The Galliard (40 page)

It was impossible to dissuade him from coming. She could only hope the cold air would sting him fairly sober as they walked up the hill. But she would not be able to prevent him drinking at the banquet – it was bound to happen. And now it was happening and she watching it, talking to Rambouillet very fast so as to keep his attention, talking, talking – what about? Ronsard and du Bellay, of course: how lucky that she had just been looking, at them!

J’offre ces violettes

Ces lis et ces fleurettes.

‘Daring innovators,’ Rambouillet called them; they had made a revolution in French poetry, the Sorbonne was fighting it desperately. Wars, wars everywhere and revolutions, even in verse and language! She nodded with grave concern; she agreed it was all part of the revolutionary spirit of the age; she thought, a great many young men drank, especially in this country, Rambouillet would know that. If only Harry would not talk so much and so loudly, and insist on Rambouillet’s two pages drinking with him glass for glass; he roared with laughter when one of them tripped forward and fell. It must be something very strong – ‘aqua composita’, Harry was calling it in a loud pompous voice, a mixture of whisky and brandy and other stuffs which he had insisted on his servant Anthony mixing for him. He had refused Barron’s wines, to the dour disgust of their sturdily respectable host, who had been prepared to be so genial. Neither he nor Rambouillet would touch the stuff, and Rambouillet looked down his pointed beard every time Harry tried to catch his eye, though he addressed him with icy deference as the King.

‘The King!’ He ought to be drinking with the scullions in the pantry; it was grotesque that he should be here beside her, with his new decoration of the Order of the Cockle round his neck and his hands groping up over it while he interrupted her talk with Rambouillet to make some foul joke about the Order of the Cuckold. He went on interrupting them; he was determined to show that he was as important as his wife, even though he hadn’t yet got the Crown Matrimonial – and why
hadn’t
he got it, he’d like to know?

‘The Crown Matrimonial?’ Rambouillet inquired with polite interest. ‘That, I take it, confers equal powers on the consort, and in the event of the Sovereign’s death leaves him the throne?’

Darnley, only hazily distinguishing the cool crisp French words from among the loud blurr in his ears, was somehow disconcerted by the dispassionate inquiry: it made him want to
assert himself on his own merits.

He began to brag of the support and encouragement given them by the Pope and Spain: ‘They want us to lead an army into England, of course. We could do it, too, like a shot – look how we chased those rascals over the Border. But Mary’s so weak – she hates war and yet she loves fighting – just like a woman, ha ha ha! We Catholics ought to conquer England and convert her over again – she’s used to it, isn’t she? Been converted three times already – Protestant under King Hal, Catholic under Bloody Mary, Protestant under his bastard Elizabeth – and now Catholic again under the next King Hal. That makes it all fair and square, doesn’t it? But Mary doesn’t care a rap for the Church – gets their backing and does nothing for it, and doesn’t mean to. Says people ought to worship as they wish – can you imagine such stuff? And yet there she sits up night after night with little Davie, writing letters to the Pope and King Philip to make ’em think her a good Catholic – or says she does – and if she doesn’t, what
are
they doing, I should like to know? Have you any more of that aqua composita, Anthony? – if not, just mix it again.’

Mary had stopped thinking. Rambouillet, the representative of French Catholicism, had heard that she meant to do nothing active for their religion; their rigidly Protestant host, Mr Barron, a friend of Knox, had heard she sat up night after night writing letters to the Pope and Spain through Rizzio; and everyone present had seen and heard that her husband, who demanded full rights as King of Scotland, was a babbling sot who could be trusted rather less than a mischievous child.

She made a sign to Anthony, but her husband saw it and turned round on her in a sudden rush of fury. ‘Not the first servant you’ve tampered with behind my back, I’ll be sworn. Like servants, don’t you – like to do them honour and tell them to go against me –
I
know – you think I don’t, but
I
know.’

She rose, trembling all over, stunned and shaken as if he had crashed his fist into her face, as indeed for an instant she had thought he was going to do. They had all got up, they were saying things, Harry was shouting. She began to cry, wildly, helplessly.
Someone threw a cloak round her, took her arm, was leading her away so fast that her steps tottered, but the hand on her arm held her up; and now there was cold air on her face and darkness round her, no more faces round her, staring shocked faces, contemptuous pitying faces, no more of that heated face that had slipped into so dire a change from everything she knew in it, shifting and twisting itself as it blared out worse and still worse things.

There was only the cold air and the black jagged roofs against the stars.

‘Steady now, steady,’ said a voice close beside her; ‘there’s no need to force the pace.’

She went on through the darkness, held up by Bothwell’s arm.

Chapter Four

He took her up the narrow spiral stairway into the tiny room where they had supped that first evening of his home-coming. A fire of pine-logs and fir-cones burned in the corner. A small lamp of perfumed oil hanging by a gold chain swung gently in the draught as they came in, and filled the room with moving shadows. He set her in a chair and poured out wine from a flagon on the little oval table that had been pushed to one side. She asked for water to mix with it, as was her custom, and he added it from a tall silver jug. It was the first time she had spoken at all; and now she said dully, ‘My feet are cold.’

He flung himself down on his knees before her, dragged off her shoes without waiting to unfasten them, and began to rub her feet with such exasperated violence that she pulled them away, thinking that he was angry with her. But at that he caught them again in his hands and began to kiss them, and then sprang up and snatched her to him, kissing her face, her hair, her throat and shoulders, blindly, furiously, and the next moment his hands tore at her dress. She gave a cry so full of anguish that it reached him even through his deaf passion.

‘I am with child by him. If you hurt that, all is gone.’

He let go of her as violently as he had gripped her; he thrust her from him and stood there with his hands clenched. He forgot everything but the sight of her face before him, white and still among the warm swinging lights and shadows, and the knowledge that they were alone together in this small bright
scented room, and that he must not touch her.

‘Say that again,’ he said at last in a low voice that seemed to come from a long way off; and then, ‘What was it you were telling me?’

She began to cry again, not wildly this time, but like an unhappy child.

‘Why are you crying?’

Again it was that strange voice. He might have been speaking in his sleep. She shivered as she said, ‘Have you gone mad?’

‘Is it mad to love you?’

‘Now you must be mad. All these years you’ve never been in love with me.’

‘Never till now, when you’re with child by another man.’ His own words woke him from that trance. He turned to the table and poured himself out some wine. ‘Drink yours,’ he said, without turning his head. It reassured her immeasurably to hear that curt command in his own voice again. It was as practical as a doctor’s as he asked her if she were certain about the child, and when it should be born.

‘In May or June,’ she answered, and began to laugh hysterically as she sipped her watered wine. ‘That horrible nightmare, Harry’s face, all their faces, everything crashing round me – what a time to tell me you love me! Why, you were never even polite to me. We’ve always quarrelled. You’ve only paid me two compliments in all these years, and they were more on behalf of Scotland than yourself.’

He could look at her now, and even feel grim amusement in her unconscious admission. So she, who had been paid such thousands of compliments, could remember his two – which he could not!

‘Did I ever pay you compliments?’

‘Why yes, at your sister’s wedding – something about my making Scotland a fief of Elfland. And long ago, in France, you told me to come back here and be such a Queen as they would make songs and stories of until the end of time. Do you still think that?’

‘God knows what Scotland will do with you! We’ve got to think what you can do with her. This child, that will be your highest card against your enemies. It secures the succession, it will be Sovereign
of Scotland and England both. You must guard yourself in these next months as if you were made of glass. You were ill lately. You must not be.’

‘I was only tired out, I think. That mad campaign last summer, and then this autumn.’

‘A bad start for breeding; No matter. You’ll rest now.’

‘Yes, if only—’

‘There’s no “if only”. Keep friends with the King till the child’s born. Does he take other women?’

‘Yes. It must have been my fault. He said I was cold.’

So he was right. Darnley had disappointed, probably repelled her physically as soon as they were married. The thought gave him a fierce stab of exultation. But he repeated, ‘All the same, keep friends with him. You don’t want him shouting about the place that your child is none of his. What did he mean about Rizzio?’

‘I sit up late with him, of course. He’s my private secretary. Even Harry could think nothing of that except when he’s mad drunk. I love Davie, he is adorable, utterly faithful, but, but – well, you have seen him.’

‘You mean he’s deformed?’

‘Yes, and of low birth.’

Once again he was astonished by her ignorance of the world. ‘You’ll find neither a protection against scandal – and your husband seems anxious to make one.’ His taut dry-voiced control suddenly snapped. He broke out, ‘Didn’t I say you’d always trust the wrong man! Elizabeth at least has an eye for one.’

‘She’s shown that, I suppose, with Leicester.’ Mary’s voice went cool and ironic as his flamed.

‘True, I’ll give you her Dudley for your Darnley. But at least she didn’t marry him.’

‘Because Cecil would not allow it.’

‘Nor would I have allowed it. Christ’s blood, why wasn’t I here! Only the little Italian, and he must needs spoil you, must put whatever sugar-plum into your mouth you cried for, however bad for you.’

‘I
didn’t
cry for Darnley. It’s true I wanted to marry. For me
not to do so, that would be impossible, you know – and I had just begun to know it. But I had given up all my hopes of a great Continental alliance – no, not because Elizabeth was determined to thwart them, but because I’d learned – by now – that union with England matters so desperately.’

‘And the man, as usual, didn’t matter!’

She stamped with rage. ‘I told Randolph in joke that I’d have no husband but Elizabeth!
Now
do you understand? I’d even have taken Leicester if there’d been no other way. Then Darnley came North, and I thought there was. My eye for a man may not be as true as Elizabeth’s, but then I didn’t have him by my side a whole year as she had, studying him with a view to this very purpose.’

‘
What
purpose?’

‘Her purpose in marrying him to me, of course.’

He thought her light-headed. Elizabeth, he said, might have wanted to side-track her from the Spanish marriage, but she could not have actually wanted a marriage which should combine all the Catholics in England under Darnley with those in Scotland under Mary, and ensure their Catholic heir for the English throne.

‘It was
not
ensured – that was one of the chief points of her game. She meant me to marry without any promise from her of the succession. And so I did.’

‘Then why did she try to stop the marriage? Recall his father and himself to England, send Throckmorton – you like him – up here to dissuade you? Throw his mother into prison to punish her for managing it?’

‘That’s just the way she works – gets people to do what she wants, and then punishes them so as to hide that it’s her doing. Yes, and all that she did to stop the marriage she did just too late, havered and hesitated to make people think she didn’t know her own mind, to make them think as I thought – fool that I was – that I had outmanoeuvred her. When all along I was being tricked and betrayed into marrying the very man she had intended for me from the beginning.’

He still looked incredulous.

‘Won’t you see it even now?’ she cried. ‘That was why she paid
me the insult of offering Leicester as a husband. She even suggested that she and her Sweet Robin and I should form one household ‘at her charge’! And to make it clear, she went on flirting with him more openly and intimately than ever – all to show the world I could not win him from her. It was to goad me into marrying someone else in haste – into marrying the very man she knew would be my ruin.’

He was now utterly disgusted. Even her condition, with child by a mate whom she had suddenly discovered to be despicable, did not excuse such hysteria. ‘It’s all the most damnable feminine stuff – it’s too far-fetched. Machiavelli himself could never think of anything so subtle.’

‘Machiavelli wasn’t a woman.’

‘Even a woman couldn’t be such a devil.’

‘I have proof of it – her own Ambassador’s letter to Cecil. One of my servants saw it in Randolph’s rooms – never mind how – but here are the very words.’

She unlocked a minute cabinet and gave him a paper with a woman’s handwriting on it – Beton’s, as he guessed. ‘And as to Machiavelli,’ she added, ‘that is her chief boast – that they call her “the Florentine”.’

He sat on a chair near the lamp and read the copy of Randolph’s letter, the original of which was now in Cecil’s files in London. Of Mary’s marriage to Darnley the Envoy had written: ‘a greater plague to her there cannot be, nor a greater benefit to our Queen’s Majesty. My whole care is how to avoid suspicion that our Queen’s Majesty was the whole means and worker of it.’