The Galliard (42 page)

‘He has shown he knows how to use it, by the reports of his former marriages,’ she replied, with no hint even of irony in her grave young voice.

Gordon felt a twinge of anxiety for his friend. But Bothwell of all men would know how to ride a grey mare.

Lady Huntly showed no such coolness for her future son-in-law.
She told him all about the Queen’s magnificent presents, and Bothwell had the sense to keep it dark that he had happened to come in on her just when she was looking them out with her own hands. The stout old lady would purr like a stroked cat over it, but the girl standing so still by her side – well, there was another sort of cat there! He enjoyed the challenge implied in Jean’s manner to him; to conquer her would give him something to do and think about; of all things, he could never have stood a gentle and loving bride at this moment. It intrigued him that she showed no eagerness to obey her mother, who insisted, in transparent excuse to give the young people a moment together alone, that she should take her lover to the sewing-room to see her maid sewing on all those lovely pearls – ‘such a clever girl, Bessie Crawford, though only a blacksmith’s daughter.’

Jean led him up the stairs without a word, and he followed her into a long low room where the February sunshine slanted in through little crooked panes of greenish glass. Again he saw those moonlight-coloured waves of silver stuff billowing and flowing away, this time round a seated figure, dark against the window, with black head bent low over her work. Bessie Crawford raised her head to show eyes black as sloes and a white skin; she began to rise to make a curtsy, but Jean motioned her to stay where she was. ‘You’ll drop the pearls,’ she said.

It gave him an odd sensation to see in those busy hands the globed translucent drops that he had last seen trickling through the Queen’s long fingers. Pearls and waves of silver, of their very essence they belonged to her, ‘the Mermaid’. This dress should be for her, this wedding – It was the first time the thought had occurred to him, and it went through him with a cold thrust like steel.

Jean had left the room, so quietly that he only now heard her going downstairs. Had his thoughts been louder than her footsteps? She was credited with witchcraft, the usual tribute to any woman with some learning. He turned to follow her, nodding goodbye to the sewing-maid and hoping she would like it when she came to Crichton.

‘If I stay so long in my young lady’s service,’ said the girl smoothly.

‘Why, it’s not till the end of the month!’

‘She doesn’t keep her servants so long as a rule,’ was the demure answer.

He chuckled at her impudence.

Of all the grand weddings Mary had so proudly counted at her Court, this was the most superb. She herself had two new dresses made for it, one all white and the other crimson, braided with black and gold.

Bothwell insisted on the Protestant Church for the ceremony, though Mary artfully pleaded the feelings of the bride’s mother.

‘If I won’t do it for you, d’you think I would for my mother-in-law?’ he demanded.

It was the only satisfaction she got. ‘And I shall wear the white at the banquet instead, as I like it better,’ she said to Beton. ‘The Kirk of the Canongate shan’t have the honour of my prettiest dress!’

The Kirk was so crowded that many people could not see the handsome couple at all, though they stood on stools brought for the purpose.

The Queen signed the marriage contract together with Bothwell’s friend, Long Geordie Seton, the Hepburn lawyer Mr David Chalmers, all the Gordon brothers, and their mother the Dowager Countess, who, dimpling coyly all over her wise old face, admitted she could not write, and had to have her hand guided by the Bishop of Galloway.

A tremendous banquet followed at Kinloch House, and everyone said what a regal and sumptuous figure the bride made. The Queen, in her white dress, though many knew her now to be with child, looked far slighter, younger, more like her bridesmaid than her wedded Sovereign.

Darnley said so, rather too loudly, though he actually refrained from getting drunk, for he was determined to make it up with Mary at this wedding. They danced together, except for the opening Dance Royal of the Galliard, when etiquette demanded that he
should lead out the bride, and the bridegroom the Queen.

‘I have danced this before with him,’ thought Mary, ‘and I shall do it again. Why does it seem as though it were the only time we have ever danced together?’

There were five more nights of dancing and banqueting in Edinburgh, and five days of tournaments in the tiltyard of the Castle, and all the citizens attending them congratulated Mary on having brought back the old glory when Edinburgh had been the scene of chivalry as courtly as any in Italy or France.

‘Ah, those were the days!’ sighed old Lady Huntly as she sat beside Mary at the jousts in the cold spring sunshine, and told her that this tiltyard used to be known as the Field of Remembrance, between the Castle of the Maidens and the Secret Pavilion. That great oak at the end was where the knights hung their shields in challenge; ‘and for five
weeks
on end, not days; it was called the Tree of Hope which grows in the Garden of Patience, bearing the Leaves of Pleasure, the Flower of Nobility, and the Fruit of Honour.’

For the first time since she had met her, Mary saw Jean smile. Her mother said rather sadly that for all Jeannie was so clever, she never looked at a book of romance.

‘But I do, Lady Huntly,’ said Mary. ‘I was reading Tristram and Iseult all through again the other day. And I love Sir Launcelot.’

‘I think all girls do, even nowadays,’ said the old lady, patting her knee – ‘Jeannie, too, don’t you?’

‘I know nothing about him, Madam, except that he was the Queen’s lover.’

Jean was born old, thought her mother with a sigh.

But Mary loved to hear all she could tell of those gayer and gentler days. ‘Oh, if I had seen Edinburgh then! And my grandfather – the most splendid young King in Europe – did you ever see him, Madam?’

‘I did indeed, in this very Field of Remembrance. Five years old I was, and proud to be taken to my first tournament – and in whose honour do you think it was held? Not for the Tudor rose, Queen Margaret, but for a Black Lady – a negress that had been captured in a Portuguese ship, and the wild young King must needs make
her Queen of the Tournament, and himself her Savage Knight, to joust for his lady against all comers. And at the banquet a magic cloud came down from the ceiling, a most ingenious invention of Bishop Forman’s – there are no bishops like him now, all this theology has spoiled the clergy. The cloud bore her up over our heads in all her spangles like a glittering black angel – or ape! Willie Dunbar wrote an absurd poem to her, saying how

In her rich apparel,

She blazed as bright as a tar barrel.’

And she laughed so much that her light tawny wig had to be set straight by Jean, who blushed very red for her mother; it was bad enough that she could never remember to have her grey eyebrows made up to match the wig. But Lady Huntly, no whit disturbed, only said, ‘Thank you, my bairn.’

Bothwell won joust after joust, and laid his prize before his bride, whose scarf he wore bound round his arm. Mary thought of Queen Guinevere watching Sir Launcelot at the jousts when he wore Elaine’s sleeve. Her old French romances and Bothwell’s ballads and legends of the Border, though so much rougher, met in the same great-hearted world of chivalry; the chivalry of friendship, whether between man and man or man and woman. ‘Well is he that hath a trusty friend,’ Guinevere said when Launcelot rode to her rescue – as Bothwell had done to her own. She suddenly found herself looking at the Field of Remembrance through a mist of tears.

The Queen had proved her desire to have all men live as they wish by allowing Knox to return this winter to preach in St Giles’. Bothwell carried off his brother-in-law to hear him the Sunday after the wedding. The Queen had thought he could not refuse her the return compliment of hearing Mass with her ‘this once’, as she had attended his Protestant wedding; in her eagerness she took him by the hand and said, ‘Won’t you come with me?’

‘Where, Madam?’ he asked, with his hard hot eyes upon her.
‘I’ll leave you to go to God alone.’

And to Knox he went with Gordon.

In the fading daylight of that wintry day in early spring the little figure of the preacher hunched over his pulpit looked older and feebler than when Bothwell had last seen it more than three years ago. His voice too was hoarser even than usual, with the croak of a sore throat that sometimes took away his voice altogether. But his fierce whisper, determined to make itself heard, hissed through the darkening church. That intent crouched form, the sweep of his black winged arm in the gloom, seemed charged with some dreadful purpose; the sibilant voice urged its meaning forward like a serpent hissing as it struck.

And what was its meaning? Why was he telling the story of Queen Esther and the faithful Mordecai whose services had been forgotten? Why did he rail again and again on that lying, spying knave, the villain Haman? The whole sermon was an incitement to hate, rising higher and shriller, until that weak bodiless voice seemed to whisper a prophecy: ‘So they hanged Haman high upon the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.’

‘Well,’ said Bothwell as they came out of the church, ‘for the faithful Mordecai read the Bastard, I suppose, and for Haman, David Rizzio. How long has he been preaching holy murder?’

Gordon could not believe the preacher to be so bold. ‘He has only just crept back out of his hiding-hole.’

‘Aye, he moves fast enough at a gun or the clash of a sword. But put that one into a pulpit and he’d preach death and damnation to God Himself.’

And he thought it worth while to speak a word of warning to Rizzio. But the little man showed flamboyant confidence. ‘Those great Scots lords, they brag, they talk very big – pouf!’ and he blew himself out – ‘but they will not act. They are like geese strutting one after the other.’

‘Are they so? You’ll find they can fly all together like geese and strike at the same mark. Be careful not to give them that mark, that’s all I say.’

‘My lord, do not be angry with me. I speak to you as my friend,
who have nothing to do with these geese – all birds of a feather. But you are the lone eagle, and I’ – he struck himself absurdly on his squat black and white velvet doublet – ‘am the lone magpie. Now I will tell you why I am safe. A fortune-teller has told me to beware of a bastard. But as long as I am here,’ and he laid his finger vulgarly to his nose, ‘the Bastard stays at a safe distance in England.’

Bothwell was astonished at his simplicity.

‘God knows what distance is safe for that one. Nor is he, by a long shot, the only bastard in Scotland.’

But he could not stay to argue. He had his honeymoon to see to; he could spare a week at Seton House before returning in time for the opening of Parliament. He told Gordon to keep what watch he could at Court, and rode off to Seton with Jean.

The honeymoon might have been more of a success if she had not worn black the first day, in mourning for her lost love, having just had the news of Sandy Ogilvie’s open engagement to Mary Beton. Her husband roared with laughter at the insult, tore the dress off her back, and threatened to dress it with his whip if she ever wore widow’s weeds at him again. If she had laughed back it would have won him to her faster than anything, for her childish gesture of defiance had amused and excited him. But he had frightened her more than he intended, or realized, and fear always made Jean sullen. Nor had anyone ever heard her laugh since her father died.

So she sulked, and he cursed and yawned, and meeting a girl in the passage whose black eyes glanced merrily at him, he remembered it was Bessie Crawford and said, ‘What, the faithful retainer! Are you still in Her Ladyship’s service?’

‘Arid in His Lordship’s, sir,’ she said, curtsying.

He tweaked the saucy coloured handkerchief she wore on her black head, and laughed as he passed on.

Chapter Six

The week’s honeymoon was over, Bothwell back in Edinburgh, and the next day, Thursday, he rode in the procession to open Parliament, bearing the sceptre, while his brother-in-law, George Gordon, Earl of Huntly, bore the crown. Mary wore her new crimson dress with the flowing sleeves lined with glistening white, and all her company were particularly magnificent, for this was the first Parliament since her marriage and the overthrowal of the Bastard, who was to be tried, in his absence, for his rebellion last summer.

But there was one notable exception, the King himself, who had preferred to go hawking on the sands of Leith. It was his way of showing that he ought to be given the Crown Matrimonial.

‘He blames Davie that he has not got it,’ Mary contrived to tell Bothwell, ‘but it is impossible.’

He thought her face looked thin and strained under the rouge, which did not suit her in the daylight and at close vision. She was nearing the seventh month of her pregnancy, a ticklish time, and she did not look fit for it, and one never knew what next that young idiot might do to upset her. Bothwell, who had never before considered the bearing of children as much different from the production of a litter of puppies, now found himself hideously anxious. He suggested a hunt next day to distract her mind, was abashed that she had to remind him that it would not be safe for her to ride hard.

Two months more and she would be free, and this precious burden within her, safe.

All she wanted now was to be as quiet as possible; on Saturday she got up late and watched her husband playing tennis with Davie all the afternoon. Davie, though so short and squat, was an uncannily quick and forcible player and held his own untiringly against the tall graceful golden-haired youth. It delighted her to see them playing together, it showed that Harry had already forgotten his sulks and sense of grievance against Davie.

They came up to her now, laughing and mopping their foreheads; it had been a grand game, a close game, but Davie had won at the end, and Harry rather surprisingly took it quite good-humouredly. ‘I’ll get the better of you next time,’ he said, drawing his fine linen shirt-sleeve across his hot face with a jolly boyish gesture and then flinging his coat over his shoulders for he was still too hot to get into it.