Riding, Sheena knew, had become a new enthusiasm simply because Mary Stuart wished to emulate anything that the Duchesse de Valentinois did.
The young Queen had almost a hero-worship for the older woman and so because of her attachment she had ordered her Ladies-in-Waiting to wear white with just a touch of black in admiration of the Duchesse’s famous fashion.
Sheena found herself the possessor of a beautifully cut riding habit of white velvet with a collar of black velvet trimmed with jet buttons.
The first time she had worn it Mary Stuart exclaimed,
“You look enchanting, Sheena,” in her soft seductive tones. “It makes your skin look like mother-of-pearl and your hair like a sunset over the Louvre.”
She had blushed at the unaccustomed compliment and Mary Stuart laughed and, putting her arm round her shoulders, drew her face close to her own.
Then she turned so that they both saw their reflection in a huge gilt mirror.
“Look,” she said. “Was there ever anything more unexpected at any Court of dark sloe-eyed women than three redheads? The Duchesse, you and me.”
Sheena thought at that moment that no one could hold a candle to the young Queen when she laughed and her face was animated.
And yet in some extraordinary way both of them paled almost into insignificance beside the beauty of the Duchesse.
“Redheads!” Mary Stuart repeated, delighted at the phrase. “The artists and the painters talk of our hair being Titian, Venetian or Sienna tinged with gold, but you and I know that we have just a tangle of Scottish red and, if we were living anywhere else in the world, the boys would be calling us ‘carrots’.”
When Mary Stuart was in this mood, Sheena could not help adoring her.
“Are we not fortunate?” the Queen went on in her confiding manner, which could make any man or woman her friend within a few seconds. “It would be terrible if we had any more rivals. Think how ordinary I shall look when I get to Scotland where every other woman has red hair.”
“You would never be anything but lovely and outstanding wherever you went,” Sheena said loyally.
“All the same I like being unique,” Mary Stuart countered. “Do you know how I heard one of the Courtiers describe me yesterday? “
“No, what did he say?” Sheena questioned.
“He said,” Mary Stuart answered, “that I was like a statue of snow with a fire inside that would one day consume me.”
“What an unkind thing to say,” Sheena said hotly.
“No, no,” Mary Stuart replied. “I liked that. I want to think that I have a fire in my heart, that I shall be consumed by enjoying my life and by living it fully? I want to live, Sheena. I want to come alive and, above all, I want to love.”
Mary Stuart dropped her voice on the last word. There was a little tremor in it that told Sheena much more than her words. She put out her hand to take the little Queen’s.
“You are young. There is so much time for all that later on. Be happy now with your friends. Soon there may be far more serious things to do.”
She was thinking as she spoke of the war against England, but Mary Stuart with a light laugh turned away from the mirror.
“There are indeed serious things in the future,” she said, “For I am to be married. I shall be the Dauphine of France and, who knows? perhaps sooner than anyone expects I might be Queen.”
“You are already a Queen,” Sheena reminded her.
“But who would not prefer to be Queen of two countries?” Mary Stuart said. “And so, better still, of three, a Triple Crown! Shall I ever wear it? I wonder.”
She was serious for a moment and then her eyes lit up.
“We will go and ask Nostradamus,” she said. “Did you know that the Queen has invited him to come to Paris?”
“Who is Nostradamus?” Sheena asked her.
“Tiens!” Mary Stuart exclaimed. “Can you really be quite so ignorant? He is the greatest soothsayer in the whole world. His predictions are fabulous.”
“The Queen has asked him here?” Sheena asked.
“But, of course, I have told you that the Queen is crazed on fortune-tellers. She has even built a Tower for them at the far end of The Palace and near to her Apartments. The Ruggieri brothers work there, but they are old and dull and spend months making plans of the stars and the planets. There are other soothsayers too. The Queen does not really like our consulting them, she likes to keep them all for herself.”
“Surely she does not really believe in them?” Sheena asked.
“Believe them!” Mary Stuart replied. “Her whole life centres round them. She follows all they say. She consults them all a dozen times a day. And ’tis said – ” Mary Stuart paused a moment and glanced over her shoulder as if to be sure that no one was within hearing, ’tis said that she attends secret rites of Black Magic.”
“What rubbish!” Sheena spoke scornfully. “This Palace is so full of such rumours. I have been told a dozen times that the Duchesse is a witch and she has sold her soul to the Devil so that she can remain young. But who really believes such foolishness?”
“The Queen for one,” Mary Stuart replied with a twist of her lips and then, as if bored with the conversation, she had turned to a number of young people who had just come into the room and prevented Sheena from saying more.
‘They are all a bit touched in the brain,’ Sheena thought scornfully, knowing that such nonsense would never have been tolerated in Scotland.
At home there were people who were ‘fey’, who had the second sight, but witches and sorcerers and magicians were to be credited only by the stupid superstitious English. They even believed that the Scotsmen carried magic claymores that could cleave a man’s body in two without the owner exerting any strength whatsoever.
“Let them think such nonsense!” Sheena had heard her father exclaim more than once. “A man is usually a coward when he believes he is up against the powers of evil.”
Yet, as she dressed in her white velvet habit, Sheena could not help wondering if in fact the magic attributed to the Duchesse was not such nonsense as one might suppose. It was so incredible that she could be getting on for sixty and yet still looking so young. There was not a line on her lovely face and her body was as slim and graceful as that of any young girl.
Could there be something in the potions she was supposed to drink before she went out riding or the water she washed herself in not once but two and sometimes three times a day? Perhaps the answer lay in the salads and fruit she preferred to eat instead of all the meat and venison and rich pâté that everyone else consumed?
Maggie had told Sheena that the Queen’s attendants swore that they had seen the Devil with his cloven hoofs and tail galloping behind her on her morning ride and Sheena had never been able to forget the tone of voice in which the men in the courtyard had denounced her for seducing and bewitching the King.
“’Tis nonsense!” she said aloud. “And yet she could not help the shiver running through her body as, dressed in her white velvet habit, she waited for the hours to pass until it should be eight-thirty.
When a distant clock chimed the quarter hour, she set on her red hair a little tricorn black velvet hat trimmed with a sweeping white ostrich feather that curled down to her shoulder. She smiled at her reflection in the mirror before, picking up her embroidered gloves, a nice present from the Queen, and a riding whip with a jewelled handle that Mary Stuart had lent her, she went from the room and started the long walk down the corridors to the door that led to the South Gate.
There were few people about at this time for The Palace slept late. There were pages and chambermaids and an occasional glimpse of a gallant stumbling along with a drunken gait and yawning mouth towards his own Apartment. He would have spent the night gambling at cards or in the debauchery that made the younger set in The Palace the subject of unceasing gossip and condemnation.
Sheena, however, was too intent on her own thoughts to take note of her surroundings. There were f
aint lines under her eyes this morning and her mouth drooped a trifle wistfully.
She looked lovely, but it was as if a film lay over her face hiding some of its youth and radiance.
She glanced out of one window as she passed and saw the garden through which she had walked the night before with the Duc when he had brought her back to the house.
“I hate him!” she whispered again beneath her breath and felt the blood suddenly come coursing into her cheeks and her hands clench with the force of her emotions.
“I hate him! I hate him!”
The words seemed to repeat themselves over and over as she walked down the polished stairs, her hand resting on the gilt and crystal banister.
She reached the doorway and saw that outside the horses were waiting. Eight perfect examples of highly bred horseflesh champed at their silver bits and fidgeted restlessly as their grooms tried to calm them.
Mary Stuart’s large mount was ebony black with an embroidered saddle on which were emblazoned the Arms of Scotland. At least Sheena thought suddenly they need not feel that her position as Queen was ever forgotten.
Everywhere that it was possible for them to be painted, embroidered or portrayed, the Arms of Scotland were to be found, in the young Queen’s Apartments, on her carriages or her servants’ Livery and indeed on her saddles.
The Queen of Scotland! And yet Sheena could not help asking her heart how much it really meant to Mary Stuart.
She heard a footstep behind her and then saw one of the aides-de-camp come hurrying through the hall. He looked surprised when he saw Sheena.
“You did not receive my message, Mistress McCraggan?” he asked.
“Your message, monsieur?” Sheena questioned, dropping him a small curtsey.
“Her Majesty has decided not to go riding this morning. I have sent pages to everyone’s Apartments, but yours must, alas, have arrived after you had left.”
“Her Majesty is not well?” Sheena asked in concern.
The aides-de-camp smiled.
“Her Majesty was very late last night,” he answered. “When the dancing finished, we all went boating on the lake and I am afraid that one or two of the party were forced to swim for the shore.”
It was the sort of high-spirited horseplay that Mary Stuart would most enjoy, Sheena thought. At the same time she was glad that she had not been there.
“We all got to bed when the sun was already above the horizon,” the aide-de-camp went on. “I am sorry, Mistress McCraggan, that you should have risen early to no purpose.”
“On the contrary,” Sheena said. “As I am ready, I shall ride.”
“I regret I cannot accompany you,” the aide-de-camp sighed.
“I don’t want to sound rude,” Sheena answered, “but I would rather be alone.”
She beckoned one of the grooms and he brought a horse to the mounting block. It was a beautiful animal, almost snow-white in colour with embroidered reins and a saddle cover of deep crimson velvet.
He assisted Sheena to mount and she swung into the saddle feeling, as she had felt when she first awoke, a wild desire to be away from The Palace and into the open air. She turned her horse’s head towards the gate and knew that one of the grooms was following as she heard the clattering of his horse’s hoofs on the cobbles behind her.
She did not look round or speak and the groom kept his distance, which gave her a sense of feeling free, of riding as if she was back in Scotland, alone and unaccompanied with only the wind to talk to and the birds for companions.
It did not take long to be away from the streets and out into the open country. Here the King’s great Park rolled away to a long distant horizon and the rides through the woods were empty save for a startled deer or a covey of partridges winging their way to the open fields.
Sheena urged her horse faster. She so wanted to get away from The Palace and from her own thoughts and somehow only speed could achieve that.
She then brought her whip down lightly on the horse’s flank and he sprang forward.
Faster, faster, she urged him on and then heard a sudden cry from behind her. She looked back over her shoulder without slackening speed. The groom had dismounted and was raising his horse’s hoof as if there was something wrong. A cast shoe or perhaps a stone lodged so that the animal had gone lame, Sheena surmised.
The man shouted out again, waving his cap and Sheena turned her head and urged her own horse forward even faster. Nothing should stop her now. The groom could go home and relate what story he liked. All she knew was that she wanted to escape from the emotions and dreams of the night before, from the feel of the Marquis’s arms around her and the touch of the Duc’s lips on hers.
Faster! Faster!
Would she ever be able to forget the look in his eyes or the hard angry possessiveness of his mouth? Her own was still bruised and once again she repeated the words that had been in her mind all the morning,
“I hate him!”
How long she rode she did not know. She only knew that at last her horse was tiring and instinctively, because she loved animals, she drew in her reins and let him slow down, first to a trot and then to a walk.
They were both exhausted for the moment and Sheena felt her breath coming so quickly between her parted lips. Yet somehow she already felt fresher and much calmer. The wood was thick and, as the broad ride ended, she turned on to a narrow grass path leading between high pine trees.
Here at last she was at peace. How seldom, Sheena thought, was she ever alone.
Always in The Palace there was someone chattering or talking, laughing or singing, as if all of them were afraid of their own thoughts and dared not be separated from the others.
And in her own bedchamber there was always Maggie, talking and gossiping, relating scraps of information she had acquired below stairs or else scolding her for not doing exactly what she thought was right.
Sheena drew a deep breath of relief. The groom was left behind. There was only herself and her horse and the soft sunshine percolating through the dark branches of the trees.
“Shall we run away and just never come back?” she asked with a sudden whimsy and she saw that the animal put back his ears as if trying to understand what she was saying.
She bent forward to pat him, and now the path was twisting a little to the right and then to the left.
The woods seemed to get thicker.
“Where are we going, do you think?” Sheena asked. “And does it matter? Lead the way and perhaps we will find a new land with new people and escape from all the problems that are troubling us.”
She laughed a little at the sound of her own voice. How ridiculous she was being, she thought, talking to a horse! As if a horse could have any problems except that of returning to its comfortable stable and enjoying a good meal of oats and hay.
She bent forward to pat his neck again and then raising her head realised almost with a sense of dismay that the wood was getting denser still. They had been moving for some time since they left the broad ride and she wondered where they could be and if it was possible to get lost.
“Supposing,” she said aloud, “we wandered for hours and hours and never found our way home? You would be hungry and I should be frightened. I wonder if it is possible ever to be completely lost when we are so near to Paris?”
As if in answer to her question, she suddenly heard sounds a little ahead, the sounds of voices.
“We are not lost, after all,” she said with a smile. “Shall we retrace our steps or shall we enquire if there is a different way of returning?”
Answering her own question, she urged her horse forward and came suddenly through the wood and into a clearing. There was a house at one end of it, which she guessed belonged to a woodcutter or someone of that sort and, to her surprise, in the clearing and in front of the house there was a large crowd of people.
There must have been two or three dozen of them, all men, all apparently listening to one of their number who was standing on a fallen tree
and addressing them.
Sheena came out from the darkness of the trees into the sunlight and then suddenly the speaker stopped his discourse and stared at her with his mouth open.
As his astonishment communicated itself wordlessly to the others, the men all turned and they too stared wide-eyed as Sheena advanced slowly towards them.
They were all peasants, she noted, rough and unkempt and many with uncut beards. She thought the man who had been speaking to the others might be a Preacher. But they all for the moment seemed paralysed by her appearance.
She could not understand why her arrival should astonish them so much and yet as they stared and stared, their eyes broadening and their jaws dropping, she moved on towards them until her horse carried her within a few feet of the man still standing on the fallen tree.
“Excuse me, monsieur,” she said politely, “but would you please direct me back to Paris? I appear to have lost my way.”
As she finished speaking the man standing on the trunk of the tree gave a sudden shout.
“’Tis she! ’Tis she!” he yelled in a strange and rather guttural dialect, which Sheena had a little trouble in understanding. “She has been sent to us. The Lord has delivered her into our hands.”
The men, as if at a word of command, all scrambled to their feet and surged round her.
Sheena saw that they were putting out their hands to touch her horse and then the skirt of her riding habit as if to reassure themselves that she was real and not just a figment of their imagination.
“’Tis she!” the Preacher cried again. “She has come to us.”
Sheena decided that he must be a little mad.
“Pardon me,” she said again, “but I am anxious to return to The Palace. Will one of you please show me the way?”
Without replying they all began to talk at once. Their voices were high and excited and Sheena found it hard to understand their words. Over and over again it seemed to her that they kept saying,
“She has come! She has been sent!”
And then it seemed that she sensed rather than felt that there was something wrong.
The Hidden Evil Page 12
