The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots: A Novel

by Erickson, Carolly

  I noticed the earl watching him, with what I thought was a look of envy.

  “He is younger, after all,” I said.

  “Hah! Am I old? I am not yet twenty-six.”

  “I imagine my groom is all of, perhaps, sixteen. He plays tennis well. I have played with him, when no one was watching. It is not thought proper for a queen to compete against men—or boys,” I added by way of explanation. “Especially servant boys.”

  “And did you win?”

  “Once. I think he let me win. But win or lose, I was good competition.”

  “I notice you ride well too.”

  “You noticed?”

  “Of course I noticed.”

  A comfortable silence fell, while we ate and drank. As during the supper the previous night, he ate heartily while I nibbled.

  He picked a juicy red strawberry from a bowl and held it out to me. I started to reach for it, then, rather daringly, took it with my teeth, making the earl smile, watching me.

  “Now where, do you imagine, are ripe strawberries to be found this late in the year?”

  “My mother-in-law has them brought from the south. She says greenhouse strawberries are not as sweet.”

  “How far south, I wonder? Africa?” We both laughed.

  “No. Only her monkeys come from there. Or do they come from the New World? I can’t remember. Messy things, monkeys.”

  After eating several more strawberries and drinking another goblet of wine, the earl began humming. It was a dance tune, one I remembered from my early childhood in Scotland, before I came to France.

  “I remember that tune,” I said.

  “A song from the borders. My father used to play it on the pipes. He tried to teach me to play, but I was never any good.”

  The earl lay back on the linen, his hands underneath his head, one booted leg crossed over the other. After a time he looked over at me.

  “My father loved your mother, did you know?”

  “No.”

  “When they were very young. He was Patrick Hepburn, the Fair Earl. He wanted to marry her—before she was matched with your father the king, that is. I think she secretly loved my father. Still loves him, perhaps. I know he went on loving her, right up until he died. I think the reason she likes me so well is that I remind her of him.”

  I listened with interest. I had never before thought of my mother as a woman in love, only as a widow, a woman alone. She rarely mentioned my father, and never with affection.

  “What was he like, your father?”

  “Handsome. A good swordsman.”

  “Honorable?”

  “He upheld the honor of the borders.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He thought for a moment. “It means, you can’t trust anyone. A year ago your mother sent me south to make peace with the English. The treacherous, thieving, murderous English. I went. We signed an accord: no more fighting, no more skirmishes along that thin invisible line that separates our two kingdoms.

  “We all agreed, made vows, and went home. And do you know what happened next? The lord Arran, your royal kinsman, takes money from the English and does their bidding. He comes to my castle at Crichton with fifty men and two English bombards and breaches the walls, steals everything inside, then sets fires in the ruins. And all, he says, because I broke the peace by brawling with my men on his lands. Brawling, mind you! Not doing anyone or any thing any harm.”

  Warming to his tale, the earl got to his feet.

  “I sent him a challenge. He didn’t even answer! He knows I can outfight him any day. But he’s still a coward! A weak, sniveling coward.

  “I went after him. I made him beg for his life. I wanted to kill him, but I knew your mother wouldn’t like it. So I made him pay me a hundred crowns instead and forced him to give me his hand in peace. I left. And do you know what he did then?”

  “I cannot imagine.”

  “He betrayed me to your mother. He went to her and sat in her council chamber and swore that he and I were plotting to kill her and seize the kingdom, and that I put him up to it!”

  “I know from mother’s letters that Arran is not to be trusted.”

  “He’s not to be borne! I would gladly hunt him and not these silly hares. Set the dogs on him, and let them tear out his black heart!”

  The hunt was reassembling, the grooms packing up and preparing the horses. I got up and went over to Bravane, untied her and stroked her neck and asked the earl for his help in mounting her.

  “At least,” I said as he offered me his arm and I stepped up onto the planchon, arranging my skirts as I took my seat, “Arran is no longer regent.”

  “No. It is much worse now. He heads the rebels, those pernicious Lords of the Congregation, who have been fighting your mother. Your cousin Elizabeth sends him money. Sometimes my spies catch her messengers riding up from London with bags of gold, meant for Arran and his Lords. As much as a thousand pounds.”

  He mounted his jennet. The horns were beginning to blow and the beaters to thrash the bushes. We urged our mounts across the brook and joined the other riders, our eyes on the hounds, waiting for the signal to resume our headlong gallop, the swift, elusive prey ever in view.

  SEVEN

  They brought her poor swollen body back to France in a gilded coffin, painted with the silver eaglets of Lorraine.

  I watched from the harbor as the great Flemish galleass that bore her hove into view, under full sail, and wept as the ship rode at anchor and her privy councilors lowered the coffin into a small boat and then hoisted it up onto the pier.

  I had known that my mother was dying, yet I was not at all prepared for the news of her death. It was the Earl of Bothwell who told me—he had rapidly become my closest adviser, the one man at the French court I felt I could fully trust. Shortly after we returned to Fontainebleau from our northward progress the earl received a message from Edinburgh, telling him that despite the rhubarb poultices and the strong spells his sister cast to counteract the sorcery of the Earl of Arran, the great Queen Dowager of Scotland had died.

  She had died, valiant and undefeated, surrounded by traitors and wolves, and as soon as the earl told me of her death I vowed I would avenge her.

  I balled my fists as I watched her coffin being carried into the wharfside chapel. I vowed I would fight my villainous cousin Arran, and his rebellious Lords of the Congregation. That I would resist the traitorous Scottish Parliament that had abolished the mass and declared Scotland to be a Protestant kingdom. And I would fight the English too, though how I would manage that, I couldn’t for the time being imagine.

  For Scotland, without my mother’s guiding hand, was a kingdom adrift. I was Scotland’s queen, I reigned—but could not rule, not as long as the petty lordlings such as Arran continued to fight like snarling dogs for the bone of power, and I stayed on in France by my husband’s bedside.

  I had wanted to bury mother among those she loved, at the convent of the Poor Clares in Pont-à-Mousson where she lived as a child. But my uncle the Duc de Guise, as head of the family, prevailed on me to order that she be interred at Rheims, the royal city, as befitting one who had been the wife of a king and the mother of a queen. I was in mourning, I did not insist. I deferred.

  I wore a medallion with mother’s portrait on it to the requiem mass, and tried to remember her face, not as it was painted on the circlet around my neck, but as it was the last time I saw her, when she came to visit me many years earlier. I remembered that she smiled, and hugged me, and that she cried when she left to return to Scotland, though she tried not to let any of her servants see her crying. I remembered the sound of her voice, and her laughter. But I could no longer see her face clearly, the intervening years had taken it from me. And it was all I could do, as the priest recited the words of the Dies Irae, those terrible words about the day of wrath and destruction, to keep my trembling knees together and prevent myself from falling. For I was an orphan now, an orphan queen, and there was no one I could g
o to any longer for succor.

  EIGHT

  At my suggestion Francis appointed the Earl of Bothwell to be one of his chamber gentlemen and he became a member of our court. His friend Cristy Ricarton stayed nearby, though he had no official court appointment. He seemed glad enough to undertake occasional responsibilities when asked, though what he liked most was to go out with the earl on his nightly excursions.

  What must it be like to be a man, I wondered, with the freedom to spend the evening however he liked? Highborn or lowborn, it seemed, men caroused with their friends and hangers-on. They drank, they gambled, they brawled on occasion—and they enjoyed the company of women. Not the sort of women I was forced to spend my evenings among, my ladies and relatives, my Guise cousins and aunts, my grandmother (whose company I always enjoyed), my mother-in-law (whose company I generally shunned). No: men sought another kind of women entirely, ones to be found, I assumed, in taverns or in brothels, in attic rooms or in dark alleyways. Or, as I was well aware, men had mistresses, or visited the luxurious residences of courtesans, like Diane de Poitrine. Diane had several such houses. I had visited them. There amid beautiful, tasteful surroundings, her lovers could indulge themselves to their hearts’ content in sensuous pleasures.

  Drinking, gambling, brawling, wenching. It was a world closed to me, yet I was curious about it, and I had the strong feeling that men were allotted by nature a generous measure of freedom and enjoyment which was denied to women, and I envied them.

  The truth was, I was curious about how the Earl of Bothwell spent his evenings with his friend Cristy, and I asked Adrien to try to find out.

  A few nights later Adrien came to tell me what he had learned. I had him escorted into my private apartments and then told my women to leave us—even my tirewoman Margaret Carwood, who knew nearly all of my secrets and who was both surprised and offended to be excluded from my interview with the handsome Scots Guards officer who was coming to be one of my most trusted servants.

  “He plays cards, Your Highness,” Adrien said simply once we were alone. “He gambles with dice. He is lucky. He wins.”

  “But to win, one must have a large stake,” was my immediate response, “and I thought the earl had no money. At least, he convinced me that, like many Scottish nobles, he has an honored title but no wealth to go with it. In fact he told me outright that he is very short of funds. That was one reason I convinced my husband to appoint him to his household. And beyond that, I gave the earl a purse of coins—six hundred crowns—to reimburse him for his services to my mother, and as a memorial to her.”

  Adrien looked uncomfortable. “Six hundred crowns is a great deal of money, indeed. However—Your Highness may not wish to hear this—I assure you the earl wagers even larger sums than that with abandon.”

  “Does he indeed? And when he loses?”

  “His friend Lord Ricarton produces from his own purse whatever is needed to make up the losses.”

  “Ah, so Cristy has a fortune. He is the earl’s bank.”

  Adrien smiled. “I wish I had such a rich friend.”

  “So they drink, and the earl gambles, and—what else?”

  “There is something else. Something that puzzles me.”

  “And what is that?”

  “There is a woman. She is not French. She speaks a language I can’t understand. She shouts it, in fact.”

  “Describe this woman.”

  “She is not young, she is not beautiful, she does not have a sweet face or a sweet nature. She is very sour, in fact. Very loud and demanding. More like a fishwife than a wellborn lady. And yet—”

  “Yes?”

  “And yet, her clothes are fine. Not quite clean and certainly not of the newest fashion, but fine nonetheless. She appears every night, wherever the earl and his friend go. They know her—or at least, they are not surprised to see her. The earl glowers when she comes near.”

  “Is she alone?”

  “As far as I can tell, yes.”

  “Plain, aging, foreign, and alone. And dressed in shabby finery. How very strange.”

  I pondered Adrien’s words for the next few days. I could not help noticing that whenever I went into my husband’s apartments and found his chamber gentlemen there, they were idling away their hours playing cards or dice—the Earl of Bothwell among them. He usually appeared to be winning, with a high pile of coins at his elbow and a broad smile of triumph on his face.

  I noticed this—and tried to put it out of my mind. But for some reason my knowledge of his gambling, and especially of the odd foreign woman, nagged at me, until in the end I summoned Adrien again.

  “I want to see for myself this woman you described,” I told him. “I need you to escort me to the tavern where the earl and Lord Ricarton go.”

  “But Your Highness cannot visit a low tavern! There are thieves and spies there, and women of the streets—and murderers!”

  “I shall not go as the queen, but as—as your sister. Are there no mothers or sisters in taverns?”

  Adrien thought a moment. “I have seen travelers take their womenfolk now and then.”

  “So we shall be brother and sister, traveling together. Bring two horses into the stableyard tonight. If anyone asks, say you are being sent on an errand for the king. What time shall I meet you there?”

  “Ten o’clock.”

  “Very well.”

  As afternoon wore into evening I could not wait to meet Adrien. I listened eagerly for the chiming of the clock, I could hardly sit still. At nine o’clock I retired to my room, telling my bedchamber women that I felt unwell and asking them not to disturb me. Once again, Margaret was offended—and aggrieved. As a rule she slept on a trundle bed at the foot of my own large high four-poster bed. I could tell that my request to be left alone puzzled her. I had never excluded her from my room at night before, though etiquette demanded that whenever Francis came into my room after dark my women left us alone together.

  Waiting for the hour of ten to arrive, wearing a borrowed plain gown of homespun stuff, a patched cape with an ample hood enveloping me, I trembled with excitement. Adventure! It was something I had had very little of since my marriage. And now, tonight, I would surely have my fill.

  NINE

  Adrien knew an unfrequented way out of the least used castle gate, a way favored by peddlers and servants, and as I kept the hood of my cape low over my face, no one we passed recognized me as we guided our horses out onto the road that led to the nearby village.

  The moon had risen, but dark clouds soon came up to obscure it, and we had not gone far when it began to rain.

  It was hard rain that came down in sheets, and I was soon drenched.

  “Shall we turn back, Your Highness?” Adrien asked, shouting over the noise of the downpour.

  I shook my head and we continued. I could not have said why, except that my blood was pounding in my veins and after all the anticipation of the afternoon and evening I did not want to be disappointed of my adventure.

  I did not give a thought to whether or not my absence from the palace would be noticed, I merely assumed that for the next few hours I would be free. And for those precious hours I would not be Mary, wife of the king but someone else entirely: I would be merely the sister of one of the Scots Guards.

  By the time we arrived at the Inn of the Three Barrels and Adrien helped me down from my horse I was completely soaked from head to foot. My gown clung to my body in wet lumps, my cloak hung dripping from my shoulders, the hood so low over my face that it covered even my wet untidy hair that drooped in wet ringlets across my cheeks.

  Our entry into the noisy, candlelit tavern was inconspicuous, so engrossed were the drunken men inside in their goblets of wine and their raucous singing and laughing. There were a few women among them, and I glanced at the women, though I did not see anyone who looked like a foreigner wearing what had once been costly clothing. I did see the Earl of Bothwell and Lord Ricarton, however. They sat with four others, playing cards.
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br />   At first I was all but overcome by the reek of liquor and sweat, damp unwashed clothes and unwashed bodies. Only once before, when entering a soldiers’ barracks, had I encountered such a strong odor. I restrained myself from holding my nose and, keeping my head lowered, managed to follow Adrien as he made his way through the room.

  We seated ourselves at a table in a dim corner of the tavern and from somewhere Adrien produced a dry cloth with which I dabbed my dripping face and hair. We were served with wine. As I sipped from my goblet I glanced over at the earl’s table. He was completely absorbed in his game. Every roll of the dice was greeted with loud cries of dismay or rejoicing.

  Suddenly two men sitting near us began shouting at one another and then fighting. Adrien stood, shielding me from the mayhem, and the burly tavernkeeper came up to the table and roughly ordered the men to go outside. They stumbled out. As they reached the doorway they nearly collided with a remarkable figure coming in—a tall woman all in scarlet, from her feathered headdress to her gilt-edged cloak, muddy at the hem, to the embroidered gown she revealed as, throwing aside the cloak with a theatrical gesture, she strode into the room.

  “It is the Skottefrauen,” I heard someone say as the woman walked up to the Earl of Bothwell and, putting her hands on her hips, spoke to him in guttural tones.

  Her words were forceful, but I could not understand them. He ignored her, as did the others around his table, though I heard a few groans and snickers.

  She resumed her harangue but was drowned out as some of the men began singing, and soon most of the others in the room joined in. They were singing in French, a gutter French spiced with filthy words.

  Big woman with the ugly face, go home!

  Big woman with the ugly voice, be still!