Mary Queen of Scotland & the Isles (92 page)

"The Queen!" said Jock. "What does she know?"

"She knows of mercy. Too much for her own good, the good of the realm,
and her own safety, perhaps. But in her mercy lies your safety."

"I accept it, then."

"Very well." Bothwell slowly took away his sword and released Jock
from the hard grip in which he had held him.

The outlaw stood up as if his dignity had been trampled, and brushed
himself off.

"You must return with me," said Bothwell. "I shall not do you the
dishonour of binding you, for your word must suffice."

He sheathed his sword and walked back to his well-trained horse, who
had been patiently waiting through all the scuffle. When he swung up
into the saddle, he turned and saw that Jock had mounted and was
galloping away, fleeing.

A liar. A man who betrayed his own word.

Calmly Bothwell took out his pistol and shot Jock, knocking him out of
the saddle. The outlaw was lifted up with the impact of the blast and
then, clutching wildly at his horse's mane, tumbled down beneath his
hooves. The horse kept running, but Jock lay in a hollow, his legs
sticking out of the heather and bracken. One foot was twitching and
jerking.

"A man who breaks his word is lower than an animal," said Bothwell,
riding over to the pl aided huddle.

There was no sound, and the movement had ceased. He must be dead, or
dying.

Cautiously Bothwell dismounted and made his way over to the heap, alert
for any movement. But there was nothing but the abnormal quiet of
eternal stillness.

Closer now, he could see blood staining the green and red plaid; it was
hard to distinguish the new red from the red in the pattern.

The fool. Why did he not return with me? The Queen would have
pardoned him, most like. She's yet to order an execu

With a shrieking yell, Jock rose up swinging his sword and hit Bothwell
in the arm, knocking him over a mossy, slippery stump, exposing him
belly-up like a beast to be slaughtered. A further slash to the
underside, tearing through the padded leather and ripping into his
entrails .. .

A red tide of anger and shock and revenge took possession of Bothwell,
running just before the pain, and he grabbed his own short, sharp
dagger in his right hand, wrenching it out of its belt.

The face of Jock was right up in his own, grinning its death's-head
grin, breathing its foul breath directly in his nostrils. Then with
all his strength, a tiny second ahead of his own incapacitation,
Bothwell plunged his dagger into Jock's chest, piercing through the
cloth and deep inside, then pulled it out and managed to thrust it into
a second spot. The grin faded from Jock's face, drained away like a
water-bag emptying, and blood gushed from his mouth and spilled into
Bothwell's face, blinding him. He felt Jock rolling off him, tried to
stab him again and found only air, then suddenly a blinding,

slicing force crashed across his head. Lights exploded inside his eye
sockets, sending showers of sparks, different coloured and shaped ones,
cascading like the fall of sparks from a blacksmith's hammer forging
metal.

All sound dimmed, feeling receded, and only taste remained: the rusty,
hot taste of blood pouring down his throat, drowning him, choking him,
rising in a tide to carry him away, down a black, swirling chute.

There was no air. Bothwell's lungs were filling with blood, and he had
no strength even to turn over to drain them. Blood gurgled and
overflowed out of his mouth, like one of the thousand trickling burns,
making its own well of crimson liquid, submerging his face.

THIRTY-SIX

Lord Lieutenant Bothwell is dead," said the soldier, standing before
Mary. He was tired and dirty from the twenty-five-mile ride from the
Hermitage, so near the English border, to Melrose, where Mary was on
the first stage of her journey to Jedburgh.

When the Queen did not speak, the man went on, "He was killed by Jock
o' the Park, an Elliot. He rode on ahead of us, giving chase to Jock,
and caught up with him out of our sight. By the time we got there, he
was lying in his own blood, dead."

Dead? Bothwell, dead? No, it was impossible, unthinkable. He could
not die. She heard herself saying to the man, "You must be weary. Pray
refresh yourself," and nodded to the only servant in the room.

I should summon Lord James and Maitland, she thought. No, not yet. Not
yet.

She seated herself gracefully and waited, hands folded, while the
messenger one of Bothwell's men, perhaps one he had spoken of earlier
drank two goblets of fresh-pressed cider.

I will see thee in Jedburgh.

Now, never.

"They took his body back to the Hermitage. I came directly here," said
the man.

Body.

"Is he ... has he been buried yet?"

Had they just given him a soldier's burial, shovelled him in? Or was
there to be formal interment in a family vault somewhere? Bothwell
would have preferred the former, she somehow knew.

"I did not go with them back to the Hermitage. I do not know what they
have done with the corpse. Oh, I beg your pardon, I did not mean to
offend you. If you have instructions "

Corpse.

"I assume .. . Lady Bothwell's wishes should be followed." She had
almost forgotten about Lady Bothwell. "Yes, you should go directly to
his ... widow, and inform her straightway. She must not hear it from
others."

Dead. Quite, quite dead?

"How did he ... in what manner was he mortally injured?"

"He was badly cut in the face and belly, and his left arm was both
slashed open and broken, evidently from the force of the attack with a
two-handed sword. But we'll never know from Jock. We found him dead a
half-mile away, shot in the thigh and stabbed twice in the chest.
Bothwell got him," he said proudly. "He just crawled away to die. He
was slumped over a mossy stump, his blood still warm. Of course, so
was Bothwell's," he added.

These details suddenly made it true. The broken arm, the warm blood

"O God!" She burst into tears, and impulsively embraced the young
soldier. He had seen him, had come directly from his side. There was
blood on his sleeve Bothwell's? She clutched at the spot. It was
black and had a hard sheen to it.

She swallowed hard and pulled herself away. "Pray call my councilmen,"
she said to the attendant.

"What is it, dearest sister?" asked Lord James, as he entered the room
a few moments later. He was all solicitation and hard eyes.

"Yes, what is it?" echoed Maitland, close on his heels.

Bothwell is gone and once again I am in your hands, with nowhere else
to turn, she thought.

Now his loss, simply as a military and political ally, as he had
started out, dropped like a weight into the net of despair where her
love for him as a man already lay dead.

She held her head high and gestured to the messenger. "He will tell
you." She did not trust herself to speak; and besides, she wanted to
hear it again. Oddly enough, she wanted to hear it over and over.

The lad he was little more than that cleared his throat. "Lord
Both-well has been killed in a fray with Jock o' the Park. "Little
Jock," they called him. Because he was so big." He laughed
nervously.

Lord James and Maitland shot looks at each other.

"God grant him rest," said Lord James mechanically.

"What now?" asked the practical Maitland.

"We must proceed to Jedburgh as we had announced," Mary heard her calm
voice saying. "The outlaws and reivers our loyal Lieutenant has
arrested must not go free because of his death. That would be a
mockery to his memory."

"Tomorrow, then, we proceed?"

"Yes."

She turned to the messenger. One was supposed to hate the bringer of
bad news, she thought, but I never want to let him out of my sight. He
is my last link to the living Bothwell. She looked again at his bloody
sleeve. "Pray stay with us until morning."

There was no sleep for her that night. She was afraid she would dream
of him again; nay, she knew it. And the anguish of having him alive in
her dreams would only intensify her despair upon awakening again. It
was better to stay awake, held in the very hand of pain, then to swerve
from it and make it worse.

But lying awake was horrible, too. She felt his presence in the room,
and feared to open her eyes, lest she would behold an apparition, all
bloody and mutilated.

"I fear you, Lord Bothwell," she whispered, "and in doing so I know I
wrong you, for you have never wished me harm. But you are another now,
different .. . forgive me, I fear death and its changes, even to those
I love...."

With the dawn, the presence seemed gradually to fade.

The ride to Jedburgh should have been soothing, for there was beauty in
the yellow October sunlight and in the lingering warm touch of the
parting summer. They rode past the ruined Abbey of Melrose, its
skeletal arches pointing toward the sky like slender ribs.

All dies, and is ruined by violence, Mary thought. The monks came here
when Scotland was still wild and beyond the edge of civilization, and
built their church, stone by laborious stone. But English violence
destroyed it in a day; and if they had left it untouched, Knox's
violence would have done their work for them. Bothwell tried to bring
order to the Borders, but has been killed by an outlaw.

It seemed, on that golden day, that darkness, chaos, and disorder would
always prevail, that sunset would always come early. The pale ribs of
the ruined Abbey testified to that.

They were to lodge in a fortified stone house, a bast el house," in
Jedburgh, rented from the Kerr family. Jedburgh itself was a pleasant
enough town, considering where it lay. It had been attacked numerous
times by the English and had always picked itself up from the dust,
like a village wrestler, set itself in order, and begun again.

There were three large rooms on the first floor of the three-storey
house, with two on the next floor. The opposite-turning spiral
staircase between the floors entertained them, they were so used to the
normal kind. That night, lying in the cold, straight bed, Mary slept,
and dreamed no dreams. There was no longer anything to dream of. She
awoke thankful that the night had been blank, like being put in a
locked black box.

The Court of Justice was to begin on the morrow. One by one the
criminals would be brought forward, bound with rope or chain, before
her for sentencing.

"Hang them," Bothwell had said.

Maitland had cautioned about the shortage of gallows and hangmen and
advised mass drownings as more economical. "They are just as dead with
water as with rope," Maitland had said.

"You are too merciful," Lord James had said, raising one eyebrow. "Just
make sure there are executions."