Authors: Margaret Irwin
The official climax to the jollities was a sham fight out in the churchyard under the glittering December stars; the whole company trooped out to see a fortress attacked by centaurs, demons and Highlanders, lanzknechts and Moors. Fire-balls and fire-spears were the weapons, shooting in flame against the night; finally, in a furious explosion, amid a roar of cheers and laughter, the fort was blown up by gunpowder. At the end of this gorgeous firework display, which had taken six weeks to prepare at a cost of £190 17s. 5d., the laughing, chattering, shivering party returned indoors, to be met by scared servants important with news.
Darnley had received a message from his father and within the last few minutes had fled from Stirling.
Chapter Twenty
Stirling Castle was an island cliff looking down on an eddying sea of blown mist; when the wind tore it apart for an instant, a strip of brown woods or gleaming water showed small and clear, framed in cloud. ‘This is my life,’ thought Mary. ‘I can see only glimpses here and there of what is going on in it, knowing nothing of what is round me.’
News and rumours came flying every hour, giving a sudden brief picture of little groups of men going about their business, some of it straightforward, some mysterious, some sinister, all of it affecting herself, though she did not know how.
One was of the Catholic Consistory Court, restored the day before Darnley fled from Stirling, that it might find a convenient formula for the Queen’s divorce.
Another was of a company of men riding over the snow-scarred hills of the Border, at their head a stout man whose small pig’s eyes flickered out with a look of gross cunning above his bushy red whiskers. This was the Earl of Morton and his Douglas kinsmen returning from exile after the pardon that the Queen had given them, as was agreed, immediately after the baptism. The Douglases, Darnley’s kinsmen, were now his deadly enemies, and had sworn to avenge his betrayal of them after Rizzio’s murder.
There was that rumour that the Council were planning to arrest him and kill him if he resisted. So one of Lord Eglinton’s servants told the Town Clerk of Glasgow, and the Town Clerk told the Provost, and the Provost told Lennox, and Lennox sent a messenger
to tell Darnley, and that, on top of Morton’s approach, and the re-establishment of the Archbishop’s Court, was enough to send him flying from Stirling, and behind him the hosts of men with which Lennox had filled the little city.
That scene of urgent flight quickly melted into one more passive: of Darnley lying mysteriously ill in his father’s house at Glasgow. There were whispers of poison; the doctors said small-pox, but the symptoms seemed to be the same as he had shown when ill some months before. At that time the report had reached England that Darnley had the pox, and this recurrence of the disease seemed to confirm it. The wretched youth who had been so proud of his looks lay in bed in a darkened room and wore a silk mask to hide the spots on his face; this picture was unbearably painful, and Mary turned away from it to send her own doctor to him and order fine linen to be made up into night-shirts for him and a blue satin coat to wear in bed.
But another scene near by that darkened sickroom impinged upon it, the grey outline of a tall English ship riding at anchor in the wintry fogs of the Clyde. What was that ghost-ship still waiting for, what orders from Darnley, even now that he lay so desperately ill? Helpless as he might be, the plans that he had helped contrive were going forward; here and there in other countries, the mist that surrounded her lifted a corner of its thick curtain to show a distant warning.
The Duchess of Palma in the Netherlands, the Spanish Ambassador in London, had heard from Paris of a plot forming in Scotland against the Queen; the Archbishop of Glasgow, now in Paris, sought an interview with Catherine de Medici to discover what she knew of it. It would take a very wily man to discover what Catherine chose to conceal. But her ironic praise of Mary’s mercifulness to her enemies suggested that she might find good reason to regret it. The Archbishop paid attention to that hint, vague as it was, and dispatched one of the Scottish archers to urge Mary ‘to take heed to yourself’ and see that her guards were ‘diligent in their office’, as he feared ‘some surprise to be trafficked to your contrary’.
Ambassadors and Archbishops sitting at their inlaid escritoires in foreign capitals, their ringed hands in their furred sleeves, their big quill pens and the serpentine trail of pointed Italian handwriting staining the white paper for centuries to come with dark warnings of what might happen within the next few weeks, or even days – these minute vignettes could be discerned for an instant, but threw no light on the hidden scheme.
That she must discover herself; no other could do it. They all told her so, even Bothwell, though he plainly loathed the thought of her going near Darnley; but the danger was too great to think of that. At any moment he might die, and the plot in which he was involved march on without him, and their one possible source of information on it would die with him.
Mary must go to Glasgow, and under strong guard, for it was a stronghold of the Lennoxes, and get Darnley away from it as soon as he was well enough to be moved. Together with Gordon, towards the end of January he escorted her part of the way there, but not all, for Darnley was more nervous and jealous of Bothwell than of all the other lords, and she must allay his fears. Besides, the Elliots were giving serious trouble again in Liddesdale. So, halfway on their ride west between Edinburgh and Glasgow, he swung off towards Hermitage. He had but just come from Whittinghame, the house of one William Douglas, where he had met Morton and Lethington, and all he would say to Mary about that oddly mixed company for him was that they had had a pleasant walk in the garden – a strange pleasure for this icy foggy January!
At Lord Livingstone’s house he took his farewell.
‘Write to me,’ he said.
‘And if I discover nothing?’
‘Then write that. But you must discover what he is up to. You must get him away from Glasgow and under our watch till your divorce rids you of him.’
‘
Must – must!
’ – it had a strange echo from a subject.
She did not see that his very hatred of the work he was forcing on her made him so harsh and peremptory. Fear too, for could he trust her to carry out this business? She was pitiful, tender;
she must not be so now or she would mar everything. Nursing him through measles without any thought to her own danger had first won her to this rotten-hearted boy. Would the pox have the same effect? he asked himself savagely. It was not thought to be infectious, that was one consolation; all the same – ‘Take care,’ he urged her, ‘don’t kiss him, however much he begs you,’ and the scar above his eye seemed to turn livid as he said it. ‘Short of that, use all means. Promise him anything – everything.’
‘Even myself?’ she asked very low.
‘Even that. You shall never keep the promise. I swear it.’
She shuddered, sick at the hateful task before her. At that moment she hated the man that now knelt to her, kissed her hand in farewell, outwardly courteous and subservient, yet mastering her with his insistent command that she should do this thing against her nature. Was it indeed the Gay Galliard that they had danced together? They seemed now to be dancing between swords.
She watched him ride off to the clean air of the hills, to the Border fighting that he loved, to open enemies, and danger only to the body.
Then she rode on, it seemed quite alone, in the midst of her guards through the dense grey air.
Just outside Glasgow she was met by Thomas Crawford, a servant of Darnley’s. He had a message from Lennox, apologizing for his failure to escort her himself into the city; he was afraid to do so, Crawford said, because of her displeasure at the extraordinary number of his men he had installed in Stirling at the time of the Christening. She sat silent; erect and still on her horse, while under her cold level eyes the glib fluency of the messenger broke up into nervous stammering.
At last she said, ‘There is no recipe against fear.’
Lennox’s fear, said the messenger, was only because she had shown anger.
‘He would not be afraid if he were guiltless,’ she replied.
‘The Earl of Lennox wishes nothing better than that the secrets of every man’s heart were written on his face.’
The eyes of the Queen glittered like ice; sitting there before him
so straight and alert she had the look of an unsheathed blade.
‘Have you any further commission?’ she demanded.
‘No, Madam.’
‘Then hold your peace’; and she rode on through the frosty mist.
In some ways she found her task all too easy. That was the most horrible thing to her about this creature of wax that seemed to have no centre, no soul of its own at all, but lay ready to be moulded by whatever hands touched it. Darnley might be plotting her downfall, even her death, but now that he was ill and miserable he was as genuinely thankful to see her as a sick child that has been naughty, but knows his mother will now forgive him everything. All his excuses and pleas were on that ground.
‘I am young,’ he told her again and again. He had made mistakes, he had been led astray, but it was by people older than himself, and she had forgiven them, so why could she not forgive him?
All she had to do was to say she did forgive him, to promise him that all should be between them as before. It was the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.
The sickroom was unbearably stuffy, for the doctors would allow no window open to the wintry air, and the patient’s breath was poisonous. She felt herself infected by his close presence, yet sat on through the night, all her nerves taut as a bowstring. When he slept, she had no desire to do so, nor even to lie down and rest. She walked up and down restlessly, softly, in heelless slippers; to the fire where the clean flames roared and sparkled up the chimney, back to the bed and stood looking down on that uneasy feverish sleep that still made demands on her, muttering her name, moaning in agonized selfpity; then remembered her promise to write a full account to Bothwell, and turned to the little writing-table behind the bed curtains and sat there, at first staring at nothing, tapping the quill pen against her teeth, unable to think of a word, then pulling a paper towards her and jotting down items here and there as a sort of rough memorandum, and then at last finding the words flow so fast that her pen had hard work to keep up with them.
She had never written like this before, to him or to anyone. She
was not indeed writing to anyone but herself. Her heart was pent up with perilous matter; she must release it or she would scream aloud, run clean mad and stab the sleeping form in the bed and then herself. She must write it all down, somehow, anyhow, though she would probably destroy it by the morning. That did not matter; she must write now.
The flaming logs died down to a steady glow, all their sputtering silent, only now and then a faint crackling whisper; the candles burned down deep into their sockets, their pointed flames descending lower, lower before her eyes. The room grew cold round her. The city lay outside asleep in the darkness, much of it hostile to her; Lennox, its overlord, had worked that. Men slept, but their ill intentions were awake, they went on continuously. Through this sleeping house a relentless current of life was flowing, bearing her away on its stream, she did not know where. Her round jewelled watch with the gold stars lay on the table, ticking in the silence. The tiny feet of time marched inexorably on and away; she saw them marching past against the descending candle-flames; each minute had a face drawn by a child, two dots and a dash and a spiked hand. Not one looked back. Each carried a load so small she could not distinguish it; yet this army of ants was carrying away the world piecemeal.
She wrote: ‘I am weary and am asleep and yet I cannot forbear writing as long as there is any paper.’
She wrote: ‘He prayed me to come again, which I did. He told me his grief – that I was the cause of his sickness, because of the sorrow he had, that I was so strange to him. And (said he) “I admit that I have done amiss, but so have many other of your subjects and you have well pardoned them.
‘“I am young.
‘“If I may obtain this pardon I protest I will not make fault again. And I ask nothing but that we may be at bed and table together as husband and wife; and if you will not, I will never rise from this bed. God knows I am punished to have made my God of you and had no other mind but of you. If I thought, when anybody does any wrong to me, that I might make my moan of it to you,
I would open it to no other.” I made as though I thought all to be true and that I would think upon it.’
She wrote: ‘He then used so many kinds of flatteries so coolly and so wisely as you would marvel at. He would not let me go but would have me to watch with him. He had always tears in his eyes. He salutes every man, even the meanest, and makes much of them that they may take pity of him. You never heard one speak better nor more humbly; and if I had not proof of his heart to be as wax, and that mine were not diamond, no one but you could prevent my having pity on him.’
That looked as though she did think all – or some – to be true that Darnley had said. True, it was his instinct to confide in her. Yet in these five days and nights of watching by him, feeding him and talking with so much apparent frankness, he had made his moan to her certainly, expressed his abject submission, but not told her what she had hoped to discover. He had denied any plots against her, any intention to go in the English ship; she had drawn a blank there. Her deceitful kindness had won this, however – his promise to go with her wherever she wished as soon as he was well enough.
‘But to make him trust me I had to feign to him; and therefore when he desired me to promise that when he should be well we should make but one bed, I told him, feigning to believe his fair promises, that if he did not change his mind by then, I was contented. I do here a work that I hate. You would laugh to see me so trimly make a lie, or at least dissemble and mingle truth with it. You make me dissemble so much that I am afraid thereof with horror, and you make me almost play the part of a traitor –