The Galliard (13 page)

‘I made it my business, since it was my lord’s, and chose the ugliest girl I could in the old Queen’s service. The ugly ones are the most grateful. She told all she could.’

He winked at his master, who had an absurd feeling that his page was play-acting in imitation of himself – badly, he hoped. He asked what use Catherine had begun to make of her power.

Quick use, as Bothwell had expected (hadn’t she stripped her husband’s mistress, Diane de Poictiers, of all the jewels and possessions he had given her, and within a few hours of his death!) And now –

‘The Constable has hurried to Orléans with eight hundred gentlemen in attendance,’ Paris was saying, ‘and has disbanded all the troops there of the Guise. The Guises are down in the mud. All they can do is to shoulder along as best they can in the crowd and forget they were ever above it.’ He rubbed a bleared, dusty eye and went on:

‘People are wondering they don’t escape from the town, but I’ll say that for the Guises, no one sees much of their backs. All the courtiers went scampering off to congratulate the new little King as soon as the breath was out of t’other’s body. They say he wants to have his brother’s wife as well as his crown, but his mother will have a word to say to that. It isn’t going to be much of a funeral, they’ve only got a leaden vase to put his heart into, it can’t have cost more than a few crowns. Nobody is thinking anything about it, or him.’

He swayed on his feet and nearly fell. Bothwell gave him a drink, and told him to go off and get some food and sleep.

‘You’d make a damned good spy.’

The lad put down his drink at a gulp and grinned up at his master. ‘I did, sir. I found out that the handsome Englishman with the horrible name, Throckmorton, was in the devil of a fidget when you went off so suddenly – to Scotland by way of Flanders too! He wrote to London to warn them to look out for trouble, and I saw the letter.’

‘Did you seduce his valet as well as Catherine’s slut?’

‘Only with drink,’ said Paris with simple pride. ‘We had a merry evening in the Englishman’s lodging while he was at the Court, that was all, and I ran an eye over his papers.’

But Paris had found only an estimate of his master’s character which showed how keenly the English Government was on the watch for all his movements.

‘This glorious rash and hazardous young man,’ Throckmorton
had written (and Bothwell did not flatter himself that Sir Nicholas intended any more complimentary meaning of ‘glorious’ than ‘vain-glorious’), and advised that ‘his adversaries should both have an eye to him and also keep him short.’

‘The shorter by a head – if they could do it!’ said Bothwell with a laugh, and gave Paris one of the remainder of the six hundred crowns. Paris went off yawning and grinning at the same moment.

Bothwell turned to his letter.

But when he had broken that elaborate seal and shaken out the paper he could find no letter, only some lines of verse with words scratched out here and there, evidently the first rough draft of a poem. Having turned it all over in vain search for anything to show that the Queen had intended it for him, and not sent it in mistake for her letter, he read the verses:

Si en quelque séjour

Soit en bois ou en prée,

Soit sur la Vesprée,

Sans cesse mon coeur sent

Le regret d’un absent.

Si je suis en repos

Sommeillant sur ma couche,

J’oy qu’il me tient propos,

Je le sens qui me touche;

En labeur et requoy

Toujours est prez de moy—

He found himself oddly moved by the utter simplicity of the grief, the bewildered sense of loss, not of a husband but of a childish companion.

He read it through again, and heard the soft cadences ringing in his mind like a peal of muffled bells.

Had she really meant to send them to him? He hoped she had. Anyway, he would keep them.

He opened the casket in which he kept his papers, and gave an exclamation of brutal amusement and disgust at the sight of Anna’s last ‘sonnet’ lying on the top. Those heavy-handed verses made odd company for this childish lament, crystal-clear as drops of dew – ‘but it’s odd company you’ll get, my Queen, if you trust me with your fancies!’

Part II

SECOND MEETING

Chapter One

He did not see her again for nearly eight months, and by then she had changed, as was natural in a girl of late development who had just begun to grow up when suddenly all her life was changed, changed in one frozen black December night, when the boy who had been her playfellow lay dead upon the pillows, and the Cardinal de Lorraine lifted his smooth white eyelids and looked at her across the still form, telling her with those fine pale grey cat-like eyes that she must remember to stand aside and let her mother-in-law pass first out of the room.

The heavy black silks rustled out before her: in the hush of that moment they made a monstrous noise, harsh as the rattle of sabres, telling her that the familiar ground of her whole life and of her home for the last dozen years was being cut from under her feet, cut in every direction.

François died at midnight; early next morning Mary sent back her royal diamonds to the new King. She was no longer Queen of France; her uncles were no longer the rulers of the kingdom; the great rival house of Bourbon with its Huguenot sympathies was now paramount; Antoine de Bourbon, King of Navarre, lately in daily fear of arrest, was made Governor of the new boy King, Charles IX; Antoine’s brother, condemned to death for his share in the Huguenot conspiracy at Amboise, was released and restored to full honour and power; a match was even suggested between Antoine’s son, the little Henri de Navarre, and Queen Catherine’s youngest daughter, a precociously clever child of seven, always known as Margot.

Mary was now only a guest in the country that had so long been her home, and Queen Catherine made it abundantly clear. During the weeks prescribed for mourning Mary followed all the accustomed regulations, wore robes first all black, then all white, stayed all the time in her own rooms, which were kept religiously dim, saw no one but her servants, her Maries, her nearest relatives and Queen Catherine and her eldest son.

King Charles IX was a quick-witted, excitable, odd-tempered boy, unhealthy, with thin legs and a big pale head that narrowed suddenly to a tiny sharp chin – ‘the Goblin of France’ my lord of Bothwell had called him in one of his daring irreverences, and she disliked but could not help remembering it as the boy talked shrilly to her, waving his nervous hands.

‘I don’t know how you stand it here, all those candles and black curtains, and you who like being out so much! The Loire’s frozen all over the shallows – do come out and skate with us. I wish you’d marry me, you’d be the Queen of France again then and I’d give you back your diamonds, and my mother couldn’t go on having it all her own way. Do marry me; I may be a bit younger than poor old François, but I’m much stronger and I mean to be a great soldier just as he wanted to be, I know I could be if I married you. Just think of all the things we’d do together! – France and Scotland leading the world, and down with all the old shams. Yes, I’m for the Reformed Religion. I took away Margot’s Mass-book and boxed her ears – she howled like anything. Mother is encouraging the Huguenots for all she’s worth, and if you joined us, how exciting it would be! Besides, I shall never want to marry anyone else,’ he added suddenly, wistfully.

That was the only time he came to her without his mother and without her knowledge, the only time Mary heard him talk.

She did not much mind the long seclusion; she wanted time before she took up the business of living once again. If it were dark in these rooms it was not much darker than outside, this iron-grey winter. Life had moved so fast, bright and shifting in these past years, hurrying her from one place to another, always to cheers and speeches of welcome, always among crowds of faces, eager, curious,
peering to look at her. Now she had to make a pretty speech of thanks; now she had to stand up before all the Court and the foreign Princes and Ambassadors and deliver a Latin oration of her own composition (or most of it), urged thereto by the continual maddening reminder that the Princess Elizabeth of England (but
she
was ten years older) could talk Greek with the learned Oxford dons. Now she had had to amuse her father-in-law, King Henri II, whose heavy Spanish-looking face had seldom lit into laughter except with her; now she had had to cheer poor François and make him believe he would soon be well.

But now –
now
, she had nothing to do but sit in a dim place and wait, wait till life should begin again, knowing that it would be something entirely different from all that had gone before. So, swathed in her white robes and veils, she waited in the dark like a chrysalis for the hour when she should burst her bonds as a butterfly.

There were already offers from that life ahead. The King of Navarre was so anxious to marry her that he was actually planning to divorce his strong-minded wife, Jeanne d’Albret. King Philip II of Spain, the austere and terrible monarch of half the world, who had tried to marry Elizabeth of England, now sought Mary, in his usual secret and ambiguous fashion, on behalf of his young son Don Carlos. And many other wooers of Elizabeth turned their attentions to this young, lovelier Queen who had so suddenly entered the lists of matrimony.

The young Earl of Arran was the most unblushing, for only that autumn he and his fellow nobles had been pressing Elizabeth to marry him as ‘next in place’ to the throne of Scotland, with a strong hint that the papist Queen Mary would then be prevented from ever returning to her country. Yet before any reply had been received from Elizabeth, Arran was already urging his suit on Mary as soon as François was dead. The stolidly jovial King Frederick of Denmark, whose drinking bouts Bothwell had shared, also promptly transferred his wooing of Elizabeth to Mary; so did young Eric of Sweden, one of the handsomest men in Europe, half genius, half madman; so did his brother the Duke of Finland;
so did the Emperor’s two sons. The Earl of Lennox, who had rivalled Bothwell’s father for the hand of the late Queen Regent of Scotland, was planning for his son Henry Darnley to follow in his father’s footsteps and win the daughter of the lady who had rejected himself. And Darnley was a possible heir to both English and Scottish thrones.

It was noted in the English Court that all this was having a rapidly souring effect on Elizabeth’s already rather acid comments on ‘My dear sister of Scotland’.

Nor did it soften Catherine’s tone to her former daughter-inlaw. ‘All France will soon not be big enough to hold your suitors,’ she remarked in that fat jocular voice that always made Mary feel sick with rage and disgust. ‘Had you not better find another country to contain them?’

Yes, but which? Her own did not want her; she was very tired; she only wanted to ‘give it all up and become a nun’, so she sobbed out to her grandmother the Duchesse Antoinette de Guise, when after her retirement she visited her at Joinville.

The old lady smiled very tenderly, looking down the enormous bony hook of her nose at the fair head buried in her lap.

The head lifted suddenly, caught the smile, and tossed back in indignation.

‘And why not, Grand’mère? I would not be the first Queen in our family to become a nun. Look at my greatgrandmother Queen Philippa of Guise – she is famous.’

‘And so may you be,’ replied her grandmother, ‘but not, I think, as a nun.’

A thrush perched on a branch of white pear blossom above them and burst into shrill song. Mary looked up at the tiny ecstatic creature.

‘No,’ she said, ‘it does not sing Mass to me as it did to Queen Philippa.’

‘Does it sing of nothing else?’ asked her grandmother, and saw that quick flush race upwards into the cheeks that had grown so much too white in her long seclusion. They were sitting out on one of the first warm days of spring, the old lady, in her black robes, on
her favourite garden seat on the lawn that sloped down to the placid stream, a tributary of the wide Marne. Mary had slipped to the grass at her feet, her long limbs in their white dress lying as though spilt on that bright green, in a languor that would have enchanted her lovers but was disturbing to the shrewd old eyes now looking down on her.

The child had been ill again. Luckily she was here where a close eye could be kept on her; the Duchesse had seen to it that she should be troubled with no diplomatic interviews. But she could not keep her from such for ever; even now she would have to tell her of visitors from that far-off fierce Northern kingdom that had given her mother so much agony of spirit. Years ago the Duchesse Antoinette had written to that mother, her own daughter: ‘You have had so little joy in the world, and pain and trouble have been so often your lot, that I think you can hardly know now what pleasure means.’

Would she ever have cause to feel the same about that daughter’s daughter?

No, she would not, for even as she wondered, the girl laughed and whistled back at the thrush, imitating his note, then broke into the tune of a song, whistling it first like a boy and then singing:

‘Worship ye that lovers be this May,

For of your bliss the Kalends are begun,

And sing with us: “Away, Winter, away!

Come, Summer, come, the sweet season and sun!”

‘That is what he is singing to me, Grand’mère – the Spring Song of the Birds that my ancestor, the first King James of Scotland, wrote when he was in prison. New life, new hope, new adventure:

And amorously lift your heads all,

Thank Love, that list you to your mercies call!’

And she turned eagerly to that wrinkled face, pillowing her elbows on the stiff black knees as she had done ever since a child, propping her chin between her hands.