The Galliard (41 page)

Mary watched him read it; a small vein on his forehead stood out like a knot of whipcord; he scrunched the letter in his hand and burst out into a string of appalling oaths. When at last he could speak coherently he said, ‘Yes, this is woman’s work. Not even the Borgia could have laid a snare so devilish.’

‘She means to destroy me utterly, both body and soul – to corrupt my soul with hatred.’

‘You shall not be destroyed. You are warned.’

He straightened out the crumpled letter and handed it back to 
her. ‘This fellow Randolph, can you get rid of him?’

‘I’ve done so,’ she answered proudly; ‘at least, I should have, but he just won’t go! Davie’s collected evidence that he handed over the English money to finance the rebellion last summer. He’s had to admit it and has been dismissed. But, in spite of that, he’s shut himself up in his quarters and refused to budge.’

‘I’ll ferret him out,’ said Bothwell with satisfaction. ‘I’ll send Black Ormiston to him tomorrow morning with half a dozen of our fellows.’

‘You won’t hurt him?’

‘Lord, no. We must keep as fair a show as we can, both with him and his Queen.’

Then he asked about Darnley. Had he shown jealousy of other men as well as Rizzio – ‘of me, for example?’

‘No, how should he? I have seen so little of you. There was the matter of your command of the army, and your Lieutenancy of the Border, he was jealous of them, but that was for his father.’

‘Hum,’ said Bothwell, and was silent so long that she asked of what he was thinking.

‘Of getting married,’ was the unexpected reply.

The blood rushed burning up into her face; she cried out as sharply as if he had struck her. ‘Married!
You
– now!’

‘“Now” seems the right time. There’s not been time before. Here I am, close on thirty-one, settling down in my own country after my – unavoidable absence, shall we call it? And having at last won the favour of my Sovereign – at least, I hope I have. All I need now is a wife to make me respectable.’

‘I’d rather she made you happy.’

‘Would you so?’ he asked. ‘Are you sure?’

He looked at her and she looked back. They did not move, but their faces seemed to swim nearer and nearer to each other. The silence grew loud and breathless.

He swung up from his chair. ‘Don’t drive me too far, or I shall forget.’

‘I think I want you to forget,’ came in a whisper.

‘Do you?’ He was across the room to her, and his hands
hovered for an instant over her shoulders, but he flung away again. ‘If I touch you, it’s all over. I’ll not do it. Your child is the one thing that matters now. I’m going.’

Going, and she would be left alone to bear Darnley’s child; all these weeks and months ahead of her till then must be lived through alone. ‘How
can
I do it?’ she cried. ‘what if it has a big chicken-tufted head and red face like his tonight? And a chicken heart and loose slobbering mouth? Let it go, it will never be a child of mine. If it were born now I’d kill it with my own hands.’

He turned back to her, came slowly across the room and deliberately laid his hand on her shoulder, which before he had not dared trust himself to touch. Now, though his hand lay so heavy on her, there was no passion in it; her cry had driven it from him, and he was forcing it from her too.

‘Listen,’ he said, ‘the child in your womb is not a person yet. Do not think of it as that until there is need. All that matters now is that it shall be born, whole and sane, to protect your throne for the time being. It is your army, which you must muster together before you can fight. What’s the sense of trying to foretell the quality of that army years hence? You are not living then, but
now
.’

The dry rattling sobbing in her throat relaxed under that hard pressure; it held her so firm that she ceased to shake. Her eyes grew less wild as she looked up at him, and presently her trembling lips forced themselves into a smile and she said, almost in her natural voice, ‘Whom are you thinking of marrying?’

‘I don’t know. Whom would you suggest?’

Again it seemed that a knife was going through her.

‘I think you like Jean Gordon,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you look at her, and no wonder, for she is beautiful – and only twenty’ (This came with a gulp, for she had just had her twenty-third birthday.); ‘her breeding, her manners and behaviour are perfect. And she is the sister of your greatest friend.’

‘She might do. I should like to marry Gordon’s sister, and it would combine the Highlands with the Border. That would strengthen us.’

‘And you think her beautiful too, don’t you?’ she insisted
‘Yes,’ he said smiling, ‘she’s my type.’

‘And I’m not?’

‘Not a bit.’ He took away his hand from her shoulder. ‘That is why you are so dangerous.’

And now she had got to let him go, there was no help for it, though she weakly said she did not know what she should do – if she went to bed she would never sleep, and there was no Davie here tonight to play at cards with her.

He swore at that ‘as roughly as a husband,’ she thought, and made her promise that she would never sit up alone with Davie again, but always have someone at hand ‘to prove your innocence to any who may seek the contrary. And now don’t think, especially of what may happen. Whatever it may be, it hasn’t happened yet.’

She promised to read and not go on thinking. She watched him go down the dark narrow stairway; and then turned back into the flickering lights and shadows. This small room, so bright within its shadowy tapestries, always seemed to be waiting for something to happen; she had thought this evening as they entered its warm intimacy that it was for her and Bothwell – but nothing had happened; she wished it had, and whatever it was waiting for, ‘it hasn’t happened yet’, she repeated to herself.

She must obey him, pull herself together before she fell to dreaming, dawdling, sitting before the fire and thinking over all he had said and she had said, and all she might have said, and wished she had not said and wished she had made him say, until half the night had slipped past outside the Palace, and the moon slid down the sky.

‘Is it mad to love you?’

‘Never till now, when you’re with child by another man.’

‘Did I ever pay you compliments?’

‘Christ’s blood, why wasn’t I here!’

But
that
she must not remember, must not think of. She sprang up from the stool where she had sunk down by the fire, and moved round the room, quick and glancing in her golden dress like some swift bright bird, touched the chair where he had sat, perched on the edge of the table and turned her head this way
and that, seeking some object to distract her thoughts.

There were her shoes, fallen on their side where he had pulled them off, the diamond buckles still fastened; she must not look at them.

There was du Bellay’s book beside her, open where she had left it; she had promised Bothwell she would read. She picked it up and held it where she sat, and stared at the page, on and on, and never saw the words.

Chapter Five

James Hepburn, as usual, wasted no time. At ten o’clock next morning Black Ormiston of the Moss Tower paid his call on Mr Randolph of London, with the half-dozen of ‘our fellows’, no more and no less, that Bothwell had specified as exactly sufficient for the purpose the night before. After a brief talk with the Black Laird, a man of few words, Mr Randolph, ‘perceiving himself narrowly encompassed’, finished his packing in less than an hour, and was escorted out of Edinburgh to Berwick.

Bothwell joined the little cavalcade once they were clear of the town, and asked Randolph point-blank why his Queen had objected to him as the Scots delegate for the Peace Commission. The little Envoy, accustomed to the circumambient language of diplomacy, blinked at this like an owl in daylight. He could not tell Bothwell the true objection: that it had proved impossible to get him on the pension list from England, to ensure his working against his own Queen. He therefore referred darkly to ‘things’ spoken by the Earl injurious to the English Queen.

‘That old scandal!’ said Bothwell impatiently. It seemed little enough for her to complain of – that she and Mary rolled together were not enough to make one honest woman! She ought to be flattered by her company! He made his usual amends, a challenge to any man who dared say he had ever spoken dishonourably of the English Queen. Randolph promised politely to report the challenge; he then made his own complaint, of his removal from the Scots Court, saying venomously that he knew well enough who
was the chief cause and adviser of his dismissal. He was accusing Mary’s secretary – naturally enough, since Rizzio had collected the proof of his treacherous conduct. What Bothwell did not like was the gleam of mysterious satisfaction that had shot across his face in that unguarded spasm of anger. What scheme did he know to be hatching against his enemies at Court? And whom would it attack? Rizzio alone? Others with him? The Queen herself?

Further questions only shut up that prim pursed button of the Envoy’s mouth. Anyway, he would be safe out of the country in a few hours, and under Ormiston’s guard till then. Bothwell parted company with him and watched that narrow bent back ambling away towards Berwick among the broad alert upright backs of his rank-riders.

He would have been less satisfied could he have had a glimpse of Randolph’s next post-bag to London, sent from the security of Berwick Castle. In it he told Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, that ‘there is a bait laid for Signor David.’ Of Mary herself, and her husband and his father Lennox, he wrote that ‘there are practices in hand contrived between the father and the son to come by the Crown against her will,’ and hinted darkly of ‘many things grievouser and worse than these – yes, of things against her own person’

To Elizabeth he wrote more discreetly that it was scarcely worthwhile for her to work further for the return of Lord James, or even for himself to forward her latest letters on his behalf; since that return should soon be effected by means of a ‘matter of no small consequence, which is intended in Scotland.’

All of which was evidently more intelligible to Elizabeth and her Ministers than it would have been to Bothwell.

That indefatigable fellow was acting yet again with his accustomed speed in yet another business; he was getting married, and within the month. Gordon was delighted to have this close tie with his friend. He came down very handsomely over the dowry, as Bothwell told him, while mentioning that his own finances, in spite of recent honours, were still somewhat shaky.

‘Jean will help you in that better than most men could do,’ the
Gordon solemnly assured him ‘Yes, you may laugh, but she has the best business head in the family. She’s done more than anyone to pull the estates together after my father’s death; got a coal-mine started on them, and salt-pans. Not a farthing wasted in all her transactions. I tell you, you couldn’t do better than put your affairs in her hands.’

This unusual praise of a young and lovely bride did not seem to inspire the bridegroom to any degree of passion. He looked rather blankly at Gordon and said he was afraid he hadn’t got a coal-mine for his wife to play with – perhaps a few loads of peat off the bog might amuse her. And his humour grew more sardonic when he asked if it were Jean’s head for business that had prompted her conversion and her brother’s to the Reformed Religion. Fortunately Gordon, so quick and fiery to take offence with others, never seemed to mind what the Hepburn said to him; the grave and haughty Highlander and the cynical Borderer understood each other far too well.

Where Gordon was generous, Mary was lavish. She gave the bride the materials for her wedding dress from the stores of gorgeous Eastern silks and woven treasure she had brought from France – a dozen yards of the finest cloth of silver and half a dozen yards of white taffeta to line the sleeves and train, boxes of pearls to sew all over it.

‘Aren’t you rather overdoing it, your contrast with the Virgin?’ Bothwell demanded in his mocking fashion of his Queen. ‘
She’d
have had me to the Tower for marrying – and on top of saying I loved her – but you give us a wedding like an Emperor’s.’

Her soft under-lip trembled; she bit it and said with valiant lightness, ‘But I like gorgeous weddings. I got the taste at fifteen. And just think of all the gay weddings we’ve had at Court since I came home.’

‘It’s what I am thinking. And in double the time at the English Court, none.’

And he went off to commission a French artist at Court to paint his and his bride’s miniatures in an oval case side by side, and had his first sitting straightaway. It was a tedious business, and
his impatience communicated itself to the portrait, the eyes alert and fierce, a permanent frown carving a rut between his brows and running sharp lines from nose to mouth. There were iron-grey threads in the rough dark hair. He wore the doublet of ribbed gold silk he had ordered for his wedding, with gold buttons and a very narrow pleated white ruff. Jean was painted in a tiny blue and gold cap far back on her fine forehead, and her narrow ruff pinned close up to her long shapely chin. She would not wear her wedding dress for the portrait, to her mother’s deep disappointment. She, as well as all her nine sons, had always been a little afraid of Jean, the youngest girl, who had from babyhood managed to establish that as a unique and privileged position. Her father had worshipped her, and the fat foolish loquacious old fellow was the only member of her family for whom the silent scornful girl had ever felt real affection.

Lady Huntly frankly adored the Queen and wished Jean did too, but girls were so hard nowadays. Was she pleased with this fine match to the rising power in the kingdom? She had accepted the offer in her calm way, as her indisputable right; but Lady Huntly knew that she had been piqued by Sandy Ogilvie’s defection to Mary Beton, though in any case Jean would have been far too ambitious to let young Sandy stand in the way of a more important marriage. She certainly signified her desire to make the offer a firm one; for she pointed out that as there had been a marriage between the families four generations back, it would be advisable to get the Papal Dispensation for marriage between cousins; Protestant as they were, the Pope was still useful legally. Her eldest brother, with unusual gaiety in his pleasure over the match, chaffed her on her cautious foresight: ‘You don’t mean to give him any loophole for escape later!’