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

by Sarah Gristwood

  They walked on towards the rose garden, all three, and the scent and the colour came up to meet them. You have to make the best of everything, thought Seton, as Maitland, like a brother, gave her his left arm, and she walked in along with him, and with Mallie.

  Sixteen

  Seton set the final hairpin in place and the bright locks sprang lively to her hand. She was always first choice of coiffeuse for her Majesty. Sometimes, of an evening, the queen would encourage her to play; to twist and curl and take the hairpieces they had brought from France, and show her in a new way. Show her even to herself, maybe.

  That’s what drew Seton to the task, from the moment the mistress of the maids first put an ivory comb into her hand, and taught her to draw it downwards gently. It seemed a kind of magic. Oh, from practice they were all handy enough; but you have to believe to do it properly.

  You can tell a lot about somebody, when you do their hair, running the tresses through your hand, soothingly. At one time Seton had been able to tell, as she pinned the curls in place, or washed the queen’s hair in white wine and chamomile leaves, whether it had been a day of feints and frustrations, or one when she’d been able to be both Mary and her Majesty.

  These days, it was different. Now, Seton couldn’t tell. On the surface the queen was a woman gay in love; setting out from the door of her privy chamber like a galleon in full sail, her hand already held out for Lord Darnley’s kiss. It was easy to smile these June days – the first of the wild strawberries, picnics on the shore – and half the smiles were real, surely.

  She was supposed to be a young woman in love at last, these summer days. It was, thought Seton, what we wanted from her, and she had, she really had, always tried to give us what we needed from her, our Queen Mary. And if some – if John Knox – would not approve, then that just proved the rightness, surely?

  Every time the queen leaned a little closer into Darnley’s arm, as he helped her draw a bow at the archery – every time she felt his hands at her waist, as he lifted her from her horse – the queen must have felt she was striking a blow against Knox’s dour church, against his prophecies of doom.

  It’s just that sometimes, as Seton swept the hair back from the smiling face, and dusted the scented powder through it, carefully, she felt she shouldn’t pull too hard, or she might pull a mask away.

  *

  There’s no denying it, Seton thought a few hours later, Darnley had been difficult that day, and over, of all things, a puppy. Someone had sent the little creature as a gift to her Majesty, and if it was small enough to be adorable it was big enough be bold, thrusting a wet silken nose up into her hand for fragments of capon. Making her laugh, just as Darnley was trying to talk to her seriously.

  Something to do with his standing in the court, as usual, as if she hadn’t heaped honours on him already, and they could see the ghost of weariness pass across her face. The face that made Randolph report to England that she was secretly melancholy.

  Maitland knew all that Randolph wrote, of course. There’s nothing closer than a diplomat and a spy. But who had told Randolph the queen wept sometimes in her sleep? Seton couldn’t but think how Beaton looked at Randolph, almost like… Like the way she used to look at Chastelard, actually.

  Seton found she avoided conversation with Beaton, these days.

  So there the queen was, with the laughter dying on her lips, and dog hairs on her dress, when they told her Randolph himself desired urgent audience. Without looking behind her she passed the dog over her shoulder; if you’re her Majesty, you know there are always waiting hands.

  Seton tickled it under the muzzle, where the baby fur was still curly, and whispered it not to make more trouble that day.

  Randolph’s face was a blank, as he delivered the ultimatum. Not that he called it such, or even said that it was a message for the Scottish Queen, directly. But he bore orders, from their sovereign Elizabeth, recalling Lord Darnley and his father to the English court. Immediately. But this was the point of no return – and it had to come hard on the heels of a puppy!

  There could, of course, be only one answer, however they would couch it in the language of ceremony. Lord Darnley wasn’t going anywhere – what, throw this whole long business of his courtship away?

  But the queen had now to declare her hand. Had to say why she was keeping Darnley in her country. This meant a wedding – one soon, for safety – and if they had those preparations to start, it was never too early.

  Seton began to slide backwards out of the crowd, and out of the hall where no one was going to miss her, and snapped to a page to call the maids, for she wished to look over her Majesty’s wardrobe. Wedding clothes: they’d need to be taken out of their chests, and hung in the sweet air, and scattered with orris root powder, and have the powder beaten out of them again, and be hung up again for several weeks before they are ready. And this was a show they’d need to stage grandly…

  It was only a sudden wriggle against her breast told her she was still clutching the puppy.

  Seventeen

  A royal marriage isn’t just about clothes, but they are a good start. And the queen was determined this marriage should be as royal as if it were between two crowned heads, to celebrate some great peace treaty.

  She had given Darnley velvets, ermines – a cape that had belonged to dead Francois, and must have been packed by accident when they left the country. Feathered bonnets for his fools, cloth of gold to deck his horses, and all in all—

  ‘—a trousseau,’ said Fleming sourly. They’d all spent too many hours standing over the sewing women, and Fleming had never been fond of stitchery. The queen sent out one order after the other like sparks flying off a faulty firework. You couldn’t but think of a little girl dressing her dolly.

  *

  Maitland had passed Seton one day in the presence chamber, staring grimly at a servant who was brushing dust under the rush mats, instead of taking the whole mess away and replacing it with new mats that smelt freshly of hay.

  He was going to pass by with a hasty bow, but she put out a hand to detain him.

  ‘They can’t even do this tidily.’ The passion of suppressed impatience said she was not thinking only of some hapless servant, trying to scurry his way through the day.

  Those last weeks, Maitland had managed to keep his eyes veiled and his head low, the perfect Master Secretary. But now they both stood silent a moment, uncertain where safety lay.

  ‘It’s good,’ said Maitland at last, ‘to see her Majesty so happy.’

  Seton briefly ducked her head. Acknowledgement – no room so empty it couldn’t hold a spy. She couldn’t bring herself to speak – couldn’t put it into words even to herself, even to the other Marys.

  Maitland watched her and slowly that look of the teacher, that look she loved, melted the watchfulness shuttering his face.

  ‘I think she is happy. I do, Mary. I think she is happy in the ways a queen can be happy. She’s a little pleased for herself – she’s a young woman still, like the rest of you – and that can’t have been easy. And she is doing what she believes is best for her country.’ If there was a faint stress on that word, ‘believes’, Seton let it pass her by.

  ‘Don’t judge her too harshly,’ Maitland said after a pause. ‘Yes, I know, odd that I should be saying that to you. But if it’s the onlooker sees most of the game, well, I’ve been watching the court for many years and I’ve seen a lot of play.’

  The corners of his mouth quirked as Seton glanced up sharply. ‘Yes, I admit it, I’ve taken a hand too, occasionally.

  ‘What is it you think – that she’s fooling herself? That she should at least be honest, whether it’s all policy or whether she has a fancy for that long, hard, boy’s body.’

  He was trying to jolt her now and she looked up, startled, and Maitland, satisfied to have got a response at last, ducked his head to see her face more clearly.

  ‘But don’t you see, don’t you see, Mary, for princes honesty isn’t always a vi
rtue.’ He half-laughed under his breath, though the sound that came out was more like a sigh.

  ‘Like any other sort of player, princes go out on stage to play a role. They take the feelings of their heart in their hand and mould them like clay, so that what they show the audience is a careful sort of effigy.

  ‘This wasn’t the match I’d have chosen for her – as you know. But if she can follow a fancy and make it look like careful policy – or if she can marry a man with his own claim to the English throne, and then manage to make it look like a girl’s folly – well, then, good luck to her.’

  He bowed slightly, and left her as the servant’s brush swept near them again. But she could have added the words he didn’t speak openly.

  Good luck to her, for she’s learned a queen’s skills at last. But if the queen were learning to act alone, where did that leave her Marys?

  *

  Where it left them, it turned out, was with their mouths full of pins – ‘As usual,’ said Fleming, She was saying more these days, and saying it more sharply, as if her forbidden love had stripped her old silence and her grace away.

  But it was not in Fleming to be sour this day, in the soft light of the very early morning. Dawn came early, this far north, and they had all been up since break of day. They had scrambled into their own clothes so hastily that Seton could feel a fold of chemise rubbing under her corset, and Livy’s underlinen peeked out under the arm where her sleeve had been laced on too carelessly.

  The queen, though, stood motionless in front of her Marys with, on her face, the faint half-smile of the woman who believes she has won a victory.

  Skirt to stomacher, sleeves to bodices, the white veil of the deuil blanc floating above the black mantle only heightened her beauty. Pins to fasten that, too – more pins even than necessary.

  In a few hours, after the ceremony, each lord of note would take one pin out, to help strip her mourning garments away and leave her symbolically clad in little more than her petticoat, ready to be robed in colours for her new life with Lord Darnley.

  Lord Darnley – there, though, was the rub. Four weeks or near since Elizabeth’s summons to England had come, and just a week yesterday since they’d read the banns in St Giles’. A short enough time in all conscience, but time enough for more tantrums. His appetite seemed to grow with every new honour, like a child guzzling at the breast until it was screaming with colic. He’d drawn a knife – they said, in whispers too shocked for laughter – on the lord sent to tell him he wouldn’t get the Crown Matrimonial.

  It had been Davy Rizzio who smoothed that trouble down. That said something about his changed status, actually, for that lord, with his self-important frightened face, wouldn’t once have given Rizzio the time of day.

  Queen Mary had reassured Darnley. He might not have the Crown Matrimonial yet (never mind, hush hush, there there, you great baby…), but the heralds would still proclaim him king the moment they were married. (And if all he had was the empty name of king, no one minded that so badly.)

  The Marys turned away from each other, when they heard, so as not to voice the query. Would this marriage do? Would it, really?

  Eighteen

  There. It was done, Seton thought, with a mixture of relief and apprehension, easing her heel out of the embroidered slipper to rub a blister, surreptitiously.

  The queen was a wife again, and Darnley might call himself King Henry, never mind that he hadn’t stayed for the mass that concluded the Catholic ceremony. Never mind that they could hardly find a noble who’d been prepared to serve him as king at the banquet. ‘So many discontented minds, so much misliking of the subjects to have these matters brought to pass, I never heard of in any marriage,’ wrote Randolph gleefully. But despite all that, it had still been something like a party.

  Now Seton was glad to stand aside as they dressed her Majesty in cloth of gold, and to cede place to Livy. And looking at Livy’s bouncing health and her happiness – well, at least marriage suited somebody.

  ‘It will work, it must work,’ said Seton fiercely under her breath. But she was not thinking of Livy.

  *

  There had been the messages from the great houses of Europe, the gifts from the ambassadors – enough of them, anyway. Nothing from Elizabeth, naturally; and yet to Seton it seemed the English Queen’s dark watchful eyes, the eyes that stared out of her portrait, seemed to haunt the festivities.

  Alone in Queen Mary’s closet for a blessed moment, under pretext of putting those black and white garments of widowhood away, Seton slumped down on the window seat for a moment and tilted back her head, staring at the devices painted on the wall.

  The fleur de lys of France for the queen’s mother: well, that was done with now. The lozenge and the diamond: well, Darnley had won himself the gem. The Scottish thistle – and the Tudor rose of Queen Mary’s grandmother. England again. They couldn’t ever get away.

  Mary and Elizabeth had been like children on a see-saw for as long as Seton could remember. One rising up while the other descended. Who was riding high now? Was it Queen Mary’s victory that no one knew what she was thinking now, not even her Marys? That at last she could keep them all guessing, as Elizabeth had done so long and so successfully.

  Or were those dark eyes laughing, secretly? As if she knew something that the rest of them didn’t – something about Lord Darnley? Oh, but we do, said Seton silently to the English Queen. Yes, I’d wager – even her Majesty.

  She went back to join the others. They were almost done now, fitting the pieces of her new gown onto Queen Mary. In her carapace of stiff fabric and jewellery she looked like a knight going into battle. Which is what she was, really.

  Suddenly – it must have been sheer exhaustion – they’d all be better for the banquet – the queen’s figure seemed to Seton, hesitating on the threshold, less like a living woman and more like a puppet, a witch’s mammet, her strings pulled by… somebody.

  The living woman gave a cry, a squeal of real pain and outrage, half masked by laughing forgiveness and apology. Someone, accidentally of course, had stuck a pin into the Queen’s Majesty.

  *

  So he was good for something, anyway. That night they’d put the pair to bed; the queen a little aloof – the monarch and the widow, not a blushing giggling girl – and Darnley flushed and glossy, spiky with confidence in his own virility. There was hardly a man at court who’d wager a worn groat that he really understood what a king’s role was about, but this night there was only one job on hand.

  The maids bustled about helping the queen into her nightgown, the lords clapped Darnley on the back with all the old well-worn jests, in genuine fellowship for this moment at least, and, as he turned eager towards her Majesty at last, filed out to close the door, and leave them in privacy.

  The next morning the queen was up early, with an added briskness in her step and a hand on the shoulder for Livy, married Livy. She looked relieved, she looked satisfied but she didn’t look like a woman drowned in pleasure. She looked like one who had finished a job, and seen it completed satisfactorily. Or so Seton thought, then shook herself: what did she know about those pleasures, anyway?

  Strange really, that of the four Marys it was only one had known a wedding night, and that one Livy, who hardly counted, who would tumble in the fine velvet bed the queen had given her as readily as a peasant in the hay…

  All four would surely have been married by now, had they not been the Queen’s Marys. It was one of the things the Marys did not say. Better to follow the queen’s example and keep their own counsel, as the country people started to scythe the barley from the fields and autumn ripened the blackberries in the hedges, and so briskness was the order of the day.

  It was as if the queen herself had only been waiting to get her wedding out of the way, before tackling the problem of Lord Moray. Months now since her half-brother took himself off from court, the tatters of his English policy trailing behind him and pea green with envy at each of the favours heap
ed upon Lord Darnley. Maitland – so the queen had said to Fleming, with tart approval – may have been just as eager for an English match, but at least he knew to pretend to take defeat gracefully.

  But now Moray had moved beyond gracelessness, beyond anything that could be excused as all in the family. He was raising arms and if he and his friends didn’t say it was against her Majesty’s very rule, it was hard to see what else it would be.

  The queen rode out of Edinburgh at the head of her own army, with a steel cap on her head and at her side, of course, Lord Darnley. A fine pair they made, too, wand – straight and single-minded. As set on their quarry as a pair of hunters on a tapestry.

  It was like that march north four years ago, and yet it wasn’t. There were fewer nerves around this time, oddly; for all that Moray meant a more serious threat than any half-mad pack of Huntlys. Yes, and for all the fighting came closer this time, with guns sounding over Edinburgh’s very city.

  ‘They’re saying it’s more like a chase-about than a campaign,’ said Beaton – which meant, that was how Randolph would be writing of it to England – but Randolph was keeping quiet these days. Time and again the royal army rode out to confront a party of rebels, who simply melted away, only to bob up again somewhere else, like the old bad penny.

  Was the queen almost glad to have action in front of her? To be riding out with Lord Darnley? He showed to his best advantage like this – they both did, you might say. The crusader queen, on a quest to reclaim her sacred rights; the young warrior, chivalrously defending his lady.

  Who knew how he’d be in a real battle – no commander for whom troops would bleed and die. But luckily the rebels showed no sign of wanting to put it to that final test; and other proofs of his kingship would naturally wait until they’d finished riding side by side through the golden hay…