At one stroke his innate, almost brutal honesty had stripped her of all the pitiful defences she was trying to build up round them. Once before, while dancing with him in a crowded ballroom, she had felt she was alone with him in all the world, with not a single ally, human or divine.
And now that fleeting vision had come true.
She gave a terrible cry. ‘I am married to my husband’s murderer – nothing can alter that, not all the reasons for it. You killed him, and within three months you married me. All the world will think you did it for that.’
‘So I would have, and for that alone, if there’d been no other way to get you. You cannot look on him as your husband – he’d twice plotted your destruction.’
‘The world doesn’t know that. He was allowed to clear himself of the Rizzio murder. No evidence can be brought of the international plot. All Europe will condemn me.’
‘Let them, as long as you hold Scotland, and we will hold it.’
His bravado could give her no comfort. The weakness of despair had fallen on her. She knew now how desperate her cause must look to all men. But to God, who had seen into their hearts from the beginning, seen what she half saw and shut her eyes to – to God her cause must have been abandoned long ago. The maimed rites of their marriage, as they seemed to her, held not even in a church but the Great Hall, like any other secular business of the State, were justified; for how could she ever have looked for God’s blessing on their union?
‘We are lost – lost,’ she cried, and her head fell on the table, on her clenched frantic hands. He bent over her and tried to raise her, but she would not look at him. To his horror, he found her clutching at his dagger to turn it on herself. He wrenched it from her and flung it away.
Even in her frenzy she was generous, for she cried that she was as guilty as he; ‘I hated him – I longed for his death. I had murder in my heart.’
He could do nothing with her, for she could not bear him near her, and cried that Darnley’s strangled body would now always lie between them. At that, despair seized him too, but in fury; he cursed Darnley, and himself.
What he could not do to quiet her was done at last by her lifelong training in good manners. There were visitors at Holyrood; she had to go and welcome them; he saw her pull herself together, compose her face into a mask of courtesy and go downstairs, a changed woman; yet able to smile and speak the right compliments, ask the right questions, and above all show that warm friendliness, that natural intimacy, that made every man think he alone was the one whom the Queen really wished to see. Often that gift had made him storm at her for a born wanton; now that even her coquetry expressed her courage, he could have worshipped her for it.
They got through that evening somehow, though it lasted a lifetime.
That night when he came to her, he stood with his back against the door, not daring to advance, and said, ‘That I did it, I cannot care for that – I am glad that I did my own work instead of leaving it to others. But I cheated you. I ought to have told you before our marriage. I knew that, and I wouldn’t do it, for if I had, you would never have married me.’
He saw the slight figure in her white draperies sitting on the bed, her face turned towards him, but her eyes strange and blank as they had been all the evening.
He said, ‘I cheated you into this. If you cannot bear it, I must and will free you. It will be easy, for many people believe that you are still my prisoner and that that is why I keep guards about you. I have only to confess that I got your consent by force.’
He turned to go, his hands blundering with the latch, thick and blind, but as he did so, there came a rushing movement behind him, her hands were on his arm, her eyes were looking at him, seeing him, they were alive, aflame.
‘I thank God you did not tell me!’ she said, ‘and if God will not hear me, then I thank love. If I suffer for it to the end of my life, I have had more happiness with you than many have ever dreamed of.’
Chapter Thirty-One
James, Earl of Moray, sat looking down his long nose at the papers that Mr George Buchanan had laid before him. They were not State papers. One batch of them bore the intriguing title ‘The Detection of Mary Stewart’, and read rather like one of the more lurid modern Italian novels. But James showed no sign of entertainment; his nose seemed to grow longer and longer as he perused it, and at last he laid it down with the remark, ‘I could wish, Mr Buchanan, that your logic were equal to your Latin.’
He flicked the pages over with a disdainful finger. ‘I asked you to find what matter you could against the Queen, and you have, I grant you, raked up enough mud to blacken a dozen women. But while working on the principle that mud sticks if you throw enough of it, you seem to have overlooked the fact that the one half of this mud obliterates the other half.’
Mr Buchanan’s red-rimmed, sensitive little eyes blinked furiously. He felt as raw as if he were again a novice awaiting judgement on his first manuscript. A literary rival had lately described him in the vigorous style of the time as a ‘bawdy fellow’ and ‘dunghill puddle and sink of filth’; he wondered if his pure-minded patron had been influenced by this adverse criticism.
‘Qui tetigerit picem—’ he began.
‘I have no concern with your indecency,’ was the chill reply, ‘but your inconsistency. Your statements contradict each other, sometimes even on the same page. You describe Bothwell as a brutal ravisher who brought the Queen back into Edinburgh “under a vain pretence of liberty”. And yet you say the Queen begged him to carry her off! Then, too, you quote Lethington, Melville and others who describe his unreasonable jealousy of her. And yet you say he is utterly indifferent to her! The two things are incompatible.’
‘But he has corresponded with, even visited Lady Jean at Crichton.’
‘Naturally, since he bribed her with Crichton and has had to settle up his estate there. Also he must be trying to get hold of that Dispensation for her marriage to him, which could prove the Queen’s illegal.’
The inexorable finger flicked on, turning the pages backwards. James noted that Mary had ridden headlong to Bothwell at Hermitage last October in order to indulge her bodily lust (with a desperately wounded man, in the space of two hours, and in the presence of her Secretary of State and other witnesses, including James himself); that her intrigue with him had begun last September (when she was still very ill from childbirth) in Edinburgh at Exchequer House, which Bothwell had visited through the garden door from Mr Chalmers’ house, and after an initial rape (though closely surrounded by her attendant ladies, courtiers and guards) so pleased her that she continually sent for him through Lady Reres, a fat aged bawd (Lady Reres being young enough to act as wet-nurse to the baby Prince, whom she was suckling at the time, miles away at Stirling); that last August she had taken a pleasure cruise up the Forth to Alloa with Bothwell and his pirate crew, ‘such company as no honest man, let alone woman, would adventure life or honour among’ –
‘But good God, man!’ exclaimed James, startled for once into an oath, ‘do you realize what you have written? The Lord Bothwell was never on the boat. And I – I was there!’
It was a most unfortunate slip. Mr Buchanan promised it should be rectified, and mentally resolved that it should not. It was the first time he had tried his hand on a story of this sort, and he had enjoyed it; his subject had run away with him. He was not going to have his fine literary frenzy cramped by these pedantic demands for accuracy.
James threw down the manuscript.
‘This scrap-heap of obscene rubbish is worse than useless. It can be disproved by everyone in Scotland.’
‘But not abroad,’ said Mr Buchanan slyly.
‘True.’ James pulled his long nose thoughtfully. ‘It may have some effect here. The French will listen to a bawdy tale where they will ignore serious argument.’
He looked disapprovingly through the window at the line of coquettish little blue pointed roofs, clear indication of a light-minded race. It would be very good to be back a
gain in Scotland.
But he would not venture it yet, not while Bothwell was still in the saddle. Buchanan had brought a note from Kirkaldy of Grange, the best soldier in the rebel coalition, asking him to come over and head it. But, as he now explained at some length in answer, he did more good in directing the operations from behind the scenes. Propaganda was by far the most important weapon in this affair.
‘Aye,’ chuckled Mr Buchanan, ‘she’d not be the first to die of scandal!’
James said rather hurriedly, ‘Those placards are doing good work out here. I have ordered several batches of them to be printed in London and sent to Paris. But it is the campaign at home that matters most.’
Mr Buchanan assured him that that was well in hand. ‘Mr Knox, though also at a distance, is directing it. All the ministers are preaching hot cannons. God will avenge Himself on the country if it does not punish the guilty. Already the farmers are saying there is foot-rot among this year’s lambs. The women in particular are being worked up into a frenzy; they are told that the Queen “has no more liberty, nor privilege, to commit murder and adultery than any other private person”. That is excellent, it touches their rights.’ He gave a hearty laugh. ‘Why should they deny themselves the pleasure of adultery and husband-murder if the Queen may indulge herself?’
James pondered this outburst of the democratic spirit. He did not want it pushed to extremes. The punishment for husband-murder was for the woman to be burnt alive.
‘The ministers are being very austere,’ was his comment. Then he roused himself to what was the really important issue. ‘Still, they are on the right course. What we must have is a moral Crusade, the country roused to righteous fury, and marching as one man to put down this reign of blood and indecency.’
‘But there’s been no blood.’
The Lord James regarded him sternly.
‘Have you forgotten the murder of the King?’ he demanded.
Buchanan’s dropped jaw increased his resemblance to an empurpled codfish. He knew – and James knew that he knew – that the ruling nobles had agreed to murder Darnley; he had a shrewd guess that James himself had ordered Archie Douglas and his band of cut-throats down to Kirk o’ Field for that very purpose. But his political training helped him to a quick recovery.
‘Then,’ he said brightly, ‘we must show that the Queen lured the King to Kirk o’ Field so that Bothwell should blow up his house with gunpowder.’
‘Certainly. The trouble is’ – James fingered his thin black beard – ‘it is difficult to explain such a violent and self-advertising method of murder, when she could have easily poisoned him without anyone being the wiser. Nor is it conceivable that she should have arranged an abduction which would obviously play into the hands of Bothwell’s enemies. There are many who are ready and willing to believe her a criminal. But no one who has spoken with her will believe her a fool.’
‘Ah, but the folly of women in love—’ Buchanan began indulgently.
‘I did not know, Mr Buchanan, that you had experience of the subject.’
The great Latinist had not just made a very trying Channel crossing in order to be insulted. His heavy black-robed figure surged up out of his chair with a volcanic dignity that swept half his papers on the floor. Fortunately at that moment a French servant entered with a tray of refreshments. James waved a lofty hand towards it.
‘Eat, if you are inclined.’
Buchanan ate and drank with uneasy greed under the other’s abstemious eye.
Thawed by excellent Bordeaux, he saw the folly of offending his patron, and remembered that he had been promised the office of Moderator of the Kirk (worth £500 a year) if he helped him to power. So he sought how to give better satisfaction than by his severely criticized detective story, and told him that a few papers belonging to Bothwell had just been – well – got hold of, which might come in handy. They had not at first struck him as of importance, being principally love-letters and poems, ‘very bad’, from one or two women, and a brief note about business from the Queen. But it had since occurred to him that if only they could get hold of more of the Queen’s letters, a profitable combination might be made of both sets of correspondence, which could be worked up to prove her guilt. To use passages of her own composition would make them far more convincing; incriminating sentences could be added, and the whole copied out by someone who had long experience of the Queen’s easy handwriting.
‘I have heard nothing of this matter, nor do I wish to hear,’ said James severely.
‘But Mr Secretary Lethington may be more interested.’
‘Lethington?’ exclaimed James. ‘But he is now on the side of the Queen.’
‘The Chameleon,’ replied the scholar, ponderously playful, ‘changes colour to suit his surroundings. So does the Secretary bird. The combination that the Lords are forming against Bothwell is now strong enough for Lethington to join it. Just before I sailed he left the Court, and without taking his leave. And,’ he continued, warming to his theme as he gulped down another glass of Bordeaux, ‘I showed him the note from the Queen among my Lord Bothwell’s papers. It is curt and businesslike, but it could be used almost as it stands. It is dated only “this Saturday”, and is unaddressed, but was evidently written at Craigmillar shortly before the Christening. Put the word “Glasgow” at the top, and it will suggest that it is written during her visit to the King there, just before he went to Kirk o’ Field, and that she was luring him to his doom.’
He balanced a top-heavy lump of butter on his crust of delicious French bread and crammed it into his mouth. James avoided looking at that gobbling turkey-cock and his pleasure in this atrocious suggestion.
His cold and indeterminate mind had long used religion as a tool. Now the weapon turned against him; for an instant he wondered what it should profit him if he gained the whole world and lost his own soul.
But there was no room for the old simple standards of Christianity in modern statecraft. Not for him the luxury of the private virtues, gratitude, pity, personal honour. He must make the great abnegation and devote, not only his life but his virtue to the public good.
In pained resignation to the Divine Will he said, ‘My sister was once the creature on earth dearest to me.’ (Yes, his eyes had once filled with tears for her. Never had they done that for anyone else.) ‘If she would renounce this godless marriage, I would find it in my heart to love her as much as ever I did. But if she do not, she must pay the price of her guilt, for she must be guilty. She is guilty. Prove it then. I do not wish to know how. But as for this filthy trash, this “Detection of Mary Stewart”,’ – and he spat out the title like a foul taste, his scorn for his vile tools making some amends to him for his use of them – ‘it may pass muster in England or the Continent, but I advise you to suppress it in Scotland, where no one now living can believe a word of it.’
The indignant author flung out a black-sleeved arm in a gesture as portentous as that of Mr Knox. ‘I,’ he prophesied, ‘write for posterity.’
Chapter Thirty-Two
‘The dance has begun!’ said Bothwell, and she laughed with him in sheer light-heartedness. This was no dancing floor. They stood on the battlements of Borthwick Castle and saw the dark masses of horsemen on the horizon advancing against them.
‘We’re in luck,’ she cried. ‘An hour or two later, the Castle would have been surrounded, and you cut off from me.’
‘I’d have got through to you somehow. There must be at least a thousand altogether over there.’
She strained her eyes into the distance, but good as they were they could not equal his hawk gaze, trained from childhood in Border warfare. Like a hawk he looked on this eyrie of Borthwick tower, his head held high, his eyes fierce and cool as they watched the oncoming of his enemies. A sick spasm beset her at the thought of how nearly he might have fallen into their hands, but she quickly fought it down.
He had brought her here after just a month at Edinburgh, on the day that Lethington’s desertion had gi
ven the first quiet signal that it was no longer safe for the Queen to stay at Holyrood Palace. Bothwell had already summoned all ‘lords, landed men and substantial yeomen’ to muster at Melrose on the 15th of June with arms and a fortnight’s provisions, on the usual pretext of disciplinary measures on the Border. But things were moving too fast to wait for the muster. So he placed the Queen in this massive stronghold, under the guardianship of the loyal Lord Borthwick and his men, and the addition of his own artillery and a hundred and fifty of his two hundred hagbutters.
With the remaining fifty he himself left the Castle quietly at night, the first time that he had left her since he had carried her off to Dunbar, and rode to Melrose to collect any early comers that might have come in, in response to the summons for next week. But no one had yet done so; all he could do in the time was to leave his fifty hagbutters and their Captain there to hurry things up as best they might, and ride back with only one or two men to Borthwick.
No sooner had he sat down to eat and drink and tell Mary his adventures than one of his outposts came galloping up with news of an army of cavalry advancing on them from the north. Down went their knives, and up they sprang from the table to scamper up the stone stairs to the top of the tower. They gazed out over the wide rolling sweep of country, all sparkling and waving with the feathery shoots of the young bracken in the mid-day sunshine, and saw those dark clouds moving over the northern skyline towards them, and laughed, for the dance had begun, and they were in luck, since they were together.
Once before, Bothwell had stood on this tower, and given a roar of laughter to see his house and barns of Crichton go up in smoke; and now he flung his arm round Mary. ‘Here’s a prettier piece of Venetian glass than any that Arran’s troopers smashed!’ he cried as he kissed her.
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