The Galliard (39 page)

There was some pleasure among all this business: a brush or two with the English at Berwick who had objected to his guard on the Border passes; more than a brush with the Elliots, whose peel towers he now burned as he had threatened, in accordance with his powers as Lieutenant of the Border ‘to ride with fire and sword’ upon those houses that had disobeyed his call to arms. Rob Elliot of Redheugh sought safety with Sir John Forster, but Forster had to go cannily, for the English Queen was anxious to appoint a peace conference, with Forster and the Earl of Berwick as the English Commissioners.

Once again Bothwell stood in her way. He was chosen by Mary as the chief Scottish delegate instead of the easy ‘tractable’ nominees that Elizabeth had wanted. In vain did her Envoy, Randolph, protest and even storm at the Scottish Queen, declaring that she had chosen the very man most hated by the Queen of England.

The delicate girl lying back on her pillows only laughed at the indignant little man’s attempts to bully her out of her right to choose her own representative. She apologized charmingly for receiving him in bed, but she had not slept well. Randolph’s gallantry was more disconcerting than his anger.

‘I expect,’ he said archly, ‘Your Grace has something in your belly to keep you awake.’

‘Do you really like that man?’ she asked later of Beton, who had held a long flirtation with Randolph.

Beton tossed her impudent curls; the corners of her mouth went up in a hard little shut smile.

‘He thinks so. You may find it useful that he does, Madam.’

‘He’s a spy, of course. Have you been spying on the spy? Is it something about Elizabeth? Will it affect me?’

‘It is something about Elizabeth. It has affected you. I don’t know how much it will.’ Beton spoke more slowly than usual. Mary threw a pillow at her.

‘Beton, you teasing monkey, tell me quick!’

‘No, Madam, give me time. I like to make sure of my facts.’

Mary gave in good-humouredly. ‘And so you let Randolph make love to you, merely to make use of him for me?’

Beton was instantly again the casual cynical young woman of the world. ‘He is well enough to flirt with – and to work up others. I like handsome Sandy Ogilvie better.’

‘So does Lady Jean Gordon, I fancy.’

‘She may, but she’s a dull creature.’

‘All the same, I have a notion that she will always get what she wants in the end.’

The end of my life then!’ and Beton laughed at so incredible a thought. She was already secretly engaged to the fickle swain, she admitted.

Kisses and congratulations, laughing promises of secrecy and a wedding dress, they could not keep off the chill dismay that struck at Mary’s heart before she recognised its cause. Was it that Sandy was not good enough for the most brilliant of her Maries? No, it struck nearer home – the knowledge that Jean would now be thankful to save herself from the ignominious position of the jilted, by encouraging a lover of far greater power and importance than young Alexander Ogilvie of Boyne.

He was not the only man who had noticed the Lady Jean Gordon. She was too pale and her nose rather too long, but her figure was beautiful, full-formed, and carried with the conscious voluptuous grace of a much older woman. Her whole air and manner were of a remarkable composure for her age: whatever the cause of her silence, it was certainly not from any shyness or diffidence.

Bothwell had noticed her deliberately on his rare appearances at Court, for he was glad of the chance given him by a fine young woman to distract his attention from the Queen. Mary’s presence was now an acute discomfort to him; it was bad enough in absence to hear in his mind some sudden echo of that magic voice, the tingling vibrant excitement of it, ringing across the serious business that he had in hand, sometimes even waking him just as he was falling asleep, so that he started up imagining for one wild instant that he had heard her speak. While away from her he could tire his body and drug his mind with the furious speed of all his activities; when with her, the only relief for his tormented senses, as he watched her with that pampered boy, was to behave with rather
more than his accustomed ungraciousness to her.

It was becoming the fashion for the young Protestant nobles to attend Mass in the Queen’s chapel occasionally as a courtesy, and also as a relief from the long sermons of their own ministers. But Bothwell still refused to do so, flatly and bluntly; he would not give any handle to the notion that because he supported the Queen he must therefore be ‘a great Papist’. The world had gone mad over tying labels, generally the wrong ones, on to everybody.

‘You are the Inquisition’ – that still expressed the common opinion of Mary.

He did not explain this, but laughed when she thought he would come, ‘if only for the music, as many do. We’re having the new Palestrina Mass. Davie got a copy of it from Rome. He still sings the bass.’

‘Aye, they call him a base fellow.’

‘What a stupid joke! I thought you liked him.’

‘I do. My only objection to him is that he’s served you too well.’

Again he would not say why, and when she cited the Protestants at Court who attended Mass, he jeered at them. ‘They’re used to changing their coat – more often than their linen, some of them. Even that may follow, now you’re civilizing us all so fast.’

How rude and sneering he’d grown in his long absence! He would probably never quite forgive her for it. So she still spoke gently, though urgently, as she explained that this particular Mass was a State occasion of international importance. Monsieur Rambouillet, a nobleman from the French Court, was being sent to confer on Darnley a high honour of ecclesiastical origin, the Knighthood of the Cockle, of the Order of St Michael. This decoration had not been given to a Scot since half a century ago when François I had bestowed it on his friend the Franco-bred Duke of Albany, ‘Magnificent Uncle’ of James V, who had left his fair wide lands in France to come and be Governor of Scotland during his nephew’s minority. Tremendous preparations had then been made for the Collar of the Cockle; the Palace of Holyrood had been repaired (even the drainage sewers, which were never its strong point) and
partly rebuilt; all the lords and barons throughout the kingdom were summoned to attend the ceremony in St Giles’ Cathedral in new robes of cloth-of-gold, crimson satin, purple velvet and black taffetas. Albany ever after bore the Cockle shells round the border of his coat of arms.

She told all this to Bothwell, almost begging him to understand her eagerness that the occasion should not fall too far short of that earlier splendour. St Giles’ was now Protestant, and closed to her; the ceremony could only be held in her private chapel, but at least let her and Darnley have the support of her greatest nobles!

Even this failed to move him. He said that he would meet the Frenchman at the banquet that his old friend, the merchant, Barron, was giving in honour of the occasion, and that would certainly impress Rambouillet if Barron told the full list of Bothwell’s debts to him as an after-dinner story.

She shrugged her shoulders; she might have known it, he would do nothing to please her. Serve her, yes, he had proved that again and again, but that was his loyalty, the one tribute he paid to morality. But he cared nothing for her happiness or unhappiness – and nothing for what she thought of him, any more than he cared what the world thought. She felt as much envy as irritation. If only she could be like that, carefree, insolently regardless of others’ opinion!

For she was indeed desperately anxious about the effect Darnley would make on Rambouillet, and through him on all her family and friends in France; all the more so since Beton had at last told her her discovery from Randolph. But that she would not, dared not think of now, for she must seem confident and secure – more, a radiantly happy bride; and the best way to seem that was to feel it.

Her Maries helped her into a new dress for the banquet that glimmered with gold tissue, and twisted the pearls in her shining hair and dabbed a touch of rouge on her cheeks, the first time she had ever used it, for she had always been proud of the peculiarly transparent whiteness of her skin, but today it made her cheeks look thin and her eyes hollow, and that would never do. She picked up her little silver-backed looking-glass she had brought from France,
the first ever seen in Scotland, where mirrors were made of polished metal.

Gazing into it this dull wintry afternoon when the candles had been lit since morning against the grey light, she saw that white face like a ghost looking back at her – ‘and I shall be one day’, she thought, ‘and other faces then will look back from this glass, the faces of my children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and something of me will look out from their eyes’.

That gave her confidence again in the future. After all, if anyone had told her a year ago what her position would be today, she would have run mad with joy. For she would walk to Mr Barron’s house (they were going, as they often did, on foot) and pass under that overhanging house at the foot of the Netherbow, knowing that that old man Knox was no longer peering down from his study window at her like a crow from its nest, most literally ‘overlooking’ her with the evil eye, since all that he could see would be stored up to use against her. Now she had got rid of Knox, as she had got rid of James and all her enemies; there would soon not be a single pensioner of England here to work against her.

Only French opinion remained to be convinced; and that she knew to be largely personal – her uncles were so fond of her, they were unlikely to think any match good enough for her. Rambouillet must tell them – oh, but how she wished Rambouillet could see him now!

For at that moment Darnley had come swinging in on her from his ride, with the great buffalo-hide coat making him look so much a man and every inch a king – and what a lot of inches there were as he leaned over her shoulder to peer into her glass and laugh at all the pretty little objects on her dressing-table!

‘Rouge? So you’ve come to it at last. I like your pink cheeks. There wasn’t much game to be had. The birds are too cold to fly. There’ll be snow before night, I swear. How much longer will you sit and fiddle with these pots and pans before you’re ready?’

‘I’m ready now. Oh, Harry, I wish you could come like that! I love you in those great boots.’

‘Only in them?’

‘And in that great coat.’

‘Only in that?’

‘Off with you, silly, and make yourself gorgeous. What will you wear?’

‘Oh, I Don’t know. Anthony will see to it.’ He swaggered off with an air of manly indifference, manifestly feigned, for he delighted in all the fine clothes Mary had ordered for his trousseau and the proud evidence of the hundreds of pounds she had spent on him. She wandered into the little anteroom and sat waiting for him, smiling, assured, all that former vague uneasiness dispelled by the sight of his jolly boyish face fresh from the keen air.

He was a long time dressing. He always was a dawdler. Royalty oughtn’t to be late. Time took twice as long when one was waiting. She picked up a book – Ronsard’s new poems that he had sent her with a charming flattering inscription; she dipped into it, noted a prettily pedantic phrase, a diminutive or two, musical as the tinkle of little bells – ‘
ondelette
’, ‘
doucelette
’ – saw something about eating strawberries in a wood by a fountain, looked up at the lowering sky outside and remarked, ‘How very improbable!’ and saw her jewelled watch on the table.

There was no doubt now they would be late. She sent a message to Darnley to urge haste; walked round the room, took up another book in a white vellum cover with gold tooling, more poems and a treatise on poetry by Ronsard’s gentle young friend, du Bellay, who had died on his return to the Loire country for which he had always been so homesick. As she read of the winnowing flail in the summer heat and the dust dancing in the barn door, she saw the silvery light breaking through low clouds over that wide soft-flowing river, the flat fields of waving corn and little homely blue-grey roofs pointing upwards at absurd angles; and majestic châteaux rising by that river, rich with carving and the new painted glass, more delicate than the old stained glass, the châteaux of Chambord and Amboise, Chenonceaux and Blois, where she and François had loved to stay, the little town of Orléans on the river’s edge, where François had died.

These elegant arabesques of words, interweaving like the sinuous
lines of that architecture, where stone had been made supple and slender as the reeds by the Loire, wove their spell round her and lulled her back into their world of refined and learned dreamers, a world so civilized that the style in verse mattered more than its content, and the introduction of a Greek word into the French language more than the civil wars of religion that raged while they were being written. The strongest passions in this intimate and delicate poetry were ennui at the world’s affairs, or the sense of loss that steals on one with the slow passing of the days; the controversy in this prose treatise was on no more dangerous a theme than the defence of the French language against the Latin. But now she had ceased to notice what she read, for ‘we shall be late’, she kept saying to herself, ‘we shall be late, late, so late’.

Chapter Three

Darnley came into the room. As she laid down her book and sprang to meet him, she saw that he had come back quite different.

‘Harry, you’re not well. Don’t worry – I can easily explain. You know you said what a tedious business it would be – long speeches all so polite! I envy you, not coming.’

‘Not coming – what do you mean? Want to keep me out of it, do you? We’ll see about that.’

He stood there magnificent in white and gold, ‘but he is quite different’, she said to herself, and ‘I knew it. I knew this would happen.’ His eyes were staring over her head, vacant and blue as glass; his face sagged, his full mouth drooping open, his restless hands plucking nervously at his sleeves, his dagger, the tight buttons at his throat, unable to finish anything they began to do. Only his hair remained unchanged, that curling chicken-yellow hair that looked almost ridiculously young when he was fresh with riding, but now sat on that red heavy face as grotesquely as a wig.