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

by Sarah Gristwood

  The soldiers had gone through the place like scavengers through a midden. Every chest had been emptied of its contents, so that the queen’s chemises and petticoats were scuffed underfoot. Powders and lotions from the dressing table had been flung down and ground into the mats. If these men followed John Knox’s creed, they’d hate the tools of beauty as if they were the devil’s spawn. Their betters had long since carted the queen’s jewels away, but a broken silver locket lay half-hidden by a torn-down tapestry.

  Seton stared at the locket, knowing it. Once the queen’s own property, but then given as a gift to… Beaton had been wearing it, the night the queen told her she must marry. Had Seton seen it again, as her new husband took her away, to his grim castle by the inland sea?

  If this were indeed the same locket, there should be a miniature of her Majesty inside – Seton tugged at the catch with fingers exhaustion made clumsy, and then felt the taste of the herring rise greasy in her mouth.

  The delicate painted face, with its arched brows and curved mouth, had been scratched through again and again, with such force as to tear the parchment below. Some spiteful soldier, some fanatical Protestant among the looters? Without knowing quite why, Seton stooped and put the locket round her neck.

  And then it began.

  *

  She hardly knew what was happening at first, it came so quietly. Like a trickle of dirty water under the door, when the river swells beyond its banks. The same stealth, the same inevitability. It was as if the ordinary Holyrood room were beginning to draw its skirts away and shrink into the shadows.

  Suddenly, with as numbing a shock as if she’d dived into icy water, Seton wasn’t in Holyrood any more.

  She was in a sparse grey chamber that made castle rooms she’d known before seem homely, where the draughty window slits hissed with the sound of wavelets on pebbles and a man and a woman were quarrelling, though she couldn’t hear the words clearly.

  The woman looked up, and Seton saw Beaton’s face wrenched with hatred. She saw Beaton – she was Beaton. Or, thought Seton afterwards, Beaton was me.

  Seton could feel the bitter emotion in that room in her head, the anger and the misery. But something other than the quarrel with her husband held Beaton’s attention now, and Seton felt a will stronger than her own bear down, crushingly. Peine forte et dure, they call the punishment, but it didn’t need rocks piled on her chest – she felt the very air press down, blotting out her own identity.

  She was drowning, yet she felt the scorch of something fiery. No! – she wouldn’t let it—

  She was fighting for control of her own mind as you’d fight to control a bolting horse. Won it, but only the way a wrestler wins a bout, with an effort that left her sick and dizzy.

  It had lasted – Seton didn’t know, a few seconds, an age? – but she was back in Holyrood, back in her own body, and with her own fury rising up in her like bile.

  Afterwards, she thought that it was her own fury. To say anything else would be just a fairy story, to take some of the guilt away.

  She thought of Beaton’s face as she walked up the aisle to marry a man she didn’t love. Fleming forced to see her husband and her friends face each other across a battleground; Queen Mary, throwing down into the dust a life they’d all fostered like a hothouse flower and the wreck of everything they had dreamt – Maitland, George, other good men, the Marys.

  Unable to bear her thoughts she flung around, so sharply her sleeve sent the ornaments crashing from a table. Found she was pacing the four corners of the room like an animal caged. Had the strangest feeling still that Beaton paced beside her, her feet spelling out a pattern Seton could not see.

  *

  What brought her up short was the sight of herself in the shattered remains of a great mirror, white, with huge shadowed eyes and a snarling mouth. It was as if for the first time she were seeing herself clearly, and what she saw was a stranger’s face.

  The locket was still round her neck and she raised a hand, meaning to rip it away. But a lifetime’s training doesn’t vanish easily. Automatically, instead, she knelt to pick up the scattered ornaments, taking hold of the first thing her eye lit on. It was a small brass bound casket, and, opening it, she saw a familiar writing. This was how the queen makes her curling letters – Seton had stood behind her often enough, while she dashed off her notes.

  But these were letters from a woman to a man who had her in thrall. ‘I am so far made yours that what pleases you is acceptable to me, and my thoughts are so willingly subdued unto yours…’ Reading them now, amid the wreckage the queen’s subjection had wrought, Seton stared down with a distaste that hardened slowly to a cold fury.

  *

  She didn’t know to whom Queen Mary had been writing. Bothwell or Darnley, it hardly mattered, really. One mistake of a man or another; murderer or mannequin; a matched pair, when you thought of how they served as consorts for a woman who really hoped to rule her country.

  Now Bothwell too would find he’d get his fingers burnt for getting to close to the fire around Queen Mary… Burn the whore, they’d cried in the streets of Edinburgh last night.

  Aghast, Seton pulled herself up. These weren’t her words, her thoughts. They couldn’t be.

  But it was as if every doubt she’d ever had was suddenly raging free. Every doubt: since Kirk o’Field, since the river before Dunbar, since they’d had to stand behind the queen again as she married that man in a heretical, Protestant, ceremony.

  For four months, Seton had been choking down her uncertainty. Telling herself that in a changing world she had just one duty, to a mistress who – however rash, however misled – was innocent of the slurs of her enemies.

  Now Seton stood amid this wreck of a royal room and looked at the remains of that long loyalty. The talons of pain had her in their grip, and she felt the rupture deep in her own body.

  But what wasn’t her own was that hatred. Not even now, with the fear rising that every second of her life had been a lie.

  *

  The broken door was pushed roughly open, and two men were standing there. One, she saw with a spasm of loathing, was Morton. Of course, Morton. The other was Maitland, and while her loathing of Morton was hot and pure enough to warm her, so much lay between Seton and Maitland that the silence was deep as the sea.

  ‘Where are they?’ Did Morton say it, or was that just in Seton’s head? Surely Maitland must have said something to make sense of it all – ‘Her Majesty’s letters? We need to see the queen’s letters, Mary.’ But if so, it was muffled, flattened like something in a dream – that dream-like certainty, as to what they wanted. And Seton moved like a figure in a dream, or a puppet, stiffly – as if someone else were manipulating her body.

  Stiffly, she felt her arm rise, the letters still clenched in her hand so tight the knuckles stood out white. It was as if some voice – no, not voice, there were no words – as if someone were inside her, commanding her body.

  That someone turned her away from Morton, her body rigid as a soldier on guard duty. If she’d had to see his red-whiskered face she couldn’t have done it, but it was to Maitland that she handed the queen’s incriminating letters, dumbly. And looked up to see her future in the compassion in his eye.

  It was only a moment’s work. But sometimes a moment is all it takes, to do something you’ll repent for eternity.

  Thirty-five

  There had just been too many crises, Seton thought a few weeks later. They’d gone down into the void, and painfully clawed their way back up again – feet slipping in the mud and the earth matted under their fingernails – and then it all began again. Just plain too many times.

  Too many times thinking that now – now the troublemaker was gone, now the danger was over – it would be all right. But all right wasn’t the measure of queenship. Maybe all right, all over, wasn’t your aim when you were trying to rule a country.

  Maybe there would be a different future for Queen Mary; another chance, on this throne or another.
England’s Elizabeth had been touched with scandal as a princess, hadn’t she? Touched with treason, imprisoned in the Tower, and what was Lochleven compared to that? Just a grey castle on a green island nestled in a lake, one they’d gazed at across the water once, as the gay court party rode by. Romantic, even, if you wanted to see it that way.

  But I don’t care, Seton thought. That’s the point. I don’t care if there’s another future for the queen – or for me. I just want to be, if be I must. Concentrate on putting one foot in front of the other, on lifting the spoon to my mouth and tasting the food given me, and not thinking, not thinking, not thinking about letters, or Maitland, or Queen Mary.

  *

  She hadn’t needed to send word to George in the end. When news reached him that the queen was taken, he’d come at once to Holyrood to fetch her, and the warmth of that thought crept through the blank chill that seemed to wrap her, these days, like the glass jar an apothecary used to hold a precious specimen.

  One foot in front of the other: all she seemed to do, that first week back at Seton Palace, was to pace, like a beast in a menagerie. Like a nun round a cloister, since she’d chosen the walled garden for her walkings. She seemed to have it to herself, though there’d be work to be done – roses to be clipped, the herb edgings to be trimmed – these fertile June days.

  Later, she realised Isobel must have told the gardeners to stay away. They’d have cursed, as they laboured long into the light summer nights – another tiny mark to put down on the ever-growing score against Queen Mary.

  *

  Something in her had been stopped, like a dead baby inside a living woman’s body. Now it had been ripped away. She was empty, but she knew soon she could be free. Her skirts trailed heavy in the early morning dew, and though the peacocks cried at her, hopeful of food, she gazed at them unseeingly.

  She did think as she walked – couldn’t help it, in the end. Of France, and of Fleming and – surprise – of Livy. Not of Maitland; and oddly enough that came naturally. The steps of the dance had carried him away. Was this what Elizabeth had felt, when she began to call herself the Virgin Queen? After Dudley?

  She did not think of Beaton. When that thought came near, she’d snatch at an oily head of lavender so that the scent could drive the thought away.

  *

  It was as if her past paced with her round the garden – even the ghost of the mother who’d long ago left the Seton clan. The mother who’d sent her away. One day, catching a glimpse of her mother’s black curls across the lawn, she even started forward – but of course it was Isobel’s face beneath the dark hair, smiling at her, sympathetically.

  Queen Mary had a motto taken from her own mother, the old regent. In my end is my beginning. All the queen’s ladies had learned to prick it out, in the embroidery they did for her Majesty. Even Lord Darnley had used a phoenix rising from its own ashes on the jewel he gave her Majesty… Much good had it done him, poor stupid boy.

  But sometimes Seton thought she felt the first stirrings of that bright fiery bird rising from the ashy void within her and stretching its new-hatched wings.

  *

  She didn’t think of Beaton but there was something she did do, one day. She set out down along the shore to visit old Bridie. The grooms offered a horse but she waved them away – didn’t care so much for riding, since those last rides with Queen Mary.

  Though the walk was a long one, she had an urge to stride through the sand dunes where the curlews cried, to feel as if for a moment she were running free.

  It could have been any courtesy visit to her old nurse, bringing a cheese or a gift of preserve from the big house – but the old woman didn’t take it that way. Before a word could be spoken she pulled Seton inside, peering into her face with eyes long gone rheumy.

  ‘Eh,’ Bridie said, half under her breath, ‘she shouldn’t have done that, she shouldn’t really.

  ‘Come here now – sit you down, dearie.’

  Gently, she tugged Seton towards a carved three-legged stool and Seton was glad to sit down, suddenly weary almost to death – as if the ghosts of all that had happened in the last weeks had risen up, some tugging her skirts like fractious children, others standing before her, threateningly.

  Through the scent of the herbs on the fire that Bridie always kept burning, she could hear the old woman crooning what sounded like a litany, or a lullaby. Then, from behind, Bridie’s hands on her temples, firm and heavy for her frail bent figure – and the clamour around them seemed to die away.

  Back in that room at Holyrood she’d torn Beaton’s locket from her neck, when Maitland had gone, and flung it hard away. But now, in the hollow of her throat where it had rested, she felt a burning, briefly.

  She heard the old woman’s voice, though it may have been only in her head. ‘You have to name the evil. You have to name the evil to drive it away.’

  Seton struggled to understand what was wanted of her but it was as if she were under deep water, trying to struggle her way up from the bottom of the sea. One word swam through into her head. Not ‘Beaton’ – not, God forbid, ‘the queen’, nor ‘Mary’, but…

  ‘Jealousy.’

  Blindly Seton turned and stared up at Bridie, almost like the child she’d been. Yes, that was right, that was the evil. But whose? Beaton’s jealousy of the queen or—

  ‘Hush now, dearie. Don’t try for the sense. You always were the one for thinking too much, but it’s not everything that works that way.

  ‘Get you home. It’ll be dark soon, and ye’ve to walk a fair piece, along by the sea.’

  *

  She’d been in the cottage longer than she realised. The light had changed, and the dying sun sent pink streaks across the sky.

  The water was dark but with a glitter on it to recall the tales Bridie told, of bright caves in the rocks of her western isles and caverns and palaces under the waves. The very dunes seemed to have shifted shape – or perhaps just the last great storms had wrought the changes and she’d simply been in no mood to notice earlier in the day.

  That’s why I’ve never been sure about the sea, thought Seton, suddenly. For a long time now she’d looked for constancy. But now it was with a growing sense of hope that she strained her eyes out towards the sandbanks that rose from the water, where the fat grey shape of a seal heaved itself over to swim away.

  Bridie had used to tell her stories of the seal people. For a moment in this strange new mood of childhood, Seton could almost imagine a sleek dripping figure with smooth skin and dark hair rise out of the water against the setting sun.

  The light was fading faster now, and Seton turned her steps and began to hurry, as the terns that nested in the dunes dived angrily at her head.

  *

  It was the next day her brother joined her in the garden, when the air was warm and close, and the fading summer light grew heavy. His voice dropped leaden as a weight – the lords were moving against the queen, pressing for an abdication in favour of her infant son.

  ‘God send it gets no worse, Mary. Though that’s not a thing I ever thought I’d have to say.

  ‘But it seems they’ve got some sort of letters, letters to Lord Bothwell. Showing her to be – well, not the kind of woman for a throne, anyway. Letters saying they were sinning together long before Lord Darnley—’

  He broke off, looking sideways at his sister. As if to say: you were there, you can tell me.

  Then, she saw his eyes change as he realised. He didn’t really want to know. With a small bow – he never omitted such courtesies – he turned back to the house and left her pacing there, among the granny’s bonnets and the rosemary.

  The message came the following morning, and through official channels, not from Queen Mary. Permission had been granted for Mistress Mary Seton to join her Majesty on Lochleven, where the queen would be most glad of her company.

  Later, she wondered about those last words in. ’Most glad.’ It was only they that gave the slightest clue. But courtiers were used
to letters that gave up their secrets slowly. Like the writing in lemon juice that darkens when held up to a fire. Like the secret message of a spy.

  It was the messenger who confirmed her suspicions. She took care to give the man thanks and money for his trouble, as she sent him back on his way.

  ‘Nobody told me anything,’ he said from the corner of his mouth. ‘But they’re saying – in the guard room – you know, my lady.’ She nodded him on. Of course she knew.

  ‘They’re saying, well,’ – he hesitated, ‘women’s troubles.’ In a rush: ‘They’re saying that she’s miscarried. Twins.’ In his voice was all the old fear. If God (if not some other) sent you two babes instead of one, He had picked you out, and you stood clear above the parapet, dangerously.

  *

  Seton went back to the gardens one last time, as if to say goodbye. She didn’t think of letters, far less of what else had happened in that room of Holyrood. Being around a queen – it taught you how not to think, when that was what was necessary. But it could not, she found, spare a new sense of vulnerability.

  She found she was thinking of childhood days, when her mother had vowed her to Queen Mary. Vowed her as surely as a nun taking orders; for her own sake (for here was advancement); for the queen’s sake; but also for the sake of her whole family.

  She was thinking of another time at Seton, when the springtime air was lighter and the green still fresher on the trees. That time with Beaton – after Chastelard – and they’d seen the hawks as they made their way back from the shore.

  She’d thought then that hawks yearned to be free. But after flying and finding, with the prey in their talons and the air beneath their wings, didn’t they choose to come home at the end of the day? Choose the hood, and the jess, and the perch in the darkened mew. Was that where their true freedom lay?

  She was no longer pacing the square of the border, Seton found. Her steps were headed for the great house, purposefully. She didn’t even go to tell George and Isobel she was leaving. There was nothing to say.