Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (60 page)

I might as well have poured it into my ear, he thought. The idea
struck him as extremely funny. He took another large gulp. This one
did not burn so much as it went down.

Your fellow has already left a path, he thought. His head was starting
to feel as if it were lifting off his shoulders, and he was getting
that lovely feeling he got from nothing else. It was a feeling he
looked forward to, a feeling of peace and being where no one could
touch him, where he did not have to answer to anyone. His mother faded
as if he had left her behind in another room, as he had. This room was
his private room, the spinning one in his head that he sought as often
as he could.

He did not know how long he sat there or how much he drank. He only
knew that he was hearing knocking. Someone was intruding! He shook
his head to clear it; to his disappointment the thick, muffling feeling
had begun to thin out and he no longer felt as if he were floating.

"A moment." He stood up and fastened his doublet. "A moment." He
stumbled across the room and flung open the door.

Who was it? He could barely see in the dim light.

"I beg your pardon for disturbing you," a voice was saying. "And
evidently I have disturbed you."

Lord James! Darnley clutched at his doublet. It was buttoned wrong.
"Not at all," he said, wondering if he sounded normal. He listened to
the tone of his own voice. "Pray come in."

He turned and expected James to follow. But from the doorway he heard
him say, "I see you are in no condition to talk." The door slammed.

The next morning was Sunday, and in the freedom of her own castle, Mary
ordered mass to be said in the Chapel Royal. As it was already the
fourth Sunday of Lent, a time allowed for brief relaxation of the
Lenten rig ours rose-coloured vestments were worn instead of purple,
and there was a celebratory air to the service. The Catholics in the
group attended, while the

Protestants stayed in their quarters, either sleeping or reading
Scripture. Mary did not know and would never presume to inquire.

As was customary, a dinner would follow in the Great Hall, and then
they would go hawking. The day was fine and clear, and promised good
riding if the ground was not too muddy from recent rains. But before
Mary and her group had reached the entrance of the Great Hall, they
encountered the Lord James and all his party saddling up.

"We are not yet ready for the hawking," said Mary. "The falconers will
not be prepared. Pray you, wait a bit."

"We are not interested in hawking," said James. "We feel these Popish
ceremonies in the Chapel Royal to be insufferable. We cannot remain
here."

"You were not even present, so how can you have found them
'insufferable," brother? Perhaps you ought to have attended. There
were words spoken that might have comforted you. And when you say
'we," do you mean yourself in the royal sense? If not, whom do you
mean?"

James straightened in the saddle. "I mean myself and my attendants. Of
course I do not mean the royal we."

"I see." She paused a long while. "I am grieved to see that you
cannot remain," she finally said. "Within these walls we played as
children and came to know each other. In that sense they are sacred.
Must you part from me now?"

She went over to him and, touching his saddle, laid her hands upon it
and looked up at him. From that angle, his chin looked as heavy and
immovable as the outer defence works of the castle.

"You drive me away," he said, jerking the reins of the horse and
wheeling around, so that she lost her grip on the saddle and almost
fell. "You and your folly. The mass is the least of it."

His words made no sense.

"The people you choose to love," he finally said, urging his horse
forward. The animal trotted off toward the guard towers.

With so few to dine, Mary abruptly ordered the dinner to be served in
the Queen's Presence Chamber instead of the Great Hall. The reduced
company was presented with dishes of smothered rabbit, capon in lemon
sauce, boiled onions, and sweet cubes of jellied milk. Sunlight
streamed into the room, filling it with light.

"The Lord James and some others have departed," Mary announced. "Alas,
they could not stay. Methinks it is an April Fool, this being April
first, and they having no cause of displeasure. Nonetheless we will
eat, hawk, and hunt as planned. They will doubtless rejoin us on the
morrow."

A wide grin spread across Riccio's face. "Then let us propose a toast
for their safe journey to ... wherever it may be," he said, raising his
goblet. The thin April sunshine caught the rubies and sapphires along
its rim.

Afterwards, as they were making their way across the upper courtyard
toward the palace, Mary turned to Darnley and said, "Now we will have
until dark to hawk. All is prepared." She had meant to turn back to
speak to the others, but the frown on Darnley's face stopped her.

"I do not feel well," he said. "My head hurts."

In walking across the courtyard, Darnley's head throbbed with each
jarring step, and by the time he reached the palace, only a short
distance away, it had increased to such a pitch that he had to hold his
head in his hands. He rushed into his bedroom and fell on his gigantic
bed, groaning. Taylor, his servant, pulled off his boots and undressed
him. By evening he was delirious.

"It is the ague," said Bourgoing, Mary's physician from childhood, and
a friend as well. "In someone of his age, it is not of concern. He
will sweat and dream and toss and sleep. When he awakens, he will
remember nothing. It is us, the watchers, who will be tired."

Darnley lay fevered for several days and then, abruptly, the fever
departed. He sat up and ordered his favourite soup, sorrel with figs,
and the cooks had to stir round to locate a recipe for it. The
musicians came and played in his chambers, and Mary visited him,
pleased to find him well. But before morning he felt worse, and could
retain no food.

Mary sent Bourgoing to him straightway, and the French physician at
length emerged from the chambers shaking his head.

"Measles," he said. "The Lord Darnley has taken measles, in the
footsteps of the ague."

Darnley lay in the great royal bed in a trough of sweat. He was
drowning in water that seemed to come both from within and without him.
He was oozing, and surrounded by an oozing bog. He did not feel the
valets de chambre lift him and change the linen and fluff the mattress
and place him once again on dry cloth. His fever mounted higher and
all he felt was a hot buzz in his head, and intensely rendered images
behind his closed eyelids. Then there would come a soft assurance, a
presence. It seemed familiar. But he could not know. Who was it?

"Monsieur Bourgoing, he does not know me," said Mary, weary after
having kept vigil all night by Darnley's bedside.

"He knows you in his dreams," the physician said. "But you must rest.
Why do you persist in this vigil?"

"I do not know. Perhaps because it is the first vigil I am honoured to
be given .. . since the King. King Francois."

"Sickbeds are not an honour, but a cross."

"I love Darnley!" she burst out. "Pray tell me he will not die!"

Bourgoing looked surprised. "A young man will not die of measles.
Unless he harbours some other debilitation, like syphilis, or is
unusually weak."

Darnley lay hacking and coughing, each cough racking his thin body and
searing his already raw throat. Inside his mouth were white eruptions,
and all the tissue was red and swollen around them, making it
impossible to eat, although he kept vomiting from his withered and
empty stomach. Each time the muscles contracted, it felt like bleeding
paper being ripped asunder. His eyes were so sensitive to light that
all the windows had to be shaded, and no candle could burn near his
bed, lest it cause him stabbing pain.

In the darkness Mary sat by him, watching over him like a delicate
Egyptian goddess standing guard over a Pharaoh's tomb. Whenever she
reached out to touch him, his skin was dry and felt as hot as one of
the chaufrettes, the silver foot warmers she used here in the winter.
Francois had never been as hot as this. Could someone be this hot and
live?

Mary would look at his shrunken body he had lost so much weight and
feel him slipping away from her, and she prayed for hours, sitting on a
stool beside him. In the dim light he already seemed to be in a
sepulchre, and his pale face and draped body to be that of a tomb
effigy carved in alabaster.

She could not lose him; she could not lose to death a second time.

If I could take your place, she thought, lie down in this spot, and
wrestle with the abhorred shade when he steals into the chamber,
thinking to have an easy victory. I'd grab and twist his bony fingers,
break them off, hear them snap, see the pieces fall on the floor.

Darnley groaned and rolled over.

No, he shall not have you! Death will have to meet and overpower me
here, disarm your gatekeeper. He is no match for me, she promised,
wiping his brow in cool, violet-scented water.

On the sixth day Darnley broke out in red spots on his face and neck.
The spots spread rapidly to the other parts of his body, and his
temperature fell. His eyes fluttered open and he saw Mary for the
first time.

"How .. . long have you been here?" His voice was a croak.

"Through the whole illness," she said

He smiled a crooked smile. "How long have I been ill?"

"Since Sunday mass on Laetare Sunday. Tomorrow is Passion Sunday."

He shrugged. "I know not these terms."

A good Catholic should. "Almost two weeks."

He rolled his eyes still bloodshot. "So long."

"A short time for two severe illnesses. A weaker man could not have
recovered."

"I will never recover," he whispered. He raised his hand, so thin it
looked like a translucent web. "I can barely lift it."

Mary took his hand in hers, and hers was the thicker and stronger. She
twined the fingers together. "Together we are strong," she said.
"Nothing can separate us."

"Is she still closeted with him?" asked Knox, drawing aside the Lord
James after the Sunday service at St. Giles. He had preached on life
in the midst of death, and death in the midst of life: a thorny concept
of joy and resignation. It had gone confusingly well.

"So they say." James nodded and smiled at the other worshippers filing
out, particularly the Lords of the Congregation, who had all dutifully
attended this windy April day. Now they would walk down the Canongate,
enjoying the brisk air and swirling their mantles, on their way home to
their Sunday dinners. "Young Darnley took the measles on the heels of
the ague and almost left this world. An ignominious end to an
ignominious boy." James smiled and lifted his hand. "Good day, my
lady." Jean, Countess of Argyll, nodded. "He is altogether
insufferable."