The Queen's Mary: In the Shadows of Power...

by Sarah Gristwood

  Extraordinary how you think one option is bad, until you see how much worse things could be. To his credit, Randolph managed to hold his voice steady – perhaps Beaton’s will held him up, invisibly. her Majesty Queen Elizabeth did not in the end – his voice did falter here, remembering how long the end had been – did not in the end feel able to decide about the succession to her throne until she herself had finally decided never to marry.

  Behind her, Seton felt rather than heard Maitland start, and a stifled exclamation from Lord Moray.

  Her Majesty’s face was completely blank.

  ‘I shall ride out hunting. Immediately.’

  *

  In the stables the grooms made long faces, and talked of the horses’ legs on the ice, and the huntsmen said it was too late in the day. At another time, the bustle might have made the queen laugh – as though she’d poked a stick into an ants’ nest and stirred. At another time, she might even have said something – sweetly, gently – about being sorry to cause them all so much worry. Part of being a queen is knowing when not to stand on your dignity.

  But now, clearly, the queen could think of nothing but those last months – years! – when Elizabeth dangled the prize in front of her, like a carrot in front of a led donkey. She rarely used the spur but now she jabbed her heel. And as the mare’s muscles started under her soft velvet skin, she did not even feel sorry.

  They didn’t not find, but it was no matter. Even if they found their quarry, no kill could quench the anger in Queen Mary. Seton, clinging to her own horse just behind, could sense what she was feeling.

  The queen felt stupid. Stupid as the stuffed grinning mannequin at the end of a jester’s stick, and just as tiny. Felt like a lapdog Elizabeth has petted for a moment, and then kicked away. Felt sick with rage and humiliation, and with that pain in her side that used to trouble her so badly.

  But at least she knew who to blame: Maitland and Moray. And herself, of course – gullible Mary, who thought she was forging two kingdoms’ destiny and turned out to be no more than a child making mud pies and calling them pastries.

  Well. In one thing they should not have her. The queen’s marriage was a matter for herself alone to rule: at last she saw that clearly. A girl’s husband is chosen by the men of her family, but she was man as well as woman, as any ruler must be.

  The queen let the mare slacken pace at last, and a sigh of relief came up, almost audible, from the courtiers behind.

  On the way back to the palace, dusk was falling. They were still all in a flutter there, waiting to see what the queen’s mood would be – waiting to see if she’d be carried in on a hurdle, with her shoulder or her neck broke, probably.

  The queen led the way straight to her own private rooms. She did not look at Randolph, waiting to catch her eye. She did not raise a finger to her Marys, but they were right there behind her, shutting the door to keep the others away.

  She went straight to the chest where their men’s clothing was kept, too impatient to stand there passively. She did not even have to say what she planned next. They were dressed, and Fleming was buckling the sword around Queen Mary’s waist when someone dared to knock at the door.

  Beaton turned a scandalised face. ‘It’s Lord Darnley!’

  The queen hesitated only a second. ‘Let him come in.’

  Her Marys, doubtful, only waited long enough to see her eyes widen before they obeyed. It was indeed Darnley, with Davy Rizzio capering behind him, and a kind of recognition in his eyes.

  The queen turned to face him – and if she had shown herself to the man naked, Seton thought, she could not have shown their lives ahead any more clearly.

  Fourteen

  The muffled sound of horses’ hooves galloping on sand – again – and Lord Darnley reined up before the queen, with his face aglow. Sweating, delighted, he looked like a boy, and it was as a boy that she encouraged him.

  ‘Again, my lord – again!’

  The very day after the snub from England, the queen ordered the court down to the shore at Leith, to watch Darnley – and the other lords – play at running in the ring. And of course it takes skill to hold your lance steady at a charger’s pace, and pass it through a small hoop, but really…

  So here they all were, with the wind whipping their hair, and it’s all very well for the queen, said Seton rebelliously to herself, she’s well furred, the rest of us aren’t so fortunate. Fleming looked positively frozen with misery – but then, the other thing the queen had done that morning was to send for Maitland, and be sure she did not receive him warmly. It’s he and Lord Moray who got most of the blame, for having pressed the English cause so ardently.

  So Maitland was sent away with letters, first to England, then to France. Her ladies couldn’t know exactly what notes the queen dictated, closeted alone, with only Davy Rizzio to play secretary – but if they hadn’t seen the score, they could all hum the theme.

  No more dancing to Elizabeth’s tune. A plea for French support for – well, surely for her marriage to Lord Darnley.

  *

  At least – Seton thought, watching the chilled foreign ambassadors watching the smiling queen – at least it was Davy passing the napkin to mop Darnley’s face, and pouring the ale for him – not her Majesty. Davy laughing as he brushed the wet sand from a rock, and called to a servant to bring a cushion, so the victor could sit comfortably.

  The queen was looking at Fleming, not unkindly.

  ‘Take a cup of hot ale yourself, cousin,’ she said gently. She doesn’t say: ‘Maitland will be back,’ thought Seton. She doesn’t say: in the end I’ll forgive him. She doesn’t even say – which is probably the surest – that you, Fleming, give me my best grip on our Scottish Machiavelli. That because he loves you, he’ll obey me.

  But Fleming’s pale face did lighten, just perceptibly.

  Suddenly Seton saw them all as pieces on a gaming board, and realised what a shifting of places this latest change in policy must bring. Moray and Maitland out of favour; all those who are for Lord Darnley in, and George among them – one good thing, anyway. Darnley would have it all now, for sure; and he knew it – a spoiled boy let loose in a pastry shop.

  But as the queen went to offer her congratulations, a warm and determined smile on her lips, Seton couldn’t but be glad to see her hand trail over Fleming’s shoulder, lightly.

  *

  It seemed to be nothing but games these days, and not just the great game of diplomacy. At Stirling one showery afternoon the queen, laughing, allowed Lord Darnley like a child to snatch her hand, and tug her towards the billiard table.

  ‘We shall make it a doubles match,’ she declared, her bright eyes dancing around, imperious as she should be, as she still was towards everyone but Darnley. ‘Beaton and – yes – Master Randolph, against we two.’

  The English envoy looked a little confounded, as well he might. On the one hand, such a sign of favour was welcome; the first he’d had in many a long day. There are a great variety of tools in diplomacy. On the other, to have himself and Beaton coupled so publicly…

  Beaton’s smooth face was impassive as ever as she glided to the table, gracefully. The match was a hard-fought one: anyone might have thought the queen and Darnley would be the more able players. But it was Beaton and stout Randolph who were the victors.

  Lord Darnley’s face was flushed, his full lips drooping. It was he who had set the stakes so high, and he who had to hand over the winnings, for the whole court to see.

  ‘Well, let’s hope that’s not an omen. England winning, I mean,’ Livy added, unnecessarily. It was good to have her back at court after her honeymoon, and voicing the thoughts no one else would say – though Seton was glad it was in her ear only.

  A tiny movement behind them made her turn. It was Lord Lennox, Darnley’s father, taking pains to catch his sulky son’s eye; and whatever signs of displeasure Darnley might have given, he managed, chidden, to choke them down. Later, they all admired the ring and the brooch of aga
tes he gave to Queen Mary.

  *

  ‘D’you suppose his father wished it on him? Shut him up in a room full of spotty urchins, maybe?’ The others were impressed Livy still had the energy to giggle. Three weeks of royal sickroom visits had taken the energy out of everybody.

  He’d only fallen ill, hadn’t he? –Seton thought. Lord Darnley, that is. Right after they got back to Holyrood, and the best thing he could do, really. His weakness makes him a child again, and no mother really minds if her child sometimes behaves badly.

  It was measles, the doctors told her Majesty, so he was wearing a mask to hide the spots whenever they visited, which they did every day. The queen felt his forehead – through the mask – and spooned him broth and stroked his hair. She had even combed it for him, today.

  Seton struggled not to catch Beaton’s eye as she carried the comb away, but Beaton was looking at something no one else could see.

  Fifteen

  ‘Davy?’

  He stopped short at once, and swung round into his bow, his ever-ready smile flashing out, questioning. This was a good chance, the best, to speak to him without the rest of the court crowding round, but now Seton found she was not sure what to say.

  He knew it, of course. Part of Davy’s charm was that he did always understand when a woman was struggling.

  ‘Mistress Seton – you permit?’ Deferentially, he offered her his arm and turned their steps back, away from the palace again, along the raked sanded path towards the gardens. ‘It is,’ – his accent made it ‘ees’ – ‘still a beautiful day.’

  ‘You ’av – have – some difficulty?’ Once no difficulties would have been Davy’s business, unless they concerned the reading of a bar of music, or the precise serving of a foreign dish, maybe. But now there was no matter at court so great you might not find Davy’s fingermarks on it. And that was the difficulty. Even Randolph had been writing home about it, telling a gloating Elizabeth that it was ‘heart grief to many that see their sovereign guided chiefly by such a fellow’.

  But how to say that gossip was spreading? ‘They found Lord Darnley in bed with Davy,’ was how Beaton, her eyes downcast onto her sewing, had put it to Seton, bluntly. Say that to Davy and he’d fling up his hands and open his dark eyes wide.

  ‘Naturalmente! Of course!’ Puzzled, then flushing slightly. Half the court shared beds with the other half. There were never enough places for everybody. ‘You are not suggesting…?’ No, of course she was not suggesting an offense the church still punished by death – not exactly. But the story that Scotland’s future king chose as his closest companion a mere Piedmontese musician – that he was in thrall to a jumped-up secretary – that was as bad, or nearly. And even harder to say.

  ‘Can’t you stop him drinking so much, at least?’ was all Seton managed, lamely. ‘Couldn’t he be less…less…’

  Davy didn’t pretend to misunderstand her. ‘Less like Lord Darnley?’

  He dropped the arm he had taken, but walked on beside her. The gardeners in their leather aprons were still out there on their hands and knees, tidying the last of the Lent lilies away, but Seton stared at them unseeingly.

  ‘I do not think you understand, my lady.’

  ‘Then,’ – and he could see she was sincere, almost desperate – ‘explain it to me.’

  ‘If you ask why Lord Darnley is as he is, mademoiselle, then you should ask the mother who spoiled him. Taught him that the world had deprived him of his blood inheritance, his royalty. So now his wanting is his whole world, like a two-year-old whose toy has been taken away.

  ‘He can play the courtier’s part long enough to get what he wants – his father tutored him in that much – but those games are for her Majesty. For the rest of us, he values only those who promise him what he wants. Who treat him as though he were indeed a king, married to a queen, and with the Crown Matrimonial on his head already.’

  ‘If you know so much about him then why—’ a sharp jerk of Davy’s head interrupted her, with a quickly lowered glance to show he knew this was still bold, from a secretary to one of the queen’s own ladies.

  ‘Why do I not – what? Reprove him? Stay away from him?’ His eyebrows said it: hardly. ‘Tell him that to be royal is not just to have? Talk to him of the good of the country? I’m not sure he wouldn’t turn a dagger on me.’

  It was not a joke, not entirely. There had been tales of how Lord Darnley, thwarted, could behave. Not that violence made him so unusual, among the Scottish nobility.

  ‘Surely, after all, it is to the good that he should marry her Majesty,’ Davy said gently. ‘Since she has to marry, who else is it to be? No. I stay close. I try – once his wants have been satisfied – to guide, to soften him, by degrees.

  ‘And, besides—’ Seton saw he was no longer looking at her. Instead, his eyes were fixed on the great bulk of Arthur’s Seat. The sharp jut of rock seemed like a blade. It was as if something had sliced away the curled and dapper Davy they all knew and laughed at from the man who stood quietly before her.

  ‘Besides, I too know what wanting means. I came from nowhere and I have come far. But it gives me – a sympathy.’ He squinted against the last of the sun, as if to see Seton, too, more clearly.

  ‘It is different for you, of course, Mistress Seton. Born to one of the first families. Yet, all the same, always two steps behind her Majesty…

  ‘What is it you want, my lady?’ He paused a second, but she could not answer. He bowed again, and walked briskly away.

  *

  There was a grove of trees that Seton went to in the gardens, when things inside the palace got too much. The tall trees were still bare, but with the buds, when you looked for them, visible on the branch, and the gardeners had already carved out the paths of a grassy maze into the a slow carpeting of emerald below. The cream of primroses gleamed among the trees, but somehow the spring evening could not reach her.

  The steps of the dance were moving them all on again, facing each other from different positions. Could she go on following where her brother George led? Was she still sure it was so right for the queen to marry Lord Darnley? With Moray gone from court, with more stories of Darnley’s weaknesses every day?

  The queen knew what she wanted. So did Fleming, even if Maitland was still away. That left Seton – and Beaton, maybe.

  She had walked so long, the light was fading as she went back to the palace under a harebell sky. It was growing chilly, but blue puffs of mist rose from the ground, as if the very soil was burning quietly.

  *

  Yes, but you can’t stay gloomy forever. Not when it’s spring, and warmer at last, and you’re still not yet twenty-three—

  ‘—not even you, Seton!’ Fleming said. But she was too happy to say it sharply.

  Every day had been a party recently. There’d been Lord Darnley, dressed in velvet the colour of the primroses dying in the lanes (‘To match his hair,’ said Beaton cattily.) demanding an evening when dresses, songs and food were all in the Italian style – ‘Davy can show us – can’t you, Davy?’ Lord Darnley declaring they should all ride out early, like the knights and ladies of King Arthur’s court, to pick the May blossom on a chilly May Day.

  Darnley had ordained (oh yes, he could give the palace servants orders, sure they’d be obeyed) that the fires burn sweet applewood for their return, with a hot wine served to his mother’s recipe, as if the pleasures of night-time had melded into day.

  If Darnley weren’t the mover behind a festivity, then he was still the excuse for one. That, Seton decided, was the point of Lord Darnley. Even Maitland had come back in the middle of May. Seton had seen him from the window, climbing down from his horse as if it were a rock face, so worn that even the points of his doublet looked weary. It seemed even his disapproval of Lord Darnley was a thing of the past, and the only one to hold out was Lord Moray.

  Seton found Maitland with Fleming in a window seat one day and silently, without fuss, they made space for her. The air from the casemen
t was coming in sweet, and Maitland gestured at it: shall we? Her Majesty was out riding with Lord Darnley and there was a sense of holiday.

  On the sandy path outside he gave an arm to each of them. Seton could feel the prickly plush of his doublet beneath her hand, and the hard edge of the gold embroidery.

  From a child, she never could leave well enough alone, or so her old nurse said. Maitland was never a portentous man: when he said the queen was lucky, the weather seemed set fair, there was no reason to suppose he meant anything else but the sunshine of the day.

  It was Seton who burst out to know what he meant, that what was he going to do, that for all he was back at court they could all see her Majesty didn’t trust him really…

  He held up his hand in warning, half-smiling, as if to a child, ‘Hush, now. Hush, Mary.’ No one but Seton’s family used that name to her. But perhaps to him Fleming was ‘Mallie.’

  ‘I fulfil, do I not, all the functions of Scotland’s State Secretary?’ Maitland the pedant: they nodded, obediently. Everyone knew he had been so much more than that. And – yes, they saw it – would be again, maybe.

  He continued, as if he knew they’d understand: ‘I hold, I will always hold, by the middle way.

  ‘Do you sail, either of you? Well, Mallie, I know you don’t.’ Dumbly, Seton shook her head, remembering those two terrible sea voyages. ‘We must all go some day. There’s nothing like a pleasure boat on the Forth, on a fine windy day.

  ‘But when you’re in a small boat, and the seas grow higher, sometimes you have to hold hard, as sailors say. Keep the tiller steady, with only the smallest movement of your hand to show the craft the way. It looks as if you’re doing nothing, and it’s harder by far than tacking – oh, I’m sorry, than throwing yourself hard to either side. But sometimes it’s the only way.

  ‘The best must be made of everything.’ He didn’t say, ’even Lord Darnley’. Instead he smiled, turning to Fleming and then to Seton. ‘At the moment, that seems quite easy.’