The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots: A Novel

by Erickson, Carolly

  He smiled, showing yellow chipped teeth.

  “I see that my gift is being put to good use.”

  “Indeed, and thank you milord. I can tell already that she is a gem among horses. I call her Mignonne.”

  “Still a Frenchwoman at heart, aren’t you, giving your horse a French name? Well, that is no bad thing, as it happens.”

  “I am attempting to perfect my English, and to lose my French and Scottish lilts and rhythms. Listening to Bess hour after hour helps me—a little.”

  “I too have been listening for hours and hours—not to Bess Shrewsbury, but to the dolts and dullards at the court in London—and to Elizabeth, who is no dullard, but who does tend to screech when provoked, as she so often is.”

  I had to laugh at this. “I was not aware that the queen screeched.”

  Thomas gave a shrug, as if to say, she is a woman, and all women screech, and it is of no consequence whether they do or not.

  “Of far greater importance, I have been conferring with others at court—men of the north, most of them—who feel as I do about our present governance. Men who desire change and look to me, as England’s only duke, to lead them.”

  His small gray eyes darted about here and there as he spoke, coming to light on my face now and then but never resting there for long. So unlike Jamie, who, when he looked at me, gave me the feeling that he could not take his gaze from my face, my throat, my bosom—as though he were captive to my womanly beauty.

  “What sort of change, milord?”

  Thomas looked around warily at the soldiers standing nearby before he spoke. “I think we both know what change I mean,” he said in a low tone, adding “Let us walk a ways.”

  We strolled along the edge of the brook, stopping when we were safely out of earshot.

  There was a new vitality about Thomas, it seemed to me. He had altered since our last conversation. Something had quickened his disposition, he was less inclined to lapse into melancholy than usual, more animated and at the same time more impersonal toward me. I had the feeling that in a way, he wasn’t really talking to me, to the woman he admired and hoped to marry, but to a fellow player in a vast chess game. He was knight, I was rook, and the personage we were speaking of, the powerful queen, was the dominant player but also the one in greatest danger, for whoever toppled the queen won the game.

  “Did something happen on your visit to court, Thomas? Something that has changed your expectations?”

  He smiled. “You women! You are always jealous. No, my dear, I did not meet anyone else or dally with anyone else.” He reached for my hand and assured himself that his diamond was on my finger. “You alone wear my ring. You are the one I am pledged to.”

  “We are not pledged, Thomas,” I reminded him. “You have merely given me a gift, which I wear as a token of our friendship. I forbid you to tell anyone that we are pledged, or that I have given you my promise.”

  He made a dismissive sound, and dropped my hand. “As you wish. For the moment.”

  “And when I asked whether something had happened to change your expectations, I did not mean to ask whether you had become enamored of another woman.”

  He gave me a sharp look, then went on a few steps farther from the soldiers, who continued to watch us but did not follow us. Mignonne stood cropping the grass at the brook’s edge, looking as if she were heedless of all but the sun on her back and the fresh taste of the green blades on her tongue.

  “There is something I must tell you,” Thomas was saying. He was addressing his words to me but his eyes never left my guards. “No, two things. First, the pope’s bankers are raising funds to support a rising in the north, which will happen very soon, and second—” He broke off, aware that one of the soldiers was walking toward us.

  “If you will pardon me, milady, I have orders to return you to the manor within the hour,” the guardsman said.

  “But when your orders were given, I did not know that I would have the pleasure of meeting up with my lord of Norfolk.”

  “Nevertheless, your ladyship—”

  “I will answer for her lateness,” Thomas said. “Now leave us alone.”

  The soldier made no retort, but merely bowed to Thomas and retreated, saying “As you wish, Your Grace.”

  “Now then, second,” Thomas said to me after a time, his voice somewhere between a mutter and a whisper, “there is something about Elizabeth that has come to my knowledge. Something that will bring her down, as surely as any army.”

  My eyes wide with surprise, I listened.

  “The scandal alone could dethrone her—and will, if I have my way.”

  “But I thought—”

  “Yes, I know. You rely on earning her favor. I have relied on it too—in the past. But we must do what serves our interests best. Elizabeth may fall—and soon.”

  Now it was my turn to whisper. I whispered into Thomas’s ear, avoiding being tickled by the white feather that dangled from his cap.

  “What is it that you know?”

  “She wrote letters. Letters to her paramour Robin Dudley. Letters that prove she knew when and how Dudley’s wife Amy was going to die. And I know where those letters are.”

  “Where?”

  “In Amy’s casket.”

  FORTY

  It was not yet dawn when I heard the hounds baying in the kennels of Wingfield Manor, awakening me, and took fright from the loud tumult in the courtyard. The next thing I knew men were tramping through the corridors of the old manor house, loud voices were shouting and heavy oak doors were being thrown open amid screams of alarm.

  My faithful Margaret, courageous as she had always been despite her nearly forty years, came into my bedroom from the antechamber where she slept, holding a cudgel that she kept underneath her trundle bed in case of danger, and stood in front of my door, feet planted apart, ready to defend me.

  Jamie had given me a pistol which I kept well hidden, but I had no time to take it from its hiding place and load it before I heard the loud thudding of boots outside my door and then, with a crash, the door was forced open.

  Margaret was swept aside as if she had been made of featherdown, her cudgel plucked from her hands. Armed men poured into my bedchamber, ransacking my desk, my chests, the little shelf where I kept my rosary and prayerbook, rifling through my linens and even ripping my mattress to shreds with their knives, making an utter shambles of my bedchamber while I stood shouting at them to stop.

  Where were the guards, I kept thinking. Where were George and Bess? What was going on? Would these men harm me?

  Then, as quickly as they had come, they left, marching noisily out of the room and clustering in the corridor outside. I saw that they had taken some papers and my prayerbook, but had left my clothing and lace and the valuable trimmings for my gowns untouched. My jewels were not in the bedchamber, Bess kept them under lock and key in the manor’s treasure room. I hoped they were safe.

  I knelt down beside Margaret, who was lying on the floor, dazed and breathless, and did my best to raise her up. She shrieked when I touched her left arm, and I saw then that the bone was poking out through the cloth of her nightdress, below her elbow. The foul ruffians had broken her arm.

  I went out into the corridor, where the men were, and called loudly for my servants. No one came. I waited, but still no one came and the house was oddly silent, though I could hear horses clopping and stamping outside and I thought I heard, as if from a distance, Bess’s loud, querulous voice raised in argument.

  I went back into my bedchamber and tried to shut the door but it had been torn from its ancient hinges. Not knowing what else to do, I stayed beside Margaret, doing my best to comfort her, wishing with all my might that Jamie would come.

  Finally I heard a slight commotion in the corridor and in a moment a man appeared in the open doorway. He was tall, almost regal in his bearing, yet his clothing was somber in hue and rather plain, save for the stiff white ruff at his neck. He was clean-shaven, and though I judged him
to be quite elderly—at least forty-five or fifty years old—he did not look at all feeble and his face was surprisingly unlined. It was the face, not of a nobleman, but of a farmer. I might almost have said, of a Yorkshire farmer—a good honest plain English face, though the eyes were shrewd and the mouth unsmiling.

  I took all this in, though my heart was pounding and the ravaging of my possessions left me feeling as though I had been ravaged myself, my dignity torn from me and my anger rising because of the injury to Margaret.

  I saw that the man in the doorway had a silver walking stick, and leaned on it slightly, as if he too had an injury or a weakness that needed propping up.

  “Mary Stuart, I am ordered to detain you in a state of arrest for aiding the rebel Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, and to inform you that the duke is in prison and will be put to death.”

  I drew in my breath in fear, but at the same moment I instinctively, unobtrusively, turned Thomas’s ring so that the diamond was on the inside of my hand, and began slowly working the ring down from my knuckle, over the joint and off my finger, holding onto it with my fingertips and wishing I could drop it out the window.

  “And I demand,” I answered in my firmest voice, “that my servant Margaret be treated at once by a physician. Your churls have injured her.”

  “Sit down,” said the intruder. “You will answer the questions put to you and add nothing further in your responses. If you are fractious or argumentative you will be confined in the dungeon.”

  Fighting my strong urge to refuse this command, I forced myself to sit on a bench—the one undestroyed piece of furniture in the room. I managed to slip the duke’s ring into the ruins of my mattress.

  “Have you sent letters to the Duke of Norfolk?”

  “No.”

  “You have! I have seen them! Such letters were in the duke’s possession when he was seized! You are a prevaricator!”

  He reminded me of John Knox, yet he was not a preacher.

  “Are you pledged to the duke in marriage?”

  “No.”

  “You are a liar. You wear his ring.” He reached for my hand, but the only ring I wore was the one the queen had sent me several years earlier.

  “Where is the ring?”

  “The only ring I wear is the one you see on my hand, the one the queen was gracious enough to send me.”

  “The ring will be found. And your treason will be exposed. Have you written to the pope in Rome?” he went on.

  “No.”

  “Liar!”

  “Have you written to the King of France?”

  “Yes. He is my brother-in-law.”

  “Treason! To communicate with the enemy of England!”

  “I may surely communicate with my relatives.”

  “It is not for you to decide what you may and may not do. You are guilty of treasonable behavior. You may well follow the duke to the executioner’s block. In the meantime, your household, which I believe numbers some forty-one servants, will be reduced to ten, and you will be confined to the manor.”

  “But what about my exercise?”

  “You may take exercise by walking upon the roof.”

  “And what if I should fall off?”

  His pause was brief—and eloquent.

  “Then England, and England’s queen, and I, Baron Burghley, shall be greatly relieved.”

  FORTY-ONE

  I was in very grave danger.

  I was formally accused of plotting against the queen’s government, of being a traitor, of lying about my treason—in short, of being an enemy of England, deserving of death.

  “Cecil—I mean Baron Burghley—wants to cut off your head. He’ll do it if he can,” Jamie told me bluntly when we met in the still room after he came back to Wingfield Manor from his excursion to London and the south.

  William Cecil, Lord Burghley, the queen’s principal adviser and secretary of state, was doing all he could to eliminate me as a rival to my cousin Elizabeth.

  “Burghley is in command now more than ever,” Jamie said, “because the queen is ill. She hands over her authority to him when she has one of her fainting spells. She faints when she gets angry, they have to revive her with vinegar. Sometimes she stays in bed for days afterwards. And she gets terrible headaches, that keep her shut up in her room. And they say she is consumptive. Oh, the list of her ailments is long, believe me. The court is full of rumors about it. She isn’t yet forty, but she has the ailments of an old woman. All her physicians say so, though they do not dare say it to her face.”

  “If she is really that ill, then maybe she will finally name her successor. Maybe she will name Baron Burghley to succeed her,” I said wryly.

  “No chance of that. He is too hated—and he belongs to the Puritan sect, the Protestant extremists. Parliament would never stomach a Puritan in the seat of royalty. But one thing is certain: Burghley will use whatever power he has to rid England of you. He is afraid of you. He knows what a threat you are to the queen’s security. He’ll see to it that you are condemned to die, if he can, under any pretext.”

  “If only we could find Amy Dudley’s casket, and the letters Thomas told me about.”

  Jamie shook his head. “I did my best to find the casket on this trip. There is no casket in her tomb at St. Mary’s Church in Oxford. That I discovered for certain. But no one would tell me where else it might be. No one would even talk to me. Of course, I could hardly expect anyone to confide in me, I’m only a peddler of remedies and potions. No one important. And even to discuss Amy Dudley is to raise the question of whether the queen might have had her murdered.”

  “If only we had those letters, I could try to bargain with my cousin,” I mused, half to Jamie and half to myself. “I could trade the letters for my freedom.”

  “Don’t talk foolishness, Mary,” Jamie chided me. “Surely you realize that if Queen Elizabeth knew you had documents that could prove she ordered Amy Dudley’s death, your life would be worth less than nothing.”

  Month after month, following my formal accusation, I waited to receive word that like Thomas, I would be executed for treason. Yet the months passed, and no announcement came. I was kept confined at Wingfield Manor with my much reduced household—including Margaret with her imperfectly healed left arm—and was not allowed to leave the manor house or communicate with the outside world. But Jamie, in the guise of Holp the peddler with his larks’-tongue balm and other medicinal remedies so necessary to George Talbot’s wellbeing, came and went freely under the eye of Baron Burghley’s men, as freely as did the suppliers of foodstuffs and even the occasional cloth merchant bringing silk or lawn for new gowns. (The time was long past when I was wearing gowns made from the queen’s castoff clothing; I was allowed a dressmaker, and a clothing budget.)

  I was not without news of events in the outside world, or of events at the royal court. I learned, somewhat to my horror, that my brother James had been assassinated in Scotland, as had his successor as regent, my former father-in-law Lord Lennox. I was made aware of the dread aftermath of Thomas’s failed rising in the north: men hanged for treason in every village and town, heavy fines levied on the villagers, grain stores seized by the queen’s officers, which in a region of lean harvests meant a very real threat of starvation. And I was aware of the most enduring legacy of the rebellion, the fear that lingered on after the brutal reprisals had ended. The queen’s message was clear; rebellion would be harshly punished, the rebels hanged and their communities devastated.

  After many anxious months of waiting for my own reprisals to descend, I was sitting one afternoon in Bess’s chamber, embroidering a cushion, my needle in my hand, when Bess surprised me by saying that I would soon be leaving the manor.

  “George is going to take the waters at Buxton,” she said. “You are to go with him. He is sure the waters will help to relieve the pain in your side. You can take your tirewoman with you. The mineral baths may help her arm to heal.”

  The hot, sulfurous pools that welled up
from deep in the earth at Buxton spa were known to have healing properties, and the sick had sought them out for centuries. Bess’s husband went to bathe his arthritic hands and gouty feet and legs in the medicinal waters from time to time, but he had never before taken me with him. I was frankly astonished at the suggestion that he meant to take me now, given the far stricter confinement that had been forced on me since Baron Burghley’s invasion of Wingfield Manor and the fearsome accusations made against me.

  I did not question the plan, but was somewhat apprehensive. Was this proposed visit to the spa part of some diabolical scheme to get rid of me? Would villains attack me and kidnap me on the way to Buxton? Was this Baron Burghley’s insidious way of ridding himself and England of the danger I represented?

  Then I learned the startling truth behind the proposed visit. The queen, who traveled extensively every summer, going on progress from one splendid manor house to another, visiting her nobles and obliging them to feed and lodge her enormous retinue for many days or even weeks at a time, was coming with her household to Buxton. As Jamie had told me, Elizabeth was plagued by illness. She sought relief at the healing waters of the spa.

  And, I strongly suspected, she wanted to see me. She must have sent an order to George Talbot to bring me to the spa.

  We were not due to leave for Buxton for another three weeks, and during that time I devoted myself to making a gift to present to my cousin when we met. I knew that she had a taste for extravagant, magnificent clothing and jewels, and that she indulged her desire for these luxuries on a grand scale. She was vain, Bess said. She liked to believe that she was beautiful. Any gift that flattered her vanity would be welcome.

  I set to work designing the most beautiful garment I could afford to make. I chose a swath of blue satin for a cloak, cut and sewed it with care, making sure my stitches did not show (careless seamstresses always fail to conceal their stitches), and when the cloak was finished, I embroidered it with extravagant red and pink roses, bold yellow and purple tulips (tulips being then in vogue, having only recently begun to appear in English and Scottish gardens), blue gillyflowers and delicate white and green anemones. I lined the cloak with peach and gold satin with gold spangles, and when it was finished I thought it a unique and charming thing, sure to capture the queen’s reputedly wayward fancy.