by Jane Yolen
I could barely say his name without a clench in my gut. But for the queen’s sake, I hid my feelings and went to the wedding in a new dress of green silk with a high lace collar and velvet shoes.
Queen Mary was escorted to the chapel royal by Darnley’s father, the Earl of Lennox, a heavyset man who looked nothing like his slim, elegant son.
To signify that she was a widow, the queen wore a black robe with a wide hood, the very robe she had worn at her husband’s funeral. But it was clear that Darnley had spared no expense in his own garb. He was dressed sumptuously, with a doublet of gold and hung about with jewels.
With the summer sun just lighting the chapel’s windows, he placed three rings on the queen’s finger. The middle one bore a diamond as large as a quail’s egg. I wondered that Darnley’s mouth was able to speak the word “faithful” in the wedding vows without a sneer.
When the ceremony was done, the newlyweds proceeded to their individual chambers.
In the queen’s room, the Four Maries unpinned the queen’s black mourning robe.
“Careful,” the queen cautioned when Pretty Mary—in an excess of excitement—was too quick. “I am not some virgin so eager for the marriage bed I would tear off my clothing! Remember, while I am Queen of Scotland, I am also the dowager Queen of France. By taking off my mourning clothes, I come afresh to this new marriage.” But then she giggled, which put a lie to all her protests.
“Let me help,” I said, but I was warned off with a look from Pious Mary. I had no place in this ceremony. So I stood back and simply watched.
When they had peeled the robe off, what was revealed beneath was the glistening wedding gown the queen had promised us, with its intricate embroidery of golden flowers and insects on bodice, sleeves, and skirts. She looked every inch the Queen of Faerie I had believed her to be in the garden at Rheims.
I applauded, my hands ringing out in praise. For her. But not for him.
A royal wedding is not like a commoner’s. The celebrations continued for days. I was well tired of the drinking and dancing and masques long before they were over. I was overfull of both wet and dry confections. If I had to eat another caramelled or candied fruit or another bite of Nuns’ Beads, or any other sweet, I might die of a surfeit of sugar. My voice was rough with all the singing and storytelling and the lack of sleep.
Each night, the queen and king—his title hateful in my mouth—threw handfuls of coins from the balcony to the crowds of wellwishers who had poured down from the city. The queen had her arm around the king’s waist. But his hands were busy only with the coins.
A number of the Scots lords got wildly drunk at the feasts, and there were more than a few fistfights among the queen’s devoted Highlanders. From the second day forward many of the dancing men sported blackened eyes.
On that second day, the royal heralds proclaimed that Lord Darnley—now King Henry of Scotland—would henceforth sign all documents along with the queen. This declaration was met at first with utter silence by the assembled Scots lords.
Only the Earl of Lennox, the English father of the king, was heard to cry out, “God save His Grace!”
I was not the only one to notice that Lord James was missing from the celebrations. As good as his word, he had refused to return to Edinburgh for the wedding. Instead he had fortified himself in the midst of his vast estates, declaring that the queen planned to bring back the hated Catholicism to Scotland. And further, he called for the Protestant lords to join him in denouncing the queen.
“That long-legged pup and his father plan to assassinate me,” Lord James was reported to have said of the king and Lennox. Davie told me this in a delighted whisper out in the garden. I had forgiven him his bad behavior of before. One does that for a friend. Forgiven—but not forgotten. And he had forgiven me what he called my silly innocence.
“Lennox,” he added, rubbing his hands together, “has just warned the queen that Lord James intends to kidnap the king and ship him back to England.”
“Is it true?” I asked. “Oh, if only it were true.”
Davie threw his head back and laughed uproariously.
“I am serious, Davie,” I said.
“So is the queen,” Davie said, grinning at me. “She is putting Lord James to the horn!”
“You mean—she will outlaw him?” My hands went to my mouth.
“Aye.” Davie’s expression was one of impish delight. “And she’s taken away all his lands!”
I was shocked that the queen would condemn one who had stood so closely to her in times past, and I remembered how Lord James had faced down the mob at the chapel door for her. But I was even more shocked at what I read so clearly in Davie’s face—that he had encouraged the queen so that he might have his own revenge.
Revenge, Papa had always said, is a tainted meal. Strange meats, I thought, for a wedding feast.
Davie had even more revenge than that. Goaded by Lord James’s stubborn opposition, the queen and her new king had no choice but to lead an army against him.
I watched them ride out from the gates of Edinburgh at the head of their troops. The king was dressed in a glossy suit of gilt armor. I thought he seemed like a knight from a fanciful romance.
But the queen—she looked every inch the soldier—wore a plain soldier’s armor and had sword and pistol at her side. There was an expression of such determination on her face, I did not believe that anyone could stand against her.
Indeed this proved the case. Word came back to us through a messenger to Davie that Lord James had found little support for any uprising and had been forced to flee into exile in England with the few Scots nobles who remained on his side.
As he told me all this, Davie did a sprightly jig, right there in the corridor.
“Hush, Davie,” I cautioned, but he did not stop his dance.
Queen Mary returned to Edinburgh in triumph. Even John Knox was forced to acknowledge her courage.
For a brief, glorious moment, it looked as if all was well.
I said so to Davie as we viewed from a balcony the return of the troops. “Maybe it will be ‘happy ever after’ after all.”
“History compressed into one of your fairy stories?” Davie asked.
“Well, why not?”
“Because history, my dear Nicola, is never so tidy,” he replied. “And because history does not stop for an ending, happy or otherwise.”
28
SPILLING GOOD WINE
How often is the passing of one storm only a prelude to another. With Lord James gone, who had served her so well, the queen needed to appoint a new lieutenant general to command the royal armies.
Did she name someone safe and reliable? Someone with only her safety at heart?
No.
She awarded the post to the Earl of Bothwell.
Bothwell!
I wish I had never heard his name.
Where the new king was handsome, weak, willful, Bothwell was the opposite. Short and stocky, with the heavy good looks of a scrap-per, he said things bluntly, but left out much in the saying. A fox and a wolf together. I believe the queen saw in him a man who could command her armies with energy and cunning.
Oh, but what a price she was to pay for his services.
The king had hoped his own father would be appointed to the position. When Bothwell, a Scot, was named, it became the first of many grievances he nursed against the queen. He still smiled and danced and paid her pretty compliments, of course, but as yet she did not suspect the poison that was growing in his heart.
Should I have told her? How often since I have asked myself that. The truth was, I thought she had turned to Bothwell because she knew the king’s venomous soul.
But I was now rarely at her side, and there was no good time to say what I thought. She was too busy—with her husband, with Bothwell, with the business of governing.
Who will speak truth to the queen now? I wondered.
No one took more satisfaction in Lord James’s exile than Davie.
He and Darnley toasted one another over the great laird’s downfall, gloating excessively in the king’s chambers.
But alone with me, out in the garden—Davie called it the only safe place for conversation—he spoke differently of his master.
“What a lackwit,” he said. “What a wastrel.”
“How can you serve a master you despise?” I asked, bending over to work the soil.
“And do you so admire yours?” he said, smiling.
I stood, hands on hips. “You know I do. She is the kindest, the sweetest, the ...”
“Kind and sweet she may be,” Davie said with that same teasing smile. “She knows poetry and music and is good to her dog. But that is not what makes a great monarch, Nicola. The queen is led too often by her heart. To reign well, one must lead with the head.”
“And you know how to reign?” I threw down my digger. “You who bend knee to a king you consider a wastrel? You are spilling good wine on bad soil, Davie.”
He laughed. “This garden has gone to your head, little fool.”
I walked away and did not look back.
For weeks after that conversation we did not speak, ignoring one another in the corridors every time we passed.
But as Davie himself would have been the first to admit, calling a log in the water a fish does not give it gills. Darnley never rose to the task of being a true king. Rather he pulled the office down around him. And seeing the wreckage Darnley made of everything he touched, Davie finally fell out with him, just as everyone else had.
Everyone, that is, but the queen.
As winter drew on, Queen Mary was subject to another bout of ill health, a flux contracted on one of her rides. She asked for me specifically to nurse her.
Me!
How could I refuse? I even slept on a small cot by her bed in case she should cry out in the night.
The king was never by her side during her illness. Sometimes he was gaming and drinking with his low friends, Toby and Giles, finding every alehouse in Edinburgh. Or he went off on hawking and hunting trips with the few Scots lords who could still abide his company.
Often in her fever the queen would call out for him. And I—to my shame—always lied to keep her quiet.
“He has been to see you while you slept, Madam. He sat for an hour by your side,” I told her not once but many times.
“That he should care so,” she would whisper, and slip back into her fevered sleep.
He had not been there, of course. He never came. But I could not tell her so.
When the queen had recovered enough, we went to her palace at Linlithgow, with its beautiful view of the nearby loch. Even illness could not alter her long French habit of changing houses on a whim.
“I always feel better there, near the water,” she told me before we left. “With you and the Maries to entertain me, I will be entirely well soon.”
She was carried to Linlithgow by litter, rather than riding there, and this led to a fresh flurry of rumors about her health.
“She is just tired,” I would say when asked. “She is recovering.”
And she was tired from the days of fever. But it was more than that. She sighed often when she thought I did not notice, her face as pinched and white as when King Francis had died. She was tired and Darnley did not come to visit. Nor did he send letters.
What the queen had, I was certain—though no doctor told me—was a depression of the heart. All my little evasions had not fooled her. Deep down she now knew Darnley for a knave.
It was a dreary December day in Linlithgow when I came upon Davie sitting on a bench by the great fireplace in the parlor. His back was to me and he was intent on a book which I took to be a volume of poetry such as he and I used to enjoy together.
Weeks earlier I would have avoided him, hating him for his championing of Darnley. But since his break with the king, and especially here in Linlithgow, we had come to a sort of peace, occasionally even chatting companionably, though with none of the closeness we had had before. Of course he was now high in the government and had little time for card games with the queen’s fool.
I missed him, if one can miss a person one sees every day. So I peeked over his shoulder, to be near him again. I saw then that he was not reading poetry at all but rather a treatise on the laws and statutes of Scotland.
“That looks very dull,” I said. “Have you given up on the poems of Monsieur Ronsard?”
He looked up guiltily, then smiled his monkey smile. “I have found that the law has a poetry of its own, Nicola.” He laid the book aside. “There’s a rhythm to smooth governance, a meter like a poem.”
I sighed. “I thought such matters were Maitland’s domain.”
“Ah, Nicola, Maitland earned the queen’s disfavor when he opposed her match with Darnley. He will not easily win it back.”
“But he is still her secretary of state,” I pointed out.
“Retaining a title is not the same as being in power,” he said, a strange note of ridicule in his voice. The flickering flames from the hearth cast odd shadows, so that his face was now dark, now light.
“But Maitland is here at court all the time,” I said.
“Courting Mary Fleming, rather,” Davie snapped.
I could not stand the contempt I heard in his voice. For Maitland, for Regal Mary, maybe even for the queen. “Davie, what has happened to you? Who have you become?”
“What have I become?” He grinned and puffed out his little chest. “I have become more powerful than the king.”
I must have gaped. “More ... ?”
“The king is a child who plays instead of learning statecraft.”
I shrugged.
“Did you know that his latest piece of petulance is to sulk because he has been refused the crown matrimonial?”
I looked at him blankly. “What is that?”
He patted the bench. “Come sit, little fool, and I will explain.”
I sat.
“Darnley is king only by virtue of being married to the queen. If she were to die, then he would lose his throne.”
“Oh,” I said, “as the queen did in France.”
“Aye,” Davie agreed. “But the crown matrimonial would make him king in his own right, so that he would continue to reign whatever happens to Queen Mary.”
“Darnley reigning unchecked over Scotland!” I was appalled.
“Oh, I agree such is unthinkable. But there are those who, failing to find advancement with the queen, have tied their futures to Darnley. They fill his head with notions of his own greatness.”
“As you did once, David,” I reminded him, shaking a finger under his nose.
He had the grace to look embarrassed, and his monkey face suffused with color. “Do not task me, Nicola. I did it for the queen.”
“Davie, let us have truth between us as we used to. You did it for yourself.”
He nodded. “I hide nothing from you, my dearest friend.”
“Good,” I said, smoothing my skirt.
“I did it for the queen.” He grinned.
“Oh, you! You are impossible,” I said.
“If I did not have the queen’s ear, there are many who would even now be urging her to take second place to her husband,” he said sternly.
“Surely the queen would never agree to such a thing.”
“Not so long as wiser heads prevail,” Davie responded, slapping first his head, then his chest. “I have here, under my tunic and over my heart, the solution to Scotland’s woes.”
“Who is the storyteller now?” I said.
He looked a bit peeved with me, his face wrinkling in displeasure. “No, it is true.”
I stood. “David Riccio, you would not know truth these days any more than ...”
“Nicola, listen. I will prove it.” There was a battle being waged on his face, between wanting to boast and wanting me to believe him.
I sat again, the fire warm on my face. “Prove it then.”
“The king’s pleasure
s are what, Nicola?”
I shrugged and counted on my fingers. “Drinking, gaming, hawking, drinking, hunting, dicing, cards, drinking, wenching ...”
He nodded approvingly at my count. “In fact everything but the business of the land. He hates being called away from his pleasures even to set his signature to royal proclamations.”
“So ...”
“So—a solution was proposed,” David replied smugly.
“By whom?” I asked, suspicious.
“By me!” He reached inside his tunic and pulled out a metal disk on a length of chain. “Now do you see?”
I leaned closer, but could not make out what it was. “What am I supposed to see, Davie? It does not look important.”
“Ah, but it is a mistake to be fooled by appearances, Nicola. The beautiful Darnley is little more than a shadow of a king, while I—his ugly and despised servant—possess a stamp with the king’s signature.”
Now I could see the signature picked out in raised metal.
Davie laughed. “With this stamp I can imprint his name upon any document I wish.”
“And he has agreed to this?”
“Agreed? My dear friend, he was delighted!” Davie dangled the metal amulet before me.
I reached out a finger to touch it. It was cold and hard and unfeeling. The very coldness of the thing chilled me through and through. So I stood and went over to the hearth, hoping that the fire would give me back some measure of warmth.
I turned and saw Davie still eyeing his prize as a drunkard eyes his wine.
“Oh Davie,” I cried, “these games are too dangerous for the likes of you and me. You may love the workings of power, the poetry of the law, but you have no army at your back, no powerful family to save you should anything go awry. We are like mice scampering about the feet of angry lions. If we squeak too loudly, they will eat us.”
Davie was unmoved. “And what of the fable you once told me of the bound lion that owes its life to the mouse that chewed through its bonds?” He stuffed the disk back in his tunic.