Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (57 page)

"What harvest half so sweet is, As still to reap the kisses grown ripe
in sowing? Kiss then, my harvest Queen, Full garners heaping: Kisses
ripest when they are green Want only reaping."

Mary, lounging at his feet, was caught in the golden net he cast.
Within that net, all was youth, beauty, understanding a homecoming in
her alien land.

At the end of the celebration, when the weary company betook themselves
to their chambers, Darnley motioned to Mary, whose eyes were nodding
from the spiced wine and the warmth of the fire. "I have a gift for
you," he said. "Come see."

Behind the arras there was a bulge, and Darnley went behind it and
pulled something out. It was an elaborate birdcage, made all of wicker
and painted with delicate gold patterns.

"It is a pair of songbirds," he said. "Chaffinches, captured before
the weather grew cold. A hen and her mate."

When she looked puzzled, he said, "Valentine's Day is when birds choose
their mates, is that not so? Thus it seemed a fitting present for me
to make to you, my Valentine." He knelt and presented it to her.

She peered at the birds. "Will they sing?"

"It is only the male who sings," said Darnley. "As I do when I am with
you." He grasped her hand.

"You sing extraordinarily well," she said, extracting her hand.

"Will you be my Valentine?" he said.

"I am that already," she said. "We drew names."

"I mean beyond tonight."

He seemed sculpted out of a maiden's secret dream, and he had appeared
at exactly the moment when her yearning was at its highest pitch.

"I I do not know," she replied.

"Oh, tell me that I may hope!" he cried, grabbing her hand again and
covering it with kisses. His head was a gleam of gold as he bent over
her hand.

"As I may," she said. "As I hope for " What did she hope for? So many
things. But at that moment, that someday she could kiss his hair, his
lips .. ." happiness."

"Let me make you happy!" he murmured. She slipped her hand out of his
and cupped his jaw in both her hands. She bent to kiss him, and as her
lips touched his he rose and stood taller and taller, until her head
tilted far back. His lips were like sweet jelly, and she wanted to
roll on them, crush them, bite and taste them.

"Ah. Mary," he breathed, and clasped her to him. His body was lean
but hard, slender, and trembling slightly beneath his thick velvet. "I
wish to say something we can remember always, but only "Mary' comes to
my lips," he said. He kissed her in many ways: lightly, like a
schoolboy; hungrily, like a woman-starved soldier; slowly, like a sated
man savouring the last morsel of honeycomb.

"So much for poetry," she finally said, pulling away to catch her
breath. "It is never to hand when we need it." She attempted to
laugh, but he put his fingers to her lips.

"Sssh," he said. "We do not need it. We need no poetry." He kissed
her again. "You have not answered me. Will you be my Valentine?"

"Yes," she said. "Yes, yes."

Mary returned to Edinburgh a week later, and Darnley followed. There
he was reunited with his father and formally welcomed by Lord James and
all the Lords of the Congregation. James held a large banquet at
Holyrood for Darnley and Lennox to meet Randolph and all the Scots
noblemen present in Edinburgh. Mary laughingly sent word that she felt
excluded, to which her brother sent back word that it was her own
palace and she was free to do as she wished. Whereupon she invited the
entire company to come to the royal apartments at the end of the
evening. They did, crowding into the audience room and overflowing
into her bedroom, where they drank more wine and used up all the cherry
logs in her log basket, which she had been saving to burn some special
evening, as she was very fond of their scent. Riccio and Darnley led
the singing, their bass and tenor voices twining round each other.

"I wish I were where Helen lies, Night and day on me she cries; O that
I were where Helen lies, On fair Kirconnel lea!

"O Helen fair, beyond compare! I'll mak a garland o' thy hair, Shall
bind my heart for evermair, Until the day I die!"

Mary was lost in a reverie induced by their voices when she became
aware of Mary Livingston and John Sempill holding hands next to her.
Even their arms were intertwined and for the first time in years she
did not feel lonely and excluded at the sight of lovers holding
hands.

Darnley was singing just to her; he lifted his eyes and looked straight
at her. Almost imperceptibly he tightened his lips, and at once she
was awash in a surge of memories and desire.

His kisses. From those first kisses on Valentine's Day, to all the
kisses he had given her during their private meetings at Wemyss, each
seemed different. Each seemed to touch her in a different place, as
though there were invisible threads between the lips and all the secret
places in the body, and each place trembled in a separate way. And
once each place had been touched, it hungered for further touching.

Why did no one tell me of this hunger? she thought.

"Your Majesty," said Mary Livingston. "I we " She leaned close and
whispered, "John has asked me to be his wife. And I have told him I
wish to be."

"Oh!" Mary said. "Why you will be the first the first of my Marys to
wed. Yes, of course I release you from your vow. With all my
heart."

Livingston kissed her mistress gently on the cheek. "Thank you, kind
Queen."

"And I insist you be married here at court. It will be the first
wedding festivity at Holyrood. Oh, Lusty! This is the beginning the
beginning of happy times, weddings, and love, and births ... for all of
us."

They were married on Shrove Tuesday, in a Protestant ceremony, and
afterward there was a banquet and dancing at Holyrood. Mary had
combined the masquing and elegance of a Shrovetide ball in France with
the grandeur of a wedding feast. By the light of thousands of candles,
silver-masked dancers moved in stately measure to the sweet music of
psaltery, arch lutes and recorders.

Mary, dressed in a gown of silver tissue with a ruff of lace-edged lawn
and a mask of white and black feathers with diamond-studded streamers,
danced with a variety of fantastical partners: a knight from King
Arthur's court, with antique armour, which limited his dancing ability
(his voice betrayed him as Melville); a green and yellow cockatoo whose
headdress was three feet tall (Randolph); St. Giles Cathedral,
complete with crown-shaped spire (the portly Earl of Morton); Julius
Caesar (Lord James), with woollen hose and sturdy boots peeking out
from under his toga; a Highland chieftain, whose sword clanked and
dragged across the floor (the French ambassador). Then Darnley,
dressed as Goliath because of his height if not his breadth, took her
in his arms.

"Queen of mystery," he said. "From across the hall I could see you,
glittering in black and white."

"Colours that are no colours," she murmured.

"Because you have no colours?"

"Because they are mourning colours."

"You are not in mourning."

"Not formally. But my late lord "

"Your 'late lord," as you style him, is gone for four years. Convention
does not demand mourning of such length."

"Convention does not know the heart," she maintained.

"The heart is a living thing, and yours, surely, is above all a living,
and loving, thing."

He held her close to him, and his scanty costume pressed his bare flesh
against her silver gown.

"Will you love again, Madam? Nay, I know it. You have, you do, you
will. But publicly, will you lay aside your mourning? I am well aware
that mourning carries its own voluptuous beguilements the cocooning,
the reveries, the delicious recitations of memories and guilts. Also
the feeling of accomplishment: I've loved, I loved well, it's done."

"How dare you?" She pushed him away.

"Because I love you." He grabbed her, fending off the hovering
solicitations of the Earl of Argyll nearby, awaiting his chance in his
dolphin's costume. "I love you, I love you, I feel I cannot live
without you. And to see you pouring your love, your present, your
future, offering it all to someone who is gone and cannot partake nay,
it breaks my heart! Though I may well be unworthy, offer it to someone
more worthy; that I can applaud. But do not take the fairest flower of
all the earth, and lay it in a tomb!"

Tears trickled down his cheeks, and she gently wiped them away with her
handkerchief. "Why, Henry," she said, so surprised she was at a loss
for words.

"We go so soon to our own tombs," he cried. "Do you not see that? To
keep company at one out of season is an abomination." He stopped
dancing and clasped her hand. "Marry me, Mary. I would ask that of
you if you were Mary the chambermaid and I Henry the groom. Let us
cheat the tomb while we can, for we cannot cheat it long. But for now
there are sweet-scented fires and verse from Ronsard, Bordeaux wine in
Venetian goblets, and masks with peacock feathers. There are even
diamonds on the ribbons and a Riccio to sing for us. Be my wife, Mary,
and I promise you we will revel in all the beautiful things, the brief
things, that earth offers us. Together we will romp as if we were in
the Elysian Fields, along with Helen and Paris, Antony and Cleopatra ..
. oh, they will envy us, the happiest mortals on earth."

" "Happiness' and 'mortal' are not two words that can be linked," Mary
replied. She began dancing again, to distract attention from them.

"Not permanently, no, but ah! what a flare they can make upon this
earth whilst they blaze."

"And extinguish themselves shortly thereafter."

"Why, you are afraid! You are a coward this great daughter of the
Stewarts, so brave in battle, so willing to risk shipwreck and bullets
you are afraid of this! To snatch happiness, if only for a moment,
from the gods "

" "The gods'? Are you not a Christian, a Catholic? Who are these
pagan gods you invoke?"

"Fate, Madam. For we all have a destiny, Christian or no, and creed
has little to do with it whilst we live. Only afterwards .. . but why
talk we of 'afterwards'? Be mine now, upon this earth, in the palace,
in my bed " He kissed her as they danced, bending her head back, until
her mask fell off "Yes, I will," she murmured. She retrieved her mask.
"But I pray you" they resumed dancing "it must be our secret, for now.
Powerful people will try to prevent it. Not fate, but certain
people."

"I will slay them," he said.

"In this court there are many little Davids with accurate little
slingshots," she said. "Dear Goliath let us keep our secret from them
for our own safety, for now."

"Then you will be my wife?" he whispered.

"And you will be my king," she said softly, and he smiled in
disbelief.

A hulking black bear made his way toward them, recognizable through his
costume as Lord Ruthven.