The Galliard (10 page)

The Court had moved again, the Court was always moving, partly as a precautionary measure, since it was unwise to stay too long in any country palace to be a settled target for Huguenot conspirators. So the Court moved to Orléans, and a magnificent reception was given by the city. The splendour of the processions, the triumphal arches, the decorations, gave James Hepburn, after
the rough poverty of the little towns along the Border, a dazed sense that he had come to another world, even another age. He was invited to a ball, where the young King led out his Queen with a torch in his other hand which he passed to her, and she to the Duc de Guise behind her, and so on to every couple, its leaping flame flickering up on to the glinting jewels, the suddenly bright face, of one dancer after another, until all the dancers swung into a ring for the Branle des Lavandières, clapping their hands in mimicry of the washer-woman beating out the linen on the stones by the Seine.

It was a wild movement, a fantastically courtly copy of the rough peasant dances; and as Mary led it, her delicate head tossing back on the long slender throat like a flower stalk, her eyes were dark and brilliant with excitement, drunk with happiness.

The girl ought to be always moving – riding, dancing or ablaze with sudden anger; no wonder no painter could ever show her.

He made a brief comment of the sort to d’Oysel, who shrugged, mopped his pink forehead, which was steaming gently after the dance, and remarked with dry French finality, ‘But of course. It is known. The connoisseurs have pronounced her the best dancer of the day.’

‘Damn the connoisseurs!’ muttered Bothwell.

D’Oysel was not the only one to want to cool his head. Both King and Queen were wearing their crowns in compliment to the State reception; she found it very hot stepping up and down with a crown on her head, her face was flushed a brilliant transparent rose; when they gave her red wine to refresh her, Bothwell could have sworn he saw it pass down her throat, for the white skin had flushed there too for an instant.

The musicians were now playing the strange Oriental music that the late King Henri II had loved, and half a dozen gilded ships were propelled into the hall by some mechanism, rocking backwards and forwards as if on real waves. In each ship stood a prince who invited a lady from the company to share his magic voyage. King François stepped from his boat and handed his Queen into it; and they sat looking up at sails of blue Cyprus silk spangled with gold stars, listening to the singing of sirens whose
glistening tails and silken hair of inhuman length were coiled about the crystal rocks.

In the boat beside them another King, the handsome young Antoine de Bourbon of Navarre, turned his head and looked at them with a half-smile on his weak, sensitive mouth.

‘What are you looking at?’ his wife demanded in her emphatic fashion.

‘At those children.’ But Queen Jeanne saw that his eyes were fixed only on Mary, and her delicate nose wrinkled in exasperation. Poor Antoine – he was always so transparent!

Mary did not notice their companion royal couple. She was examining the boat.

‘How does it move?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ François confessed. ‘My mother arranged it all. I am sick of hearing her say my grandfather had to get Leonardo da Vinci over here to do his shows for him. Now she’s got other mechanics from Italy. Do you feel seasick?’

‘I never do,’ said Mary proudly.

‘I don’t usually, but somehow—’

‘Oh, François! Had you better –?’

‘No, I am all right.’

‘Ah, thank heaven, there is supper!’

‘You are always hungry,’ grumbled François. ‘I don’t feel I can eat a thing.’ He looked at her enviously, but forgot his discontent at sight of those dancing eyes. ‘And you are always happy,’ he said in wonder.

‘I am the happiest woman in the world. I once wrote and told my mother so – did I never tell you that?’

‘No. When was it?’

‘On our wedding day.’

‘Oh, Mary –!’ he sighed, and then, ‘what did you tell her?’

‘Only that, the happiest woman in the world, because my husband loves me so much that I can wish for nothing more than to live and die in that love.’

She had written that because of him! He could not speak. Her genius for love awed him.

She took his hand in her strong warm clasp. His was very cold for all the heat of the room.

‘You have a headache again,’ she said; ‘it is only because you are growing so fast. You always said it was unfair my being nearly two years older and taller, and that you’d never catch me up, but now you’re doing it so quickly that I shall have to wear high heels!’

He looked at her with the shy adoration that he had felt ever since his father had led him up to the ‘most lovely child I have ever seen, and one day you will be her husband’. The Duc de Guise had given him a toy suit of armour on his fifth birthday, and François had challenged him to single combat in the hope of winning the favour of ‘a certain beautiful lady’. The children had played together and quarrelled, and in the middle of some assembly would trot off into a corner by themselves to whisper some secret plan together, the little boy frequently interrupting the conclave to fling his arms around the older, stronger child in a fierce hug. And eighteen months ago they had been married in Notre Dame under a golden canopy, and she had moved to music beside him, high up on a platform above the vast swaying, roaring crowds of Paris, moved in the dazzling radiance of her dress like a lily swathed in gossamer.

But still he had had to wait before he could be her husband, ‘only a year or so,’ the doctors had said, as though a year or so were so short a time, and so it was to them, slow old fellows with their fifty, sixty, seventy odd years, all too many and too long; but to François, who could never go fast enough for his wishes, who tired out his companions, far bigger and stronger than himself, by the fury with which he rode to hounds as if determined to prove himself a man before his time – since later there might not be time – to François II of France ‘a year or so’ spelt a lifetime, as indeed, deep down in his inner self, he knew that it would prove.

Marble supper-tables were carried into the hall by innumerable pages in white and scarlet. Bothwell found himself seated near the high table; he watched the Guise brothers as they ate and talked, their rings and earrings flashing as they moved, their teeth smiling in their fair pointed beards (‘Aye, there’s the grin of the fox,’ he
thought as his eyes fixed on the Cardinal de Lorraine); he listened to their crisp French accents, sharp and light as the clapping of hands in the Branle, certain as commands. Every now and then they turned towards their niece, drawing her into their conversation, smiling at her, petting her.

‘Yes, tell us, Madam. Who should know, if not “the Little Savage”, how it is pronounced, that cacophony?’

‘Ker – ker – ker – nochs? Is it possible? All their names are alike – you have only to imitate water hissing on hot iron.’

‘But of whom are you speaking?’ she asked.

‘Why, of your countryman, the Scottish preacher who gave your mother so much trouble. It is he, we have just discovered, who was the author of that anonymous pamphlet from Geneva.’

Bothwell’s ears, as well trained as the mountain deer’s, listened acutely. They must be talking of ‘The First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women’, which John Knox had written to prove that it was against nature and the laws of God and man that any woman should have the supreme rule of a nation.

‘“Woman,”’ the Cardinal’s soft ironic voice was quoting, ‘“having been accursed of God, is to be for ever in complete bondage to man and daily to humble and subject herself to him.”’

‘He must be very ugly to hate women so,’ said the Queen’s grave childish voice.

They all laughed, and the Duc de Guise said, ‘Hate rulers rather – ever since he was embroiled in that English plot to murder Cardinal Beton, and served a couple of years in our galleys for it.’

‘Then why was he ever let out to plague my mother?’ she demanded indignantly.

No one could remember at first; then one of them said it was through some negotiation of England’s.

‘Ah, then England acknowledged him as her agent!’ she cried triumphantly.

‘Very right.’ The Cardinal de Lorraine smiled with pleasure to hear her talk politics so wisely. He held the floor with light graceful gestures of his beautiful hands. ‘This particular agent was
even acknowledged so far as to be made King’s chaplain to the boy Edward VI. He took the chance in his sermons to abuse all the chief councillors to their faces under the thin disguise of Biblical names!’

‘A bold fellow!’ There was a note of admiration in the deep voice of the Duc de Guise.

‘Bold as brass – while under royal protection. The moment the Catholic Mary Tudor was on the English throne he bolted and left his friends to burn.’

The Cardinal’s amused eyes glanced at Queen Catherine to see how she took his account of the Reformers, her former protégés. But she was busy capping the classical quotations of the Lord Rector of Orléans University; she was also busy eating, ‘shovelling all the food she can into her mouth’, as Mary noticed – and without any discrimination, although she was worried by her growing stoutness; no doubt she would outwalk all her courtiers after this in order to counteract it!

The Bottle Cardinal remarked that all Reformers were treacherous to their friends, and the Duc de Guise said, ‘Because they are so to their foes. If a man cannot keep faith with his enemy, then he will do so with no man, nor with God.’ (‘This is as great a man as I’ve heard,’ thought Bothwell, but he was staggered the next instant by de Guise’s example of the Reformers’ lies.) ‘Their Bible is supposed to be the book of the gospels, written fifteen centuries ago, and yet today I saw a copy, and the date in the beginning was only last year’s!’

There was a second’s hushed gravity in respect to the head of their house; then, it was irresistible, all his brothers began to laugh, until he, puzzled at first, suddenly saw his blunder and laughed too.

‘We simple soldiers, sir, should leave these matters to the clerics,’ René de Lorraine, the Marquis d’Elboeuf, said to him, grinning with the impudent delight of a younger brother.

‘Got it wrong, have I? Well, anyway, I’d have got it right in the galleys and let the traitor sit on there till he’d worn through his – breeches.’

‘If it is any consolation to you, brother,’ said the Cardinal de Lorraine, ‘I am told that his session was long enough for him to contract a certain distressing complaint.’

‘Ha, ha, undermined his constitution, hey?’

‘But,’ said the Cardinal, turning yet again to that tall pretty child, taking, as Bothwell noticed, any chance to hear her clear voice, ‘you have still not told us, Madame la Reinette, how is one to say that name – K-N-O-X?’

‘You do not say the K at all, sir; it is pronounced “NOX”, like the Latin for “night”.’

‘Then may night never fall on you!’ he answered, smiling, and Bothwell was hastily suspicious of so lewd a gallantry from an uncle. But she took his remark literally and gave him a bewitching, rather tired little smile.

‘My crown is so heavy,’ she said. ‘May I take it off?’

She lifted it from her head and put it beside her, although she saw her mother-in-law give an involuntary gasp. The Medici was so superstitious with her astrologers and slavish belief in dreams and omens, she was always afraid, thought Mary with the irritation of one who is never afraid. She pushed up the, damp reddish tendrils of hair that the crown had pressed down on her forehead, and gave her head a little shake to free it from the sensation of that weight.

As she did so she caught the eye of a young noble at a neighbouring table, and recognised the Earl of Bothwell. She was so tired that she gave him exactly the same bewitching shy sleepy smile before she remembered that she had dismissed him in anger at their last meeting. But why should she bother about that? It was tedious to go on being angry; and her mother had told her she would be wise to make friends with this young man.

So, for she did things thoroughly, she beckoned him to her side after the banquet and introduced him to her uncle the Duc de Guise, ‘who has heard so much of you.’

De Guise was gracious, his keen eyes sweeping the strong figure before him, the alert head and great shoulders. ‘My sister the Regent has told me something of your doings, my lord, and so has our Ambassador to England. You have not only done some
very pretty work for Scotland; you have actually brought a blush to Queen Elizabeth’s maiden cheek!’

‘No man could have the face to do that, sir!’

‘At least you gave her an awkward moment when you robbed her baggage.’

‘And gave your Ambassador the opportunity to call her one,’ was the instant retort.

De Guise chuckled at his impudence. ‘Yes, you forced her underhand dealings into the open.’

‘Wars nowadays,’ said James Hepburn, ‘seem to be less a matter of men and weapons than of the lies told by their governments.’

He spoke quickly, forcibly, as if he were dealing strokes in battle, for he knew that the greatest captain in Europe was summing him up, and he might only have a minute or two in which to give a decisive blow for himself.

De Guise’s next words were obviously designed to give him an opening: ‘What did you think of our cannon? Do you believe in a future for that weapon?’

‘Its best effect, sir, is no doubt in siege, but I firmly believe there is a great future for it, though we may not live to see it.’

‘I hope not. For I have heard it said that with improved artillery the individual soldier will make precious little odds.’

‘Don’t you believe it, Your Highness! What counts, as always has and always will, is the kind of man you’ve got behind the big gun, as behind the musket, behind the bow and arrow or the stone in the sling.’

‘Personal leadership – and well you’ve proved it, young man! The Galliard has made war
gaillardement
.’

So he even knew his nickname. Bothwell saw why the Guise’s men worshipped him. And the great man gave him his best chance by asking how he had combined with his French allies.