The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots: A Novel
Page 12
“You’re much too thin, lass!” was Jamie’s greeting when he came to my court a scant month after my son was born. “You want feeding up! Come to Ainslie’s Tavern and we’ll have ourselves a feast!”
I went, under close guard, partly because I felt the need of convivial company and partly because Jamie had told me that Red Ormiston would be there, and I wanted to speak with him.
I had not dined well since the fateful night when I nearly lost my life and David Riccio was killed. The large noisy tavern room was full of the rich odors of roasting fowls and onions, flavorful broth and gravy, freshly baked bread and spiced wine. I ate my fill, sitting across the table from Jamie who watched me eat with inebriated benevolence, nodding his head in satisfaction.
“Where is your wife then?” I asked him while we ate our syllabub.
“She sulks at home.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“She seems to think that I am keeping company with another woman,” Jamie went on.
“And are you?”
He shrugged. “When I can find one.” He winked.
“Surely your marriage will be happier if you don’t go with other women.”
“My wife allows me no liberty at all.”
“She is not your jailer.”
“It often feels as though she is.”
Sitting there in the noisy tavern, albeit surrounded by Adrien and at least a dozen others of my guard, I began to feel at ease. Just having Jamie nearby reminded me that I had a champion. A champion who was unhappily yoked to Jean Gordon, and who could not seem ever to be free of troubles with women.
“I came here tonight because it is high time I settled my debt to Red Ormiston,” I told Jamie. Together we found the huge, bearlike brigand sitting across the room with several companions, all of them drinking from immense tankards. They got to their feet when I approached but I urged them to be seated again.
“Master Ormiston,” I said, “I want to thank you for saving my life and the life of my son. If you will come to the palace tomorrow at noon, I will show you my appreciation.”
“You owe me fifteen thousand crowns, Your Highness,” was all Red Ormiston said. “And my friends here know it. John of the Side,” he said, indicating a younger man across the table from him, “and the Lord’s Jock, who used to be a preacher before he took to outlawry.”
“To outlawry!” John of the Side cried, and the three men drank from their tankards.
“To the queen’s health!” Jamie cried, and they drank to that toast as well.
“Until tomorrow,” I said, and left the table, the men struggling to get to their feet once more as I departed.
Red Ormiston came to the palace a little after noon on the following day, dressed just as he had been the night before, in worn black trews and a patched leather vest, high boots and a shirt that had once been white, and with a sprig of heather in his cap. With him were the two men he had called John of the Side and the Lord’s Jock, both with cleaner faces and hands than when I had seen them last.
I had the men ushered into the throne room, where I waited with Jamie at my side and a dozen guardsmen in attendance.
“You may approach the throne, Master Ormiston,” I said. He was clearly alarmed by his surroundings. I thought he might run out of the room.
“I have brought you here to offer you a full pardon for what you did on the night my servant David Riccio was killed.”
His look of alarm gave way to one of relief.
“It was Your Highness we were hired to kill,” the outlaw said in his deep rasping voice. “I want that clear.”
“My husband Lord Darnley hired you?”
Ormiston nodded. “He said the English soldiers would protect us. But there were no English soldiers. We could see that for ourselves. And Lord Bothwell there”—he pointed to Jamie—“he said there weren’t going to be any. He was right. He’s always been true and square with me and me with him, and he told me, there are no English, not within a hundred miles.
“Look here, he says, Lord Darnley says he will pay you but he won’t. The queen will give you fifteen thousand crowns if you save her life. Take it, he says. Take it and save her. So I did.”
“Why did you kill my servant then?”
Red Ormiston shrugged. “We had to kill somebody. Just not you.” He paused for breath, and looked around the room, then at me.
“Now you owe me my money.”
At a gesture from me two guardsmen brought forward a chest and, setting it down in front of the outlaw, raised the lid. It was full of shining gold coins.
Red Ormiston and his friends rushed to the chest, wide smiles on their faces, and dug their hands deep into the hoard of gold.
“Kneel, Master Ormiston,” I commanded, and he obeyed. I reached out and took a sword from one of the guardsmen. As he knelt before me, head bowed, I touched the outlaw lightly on both shoulders.
“Arise, Sir Ormiston,” I said. And then, as he got to his feet, somewhat dazed by the unexpected honor I had done him, I added, “Arise, and meet your bride.”
“My bride?”
The Scottish wife, who until then had been in an adjacent room, now entered the throne room and walked proudly toward us. At my request Margaret Carwood had dressed her in a gown of russet velvet, with a high steepled headdress like those I myself wore. There were pearls at her neck and gold in her ears and on her fingers, and she looked, I thought, like the woman she had once been, the woman who had been the daughter of an admiral and the fiancée of a young nobleman. The woman she had been before she had the misfortune to be won by Jamie in that fateful game of cards.
She was far from beautiful, but she was clean and dignified and she walked toward us with pride, and a glow of happiness I had not seen on her face until then. She looked like a fine, sturdy, respectable wife—a wife any newly knighted outlaw would be proud to have for his own.
“Sir Ormiston, this is Anna. It is my wish that the two of you should wed.”
They looked at one another, he taking in her expensive clothes, the pearls and the gold, her plain features, her strong, solid body, her steady gaze, she assessing his tall, bulky frame and countryman’s well-worn clothes, his shaggy black hair and uncombed beard.
They looked at one another, and they grinned.
In the briefest of ceremonies—not a nuptial mass as neither the bride nor the groom was Catholic—Sir James “Red” Ormiston and Anna Thorsen became man and wife, with Jamie standing up for the outlaw and Margaret Carwood for Anna.
After the vows had been exchanged, Anna practiced her newly learned Scots. “I haf nefer been so happy as this day I am,” she said. “I vish you all so happy.”
And I heard Jamie say, under his breath, “Amen.”
TWENTY-SIX
No one had ever seen such storms. No one had ever heard such wind. The harsh weather that swept down from the north to freeze the crops and blight the harvest in that winter and the early months of the following year was far worse than even the oldest among my subjects could remember. Cold rain beat down ceaselessly and the merciless cutting wind, high and swift and with a fearsome singing, sliced the air like a knife.
My people blamed me for the fierce storms and the ceaseless wind, saying that I was accursed because I did not adopt the reformed faith and because I was a light woman who had married a man of low morals. I was accursed—and therefore my people were suffering. They did not want to suffer any longer. If I were no longer queen, they murmured, then their sufferings would be at an end.
Now I began to worry that the mischief-makers in my household might not be in the pay of my husband. They might be part of a general upwelling of anger and discontent coming from all my subjects, or many of them. I had no way of knowing—unless someone was caught in the act of trying to taint my food or cut my clothes to ribbons (Margaret had found several of my fine gowns lying in their baskets, destroyed in this way) or substitute wormwood syrup for honey in the big yellow pot that sat on my table.
Thick snow smothered the palace on the January morning my council met to advise me on what action to take to protect myself and my son. Ice covered the windows of my council chamber and I had to have extra logs put on the fire to keep off the chill.
“You will never be safe, Your Highness, until you rid yourself of this man you married.” My brother James, whom I had restored to favor (though he did not have my full trust) as I needed and valued his advice, was holding forth as we warmed ourselves in front of the blazing hearth. “You ought never to have chosen him, but the time for altering that has come and gone. Now you must treat him as you would a venomous spider.”
“Or a snake in the grass,” put in Jamie.
“I have sent two men to Rome to consult with the papal court about a divorce. After all, the pope never granted a dispensation for us to marry.”
“And your husband has never forgiven you for failing to obtain that dispensation,” said George Gordon, who had taken his late father’s place as leader of the Gordon clan. “He accuses you of deceiving him.”
“Never mind what Lord Darnley says, or thinks,” came another voice. “I have just heard that his plan is to kidnap the baby prince James, take him to the Scilly Isles and proclaim him king (with himself as regent, of course), then invade Scotland with a force of English ships and depose you, Your Highness.”
“Can he do that?”
“Not if he should have a terrible accident first,” said Jamie. “There are so many ways a man can die: a fall from a horse, a choking rheum, a surfeit of lampreys, a misdirected arrow while he is hunting.” He counted these off on his thick fingers as he spoke. “He can tumble off a high cliff. He can run afoul of a gang of thieves. He can drink too much and partake of too much hashish—”
“Hashish? Where would he get hashish?”
“From the sailors. They carry it from port to port, and sell it, and enjoy it themselves.”
“No wonder so many ships go aground,” remarked another of the councilors.
“What I am saying is,” Jamie went on, “Lord Darnley may not be long for this earth.”
“I would not be sorry to see him gone,” I admitted. “But won’t he die soon, if he has the French disease?”
“He could last for years,” said my brother. “He would be mad, of course, but he would not be dead. And madmen have led rebellions before now.”
As the dark subject of my husband’s hoped-for demise was being discussed, snow continued to fall, whirling in columns outside the frost-rimed window, the fallen flakes mounting higher and higher in the courtyard, the snow mounds rising faster than the grooms could shovel them away.
“We will be prisoners here if the snow gets any higher,” I remarked. “Just as I am a prisoner of my marriage.”
“There is always divorce,” came the voice of Lord Argyll, head of the Campbell clan.
“The church prevents it.”
“Exceptions have been made,” Argyll continued. “Your own grandmother Queen Margaret divorced her second husband, the Earl of Angus.”
“Those Tudors trust to divorce overmuch, I fear,” was brother James’s response. “Many people still say that the English Queen Elizabeth is a bastard because her father divorced Queen Catherine in order to marry her mother.”
“All the English are bastards,” was Jamie’s sardonic comment. “Whether their parents are legally married or not.”
“An annulment, then. Surely the best course, short of accident or murder, is to persuade the pope to issue a document saying that the marriage was never valid. Then Lord Darnley cannot claim the throne, either as regent or as your husband.”
“But an annulment would make the little prince a bastard, would it not? No one wants that.”
The discussion and debate went on for an hour or more, the voices rising at times to shouts in order to be heard above the mournful, vaguely menacing singing of the wind. I bit my nails and listened, aware that Jamie was watching me closely and even more aware that it was up to me to decide what course to take against Henry. It was action that was needed, not words.
And so, despite the snow and wind, I made the decision to ride to Glasgow where Henry was. Partly because I took forty guardsmen with me, and partly because he was ill and weak, I persuaded Henry to return with me to the capital. I needed to keep him nearby, so that whatever scheming he might try to do could more easily be detected and thwarted.
I let him choose his own lodging and he chose a comfortable small house with a garden less than a mile from Holyrood, right next to the town wall. It was in a compound known as Kirk o’Field, a small enclave with several other houses and gardens. I furnished the house for him with hangings and tables, linens and kitchenware from the palace storerooms.
Despite the information I had that he had been conspiring and telling lies about me, Henry seemed quite docile in his new lodgings, and made no demands on me other than that I come to see him during what he hoped would be his recuperation from the French disease. Perhaps he knew, perhaps he denied to himself the knowledge that there was no recovery possible. The dreaded scourge brought with it only increasing weakness, pain, and eventually madness, as my brother James had said. I cringed at the thought of Henry’s suffering to come; despite his treachery, and his attempt on my life, despite all the hatred I had felt toward him, I could not wish him the agony of a lingering death.
I went each day with my escort along the Canongate and down Blackfriars Wynd to the little house at Kirk o’Field, and stayed there for several hours while Henry played his lute, and sometimes gambled, and met with Dr. Bourgoing who did what he could to soothe the skin eruptions and ugly rash on the soles of Henry’s feet and the palms of his hands. He was growing bald, his once luxuriant blond hair falling out in patches. I brought him knitted caps to wear and mittens for his rough red hands, and concoctions from my apothecary for the headaches that plagued him.
Then came very good news: Dr. Bourgoing told me, in private of course, that he was certain I did not have the French disease, and that my loss of weight was simply the result of low spirits and a poor appetite. And my tirewoman Margaret Carwood told me that she was soon to marry, and asked me if I would attend the ceremony.
“I will do better than that,” I said. “I will give a ball at the palace. Shrovetide is nearly upon us, and we ought to celebrate. It has been such a long and dreary winter, we deserve to rejoice and amuse ourselves before Lent comes.”
My mood lightened by the day. I ordered my cooks to prepare a lavish banquet for three hundred guests and told my servants to decorate the palace with bright colors and greenery, hundreds of wax tapers and my best gold and silver plate for the banqueting. For the first time since James’s birth I felt a return of my old energy, my old lightness of mood, as I prepared for the merrymaking to come.
But outside the palace windows the terrible storms continued, and with them, the racking wind that set my teeth on edge and turned the entire town into a giant icicle. Even the poorest of my subjects were glad to hear that a celebration at the palace was being planned, for they knew that would mean scraps of meat and bread for them and extra charitable gifts given out at the palace gates. But still they grumbled about the worsening weather, and blamed me, and were overheard to say that they wished the accursed queen was no longer on her throne.
TWENTY-SEVEN
“Master Fullerton!”
I had just walked into my bedchamber, intent on readying myself for the ball which was to begin in only two hours, when I saw my groom, Adam Fullerton, bending over the hearth and throwing something—something—
I cried out in horror as I saw that he was throwing my favorite portrait of my mother in its elaborate gilded frame, into the fire.
I rushed toward the hearth, heedless of my skir
ts which threatened to ignite from the sparks that flew upward from the blaze. Snatching the tongs, I managed to pull the portrait out of the flames. It was singed but not ruined. My mother’s young face, the face I loved more than any other, still gazed out at me from the painting.
My groom had taken to his heels but I ran out into the corridor and called for my guards to catch him. It was Jamie who swiftly brought Adam before me, ashen-faced, his hands secured behind his back.
“So this is the mischief-maker who has been terrorizing you,” Jamie said.
“Look! He almost burned my mother’s portrait!” I held out the singed painting for Jamie to see.
“Evil swine! Who paid you to do this?” Jamie tore off his belt and wrapped it around Adam Fullerton’s throat, tightening it. “Who paid you? Tell me or you’ll never breathe again!”
The groom choked, trying to talk. The belt was loosened slightly.
“Was it the king?” I demanded. “Was it my husband?”
The boy shook his head.
“Who then? Which of my traitor lords?”
He continued to shake his head, until Jamie slapped him.
He coughed, then managed to spit out a few words.
“No, not a lord—a—”
“A what?”
“A reverend.”
“Don’t lie to me, boy,” Jamie said menacingly.
“I swear. It was—Reverend Knox.”
Jamie loosened his belt and the groom fell to the floor, grasping his throat and coughing.
“He says—you need to know—the fear of God.”
“I’ll teach that churl Knox to fear—to fear me!” Jamie swore. “And as for this insolent, thieving knave—” He did not finish his sentence, but his intent was clear.
Staring down at the gasping groom, I did my best to remember when the chain of frightening, unsettling events in my bedchamber began. It was soon after my son’s birth. And Adam Fullerton, along with several others, had been added to my household at about that time.