by Jane Yolen
And with her amber hair on her shoulders, she indeed looked like a great lion ready to pounce.
“They say the queen now has six thousand men, Joseph,” I said at breakfast in the kitchen at Hamilton. “Is that a lot?”
“It is a start,” he said.
“Is it enough?” I pursued.
He did not answer me right away but glowered at his porridge.
“Is it enough?” I asked again, putting my hand on his arm.
He looked at me. “Enough men,” he said, “but too many commanders.”
Later that same day at dinner in her chambers, Lord Seton cautioned the queen of the same thing. “An army is but as good as its commanders, Majesty.”
The queen listened intently, chin on hand.
By her side, as fool once more, I said what was on all our minds. “I hear they quarrel ceaselessly, like children in a game of war.”
She made a face. “Dear Lord Seton, are the commanders not just trying to find the best way to return me to the throne?”
He shook his head. “I fear the worst, Majesty. We must pick our fights with care.”
The first test of our strength came on the banks of the Clyde, that great slow river that halves the city of Glasgow.
As our army came to the little village of Langside, the problem of too many commanders, which both Joseph and Lord Seton had feared, proved lethal.
The first of the queen’s troops, under Lord Claud Hamilton, raced forward eagerly. They headed through the village towards the other side, where it was known that Lord James and his troops were well established.
We had more men, Joseph told me, but Lord James had two very experienced generals with him—Kirkaldy and Morton. They used the little town’s narrow main street to advantage, setting hagbutters at windows and doors to harry the queen’s men without mercy.
Still our troops went forward, fighting bravely for each step, and we could have held the town. Of that I am certain.
But at the wrong moment, one of our commanders—Argyll—had an epileptic fit when he should have been urging his troops forward to help Hamilton. So the order was never given. And Argyll’s men—who were the greatest part of the queen’s army—never advanced.
Caught in a crossfire of hagbutters, harried on by unremitting pikemen, the brave men of Hamilton could do nothing but turn and flee, heading back to the Highlands.
It was an awful defeat.
The queen and I had been watching from a nearby hill when our army broke. There was nothing for us to do but go after them.
North.
North towards safety.
We rode like men, our legs clamped about the horse’s broad backs, for there was no time to sit sideways like a lady. In consequence I had sores on my inner thighs, and my legs and bottom ached from the long hours in the saddle.
The queen did not complain, not once, but she must have been as sore as I, for her face was haggard and she had deep circles beneath her eyes.
Just above the village of Tongland, a sleepy little town in the mountains, our company crossed the river Dee. As we raced over an ancient wooden bridge, our horses’ hooves clattered loudly enough to rouse the countryside.
As soon as all had reached the other side, Lord Herries dismounted and called his men to him.
“Destroy this bridge,” he cried. “It will buy us more time.”
Time, I thought bitterly, as if that was all we needed.
The men at once began dismantling the plankings. Then they levered up the crossbraces and threw them into the water. I would have offered help but it was clear they needed none from me.
That evening we camped in dense woodland, hiding like outlaws. And indeed, that is what we had become. As I crouched in front of the fire, my cape pulled around me for warmth, I suddenly realized that I could not remember any stories or songs to cheer us. The future looked as dark as the night closing in.
All we had had to eat that day was sour milk and oatmeal without bread. My stomach was full of needles and pins that pricked relentlessly. I put my hand on my belly and thought about moaning. But I did not. There was enough misery in the air already. There were wounded and dying men in our company. The dead we had left far behind. I knew I could at least bear a little hunger without complaint.
Queen Mary sat under a makeshift tent, with Lord Herries at her right hand. I had left her there to dine on more oatmeal—wretched stuff!—with Joseph at a smaller fire.
“I feel like a wounded deer with a pack of snarling hounds hard by,” I told Joseph.
“We are wounded,” he said, “but that is no reason to give in to despair. Look at the queen.” He pointed.
She had left the sanctuary of the tent and was now strolling around the camp, offering a smile or a word of encouragement to every man there. The firelight softened her features and made her look almost young again.
So I left Joseph’s side to follow the queen’s lead, and suddenly all the stories and songs I knew came flooding back to me, like a river in spate. I began joking with the tired soldiers, telling them the story of the lion and the mouse, and the one about the girl who tripped while counting the money expected from the sale of her eggs, thus breaking every one.
“Lord James needs to watch his footing,” I finished with a laugh.
They laughed with me, and one called out, “We will break his eggs for ye, Miss!”
“Brava, Nicola!” someone cried. I turned. It was the queen. Her face, lit by the firelight, was hollowed, like a saint’s.
She beckoned me to follow her and led me to a clearing overshadowed by the darkening sky. A half-moon shone above it like a wish only half come true.
“This is not unlike the night when we first met,” she mused.
“The surroundings are wilder, but the sky very like,” I agreed. There was something in her voice that warned me she was doing more than simply reminiscing.
“Do you regret that first meeting, Nicola?” she asked. “Might you have been happier if you had remained in France?”
It was an unexpected question. “I was ... not so happy then as I have been since, Majesty. You have shown me more kindness and more beauty in the world than I could ever have imagined.”
“You have also seen much that was not kind or beautiful,” the queen reminded me. “From Amboise, to Holyrood, to Kirk o’Field, to our last battle, violence and bloodshed have dogged me. Might it not have been better if you had never been party to such things, dear Jardiniere?”
I bit my lip. “Nothing was forced upon me that I did not agree to, Majesty,” I assured her. “If we take pleasure in the beauty of a rose, we cannot complain if we are pricked by the thorns.”
“Spoken like my own fool,” the queen said, and half smiled. “So if you have no regrets, then I shall have none for you. Just memories of our happy times together.”
“Memories, Majesty?” I asked.
The moon went suddenly behind a cloud and everything seemed colder. The queen pulled her cloak tighter about her shoulders. “I am haunted by the ghosts of all that might have been.”
I shivered, and not just from the cold. Memories. Ghosts. She was talking about the past. I was suddenly afraid for the future. “What do you mean, Madam?”
She looked up again at the darkened sky. “I have made a decision, Nicola, the most difficult since I first resolved to leave France. I am going south to England to throw myself upon the mercy of my cousin Elizabeth.”
“England?” I was appalled. “It was to England Lords James and Ruthven fled from your justice. Even Knox has courted the favor of the English queen. The English have no cause to love you. Oh, Majesty—do not go. For Jesu’s sake, do not go.”
She looked at me. “Why should I not appeal to my cousin when justice and kinship are my advocates? If I can only meet her face-to-face, she will see in me the sweet sister she has always called me.”
“You cannot trust her,” I warned with a brisk shake of my head. “She will turn you from a queen into a pawn a
nd move you about in some wicked game of her own devising.”
“I cannot deny the danger,” she answered. “But I will never be a pawn. I am a queen, whether on a throne or in chains.” The moon emerged from the clouds as she finished speaking, casting her face in silver.
“But what of those who love you here in Scotland?” I cried. “They need you to lead them.”
She turned from me and looked back at the woods. “My supporters are scattered. Or dead. If I go now, I spare those loyal to me any further suffering. For the sake of my sweet son James, who will one day be old enough to rule on his own, I cannot let our country be wounded further.”
I could tell that her mind was made up. But still I had to say what she required of me. “You are but a mortal, Majesty.”
“As a mortal, I am deeply afraid, Nicola.” She gave the cloak another pull around her. “But still I must go.”
I thought of my beloved Joseph leaving for France. I thought of the dangers that lay across the border in England. Yet I did not hesitate. “Where my queen goes, I go, too.”
She shook her head and grabbed up my hands. “Not this time, my dearest fool. You at least have life ahead of you.” There was a catch in her voice. She pointed to the trees where Joseph had just emerged, leading two horses, saddled and ready to ride. “I have already spoken to Joseph this evening and he has everything you will need for your journey.”
“Madam,” I cried, “no!” Then I fell to my knees before her, hoping that would prove my faithfulness. “How can you send me away?”
The queen bent down and raised me to my feet. “My dearest Nicola, Joseph is a brave young man, more than worthy of your love. In this one thing I beg you to be wiser than I. In matters of the heart I am the one who has always been the fool. Do not repeat my mistakes.”
A wind had started moaning through the oak trees, and I raised my voice so that she could hear me. “You will need me, Madam.”
“You have done more than enough already,” said the queen. “Go, like your favorite, Marie-in-the-Ashes, with her prince. Leave behind these palaces packed with danger and lies. Make instead a home filled with the laughter of children.”
I felt a fire burn in my breast and the taste of bile in my mouth, burning the edges of my tongue. To choose now between Joseph and my queen—how could I make such a choice?
“If you force me to, Nicola, I will command you to go, for I am still your queen, am I not?”
“Now and forever, Majesty.”
“Then do not compel me to give such an order. Go because of the love you bear me and not because I wear a crown, however tarnished that crown may be.”
“As you wish,” I whispered, silent tears now raining down my cheeks.
The queen took hold of my chin and tilted my head up so that I met her eyes. In the moon’s small light I saw her own tears matched mine. “I am putting myself in God’s hands as much as in Queen Elizabeth’s,” she said. “Whatever befalls, I shall take comfort in knowing you are safe, that this one flower out of all my gardens blooms still.” Then she motioned me to go to Joseph, who had patiently kept his distance.
I took one step, then turned back.
“Why do you not come with us?” I asked. “There are many in France who love you still. You have lands and family there.”
The queen’s head drooped for a moment with the temptation. But then she shook it away, recovering her resolve.
“No, Nicola, here in Scotland is where I am still queen.”
I tried to summon a word of farewell, but before I could speak, there was a violent stamping and crashing among the trees. I looked around in alarm, wondering if Lord James’s scouts had tracked us already. Then, leaping forward, I grabbed the queen by the arm, thinking to throw her up into the saddle. But too soon battering hooves bore upon us and I had only time to pull her aside, falling to the ground on top of her, my body a fragile shield.
However, it was not a pack of hunters but a magnificent stag that burst out of a bush. The thorns had drawn thin trails of blood down his heaving flanks. In a thunder of hooves he swept past our trembling bodies, and bounded to the crest of a hillock where he paused for a moment, lifting his crowned head to the moon.
I sat up and the queen did as well, clutching my arm, staring at the stag. Part of the thornbush had been ripped off by his headlong charge and, for a brief instant, as he turned his great head in the moonlight, the broken branches formed the shape of a cross between his spreading antlers.
I got to my knees, as Saint Hubert and King David had done when the power of God had blazed before them. In that single moment, I understood all the mysterious forces that had seized hold of my life. And in that same instant I felt gratitude—for the queen’s love and for Joseph, who had waited so faithfully.
Then a cloud covered the moon and the hilltop grew silent.
When the cloud moved on and it was light again, the stag had disappeared to the east, behind the hill.
The queen stood and lifted me gently to my feet. “You see, Nicola,” she said hoarsely, “God is watching over us.”
Just then the queen’s soldiers came running towards us, swords drawn. Joseph called out for them to stop. But they did not even slow down till they saw that the queen was all right.
“Go back to the camp,” she told them, brushing off her bodice and skirt. “It was a miracle sent by God. It was Saint Hubert’s stag.”
“Venison tonight, lads!” cried one of the soldiers.
“If you love me, that stag goes free,” cried the queen, with such passion, the soldiers turned at once back to their oatmeal and soured milk.
“You must go free, too, Madam. East like the stag, to France,” I told her.
She shook her head. “Though my heart goes with him, Nicola, my head tells me my fate lies south, in England.”
Fato! I shuddered. “Sometimes the head is a poor councilor, Madam,” I said. “Please take the advice of your fool.”
“I would rather your advice than a thousand councilors, dear friend,” she said. “But good advice may be given and yet not taken.”
Friend. She called me friend. Not fool or girl or child or Jardinière, but friend.
She drew her hand away, squared her shoulders, and gazed at me with such sadness, I all but wept again.
“I am the queen,” she said. “There is no safety in that.” Then she turned away and there was in her bearing such beauty and such loneliness as I had never seen in another human being.
Joseph touched my shoulder. “She is beyond our help, Nicola,” he said. “Now we must help ourselves.” He boosted me onto my horse and I flinched as my sore legs touched the saddle. Then he mounted his own horse, and we turned towards the east.
When I looked around, the queen was already walking into the woods, where her little band of soldiers waited.
I knew for certain that I would never see her again.
EPILOGUE
The queen had given Joseph two leather bags, one full of gold and one with jewels, and the small casket covered in crimson with the or m silver gilt she had smuggled out of Lochleven. with the letter in silver gilt she had smuggled out ofLochleven.
“For Freedom,” she had told him.
There was also an embroidery she had done in Lochleven, of a caged bird with a Latin motto arching over its head. Joseph translated it for me: “Virtue flourishes as a result of a wound.”
We made it to the east coast of Scotland, just a pair of servants looking for work, and then across the sea to France. We had no problems getting there at all. Scotland was searching for a missing monarch, we posed but little interest.
Joseph sold two of the jewels for a great deal of money, and with that we bought a country house not far from Blois and made—as the queen had requested—“a home filled with the laughter of children.”
There, too, we started a school for jesters. Joseph teaches our students to play the lute and sing, I how to tell stories and dance.
Twice a year Troupe Brufort
comes through and they give lessons in juggling and acrobatics. Uncle Armand is long dead, having fallen under the wheels of a wine cart in Paris just months after I had left the troupe. All those years of worrying about him had been for naught!
The troupe now consists of Pierre with his wife, Bertrand with his, Annette, who has never married, and old Nadine. Little Jean has gone for a soldier.
None of them write between visits.
None of them know how.
However, once in a great while a letter comes from Queen Mary in England, bearing the prints of many hands. It seems that passage is more difficult for the queen’s mail than for two frightened travelers.
Her letters always say that she is well and that she believes God will provide. But we know the letters come from a castle where her cousin Elizabeth has imprisoned her.
Dear Mary—once queen both of Scotland and France—has waited in her lonely gaol these past nineteen years, hoping for a miracle. But I fear the last of her miracles occurred on that hill where the great stag made its break east for freedom, between its antlers the Lord’s own cross.
Authors’ note: After almost twenty years as Elizabeth’s prisoner, Mary Queen of Scots was accused of plotting to seize her cousin’s throne. She was condemned to death and beheaded at Fotheringhay Castle in Northamptonshire in 1587. It took two blows by the executioner to kill her.
Pious Mary Seton had gone with the queen into captivity, though in 1583, because of ill health, she was allowed to retire to France to a convent in Rheims where, thirty-two years later, she died.
When Elizabeth herself died in 1603, she left no heirs and Queen Mary’s son James became king of both Scotland and England.