The Galliard (50 page)

‘And are you telling me that no one else can hold it?’

‘I doubt if a Sovereign can. It’s not statecraft.’

‘The State is only the sum total of human lives within it. You cannot have one law for men and another for nations.’

He looked down on her sitting there with her hands lying so white and still in her lap. ‘Christ’s heart!’ he cried suddenly. ‘What do I care for all this? It’s your life or death that matters. You’ve got to destroy James before he strikes at you for the third time.’

‘He may not have the time.’

It came to him then, cold and deep within him, the reason for her resignation. She did not believe she would survive the birth of her child. It was small wonder. But worst danger of all was the wish to die that now was evident in her.

He flung himself down on his knees before her and caught at those limp hands, crushing them in his grasp without knowing what he was doing or what he could say to give her heart, and hope. When his words did come, it was in a torrent of rage that startled himself.

‘So that’s the outgate you’re hoping for! You think to die and escape your trials. You
shall not
have such easy victory! You – who have been braver than any woman, or man either, that I’ve ever known – are you to turn coward now, and leave the kingdom to be torn yet again, as it was at your own birth when your father died for lack of courage to go on?’

‘It’s true,’ she whispered. ‘I am afraid to live.’

‘Better to accept defeat – is that it? Better to sit than to walk, better to lie than to sit, better to sleep than to lie, better to die than to sleep! Look at me. Open your eyes. Swear to me that you won’t give in.’

She looked, and her eyes were not veiled now; they were like bright swords.

‘I’ll swear it.’

‘You
want
to live, remember.’

‘If I do, it’s because you’ve made me.’

He bent his head on her hands but did not kiss them. She felt his tears on them. Then he got to his feet, clumsily, blunderingly, and moved towards the door without looking back at her.

‘Where are you going?’ she cried.

‘Back to the work you’ve set me. There’s nothing I can do here.’

Chapter Thirteen

It is not surprising that immediately after such unwonted exaltation of the spirit Bothwell took a mistress, the first time he ‘had ado with any woman since he was married,’ as his servants observed with some apparent surprise. As he had been married a bare three months, this was not a strong tribute. The Rizzio murder had early interrupted the course of his matrimony, and it did not run any the more smoothly for it now that they were together at Haddington Abbey, which he had reclaimed from Lethington. Jean did not show any obvious feminine jealousy over the amount of time that her husband had had perforce to spend away from her and with the Queen. But when her brother Gordon repeated to her the Queen’s public praise of Bothwell’s ‘force and dexterity’, and ‘how suddenly by his providence not only were We delivered out of prison, but also the whole company of conspirators dissolved and We recovered our former obedience’, then Jean’s silence was positively deafening.

Gordon’s own aloofness was stirred to a brotherly blundering; he had been badly disappointed at the way this marriage was going, and now indignantly rubbed in that all men – ‘I say all
men
,’ he repeated, glowering down at that impassive female figure, ‘recognise that nothing of importance is now done without Bothwell; he stands higher than any man in the country, and damnably lucky you are to have married him instead of that nincompoop Ogilvie who left you for the Beton girl – and for very shame you might have had the decency to send them a wedding present!’ he delivered as a final shot.

Jean went on sewing.

Gordon was not the only man to reflect how insidious a weapon was the needle.

Mary’s exquisite embroidering of her designs through all the wrangling of politics had sometimes reminded her Council that the beauty she was making would last long after their discords had ceased to have a meaning; that there was a heart of peace and harmony in the world, however troubled its state, to those who cared to create instead of destroy.

‘Queen Mary sat in her bower

Sewing a silver seam.’

That was the picture of her that her subjects sang as they went about their work in the steep crowded noisy streets of the hill-town, and looked up at the towering crag of Edinburgh Castle where their Prince would be born.

A refuge to Mary, a weapon to Jean, the needle provided another and piquant instrument to her sewing-maid Bessie Crawford. Her sleek dark head in its bright cap bent over her sewing, her quick hand darted backwards and forwards, the tip of her tongue peeped out between her white teeth and passed slowly from side to side as she sewed, while a very low humming sound came from her red lips; intent, industrious, demure, she looked as happy as a little cat lapping cream; then she saw that the Earl was watching her; the humming stopped, the tip of the tongue went in, but her eyelids never fluttered, and her fingers flew faster than ever, drawing the needle and its scarlet thread backwards and forwards in its endless rhythm.

‘Stop pretending you haven’t seen me,’ he said, ‘and come here.’

Down went her hand as fast as a shot bird, and the needle and its scarlet thread, and all the coloured silk in her lap into a pool at her feet. She dropped a curtsy and came over to him; she did not know how much depended on her walk. If she had minced up to him, as he half expected, he would have thrust her out of his sight.
But she was neither timid nor too bold, she came directly up to him and looked him in the face. He took her round chin between his finger and thumb, pinching the soft firm flesh, turned it this way and that, scanning her face. Her eyes fell before his look, her lips parted in a quick intake of breath, and then were crushed by his mouth. She met his kiss eagerly, springing forward into his arms.

‘So you’ll enter His Lordship’s service,’ he said. ‘Go up into the little room in the steeple and wait for me there.’

But they were observed as they came down.

Bessie had not libelled her mistress when she said she did not keep her servants long; Jean’s own letters have left it on record that the difficulty of finding honest and faithful servants was one of her chief domestic troubles; her most poignant complaint was that she ‘had no peace because of the oft-changing of her servants’.

She certainly had good reason to get rid of Bessie, and did, within only a few days of that excursion up the steeple. Bessie went back to her father the blacksmith, but as his smithy was in Haddington town, and as Willy Crawford had a very proper sense that ‘the nobility and gentry should have every justice’, this only made Bothwell’s brief visits to her rather more convenient.

He had been acerbated to fury by his unsatisfied love and anxiety for Mary, and the irritation of his wife’s passive hostility; added to this, Anna Throndsen had started again on long reproachful letters from Scandinavia since she had heard of his marriage. His nerves and senses found something of the relief they craved in the moments of entirely animal union with the rapturously acceptant Bessie. Gossips were on the look-out for the Earl’s tall figure in the dark cloak that concealed his white doublet as he passed down the back streets of Haddington, where once he had fled on a very different errand, with a bag of gold under his arm, to the kitchen of a bigger and a better Bess.

The gossip at once reached Jean. It was only three weeks since they had come to Haddington, and already Bessie had been seduced, dismissed, and re-established in her connection with her lord and master. With his accustomed speed in love as in war, Bothwell now quenched the ensuing storm with his wife. Their quarrel was quite
like the old days with Anna, he reflected, with amused contempt of himself as well as of both women; his passion had flamed as suddenly as her wounded pride, and conquered her utterly for the moment; in recognition of which he wrote out in suitably loving terms a deed of gift of his lands, houses and castle of Nether Hailes for the period of her life. For a woman of Jean’s sense of property and administrative powers this was an excellent equivalent of the necklace usually given in such cases; it was of greater value, and provided her with an estate and occupation apart from his side.

His own occupations gave him little enough time either for wife or mistress. Just over the Border on the English side, Morton and his fellows were prowling up and down, only waiting their opportunity to break through. Nor could he himself keep watch there all the time, for he was continually riding to and from Edinburgh to attend the Privy Council, which meekly passed all the Acts proposed by him. In these few weeks he brought forward two to promote order on land and sea: Courts of Justice to be held on every royal progress, and piracy checked by cancelling letters of search, even those that had been issued to his own sea-captains; two preventive game laws, one against the shooting of deer, which were growing scarce, and the other against foreigners fishing in the Highland lochs; a Currency Act to stop false money being imported from Flanders; and two Acts directly aimed against Mary’s own indiscriminate charity, forbidding further shameless and indiscreet begging of benefits from her private purse (which left her barely enough for her own living): and limiting the number of pardons issued in the future by the Queen, who had ‘oft times shown mercy without occasion.’

His lawyer, Mr Chalmers, told him the Queen had made her will, remembering everybody, and showing particular generosity to Darnley. Bothwell could see from that how she had welcomed death; she was free to forgive when she had no more to fear. There were magnificent bequests of jewels to his wife, rivalling those to the Crown of Scotland; to himself, a ring with a great diamond, and a jewelled plaque of her own symbol, a mermaid
on a dolphin’s back, an enchanting thing made by an Italian artist for the Mermaid, bride of the ‘Dolphin of France’.

One fine early-summer morning as he rode towards the capital he heard the crash and roar of the guns thundering out from the Castle, set spurs to his horse and galloped the rest of the way until he came clattering up the High Street, and had to slacken his speed among the hosts of people who were flocking out into it. Every door stood open, every window was alive with faces, the city hummed like a hive with anxious eager questioning voices. ‘A boy,’ he was told in answer to his demand. ‘She’s the lighter of a son, God bless her bonny face! A braw big laddie, they’re saying.’

‘Big’ – and some other fool came running downhill saying she’d just heard from one of the kitchen-maids herself that she’d been told that the bairn had a bonny big head!

Big – and a big head – after all she’d gone through, and her hips as slight as those of a lass of fifteen! He had always thought the stock too fine to breed from.

He pushed his horse through the crowd and reached the Grassmarket at the foot of the Castle Rock, and looked up that sheer height to the window that he knew to be that of her bedroom. Others were hanging about there too, staring up, waiting for any more shreds of news. Sir James Melville had been waiting here on horseback ever since dawn, they told him, and the instant the baby was safely born, Mary Beton, now Ogilvie, had leaned out of that window over the sheer drop of the cliff and let down a ring and a letter on a cord. Melville had caught them and galloped off to take the news to Queen Elizabeth in London, as fast as fresh horses posted all the way could carry him.

Inside the Castle he could get no news that reassured him. The Queen had had a long and terrible labour; the doctors, and what was even more important, the midwife, Margaret Houston, had not believed it possible that she could live. But she had made such a fight for her life that by her will alone she had won through.

(‘You
want
to live, remember.’

‘If I do, it’s because you’ve made me.’)

But it was too early yet to know if he had succeeded; she was
lying up there, limp and exhausted and grey with her agony, and who could tell yet if she would recover from it?

Round him the busy, complacent voices buzzed against his ears, talking again and again of this brat that might even now cost her her life, a ‘fat bouncing boy’ – Du Croc had said his godfathers would feel the weight of him when it came to the christening.

He was the living spit of the King, they said, with sly triumph in their tones, for that would dispose of any lying rumours that suggested Signor Davie as the father. And they went on repeating descriptions of the big sloping head and blue eyes set very wide apart, until Bothwell went out on the battlements to cool his head of the raging desire that filled him to kill both Darnley and his son together.

Up in the small stone room with the one little window looking down over the Grassmarket, the figure in the bed at last moved its head on the pillow. It was night by now and the candles were shaded from the patient’s eyes, but the curtains had been drawn back from the window to give her air, and showed a square of sky that was one red glow. Bonfires were blazing on the heights all through Scotland; five hundred were afire in Edinburgh alone, and with that smoky glow there came the surging roar of voices, cheering, singing, shouting with joy in the town below.

She heard them and opened her eyes and saw the sky all red for joy of her son who would be King of Scotland, and of England. They brought him for her to look at.

Presently, when she was stronger, they brought Darnley in to see her and the baby. The room was full of people. He stood awkwardly, looking down on her face that seemed to have been spun all over with a cobweb of tiny fine lines of pain. Margaret Houston drew back a shawl, and there, tucked into Mary’s arm, lay a crumpled red scrap that opened its mouth and yawned in a terrifying manner. Mary spoke in a voice only just above a whisper: ‘My lord, God has given me a son begotten by none but you.’

He blushed crimson, and not knowing what to say, stooped and kissed the infant. But still that relentless whisper went on, as if it
were stealing into the room from the other side of the world. ‘Here I protest to God, this is your son and no other man’s son. I desire that all here bear witness. For he is so much your own son that I fear it will be the worse for him hereafter.’