The Galliard (65 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

She could not stay at Seton. She left the next morning to pay a private visit to her baby son at Stirling, and would only take a small escort of about thirty horsemen, with Gordon and Lethington in charge. No, she would not take Mary Seton as she begged. ‘What odds?’ she said. ‘I shall be back in Edinburgh on Wednesday.’ She wanted to escape from everybody, even her best friend. Thank heaven there was still her baby, who could not talk and turn her affection to irritation, as did Seton’s anxious solicitude; or to hatred, as did Bothwell’s abominable behaviour.

But she hated herself worse. It was her doing that he had changed so to her. She had cheapened herself to him that night when she had asked his love and he had left her without even troubling to reply; she saw now how be must have despised her for it, he who was accustomed to women making fools of themselves for him. The proof of it had been in the contemptuous insolence of that proposal; he had actually got the consent of her lords before asking hers – because he could take that for granted! And so much for granted that he had not troubled to woo her, had made not even any pretence at love, or wish for her love; no doubt he felt he had no need to, since she had held out her hands and offered herself, ‘just like any courtesan of the Paris streets!’ she told herself miserably.

She would never love any man again; she would devote herself from now on only to her kingdom and her son, and she heaved a deep sigh of relief at the contemplation of those respectable emotions, patriotism and maternity.

But the visit to Jamie was not an immediate success. It was some time since he had seen his mother, be did not like her black clothes, worst of all, she gave him a diamond safety-pin to fasten his bib which made him howl with terror. Lady Mar told Mary that he could not bear the flash of jewels or steel and they had to be careful how they used knives before him. It was unthinkable that any Stewart should be a coward. Did little Jamie unconsciously remember the daggers that had flashed before his mother’s eyes in the anteroom at Holyrood so soon before he himself was born? But theories of pre-natal influence had not yet been exalted into a religion, one that in any case bore no consolation. Her solitaire proved more successful than the safety-pin; Jamie gurgled with delight over the little figure of a Cupid as a Court Fool, and the great pendant pearls which he tried to tug off. Mary left it in his fat hands.

On the Wednesday she set off back again, but Edinburgh suddenly seemed unbearable; she must have one more day’s respite from those prying houses. She had failed to find much comfort in her baby; now she sought it in the memory of her mother, and on a sudden whim decided to spend the night at Linlithgow, her mother’s favourite palace, where she herself had been born.

Linlithgow’s foundations were so old that none knew what race of giants had first built it; her father had added to it and adorned it with stained glass and carving by French artists in honour of his bride from France. It seemed still to linger under the influence of that tall gracious lady with the calm eyes and wise smile. Mary had trotted along with her hand in that rather large, firm, capable hand when they went to throw bread to the swans who came sweeping up over the loch towards them, their great wings upreared, superb as avenging angels; but she was never afraid of them when with her mother.

She went straight to the loch below the Castle walls as soon as she arrived this fine spring evening, and once again the swans came sweeping up to be fed. ‘How much smaller they seem now!’ she thought, and yet she herself was just the same as that little girl in a rose-coloured snood listening to her mother’s soft French voice
telling her that her kind grandmother de Guise had just sent her a thousand pins for her birthday and this pretty little watch with the gold stars. The watch had ticked on ever since, minutes, hours, days, years it had ticked out, and yet it was just the same, ‘and I too, for here I am the same as ever inside’.

The evening was full of light, the loch water gleamed, the wild daffodils and primroses on its shore shone out like faint lamps. Little wooded islets touched with pale green lay dreaming in that wan water; long ago a fairy hound had been found on one of them chained to a tree, so her mother had told her, but could not tell her what happened after that.

A missel-thrush sang quick and bold on a willow tree; the boughs, though still bare, were outlined in dark gold, and fell like a fountain against the dimly rosy sky. They called that bird the storm-cock up here because it sings in all weathers. ‘Yes, he’s no fair-weather friend, he’s proved that,’ she told herself involuntarily – and then remembered she had driven him away.

Would he perhaps never come back?

It was unthinkable that James Hepburn should leave her service – and if he did, what should she do?

But what else could she have done? Surely her mother would have approved.
She
had sent his father packing when he had dared propose marriage, but far more decorously. She had encouraged him first, though, when it had suited her to win the Fair Earl’s service with hopes of her favour. Was it possible that the house of Hepburn had some reason to feel aggrieved at its treatment by widowed Queens?

The moon, nearly half full, was growing clearer in the pale sky; it would be. a lovely night. She sighed for no reason that she knew of, and wondered how long she must wear this hideous black; no wonder Jamie cried at sight of it. ‘This is the Palace of Widowed Queens,’ she thought, looking up at the turret window of Queen Margaret’s Bower where her Tudor grandmother had watched to see King James IV come riding back from Flodden – but he never came back.

In this haunted twilight she herself seemed only a ghost – and
of one who had never lived. She was twice a widow, who had never really known what it was to be a wife. Tomorrow would be St Mark’s Eve, the anniversary of her wedding nine years ago to the Dauphin of France, and she the loveliest bride that age had seen, so the poets had told her and the courtiers and Ambassadors and her admiring uncles and father-in-law, all adoring her; but the poor sickly child, her bridegroom, two years younger than herself, had clung to her crying after all the fatigue and nervous excitement of the day. The wedding had never been consummated.

‘For me not to marry, you know it is impossible’; but she developed too late to know it for a very long time. And then all her curiosity and awakening desire had been disillusioned by Darnley from the first night of their marriage.

It was love itself she was wanting, and so had been fool enough to think she could have it from Bothwell, who took women as casually as he took wine, and despised them for being so taken. ‘
Oh
!’ she cried aloud in pain so sharp that she could not bear it in silence, and pressed to her burning face the hands that she had held out to him, asking for him.

She could stay here no longer. She went back to the Palace through the central courtyard, under the superb carved gateway built by her father, where his cockle-shell of St Michael and motto, ‘
tremor immensi oceani
’, spoke of the troubling of the great sea. Lighted windows were making bright orange-coloured squares all round the great quadrangle. Yet there was still light enough from the sunset to see the figures on the eastern wall of the Three Estates of the Commonwealth, a priest for the Church, a knight for the Nobles, a labourer for the Commons, all equally important to that ‘King of the Commons’.

Yes, she and her father would have agreed well.

So we’ll go no more a-roving

So late into the night.

But why had he sung that, the unquenchable rover?

She went in and to bed in the room where the carved stag stood
under the tree and the words ran in stone, ‘
Belle
à
vous seule
.’

She read in bed, on and on, for she knew she would not sleep. Old Sir Richard Maitland had sent her a book of English verses, Tottel’s Miscellany, printed ten years ago. He had told her that she would be interested in tracing the influence of the Italian poets on the verses of Sir Thomas Wyatt. She did not notice that. She heard Bothwell’s deep voice in all his words.

Forget not yet the tried intent

Of such a truth as I have meant;

My great travail so gladly spent,

Forget not yet!

This was himself, speaking of his ‘steadfast faith yet never moved’, of his ‘service such as none could tell’, his ‘great assays’ – and – oh God! had he too not some reason to speak of her own ‘scornful ways’ and his ‘painful patience in delays’?

She turned the page, and found no escape from his reproach.

And wilt thou leave me thus,

That hath loved thee so long

In weal and woe among?

And is thy heart so strong

As for to leave me thus?

Say nay! Say nay!

No, her heart was not so strong, she felt that it was breaking. She sprang out of bed and flung her furred cloak round her; she could lie still no longer here in the great chamber where she had been born just after Sir Thomas Wyatt had died. He had loved King Harry’s Queen, the fair frail Anne Boleyn, who had given birth to Elizabeth ten years before Mary herself lay in that beautifully carved cradle that still stood in the corner of the room.

She was walking up and down in her white feathered slippers on the coloured French tiles, trying to distract her thoughts with the strange tangle of human lives. Here was this English politician,
dead before she was born, speaking for Bothwell and herself alone. ‘Farewell, unjust!’ He might well call her that. ‘Farewell, unkissed!’ Yes, he had gone, and not even kissed her hand.

She went to the window and looked out on a ghost-white world; the jagged shadow of the Castle lay black upon the moonlit loch where the mist rose in thin wraith-like forms. Two dim figures on the shore were just passing into that shadow, and her heart gave a leap, for she thought in that instant that one of them walked like Bothwell, but in the next she knew that it was only because his image was so clear in her mind, for she could not have recognised him in this light and at that distance. And he of all men would never come back, at midnight, to gaze up at her window like the pathetic scorned lover of romance. He would shrug and go his way – Sir Thomas Wyatt had just told her so.

May chance thee lie withered and old,

The winter nights that are so cold,

Plaining in vain unto the moon:

Thy wishes then dare not be told:

Care then who list! for I have done.

And suddenly, with a shuddering inarticulate cry, she clutched at the window-sill, for she felt as though a new self were being born within her, here in this room where her body had been born twenty-four years ago, and never come alive till now – now, when every nerve of her was tingling in an agony of regret and longing.

Those two shadows by the loch might have been their two selves walking together in the enchanted night. ‘We shall have moonlight again,’ he had said that reivers’ over-word years ago to her in France, and it had echoed ever since; but she had sent him away, she would never feel those fierce arms round her again, nor those kisses that had struck like blows, giving her no chance at the time to know how she desired them. Now, too late, she knew.

She slid to the floor, her head against the window-sill and whispered brokenly,

‘We’ll go no more a-roving

Let the moon shine ne’er so bright.’

Mary’s first fancy had been right. It was Bothwell she had seen on the shore of the loch, but he had not come to gaze at her window. He had paid a secret visit at midnight in order to talk with George Gordon, Earl of Huntly, to Gordon’s surprise, for his brother-in-law had just set about collecting a large force of men for a raid into Liddesdale, so what was he doing up here? Bothwell had got him out of the Castle, away from any possible eavesdropper, and was now walking with him up and down, talking in low, urgent, imperative tones while the Gordon stalked beside him in silence.

Bothwell had already discussed with him his project of marrying the Queen, and Gordon had given his consent to the divorce as gladly as he had given it to the marriage. A year and two months had been more than long enough to prove it a failure, nor was it Bothwell whom Gordon blamed for this. The admiration that his unpractical nature had felt for his sister’s businesslike qualities had turned to dislike; he was harsher than Bothwell when Jean flatly refused to give up the lands she had acquired as Countess of Bothwell. Her husband excused her, ‘it’s little else she’s had from me, after all’, and promptly bought her off with the promise of the fairest of his castles, Crichton, and all its goods. Everything should have gone as merrily as a wedding bell, or a collusive divorce court decree. Only the Queen’s consent was needed, and he had now to admit to Gordon that he had failed to win it.

‘Then,’ said Gordon, ‘there is no more to do.’

Bothwell swore. ‘You think that, do you; that I am to take my dismissal like a whipped hound, after all I’ve done for her!’

An echo of his mother’s quiet voice struck on his unwilling mind: ‘once a man begins to count up “all I’ve done” he might as well hang himself’. He hastily expanded it to – ‘and after all I’ve put up with from her! Are you, too, going to prove yourself my unfriend? I had thought you’d stand by me if all else turned against me.’

‘And why will they?’

‘Because, I tell you, I will marry her, whoever will or will not – yes, whether she herself will or will not.’

Gordon stood still and faced his friend. ‘What devilry is this?’ he asked.

‘It’s no devilry to carry off the woman I love, and who loves me – I know she does. I was a clumsy fool with her. I’d never have bungled so with any other woman. But needs must when the devil drives. I’ve sworn to have her, and there’s an end. Either I’ll lose all in an hour or I’ll bring it to pass.’