The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots: A Novel

by Erickson, Carolly

  “I’m nothing. I’m no one,” the boy was saying. “Others are doing much worse things.”

  Instantly Jamie had him by the throat again.

  “What things? Is it that blasted whoreson Knox again?”

  Adam shook his head. “No. It’s the others.”

  “What others?”

  “I swear I don’t know. They are dressed like laborers. I’ve seen them go into the cellars. I watch them, at night. Nearly every night for the past week they have gone in there—”

  “And done what?”

  Adam blanched. “Go into the cellars, and you’ll see.”

  “Take me there! Show me what you are talking about!”

  “No!” Adam pleaded. “No, it’s too dangerous!”

  Jamie kicked the groom, knocking the wind from his lungs. I had to look away.

  “Show me or you’ll be in real danger,” Jamie was saying. “From this sword.” Swiftly he pulled his sword from its scabbard and held the sharp edge of the blade to Adam’s throat.

  Trembling with fear, the boy led us down into the storerooms where I had gone with Jamie on the night David Riccio was killed. Past storeroom after storeroom. Past the dim room where we had discovered my cringing husband.

  At last, in a storage room filled with piles of discarded lumber and broken furniture and leather trunks that looked centuries old, the boy showed us a hidden entrance to a narrow tunnel. The wall had been breached, and recently, to judge from the jagged edges of the tunnel mouth and the piles of freshly dug earth beside it.

  Jamie lifted a torch from the wall and entered the tunnel, holding the torch in front of him. I followed.

  “No!” screamed Adam Fullerton. “No fire!”

  Reluctantly, Jamie retraced his steps and put the torch back, then cautiously began walking along the tunnel as before.

  “Wait here,” he said to me.

  I heard his footsteps, then a long, low whistle, and an exclamation. “Of all the—”

  In a moment Jamie came running out. He seized my hand and hurriedly led me back upstairs, tugging Adam along with us. His face was set in a grim rictus.

  “What is it? What’s in there? I demand to know.”

  He put his finger to his lips. “Not here,” he said. Only when we were safely back in my bedchamber, and the groom had been handed over to the guardsmen to be locked away, did Jamie speak.

  “Now, Mary, listen to me carefully. This is very important. I want you to do your best to pretend that nothing happened here tonight. I want you to get ready for your ball now, and not to let on to any of your household that there is anything amiss. Promise me you will stay calm when I tell you what you need to know.”

  Wide-eyed, I promised.

  He took my hand. “There is enough gunpowder in that basement room to blow Holyrood Palace into the Firth of Forth.”

  I gasped. I felt faint.

  “And all the means to ignite it. I’m going to go now and gather my men and take them down there and get rid of it. All of it. Every last barrel. But you mustn’t let on that you know about this, or whoever put the powder there will light the fuses, as sure as anything. Now, are you going to be all right until I come back and tell you everything is safe?”

  I gulped. My heart was racing. Jamie squeezed my hand reassuringly.

  “Oh Jamie, what if they see you? What if they prevent you?”

  “Then we’ll die together, Orange Blossom. And we’ll meet in heaven—or some hotter place. Now, let me get on with it.”

  How I managed, my hands shaking, my knees knocking, to dress for the ball I cannot remember. I know that I drank cup after cup of willow bark tea in an effort to calm myself, and that Margaret had to rub my stomach to keep me from vomiting, I was so frightened. I did not tell her or anyone else the awful secret I knew, but she sensed that something was terribly wrong. When she began to question me I cut her off roughly.

  “Hold your peace, Margaret, and say your prayers,” I said sharply. She did as I asked. I could see her lips moving silently as she helped me dress and arranged my hair and headdress.

  “Where is your husband?” I asked when I was fully gowned, my hair faultlessly gathered under my headdress, my pale cheeks faintly rouged with vermilion. (I never rouged my lips or cheeks, but on this night, to hide my fear, I made an exception.) It had only been two days since Margaret’s wedding. Her new husband was a member of the night watch, the constables who patrolled the Edinburgh streets after dark.

  “Sleeping, Your Highness. He sleeps in the afternoons, so that he can keep the watch all night.”

  “Go and wake him up. I want you to go with him tonight, on his rounds.”

  “But Your Highness, the ball—”

  “Do as I say, Margaret.”

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “And stay warm. It is a cold night.”

  For the past two hours, ever since Jamie left me, I had been in a state of dread. With every passing second I feared that there would come an explosion, a sound like the cannonfire I had heard on the battlefield when we fought the Gordons and my brother James’s men. Every minute that passed and brought no explosion was a relief—yet I thought, as the seconds ticked away, perhaps the gunpowder will go off now, or perhaps in another minute, or in five minutes more. I felt my muscles clench as if to ward off a blow that might come at any time. Without being aware of it I found myself frowning, and lowering my head and shutting my eyes tight, gritting my teeth, as if to armor myself against disaster.

  It was midwinter, and darkness came early. My guests arrived, the musicians began to play. Where was Jamie? Why hadn’t he come to tell me all was well? Had he been captured or killed by my hidden enemies?

  An hour passed, and then another. Nothing happened. We danced. We dined. We celebrated the Shrovetide. I began to believe that everything would be all right.

  After nearly four hours Jamie appeared among my guests, resplendent in a black velvet doublet trimmed in silver, a glittering diamond in his ear, his jeweled codpiece winking in the candlelight. Only the grime on his hands betrayed (to me alone) what he had been doing. He had been saving my life, and the lives of everyone in the room.

  He came up to me and whispered in my ear, “The danger is past. There is no longer anything to fear.”

  Until then I had managed to control myself. But when I heard that there was no more danger my knees gave way under me and I sank to the floor, and might have hurt myself had Jamie not caught me in his strong arms and carried me, fainting, to the nearest couch.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  A thunderous, ear-splitting boom rent the night, shaking the walls of the palace and setting everyone in it, including me, to screaming.

  Were we under attack? Were the walls going to come tumbling down around us? Terrified, I leapt out of bed, struggling to shake off the drowse of sleep. Then I remembered. It had to be the gunpowder. The gunpowder Jamie promised me would not harm us.

  Expecting more explosions, I hurriedly put on my furred bedgown and slippers while my guardsmen rushed in to my bedchamber, uncertain where the danger lay but determined to save me from it.

  “It’s the Cowgate,” I heard someone shout. “They’ve blown up the Cowgate!” I went to the window and looked out into the night. My subjects were pouring out of their houses and into the streets, in their nightclothes, carrying torches. There was a clamor of voices. Before long I thought I could hear, in the distance, the tramp of boots. I imagined it was the sound of soldiers coming along the Royal Mile from the castle on its height.

  Then a messenger came.

  “Your Highness,” he said, kneeling, “I have been sent by the constable of the watch to tell you some very bad news.”

  “Yes?”

  “I am sorry to have to tell you, Your Highness, that the body of the king your husband has been found in the garden of the house where he was staying, the old porter’s lodge in Kirk o’Field.”

  It took me a long time to respond.

  “He is
dead then?” I said at length.

  “Yes, Your Highness.”

  “And the explosion we heard?”

  “The lodge exploded. The constable believes it was a mine.”

  Just then Jamie came into the bedchamber, wearing his nightclothes and looking perplexed.

  “What is it? What’s happened? Somebody tell me what’s happened!”

  Others in my household were rushing in, my equerry Arthur Erskine, some of the tirewomen, sleepy-looking grooms.

  “Is a search being made for more mines?” I asked the messenger. “Have the guilty men been caught? And is my husband’s body being treated with the honor his rank deserves?”

  “The men of the watch were in charge when I left,” he replied. “I do not know whether they have captured anyone, or what is being done with the king’s body.”

  “Take an escort and go back to Kirk o’Field. Tell the constables that the queen sent you with these instructions.” I went to my desk and wrote a few lines, ordering that Henry’s body be brought to Holyrood and laid out in the chapel, and that a coffin be prepared immediately to receive it. I folded the paper and handed it to the messenger, who got up from his knees, bowed and left the room.

  “Now then,” I said to the others, “leave me, all of you, except for Lord Bothwell. Guards, stay in the corridor. Arthur, let no one in except my brother James, if he should wish to see me. Kindly tell him the dire news, if he has not already heard it.”

  Everyone left my bedchamber, except Jamie, who sat on a bench near the fire, yawning.

  I sat also, looking at him but saying nothing. I kept expecting to feel something, anything. But I was numb.

  “So he has been dispatched,” I said after a time. “And with the gunpowder you found in the cellar. Am I right?”

  Jamie nodded.

  “It was a sudden decision. After I left you I rounded up Red Ormiston and his brothers and about thirty of my men from Liddesdale who were in Ainslie’s Tavern, and we managed to get the barrels out of the cellar, every one of us fearing for our lives all the while. If one of us had dislodged a torch, or struck a spark from a bit of metal, or if, Lord forbid, there had been a stray coal from the kitchens or even straw lit in the stables for warmth, and a wisp of it blown out into the courtyard—” He shook his head at the dangerous thought.

  “We got it all into carts. All those heavy barrels. But what were we going to do with them? We didn’t dare take them up toward the castle, we would have been seen for sure and challenged. People would have been frightened. Then I thought, if it was Darnley who was plotting to destroy you and your palace, then why not use his own weapon against him? What could be more just?

  “So I told my men to get black felts from the storerooms and we covered the carts to look as though we were a funeral procession, and put on our own black cloaks and had Red Ormiston walk in front of us, carts and all, holding up a silver cross we borrowed from your chapel—mea culpa, mea culpa—and in that way we were able to go unhindered down into Blackfriars Wynd and across Cowgate and so to the old porter’s lodge.”

  “No one saw you?”

  “The watch, naturally. But don’t forget: I am the sheriff of Edinburgh!”

  “So you are.”

  “When we got to the lodge there were lights on inside but the men waiting there (all murderers, I am certain) must have all had guilty consciences—or a want of arms, more likely—and so they fled like rats—like rats, I swear!—out into the night as soon as they saw us. We broke in and set our barrels in place and our fuses. Some of the neighbors came up to the edge of the garden but they didn’t dare bother us. Besides, we were swift.

  “Darnley must have been hiding somewhere inside. I know he wasn’t in his bed, I looked. We lit the fuses and left. But I wanted to make sure the house went up so I stood and watched from a cow pasture a little ways away. I heard shouts and a challenge, coming from the garden of the lodge. Some of my men were still close by, but so were some Campbells and some Hamiltons, and even a few Douglases.

  “Then the house went up and I thought, good, that’s the end of all Darnley’s scheming. He wanted you dead, and now he’s dead instead. Then I hurried back to the palace and put on my nightclothes and pretended I had never been away.”

  “Keep pretending,” I said. “What a long day this has been! There is no peace anywhere any more.”

  But Jamie was grinning. “There is for Darnley,” he said, with a malicious twinkle in his eye. “The peace of eternal rest.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  The wolves were howling, the wolves were closing in. All Edinburgh, it seemed, was convinced that I had ordered, perhaps even carried out, the murder of my royal husband.

  My people, lords and commons alike, Catholic and Protestant alike, were united in condemning me.

  The most daring among them accused me of being an adulteress, of plotting with my lover Lord Bothwell (for was he not my chief counsilor, and was I not often in his company?) to carry out my husband’s murder. They asserted it to one another, and the priests and pastors among them shouted it from their pulpits. Artists drew perverse sketches of me consorting with my paramour. My enemies devised a banner showing my late husband’s corpse, and our child, little Jamie, lamenting his dead father, and the word “JUSTICE” in large bold letters. Whenever I left the palace, or looked out of my windows, I saw this banner waving aloft.

  And I felt guilty, for in fact I was guilty. To be sure, I had nothing to do with the placing of gunpowder in my palace cellars, which had put me in peril of death. Nor had I given orders that the gunpowder be moved to my husband’s dwelling. Nor had I been the one to strangle him as he fled the house (for he had not in fact died in the explosion, as it turned out, but had been strangled, by a person or persons unknown, as he tried to get away). But I had compassed my husband’s death, as the legal phrase goes. I had discussed with my advisers how he might be eliminated. I had become one of the wolves, the feral Scottish wolves that turn on each other and rend each other with their sharp teeth. I did not mourn my husband, but neither did I rejoice in his death. Rather I blamed myself, and fell into melancholy.

  Jamie was determined to raise my spirits.

  “Listen to me, lass, and free your mind of these morbid imaginings!” he said, taking me by the shoulders and all but shaking me like a child. “What happened to Lord Darnley was not your fault—or mine, for that matter. It was entirely his own doing. He had made many enemies. It was only a matter of time before one or another of them killed him. David Riccio’s brothers were plotting to poison him. Nearly all the Scots lords hated him, even though they found him useful at times. And remember, the explosives that led to his death were his, he got them from the English (so I have heard). The crime was his—only at the last moment it was turned against him, by the hand of providence, or justice, or whatever name you choose to give to luck.”

  On a sudden impulse I turned to Jamie. “Take me away from here,” I said. “Take me on board the Black Messenger. Let’s sail away. Far away. And never come back!”

  “That’s my lass! That’s the spirit!” And he laughed his hearty laugh, and swept me up into a dance measure—only there were no musicians to play for us at that moment, more’s the pity, and we had to beat out the measure with our own kicking, flying feet.

  The island loomed up before us, green and vast and empty, as we rounded the Ross of Mull and pulled into safe harbor. The Black Messenger had brought us safely around the northernmost tip of Scotland and through the rough waters off the coast of Argyllshire, wetted under squalls of rain and buffeted by shifting, unquiet seas that slapped against the ship’s hull and threatened to overturn her.

  “I’ve a friend with a cottage here,” Jamie said as we entered a protected bay and made safe anchorage. “Bit of a pirate, actually. At least he used to be. Oh—and he also used to be a bishop, but don’t mention that. It’s a bitter memory to him.”

  “And how do you know this pirate who used to be a bishop?”
r />   “He sort of brought me up. He was my tutor. He taught me my catechism—and other things.”

  “Oh.”

  The aging, white-haired man who met us as we climbed out of the dinghy was spry despite his years. He walked with a limp yet his voice was strong as he greeted us and the look he gave Jamie held the faintest hint of a leer. The leer of a man of the world, not a bishop.

  “This is the lady you wrote me about,” he said, extending his hand to me in friendship. So he does not know who I really am, I thought. Otherwise he would bow and call me “Your Highness.” Or perhaps he does know, but has agreed to pretend ignorance.

  “This is my lovely Orange Blossom, yes.”

  “So mysterious!” the old man said with a wink.

  “And this, my dear, is my godfather Archibald Skerriton, who owns most of the land hereabouts.”

  “I thought this was Maclean country,” I remarked, remembering what I had learned of the Highland clans and their territories.

  “It is. My mother was a Maclean—and then she married a Skerriton, and I was the sad result.” Jamie and Archibald both laughed loudly at this, and I smiled amiably.

  “We have had a rough wet journey, and are in need of food and rest,” Jamie said.

  “And your crew?”

  “They stay on the ship. They fend for themselves. They are Norwegians.”

  “Ah!” Archibald’s single syllable was eloquent. Evidently Norwegians were as respected for their self-sufficiency as they were for their ability to sail.

  He led us to a small, isolated whitewashed cottage on a hillside, overlooking the inlet. The sun came out from behind the clouds to sparkle on the turquoise waters of the shallow bay.

  “Here we are then, Mary,” Jamie said after Archibald left us and went back down the hill, whistling.

  “Here we are then.” We looked into each other’s eyes, as we had so many times before. Only now, in the quiet of the cottage, there was no one to interrupt us, there were no demands to distract us.