“There is a gibbet at every crossroads,” Queen Mary observes. “There are not many in the North who would agree with you that Elizabeth’s mercy falls like the gentle rain.”
“There is a rebel at the end of each rope,” I say stoutly. “And the queen could have hanged a dozen more for each one.”
“Yes, indeed, she has lost all her support,” Mary agrees sweetly. “There was not a town or village in the North that declared for her. They all wanted the true religion and to see me freed. Even you had to run before the army of the North, Bess.Tiens! How you labored with your wagons and how you fretted for your goods! Even you knew that there was not a town or village in the North that was loyal to Elizabeth. You had to whip up your horses and get through them as quick as you could while your silver cups fell off the back.”
There is a ripple of sycophantic laughter from my ladies at the thought of me struggling along with my Papist candlesticks. I bend my head over my sewing and grit my teeth.
“I watched you then,” she says more quietly, drawing her chair a little closer to me so that we can speak privately. “You were afraid in those days, on the road to Coventry.”
“No blame in that,” I say defensively. “Most people were afraid.”
“But you were not afraid for your own life.”
I shake my head. “I am no coward.”
“No, you are more than that. You are courageous. You were not afraid for your life, nor for the safety of your husband. You were not afraid of the battle either. But you were terrified of something. What was it?”
“The loss of my house,” I concede.
She cannot believe me. “What? Your house? With an army at your heels you were thinking of your house?”
I nod. “Always.”
“A house?” she repeats. “When we were in danger of our very lives?”
I give a half-embarrassed laugh. “Your Grace, you would not understand. You have been queen of so many palaces. You would not understand what it is like for me to win a small fortune and try to keep it.”
“You fear for your house before the safety of your husband?”
“I was born the daughter of a newly widowed woman,” I say. I doubt she would understand me even if I could spell it out for her. “On my father’s death she was left with nothing. I mean that: nothing. I was sent to the Brandon family, as companion and upper servant in their household. I saw then that a woman must have a husband and a house for her own safety.”
“You were surely in no danger?”
“I was always in danger of becoming a poor woman,” I explain. “A poor woman is the lowest thing in the world. A woman alone owns nothing; she cannot house her children; she cannot earn money to put food on the table; she is dependent on the kindness of her family; without their generosity she could starve to death. She could see her children die for lack of money to pay a doctor; she could go hungry for she has no trade nor guild nor skill. Women are banned from learning and from trade. You cannot have a woman blacksmith or a woman clerk. All a woman can do, without education, without a skill, is to sell herself. I decided, whatever it cost me, I would somehow win property and cling to it.”
“It is your kingdom,” she says suddenly. “Your house is your own little kingdom.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And if I lose my house I am thrown on the world without protection.”
“Just like a queen.” She nods. “A queen has to have a kingdom and without it she has nothing.”
“Yes,” I say.
“And does your fear of losing your house mean that you see your husbands as providers, and nothing more?” she asks inquisitively.
“I loved my husbands because they were good to me and left me their fortunes,” I admit. “And I love my children because they are my dearest own children and because they are my heirs. They will go on after I am gone. They will be heirs to my fortune, they will own my houses and wealth, please God they will add to them, and they will have titles and honor.”
“Some would say you are a woman without a tender heart,” she remarks. “A woman with the heart of a man.”
“I am not a woman who relishes the uncertainty of a woman’s life,” I reply stoutly. “I am not a woman who glories in being dependent. I would rather earn my own fortune than curry the favor of a rich man and look to him for my safety.”
As she is about to reply, the door opens behind me, and I know that it is my husband the earl. I know it before I even turn to see, because of the way her face lights up at the sight of him. I know that she would shine her smile on any man. She has all the discrimination of a whore. Any man or boy, from my eight-year-old page boy Babington to my forty-two-year-old husband: to them all she is equally delightful. She was even gaily flirtatious with Hastings in the days before he left.
I cannot say how galling it is for me to see the intimacy of her smile and the way she extends her hand, and how utterly infuriating to see him bow over her hand and kiss her fingers and hold them for a moment. There is nothing improper in her behavior or his. Her gesture is queenly and he is a restrained courtier. God knows, there is far grosser flirtation between Queen Elizabeth and any new arrival to her presence chamber, more bawdiness in the court too. Elizabeth can be downright lustful and her constant hunger for flattery is a byword amongst her courtiers. In contrast, this queen, though far more desirable, never strays from the most enchanting manners.
But I suppose I am weary to my soul of seeing her in my rooms, seated in my best chair, curtained by her own cloth of state, with my husband bowing to her as if she were an angel descended to illuminate, rather than a most unreliable woman.
“A messenger has come from London,” he says. “He carries letters for you. I thought you might want to see them at once.”
“Indeed I do.” She rises from her seat and so we all have to jump up too. “I will read them in my rooms.”
She throws a smile at me. “I shall see you at dinner, Lady Bess,” she dismisses me. But she turns to my husband. “Will you come and look at what they say?” she invites him. “I would appreciate your advice.”
I press my lips together to swallow words that I should not even think. Such as: What help could he possibly give you, since he thinks of nothing and plans ahead not at all? How could he ever choose any course when he does not know what he is worth, what it would cost him, and if he can afford it? Do either of you know that he is sliding into debt every day? What help would you seek from a fool? Unless you are a fool yourself?
My husband the earl, whom now I inwardly call my husband the fool, gives her his arm and they go out together, their heads close. He has forgotten either to greet me or to say farewell. I feel the eyes of my ladies on me and I sit down on my stool and snap my fingers at them. “Carry on,” I say. “Sheets don’t mend themselves, you know.”
1570, FEBRUARY,
TUTBURY CASTLE:
MARY
Bothwell,
You will laugh to read this as I laugh while I write. My half brother Moray is dead, and they want me back as queen. I will be back on my throne this summer and have you freed the next day. I always was lucky, and the prison that could keep you has not been built.
Marie
1570, APRIL,
TUTBURY CASTLE:
GEORGE
Ihave become, despite myself, Queen Mary’s advisor. I have to: it is a duty of honor. She cannot be left without someone to talk to. She has no one that she can trust. Her betrothed, the Duke of Norfolk, is imprisoned and can only write to her in secret; her ambassador, the bishop John Lesley, has been silent since the arrests; and all the time Cecil is pressing her to come to an agreement about her return to Scotland, on terms that even I can see are relentless.
“You are too hasty,” I scold her. “You are too eager. You cannot agree to these terms.”
They want to impose on her Cecil’s old Treaty of Edinburgh, which makes Scotland a subject nation, subservient to England, incapable of making its own alliances, banned from having a
foreign policy at all. They want her to agree to make Scotland a Protestant country, where she may worship only in private, almost in hiding. They even want her to surrender her claim to the English throne; they demand that she disinherit herself. And like a queen in very truth she is prepared to accept this humiliation, this martyrdom, to win again her throne of Scotland and return to her son.
“These are impossible demands; they are wicked demands,” I tell her. “Your own mother refused them for you, as she was dying. Cecil would have forced them on her; he should be ashamed to force them on you.”
“I have to agree,” she says. “I know they are onerous. But I will agree.”
“You should not.”
“I will, because once I am there…” She shrugs, a gesture so utterly French that if I saw only the movement of her shoulders among a crowd of other women, I would know her at once. “Once I am on my throne again I can do as I please.”
“You are joking. You cannot mean to sign an agreement and then renege?” I am genuinely shocked.
“No,non ,jamais , no. Of course not. But who would blame me if I did? You yourself say these terms are wickedly unfair.”
“If they thought you would go back on your word, then they would never agree with you at all,” I point out. “They would know that you could not be trusted. And you would have made your own word, the word of a queen, utterly valueless.”
She flicks a smile at me like a naughty child. “I have nothing to put on the table,” she says simply. “I have nothing to barter but my word. I have to sell it to them.”
“They will make you keep your word,” I warn her.
“Ah, bah!” She laughs. “How can they? Once I am on my throne again?”
“Because of this last condition,” I say, pointing it out to her. The document is written in English; I fear that she has not fully understood it.
“They say that my son James shall be raised a Protestant?” she queries. “It is unfortunate, but he will be with me. I can instruct him in private. He will learn to think one thing and say another as all clever kings and queens must do. We are not as normal people, my Chowsbewwy. We learn very young that we have to act a part. Even my little boy James will have to learn to deceive. We are all liars under our crowns.”
“He will be raised as a Protestant in England.” I point to the words. “En Angleterre.”Usually she laughs at my attempts to speak her language, but this time, as she understands me, the color and the smile drain from her face.
“They think they can take my son from me?” she whispers. “My boy? My little boy? They would make me choose between my throne and my child?”
I nod.
“Elizabeth would take him from me?”
I say nothing.
“Where would he live?” she demands. “Who would care for him?”
Of course the document, drawn by Cecil under instructions from Elizabeth, does not trouble itself with this most natural question from a young mother. “They don’t say,” I tell her. “But perhaps the queen would make a nursery for him at Hatfield Palace. That’s the usual—”
“She hates me,” the Scots queen says flatly. “She has taken my pearls and now she would take my son.”
“Your pearls?”
She makes a little dismissive gesture with her hand. “Most valuable. I had a great string of black pearls and my half brother sold them to Elizabeth the moment he forced me from the throne. She bought them. She outbid my mother-in-law. See what vultures I have around me? My own mother-in-law bid for my looted pearls while I was held in prison, but she was outbid by my cousin. Elizabeth wrote to me of her sorrow at the injustice that was being done to me and yet she bought my pearls. Now she would take my son? My own son?”
“I am sure you could see him…”
“She has no child of her own; she can have no child. She will soon be beyond childbearing years, if she is not dried up already. And so she would steal my son from his cradle. She would take my son and heir and make him her own. She would rob me of my heart, of all that makes my life worth living!”
“You have to think of it from her point of view. She would have him as a hostage. She would hold him to make sure that you kept to this treaty. That is why, when you agree to it, you must realize that you will have to keep to it.”
She hears nothing of this. “A hostage? Will she keep him in the Tower like the poor little princes? Will he never come out at all? Will he disappear as they did? Does she mean to kill him?”
Her voice breaks on the thought of it and I cannot bear her distress. I rise from my seat at the table and I go to look out of the window. In our rooms across the courtyard I can see Bess walking down the gallery, accounts books tucked under her arm. She feels a long way away from me now, her worries about rents and our costs are so trivial compared to the unfolding tragedy of the Scots queen. Bess has always been prosaic, but now I have the very heart of poetry beating wildly in my own house.
I turn back to the queen. She is sitting quite still with her hand shading her eyes. “Forgive me,” she says. “Forgive my emotion. You must wish you had a cold-hearted queen to deal with, like your own. And forgive my stupidity. I had not read it properly. I thought that they meant only to supervise James’s education, to make him a good heir to the English throne. I did not realize that they want to take him from me altogether. I thought we were talking about a treaty—not about my destruction. Not about the theft of my child. Not about his kidnap.”
I feel too big and too awkward for the room. Gently, I stand behind her and put my hand on her shoulder, and with a sigh she leans back so that her head rests against my body. That little gesture, and the warmth of her head on my belly, fill me with tenderness, and an inevitable rising desire. I have to step away from her, my heart pounding.
“I was parted from my mother when I was just a little girl,” she says sadly. “I know what it is to be homesick and to miss one’s mother. I wouldn’t do that to my son, not for the throne of France, let alone Scotland.”
“He would be well cared for.”
“I was dearly loved in France,” she says. “And my dearest papa, King Henri, loved me better than his own daughters. He could not have been more kind and tender to me. But I longed for my mother, and I could never go to her. She visited me once, just once, and it was as if I became whole again, as if something was restored that had long been missing: my heart perhaps. Then she had to go back to Scotland to defend my throne for me, and your Cecil, your great William Cecil, saw her weakness and her loneliness and her illness and he forced the treaty on her that he is now forcing on me. She died trying to defend my throne against Elizabeth and Cecil. Now I have to fight the same battle. And this time they want to take my child and break my heart. Elizabeth and Cecil together destroyed my mother and now they want to destroy me, and destroy my son.”
“Perhaps we can negotiate,” I say, then I correct myself. “Perhaps you can negotiate. You could insist that the prince stay in Scotland, perhaps with an English guard and tutor?”
“I have to have him with me,” she says simply. “He is my son, my little boy. He has to be with his mother. Not even Elizabeth can be so hard-hearted as to steal my right to the throne and then my own son from me.”
1570, MAY,
TUTBURY CASTLE:
MARY
Itry to stay courageous but some days I am exhausted by sadness. I miss my child and I am so fearful as to who is caring for him, and educating him, and watching over him. I trust the Earl of Mar, his guardian, to guide him and educate him, and his grandfather the Earl of Lennox should keep him safe if only for the sake of Darnley, his dead son, my boy’s father. But Lennox is a careless man, dirty and rough, with no affection for me, and he blames me for the death of his son. What would he know about caring for a little boy? What would he know about the tenderness of a little boy’s heart?
The warmer weather is coming and it is light at six o’clock in the morning and I am woken every dawn by birdsong. This is my third sp
ring in England, my third spring! I can hardly believe I have been here for so long. Elizabeth promises I shall be returned to Scotland by the summer, and she has ordered Shrewsbury to let me ride out freely and receive visitors. I am to be treated as a queen and not as a common criminal. My spirits always used to lift at this time of the year; I was raised so long in France that I am accustomed to the warmth of those long beautiful summers. But this year I do not smile to see the primroses in the hedge, the birds flying, carrying straw and twigs for their nests. This year I have lost my optimism. I have lost my joy. The coldness and the hardness that my cousin Elizabeth embodies in her spinster rule seem to have drained my world of light and warmth. I cannot believe that a woman could be so cruel to me, and that I have to endure it. I cannot believe that she could be so unloving, so unmoved by my appeals to her. I have been the beloved of everyone who knows me; I cannot accept that she should remain so indifferent. I cannot understand unkindness. I am a fool, I know. But I cannot understand her hardness of heart.