her friend the Bishop of Dunblane, who was about to go to France.
‘Clear the decks. I’ll not have it said there was any collusion on your part over the abduction, as in Jean’s over the divorce. Tell him the truth and lay the blame where it is due, on me. It’s true it was a rape – admit it. Tell him too, if you will, I’d do it again!’
She did not quite say that, but tried to make it as respectable as she could for the old Bishop’s eyes, and Bothwell laughed at what she wrote, but let it go.
He would have none of the titles or appanages of a king such as she had showered on Darnley.
‘Give me only what was mine for centuries, which your father, that “Good Poor Man’s King and murderer of the nobles”, took away. My blood was Prince of Orkney when Malcolm Canmore reigned in Scotland and the Stewarts hadn’t yet left Brittany.’
That last laughing flare-up of his old grudge against her family was appeased when she sat on her throne under the Canopy of State in the Abbey of Holyrood. The Gordon bore the crown before her, the heralds in coat armour passed in procession, and a blue banner showed Bothwell’s arms with the addition of a golden ship with silver sails on an azure sea for Orkney; Bothwell himself in a furred red robe was led in between two earls and knelt before her: she placed the coronet for Duke of Orkney and Lord of Shetland on his head with her own hands, as once she had placed a crown of silver paper and named him Lord of Misrule. Absit omen! Would his present followers turn and rend him?
There was little time or money for pageantry, or wedding presents either. Instead, Mary gladly suggested melting down the gold font sent by Queen Elizabeth at the Christening, for pay for the beginning of a small regular army that Bothwell was anx
ious to form – ‘a better trinket than any other I could give you!’
And in sharp contrast to all the sumptuous clothes and jewels she had lavished on Darnley at their wedding, he would accept from her nothing but some fur off an old cloak of her mother’s to put on his dressing-gown; and one superb enamelled and pearl chain – not for himself, but to send as the accustomed gift to his stepson, Prince James.
To his sister Jan, who had just been remarried to the Earl of Caithness’ eldest son, she gave a crimson satin and sequinned petticoat and a dashing coat of black taffeta and silver, at the same time recommending her nephew and godson, Jan’s fatherless little boy, Francis, to the Abbey of Kelso.
But for her own trousseau, and then not till the last minute, she had some new linings put on an old gown and petticoat, and an old black velvet done up with some gold braid. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked, thinking of her first wedding, when she had worn a silver train twelve yards long, and a single jewel in her tiara was worth £500,000.
‘What do I care for your clothes, now I can see you lovelier than I ever have, in none!’ But he had heard the wistful note in her voice, and added, kissing her, ‘It’s you, my dearling, who must miss your gauds – you who once set the fashion for them through France and Europe.’
She looked up into his, face and laughed. ‘What do I care? I’d follow you to the end of the world in a white petticoat!’
It was not always so happy between them. He was madly jealous, ‘the most jealous man alive’, complained the many men whom she had treated in delightful casual fashion as her intimate friends; ‘so beastly and suspicious that he would not let her look at anybody, or anybody look at her, though he knew that she liked her pleasure as well as anybody’.
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