The Galliard (67 page)

‘Who’s to come to your help in “the strongest of my fortresses”?’

She saw how she had maddened him, and now made a wild attempt to plead.

‘There is yourself – my faithful friend.’

‘Am I to come to your rescue again, even against myself?’

He was laughing, with the laughter that his men knew well, for they had heard it often enough in battle; she knew only that it was the laugh of a stranger, and a devil. It roused her own fighting spirit again. Even now her astonished pride could not believe that her subject would actually dare to force her body. Not even her husband and royal cousin Darnley, when sick and craving for her, had dared attempt it.

His hands came down on her, and she stood quite still under them, so certain was she of the mastery.

‘You will get nothing of me but of my own will,’ she said, her voice small and cold as a stiletto.

His answer was to seize her. In the shock of his attack all her newly reawakened love of him now turned again to hatred, and she fought with frenzy to defend herself, tearing his hard hands with her teeth, trying to tear his lips too as they crushed down on hers, not to kiss but to batter resistance out of her. She roused all his brutality, his determination to conquer. At last he conquered.

He looked at her lying only half-conscious, at the bruises on her delicate throat and breasts that were still round and small, her body still immature in spite of childbirth. He forced some wine between her lips; it revived her, but was strong and made her choke, and she asked for water to mix with it.

‘No, drink it as it is, you need it – and will again,’ he told her
grimly. She flung up her arm in a wild weak gesture and sent the cup full in his face. He laughed with delight that her spirit was still unbroken, even while he forced more wine down her throat.

Spluttering, she told him, ‘I will have your head for this. I will send for the Provost of Dunbar tomorrow and tell him of your treason.’

‘Send for him, then, and your tame cat Lethington, and see what succour they can give you!’ And he poured out wine for himself in the same cup, singing,

‘Go seek your succour where ye paid blackmail,

For, Ma’am, ye ne’er paid money to me!’

Her head fell back on the pillow. ‘And I doubted less of you than any subject that I have!’ she said in a low voice.

That did not move him, except to some amusement. ‘What reason had you to doubt any man, who know nothing of them?’

But there he stretched his mockery too far, and a sudden pity caught him unawares. He knew that he loved her helplessness even while he abused it, that her frankness and trustfulness had worked against her and always would, with others as well as himself; and that he would not have it otherwise. He walked away from her to the window and stood staring, seeing nothing; thinking how he had first seen her in Paris, and said that night at dinner that she was too young for him – and so she was still.

He did not want to think of that now when at last after all these years he had her at his mercy; it was better to be angry with her, fighting her. She had had good use of him; it was her turn to pay.

‘I paid high enough for intent to ravish you when I had none,’ he said, ‘a sort of Jedburgh Justice that I should now enjoy the crime for which I went into prison and exile!’

And he turned back again to remind himself and her of his new mastery. But when he reached the bed and lifted back the tumbled hair that had fallen over her face, he saw that she had fainted outright. He was not much surprised, for she had fought so furiously and he must have hurt her badly; he made sure that he
had not actually harmed her, then set to work to bring her round, first to consciousness, then to ease and quiet and to acceptance of him. He did not speak nor let her do so, but used all his practised cunning as a lover that had made women follow him blindly; used it cynically, almost mechanically, knowing that he could make her ‘like her pleasure as well as another’.

But this magic gentleness after cruelty, so new to her after Darnley’s boyishly clumsy and selfish notion of love-making, aroused something new in her – and in him. His deliberate intention to win her over was forgotten in a strange new pleasure, that of watching her bewildered delight in his caresses. She turned to him with the wonder of a child and the rapture of a woman, giving him all the ecstasy of her body in undemanding, unquestioning gratitude, giving as utterly, as royally, as she had just now withstood him, her greatness of spirit as clear in surrender as in conflict. He was abashed and conquered by it. All his artifice, his clever tricks learned from a score of women, seemed cheap to him, a base coinage which this royal creature accepted in her ignorance, but still more in her generosity, as pure gold.

So it was that now, when he had made her his prisoner, his victim, literally since he had conquered her – at the very moment when with others he would have shrugged, amused, ‘She is like all the rest,’ he was instead brought for the first time in his life to real humility and tenderness, and wished he had coin to give her that had not been debased ever since his dissolute boyhood. His peacock father, his sensual old uncle at Spynie had made his upbringing; and all his life, though he despised them, he had followed the lines they had laid down.

He knew that he would be proud of having subdued her so easily and so soon after her furious repudiation of him, that he would even tease her with it, gently; yet it was not till now when he had utterly subjugated her that he himself knelt to her in spirit. So he did now in act. ‘My Queen,’ he said, and kissed her hand.

It was the first time he had ever truly done her homage.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

But he found next day that she would not consent to marry him. Her denial was no reaction from the violence of passion the night before; it was clear and considered. He was astonished at the coolness with which she kept her head when physically and emotionally she had been swept off her feet; her lifelong political training in France had taught her to keep her thoughts free from her passions, years before those passions could be roused.

He admired it even while it infuriated him. All through that day he coaxed, pleaded, finally bullied, and still she said it was impossible. His fellow-nobles had been blackly jealous of his power before this; there was not one of them who would stand him on the throne; they would at once combine together to pull him down. Even the men of the Border, who had followed him so devotedly as their own overlord and lieutenant, would bitterly resent him in the position of that age-old bogy, their hereditary foe and tyrant, the King of Fife and Lothian. He had given her many instances in the past of this jealous instinct against the authority of even their legitimate monarch; she used them against him now with damnable logic. How coolly she faced him, telling him that! He knew it better than she, and for that very reason wanted to shake the breath out of her body before she should finish saying it.

But he was certain he could override all such jealousies and enmities; he had got his lambs feeding out of his hand, they’d never turn against him. As for the nobles, they’d bite if they got the chance, of course, but he’d not give them that chance. He knew that
France and the Catholic Powers would never support the match, that England would seize the chance to stir up all the trouble that she could against them – were they to be downed by that?

She took fire from his defiance; yet still that cool brain of hers went on reasoning; she saw, what his furious impulse had ignored, that dangerous as it was in any case for them to marry, it was madness to do so after he had kidnapped and carried her off. Either he would be regarded as a criminal ravisher (for which the punishment by law was death) who had coerced her by brute force into consent to the marriage; or she would be suspected of having connived at the whole scheme, perhaps instigated it, in order to save her face in marrying so soon after her husband’s death.

‘They will say you were my lover all along. Already they say you murdered him; now they will say you did it in order to marry me, and that I approved.’

‘“They say – what say they? Let them say!” Do you care what the rabble shouts?’

His towering arrogance could not believe that he alone was not a match for the whole pack of them. It made him say the worst thing he could have said to her: ‘There’s no need for all this talk. You’re my prisoner. I’ve sworn to marry you, whoever will or will not – yes, whether you yourself will or will not.’

‘Then indeed there’s no need for more talk,’ she said in that low, ice-cold voice that she could use like a whip.

He felt his anger rising, his hands went out – to do what? He had ravished her; he might kill her; he could never force her to submit. He went quickly out of the room, out of the Castle, knowing only that for the moment he must leave her.

Left alone, Mary’s high courage collapsed into frightened sobbing. His look had terrified her, and his silent going from her.

If only she had stayed safely in France! She even found herself longing for James’ unalterable respectability, for Lethington’s suave manners. And it was just then that Lethington with precise delicate steps came into the room. There was no time to be lost, and he had left the door open for a speedy retreat. Quickly yet unhurryingly, with a quiet matter-of-factness that sounded unbelievably
reassuring, he told her that he had contrived to get a message sent secretly to the Provost of Dunbar to arrange for her rescue – if she indeed desired her freedom. The implied doubt stung her; it was just what she had pointed out to Bothwell, that her consent to him now would look like her connivance beforehand.

‘Indeed I desire it,’ she cried indignantly. But what could be done? Dunbar was impregnable, the key of the East Coast from Leith Harbour to Berwick-on-Tweed, defended by the sea on three sides of it, and now by close on a thousand men as well as some cannon. It was impossible for the Provost to raise men to attack it, nor would she have a civil war. ‘A boat under the Castle walls—’ she said it at the same moment that Lethington was making the same suggestion, and he smiled with gentle humour.

‘It is no wonder that we think alike, since the poets seem to be the authority for our plans. Many Queens have made history, it is left for you, Madam, to make romance.’

Here was the modern gentleman, to whom it was as unthinkable to ravish a Queen as to get a divorce for her through the medium of a blacksmith’s daughter. The reminder he gave her of the civilized world that she seemed to have lost for ever was too much for her; she laughed and began to cry again at the same moment. She looked so pretty in spite of her tears that he felt really sorry for her and patted her shoulder, then stroked that shining head bowed over the arm of her chair. He had always wondered if her hair felt as soft as it looked; it did.

‘There, there,’ he murmured somewhat fatuously, ‘it will be all the same in a hundred years’ time.’

It struck his speculative mind that Elizabeth’s smirched, shrewd childhood had learned more of men at thirteen than Darnley’s widow knew even now; the English Queen could exploit her love-affairs to her advantage, where the Scots Queen was taken by surprise, perhaps to her own ruin, as well as to that of the men who loved her. So headlong a career as Bothwell’s must shortly crash in disaster; the sooner he helped to dissociate her from it, the better for himself.

Suddenly the Queen leaped from her chair and thrust him away
so violently that only the wall prevented him from falling. Before he had recovered his balance she dashed in front of him, and he saw Bothwell’s murderous eyes above her head, and his hand raised to strike with his whinger.

With his other hand Bothwell seized her to drag her away from Lethington, but she screamed and flung herself on the arm that held the knife, crying, ‘I have seen a man murdered – don’t, don’t let me see it again!’

He dropped his arm; through the choking red mist before his eyes some sense came to him that he must not do her more hurt.

‘I’ll not kill him in front of you,’ he said.

‘You
shall
not
kill him, or your life will pay the forfeit, I swear it, as soon as I am free.’

‘Aye, he was plotting your escape, I know that. And you’d trust yourself to that double-dyed traitor rather than to me! You’ll get no more chance of that.’

He went to the door, called to the guards, and told them to take Lethington away and keep him in his rooms under lock and key. Lethington wiped his forehead with his fine silk handkerchief as he was led away.

Bothwell turned to Mary. She had fallen back into her chair and was trembling violently from head to foot. He could not speak to her, and his eyes were clouded as though he saw her not as herself but as part of his rage and hatred. His hand was still gripping his whinger, the knuckles white, and she gave a little moan of fear ‘Your hands – they are murderers!’

He rammed the knife back into its sheath, and walked away from her and then back, up and down, restlessly, ceaselessly; would he never stop prowling up and down, never speak, never turn and look at her? She had given herself body and soul in the night to this man, and now awaked to find him ‘the two-footed beast’ that his enemies called him.

At last she had to ask it. ‘You will not kill him?’

‘No, I will not.’

He came back and stood before her, with desperation in his eyes, and yet there was also a proud humility.

‘I have made you hate me. I would give the world to undo it, but what’s the use of that? I go mad with rage, it comes up hot in my throat, choking me, and hot like fire in my eyes, and hot, hot in my hands with the longing to stab and smash and kill, and then I know and care for nothing but that. It’s made me blunder and do things to my own hurt, and that just lately. Now I
must
win you. I’d fight the whole world to do it – but what’s the good of that if I make you hate me?’

It was the appeal that he had flung at her only ten days ago, after the night she had sat up praying in the chapel, and it had haunted her ever since; now it rose to her own lips – ‘Oh don’t let us hate, or it will be the end of us both.’