The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots (13 page)

I was in Jamie’s arms. I was being carried in his arms as he ran through the corridors of the palace, bumping along, amid a chaos of noise and crowding and shouted voices and, above it all, the sound of the alarm bells ringing throughout the city.

He swerved. He yelled at people to get out of his way. I opened my eyes but felt dizzy so I closed them again. Was I hurt? Was my baby hurt?

I opened my eyes again but now we were in the dark, and I could see nothing but stone walls. He was carrying me down stairs, into the cellars. I could smell the damp, the green slime that grew down the old stones of the walls on either side of us. Faint torchlight glimmered as Jamie reached the bottom step and made his way along a corridor to a small room nearly filled with piles of wood and barrels and hogsheads.

Jamie set me gently down. I was dazed, but I could stand, holding onto his shoulder for balance.

“We must get away, before they come after us, before there are any more murders. Can you ride, do you think?”

I nodded. “If I must.”

“You are not injured?”

I shook my head. But my head hurt. Perhaps I was injured. I decided to ignore it.

“Then we must try to get to the stables. Do you think—”

With a crash one of the barrels tipped over.

“Don’t kill me!” came a voice—my husband’s voice, tremulous with fear. “I swear it wasn’t my doing! They made me! They used me!”

In my weakened state it was all I could do to swat the air and say, “No, no, don’t let him near me!”

Henry was cowering in a corner of the storeroom, his clothes covered in blood. Jamie quickly went to him and seized his pistol and the long knife he had stuck into his belt.

“It was all your doing,” Jamie said to Henry, his voice cold with rage. “Every bit of it. I know your purposes, and so does the queen your wife. I ought to kill you here and now for what you did—and what you meant to do.”

“Oh, Jamie, it was horrible. All the blood, and poor David, they hurt poor David—”

“He is dead. They meant to kill you too, but Red Ormiston protected you.”

“He did. I remember now. He said, ‘You owe me fifteen thousand crowns.’ ”

“Please, you must save me,” Henry pleaded. “Don’t let them find me. They will torture me!”

“And you deserve it. Preening little princeling! Worthless swine! Whoreson cur!” Jamie kicked Henry then, who began blubbering and once more pleading for his life.

“We’ve got to get to the stables,” Jamie said to me. “It will be faster if you can run. Can you?”

Some clarity was returning to my dazed mind and senses. “I’ll try.”

“Don’t leave me!” Henry begged. “Take me with you!”

“Then come along, if you must,” Jamie called out over his shoulder as we made our way as quickly as we could through the maze of hallways and storerooms, slipping on the slick stones and listening for the sound of pursuers.

“We’ve got to get to Dunbar,” Jamie was saying. “I have loyal men there. We will be safe there in the castle.”

I was feeling ill but once we reached the stables Jamie was able to lift me up onto a strong horse and we rode together, the poor horse straining and snorting under our weight, along the road that led out beside the abbey, avoiding the crowds and hubbub. Henry rode behind us, I could hear him cursing as he fell farther and farther behind.

We were soon out of the town though I could still hear the alarm bells ringing when we were miles away. We rode as swiftly as the overburdened horse could carry us, but it still took us nearly four hours to get to Dunbar. All the way along Jamie kept looking back, watching for fast riders trying to overtake us. But the only rider behind us was Henry, whipping his poor mount along, though we did share the muddy roads with other travelers, some with carts, and with flocks of sheep being driven to market, all of which slowed us down a lot.

Finally we crested a hill overlooking the sea, and there, looming vast and forbidding, was the ancient castle of Dunbar. The castle that had belonged to Jamie’s family for generations. I welcomed the sight. Behind those thick stone walls we would be safe, I thought. Except that my husband would be within the walls, and I feared him. I wished that Jamie had dispatched him, there in the cellars of Holyrood. I wished that I had never seen him, and been bewitched by the sight. But what was done was done, and in only a few months there would be a child to carry our blood, to bear our likenesses, to succeed me on the throne.

I took my chamber at Edinburgh Castle toward the end of May, and prepared for my delivery.

The terrible events that had taken place at Holyrood, and that had led me to take refuge in Dunbar Castle, were two months behind me, and I had returned to Edinburgh with an escort of hundreds of loyal men, the conspirators who had assaulted me and killed my
servant David Riccio having fled and my treacherous, cowardly husband having once again retreated into the shadows of my life.

When my labor began three weeks later I hoped that the charm stone Jamie’s sister Jean had given me would preserve me from suffering. And perhaps it did—to an extent. But the gripping, clamping pains that made me cry out hour after hour caused me more suffering than I imagined any one woman deserved. I strained against each renewed, agonizing onslaught, hoping that it would be the last. I looked to the midwife Mistress Asteane for help and reassurance. But there was very little she could do, other than to remind me, rather drily I thought, that thousands of women since time began had sweated and cried out just as I was doing, and that if they could bear the agony of it, then so could I.

After ten hours of misery she gave me a posset to drink that she said would ease my agony, but I could not keep it on my stomach. I vomited it up, and the retching only made my sufferings worse.

In the end I cried out for death, I was so wretched, and Margaret Carwood sent for the priest who was waiting in the next room, ready to give me extreme unction in the event I did not survive my ordeal.

He prayed over me, and made the sign of the cross, and I thought, will I die before my son can ever know me? I had never known my own father; would my son too be a child of bereavement?

Was this what Michel de Notredame had meant when he said my life would be baleful?

By the time Mistress Asteane told me that the birth was near and that I ought to try my hardest to push the child out into the world, I had no energy left. I was exhausted. She bore down on my stomach and pinched me so hard that I became angry and this energized me. More pinches, more anger—and then I heard Margaret say, “Here comes the little prince,” and I gave a last groan and forced my shuddering body to yield up its burden.

I heard a muffled cry. Then whispers.

“He has a caul.”

I looked at the tiny red child the midwife was holding up, and saw that he was indeed a prince and that there was a pink bubble around his face. The women in the room shrank back from the sight, but Mistress Asteane took it in stride. Expertly she cut the bubble open, letting fluid spill out, and then my son began to wail as she carefully removed the pink membrane from around his head.

“Hear him now, the little caulbearer!” Margaret cried out, and reverently touched one small arm with her finger. The others rushed up to touch him as well.

“He’s a blessed one,” someone said. “He will have the second sight, as all caulbearers do. He will know the future.”

“I will call him James,” I managed to say, though I could hardly speak, my throat hurt so. “Prince James Stuart, and in time King James of Scotland, the sixth of that name.”

I began coughing then, and kept on coughing for most of the night, while outside my windows I could hear the guns thundering their salute and my subjects shouting their joy at the news that I had been safely delivered. Little James slept in his cradle beside my bed, swathed in sheets of fine Holland cloth embroidered with the royal arms.

“Prince James,” I mused when at last I fell into a deep sleep. “Jamie. My favorite name. Jamie.” And I reached out my hand to touch the blessed face of my newest love.

My recovery was slow and full of difficulties. I was nervous, my nails were a shameful sight and I chewed on bits of leather and even on the ivory binding of my prayerbook. My teeth marks were all over it. I never knew when I might feel dizzy and there were times when I shook and shook and could not stop.

I never felt safe. Someone in my household kept playing fearsome tricks to remind me that I was in danger. One night when I went to bed I found blood stains on my pillow. Someone was turning the flowers in my bedchamber upside down in their vases, or replacing them with nettles. When I put on my slippers I found sharp thorns inside them, so that they hurt my feet. Sometimes, when I was eating, I imagined—or was I imagining?—that the food tasted strange, and I spat it out, fearing poison. I had never forgotten what little King Charles told me in France, that my mother-in-law was intent on poisoning me. Quite possibly my enemies in Scotland had the same goal.

Every time I received one of these ugly reminders of danger I felt faint and ill. I knew that I was being watched, that someone—no doubt someone being paid by my husband—was determined to destroy my peace and drive me into a state of terror.

Henry was nowhere near Holyrood, he had gone to Glasgow to be
close to his father whose Lennox lands and possessions were nearby. He had spoken of leaving Scotland, of going to Norway or France, and I heartily wished he would go. But then he had changed his mind and gone to Glasgow instead, and he was said to be plotting against me once more, and telling lies about me to whomever would listen, stirring up old resentments and criticisms and even saying that our son James was not his but the child of another man.

I was in low spirits much of the time. I had always been slender, but now became very thin. Far too thin and spare for a woman not yet twenty-five. When I heard that Henry too was ill, and with the dreaded French disease, I worried that he might have passed it on to me, and that that might be why I was fast becoming a wraith.

“You’re much too thin, lass!” was Jamie’s greeting when he came to my court a scant month after my son was born. “You want feeding up! Come to Ainslie’s Tavern and we’ll have ourselves a feast!”

I went, under close guard, partly because I felt the need of convivial company and partly because Jamie had told me that Red Ormiston would be there, and I wanted to speak with him.

I had not dined well since the fateful night when I nearly lost my life and David Riccio was killed. The large noisy tavern room was full of the rich odors of roasting fowls and onions, flavorful broth and gravy, freshly baked bread and spiced wine. I ate my fill, sitting across the table from Jamie who watched me eat with inebriated benevolence, nodding his head in satisfaction.

“Where is your wife then?” I asked him while we ate our syllabub.

“She sulks at home.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“She seems to think that I am keeping company with another woman,” Jamie went on.

“And are you?”

He shrugged. “When I can find one.” He winked.

“Surely your marriage will be happier if you don’t go with other women.”

“My wife allows me no liberty at all.”

“She is not your jailer.”

“It often feels as though she is.”

Sitting there in the noisy tavern, albeit surrounded by Adrien and at least a dozen others of my guard, I began to feel at ease. Just having Jamie nearby reminded me that I had a champion. A champion who was unhappily yoked to Jean Gordon, and who could not seem ever to be free of troubles with women.

“I came here tonight because it is high time I settled my debt to Red Ormiston,” I told Jamie. Together we found the huge, bearlike brigand sitting across the room with several companions, all of them drinking from immense tankards. They got to their feet when I approached but I urged them to be seated again.

“Master Ormiston,” I said, “I want to thank you for saving my life and the life of my son. If you will come to the palace tomorrow at noon, I will show you my appreciation.”

“You owe me fifteen thousand crowns, Your Highness,” was all Red Ormiston said. “And my friends here know it. John of the Side,” he said, indicating a younger man across the table from him, “and the Lord’s Jock, who used to be a preacher before he took to outlawry.”

“To outlawry!” John of the Side cried, and the three men drank from their tankards.

“To the queen’s health!” Jamie cried, and they drank to that toast as well.

“Until tomorrow,” I said, and left the table, the men struggling to get to their feet once more as I departed.

Red Ormiston came to the palace a little after noon on the following day, dressed just as he had been the night before, in worn black trews and a patched leather vest, high boots and a shirt that had once been white, and with a sprig of heather in his cap. With him were the two
men he had called John of the Side and the Lord’s Jock, both with cleaner faces and hands than when I had seen them last.

I had the men ushered into the throne room, where I waited with Jamie at my side and a dozen guardsmen in attendance.

“You may approach the throne, Master Ormiston,” I said. He was clearly alarmed by his surroundings. I thought he might run out of the room.

“I have brought you here to offer you a full pardon for what you did on the night my servant David Riccio was killed.”

His look of alarm gave way to one of relief.

“It was Your Highness we were hired to kill,” the outlaw said in his deep rasping voice. “I want that clear.”

“My husband Lord Darnley hired you?”

Ormiston nodded. “He said the English soldiers would protect us. But there were no English soldiers. We could see that for ourselves. And Lord Bothwell there”—he pointed to Jamie—“he said there weren’t going to be any. He was right. He’s always been true and square with me and me with him, and he told me, there are no English, not within a hundred miles.

“Look here, he says, Lord Darnley says he will pay you but he won’t. The queen will give you fifteen thousand crowns if you save her life. Take it, he says. Take it and save her. So I did.”

“Why did you kill my servant then?”

Red Ormiston shrugged. “We had to kill somebody. Just not you.” He paused for breath, and looked around the room, then at me.

“Now you owe me my money.”

At a gesture from me two guardsmen brought forward a chest and, setting it down in front of the outlaw, raised the lid. It was full of shining gold coins.

Red Ormiston and his friends rushed to the chest, wide smiles on their faces, and dug their hands deep into the hoard of gold.

“Kneel, Master Ormiston,” I commanded, and he obeyed. I reached out and took a sword from one of the guardsmen. As he knelt before
me, head bowed, I touched the outlaw lightly on both shoulders.

“Arise, Sir Ormiston,” I said. And then, as he got to his feet, somewhat dazed by the unexpected honor I had done him, I added, “Arise, and meet your bride.”

“My bride?”

The Scottish wife, who until then had been in an adjacent room, now entered the throne room and walked proudly toward us. At my request Margaret Carwood had dressed her in a gown of russet velvet, with a high steepled headdress like those I myself wore. There were pearls at her neck and gold in her ears and on her fingers, and she looked, I thought, like the woman she had once been, the woman who had been the daughter of an admiral and the fiancée of a young nobleman. The woman she had been before she had the misfortune to be won by Jamie in that fateful game of cards.

She was far from beautiful, but she was clean and dignified and she walked toward us with pride, and a glow of happiness I had not seen on her face until then. She looked like a fine, sturdy, respectable wife—a wife any newly knighted outlaw would be proud to have for his own.

“Sir Ormiston, this is Anna. It is my wish that the two of you should wed.”

They looked at one another, he taking in her expensive clothes, the pearls and the gold, her plain features, her strong, solid body, her steady gaze, she assessing his tall, bulky frame and countryman’s well-worn clothes, his shaggy black hair and uncombed beard.

They looked at one another, and they grinned.

In the briefest of ceremonies—not a nuptial mass as neither the bride nor the groom was Catholic—Sir James “Red” Ormiston and Anna Thorsen became man and wife, with Jamie standing up for the outlaw and Margaret Carwood for Anna.

After the vows had been exchanged, Anna practiced her newly learned Scots. “I haf nefer been so happy as this day I am,” she said. “I vish you all so happy.”

And I heard Jamie say, under his breath, “Amen.”