*
Just a day or two later came a message that the women were to pack their bags. Seton did so with the rest; but when the moment came, as they filed out of the door, the servant said, ‘Not you, mistress. My orders are, you stay.’
Sitting down on the bed again, Seton found she wasn’t entirely sorry – though from the pitying glances back over their shoulders, it was obvious none of the other maids would have felt the same. But looking out of the window, she saw only the women riding pillion away.
That meant the others were still there in the castle. Maitland – and Queen Mary. Over the next day or so, she found the conditions of her imprisonment – if it were imprisonment – were relaxed; though when she ceased pacing the four corners of her room, when she tried to go back to Maitland’s cell, they barred her way.
But the bought guard got a report through; his wound was healing nicely. They even let her send a message to her brother, reassuring him that she was well and no action was necessary – though Seton saw the captain stop the man at the gate, and quiz him on what he was to say.
It hardly mattered. She felt as detached as a player, acting the part of guest or prisoner, like someone in a masque. (Beaton, you’re the Queen of Love… Poor Chastelard. It seemed a lifetime away.) She’d grown so used to being there, in her one tower, she hardly tried to go beyond the courtyard doorway. Just threw crumbs from her breakfast to the birds outside, as if only they might ever fly away.
But one day came a knock on the door – a servant, not a soldier, with a low bow – and Seton knew. She knew. At last. He was taking her to her Majesty.
*
The queen looked hardly different – that was the first thing Seton saw. The auburn curls weren’t arranged quite as she would have done it, but Jean Gordon, Bothwell’s wife (and in all of this, where was Jean?) had trained her servants properly.
The queen did not look like a woman who had suffered, not that Seton wanted her to, precisely. But her blue velvet and fine lawn were what she might have chosen to walk in the gardens any Holyrood day.
But then she was on Seton’s shoulder, weeping.
‘Your Majesty, are you—? Did he—? Did he hurt you, your Majesty?’ But as Seton took her arms in a firm clasp, looked searchingly into her face, the queen dabbed her eyes and moved away.
‘No, no, it’s just— I’m just being silly. But what about you, Seton? It’s so nice to see you again.’ The queen sounded for all the world as though one of them had merely been away for a pleasure trip.
Baffled, Seton gazed at her. She didn’t know what to say. Perhaps it was the silence that drew from the queen a kind of honesty.
‘Enfin – I’ve been hurt worse. And it may all turn out for the best, you’ll see.’
Behind them the door opened again, and there stood Lord Bothwell himself, coming into the queen’s bedchamber as if he had the right, and grinning at Seton obnoxiously.
He moved over to put his arm around the queen. She shivered under his touch like a nervous horse, but accepted it in much the same way.
‘I told you once, didn’t I,’ he said to Seton familiarly. ‘Years ago I asked you who would stay in the end, and I told you it would be thee and me.’
*
After that, really, there was no point in pushing further. Seton felt that somehow, she had always known this about Queen Mary.
‘We’ll wed, of course,’ the queen threw out, when he had gone away. ‘It’s a necessity.’ Faced with this determinedly insouciant queen, Seton didn’t dare to ask, why necessary? Because you’d be shamed to say he raped you? Because you think he’ll help you run the country? There was one thing, though—
‘And Lady Jean?’ His wife, as Seton didn’t say.
‘She’s sued for divorce, on the grounds of his adultery. Some bonnie, black-eyed, serving lassie,’ the queen threw out. Maitland himself couldn’t have arranged things more smoothly.
‘It’s what the lords want – they signed a bond, he showed me. They got together at Ainslie’s Tavern one night, and they all signed a letter saying he’d be the best choice, since of course I must marry.’
‘All of them?’
‘Well, not Moray in France, of course, and Maitland and just one or two others stayed away.’
Silent, Seton began to move around the room, arranging the queen’s things more neatly. Unexpectedly, the queen herself joined in – what, had she had to learn to help herself these last few days? Or was it that speech was easier when your hands were busy? For the queen began talking – babbling, almost – of all the things Bothwell had said to her.
‘…how unfortunate he had been to find men his unfriends, whom he had never offended; how he couldn’t save himself from the conspiracies of his enemies. How he couldn’t ever find himself in surety unless it would please us to do him that honour to take him to husband. Protesting that he would seek no other sovereign, but to serve and obey us all the days of our life.’
The talking was the most of it, clearly, thought Seton with a flash of black humour. Queens – consort or regnant – are bought and sold by treaty, sold to a man convenient for their country. They hardly notice invasions of the body.
Then humour died away, as she understood what he was really telling the queen. What had really persuaded her. That they were two of a kind. That no one but he knows what it is to be Bothwell. No one but the queen knows what it is to be Mary.
The relief of that must have been like a warm hand reaching out through the cold distance that surrounds her Majesty. She showed herself to Darnley – Seton thought – but he had not the eyes to see.
Still Seton did not answer, and her silence was rewarded when the queen threw out—
‘I have to have someone to help me!’
There’d have been a time when Seton could have thought, you have your Marys. Now, she had nothing left to say.
That night, she dreamt of two writhing bodies.
Thirty-one
They stayed at Dunbar: Seton waiting on the queen by day, avoiding Bothwell, and being escorted back to her own room at night. Apart from that – the sense of being still half a prisoner – it was almost like being back in the marriage to Darnley.
No use to ask the queen when they’d be leaving: she didn’t have the ordering of this, all too clearly.
It gave Seton a shock to realise they’d been in Dunbar almost a fortnight. With Bothwell and a returned Huntly, and a pale and shaken Maitland helped up to the table, they could even hold some semblance of a Privy Council meeting. Another sign, for the world outside, of normality.
Briefly – as she watched the queen ride out, hawk on her wrist and Bothwell at her side – Seton wondered about that world outside and just how this would play.
What – in the council rooms, the kirks, and the taverns – were they saying about the Queen’s Majesty? Well, she’d know soon enough. Carelessly, as if it were nothing, the queen had tossed out the information they’d be setting out for Edinburgh the very next day.
*
The ride back to the city was like something from a nightmare. The sort where you’re running away from a fanged monster down endless halls, through a labyrinth, into a dark wood. You escape at last, with the help of some strong, helmeted rescuer, and then he slowly he begins to lift his visor and you see the sharp curved points of the teeth…
Bothwell was at the head of the convoy, of course, reaching out to steer the queen’s horse, his hands curved on the reins like the talons of a bird of prey. Glancing suspiciously from side to side, his beak of a nose challenging, questing through the crowd. Queen Mary was mounted beside him and seeming, yes, seeming delighted to be there. As if at last she’d found what she’d been looking for. As if she believed her natural place was at a man’s side.
She’d never quite understood about Bothwell – Seton acknowledged as she rode behind the queen, so close her pony tossed its head and tugged at the bit whenever the queen’s palfrey danced aside, at first an irrelevance, then a support,
but a man so much a cartoon of himself you didn’t quite believe in him, any more than you did the mythical beasts they carved on roofs to keep trouble away.
But then in the end it hadn’t come down to subtlety – hadn’t been about clever plans or conspiracies. It had come down to a man, and a woman, and what a man could do to a woman. Without her consent – or with it, maybe. Seton rode with a churn in her stomach and a swelling at her heart. A feeling she couldn’t bring herself to call rebellion like a pillion rider mounted behind her, like a baggage no one else could see.
Perhaps one person would have seen it – but Maitland was right at the back of the convoy. No litter or even a cart, but it had taken two men to haul and steady him into his saddle, and he’d managed a short laugh that ended in a hiss of pain, about being helpless as a babe in arms.
Oh well – Seton managed the ghost of her own laugh – lucky I never dreamt of a strong, helmeted hero, anyway.
‘Make your own deal, Mary,’ he’d said in their last conversation. ‘Do whatever it takes to survive. That way you win, because you’ll live to fight another day.
‘I don’t mean just survive in the body. They don’t send ladies to the scaffold – well, not often, anyway. I mean, survive here,’ – and his hand had touched her chest just lightly, but with nothing of the sexual in it. More like a knight touches the shoulders of the esquire kneeling before him, to admit him to the fraternity. And when you’ve taken your vows you obey them, you see?
That’s why, when the queen called Seton to help dress her that morning, Seton had done the job properly. Used the hare’s-foot to add rouge to the pale cheeks, arranged the queen’s own hair with as much care as if for a party.
Rummaged through the trunks for the best of the clothes they’d taken with them to… Stirling? That seemed a century ago, and a world away. And no one had been packing for a royal procession then, just for a mother to see her baby.
One gown of green satin, with the gold embroidery, was rich enough to impress, if you added the ermine cape (and it was still chilly, even if it was now May). Nothing too – well, too bright. Too light, you might say. After all, this was – wasn’t it? – a queen making a useful alliance, thoughtfully rewarding a loyal supporter. Not a light woman following her fancy.
*
Perhaps, after all, the green satin was a mistake – thought Seton as they rode, slowly and uncomfortably, up the hill towards Edinburgh Castle. Perhaps the people didn’t want to see the queen looking as verdant as the May. Perhaps, after all, they wanted her to – well, not suffer, precisely. But at least to show some sign that this wasn’t easy.
Bothwell hadn’t exactly been hiding his triumph, for all that at the West Port he’d dismounted, and taken the queen’s bridle, leading her with every sign of humility. It just made her look like his captive, actually. Word of Dunbar had crept out, of course it had. You can’t, if you’re queen, just vanish all those days.
So what was she doing waving at the unresponsive crowd? – or so the sullen faces of the citizens seemed to say. Why was she still wearing an honest man’s fortune on her back; powder and pearls? Why wasn’t she struggling to get away?
The people of Edinburgh were used to getting their own information, and to making up their own minds, independently. They knew that three days after the queen disappeared, the lords had gathered to form a confederacy. Confederate Lords, they called themselves now – Morton and Argyll and the others, sworn to kill Bothwell the ‘cruel murderer’, and to free the queen from her captivity.
So what were they to make of a captive who rode with one gloved hand at her captor’s shoulder? Who had a bond with him – you couldn’t but see it – the kind of bond that comes from just one thing.
Seton couldn’t blame them for their resistance, she couldn’t really. But then, as the horses clattered against the silence over the castle drawbridge, she saw a figure who chased all other thoughts away.
*
She’d known she’d be glad to see Fleming. She’d be glad to see any old friend – she’d be glad to see Livy. But Seton hadn’t expected this warm rush at her heart, this feeling of… call it safety. Once, she might have felt that way about the Queen’s Majesty.
It was a long time now she’d ceased to see Fleming as her royal cousin’s shadow; ceased to see first the auburn hair, and the air of being Somebody. She’d noticed instead the hint of a tilt, so unlike the queen’s long Guise nose; the supple slightness, rather than the height the queen carried so gracefully.
Now across the courtyard, in a flash she saw Fleming as Maitland might see her. Marriage had warmed and grounded her; the creature of the air had now come down to earth, with all its growing and its dyings, its ecstasy and its agony. Nothing at Dunbar had changed the way she felt about Fleming – quite the opposite, actually.
Now, as Fleming flashed past her without a glance, Seton watched her approvingly. Fleming was headed, as she should be, to the rear of the convoy, to where Maitland clung to his horse with the frozen air of one who knows that to come down from it will be more painful still. There’d be time for her own reunion later, time for women’s talk. Right now, as Bothwell lifted the queen down from her horse, her job was to pretend that all was in order, as she stood dutifully by.
*
Time, in fact, was what there wasn’t. They’d barely got into the castle, and their riding boots off, before word came of a naysayer in St Giles’ Kirk, just down the way. His name was John Craig, John Knox’s right-hand man, and who’d been asked to proclaim the banns for the marriage between Bothwell and the Queen’s Majesty.
He’d only gone and refused, hadn’t he? Fleetingly, Seton thought of Beaton, all those months ago, saying strange, how one can even think of Master Knox with sympathy. Knox’s man had demanded a writ from the queen herself, declaring she’d been neither coerced nor raped. The writ was sent the next day.
Of course Bothwell summoned Craig to account for himself, but give the Reformers their due, they didn’t scare easily. Craig laid out everything plain for all to see – ‘The law of adultery, the ordinance of the kirk, the law of ravishing… and last the suspicion of the king’s death, which the queen’s marriage would confirm.’
Couldn’t have put it better ourselves, agreed Seton and Fleming privately, afterwards. Not about Darnley’s death, of course. Nothing could confirm – as if it could be true! – that the queen played a direct part in that. But the suspicion was as lethal as the fact would have been; that much they knew. Maitland had taught them thoroughly.
Maitland was recovering now, in his wife’s care, and Seton heard the news with pleasure but without surprise. She had, she found, no desire to ask Fleming about her married life, the way they had with Livy. Who – just as the queen pardoned Bothwell for abducting her at Almond bridge – bounced back into court, ready for the wedding party.
Just in time for two great ceremonies, actually, as the queen, in her state robes on her gold throne, in the Abbey Kirk of Holyrood, raised Bothwell to the rank of Duke of Orkney.
It was Maitland told Fleming there’d been another, a rival party. The Confederate Lords in Stirling had staged a masque, with Bothwell tried and hanged for Darnley’s murder. They’d got so carried away, the boy playing Bothwell was almost suffocated in grim reality…
Of course Bothwell heard of it, yelled out an obscenity, but they none of them let slip a word within yards of the Queen’s Majesty. Sometimes Seton felt that royal apartments were paved with eggshells, they moved around so carefully.
On Wednesday, a week after Bothwell had his divorce, they signed the marriage contract. It said Queen Mary had been petitioned to marry by ‘the most part of her nobility’. It said the Ainslie’s Tavern bond had persuaded her that Bothwell was the man she should marry – should graciously agree ‘so far to humble herself’ as to marry. The humbling part was true enough, thought Seton in a moment of savagery, when the sheer fatigue of the pretence had broken down her guard, momentarily.
The wedding
would be the next day, early.
*
‘You do understand, don’t you, it will be a Protestant ceremony?’ Seton heard the speaker’s voice with dread. It was Beaton – ‘Lady Boyne, now,’ as she corrected a servant, smoothly – returned to court for the marriage.
Small wonder, of course, if the queen wanted the support, such as it was, of all her Marys. Yet she’d seemed almost surprised to see Beaton… but no one would come to court without invitation, and they all had a lot on their minds, anyway.
Just to get the dresses made in time, and the queen’s dress, especially. She’d wear the deuil – she was marrying as a widow, not a maid – just as she had when she married Darnley. But this flowing black was patterned velvet, so laden with gold and silver thread it didn’t look like mourning and they wondered if she’d able to walk for the weight. When she saw it, Livy whistled expressively.
‘A shame so few will see it.’ Beaton spoke almost pleasurably. But it was true. There was a long list of those who loathed Bothwell, those who wouldn’t watch Protestant rites, not to mention the boycott organised by the new French ambassador. Apart from the servants of the bride and groom, the four Marys would be almost the only ones to witness the ceremony.
Which is why Seton felt she had to be there. She wished she could have reached George for advice, but her brother was keeping well away from the court, and you didn’t put that sort of thing in a letter lightly.
So she stood in the Holyrood kirk, and she watched the alien ceremony, though every fibre of her being stiffened in resistance, and she looked in vain for the rings which, in the warm bosom of her own mother church, would have bound the couple for eternity.
(‘Popish superstition, so the Protestants say,’ hissed Livy out of the corner of her mouth. She knew these things now, some of her new husband’s relations having gone over to the Confederacy.)
When the barren ritual was over, they hastened back to the queen’s rooms, to dress her again, almost silently. Primrose yellow silk, this time, glistening like the rising sun, robes that said a new life was on the way. But no one had arranged any wedding party; put it down to the lack of time, rather than the general hostility.
The Queen's Mary: In the Shadows of Power... Page 20
