The Historical Nights' Entertainment by Rafael Sabatini (most important books to read .txt) 📖

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of the King was the admission, not merely of complicity, but that

the thing was done by his express will and command, that the

responsibility was his own, and that he would hold the doers

scatheless from all consequences.

 

Mary could scarcely have hoped to be able to confront her worthless

husband with so complete a proof of his duplicity and baseness.

She sent for him, confounded him with the sight of that appalling

bond, made an end to the amity which for her own ends she had

pretended, and drove him out of her presence with a fury before

which he dared not linger.

 

You see him, then, crushed under his load of mortification,

realizing at last how he had been duped on every hand, first by the

lords for their own purpose, and then by the Queen for hers. Her

contempt of him was now so manifest that it spread to all who served

him - for she made it plain that who showed him friendship earned

her deep displeasure - so that he was forced to withdraw from a

Court where his life was become impossible. For a while he wandered

up and down a land where every door was shut in his face, where

every man of whatsoever party, traitor or true, despised him alike.

In the end, he took himself off to his father, Lennox, and at

Glasgow he sought what amusement he could with his dogs and his

hawks, and such odd vulgar rustic love-affairs as came his way.

 

It was in allowing him thus to go his ways, in leaving her vengeance

- indeed, her justice - but half accomplished, that lay the

greatest of the Queen’s mistakes. Better for her had she taken

with Darnley the direct way that was her right. Better for her,

if acting strongly then, she had banished or hanged him for his

part in the treason that had inspired the murder of Rizzio.

Unfortunately, a factor that served to quicken her abhorrence of

him served also to set a curb of caution upon the satisfaction

of it.

 

This factor that came so inopportunely into her life was her regard

for the arrogant, unscrupulous Earl of Bothwell. Her hand was

stayed by fear that men should say that for Bothwell’s sake she had

rid herself of a husband become troublesome. That Bothwell had

been her friend in the hour when she had needed friends, and knew

not whom she might trust; that by his masterfulness he seemed a

man upon whom a woman might lean with confidence, may account for

the beginnings of the extraordinary influence he came so swiftly

to exercise over her, and the passion he awakened in her to such a

degree that she was unable to dissemble it.

 

Her regard for him, the more flagrant by contrast with her contempt

for Darnley, is betrayed in the will she made before her confinement

in the following June. Whilst to Darnley she bequeathed nothing but

the red-enamelled diamond ring with which he had married her - “It

was with this that I was married,” she wrote almost contemptuously.

“I leave it to the King who gave it me” - she appointed Bothwell to

the tutelage of her child in the event of her not surviving it, and

to the government of the realm.

 

The King came to visit her during her convalescence, and was scowled

upon by Murray and Argyll, who were at Holyrood, and most of all by

Bothwell, whose arrogance by now was such that he was become the

best-hated man in Scotland. The Queen received him very coldly,

whilst using Bothwell more than cordially in his very presence, so

that he departed again in a deeper humiliation than before.

 

Then before the end of July there was her sudden visit to Bothwell

at Alloa, which gave rise to so much scandal. Hearing of it,

Darnley followed in a vain attempt to assert his rights as king and

husband, only to be flouted and dismissed with the conviction that

his life was no longer safe in Scotland, and that he had best cross

the Border. Yet, to his undoing, detained perhaps by the overweening

pride that is usually part of a fool’s equipment, he did not act

upon that wise resolve. He returned instead to his hawking and his

hunting, and was seldom seen at Court thereafter.

 

Even when in the following October, Mary lay at the point of death

at Jedburgh, Darnley came but to stay a day, and left her again

without any assurance that she would recover. But then the facts

of her illness, and how it had been contracted, were not such as to

encourage kindness in him, even had he been inclined to kindness.

 

Bothwell had taken three wounds in a Border affray some weeks

before, and Mary, hearing of this and that he lay in grievous case

at Hermitage, had ridden thither in her fond solicitude - a distance

of thirty miles - and back again in the same day, thus contracting

a chill which had brought her to the very gates of death.

 

Darnley had not only heard of this, but he had found Bothwell at

Jedburgh, whither he had been borne in a litter, when in his turn

he had heard of how it was with Mary; and Bothwell had treated him

with more than the contempt which all men now showed him, but which

from none could wound him so deeply as from this man whom rumour

accounted Mary’s lover.

 

Matters between husband and wife were thus come to a pass in which

they could not continue, as all men saw, and as she herself

confessed at Craigrnillar, whither she repaired, still weak in body,

towards the end of November.

 

Over a great fire that blazed in a vast chamber of the castle she

sat sick at heart and shivering, for all that her wasted body was

swathed in a long cloak of deepest purple reversed with ermine. Her

face was thin and of a transparent pallor, her eyes great pools of

wistfulness amid the shadows which her illness had set about them.

 

“I do wish I could be dead!” she sighed.

 

Bothwell’s eyes narrowed. He was leaning on the back of her tall

chair, a long, virile figure with a hawk-nosed, bearded face that

was sternly handsome. He thrust back the crisp dark hair that

clustered about his brow, and fetched a sigh.

 

“It was never my own death I wished when a man stood in my road to

aught I craved,” he said, lowering his voice, for Maitland of

Lethington - now restored to his secretaryship - was writing at a

table across the room, and my Lord of Argyll was leaning over him.

 

She looked up at him suddenly, her eyes startled.

 

“What devil’s counsel do you whisper?” she asked him. And when he

would have answered, she raised a hand. “No,” she said. “Not that

way.”

 

“There is another,” said Bothwell coolly. He moved, came round,

and stood squarely upon the hearth, his back to the fire,

confronting her, nor did he further trouble to lower his voice.

“We have considered it already.”

 

“What have you considered?”

 

Her voice was strained; fear and excitement blended in her face.

 

“How the shackles that fetter you might be broken. Be not alarmed.

It was the virtuous Murray himself propounded it to Argyll and

Lethington - for the good of Scotland and yourself.” A sneer

flitted across his tanned face. “Let them speak for themselves.”

He raised his voice and called to them across the room.

 

They came at once, and the four made an odd group as they stood

there in the firelit gloom of that November day - the lovely young

Queen, so frail and wistful in her high-backed chair; the stalwart,

arrogant Bothwell, magnificent in a doublet of peach-coloured velvet

that tapered to a golden girdle; Argyll, portly and sober in a rich

suit of black; and Maitland of Lethington, lean and crafty of face,

in a long furred gown that flapped about his bony shanks.

 

It was to Lethington that Bothwell addressed himself.

 

“Her Grace is in a mood to hear how the Gordian knot of her marriage

might be unravelled,” said he, grimly ironic.

 

Lethington raised his eyebrows, licked his thin lips, and rubbed his

bony hands one in the other.

 

“Unravelled?” he echoed with wondering stress. “Unravelled? Ha!”

His dark eyes flashed round at them. “Better adopt Alexander’s plan,

and cut it. ‘Twill be more complete, and - and final.”

 

“No, no!” she cried. “I will not have you shed his blood.”

 

“He himself was none so tender where another was concerned,”

Bothwell reminded her - as if the memory of Rizzio were dear to him.

 

“What he may have done does not weigh upon my conscience,” was her

answer.

 

“He might,” put in Argyll, “be convicted of treason for having

consented to Your Grace’s retention in ward at Holyrood after

Rizzio’s murder.”

 

She considered an instant, then shook her head.

 

“It is too late. It should have been done long since. Now men

will say that it is but a pretext to be rid of him.” She looked up

at Bothwell, who remained standing immediately before her, between

her and the fire. “You said that my Lord of Murray had discussed

this matter. Was it in such terms as these?”

 

Bothwell laughed silently at the thought of the sly Murray rendering

himself a party to anything so direct and desperate. It was

Lethington who answered her.

 

“My Lord Murray was for a divorce. That would set Your Grace free,

and it might be obtained, he said, by tearing up the Pope’s bull of

dispensation that permitted the marriage. Yet, madame, although

Lord Murray would himself go no further, I have no cause to doubt

that were other means concerted, he would be content to look through

his fingers.”

 

Her mind, however, did not seem to follow his speech beyond the

matter of the divorce. A faint flush of eagerness stirred in her

pale cheeks.

 

“Ah, yes!” she cried. “I, too, have thought of that - of this

divorce. And God knows I do not want for grounds. And it could be

obtained, you say, by tearing up this papal bull?”

 

“The marriage could be proclaimed void thereafter,” Argyll explained.

 

She looked past Bothwell into the fire, and took her chin in her

hand.

 

“Yes,” she said slowly, musingly, and again, “yes. That were a

way. That is the way.” And then suddenly she looked up, and they

saw doubt and dread in her eyes. “But in that case - what of my

son?”

 

“Aye!” said Lethington grimly. He shrugged his narrow shoulders,

parted his hands, and brought them together again. “That’s the

obstacle, as we perceived. It would imperil his succession.”

 

“It would make a bastard of him, you mean?” she cried, demanding

the full expansion of their thoughts.

 

“Indeed it would do no less,” the secretary assented.

 

“So that,” said Bothwell, softly, “we come back to Alexander’s

method. What the fingers may not unravel, the knife can sever.”

 

She shivered, and drew her furred cloak the more closely about her.

 

Lethington leaned forward. He spoke in kindly, soothing accents.

 

“Let us guide this matter among us, madame,” he murmured, “and we’ll

find means to rid Your Grace of this young fool, without hurt to

your honour or prejudice to your son. And the Earl of Murray will

look the other way, provided you pardon Morton and his friends for

the killing they did in Darnley’s service.”

 

She looked from one to the other of them, scanning each face