‘Madam, I must go,’ he said. ‘Will you forgive me for what I cannot forgive myself?’
‘What is that, my lord?’
‘That I must go,’ he said.
Chapter Seven
The reason Bothwell had to go, at the very moment when people were giving up hope of King François’ life, was that a frantic summons had reached him from Anna Throndsen, who believed herself to be dying in Flanders of the child that he had given her. He had to go, to see that she was provided with the comforts he could now afford for her; he had to go at this most critical moment in his Queen’s life, which might well prove as critical in his own.
He left his new servant, Paris, behind, to ‘use his eyes and ears if he valued his skin’, and follow with full news of King François’ death – or life. The Queen had promised to write herself.
Battles were raging over her head; the Queen-Mother was telling the Court physicians to forbid Paré’s operating; the Duc de Guise was swearing at them that he would hang the lot of them if they forbade it; his Huguenot enemies, the Bourbon princes, were hurrying to get into touch with Catherine; and Catherine had already summoned to her side the Guise’s other great enemy, the Constable of France.
But Mary knew nothing of all this; she was with François night and day, for even in delirium the boy seemed quieter when she put her hand on his.
Bothwell had been only three days in Flanders when Paris tumbled into his lodging, stiff and blind with continuous riding and lack of sleep, and held out a paper to him. It was carefully sealed, as Bothwell had seen Mary seal her letters, with threads of coloured silk twisted in the scented wax to form her monogram.
He did not break it at once, but asked: ‘Well? He’s dead?’
‘Dead as mutton, sir.’
‘What happened? Nothing, I suppose.’
‘Just nothing. They didn’t operate. The Queen-Mother wouldn’t have it. They say the Guise roared at her, “Madam, you have killed your son!” She said nothing.’
Paris’ imitation of the lion roar of the Guise was exact. Bothwell told him not to shout, as the lady upstairs was ill. Paris repeated the gossip; there had been some ironic comments on the King’s last prayer, dictated by the Cardinal de Lorraine; it was believed to be: ‘Lord, pardon my sins and impute not to me those which my Ministers have committed in my name.’
He had died just before midnight on December 5th. The Queen was there, and Queen Catherine and the Guises; no one else was allowed in except the doctors – ‘but a marvellous lot got out! Keyholes are wide in Orléans.’ And Paris told how, as they left the room after the King had died, Mary remembered to draw back and give Catherine the precedence to pass out first, just as Catherine had done eighteen months before when her husband, King Henri, had died, leaving her as only the Queen-Mother, and Mary as the Queen of France. But now Catherine was again the first lady in the land.
‘Is the old Queen being unkind to the young one, do you know?’
‘No, sir, kind, in her way; she told her to dress comfortably and not to grieve over what couldn’t be helped.’
It was the authentic Medici touch – advising the removal of a corset as consolation in bereavement. ‘Got into the innermost circles, haven’t, you, hitting the Queen-Mother below the belt like this! How did you do it?’
‘I made it my business, since it was my lord’s, and chose the ugliest girl I could in the old Queen’s service. The ugly ones are the most grateful. She told all she could.’
He winked at his master, who had an absurd feeling that his page was play-acting in imitation of himself – badly, he hoped. He asked what use Catherine had begun to make of her power.
Quick use, as Bothwell had expected (hadn’t she stripped her husband’s mistress, Diane de Poictiers, of all the jewels and possessions he had given her, and within a few hours of his death!) And now –
‘The Constable has hurried to Orléans with eight hundred gentlemen in attendance,’ Paris was saying, ‘and has disbanded all the troops there of the Guise. The Guises are down in the mud. All they can do is to shoulder along as best they can in the crowd and forget they were ever above it.’ He rubbed a bleared, dusty eye and went on:
‘People are wondering they don’t escape from the town, but I’ll say that for the Guises, no one sees much of their backs. All the courtiers went scampering off to congratulate the new little King as soon as the breath was out of t’other’s body. They say he wants to have his brother’s wife as well as his crown, but his mother will have a word to say to that. It isn’t going to be much of a funeral, they’ve only got a leaden vase to put his heart into, it can’t have cost more than a few crowns. Nobody is thinking anything about it, or him.’
He swayed on his feet and nearly fell. Bothwell gave him a drink, and told him to go off and get some food and sleep.
‘You’d make a damned good spy.’
The lad put down his drink at a gulp and grinned up at his master. ‘I did, sir. I found out that the handsome Englishman with the horrible name, Throckmorton, was in the devil of a fidget when you went off so suddenly – to Scotland by way of Flanders too! He wrote to London to warn them to look out for trouble, and I saw the letter.’
‘Did you seduce his valet as well as Catherine’s slut?’
‘Only with drink,’ said Paris with simple pride. ‘We had a merry evening in the Englishman’s lodging while he was at the Court, that was all, and I ran an eye over his papers.’
But Paris had found only an estimate of his master’s character which showed how keenly the English Government was on the watch for all his movements.
‘This glorious rash and hazardous young man,’ Throckmorton had written (and Bothwell did not flatter himself that Sir Nicholas intended any more complimentary meaning of ‘glorious’ than ‘vain-glorious’), and advised that ‘his adversaries should both have an eye to him and also keep him short.’
‘The shorter by a head – if they could do it!’ said Bothwell with a laugh, and gave Paris one of the remainder of the six hundred crowns. Paris went off yawning and grinning at the same moment.
Bothwell turned to his letter.
But when he had broken that elaborate seal and shaken out the paper he could find no letter, only some lines of verse with words scratched out here and there, evidently the first rough draft of a poem. Having turned it all over in vain search for anything to show that the Queen had intended it for him, and not sent it in mistake for her letter, he read the verses:
Si en quelque séjour
Soit en bois ou en prée,
Soit sur la Vesprée,
Sans cesse mon coeur sent
Le regret d’un absent.
Si je suis en repos
Sommeillant sur ma couche,
J’oy qu’il me tient propos,
Je le sens qui me touche;
En labeur et requoy
Toujours est prez de moy—
He found himself oddly moved by the utter simplicity of the grief, the bewildered sense of loss, not of a husband but of a childish companion.
He read it through again, and heard the soft cadences ringing in his mind like a peal of muffled bells.
Had she really meant to send them to him? He hoped she had. Anyway, he would keep them.
He opened the casket in which he kept his papers, and gave an exclamation of brutal amusement and disgust at the sight of Anna’s last ‘sonnet’ lying on the top. Those heavy-handed verses made odd company for this childish lament, crystal-clear as drops of dew – ‘but it’s odd company you’ll get, my Queen, if you trust me with your fancies!’
Part II
SECOND MEETING
Chapter One
He did not see her again for nearly eight months, and by then she had changed, as was natural in a girl of late development who had just begun to grow up when suddenly all her life was changed, changed in one frozen black December night, when the boy who had been her playfellow lay dead upon the pillows, and the Cardinal de Lorraine lifted his
smooth white eyelids and looked at her across the still form, telling her with those fine pale grey cat-like eyes that she must remember to stand aside and let her mother-in-law pass first out of the room.
The heavy black silks rustled out before her: in the hush of that moment they made a monstrous noise, harsh as the rattle of sabres, telling her that the familiar ground of her whole life and of her home for the last dozen years was being cut from under her feet, cut in every direction.
François died at midnight; early next morning Mary sent back her royal diamonds to the new King. She was no longer Queen of France; her uncles were no longer the rulers of the kingdom; the great rival house of Bourbon with its Huguenot sympathies was now paramount; Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, lately in daily fear of arrest, was made Governor of the new boy King, Charles IX; Antoine’s brother, condemned to death for his share in the Huguenot conspiracy at Amboise, was released and restored to full honour and power; a match was even suggested between Antoine’s son, the little Henri de Navarre, and Queen Catherine’s youngest daughter, a precociously clever child of seven, always known as Margot.
Mary was now only a guest in the country that had so long been her home, and Queen Catherine made it abundantly clear. During the weeks prescribed for mourning Mary followed all the accustomed regulations, wore robes first all black, then all white, stayed all the time in her own rooms, which were kept religiously dim, saw no one but her servants, her Maries, her nearest relatives and Queen Catherine and her eldest son.
King Charles IX was a quick-witted, excitable, odd-tempered boy, unhealthy, with thin legs and a big pale head that narrowed suddenly to a tiny sharp chin – ‘the Goblin of France’ my lord of Bothwell had called him in one of his daring irreverences, and she disliked but could not help remembering it as the boy talked shrilly to her, waving his nervous hands.
‘I don’t know how you stand it here, all those candles and black curtains, and you who like being out so much! The Loire’s frozen all over the shallows – do come out and skate with us. I wish you’d marry me, you’d be the Queen of France again then and I’d give you back your diamonds, and my mother couldn’t go on having it all her own way. Do marry me; I may be a bit younger than poor old François, but I’m much stronger and I mean to be a great soldier just as he wanted to be, I know I could be if I married you. Just think of all the things we’d do together! – France and Scotland leading the world, and down with all the old shams. Yes, I’m for the Reformed Religion. I took away Margot’s Mass-book and boxed her ears – she howled like anything. Mother is encouraging the Huguenots for all she’s worth, and if you joined us, how exciting it would be! Besides, I shall never want to marry anyone else,’ he added suddenly, wistfully.
That was the only time he came to her without his mother and without her knowledge, the only time Mary heard him talk.
She did not much mind the long seclusion; she wanted time before she took up the business of living once again. If it were dark in these rooms it was not much darker than outside, this iron-grey winter. Life had moved so fast, bright and shifting in these past years, hurrying her from one place to another, always to cheers and speeches of welcome, always among crowds of faces, eager, curious, peering to look at her. Now she had to make a pretty speech of thanks; now she had to stand up before all the Court and the foreign Princes and Ambassadors and deliver a Latin oration of her own composition (or most of it), urged thereto by the continual maddening reminder that the Princess Elizabeth of England (but she was ten years older) could talk Greek with the learned Oxford dons. Now she had had to amuse her father-in-law, King Henri II, whose heavy Spanish-looking face had seldom lit into laughter except with her; now she had had to cheer poor François and make him believe he would soon be well.
But now – now, she had nothing to do but sit in a dim place and wait, wait till life should begin again, knowing that it would be something entirely different from all that had gone before. So, swathed in her white robes and veils, she waited in the dark like a chrysalis for the hour when she should burst her bonds as a butterfly.
There were already offers from that life ahead. The King of Navarre was so anxious to marry her that he was actually planning to divorce his strong-minded wife, Jeanne d’Albret. King Philip II of Spain, the austere and terrible monarch of half the world, who had tried to marry Elizabeth of England, now sought Mary, in his usual secret and ambiguous fashion, on behalf of his young son Don Carlos. And many other wooers of Elizabeth turned their attentions to this young, lovelier Queen who had so suddenly entered the lists of matrimony.
The young Earl of Arran was the most unblushing, for only that autumn he and his fellow nobles had been pressing Elizabeth to marry him as ‘next in place’ to the throne of Scotland, with a strong hint that the papist Queen Mary would then be prevented from ever returning to her country. Yet before any reply had been received from Elizabeth, Arran was already urging his suit on Mary as soon as François was dead. The stolidly jovial King Frederick of Denmark, whose drinking bouts Bothwell had shared, also promptly transferred his wooing of Elizabeth to Mary; so did young Eric of Sweden, one of the handsomest men in Europe, half genius, half madman; so did his brother the Duke of Finland; so did the Emperor’s two sons. The Earl of Lennox, who had rivalled Bothwell’s father for the hand of the late Queen Regent of Scotland, was planning for his son Henry Darnley to follow in his father’s footsteps and win the daughter of the lady who had rejected himself. And Darnley was a possible heir to both English and Scottish thrones.
It was noted in the English Court that all this was having a rapidly souring effect on Elizabeth’s already rather acid comments on ‘My dear sister of Scotland’.
Nor did it soften Catherine’s tone to her former daughter-inlaw. ‘All France will soon not be big enough to hold your suitors,’ she remarked in that fat jocular voice that always made Mary feel sick with rage and disgust. ‘Had you not better find another country to contain them?’
Yes, but which? Her own did not want her; she was very tired; she only wanted to ‘give it all up and become a nun’, so she sobbed out to her grandmother the Duchesse Antoinette de Guise, when after her retirement she visited her at Joinville.
The old lady smiled very tenderly, looking down the enormous bony hook of her nose at the fair head buried in her lap.
The head lifted suddenly, caught the smile, and tossed back in indignation.
‘And why not, Grand’mère? I would not be the first Queen in our family to become a nun. Look at my greatgrandmother Queen Philippa of Guise – she is famous.’
‘And so may you be,’ replied her grandmother, ‘but not, I think, as a nun.’
A thrush perched on a branch of white pear blossom above them and burst into shrill song. Mary looked up at the tiny ecstatic creature.
‘No,’ she said, ‘it does not sing Mass to me as it did to Queen Philippa.’
‘Does it sing of nothing else?’ asked her grandmother, and saw that quick flush race upwards into the cheeks that had grown so much too white in her long seclusion. They were sitting out on one of the first warm days of spring, the old lady, in her black robes, on her favourite garden seat on the lawn that sloped down to the placid stream, a tributary of the wide Marne. Mary had slipped to the grass at her feet, her long limbs in their white dress lying as though spilt on that bright green, in a languor that would have enchanted her lovers but was disturbing to the shrewd old eyes now looking down on her.
The child had been ill again. Luckily she was here where a close eye could be kept on her; the Duchesse had seen to it that she should be troubled with no diplomatic interviews. But she could not keep her from such for ever; even now she would have to tell her of visitors from that far-off fierce Northern kingdom that had given her mother so much agony of spirit. Years ago the Duchesse Antoinette had written to that mother, her own daughter: ‘You have had so little joy in the world, and pain and trouble have been so often your lot, that I think you can hardly know now what pleasur
e means.’
Would she ever have cause to feel the same about that daughter’s daughter?
No, she would not, for even as she wondered, the girl laughed and whistled back at the thrush, imitating his note, then broke into the tune of a song, whistling it first like a boy and then singing:
‘Worship ye that lovers be this May,
For of your bliss the Kalends are begun,
And sing with us: “Away, Winter, away!
Come, Summer, come, the sweet season and sun!”
‘That is what he is singing to me, Grand’mère – the Spring Song of the Birds that my ancestor, the first King James of Scotland, wrote when he was in prison. New life, new hope, new adventure:
And amorously lift your heads all,
Thank Love, that list you to your mercies call!’
And she turned eagerly to that wrinkled face, pillowing her elbows on the stiff black knees as she had done ever since a child, propping her chin between her hands.
Whatever happened to this girl, she would certainly ‘know what pleasure means’
‘My dear,’ said the old lady, ‘I hope you will always be able to “thank Love”. I think you will, for you are of a generous spirit.’
‘New adventure’ – Mary had just seen what that might open for her. Since six years old she had thought of herself only as the predestined wife of François; but now, with the ruin of her former position, there had opened new prospects from a new unrealized source of power – her own attractions in the marriage market.
To be Queen of Spain, of the New World and half the old, would she have love to thank for that? For, as was suitable in a proud Princess, love, in her mind, was only the handmaid to ambition. A sharp flick on her cheek recalled her attention. The Duchesse Antoinette was telling her, ‘What I should have told before, but that I did not want you to worry your head over the matter before it arrives.’
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