The Queen's Caprice

by Marjorie Bowen

  “You rest, Mary. There is a couch in that inner room. I cannot sleep and perhaps shall not for many nights, but you, you are quite dropping with fatigue.”

  “Madame, I can endure it. I had some sleep last night before we left the Abbey. But you, madame, have not closed your eyes since—”

  “I think I have died,” said the Queen, closing her eyes, “and come to life again, if indeed I do live. How long ago was it when I sat at supper there? I wonder where, after all, they buried Florestan? Mary, if you do not mean to sleep, go downstairs and find Earl Bothwell and send him up here to me.”

  Mary Seaton did not like this errand and crossed herself as she always did at the mention of the Earl.

  “Would it not be better for the Queen’s Grace to receive the Earl presently?”

  But the Queen shook her head on the pillows. She disdained all pretences, subterfuges, and ceremonies where either her heart, her will, or her mind was concerned.

  “I owe the man everything,” she said. “I wish to thank him.”

  The Queen was still lying on the mattress by the fire, propped by pillows, when Bothwell came into her presence. By her side on the floor on which a Persian rug had been hastily unrolled, was a silk scarf knotted at the end, full of the jewels that Mary Seaton had brought with her from Holyrood, and over her knees lay a rug of red damask. The fire was burning more clearly and sent a steady heat into the chilly, half-furnished room.

  The Queen smiled without moving and said:

  “I owe you everything. Stand near the window where I can see you.”

  He obeyed her gravely and stood in the window-place looking down on her where she lay, with such reverence and tenderness that from his attitude she might have been throned before him.

  Her senses almost failed her. Odd pictures floated in and out of her consciousness. The Italian cowering in the corner with upraised hands; Patrick Ruthven’s face as he drank his wine; the disordered room and Florestan’s fingers, like twigs, thrust up through the broken pastry; the midwife coming in and then the Lords kneeling on the floor on which were still little specks of blood; Moray commanding her in a hostile voice; Maitland, insinuating and gentle; the red ring on her finger; and the quick flight to the ruined church and the waiting horses, and this man …

  “You saved me!” she said aloud, and her whole heart went out in gratitude. He had done more than save her body — he had saved her soul, or so she thought, for she might easily have died and gone to Hell during those black hours in Holyrood. But now she had a chance to live again, and there would be time for repentance. She had been rescued from the depths of humiliation and she was Queen again.

  In this man’s presence, under his protection, she felt quite safe.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “I know it seems now as if I could give you nothing, but you have made me a queen again and I shall give you your reward.”

  “I want nothing,” he replied.

  “No,” she said, raising herself upon her elbows, “for you can take all you want.”

  She considered him attentively. She remembered all she had heard about him, none of which was to his credit. She had been told earnestly and by men who had advised her for her good, that Earl Bothwell had said terrible things about her. She did not know whether she believed this or not. It seemed not to matter. He might be compounded of all evil, but he had great courage, and there was no virtue that she admired more.

  There was something, she thought, puzzling about his appearance. The man’s looks were no clue to what he was. He was French-bred, elegant and cultured. He was tall, but not as tall as her husband. He was famed for great strength in sports and feats of arms, but appeared slighter than men like Lindsay and Ruthven. His features were distinctive, high cheekbones, a wide mouth, short aquiline nose, smooth-shaven cheeks, dark red hair, and eyes oddly light. He was the best dressed man that the Queen had seen since she had left France. She stirred on her mattress while he stood patient, awaiting her pleasure, grateful to him for his silence.

  *

  The Queen returned to Edinburgh with Earl Bothwell on one side and her husband on the other, and she rode with three thousand men behind her. The confederate Lords who had planned the murder of Rizzio fled, seeing themselves betrayed by the King, realizing that the Queen had broken all the promises she had made to them the day after the murder.

  They had made a desperate attempt to get these promises of an amnesty confirmed, sending Lord Sempill after her to Dunbar, but she had refused to deal with them.

  The King, also, had washed his hands of his recent accomplices. Before the Privy Council and in the Proclamation that was read at Edinburgh Cross, pasted on the Tolbooth, and in other conspicuous parts of the city, he denied utterly that he had had any “art or part” in the murder of David Rizzio. This he swore on his honour as a prince.

  The Queen neither reproached nor questioned him, but she kept on her person two bonds from this same crime which he had signed, and which the Lords, from their retreats, had sent her in their bitter anger against the King. Of these she said nothing.

  For her Foreign Secretary she took Giuseppe Rizzio, although he was an inept boy of only eighteen years old. She had his brother’s body disinterred from the common burial-ground and placed in the graveyard within the palace, which gave great offence to many. But she never mentioned his name nor gave any hint in her words or demeanour that she brooded over revenge or punishment.

  She even allowed Moray to return to the court and bring with him Sir William Maitland. Her attitude seemed to be one of indifference when she was in her brother’s company and she often went out with him and her husband, making a show before the people of stability and family harmony.

  All this was for the sake of the child, the Prince of Scotland, who was to be born in Edinburgh Castle in June, and also because the Queen thought she might die in childbirth and therefore nothing really mattered any more. So she treated everything with an indifference that increased as the days went by.

  But three bequests that she had made in her will when she thought she was going to die, showed that she had not forgotten the recent happenings.

  To her husband she left the red ring with which he had married her. “The King my husband gave it to me,” she wrote, “and I give it to him back again.”

  To Giuseppe Rizzio she left the tortoise of rubies and a cross of diamonds set in white enamel. “He is to give them to he whom he knows of,” she had written, and the name that she had whispered in Giuseppe’s ear was that of the priest. The jewels were to be sold and the money was to go in Masses for the soul of David who had died unshriven.

  To Earl Bothwell, the man who had rescued her, she also left a gift. It was a mourning-ring, a skull with tears, in black and white.

  She did not know what fancy prompted her to do this. The man — the image of him, and her interest in him, all hung in abeyance in her mind.

  She had another whim she could not explain.

  The night before the child was born she sent for Lady Bothwell, Jane Gordon, who had up to now been nothing but a name to her. Jane Gordon had to walk a long way through guard-rooms, ante-chambers, corridors, and rooms full of women, apothecaries, leeches, and servants until she came to where the Queen sat by a window, staring down on the city.

  A shaft of light fell through this window between the two women. Jane Gordon paused politely, and the Queen looked at her shrewdly.

  She told her to come forward and the young woman advanced through the handsomely furnished room towards the Queen, veiled and draped to the throat in brocade and gauze, looking, despite Mary Seaton’s care, ill and tired.

  “Oh, Jane,” sighed the Queen, “I have been thinking of you so often, dreaming of you, too, and I thought that I must see you.”

  “Why, madame, should you either dream or think of me?”

  The Queen’s tired eyes turned away. She had seen in a turn of the young girl’s head and bare neck rising from the pleated ruff, a likeness to th
e head and neck of John Gordon as he knelt before the block, and she thought of how when she had first come to Scotland she had ridden against the House of Huntly and overthrown and ruined it, and how this girl’s father had been stood up in an open coffin, a proclaimed traitor, while his armorial bearings had been torn before his dead face.

  “I gave you to your husband, Jane, it is natural that I should wonder about your happiness.”

  “The Queen’s Grace can scarcely be concerned about my happiness. It was my brother whom I obeyed in my marriage.”

  “Your brother!” said the Queen, almost timidly. “He has been a good servant to us.”

  “So was my father, madame,” said Jane Gordon boldly, “and my brother, John, and those others of my kin who perished in the north.”

  The Queen replied in a pleading voice:

  “I do not want to speak of that nor even to think of it, Jane. If I was wrong I will make amends. Your brother shall have all his estates.”

  “I do not think so, madame,” said the girl shrewdly, “while Lord Moray has your ear. Madame, have you anything more to say to me?”

  The Queen was at a loss, but very curious about Bothwell’s wife.

  “Why should I want to know,” she sighed. “What does it matter!”

  She became wrapped up again with the thought of her own approaching death.

  “Your House and mine were always in enmity,” she whispered. Then, “You have a strange man for your husband.”

  “He is not strange to me,” said Jane Gordon indifferently. “I bear him no ill-will.”

  “Not strange,” repeated the Queen. “Ah, you mean he is civil and courteous.”

  “I mean that he loves me, madame.”

  When the Queen heard these words she knew that the girl had answered all her own speculations, that this was the reply to all those dreams and doubts which had teased her as she had sat in her enforced inactivity through the long days.

  Well, she was probably going to die so it did not matter. Life seemed to have ebbed within her. She looked drowsily at the girl who no doubt hated her, who accused her, of course, of the death of her father and her brothers — a vindictive family, the Huntlys, a heretic too, this stiff girl. Why had she allowed, even encouraged the marriage? Because of her eagerness to bind together the two men, Bothwell and Huntly, who might have been of service to her. How stale and far away all those tricks and shifts of politics seemed.

  She took the rosary and the watch shaped like a skull from her waist and held them tight in her left hand on which was the red wedding-ring.

  “Well, Jane Gordon,” she said pleasantly, “forgive me that I brought you here for a whim.”

  The girl dropped her stiff curtsy and was gone, and the Queen remained in the cushioned window-place and gazed over the city below the rock on which the castle was built.

  *

  The Queen lay quiet in her bed, waiting for death. She lay between the curtains embroidered with lions and lilies and imagined she was in some monstrous, regal catafalque.

  She was sorry for herself and her body which she had so loved and on which she had lavished such care, so soon to become dry and brown and ugly. She was sorry for whatever it was that had flamed so brightly in her, — mind, soul, or heart, that soon must be quenched. She thought with relief of Heaven.

  The priest waited in the outer room and she could smell myrrh mingled with the apothecary’s drugs and the dried violet root that she had told the midwife to sprinkle on the baby linen.

  She was quite detached from her life, which seemed now brief and rather foolish and without much meaning. She began to think, to distract herself, of the future.

  Her death would, of course, be Moray’s triumph. Whether the child lived or not he would do what he had always wanted to do — rule Scotland. Maitland, elegant, subtle, wise, would be always at his right hand, no, at his left — Maitland at his left half-secretly, and Morton the big bully, at his right.

  The Queen sighed. She felt a quiet affection for the country she was about to leave. It was really like a dark jewel, her barbaric northern kingdom. She remembered the feel of the dry, springy heather beneath her feet and the dizziness she had felt when skirting one of these hills and looking down a tumbling water-fall and the loneliness of those remote valleys, above which the shadows of moving clouds scudded like ghosts.

  Still! Moray was her half-brother, her father’s son. Perhaps he knew what they wanted, perhaps he would be able to rule them. She thought of her husband. What would his fate be when she was gone? Moray would sweep him away like a dead leaf falling from the tree in autumn, he and his greedy, anxious father and their followers. The Hamiltons would help too, they would be over the Border with what plunder they could take, and David would be avenged.

  She smiled sadly, remembering Stirling and what she had hoped from Henry Stewart, how he was to be her protection and light against her enemies. Ah, well! It had all gone wrong. She had wanted his beauty and his strength and his honesty. She had thought that she could arm and adorn herself with these qualities and virtues as she could arm herself with the corselets of linked steel, and adorn herself with strings of jewels.

  But that was over; he was nothing to her any more.

  She had wanted what Rizzio had to give, too — his quickness, his cleverness, and all that intense passion which she delighted to tantalize, which she had used to punish another. She had had that, too, and that was over.

  Her thoughts went further back to John Gordon and Chastelard. All over, and she left none the richer. There was only one bridegroom left for her and she did not love him.

  She was not in the least afraid. But if she had lived who would have been her next choice? She distracted herself from the growing pain that was overcoming her by turning that question over in her mind. Of all the men who surrounded her, who had the most to give her — Earl Bothwell? Was not he the man who had set her up higher than she had ever been, who might set her higher yet?

  Pain encompassed her. She thought of men on the rack, of women chained to the stake, of Gordon and the Frenchman kneeling at the block and she pressed her lips together so as not to cry out.

  “If David had been alive I would have made him play some music for me in the outer chamber.”

  She sat up with an effort and pulled aside the curtains stiff with the yellow lions.

  “Mary Seaton! Tell them to come to me now. Let the priest be ready outside the door.”

  She tried to sing a French song that Ronsard had taught her about the girl on whose grave was poured a basket of roses and a vase of milk, and she forced herself to smile as the creeping agony seemed to break her body in two.

  Mary Seaton, trembling with terror, came to the bed and the Queen stretched out a cold hand and took the girl’s fingers.

  “Mary, when I am dead, don’t let them forget that I am twice a queen. I want the lilies as well as the lions.”

  The midwife, important, anxious, entered the room with the French girls; in the doorway the priest and his assistant knelt regardless of the sneers of the Protestant Lords crowding in the ante-chamber.

  The Queen turned into her pillows and bit at her wrist to keep herself from crying out, and began to fight for her life and that of the heir of Scotland. She laughed to stifle her moans, and because these fools were kneeling to receive as their king one whom they secretly believed to be the child of the servant whom they had trampled to death.

  *

  Moray heard with deep satisfaction that the child was a son and that the Queen lived. He saw in this fact an assurance of his future policy and his future power. Neither the Queen nor her husband was of as much importance in Moray’s eyes as this child. He must be a Protestant, in his reign all trace of Catholicism must be swept out of Scotland and he, Moray, would rule without resistance.

  There was, of course, the Lennox faction to reckon with, who considered this birth their personal triumph, but Moray did not make much of that. The undoing of these pretenders to
the power, and Lennox’s own ambitions could be left to the folly of Henry Stewart.

  There were the hordes of Hamiltons, cruel and unscrupulous, but Moray did not fear them either.

  Then, the Queen herself — his calculations stopped there. He had stopped thinking of her, for he too had believed that she might die, so plainly had he read her actions of late. She had been most civil to him, her brother, most civil to her bewildered husband; she had played the prudent wife, the decorous Queen. She had never mentioned David nor spoken of recalling the Lords who had been banished for his murder. She, too, had suspended everything, held her hand — a woman waiting for her child.

  Moray could understand her motives. Until Scotland’s heir was born she could risk no scandal, no quarrels. With none of her own French relatives to support her, husband and brother must do so. In public she had deferred to her husband, she had made him extraordinary gifts, favours and presents had gone to old Lennox. To himself, Moray, she had been more than generous.

  But he was not deceived. Once the child was born and she was free of the burden of her responsibility she would show her hand again. Moray had been present at her interview with her husband when the Prince was a day old and he remarked them both, very curiously.

  The Queen had been so faint and wan, tormented by such a deep cough, so near death, that it had not appeared possible that there was any harm or guile in her.

  She told the two men, husband and brother, how sorely she had been handled, how nearly she had died, and Moray had shuddered and felt the tears in his own eyes, but the young King had stood stubborn and obstinate, carefully looking at her, shifting from foot to foot.

  Then she had taken the child, stiff in his swaddling clothes, and held it out between the curtains and called her God to witness that it was his, Henry Stewart’s, and none other.

  Moray winced that she should have come to this for there were many people in the chamber who could hear the declaration. The King, flushed and without replying, stooped awkwardly and kissed the child. But the Queen had not been satisfied. Goaded by his silence she had taken the infant and lifting the veil from its face, said in a trembling voice: