The Galliard (70 page)

To the English Queen he admitted that he knew her to have been offended with him, yet allowed no trace in his letter of the servility that was almost a formula in such cases; neither was there any hint of arrogance; he merely mentioned ‘the misreports of my unfriends’, and declared himself ‘careful to see your two Majesties’ amity and intelligence continued by all good offices’.

‘But it will never make amends to her, or to you either, for that unlucky remark that you two Queens wouldn’t make one honest woman!’

‘I think now,’ she said, ‘that one honest woman is worth more than two Queens. You say the false currency of money will bring ruin to the State. I say that false political ideas will bring even worse. I believe Machiavelli to have been not only a villain but a fool, though it may take hundreds of years to prove him so. To make friends, that is the only sane policy.’

‘Aye – with a standing army to back it!’

Gordon’s doubt had been justified. Balfour had politely refused the diplomatic overtures to make him give up his command of the Castle of Edinburgh. He still had the power to turn informer against him to the Queen, and Bothwell dared not take the risk of her learning from anyone else what he would give the world to hide from her for ever. So he himself now told her, as he had told Gordon, the whole truth of himself and Darnley’s death.

She sat very still. Only her fingers moved a little, pulling at a ring. At last she said in a dazed voice, ‘I think I’ve known it all
along. Ever since that morning you told me so roughly of his death. But I
would
not know.’ And then presently, ‘You said at Seton you did not kill him—’ she raised her eyes as she spoke, and then again fell silent, looking at that lean rugged face. She saw how the hair had thinned and turned grey on the temples, the eyes sunk deep in their sockets, yet their fiery glance always on the alert. She had known how the tension of the last few months had told on him; now for the first time she knew how great that tension had been, and sought desperately to lighten it. ‘It was true,’ she said, ‘you did not. It was not the explosion that killed him.’

Bothwell gave a somewhat dubious grunt. ‘That’s what I said to myself, of course. But the main thing was that I couldn’t tell you that I was his murderer when I was asking you to marry me.’

At one stroke his innate, almost brutal honesty had stripped her of all the pitiful defences she was trying to build up round them. Once before, while dancing with him in a crowded ballroom, she had felt she was alone with him in all the world, with not a single ally, human or divine.

And now that fleeting vision had come true.

She gave a terrible cry. ‘I am married to my husband’s murderer – nothing can alter that, not all the reasons for it. You killed him, and within three months you married me. All the world will think you did it for that.’

‘So I would have, and for that alone, if there’d been no other way to get you. You cannot look on him as your husband – he’d twice plotted your destruction.’

‘The world doesn’t know that. He was allowed to clear himself of the Rizzio murder. No evidence can be brought of the international plot. All Europe will condemn me.’

‘Let them, as long as you hold Scotland, and we
will
hold it.’

His bravado could give her no comfort. The weakness of despair had fallen on her. She knew now how desperate her cause must look to all men. But to God, who had seen into their hearts from the beginning, seen what she half saw and shut her eyes to – to God her cause must have been abandoned long ago. The maimed rites
of their marriage, as they seemed to her, held not even in a church but the Great Hall, like any other secular business of the State, were justified; for how could she ever have looked for God’s blessing on their union?

‘We are lost – lost,’ she cried, and her head fell on the table, on her clenched frantic hands. He bent over her and tried to raise her, but she would not look at him. To his horror, he found her clutching at his dagger to turn it on herself. He wrenched it from her and flung it away.

Even in her frenzy she was generous, for she cried that she was as guilty as he; ‘I hated him – I longed for his death. I had murder in my heart.’

He could do nothing with her, for she could not bear him near her, and cried that Darnley’s strangled body would now always lie between them. At that, despair seized him too, but in fury; he cursed Darnley, and himself.

What he could not do to quiet her was done at last by her lifelong training in good manners. There were visitors at Holyrood; she had to go and welcome them; he saw her pull herself together, compose her face into a mask of courtesy and go downstairs, a changed woman; yet able to smile and speak the right compliments, ask the right questions, and above all show that warm friendliness, that natural intimacy, that made every man think he alone was the one whom the Queen really wished to see. Often that gift had made him storm at her for a born wanton; now that even her coquetry expressed her courage, he could have worshipped her for it.

They got through that evening somehow, though it lasted a lifetime.

That night when he came to her, he stood with his back against the door, not daring to advance, and said, ‘That I did it, I cannot care for that – I am glad that I did my own work instead of leaving it to others. But I cheated you. I ought to have told you before our marriage. I knew that, and I wouldn’t do it, for if I had, you would never have married me.’

He saw the slight figure in her white draperies sitting on the
bed, her face turned towards him, but her eyes strange and blank as they had been all the evening.

He said, ‘I cheated you into this. If you cannot bear it, I must and will free you. It will be easy, for many people believe that you are still my prisoner and that that is why I keep guards about you. I have only to confess that I got your consent by force.’

He turned to go, his hands blundering with the latch, thick and blind, but as he did so, there came a rushing movement behind him, her hands were on his arm, her eyes were looking at him, seeing him, they were alive, aflame.

‘I thank God you did not tell me!’ she said, ‘and if God will not hear me, then I thank love. If I suffer for it to the end of my life, I have had more happiness with you than many have ever dreamed of.’

Chapter Thirty-One

James, Earl of Moray, sat looking down his long nose at the papers that Mr George Buchanan had laid before him. They were not State papers. One batch of them bore the intriguing title ‘The Detection of Mary Stewart’, and read rather like one of the more lurid modern Italian novels. But James showed no sign of entertainment; his nose seemed to grow longer and longer as he perused it, and at last he laid it down with the remark, ‘I could wish, Mr Buchanan, that your logic were equal to your Latin.’

He flicked the pages over with a disdainful finger. ‘I asked you to find what matter you could against the Queen, and you have, I grant you, raked up enough mud to blacken a dozen women. But while working on the principle that mud sticks if you throw enough of it, you seem to have overlooked the fact that the one half of this mud obliterates the other half.’

Mr Buchanan’s red-rimmed, sensitive little eyes blinked furiously. He felt as raw as if he were again a novice awaiting judgement on his first manuscript. A literary rival had lately described him in the vigorous style of the time as a ‘bawdy fellow’ and ‘dunghill puddle and sink of filth’; he wondered if his pure-minded patron had been influenced by this adverse criticism.

‘Qui tetigerit picem
—’ he began.

‘I have no concern with your indecency,’ was the chill reply, ‘but your inconsistency. Your statements contradict each other, sometimes even on the same page. You describe Bothwell as a brutal ravisher who brought the Queen back into Edinburgh “under a
vain pretence of liberty”. And
yet
you say the Queen begged him to carry her off! Then, too, you quote Lethington, Melville and others who describe his unreasonable jealousy of her. And
yet
you say he is utterly indifferent to her! The two things are incompatible.’

‘But he has corresponded with, even visited Lady Jean at Crichton.’

‘Naturally, since he bribed her with Crichton and has had to settle up his estate there. Also he must be trying to get hold of that Dispensation for her marriage to him, which could prove the Queen’s illegal.’

The inexorable finger flicked on, turning the pages backwards. James noted that Mary had ridden headlong to Bothwell at Hermitage last October in order to indulge her bodily lust (with a desperately wounded man, in the space of two hours, and in the presence of her Secretary of State and other witnesses, including James himself); that her intrigue with him had begun last September (when she was still very ill from childbirth) in Edinburgh at Exchequer House, which Bothwell had visited through the garden door from Mr Chalmers’ house, and after an initial rape (though closely surrounded by her attendant ladies, courtiers and guards) so pleased her that she continually sent for him through Lady Reres, a fat aged bawd (Lady Reres being young enough to act as wet-nurse to the baby Prince, whom she was suckling at the time, miles away at Stirling); that last August she had taken a pleasure cruise up the Forth to Alloa with Bothwell and his pirate crew, ‘such company as no honest man, let alone woman, would adventure life or honour among’ –

‘But good God, man!’ exclaimed James, startled for once into an oath, ‘do you realize what you have written? The Lord Bothwell was never on the boat. And I –
I
was there!’

It was a most unfortunate slip. Mr Buchanan promised it should be rectified, and mentally resolved that it should not. It was the first time he had tried his hand on a story of this sort, and he had enjoyed it; his subject had run away with him. He was not going to have his fine literary frenzy cramped by these pedantic demands for accuracy.

James threw down the manuscript.

‘This scrap-heap of obscene rubbish is worse than useless. It can be disproved by everyone in Scotland.’

‘But not abroad,’ said Mr Buchanan slyly.

‘True.’ James pulled his long nose thoughtfully. ‘It may have some effect here. The French will listen to a bawdy tale where they will ignore serious argument.’

He looked disapprovingly through the window at the line of coquettish little blue pointed roofs, clear indication of a light-minded race. It would be very good to be back again in Scotland.

But he would not venture it yet, not while Bothwell was still in the saddle. Buchanan had brought a note from Kirkaldy of Grange, the best soldier in the rebel coalition, asking him to come over and head it. But, as he now explained at some length in answer, he did more good in directing the operations from behind the scenes. Propaganda was by far the most important weapon in this affair.

‘Aye,’ chuckled Mr Buchanan, ‘she’d not be the first to die of scandal!’

James said rather hurriedly, ‘Those placards are doing good work out here. I have ordered several batches of them to be printed in London and sent to Paris. But it is the campaign at home that matters most.’

Mr Buchanan assured him that that was well in hand. ‘Mr Knox, though also at a distance, is directing it. All the ministers are preaching hot cannons. God will avenge Himself on the country if it does not punish the guilty. Already the farmers are saying there is foot-rot among this year’s lambs. The women in particular are being worked up into a frenzy; they are told that the Queen “has no more liberty, nor privilege, to commit murder and adultery than any other private person”. That is excellent, it touches their rights.’ He gave a hearty laugh. ‘Why should they deny themselves the pleasure of adultery and husband-murder if the Queen may indulge herself?’

James pondered this outburst of the democratic spirit. He did not want it pushed to extremes. The punishment for husband-murder was for the woman to be burnt alive.

‘The ministers are being very austere,’ was his comment. Then he roused himself to what was the really important issue. ‘Still, they are on the right course. What we must have is a moral Crusade, the country roused to righteous fury, and marching as one man to put down this reign of blood and indecency.’

‘But there’s been no blood.’

The Lord James regarded him sternly.

‘Have you forgotten the murder of the King?’ he demanded.

Buchanan’s dropped jaw increased his resemblance to an empurpled codfish. He knew – and James knew that he knew – that the ruling nobles had agreed to murder Darnley; he had a shrewd guess that James himself had ordered Archie Douglas and his band of cut-throats down to Kirk o’ Field for that very purpose. But his political training helped him to a quick recovery.

‘Then,’ he said brightly, ‘we must show that the Queen lured the King to Kirk o’ Field so that Bothwell should blow up his house with gunpowder.’

‘Certainly. The trouble is’ – James fingered his thin black beard – ‘it is difficult to explain such a violent and self-advertising method of murder, when she could have easily poisoned him without anyone being the wiser. Nor is it conceivable that she should have arranged an abduction which would obviously play into the hands of Bothwell’s enemies. There are many who are ready and willing to believe her a criminal. But no one who has spoken with her will believe her a fool.’

‘Ah, but the folly of women in love—’ Buchanan began indulgently.

‘I did not know, Mr Buchanan, that you had experience of the subject.’

The great Latinist had not just made a very trying Channel crossing in order to be insulted. His heavy black-robed figure surged up out of his chair with a volcanic dignity that swept half his papers on the floor. Fortunately at that moment a French servant entered with a tray of refreshments. James waved a lofty hand towards it.

‘Eat, if you are inclined.’

Buchanan ate and drank with uneasy greed under the other’s abstemious eye.

Thawed by excellent Bordeaux, he saw the folly of offending his patron, and remembered that he had been promised the office of Moderator of the Kirk (worth £500 a year) if he helped him to power. So he sought how to give better satisfaction than by his severely criticized detective story, and told him that a few papers belonging to Bothwell had just been – well – got hold of, which might come in handy. They had not at first struck him as of importance, being principally love-letters and poems, ‘very bad’, from one or two women, and a brief note about business from the Queen. But it had since occurred to him that if only they could get hold of more of the Queen’s letters, a profitable combination might be made of both sets of correspondence, which could be worked up to prove her guilt. To use passages of her own composition would make them far more convincing; incriminating sentences could be added, and the whole copied out by someone who had long experience of the Queen’s easy handwriting.