The Galliard (16 page)

She laughed wildly as she heard her own words, and his hearty roar echoed her on a distinct note of relief.

‘Last time we quarrelled you confused me with your mother-in-law, and now you compare me with your grandmother!’

‘We quarrelled!’ Was there ever such impertinence! But she could not rebuke him with dignity while she was sobbing with laughter.

A haze of blue forget-me-not was spread at their feet, shimmering
in the late sunshine as though it had dropped from the sky; it spread up to the delicate Renaissance staircase of the miniature castle. They were walking in front of the modern house built by the Duchesse Antoinette’s husband in their youth, as a peace-offering after some love-affair with a peasant girl. Mary looked up at its slender turrets.

‘Do you know what this house is called? It is the House of Love Repented. That, I think, is what you are telling me to avoid.’

‘Madam, I am not presuming to tell you anything of the sort. I am not so foolish as to imagine you would ever repent of love with Don Carios, since it would be impossible for any sane woman to feel it.’

Now he had made her angry again, he simply could not help doing it; besides, she looked so pretty in a rage, her very hair seemed to flame up, along with those curious light eyes, opalescent eyes, whose colour you could not determine even when they flashed open.

He took his leave abruptly without waiting for the lofty dismissal that she was evidently preparing.

Was this an earnest of the way her nobles would treat her in Scotland? If she were married to Carlos, she would at least have the safety of formality, so barricaded with the stiff Spanish etiquette that it surely would not much matter what her husband was like.

She tried to sound her brother on the subject, but could not do so without giving away the fact that she had discussed it with Bothwell, and of this he was so disapproving that she felt she had been grossly indelicate. The Earl was no fit counsellor for her – ‘a violent and dangerous man,’ he called him, ‘whose power depends solely on his leadership of all the thieves of Liddesdale and Teviotdale, reckless and impoverished younger sons of the nobility.’

‘At least he used that power to his utmost for my mother,’ she answered, fixing innocent eyes upon him and wondering if he would blush – which he did not.

But James’ dignified presence, his austerity, even his disapproval, was rather comforting to Mary; it showed his deep concern for her,
she thought, as he stood looking down at her and laid his hand on hers in tender reproof. Excited, a little frightened by the prospect of her great new adventure, she felt that his solid respectability promised her something of the restraint and spiritual security she had always found in her grandmother’s home.

The Cardinal, who had handed over the guardianship purely from a policy of prudence, would have been astonished if he had realized how the impressionable girl of eighteen interpreted it.

Bothwell’s plans for the voyage were completed, though not to Mary’s satisfaction. Everything ordered by him she wished to flout, for even if he were her Lord High Admiral, she was his Queen, and how dare he give his commands so plainly? She had set her heart on returning to Scotland as she had come, that summer thirteen years ago, by the far Northern route first adventured by her father two years before her birth. It was only right, she told Bothwell, that she should now visit those remote islands, since her father on that voyage of discovery had annexed their Lands and Lordships.

It was an unfortunate reminder, since Bothwell’s forefathers had been Lords of Orkney and the Shetland Isles. But a gleam in his eye was the only sign of his feelings about that.

He said dryly, ‘One thing is plain, Madam, that you are a remarkably good sailor.’

‘And you are not, I understand, since you oppose my wishes.’

‘It doesn’t need a bout of sickness, Madam, to determine me that you shall not show your fear of the English Queen so far as to travel all round the Northern seas in order to avoid passing near her coasts.’

He had no trouble after that about the route of the voyage; only the difficulty of getting it to start. France, it seemed, could not bear to let Mary go, nor Mary to leave her. All her friends and relatives were planning fêtes to detain her. Would there never be an end of the mummery and dressing-up, thought the impatient young Scot, eager for the new adventure in his own country when he should make himself chief adviser to the young Queen, overbearing all the sly counsels of these ‘Scottish Cecils’, Master ‘Michael Wily’
of Lethington and the good Elder-bastard-brother James with his down-dropped glances and admonishing pats of the hand (‘the best that one dares do with a woman!’).

But he had to wait while mermaids hailed Mary as their Queen, and Venus abdicated in her favour, and all the poets in France sang their farewells to her. That was the homage she was used to: the hands that he could not grip without hurting were poems in the mouth of Ronsard; she was a puppet of the State, a pretty doll for courtiers to praise respectfully, a subject for painters and poets and the letters of Ambassadors to foreign Princes who had never seen her, but were nosing hot on her track like dogs on a scent! Was there anything of her that belonged to her alone, and to the man who would ever be fool enough to love her?

So he grumbled to himself, furious with impatience at this delicate, crisp yet pensive culture that was holding her from the real business of living in the land where she belonged.

It was mid-August before he at last succeeded in getting her away. The packing alone was a tremendous business; all her favourite books, French and Italian romances, English historical chronicles, collections of poems; most of the Latin classics and some of the Greek, with which she meant to continue her education; a sprinkling of theology, Luther’s works and Calvin’s Institutes, so that even Mr Knox would have to admit that she had studied their side of the religious question.

There were rich carpets from Turkey, thirty-six of them where her mother had only had two; forty-five great carved and painted beds, five times as many as her mother’s; and her jewels, the finest in Europe: the diamond called the Great Harry from Harry of England; a set of black and white enamelled buttons given by Diane de Poictiers, with her crescent moon in diamonds; an agate-hilted dagger, studded with diamonds and emeralds, with a huge sapphire in its head, a present to her father on his first brief marriage, from his father-in-law, François I.

She gave away quantities of parting presents: a necklace of rubies and diamonds to the young Duchesse de Guise, a huge emerald ring to the Cardinal, silver-plate to her friend the enemy, Sir Nicholas
Throckmorton, so beautiful that he thought it advisable to say nothing about it to his own Queen.

Bothwell insisted that the final day of departure be kept secret till the last moment. The Lord James had left in advance to prepare for her arrival. The Duc de Guise saw her aboard at Calais, the scene of his greatest conquest. She cried and clung to him, but young René de Lorraine, Marquis d’Elboeuf, cheered them up with his absurd jokes as he stood by them, a rare blue-ruffed pigeon chained like a hawk on his wrist. He had brought it as a present for his niece, but not a parting one, for he and two more of her younger uncles were to accompany her, Claude Duc d’Aumale, and François de Lorraine, Knight of Malta, Grand Prior and General of the French war fleet, leading the noble escort. Three uncles, four Maries, and the Chevalier Bayard’s nephew, Châtelard, and all the rest of the gorgeous young company went on board the Queen’s galley, which was all white, with white flags bearing the arms of France.

It was true then, she was really leaving France; nothing, after all, had happened at the last moment to keep her at home. Her life there was over. The Duc de Guise stood on the shore that he had wrested from England, the tears running down his scarred cheek. His farewell had been the last.

But the strangest had been when she said goodbye to Queen Catherine. The two Dowagers of France had confronted each other, the one in her white robes like a young willow tree in the snow, the other a wedgeshaped block of blackness, peering up into the tall girl’s face with those bulging short-sighted eyes.

‘You have been crying,’ she said, ‘but think how fortunate you are that you may cry. Only the slim and lovely may do that. When I came to France I had to learn to laugh.’

For one shamed instant Mary had realized that though she was suffering exquisite grief it was certainly satisfactory to be so constantly assured that she herself was exquisite – that the ‘gift of tears in the voice’ had been cited as one of her rarest charms. Whatever she might have to endure, she would never know the agony of being the dumpy, pop-eyed, entirely friendless bride of
fourteen that Catherine had been when she came to France to marry a boy already devoted to his beautiful mistress. Catherine had ‘learned to laugh’ to please his father, that jovial satyr, François I; of her husband she had been always too much afraid.

A horrid memory, from which Mary had always turned her mind away in disgust, came back to her in a sudden new light; she had heard it said that Catherine used to lie on the floor and look through the chinks between the boards at the room below, where her husband was with his Diana, that crystal goddess whose moon never waned, nor hold on him slackened, until the day he died.

‘But I,’ Catherine said, on a note as flat and dull as if a lump of earth had fallen from her mouth, ‘have never been loved at all.’

Chapter Three

There was no need of the lamp at the mast-head, said young Châtelard, for the eyes of their Queen were bright enough to light them through the darkness.

It was an unfortunate moment for his metaphor, for her eyes were red and dim with crying. She had stayed up on deck to look her last on the shores of France, luxuriating in her sadness with the rich youthful egotism of one who must taste every sensation to the full. The galley-slaves toiling below, chained to their oars, filled her with unbearable pity; there was too much misery in the world; at least she would lessen what she could of it, and she ordered her sailor uncle, the General of the Galleys, in nominal charge of the voyage, to see to it that not one of them should be struck by the slave-master’s whip, however lightly.

She would not go below even when it was dark, neither for supper nor bed. She had a salad brought her on deck and a great golden melon, like the August full moon that had swung mistily over the edge of the sea, and she was nearly as greedy of this as she had been of her homesick tears. Another exquisite sensation she would enjoy, and that was to sleep on deck. She had her bed made up there, and lay listening to the lap, lap of the waves and oars, the creak of the ropes, the occasional flap of a sail, until she saw the clouds floating like islands in the golden dawn. Its light did not reach the edge of the sea: that distant water was cold as moonlight, corpse-light, the twilight at the edge of the world.

Were these the islands she had longed to see again? She knew
they were not, that they were mere wraiths of mist, disappearing even as she watched; but what did it matter if they were of land or water? They were lovelier than any she remembered, her own as much as if she looked on them to say, ‘I am Queen of Orkney and the Isles.’

Her hair was all wet and curling from sea-mist; four Maries could not get the tangles out of it. But she continued to sleep – or not – on deck for the five nights of the voyage. She composed some charming verses in farewell to the pleasant land of France, in obedience to family tradition, remembering the sad little Princess Margaret, poet daughter of the poet King James I, who had also sung her homesickness – in her case for Scotland, which she had left to be the bride of the cruel Louis XI; had kissed the ugly mouth of the Court poet as he lay asleep in a garden, ‘because it had uttered the fairest words in France’; and, so the chronicle briefly related, ‘died of scandal’.

Girls must have been more sensitive a hundred years ago, Mary decided. No Princess now would die of scandal. Certainly not Elizabeth. There were shocking scandals about her. Gone was that Good Princess who had always been so tiresomely held up as an example to her own childhood, so much older and cleverer than herself; gone was the poor motherless girl who had succeeded in making all her four stepmothers so fond of her. From the moment she became Queen, Elizabeth did not care to possess a single woman friend; in fact, you might have thought there was no other woman at her Court. She played all her lovers off against each other, refused none of her suitors, and had managed to avoid both war and matrimony with Philip of Spain.

And Elizabeth would now be her nearest and, it seemed, her most dangerous neighbour. Mary accepted the challenge with a tingling of excitement. Elizabeth was almost twenty-eight, an appalling age to eighteen; it was high time now for her to give way before the younger and fairer rival.

And Mary thought with a spice of malice of all the red and orange-coloured sails of the princely suitors that came up the
Thames to woo the Queen of England; now she would be taking, had already taken, the wind out of those sails!

As if in prompt revenge for these mischievous imaginings. Elizabeth’s fleet managed to capture two of Mary’s ships, the two containing all her stud of horses and most of her possessions, and detained them for something over a month. Short of capturing Mary herself, the revenge was perfect, since it prevented her making the triumphal entry into her capital on which she had counted. Riding down the Royal Mile in her white robes on her white thoroughbred, Madame la Réale, followed by the gorgeous chivalry of France, she would have made a dazzling first impression on her subjects, and knew it.

But now there were no horses, no jewelled harness.

Everyone had been taken by surprise by her swift arrival; there were no preparations for it, and she had to sit in a bare shabby house on the quayside at Leith and wait while a messenger went to inform her brother; and there was a thick east wind sea-fog, so that though it was past nine o’clock on a mid-August morning she could scarcely see across the squalid streets of the little port.