The sympathies of her Lieutenant of the Border (and his Queen’s) were all with the robbers that he had sometimes to ride down and suppress. He told her of a respectable matron who at dinner would put a dish before her son, empty of all but a pair of spurs, as a hint that the larder needed replenishing and he must ride again on a cattle raid. ‘Ride, Rowley, naught’s in the pot,’ was the maternal injunction given by the Lady Graham of Netherby.
These Border women were of a piece with their men, gay with silver brooches and bracelets to show their men’s success in plunder, but their houses very bare of furniture, to be left lightly.
‘And I,’ Mary exclaimed, catching in her excitement at the fabulous pearls round her throat, given by Solyman the Magnificent to François I, ‘I do not care for possessions.’
He laughed at her, scrutinizing her narrowly. ‘Aye, it’s fine to talk so when one’s safe and snug with a hundred baggage-wagons piling up the furniture to move on to the next palace!’
For all that, he remembered that her father, with the same fine-drawn beauty and a constitution not strong enough to last more than thirty-one years, had been bred up in his boyhood in effeminate luxury by the Douglas family, who hoped thus to keep the power to themselves, and how he yet had the force and determination to break away from them when only fifteen, seize the reins of the throne, and govern with a resolute hand.
This lass looked like inheriting his spirit – his constitution also, the more’s the pity.
This was largely the reason why she still had no physical attraction for him. She was not of a stock he’d care to breed from; it was too highly bred, from a hundred kings, from Charlemagne and Saint Louis; apart from such practical considerations, she personally was too undeveloped, for all that she was nearing eighteen; she was also too delicate. The courtiers might rave about her beauty, but that was their business. He had no taste for a woman he could crush like glass; nor for one who might faint at any moment and have to spend days or even weeks in bed. Weak health was in itself exasperating to a man of his own full-blooded strength; if one were ill one had better die and make an end of it.
The Scottish Secretary of State, Mr Maitland of Lethington, was frankly banking all his policy on the likelihood of Mary dying of a consumption within the next year or two. But there Bothwell did wonder whether Master ‘Michael Wily’ (the Scots version of Machiavelli’s name) was quite as clever as he thought. Was he not counting on the wrong horse to fall on the course? To his eye there was something far more deadly in the thick puffy pallor of King François than the brilliant, swift-fleeting colour of his Queen.
She was always having to console and encourage him, and the robust vigour of the Borderer came as a relief to her. As she grew less shy of him she told him something of her troubles. She never seemed to have enough money for all she wanted to do (‘Then we are like enough in one thing,’ he told her); she had recklessly given away too many of her dresses and jewels to the wrong people and so had not enough for the right ones, ‘and I am afraid they will say I am not at all like my mother, who was always so generous.’
Her worst trouble had been a very unkind governess, but the Cardinal de Lorraine had dismissed the old hag before even she had complained to him. That would show my Lord Bothwell what reason she had to adore her kind uncle – yes, and once he had even got up in the middle of the night to come to her.
‘And wouldn’t any man!’ exclaimed Bothwell with irrepressible amusement.
‘No, he would not – to a greedy child who had made herself sick, and he a terribly fastidious young man. But after that he ordered my diet himself, and as carefully as he did my lessons. But my mother-in-law, Queen Catherine, has always continued to teach me Latin,’ she ended on a note of despair.
He bore with these schoolgirl confidences from policy rather than patience, and led her to speak instead of what she could remember of Scotland. It was not much, for life had moved so fast with her that it scarcely gave her time to notice what it had poured through her childish hands.
She was born; in a few days her father died and she was Queen of Scotland. Then that ogre across the Border, King Henry VIII, uncle to her father, whom Henry’s armies had defeated at Solway Moss and thus killed of a broken heart, proposed to marry his son Prince Edward to the baby Queen in the North; insisted that he was to be her guardian, and that if she died in childhood the Scottish crown should pass to himself. Children died easily; in the guardianship of so wicked a great-uncle (he had already beheaded a couple of wives as well as countless numbers of his nobles and servants) Mary might die very easily indeed.
Her mother refused to part with the infant, and King Henry’s reply was his army order to invade Scotland and ‘put all to fire and sword – burn Edinburgh and raze the city to the ground, sack Holyrood and as many towns and villages as you may conveniently, exterminating men, women and children without mercy.’
James Hepburn had watched that ‘rough wooing’ as he called it; again and again in his early boyhood he had seen the countryside round his home laid waste, and the flames and smoke swirling up from the nearest towns, the beautiful old Abbey churches of Kelso and Dryburgh and Melrose smashed to ruins, and the peasants flying in terror from the English and the German hagbut men that King Henry had hired to help his invasion, since the English soldiers, themselves peasants, refused to destroy their neighbours’ harvest.
‘But he did not get Edinburgh,’ he said – ‘nor you. He was told that the women and small boys of Scotland would fight for you with distaffs and stones – I was a small boy myself, and had my stones and catapult ready!’
‘You can remember it and I can’t! I had my first night-ride at seven months old when my mother took me out of my cradle and galloped with me to Stirling. But later I can remember hearing the English guns, and rushing away again from Stirling among huge silent overhanging mountains, and the man who carried me on his saddle said, “It’ll need be a bonny hunter who’ll run ye to earth in the Highlands.” But after that I even had to leave my mother and be taken away in dead secrecy to a monastery on an island in a loch – Inchmahome, the “Island of Peace”, they called it, all those kind black-robed men, whose cowled faces I never seemed to see, they were so far above me.’
Six months later she had been sent with her Maries to France to escape the clutches of the English ‘alliance’, and her convoy had had to dodge the enemy’s fleet all through the voyage.
A harried infancy, never bringing, as her devoted French grandmother, the Dowager Duchesse de Guise, lamented, a moment’s ‘rest and repose for the little creature’. The little creature had not known that, but she had known how important she was – Queen of Scotland from the week of her birth, told that she was also to be Queen of England, until the day she was told she would instead be Queen of France. The hurried journeys, the changes of scene, the different people who looked after her so anxiously, petting and playing with her, were all pleasantly exciting; while in the background there was always her mother, that tall calm woman with the low voice and the amused mouth and clear considering eyes, who lived only that she might look after her small daughter and her interests, and with so selfless a devotion that she sent her away to her own country, ‘like a small bird’, as she herself wrote, ‘that makes a nest for its nurslings’.
In France all the countryside came to welcome her with pageants and toys and fireworks and dances, and an army of a hundred and fifty children in white uniform, banging drums and shouting, ‘Way for the Queen of Scotland!’
And in France was an adoring new papa, the King of it; a devoted little slave who would be her husband; six kind gorgeous uncles and their mother, her grandmother, like an old fairy, wise and gay, an aristocrat of the old school (‘there are no ladies like that now’), with whom she stayed more often than at Court, in her country home of Joinville, learning the arts of embroidery and fancy cookery and garden-planning, hearing legends of royal and pious ancestresses who had talked with the ghosts of Saint Francis and Saint Ant
hony.
She still had her four Scots Maries, and in a few years her mother came to visit her, and for the first time Mary saw elephants, seven of them, swinging slowly down the streets of Rouen in the procession to welcome her.
Certainly, if time had moved fast in those early years, it moved in the sunlight.
To Bothwell, getting glimpses of it in contrast with his turbulent, dissolute boyhood, it was incredible that anyone, even a girl and a Queen, should have been brought up, in spite of all her adventures, so remote from reality. She seemed to take it for granted that all the men and women she met were her guardian angels; she knew nothing of them, nor, he guessed, of herself.
The Duc de Guise had been as good as his word; Bothwell was given a grant of six hundred crowns and a temporary sinecure as Gentleman of the King’s Chamber; there were promises of more solid benefits in the way of Abbey lands in Scotland should he return there. This he had now made up his mind to do, ‘despite of all men’, and work up a party there in the interests of the absent Sovereign.
He was admitted to private discussions on Scotland with the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine, the greatest honour in France. The Venetian Ambassador in France, a lively old fellow who had been a crony of Bothwell’s father during the Fair Earl’s enforced sojourn in Venice, told Bothwell that the Cardinal, Controller of Finance, was regarded by the Doge and Senate as in himself an independent European Power; and the Duc de Guise’s victory in retaking Calais, the last of the Black Prince’s conquests left in English hands, had given his family ‘such repute that the administration of France will remain in their hands for ever’. That was good hearing for the young man whom the Duc de Guise obviously liked and trusted.
Altogether life was good, the soft autumn weather mild as milk, the boat-hunting with spears a new sport, and the tame-cat existence as Gentleman of the French King’s Chamber, though intolerable if for any length of time, made quite a pleasant interlude after the furious activities of the last few years.
He decided to return to Scotland in about the third week in November, when the Court was going to move on to Chenonceaux on a hunting expedition and remain there till the end of the month.
The curtains and tapestries were taken down, the rugs taken up, the beds taken to pieces, and all the furniture piled on to barges instead of baggage-wagons to glide on down the Loire and be put up again at Chenonceaux before the royal party arrived.
It suddenly turned bitterly cold on the Monday that they were to start, and Mary shivered in a white furred mantle while waiting for François on the water-steps. Their gilded barge was moored ready for them, rocking very slightly on the iron-grey water that had been lashed into little waves by the bitter east wind. The wide sands had turned from pale gold to lead.
François was always late; she wished she had waited for him inside, instead of running out here in her eagerness to be off. She saw one of his gentlemen coming towards her; it was the Earl of Bothwell.
He looked grave as he came towards her, and said, ‘Madam, the King’s headache is worse, it is giving him ear-ache, and violently. He cannot start just yet.’
She turned very white. ‘He fainted in church, yesterday. I’ve done that several times, but it is worse for a man. He had got a cold again – can it be that that gives him ear-ache?’
She went on talking as they hurried back to the house; all the time she was thinking, ‘It’s unlucky to go back’ –unlucky, that horrible word, suggesting that there was no order in the scheme of things, only the working of blind chance, as Queen Catherine believed. She had, so her Maries whispered to their Queen, consulted astrologers here as to the length of life her sons could expect. No one could read the answer in that enigmatic face, but Mary thought her mother-in-law had been graver of late.
The dismantled house was chill and desolate. François was lying on a bare mattress laid on the floor, and shivering violently though several cloaks had been laid over him. He still had his boots on. A page was making up the fire again, blowing it with a huge pair of bellows, but the logs were damp and hissed and spluttered without sending out much heat.
‘It would happen today,’ François was muttering, ‘just the very day we were to start.’
She knelt down on the floor beside him, threw her arms round him, and said, ‘It will make no odds. We will go on in a day or two, you will be better then.’
‘But there’s nothing here – everything gone on. It’s all cold, cold, cold and wretched.’
‘Your mother has sent for some bedding. You’ll soon be warm and comfortable in bed, and your poor head will ache less then.’
He had covered his head with his arm. She looked out over it to the uncurtained window that showed the grey sky and the dead leaves blown past it, silting up on the smooth lawns in brown untidy heaps. She felt frightened and miserable, but François must be feeling far more so. ‘You will soon be in bed,’ she said again, ‘and then you will feel so much better.’
But François got worse. He had high fever and terrible pain in his head and ear. There was soon no question of their going to Chenonceaux, and Mary asked Bothwell not to leave just yet for Scotland as he had planned. So he stayed, though every day enhanced the danger of the journey, it being an ancient seaman’s law in Scotland that no ship should sail between the day of Saint Simon and Jude and Candlemas, the most stormy season for the Northern seas.
The Duc de Guise sent for Ambroise Paré, the famous surgeon who had brought him back from the grave when wounded at Metz, and Mary talked hopefully to Bothwell.
‘Paré will cure the King. He is a Huguenot, but surely he could never let that influence him towards the King?’
‘Rest easy, Madam, if the man’s half the doctor he’s reported to be, he’d never let religion foul his work.’
It was an odd way of putting it, but Mary was reassured, until there came a new fear. Paré came, with his long duckbill of a nose and bushy moustache and face like an honest bourgeois until you saw the unswerving, considering eye. He believed he could cure the King by an operation on his brain, but Queen Catherine thought the risk too terrible.
‘She is afraid, always,’ said Mary.
Bothwell wondered. The Medici knew well enough what she was about; she had extremely advanced ideas in medicine. It had begun by now to be evident that there was no other chance for the King’s life. But – how much did she really wish that life to continue?
It was a monstrous thought; Bothwell was rather appalled with himself for thinking it, but facts were facts; as long as François lived, the power of his wife’s relatives, the Guises, was paramount, and that of his mother nothing. She had ruled her son by fear, but he worshipped Mary; with every year of advancing manhood his wife’s influence would grow, his mother’s lessen.
Could any mother not a monster reason so? Bothwell’s first impression of Catherine had been of something unnatural, though there had been nothing positive in evil, nothing positive at all, only – nothing! That was it; there was nothing behind those blank eyes but an immense indifference. She was insensitive to all except her own lust for power, which she had never had a chance to excercise.
If François died, she had three other sons to take his place, and the next in age, Charles, only ten years old, was and would be completely under his mother’s thumb for a long time. If François died, she would rid herself both of her daughter-in-law and the Guise domination.
Bothwell thought it extremely likely that she would not allow Paré to operate.
November froze into December. On the 8th, Mary would be eighteen. The snow was falling lightly, soft as feathers, covering the scaled tourelles like the inverted tails of mermaids. The statues in the gardens stood all wrapped in snow, their white outlines blurred against the iron-grey sky. The King of France was dying, and the Queen of France and Scotland moved like a ghost about the palace, pale and ill from her constant watching by his bedside. She was now too full of fears to confide them to Bothwell; it was he who blurted out to comf
ort her:
‘Remember, Madam, if the worst comes to the worst, there is always Scotland.’
‘And is that the worst that can come to me?’ she laughed sadly.
But as he too laughed he took her hand and said again, ‘Remember Scotland. If you come to it, Scotland will always remember you. You would be such a Queen as they would make songs and stories of until the end of time.’
She had never heard him say anything so flattering, and yet it did not sound like flattery, it had been jerked out of him as though he were not aware of it.
‘Why did you say that?’
‘I don’t know.’ For an instant he seemed almost abashed, certainly puzzled, then pulled himself together. ‘Come, Your Grace, am I so great a boor that I should not tell a Queen her country would remember her beauty?’
That came like a cold douche; she shook back her head and said, ‘I know why you said it. You are going away.’
‘Madam, yes. I must go at once.’
‘Must you?’ She paused, her tired eyes gazing up at him – a forlorn child, he thought, ready to drop from weariness; never had he seen her look less beautiful; the light had all gone out of her face these days, she was quite plain really, and he did not know why he had suddenly seen her just now as a spirit lighting Scotland like a flame.
He must be getting maudlin in this sick-bed air of hushed anxiety and sympathy – Christ! why couldn’t a fellow leave the world quickly from a clean blow instead of dragging his maimed life along for days and days!
He towered over her; his solid yet springy strength seemed almost overpowering to her who had just come from that painfully dying boy; if only he could give some of it to François – and to herself. An almost pleading note came into her voice as she said:
‘You were my mother’s friend – and I think you are mine.’
‘Haven’t you friends enough here with all your fine uncles round you?’
His voice was unexpectedly surly even in his own ears. It was no wonder she looked bewildered; only fatigue and anxiety prevented her being angry. He went quickly down on his knee and raised her hand to his lips.
The Galliard Page 9
