The Queen's Caprice

by Marjorie Bowen

  At last he rose up impatiently, refusing to explain himself, saying to the Queen “Adieu, madame!” and to the Lords “Adieu, gentlemen, this is the last of me.” Then he walked out of Holyrood and rode away with no one following him but his page boy.

  *

  That evening Moray and Maitland drew all the Lords in a bond against Henry Stewart as he had drawn them in a bond against David Rizzio. It was very secretly and carefully done, and Moray, with many smiles and courtesies, singled out from his noble friends the Earl Bothwell to be the leader in this enterprise, thinking to himself that the thing was simple — Henry Stewart had been used to destroy Rizzio, and by that crime himself; Earl Bothwell could be used to destroy Henry Stewart and by that crime himself. In this deed, as in that, he, James Stewart, Earl Moray, and Maitland, his pliant friend, would stand aside and receive no blame nor take any responsibility.

  When all were gone Maitland asked his friend: “And the Queen?”

  “Ay,” said Moray heavily, “all comes round to the Queen. But she is not so important now there is a prince; the weight of the crown is eased about her brows, Maitland.”

  “Yet she lives,” said the Secretary of State softly, “and I. for one, would not care to harm her.”

  “Who spoke of harm?”

  “Shall she know, need she know?” asked Maitland. “She truly loathes him.”

  “What does it matter if she loathes or favours him,” replied Moray, as if Henry Stewart were already dead.

  “What shall we do with her next lover?”

  “Bothwell?” whispered Moray with his chin on his breast. “You see then how things go, Maitland.”

  “He is not perhaps her lover yet,” said the Secretary delicately.

  “I don’t know,” said Moray, with a bleak look. “I have tried to prevent it. How can one tell, she is so brittle and so clever. And he has every art But it will not be difficult to be rid of him.”

  “And yet one needs,” smiled the Secretary, “some finesse. We do not now discuss an Italian groom but a prince, and a king. Bothwell, too, might be a match for us.”

  “No. He is reckless, blinded by ambition. A man of straw. Leave him to destroy himself.”

  *

  Lady Reres wondered about the Queen. She had become very familiar with her, replacing Mary Seaton and the French girls as well as the two Maries — Mary Livingstone and Mary Fleming, who had married — but she was still baffled by her.

  Often she would tell her stories and ask her questions. But the Queen would only smile, neither offended nor surprised, admitting nothing, only amused. Lady Reres saw that the Queen did not live with her husband. Under one excuse or another they were always apart, and the fat woman with her quick eye and ear for gossip, saw that the Queen tolerated the King’s enemies, but she could not get her to commit herself that she was one of them. Then the new favourite had tried to insinuate herself into the Queen’s confidence on the question of the Italian boys.

  What had really happened with David? What had been precisely the order of events on that appalling night in Holyrood? But the Queen had been silent.

  Then there was Giuseppe. What of him?

  He went about his business and the Queen flung him money and gifts as she flung her dogs and her birds sugar and titbits.

  Lady Reres praised Bothwell, and the Queen liked to listen, but how far would Bothwell rise in court? Everyone in the court and city looked askance at the stout woman with the bad reputation who was supposed to know so many secret ways of accomplishing evil. She was to help the Queen and Bothwell as Rizzio had been supposed to help the Queen and Henry Stewart.

  It was known everywhere that the King in a fit of fury had told Lord Moray that the Queen had been his mistress before she had been his wife. Had not Lady Reres herself repeated the rumour, to the Queen, and seen no change in her expression?

  Was the Queen, after all, a chaste, discreet woman? Nothing seemed to shame her, yet she seemed to live like a nun.

  Baffled and angered, the woman said at length directly: “You know, madame, that it is whispered everywhere that Earl Bothwell tries to win you with black arts.”

  The Queen lay on the reposing-bed in the Exchequer House. Lady Reres, walking heavily up and down, began to make jokes about love and honour and virtue. The Queen smiled, slowly waving a fan of black feathers to and fro.

  Earl Bothwell and his wife lodged in David Chalmers’s house that was at the end of the passage adjoining the Exchequer House.

  Lady Reres said suddenly, standing in front of the Queen and sticking her hands on her hips:

  “Perhaps now he is casting spells and incantations. You do not know what he can do with drugs and potions.”

  The Queen laughed, and there was a note of mocking in her laughter.

  “Do you think I am here for anyone to take?” she asked indifferently. “Do you know what my Lord Moray does? He plans all into a combination against my husband.”

  “How does that affect Your Grace?” asked Lady Reres, stopping in front of her.

  “I do not know,” replied the Queen steadily. “How can they free me of him? I see no way out. If they were to find some quibble in our marriage and dissolve it there would be a smirch upon the child. And if he were to go abroad as he threatens, it would be a great scandal. If he were to go to England, Elizabeth Tudor might help him to cause discord in Scotland.

  “And what for me?” she added, “what for me?”

  “I’ll fetch Earl Bothwell,” nodded Lady Reres, and walked, fat and ungainly, out of the room.

  “Can he give me good advice?” whispered the Queen after her, but Lady Reres did not reply.

  She told Margaret Carwood, who was in her pay, to let no one into the Exchequer House where the Queen rested during the humid autumn afternoon, and she went to David Chalmers’s mansion where Earl Bothwell was playing chess with his wife.

  He had his own furnishings in this house and the autumn sunlight struck on the backs of shelves of books of magic.

  Jane Gordon looked up when she saw the old woman on the threshold and she pursed her lips. She seemed both reserved and dispirited. She overturned the pieces on the board, mingled them together, knights, bishops, pawns, while her husband’s pale bright eyes stared menacingly at the fat woman whom he had paid so well and who had so far done so little for him.

  Lady Reres spoke and her voice was wheezy from her haste.

  “Come, there some’s important business for you. Come with me.”

  Without looking at his wife, who continued to gaze at the chess pieces, Earl Bothwell left David Chalmers’s house.

  “There are spies everywhere,” grumbled the fat woman, as the door closed behind them on Jane Gordon sitting alone, “and I swear I do not know her mind. But she’s alone now, and if you were to go down boldly and say you have some business—”

  The man nodded gravely.

  “I’ll go in and talk to your wife,” continued Lady Reres.

  “No. She detests you.”

  “Well, I thought for that reason—”

  “No!” said Bothwell again, and this time the woman was silent. She returned to the Exchequer House, and waddled to the linen closet where the French girls and Margaret Carwood were putting coifs, veils and linen napkins into presses and delicately setting gauze ruffs and collars on to fine tourets of gold wire hung with jewels.

  *

  Earl Bothwell entered the Exchequer House by another way from that Lady Reres had taken — a private passage from David Chalmers’s mansion led directly to the Queen’s apartments. He walked in like a master, not arrogantly but casually.

  The Queen looked up and saw him coming. This was the man — how could she ever have mistaken the others for him, with his gaiety and brilliance, above all his audacity?

  He came to the reposing-bed and stood looking down at her. She said under her breath without moving, smiling directly into his strange, light eyes with a meaning that had nothing to do with her words: “There are L
ennox spies everywhere and Moray’s too. Trust no one.”

  “Madame, I am your friend, if all the world were in arms against you.”

  “You climb high,” whispered the Queen, and he replied, emphatically:

  “Where you wish, as you wish.”

  She seemed to reflect a moment, then she put her hand under one of the cushions and drew out a key.

  “It is that,” she said, “of the newel staircase which leads through the King’s rooms to mine. But he is not there.”

  As she spoke, musing, she was picturing Patrick Ruthven, and the armed men and her husband with his arm round her waist, the overturned supper-board, that night of horror and humiliation. She saw the body of the trampled monkey and what she had done afterwards, how she had gone down and cringed to him, and how this man standing before her now had saved her.

  “There are spies and bravos everywhere, you know — I’ll never be free.

  “Spies!” she repeated under her breath, as one of her servants entered the room under pretext of closing the windows because the evening air was cold. When the woman had gone he said, still standing away from the Queen:

  “The King’s spies?”

  “He is no king unless I choose. Call him Lord Darnley. I am weary of him.”

  “He says that he will leave the country.”

  “He must not. Come nearer.”

  She enjoyed deception, yet she could be very reckless and sometimes took no trouble at all to avoid compromising herself. This suited the man: he wanted her, by any and every means, delivered into his hands. His conquest of her had been so easy that sometimes he had to remind himself sharply that this was a queen, who might give him a crown. Since her escape from Edinburgh Castle after the birth of the Prince they had been lovers and he had not had to tell her that he loved her; they had come together like the magnet and the steel. Without words, almost without glances, he had devised her complete surrender. Setting her above all hypocrisies, conventions, and petty fears, he had treated her as a creature whose right to all the delights of love was natural and unquestioned. The Queen had been deeply grateful for this. After the shamefaced, fluctuating passion of Henry Stewart, and the half-timid, half-insolent devotion of David, she rejoiced in this man who knew neither shame nor remorse, neither regret nor fear, who spared her protestations of fidelity, who neither offered nor exacted explanations.

  He had gained an unlimited power over her. Sometimes she believed that he had really enchanted her, bound her to him with magic potions and spells. Sometimes she sensed that the logical outcome of the indulgence of this intense, heartless, and wayward passion must be tragic; sometimes she felt, with a cold self-realization, the steady deepening of her own corruption under the influence of this dazzling lover.

  But she was happy, and content to leave her destiny in the hands of the man who pleased her better than any man had yet.

  Quite at his ease, he waited her will. He did not fear either the spies of the King or the bravi of Moray. His courage was of such an arrogant quality that he felt himself to be invulnerable.

  He considered the Queen a little curiously; it had cost him so little to win her that sometimes, despite his fearless self-assurance, he wondered what possible treachery might lurk behind her implacable frivolity. He, too, had spies on her; the Frenchman, Nicolas Hubert, nicknamed Paris, who had been in her service and was now in his, daily brought him news of her behaviour. So far he had learned nothing to his disadvantage — she was all his … but he watched and was very wary. Modern as she appeared, she might yet cherish some romantic illusions that would be to the advantage of another man.

  The Queen spoke. “Come to me to-night.” She pulled at his ruffled sleeve. “He must, somehow, be dealt with.” Her face was puckered with anxiety. “But I must not be involved, do you understand? Moray and Maitland, now, look out for them—”

  He touched her cheek kindly.

  “Leave all to me.”

  “But there is need for haste, and care. Come to-night.”

  She paused, allowing her thoughts to dwell with pleasure over those secret visits: every time that he came up the newel stairs through the empty apartments of the King, she felt David avenged. It was dangerous, and she liked that, too. They had only two confidants — Mary Seaton, with her inviolable fidelity, and Paris, the debauched boy whom Bothwell had brought from the French Court.

  Encompassed by danger, yet with a sense of security, the Queen loved to lie in her lover’s arms. She felt as if his strength passed to her, making her invulnerable.

  “It is perhaps not wise for me to come?”

  “But we cannot speak here. And he is in Glasgow.”

  “I am not free. I have to account for my comings and goings.”

  “To Jane Gordon?” The Queen whispered the name scornfully.

  “And to her brother, Huntly.”

  “A false race — you are tied to a false race, like I am—”

  He smiled to hear her speak of falsehood — as if she knew what sincerity was!

  She drew him closer to her in the dusk.

  “If I am not saved now, I am lost indeed. We must be rid of — them. You understand? And soon. He has almost denied one child. This time—”

  They began whispering, closely, in the dusk.

  *

  Lady Reres, triumphant in an outer room where she chattered with the French girls, inwardly congratulated herself that she had at last put the Queen into the power of Earl Bothwell. Even she had been deceived by the adroit methods of the man who had long despised and dispensed with her services.

  While the man and woman whispered in the deepening shadows of the Exchequer House in the castle on the hill, Earl Moray put safely in a secret place a green casket that contained the bond uniting all the nobles against the Queen’s husband.

  The King lay sick in Glasgow, in his father’s stronghold, where he had fled for protection against his enemies. Only in this place in all Scotland could he be safe, and even there he awoke sometimes in the middle of the night, trembling, and calling for his servant to come and sit by him.

  So many enemies! The Queen had recalled all those whom he had offended — the Douglases, Morton, Atholl, Argyll, Lindsay, and Maitland, all of whom were surely upon his track. Never would they forgive that betrayal, never.

  His mind, plagued and tortured by sickness, made dreadful pictures of recent events — at the christening, how he had been flouted, shut away in his own room, so desperate that he had cringed to her for a little favour, for a smile, a place of honour. But no, she had refused him everything.

  There had been masques, banquets, festivals, and a great papal ceremony, and he, a son of the true Faith, had had to cower in his room, alone except for his English servants, while Earl Bothwell had been the master of the ceremony and helped to entertain the guests.

  Then, as an excuse, no doubt, to get away from him, she had ridden to the Border, holding her sessions in the frontier towns, and at Jedburgh had fallen so ill that they thought that she would die. But she had not sent for him.

  When she had recovered again, and been able to mount a horse, what had this foolish, indomitable, exasperating woman done?

  She had ridden to Hermitage Castle where Earl Bothwell lay wounded from a Border scuffle. Sixty miles in one day she had ridden — there and back, to get a sight of him, so it seemed. She had, of course, been ill again from fatigue and those about her blamed him, her wretched husband, as the cause of her distress. She seemed to him to squander everything, even her own life.

  Maitland was with her, and Moray. What did they plan? They were often closeted together. He had spies in her household and the news they sent him was bad. She spoke of him harshly. She blamed him for all her misfortunes. She drew all those about her into a clique against him. The young man saw the future as bleak and terrible; if his illness had not stricken him down he would have fled the country, taken a ship with a few followers and gone anywhere to be free of this accursed Scotland.

/>   Lennox suddenly burst into the room. The Queen had arrived in Glasgow without warning.

  Henry Stewart could not speak for astonishment; he lay staring from his pillows. Lennox spoke hurriedly. He had been ill himself and could hardly hold himself upright.

  “It is true she gave notice of her intention, but I did not think she meant it. She has ridden from Edinburgh in this winter weather to see you, to make a reconciliation, she says, yet her mood I do not think is good. She has Livingstone, Lady Reres, and some others with her. She says if you would not come to her she must come to you. Too great a lady to be fastidious, eh?”

  “She comes to hatter,” whispered the young man from the bed, his face was surly and unresponsive. “She wants something from me. What?”

  “She can do no harm here,” said Lennox heavily. “Thomas Crawford went out to speak to her and she was pleasant enough. Who knows? she may have decided this is the only way — a reconciliation, eh? While you’re here, at least you’re safe, she has only a small escort. But if you like I will tell her you are too sick and cannot see her.” Henry Stewart did not reply. He found to his astonishment that the mere mention of his wife’s name and the thought that she was in the same city with him had dissipated some of his nightmares. Supposing she was to see him after all, be good to him again? But he hardened his heart and tried to remember all her faults and offences and to conjure up an unlikeable image of her. He was angry, too, because he looked ugly, covered with sores, results of the illness that had struck him down. He had never had anything that pleased her save his good looks, and they had gone.

  At first he said “I will not see her,” then, “Let her come,” then again, “No!”

  At last, Lennox, who indeed himself scarcely knew what to do, persuaded him that the Queen should visit him. The old man reminded his son that twice she had offered to send her physician, but to this Henry replied sullenly that no doubt she had her own interests to serve by that. There could be nothing good in this visit, they had been estranged too long. She had released all his enemies, she had openly favoured Bothwell and Moray. Yet he would see her from curiosity, from longing, from hope.