Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (18 page)

She drifted partly to sleep, the birdsong drowning her senses. She
dreamed, or pictured, a man in the branches outside, crouching there,
balancing on the limb as easily as a monkey. His face was dark or was
it merely begrimed? He smiled, slowly, making an ivory slot in the
shadowy visage. Then he moved, and with such grace and power he seemed
more than a mortal man, or perhaps less perhaps an animal.

He was beckoning her, wordlessly. Or rather, she felt compelled to
rise and follow him, to leave the safety of the stone floor and
protective windows and come out onto the swaying branch with him. She
approached, and felt the chill wind blowing in the open window, and saw
the lightening green haze outside, a haze made of the rising sun
shining through a hundred thousand baby leaves, translucent and tender.
The sun, behind him, made an aureole around his head, and she could not
see to whom she was going.

She blinked awake. The covers had fallen away, and the chill breeze in
her dream was merely the loss of a blanket. The sun was just rising,
but it shone through empty branches. Mary left her bed and looked out
at the black limb directly beneath her window, strong enough to support
a person, but there was no one there.

She was left feeling both uneasy and perplexed. I should go back to
bed, dream again, and then wake up, she thought. But it is late
already. It will not be long until they come in to dress me.

Her bridal gown and mantle were draped over a wooden stand at the far
end of the chamber, where she had slept alone by her own insistence
this night.

Now she made her way to the bridal dress, and stood looking at it as it
fell in liquid folds over the wooden form. It was dazzling white; she
had had her way absolutely. When she had summoned the court tailor,
Balthazzar, and described the dress she wanted, he too had argued. "No,
no, Your Royal Highness, here in France white is the colour of
mourning. It will not do for a wedding gown!" Balthazzar prided
himself on his knowledge of materials, how they draped, and even the
history of each fabric and colour. "May I suggest blue, the blue of
the skies of the Loire in May "

"You may suggest," she had said with a smile, "but I insist on white."
So together they had selected a fine white silk the shade of snowdrops
and lily-of-the-valley, and he had made the bodice to gleam with pearls
like morning dew.

Draped to one side was the mantle and enormously long train, blue-grey
velvet embroidered with white silk and more pearls. It weighed many
pounds, it was so covered with precious stones. It would take two
people to bear it after her.

On a table of inlaid mother-of-pearl lay the crown-royal, made
especially for her of the finest gold and set with emeralds, diamonds,
rubies, and pearls. Next to it, in an ivory box, lay the Great Harry,
her inheritance from her grandmother, Margaret Tudor. She had not been
allowed to possess it until now.

She took it from the box and held it up to the light. The sunlight
penetrated the blood-red mystery of the stone's inner fire and flashed
it on the stone wall of the room. It winked and throbbed in bursts of
colour. Its beauty stunned her.

My grandmother was given this as a wedding gift from her father, she
thought. When she was even a year younger fourteen! than I am now.
And she was going to a husband she had never seen, a man much older
than she. Did the stone protect her in any way at all?

How lucky I am, she thought, that I am not being sent away to some
foreign country to marry a man I've never seen. I can stay in France
and marry my friend.

Marry a friend.

There are those who marry for love, she suddenly thought. My
grandmother, Margaret Tudor, she married once for politics and once for
love. And my great-great-grandfather, Edward IV of England, married a
commoner secretly. She was older than he, and a widow besides. And
then there was my great uncle, Henry VIII, who married for love not
once, but three times! And made a mess, leaving those disinherited
daughters.

She smiled at the thought of the English lover-King. No, her way was
the normal way an arranged, political marriage, as soon as the bride
was old enough. So it had been with Katherine of Aragon, with
Catherine de Me'dicis, with Margaret Tudor, with Margaret Beaufort,
with Madeleine of France, her father's first, frail wife.. ..

Yet all the love matches, scandalous in their time, had been made by
her blood relatives, and she found the idea curious. She could not
imagine it.

The sun was bright and the sky empty of clouds, piercingly blue over
the huge crowds of merchants, shopkeepers, apprentices, and workmen
thronging the Paris streets. The fates had granted Mary Stuart a
perfect, clear wedding day in notoriously fickle April. Much of the
ceremony was to be held outdoors, on a specially constructed pavilion
in front of Notre-Dame, called a del-royal, hung with blue cypress silk
embroidered with gold fleurs de lys and emblazoned with the arms of
Scotland. A velvet carpet repeated the same colours and patterns
beneath their feet. Not for two hundred years had the people of Paris
been able to witness the wedding of a dauphin, and the city was in a
fervour of anticipation of the costumes, the music, the ceremony, and
the traditional largesse to be thrown to the crowds. They were hungry
to be dazzled.

Since dawn, they had been hearing the flourishes of trumpets, fifes,
and drums coming from within the monastic courts of the Archbishop's
palace, whispering like a promise, "Wait ... it is coming." So they
milled, and ate the bread and cheese they had brought, and felt the sun
beginning to chase away the lingering chill that was in the air as it
rose slowly over the city.

At midmorning the procession began: the Swiss guards and band appeared,
escorting the noble guests into Notre Dame. Then followed the Scottish
musicians and minstrels, wearing the red and yellow livery of Scotland,
piping and drumming their native melodies; then a hundred gentlemen of
the King's household, marching solemnly in step; then the princes of
the blood, sumptuously dressed, wearing their family fortunes in jewels
which glittered as they moved in slow, swaying motion.

It took half an hour for all these to pass; next came the princes of
the church, the abbots and bishops, bearing great ceremonial crosses of
precious metal, wearing jewelled mitres and gold-threaded copes, and
the four cardinals of France the brothers Guise, and a Bourbon, and du
Bellay, the papal representative.

Then the Dauphin, flanked by his two younger brothers, eight-year-old
Charles and seven-year-old Henri. Francois moved mechanically, his
eyes set straight ahead, as if something unpleasant awaited him under
that billowing silken canopy a dose of medicine or a lecture.

A pause. The Dauphin and the little princes passed by, the backs of
their velvet mantles puffing out behind them.

Then, a spot of glowing white. The people gasped. Mourning? For a
wedding? The tall, proud figure, draped in a dove-coloured mantle,
with her slender, elegant neck rising out of the collar, walked on in
celestial detachment. A crown rested on her head, and her hair was
flowing long and free, to denote her virginity. Her train stretched on
and on, in a graceful arc almost forty feet long, held up by two
beautiful attendants. Even from a distance the red spot of the famous
Great Harry ruby was visible on her bodice.

The rest of the procession, colourful and opulent as it was, did not
excite. There were only the squat Queen, the little princesses, other
noble ladies and damsels all secondary to the faerie creature who had
already passed by, now taking her place beside her bridegroom,
surrounded by acolytes holding lighted tapers. The people strained
their ears to hear the vows being exchanged on the open-air pavilion,
but the whispers were lost. They glimpsed rings exchanged as the
Cardinal de Bourbon married them. They saw the nine Scots
commissioners, ruddy and stern, step forward to pay homage to Francois
as their new King.

The Duc de Guise smiled as he heard Mary safely married, God be
praised, nothing could now undo it, what God hath joined and so on
salute her husband as Francis of Scotland, which he had just legally
become.

It had been easy to persuade her to sign, before the wedding, the three
secret documents bequeathing Scotland to France, should she die without
a child. Frangois was therefore King of Scotland in fact as well as
title, even if the Scots did not realize it. Ignorance is bliss, he
thought, for those who are not ignorant. She had been so alarmed about
the growing power of the Lords of the Congregation that she believed it
was her duty to ensure that Scotland would become a French protectorate
forever rather than drift into outright heresy. The conversion of her
brother James had shocked her and she had welcomed him but coolly.

The Duc looked at her, standing so strong and young beside him. She
seemed the antithesis of death, glistening with beauty and health
before her marriage altar. The paper and all its provisions had seemed
preposterous, unnecessary, a macabre joke. She had laughed as she
signed them. The Scots, on the contrary, had not laughed as they
ponderously insisted on provisions being made for Mary's widowhood; she
was to draw a pension from the Duchy of Touraine, regardless of whether
she chose to remain in France afterward.

Both sets of guardians were assuming the death of the other one's
child.

And that, thought the Duc, is as good a definition of adult cynicism as
any.

A cheer was sounding; it was time to scatter the first of the largesse.
The Duc snapped to attention, and motioned to his men to begin throwing
the ducats, pistolets, half-crowns, testons and douzains all gold and
silver coins. The crowd roared and scrambled as the shower fell on
them like April rain.

There were two banquets, followed by two balls the first in the
Archbishop's palace, the second in the old Palais de la Cite', with a
procession through the streets of Paris in between. The Dauphin rode
on a charger caparisoned with cloth-of-gold and silver. Mary was in an
open litter, covered with the same material. The crowd pressed in upon
her, shoving to examine her face and gown; she betrayed no emotion
other than sweet curiosity to see her subjects.

After the second banquet, served on the same black marble table upon
which Henry VI of England had had his coronation banquet long ago,
after the dancing, after the masques and pageants with horses of gold
and silver drawing jewelled coaches, and magic boats with billowing
silver sails floating on the ballroom floor the torches finally burned
down, their flames ceasing to reflect in the thousands of jewels
decorating bosoms, ears, necks, and hair. Night had come, and one by
one the guests departed, stealing away in the dark, crossing the bridge
over the lapping Seine. They trailed perfume and laughter and music,
singing as they went. The moon shone on the white flowering branches
of the palace orchard and the little side streets.

Mary and the Dauphin were escorted to the royal bedchamber where they
would spend the night. The bed was high and deep, the pillows made of
new goose down and encased in satin.