The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots (14 page)

No one had ever seen such storms. No one had ever heard such wind. The harsh weather that swept down from the north to freeze the crops and blight the harvest in that winter and the early months of the following year was far worse than even the oldest among my subjects could remember. Cold rain beat down ceaselessly and the merciless cutting wind, high and swift and with a fearsome singing, sliced the air like a knife.

My people blamed me for the fierce storms and the ceaseless wind, saying that I was accursed because I did not adopt the reformed faith and because I was a light woman who had married a man of low morals. I was accursed—and therefore my people were suffering. They did not want to suffer any longer. If I were no longer queen, they murmured, then their sufferings would be at an end.

Now I began to worry that the mischief-makers in my household might not be in the pay of my husband. They might be part of a general upwelling of anger and discontent coming from all my subjects, or many of them. I had no way of knowing—unless someone was caught in the act of trying to taint my food or cut my clothes to ribbons (Margaret had found several of my fine gowns lying in their baskets,
destroyed in this way) or substitute wormwood syrup for honey in the big yellow pot that sat on my table.

I knew that I was in danger, but I could not guess from which source the danger might come. And I continued to worry that in becoming thinner and thinner I might be succumbing to the French disease, and that I might die of it.

Thick snow smothered the palace on the January morning my council met to advise me on what action to take to protect myself and my son. Ice covered the windows of my council chamber and I had to have extra logs put on the fire to keep off the chill.

“You will never be safe, Your Highness, until you rid yourself of this man you married.” My brother James, whom I had restored to favor (though he did not have my full trust) as I needed and valued his advice, was holding forth as we warmed ourselves in front of the blazing hearth. “You ought never to have chosen him, but the time for altering that has come and gone. Now you must treat him as you would a venomous spider.”

“Or a snake in the grass,” put in Jamie.

“I have sent two men to Rome to consult with the papal court about a divorce. After all, the pope never granted a dispensation for us to marry.”

“And your husband has never forgiven you for failing to obtain that dispensation,” said George Gordon, who had taken his late father’s place as leader of the Gordon clan. “He accuses you of deceiving him.”

“Never mind what Lord Darnley says, or thinks,” came another voice. “I have just heard that his plan is to kidnap the baby prince James, take him to the Scilly Isles and proclaim him king (with himself as regent, of course), then invade Scotland with a force of English ships and depose you, Your Highness.”

“Can he do that?”

“Not if he should have a terrible accident first,” said Jamie. “There are so many ways a man can die: a fall from a horse, a choking rheum,
a surfeit of lampreys, a misdirected arrow while he is hunting.” He counted these off on his thick fingers as he spoke. “He can tumble off a high cliff. He can run afoul of a gang of thieves. He can drink too much and partake of too much hashish—”

“Hashish? Where would he get hashish?”

“From the sailors. They carry it from port to port, and sell it, and enjoy it themselves.”

“No wonder so many ships go aground,” remarked another of the councilors.

“What I am saying is,” Jamie went on, “Lord Darnley may not be long for this earth.”

“I would not be sorry to see him gone,” I admitted. “But won’t he die soon, if he has the French disease?”

“He could last for years,” said my brother. “He would be mad, of course, but he would not be dead. And madmen have led rebellions before now.”

As the dark subject of my husband’s hoped-for demise was being discussed, snow continued to fall, whirling in columns outside the frost-rimed window, the fallen flakes mounting higher and higher in the courtyard, the snow mounds rising faster than the grooms could shovel them away.

“We will be prisoners here if the snow gets any higher,” I remarked. “Just as I am a prisoner of my marriage.”

“There is always divorce,” came the voice of Lord Argyll, head of the Campbell clan.

“The church prevents it.”

“Exceptions have been made,” Argyll continued. “Your own grandmother Queen Margaret divorced her second husband, the Earl of Angus.”

“Those Tudors trust to divorce overmuch, I fear,” was brother James’s response. “Many people still say that the English Queen Elizabeth is a bastard because her father divorced Queen Catherine in order to marry her mother.”

“All the English are bastards,” was Jamie’s sardonic comment. “Whether their parents are legally married or not.”

“An annulment, then. Surely the best course, short of accident or murder, is to persuade the pope to issue a document saying that the marriage was never valid. Then Lord Darnley cannot claim the throne, either as regent or as your husband.”

“But an annulment would make the little prince a bastard, would it not? No one wants that.”

The discussion and debate went on for an hour or more, the voices rising at times to shouts in order to be heard above the mournful, vaguely menacing singing of the wind. I bit my nails and listened, aware that Jamie was watching me closely and even more aware that it was up to me to decide what course to take against Henry. It was action that was needed, not words.

And so, despite the snow and wind, I made the decision to ride to Glasgow where Henry was. Partly because I took forty guardsmen with me, and partly because he was ill and weak, I persuaded Henry to return with me to the capital. I needed to keep him nearby, so that whatever scheming he might try to do could more easily be detected and thwarted.

I let him choose his own lodging and he chose a comfortable small house with a garden less than a mile from Holyrood, right next to the town wall. It was in a compound known as Kirk o’Field, a small enclave with several other houses and gardens. I furnished the house for him with hangings and tables, linens and kitchenware from the palace storerooms.

Despite the information I had that he had been conspiring and telling lies about me, Henry seemed quite docile in his new lodgings, and made no demands on me other than that I come to see him during what he hoped would be his recuperation from the French disease. Perhaps he knew, perhaps he denied to himself the knowledge that there was no recovery possible. The dreaded scourge brought with it only increasing weakness, pain, and eventually madness, as my
brother James had said. I cringed at the thought of Henry’s suffering to come; despite his treachery, and his attempt on my life, despite all the hatred I had felt toward him, I could not wish him the agony of a lingering death.

I went each day with my escort along the Canongate and down Blackfriars Wynd to the little house at Kirk o’Field, and stayed there for several hours while Henry played his lute, and sometimes gambled, and met with Dr. Bourgoing who did what he could to soothe the skin eruptions and ugly rash on the soles of Henry’s feet and the palms of his hands. He was growing bald, his once luxuriant blond hair falling out in patches. I brought him knitted caps to wear and mittens for his rough red hands, and concoctions from my apothecary for the headaches that plagued him.

Then came very good news: Dr. Bourgoing told me, in private of course, that he was certain I did not have the French disease, and that my loss of weight was simply the result of low spirits and a poor appetite. And my tirewoman Margaret Carwood told me that she was soon to marry, and asked me if I would attend the ceremony.

“I will do better than that,” I said. “I will give a ball at the palace. Shrovetide is nearly upon us, and we ought to celebrate. It has been such a long and dreary winter, we deserve to rejoice and amuse ourselves before Lent comes.”

My mood lightened by the day. I ordered my cooks to prepare a lavish banquet for three hundred guests and told my servants to decorate the palace with bright colors and greenery, hundreds of wax tapers and my best gold and silver plate for the banqueting. For the first time since James’s birth I felt a return of my old energy, my old lightness of mood, as I prepared for the merrymaking to come.

But outside the palace windows the terrible storms continued, and with them, the racking wind that set my teeth on edge and turned the entire town into a giant icicle. Even the poorest of my subjects were glad to hear that a celebration at the palace was being planned,
for they knew that would mean scraps of meat and bread for them and extra charitable gifts given out at the palace gates. But still they grumbled about the worsening weather, and blamed me, and were overheard to say that they wished the accursed queen was no longer on her throne.

“Master Fullerton!”

I had just walked into my bedchamber, intent on readying myself for the ball which was to begin in only two hours, when I saw my groom, Adam Fullerton, bending over the hearth and throwing something—something—

I cried out in horror as I saw that he was throwing my favorite portrait of my mother in its elaborate gilded frame, into the fire.

I rushed toward the hearth, heedless of my skirts which threatened to ignite from the sparks that flew upward from the blaze. Snatching the tongs, I managed to pull the portrait out of the flames. It was singed but not ruined. My mother’s young face, the face I loved more than any other, still gazed out at me from the painting.

My groom had taken to his heels but I ran out into the corridor and called for my guards to catch him. It was Jamie who swiftly brought Adam before me, ashen-faced, his hands secured behind his back.

“So this is the mischief-maker who has been terrorizing you,” Jamie said.

“Look! He almost burned my mother’s portrait!” I held out the singed painting for Jamie to see.

“Evil swine! Who paid you to do this?” Jamie tore off his belt and
wrapped it around Adam Fullerton’s throat, tightening it. “Who paid you? Tell me or you’ll never breathe again!”

The groom choked, trying to talk. The belt was loosened slightly.

“Was it the king?” I demanded. “Was it my husband?”

The boy shook his head.

“Who then? Which of my traitor lords?”

He continued to shake his head, until Jamie slapped him.

He coughed, then managed to spit out a few words.

“No, not a lord—a—”

“A what?”

“A reverend.”

“Don’t lie to me, boy,” Jamie said menacingly.

“I swear. It was—Reverend Knox.”

Jamie loosened his belt and the groom fell to the floor, grasping his throat and coughing.

“He says—you need to know—the fear of God.”

“I’ll teach that churl Knox to fear—to fear me!” Jamie swore. “And as for this insolent, thieving knave—” He did not finish his sentence, but his intent was clear.

Staring down at the gasping groom, I did my best to remember when the chain of frightening, unsettling events in my bedchamber began. It was soon after my son’s birth. And Adam Fullerton, along with several others, had been added to my household at about that time.

“I’m nothing. I’m no one,” the boy was saying. “Others are doing much worse things.”

Instantly Jamie had him by the throat again.

“What things? Is it that blasted whoreson Knox again?”

Adam shook his head. “No. It’s the others.”

“What others?”

“I swear I don’t know. They are dressed like laborers. I’ve seen them go into the cellars. I watch them, at night. Nearly every night for the past week they have gone in there—”

“And done what?”

Adam blanched. “Go into the cellars, and you’ll see.”

“Take me there! Show me what you are talking about!”

“No!” Adam pleaded. “No, it’s too dangerous!”

Jamie kicked the groom, knocking the wind from his lungs. I had to look away.

“Show me or you’ll be in real danger,” Jamie was saying. “From this sword.” Swiftly he pulled his sword from its scabbard and held the sharp edge of the blade to Adam’s throat.

Trembling with fear, the boy led us down into the storerooms where I had gone with Jamie on the night David Riccio was killed. Past storeroom after storeroom. Past the dim room where we had discovered my cringing husband.

At last, in a storage room filled with piles of discarded lumber and broken furniture and leather trunks that looked centuries old, the boy showed us a hidden entrance to a narrow tunnel. The wall had been breached, and recently, to judge from the jagged edges of the tunnel mouth and the piles of freshly dug earth beside it.

Jamie lifted a torch from the wall and entered the tunnel, holding the torch in front of him. I followed.

“No!” screamed Adam Fullerton. “No fire!”

Reluctantly, Jamie retraced his steps and put the torch back, then cautiously began walking along the tunnel as before.

“Wait here,” he said to me.

I heard his footsteps, then a long, low whistle, and an exclamation. “Of all the—”

In a moment Jamie came running out. He seized my hand and hurriedly led me back upstairs, tugging Adam along with us. His face was set in a grim rictus.

“What is it? What’s in there? I demand to know.”

He put his finger to his lips. “Not here,” he said. Only when we were safely back in my bedchamber, and the groom had been handed over to the guardsmen to be locked away, did Jamie speak.

“Now, Mary, listen to me carefully. This is very important. I want you to do your best to pretend that nothing happened here tonight. I want you to get ready for your ball now, and not to let on to any of your household that there is anything amiss. Promise me you will stay calm when I tell you what you need to know.”

Wide-eyed, I promised.

He took my hand. “There is enough gunpowder in that basement room to blow Holyrood Palace into the Firth of Forth.”

I gasped. I felt faint.

“And all the means to ignite it. I’m going to go now and gather my men and take them down there and get rid of it. All of it. Every last barrel. But you mustn’t let on that you know about this, or whoever put the powder there will light the fuses, as sure as anything. Now, are you going to be all right until I come back and tell you everything is safe?”

I gulped. My heart was racing. Jamie squeezed my hand reassuringly.

“Oh Jamie, what if they see you? What if they prevent you?”

“Then we’ll die together, Orange Blossom. And we’ll meet in heaven—or some hotter place. Now, let me get on with it.”

How I managed, my hands shaking, my knees knocking, to dress for the ball I cannot remember. I know that I drank cup after cup of willow bark tea in an effort to calm myself, and that Margaret had to rub my stomach to keep me from vomiting, I was so frightened. I did not tell her or anyone else the awful secret I knew, but she sensed that something was terribly wrong. When she began to question me I cut her off roughly.

“Hold your peace, Margaret, and say your prayers,” I said sharply. She did as I asked. I could see her lips moving silently as she helped me dress and arranged my hair and headdress.

“Where is your husband?” I asked when I was fully gowned, my hair faultlessly gathered under my headdress, my pale cheeks faintly rouged with vermilion. (I never rouged my lips or cheeks, but on this night, to hide my fear, I made an exception.) It had only been two
days since Margaret’s wedding. Her new husband was a member of the night watch, the constables who patrolled the Edinburgh streets after dark.

“Sleeping, Your Highness. He sleeps in the afternoons, so that he can keep the watch all night.”

“Go and wake him up. I want you to go with him tonight, on his rounds.”

“But Your Highness, the ball—”

“Do as I say, Margaret.”

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“And stay warm. It is a cold night.”

For the past two hours, ever since Jamie left me, I had been in a state of dread. With every passing second I feared that there would come an explosion, a sound like the cannonfire I had heard on the battlefield when we fought the Gordons and my brother James’s men. Every minute that passed and brought no explosion was a relief—yet I thought, as the seconds ticked away, perhaps the gunpowder will go off now, or perhaps in another minute, or in five minutes more. I felt my muscles clench as if to ward off a blow that might come at any time. Without being aware of it I found myself frowning, and lowering my head and shutting my eyes tight, gritting my teeth, as if to armor myself against disaster.

It was midwinter, and darkness came early. My guests arrived, the musicians began to play. Where was Jamie? Why hadn’t he come to tell me all was well? Had he been captured or killed by my hidden enemies?

An hour passed, and then another. Nothing happened. We danced. We dined. We celebrated the Shrovetide. I began to believe that everything would be all right.

After nearly four hours Jamie appeared among my guests, resplendent in a black velvet doublet trimmed in silver, a glittering diamond in his ear, his jeweled codpiece winking in the candlelight. Only the grime on his hands betrayed (to me alone) what he had
been doing. He had been saving my life, and the lives of everyone in the room.

He came up to me and whispered in my ear, “The danger is past. There is no longer anything to fear.”

Until then I had managed to control myself. But when I heard that there was no more danger my knees gave way under me and I sank to the floor, and might have hurt myself had Jamie not caught me in his strong arms and carried me, fainting, to the nearest couch.