The Galliard (12 page)

In France all the countryside came to welcome her with pageants and toys and fireworks and dances, and an army of a hundred and fifty children in white uniform, banging drums and shouting, ‘Way for the Queen of Scotland!’

And in France was an adoring new papa, the King of it; a devoted little slave who would be her husband; six kind gorgeous uncles and their mother, her grandmother, like an old fairy, wise and gay, an aristocrat of the old school (‘there are no ladies like that now’), with whom she stayed more often than at Court, in her country home of Joinville, learning the arts of embroidery and fancy cookery and garden-planning, hearing legends of royal and pious ancestresses who had talked with the ghosts of Saint Francis and Saint Anthony.

She still had her four Scots Maries, and in a few years her mother came to visit her, and for the first time Mary saw elephants, seven of them, swinging slowly down the streets of Rouen in the procession to welcome her.

Certainly, if time had moved fast in those early years, it moved in the sunlight.

To Bothwell, getting glimpses of it in contrast with his turbulent, dissolute boyhood, it was incredible that anyone, even a girl and a Queen, should have been brought up, in spite of all her adventures, so remote from reality. She seemed to take it for granted that all the men and women she met were her guardian angels; she knew nothing of them, nor, he guessed, of herself.

The Duc de Guise had been as good as his word; Bothwell was given a grant of six hundred crowns and a temporary sinecure as
Gentleman of the King’s Chamber; there were promises of more solid benefits in the way of Abbey lands in Scotland should he return there. This he had now made up his mind to do, ‘despite of all men’, and work up a party there in the interests of the absent Sovereign.

He was admitted to private discussions on Scotland with the Duc de Guise and the Cardinal de Lorraine, the greatest honour in France. The Venetian Ambassador in France, a lively old fellow who had been a crony of Bothwell’s father during the Fair Earl’s enforced sojourn in Venice, told Bothwell that the Cardinal, Controller of Finance, was regarded by the Doge and Senate as in himself an independent European Power; and the Duc de Guise’s victory in retaking Calais, the last of the Black Prince’s conquests left in English hands, had given his family ‘such repute that the administration of France will remain in their hands for ever’. That was good hearing for the young man whom the Duc de Guise obviously liked and trusted.

Altogether life was good, the soft autumn weather mild as milk, the boat-hunting with spears a new sport, and the tame-cat existence as Gentleman of the French King’s Chamber, though intolerable if for any length of time, made quite a pleasant interlude after the furious activities of the last few years.

He decided to return to Scotland in about the third week in November, when the Court was going to move on to Chenonceaux on a hunting expedition and remain there till the end of the month.

The curtains and tapestries were taken down, the rugs taken up, the beds taken to pieces, and all the furniture piled on to barges instead of baggage-wagons to glide on down the Loire and be put up again at Chenonceaux before the royal party arrived.

It suddenly turned bitterly cold on the Monday that they were to start, and Mary shivered in a white furred mantle while waiting for François on the water-steps. Their gilded barge was moored ready for them, rocking very slightly on the iron-grey water that had been lashed into little waves by the bitter east wind. The wide sands had turned from pale gold to lead.

François was always late; she wished she had waited for him inside, instead of running out here in her eagerness to be off. She saw one of his gentlemen coming towards her; it was the Earl of Bothwell.

He looked grave as he came towards her, and said, ‘Madam, the King’s headache is worse, it is giving him ear-ache, and violently. He cannot start just yet.’

She turned very white. ‘He fainted in church, yesterday. I’ve done that several times, but it is worse for a man. He had got a cold again – can it be that that gives him ear-ache?’

She went on talking as they hurried back to the house; all the time she was thinking, ‘It’s unlucky to go back’ –unlucky, that horrible word, suggesting that there was no order in the scheme of things, only the working of blind chance, as Queen Catherine believed. She had, so her Maries whispered to their Queen, consulted astrologers here as to the length of life her sons could expect. No one could read the answer in that enigmatic face, but Mary thought her mother-in-law had been graver of late.

The dismantled house was chill and desolate. François was lying on a bare mattress laid on the floor, and shivering violently though several cloaks had been laid over him. He still had his boots on. A page was making up the fire again, blowing it with a huge pair of bellows, but the logs were damp and hissed and spluttered without sending out much heat.

‘It
would
happen today,’ François was muttering, ‘just the very day we were to start.’

She knelt down on the floor beside him, threw her arms round him, and said, ‘It will make no odds. We will go on in a day or two, you will be better then.’

‘But there’s nothing here – everything gone on. It’s all cold, cold, cold and wretched.’

‘Your mother has sent for some bedding. You’ll soon be warm and comfortable in bed, and your poor head will ache less then.’

He had covered his head with his arm. She looked out over it to the uncurtained window that showed the grey sky and the dead leaves blown past it, silting up on the smooth lawns in brown
untidy heaps. She felt frightened and miserable, but François must be feeling far more so. ‘You will soon be in bed,’ she said again, ‘and then you will feel so much better.’

But François got worse. He had high fever and terrible pain in his head and ear. There was soon no question of their going to Chenonceaux, and Mary asked Bothwell not to leave just yet for Scotland as he had planned. So he stayed, though every day enhanced the danger of the journey, it being an ancient seaman’s law in Scotland that no ship should sail between the day of Saint Simon and Jude and Candlemas, the most stormy season for the Northern seas.

The Duc de Guise sent for Ambroise Paré, the famous surgeon who had brought him back from the grave when wounded at Metz, and Mary talked hopefully to Bothwell.

‘Paré will cure the King. He is a Huguenot, but surely he could never let that influence him towards the King?’

‘Rest easy, Madam, if the man’s half the doctor he’s reported to be, he’d never let religion foul his work.’

It was an odd way of putting it, but Mary was reassured, until there came a new fear. Paré came, with his long duckbill of a nose and bushy moustache and face like an honest bourgeois until you saw the unswerving, considering eye. He believed he could cure the King by an operation on his brain, but Queen Catherine thought the risk too terrible.

‘She is afraid, always,’ said Mary.

Bothwell wondered. The Medici knew well enough what she was about; she had extremely advanced ideas in medicine. It had begun by now to be evident that there was no other chance for the King’s life. But – how much did she really wish that life to continue?

It was a monstrous thought; Bothwell was rather appalled with himself for thinking it, but facts were facts; as long as François lived, the power of his wife’s relatives, the Guises, was paramount, and that of his mother nothing. She had ruled her son by fear, but he worshipped Mary; with every year of advancing manhood his wife’s influence would grow, his mother’s lessen.

Could any mother not a monster reason so? Bothwell’s first impression of Catherine had been of something unnatural, though there had been nothing positive in evil, nothing positive at all, only – nothing! That was it; there was nothing behind those blank eyes but an immense indifference. She was insensitive to all except her own lust for power, which she had never had a chance to excercise.

If François died, she had three other sons to take his place, and the next in age, Charles, only ten years old, was and would be completely under his mother’s thumb for a long time. If François died, she would rid herself both of her daughter-in-law and the Guise domination.

Bothwell thought it extremely likely that she would not allow Paré to operate.

November froze into December. On the 8th, Mary would be eighteen. The snow was falling lightly, soft as feathers, covering the scaled tourelles like the inverted tails of mermaids. The statues in the gardens stood all wrapped in snow, their white outlines blurred against the iron-grey sky. The King of France was dying, and the Queen of France and Scotland moved like a ghost about the palace, pale and ill from her constant watching by his bedside. She was now too full of fears to confide them to Bothwell; it was he who blurted out to comfort her:

‘Remember, Madam, if the worst comes to the worst, there is always Scotland.’

‘And is that the worst that can come to me?’ she laughed sadly.

But as he too laughed he took her hand and said again, ‘Remember Scotland. If you come to it, Scotland will always remember you. You would be such a Queen as they would make songs and stories of until the end of time.’

She had never heard him say anything so flattering, and yet it did not sound like flattery, it had been jerked out of him as though he were not aware of it.

‘Why did you say that?’

‘I don’t know.’ For an instant he seemed almost abashed, certainly puzzled, then pulled himself together. ‘Come, Your Grace, am I so
great a boor that I should not tell a Queen her country would remember her beauty?’

That came like a cold douche; she shook back her head and said, ‘I know why you said it. You are going away.’

‘Madam, yes. I must go at once.’

‘Must you?’ She paused, her tired eyes gazing up at him – a forlorn child, he thought, ready to drop from weariness; never had he seen her look less beautiful; the light had all gone out of her face these days, she was quite plain really, and he did not know why he had suddenly seen her just now as a spirit lighting Scotland like a flame.

He must be getting maudlin in this sick-bed air of hushed anxiety and sympathy – Christ! why couldn’t a fellow leave the world quickly from a clean blow instead of dragging his maimed life along for days and days!

He towered over her; his solid yet springy strength seemed almost overpowering to her who had just come from that painfully dying boy; if only he could give some of it to François – and to herself. An almost pleading note came into her voice as she said:

‘You were my mother’s friend – and I think you are mine.’

‘Haven’t you friends enough here with all your fine uncles round you?’

His voice was unexpectedly surly even in his own ears. It was no wonder she looked bewildered; only fatigue and anxiety prevented her being angry. He went quickly down on his knee and raised her hand to his lips.

‘Madam, I must go,’ he said. ‘Will you forgive me for what I cannot forgive myself?’

‘What is that, my lord?’

‘That I must go,’ he said.

Chapter Seven

The reason Bothwell had to go, at the very moment when people were giving up hope of King François’ life, was that a frantic summons had reached him from Anna Throndsen, who believed herself to be dying in Flanders of the child that he had given her. He had to go, to see that she was provided with the comforts he could now afford for her; he had to go at this most critical moment in his Queen’s life, which might well prove as critical in his own.

He left his new servant, Paris, behind, to ‘use his eyes and ears if he valued his skin’, and follow with full news of King François’ death – or life. The Queen had promised to write herself.

Battles were raging over her head; the Queen-Mother was telling the Court physicians to forbid Paré’s operating; the Duc de Guise was swearing at them that he would hang the lot of them if they forbade it; his Huguenot enemies, the Bourbon princes, were hurrying to get into touch with Catherine; and Catherine had already summoned to her side the Guise’s other great enemy, the Constable of France.

But Mary knew nothing of all this; she was with François night and day, for even in delirium the boy seemed quieter when she put her hand on his.

Bothwell had been only three days in Flanders when Paris tumbled into his lodging, stiff and blind with continuous riding and lack of sleep, and held out a paper to him. It was carefully sealed, as Bothwell had seen Mary seal her letters, with threads of coloured silk twisted in the scented wax to form her monogram.

He did not break it at once, but asked: ‘Well? He’s dead?’

‘Dead as mutton, sir.’

‘What happened? Nothing, I suppose.’

‘Just nothing. They didn’t operate. The Queen-Mother wouldn’t have it. They say the Guise roared at her, “Madam, you have killed your son!” She said nothing.’

Paris’ imitation of the lion roar of the Guise was exact. Bothwell told him not to shout, as the lady upstairs was ill. Paris repeated the gossip; there had been some ironic comments on the King’s last prayer, dictated by the Cardinal de Lorraine; it was believed to be: ‘Lord, pardon my sins and impute not to me those which my Ministers have committed in my name.’

He had died just before midnight on December 5th. The Queen was there, and Queen Catherine and the Guises; no one else was allowed in except the doctors – ‘but a marvellous lot got out! Keyholes are wide in Orléans.’ And Paris told how, as they left the room after the King had died, Mary remembered to draw back and give Catherine the precedence to pass out first, just as Catherine had done eighteen months before when her husband, King Henri, had died, leaving her as only the Queen-Mother, and Mary as the Queen of France. But now Catherine was again the first lady in the land.

‘Is the old Queen being unkind to the young one, do you know?’

‘No, sir, kind, in her way; she told her to dress comfortably and not to grieve over what couldn’t be helped.’

It was the authentic Medici touch – advising the removal of a corset as consolation in bereavement. ‘Got into the innermost circles, haven’t, you, hitting the Queen-Mother below the belt like this! How did you do it?’