The Galliard (15 page)

Mary showed Throckmorton what she thought of his Queen’s conduct – and manners – with a frankness, yet delicacy, that made that unfortunate gentleman even more ashamed of his royal mistress.

This was no new thing, Mary told him ironically; the English had been determined on her capture or destruction when she came to France, but she had braved the danger of the seas and hostile ships and was not afraid to do so again. If she fell into her cousin’s hands, well, then, ‘she may do her pleasure and make sacrifice of me’.

The watchful composure of her cousin’s Ambassador could not restrain a movement of pity, but Mary stopped his gesture with a look so clear and calm that it seemed to be looking through his eyes at something very far away. She said, ‘You do not know. That casualty might be better for me than to live.’

What did she see to make her say so strange a thing for a girl of eighteen, for whom the world was opening in colours more dazzling than for any princess of her time? He asked her, but she did not seem to know even that she had said it; fancies raced through her mind unsought, almost unaware, in bewildering contrast to the deliberate calculations of his own Queen. He was relieved that she instantly shrugged off her unnatural fatalism and told him with a flash of angry spirit that she would follow her own course in spite of Elizabeth, and had friends who would help her do it.

These friends had already been summoned from Scotland by
the Lord Cardinal, to undertake the perilous voyage and ‘steal the Queen out of France’ in the teeth of the English fleet. Chosen with an eye to their hardihood in seamanship, they included the sailor Bishop of Orkney, the Lord Eglinton, whom the English called a pirate, and chief, as was natural, the Lord High Admiral of Scotland.

Chapter Two

‘
Why
did I leave France, then? Do you need ask? I have been busy enough on Your Majesty’s business in Scotland.’

‘Oh, very! I heard that.’

‘What have you heard?’

‘A great many things. I heard of – of – Well, I heard of some mighty business of a race-meeting, and that Lord Ruthven had to send to England for geldings to match yours.’

‘Aye, the horseflesh in his stables was poor stuff, as needs be since he chose it. You’ll not say a race-meeting took up eight months of my time?’

‘No. There was some – some – Well, there was some slight matter of the Abbey of Melrose—’

‘Which you gave me, and its fee.’

‘I did not give you leave to bully the monks into yielding that fee by threatening to take away the keys of their chambers and heating them to brand their cheeks.’

‘Pah! If they didn’t like hot keys they could pay the fees – and did. Will you tell me a better way to get money out of monks – Madam?’

‘You abuse my authority.’

‘Who says so? The Lord James?’

‘
No
. He says nothing of you. But your Liddesdale men have been raiding the Border. Sir John Forster, the English Warden, has sent complaints.’

‘Twenty-three. He sent the list to Lord Borthwick at Hermitage.
Old Borthwick’s answer was that he held the place for me, and he gave point to it by stealing the messenger’s horse and gear.’

‘He’d never have dared do it if you had not been back. Sir John said so.’

‘Sir John was right. A man must have compensation for reading through twenty-three complaints. And isn’t the crest of my house a horse’s head, and its song, “They ne’er saw a horse but they made it their ain”?’

He had hummed the words to the tune of the Galliard, looking down into her angry face with laughing eyes. She struggled for an instant to keep it up, then burst out laughing.

At which he was quick to give serious heed to her complaint.

‘I was back in Scotland in time to convoke your Parliament at your request. I saw to it that in the coalition Your Grace’s nominees should be at least as strong as those of the Congregation. Unfortunately they saw it too – that they wouldn’t get their own way with me in the saddle. That is why they’ve sent their leader to ask you to come back and rule your kingdom yourself, in your name – and in their interests.’

‘
Their
leader –
their
interests! Is that how you interpret my brother and his motives?’

‘How else, Madam? My memory can stretch as far as a year ago.’

‘The circumstances are clean different.’

‘The characters are not.’

‘You are a severe judge of character, my lord – in other people.’

‘Christ’s blood, Madam, how am I to take that?’

‘Do you use oaths to your Queen?’

‘If my Queen were the one your brother serves, she’d use ’em herself.’

‘How dare you say the Lord James serves Elizabeth?’

‘I dare say more – that now, while he’s applying for the arrears of his pension from the French Crown, he’s also drawing pay from the English.’

‘This is intolerable!’

‘Then do not tolerate it.’

‘Is nobody honest but yourself? Am I to trust nobody but my Lord Bothwell?’

‘Precious few.’

‘It is ridiculous. You have warned me against nearly everybody in Scotland. You don’t like Lethington because he can make you look foolish—’

‘I’d make
him
look foolish if I got my hands on that canny old tabby-cat!’

‘That is your one idea of dealing with people. To you everyone clever is false. But I know my brother is honest; he may be blunt, you call it “dour”—’

‘No, Madam, I call it dyspeptic. Would you trust Calvin too on account of his sour stomach?’

‘I know more about my brother than you do. Blood is thicker than water.’

‘It’s stickier. I know more about blood than you do.’

‘I will
not
join the Worshipful Guild of Backbiters. I will not believe that if anyone shows honour or kindness it is either from self-interest or stupidity. I had rather die from trusting too much, than kill my soul by never trusting at all.’

He stared at her passion that had suddenly burst through long years of restraint in the dry disillusioned air that Queen Catherine breathed all around her, that jocular blight in which Mary had felt her tenderness for François, her devotion to her uncles, withering as though discovered to be ignoble.

As he dimly guessed, for he said, ‘But, Madam, you are not thinking of me?’

‘No-o-o,’ she breathed in a long sigh. ‘I believe I was thinking of my mother-in-law. And now,’ she turned on him, ‘I find you of her company.’

‘God forbid! I don’t ask you not to trust – only not to trust the wrong man.’

‘In fact, to trust only you.’

‘I can naturally answer best for myself. Why are you so angry, Madam?’

His voice was gentler. To her horror, she found that tears were
mounting to her eyes. In another moment she would be telling him that she was angry because she had trusted him with her verses on Francois’ death while he was disporting himself with a woman in Flanders.

So she cried instead, ‘I think the Devil’s been let loose in the world. Don’t you think it’s the Devil’s work to sack churches and monasteries? Mr Knox is commanding them all to be destroyed and so “keep the rooks from returning by pulling down their nests”. And me too – he preaches openly against the return of the “idolatrous Queen”.’

‘Well,’ he said coolly, ‘and are you going to be deterred by that?’

‘
No
. I mean to return, and teach my subjects their duties.’

He nodded with an approving smile. ‘But you’ll not bring in the Inquisition to teach them their duty to God?’

‘I’ll not meddle with their religion – nor let them meddle with mine. You’ll find my constancy to my faith a deal less dangerous than Queen Catherine’s sympathy with yours.’

‘Devil doubt it!’

‘But if I give my subjects freedom, they must give freedom to me.’

‘They’ll never do that. The first Mass you hold at Holyrood will be the signal for an organized riot.’

‘My brother swears I shall hold it, even if he has to guard the chapel doors himself.’

‘The trusty watchdog, hey? Growls, but faithful. And you’ll set him to guard the door against his own allies! The thing’s plain enough, Madam – you’ll always trust the wrong man’

‘
Go!
’

As soon as they met and talked again they quarrelled again. It annoyed her intensely that she had to discuss her plans with him: her plans for the voyage, or rather his; even her plans, or rather those of others, for her marriage, for these too had to be submitted to his approval. So the Countess of Lennox had evidently thought, that termagant niece of King Henry VIII, for no sooner had Bothwell
been given the governorship of Dunbar Castle than she had written to sound him as to his views on a royal match for her handsome long-legged lad, Henry Lord Darnley: ‘a baby face on top of a pair of stilts, is that your Grace’s fancy?’ Bothwell asked his Queen, laughing at her attempts to make him tell her what he had written in answer to the fond mother’s hopes.

He would not tell her; he stood with his legs apart, his hands on his belt, his eyes narrowed, mocking her. A mere Border ruffian, as her brother James plainly thought, but would not descend to his level by saying so; while Bothwell had no such gentlemanly scruples; he decried everybody she wished to hear praised, first her lords, now her lovers.

The King of Sweden? An erratic giant three parts mad.

The King of Denmark? A sot who sagged in drink to the pattern of his own heavy jowl and buttocks.

King Antoine de Navarre? A nincompoop; that jolly young rascal his son Henri was already more of a man than he.

My Lord of Arran? That zany!

But his breath failed him at the Prince of Spain.

This was the match she most desired. It was much the greatest. Queen Catherine, having secured the father, King Philip, for her eldest daughter Isobel, was now busily intriguing for her youngest, Margot, to marry the son, Don Carlos. It did not at all suit either her policy, or Queen Elizabeth’s, that Mary should make any important continental alliance. Mary saw them, not unfairly, as the wicked stepmother and stepsister, determined to thwart her chances. Their antagonism greatly stimulated her ambition.

There were other, more tender reasons, though these did not include the bridegroom. It would be thrilling to go to Spain, yet it would not be at all strange, for she would be going to her dearest schoolfellow, François’ sister Isobel, the gentle dark-eyed girl who had set off to Spain two years ago, at fourteen, to be King Philip’s third wife. She and Mary had done their lessons together with over thirty other noble children of France, had written their Latin exercises in the form of letters to each other, had acted their favourite romances of Launcelot and Amadis de Gaul in the little
wood above the castle at Amboise, where Mary, the elder and taller, had always been the adventurous knight and Isobel the distressed damsel. If she married Don Carlos, she told Bothwell, a little intimidated by the look on his face at mention of the plan, she would be again with her former sister-in-law.

‘Who would now be your stepmother-in-law. I quite see that the relationship is more important than that of a husband!’

Why should Don Carlos not make her a good husband? His father, King Philip, had been kindness itself to Isobel; he had sent her cloth woven from the gold and silver of the Indies for her trousseau, and underwear of the finest Flemish linen, and silk stockings from Grenada, some red, some blue – he had even sent Mary some too, of turquoise silk.

Bothwell remembered the hunt at Fontainebleau and the glimpse he had had of a slender leg in a turquoise silk stocking. The discovery that it had been sent her by King Philip most unreasonably augmented his anger against the Spanish marriage.

‘You’ll do well to remember, Madam, that we Scots are not the tame cats of England to stand a Spanish Prince over us as
they
did when their Bloody Mary married Philip. And I swear he never gave her any stockings,’ he added inconsequently.

‘Well, she adored him all the same, and so does Queen Isobel. All his three wives have done so.’

‘Because women like a man to be a brute.’

‘You are mistaken, sir. They may like the steel hand, but only when concealed by the velvet glove. I think you ride bare-handed, sir.’

He was furious. It would need his whip to teach her manners! He longed to break the icy quiet of her voice. He burst out ‘Carlos – that sickly abnormal boy! He makes the Goblin of France here a fine healthy lad by comparison! But I forgot there’s an alternative plan to marry Your Grace to him too – I beg pardon, instead. Are you never to have a man in your bed to teach you what marriage really is? Are you always to think of it as a matter only of treaties and alliances, and have no care who is to sire your sons, who are to be Kings of Scotland?’

Her hands trembled, she gasped out, ‘Never, never speak to me again!’

But he would not take her command. ‘You
shall
understand what you are doing,’ he said, and gripped her hands in his furious determination. ‘Do you know that that boy is stunted, almost deformed? That he roasts hares alive for his sport, and goes into such rages that he foams at the mouth? Have you thought what it would be to give your body to the sickly frenzied lust of such a boy – as if it weren’t bad enough to give it to a boy at all?’

‘Stop!’ He was making everything come back – her fear of François’ feeble passion, her relief and gratitude that she had never had to endure it, her tenderness that gave her remorse for both emotions. ‘Your foul mouth blackens everything. It’s true what Lord Arran says of you – you hurt both body and soul.’

He dropped her hands. ‘I didn’t know I was hurting you – or holding them. I beg Your Grace’s pardon. What is Arran’s complaint of me? I’d best hear it.’

‘I don’t remember.’ She was nursing her fingers, and her voice sounded sulky and tearful.

He looked at them in disgust; he hated a woman you couldn’t touch without bruising. ‘Will you find the Spaniard gentler, do you think?’

‘You are never to mention any plan of my marriage to me again, do you understand? No one has ever dared speak of it as you have done, not even my grandmother, and oh!’ she burst out, suddenly remembering the delicate reticences and austere humour with which the Duchesse had prepared her for matrimony, ‘You are utterly unlike my grandmother!’