The Queen's Caprice Read online

  He laid his shapely hand on Moray’s dark shoulder, and in a tone of comfort he said:

  “Let the wretch be. If he becomes insolent, he’ll not last very long.”

  *

  At Stirling the Queen felt indeed comfortable. She felt soothed and protected by the heavy walls of the huge, remote castle. Here she was free of all the miseries, the agitations of Holyrood and the capital, here there were no spies to peer and glance, no foreign envoys to flatter and fence with, no Thomas Randolph to force on her another Queen’s discarded lover, no Moray to frown, rebuke, and warn. There were no Calvinist Puritans to insult her, naming her Holy Church “harlot” to her face. She was free of the stinking streets, the clanging bells of the desecrated churches, the brawls and quarrels that echoed in her very palace, the lewd crimes and the bloody punishments.

  A faint, almost imperceptible springtide was breaking even on this northern land. In France the first blossoms would be out and she would be sending her maids to gather violets to lay between the folds of her clothes …

  They set up the magnificent bed she took with her from palace to palace. It had been given her by her mother, Mary of Guise, and was of violet-brown satin lined with crimson, heavily garnished with gold and silver. She cherished it, not only because of its superb splendour but because of her mother, whom she had loved most tenderly. Her heart would tighten when she thought of that heroic woman, the one creature who had loyally and devotedly served her interests, protected her rights, to the very end fought and schemed and struggled for her that she might preserve the Crown, which had come to her when her father died of a broken heart soon after her birth.

  “Oh, mother, mother!” said the young Queen, as she sat down on the bedstep and rested her head on the splendid coverlet.

  She remembered her mother’s visit to France, how gay and joyful they had all been, she and her playmates, Claude, Elizabeth, Marguerite, the little boys, Henri and Francois. How light and easy all had seemed then! It was only a few years ago that everything had changed. She remembered the sunny rivers, the bright, open fields, the gay palaces of France, and she felt exiled from her heart’s desire. Yet to live here was to be a queen and that was much. Yes, that was better than a paltry lodging or the chatter of amusing company … She checked her thoughts. She had not come to Stirling to brood, but to be free. She deluded herself with that word, the hallucination of the restless, the ambitious and the proud. Free! She was lonely in a solitude. She was riven by nostalgia, by yearnings, by she knew not what desires.

  “Oh, mother, mother!” She rested her smooth cheeks again on the coverlet. She was tired from the long ride, she wished she had not come. The place was gloomy, hostile, surely.

  She called Mary Seaton who was always near, always anxious to serve and to obey.

  “Undress me, put me to bed!”

  “Madame, it is scarcely dark.”

  “What is expected of me?” asked the Queen wearily. She began to pull off her ruff, to unknot her bodice; her gloves lay already on the floor at her feet.

  “Madame, Lord Darnley wishes to speak with you. He stopped me just now and seemed in a kind of passion, which I think is uncommon in him. He has few words, I know.”

  “Why should he find words to-night?” asked the Queen, without pausing in taking off her heavy riding-habit.

  “I cannot tell. I suppose he thinks he has waited so long — those weeks in Edinburgh. At first you were so kind to him, afterwards, I suppose, he was disappointed. He gave me a letter.”

  “A letter!” The Queen snatched lightly at the folded paper that Mary Seaton held out. “How long since I have had a love-letter, Mary, or one that I have read?”

  The pale girl was silent, shaking her head; she did not seem to like the subject. She turned aside to attend to the fire; though it had been lit some time ago, smoke still lingered in the chamber and the logs did not burn steadily.

  The Queen opened and read the letter with curiosity. It satisfied her very particular tastes; it might have been written by a pupil of Ronsard. It contained those gilded and voluptuous compliments to which she had been used at the Court of France. It was exquisitely written on a piece of rubbed parchment tied with yellow and scarlet silk, it wooed her with delicate, amorous reproaches, it revealed passion and tenderness and loyalty.

  She folded it up thoughtfully. So, the golden youth could write like that. If he knew French, that language so dear to her, why had he not spoken it before and made his wooing quicker?

  Mary Seaton came to her side and stood, frowning anxiously, peering down at the closely written paper.

  “Has he any merits? I thought him much moved.”

  “That might be his pride,” murmured the Queen, folding up the letter. “I have humbled him with this waiting.”

  “I think if you could love him, madame—”

  “Oh, love him!” said the Queen impatiently. “How we twist and turn that word, Mary! I would not dislike him nor neglect him, and yet, should I think of who I am? How much do you think he cares for me, Mary?”

  She unfastened the heavy riding-skirt and let it fall to her feet.

  “You remember the young Italian who used to sing in the chapel, madame?”

  “David Rizzio? Yes. I have seen him often enough lately.”

  “Well, he has spoken to me,” said Mary Seaton earnestly, “and more than once.”

  “Take care of him, Mary, he may be in someone’s pay.”

  “No, I do not think so.”

  “But why,” mused the Queen, “did he leave my service, where he had a chance of promotion, to go into that of Lord Lennox?”

  “I do not know, madame. It is rumoured that he had a reason, but he will not tell it to me. I think he loves Lord Darnley. He serves him very faithfully.”

  “These common people are like hounds,” smiled the Queen, “they’ll lick shoes and take a beating. Well, what of your Rizzio?”

  “He seems to me very humble and courteous, madame, and I take him to be a man of some breeding whom misfortune brought to servitude.”

  “Never mind his breeding,” said the Queen, moving in her petticoat to the glow of the fire, “what did the fellow say, how did he interest you, Mary, what does it mean to me?”

  She sank into the large chair on the hearth and leant forward into the pleasant circle of warmth, hugging her smooth, white arms with her cold finger-tips.

  Mary Seaton related what David Rizzio had told her of his new master. It all went to prove the passion, the infatuation of Lord Darnley for the Queen. Of course, he had not been so stupid and vulgar as to talk openly before the Italian, but by a thousand signs, broken words, glances, sighs, staring at portraits, scribbling of notes, impatient ejaculations and sleepless tossings at night, Rizzio had understood Lord Darnley’s case.

  Darnley, who hitherto had been quite untouched by any feeling for any woman, was snatched up in such a high devotion to the Queen that he dare not breathe a word of it for fear of appearing ambitious, or coarse. It was only, at last, in despair at her long withdrawal from his company and encouraged by the solitude of Stirling, that he had ventured to write the letter.

  The Queen felt a great sense of release and relief. If this was to be the solution after all! If he loved her like that, might he not sweep all her enemies before him and make her his queen, as she had dared to dream when she had first met him? Well, there was now no need for her to hold him at arm’s-length; she might encourage him, she might see what would happen if she allowed him a certain licence. There was no need to be cautious and ashamed with this man as she might have had to be cautious and ashamed with others, afraid of spies, of secrets coming to light, of little whispers and rumours creeping out.

  She rose and shook her head so that the thick chestnut hair, slipped from the pins to her waist.

  “He is a prince,” she reminded herself, although she spoke to Mary Seaton. “He has the right — the right!”

  *

  The Queen dined privately in
Stirling that night. Despite her fatigue she had not gone to bed, after all. She had put aside her mourning, the black, disfiguring clothes in which she had ridden to Stirling, and wore a little dress of green silk, which had been made for her when she was Dauphine of France. It was cut low and square on the bosom and had a high stiffened collar hung with huge pearls shaped like flower-bells that tinkled whenever she moved her head.

  She had asked Lord Darnley to come to this little supper; she was attended only by Mary Seaton and Mary Fleming. It was the first favour she had shown him for a long time, and she looked at him kindly as if there was some secret, subtle understanding between them. She had his letter in her breast, over the blood-red ring she always wore. She touched it with light mockery, wondering if he would understand the gesture.

  He had little to say, but when he looked at her steadily across the table, she felt a thrill of delicious terror, such as she had not known for a long while.

  In his simple clothes, his natural grace was very apparent. He seemed to put aside most of his awkward clumsiness with his court finery.

  As she drank to him out of the gold goblet she always carried with her for her own use, she leant towards him, and the huge pearls tinkled on her stiffened ruff. She gave him, across the candles and the crystal and the silver gilt, an unspoken message.

  When the board was cleared and the cloth was removed, everyone was for music, being too tired for billiards or chess. A tall crystal jug with a silver lip, filled with white wine, remained on the table, and as this was emptied the French servants filled it again. Mary drank slowly, deliberately, willing herself to be bemused, slightly intoxicated, so that all appeared to her radiant and beautiful, so that she could forget Edinburgh and Holyrood and all that was distasteful in the city, and only believe in this elegance that was around her, the two kind, faithful women and the handsome young man who looked at her with his candid eyes inflamed with passion.

  She watched the blue and green jewels, sapphire and emerald, rise and fall on his broad chest. He said in a muffled, husky voice that, after all, he could neither play nor sing, but he begged that David Rizzio might come in to entertain the company.

  The Queen, drinking carefully, nodded. She sat in the window-place, where the closet was so small that the fire had warmed every part of it.

  Rizzio was summoned. He came at once, neither too servile nor too forward. He did not wear, as he had worn a few weeks ago, the Lennox liveries, but a plain, dark habit that did not clash with nor yet shame his master’s magnificence. His smooth dark hair, long and heavy, was curled at the ends on his shoulders. He carried a gleaming lute inlaid with an intricate pattern, presenting himself humbly towards his master, paying him, cunningly, more deference than he showed to the Queen, to whom he bowed, but remotely, as if she was a grandeur beyond his sphere.

  The two young girls sat on the cushions before the fire, and played with the rings on their fingers and the jewels at their neck. Each thought of her own affairs.

  Mary Fleming mused on the widower, Sir William Maitland, she was so soon to marry and of whom she knew so very little. She admired him as a clever, masterful man, subtle and successful, but she wondered what life would be like with one who knew so much, who had been married before, and must find her, whatever pains she might take, foolish and ignorant.

  Mary Seaton thought of her lover in the grave. She had vowed herself to chastity, her intention being to enter a convent, but she had met a man whom she wished to marry and he had gone to Rome to obtain a dispensation from the Pope. On the way back, crossing France, he had caught the plague and died. Mary Seaton was now twice pledged to virginity, once because of the Church, once because of this dead lover. She felt sad but serene, and at peace — the will of God was so manifest.

  When her mistress married, and she hoped that would be soon, she would retire into a convent, away from all the horrid sights and cruelties and rage and lusts of the world which agitated her so much.

  *

  To these four people David Rizzio played and sang, choosing impersonal music and verses in a foreign tongue.

  The Queen sipped her wine, the young man stared from her to the singer tensely, with a questioning look. The Queen did nothing to encourage or repel him. She did not wish to meddle with destiny, she wished to be borne on despite her own volition to some pre-ordained fortune.

  David Rizzio sang and played, serving their moods, bringing them to the point where they wished to be, effacing his own personality, effacing even his own thoughts, lest the sense of them might disturb the harmony. Neutral, therefore, with a blank mind, he played. Once the Queen’s drowsy eyes turned in his direction and she saw in the plain white collar at his throat a little gold pin with a white topaz head, and the slightest smile touched her mouth.

  He had never traded on that little service he had done her when he had captured Florestan, the monkey, in the chapel. She admired him for keeping the pin, instead of ostentatiously bringing himself to her notice by returning it to her.

  She looked at his sensitive profile bent over the gleaming instrument. A servant, basely-born, but there was nothing petty, nor ignoble in his appearance. She remembered lazily what Mary Seaton had said: “Well-bred and fallen in his estate.” What did it matter? She sighed away even a hint of a thought of this; she was glad now that she had left Edinburgh for this retreat. Here she had really escaped much that was so unprofitable and troublesome to her. How had she endured this so long? Only perhaps because Moray, that powerful man, had flattered her by loving her against his wish. Yes, she knew that — the power she had over him and his resentment of it. And Maitland, too, who was going to marry the girl brooding by the fire, he also loved her, the Queen. But to torment these two had been, after all, merely a silly diversion. How could she have endured this so long?

  Well, she was free of it now. In the warm atmosphere, with the music in her ears, the wine on her lips and in her throat, the young man staring at her, worshipping her, she felt lifted immeasurably high above the black, broken, incomprehensible world that she had been called upon to rule.

  *

  David Rizzio, who had appeared to have seen and heard nothing, who had played like an automaton, suppressing his personality, followed his master out of the Queen’s closet. The winds had blown out the lamps in the corridor, there were few servants in the castle, and they stood in semi-darkness with only the light from the moon coming fitfully from a high-set window.

  The young man leaned against the wall and the servant paused behind him, holding the lute.

  “Sir, where do you sleep to-night?” asked the Italian. As his master did not reply, he added in a low, insinuating voice: “She had your letter in her bosom, I saw a corner of it. She meant you to see it. Why do you not take your chance, sir, as every man must, or be left behind?”

  With a contemptuous fury, Lord Darnley told his servant to be silent for “a chattering spy, a wretch of infamous thoughts.”

  The young Italian, not in the least affected by this abuse, spoke again, this time whispering, urgent, advising.

  Darnley, who was slightly drunk, leaned down towards his servant, then, when the Italian came to a pause, his master struck him over the face, carelessly, as if he knocked an importunate dog out of the way. But David Rizzio scarcely winced; he took his master’s arm and guided him along the corridor and up a staircase, down a secret passage, through all the places that he had noted carefully himself on his first arrival at Stirling, guided him exactly where he wished him to go.

  *

  The Queen sat alone in her bedchamber, erect in the great bed that had belonged to Mary of Guise.

  She had sent away Mary Seaton and Mary Fleming and the French girls. Since she had been a widow she had always slept alone. When they had left her she had got out of bed and drawn the heavy curtains away from the window so that she could see the setting moon and the scudding clouds. An elusive, slanting light fell on the figure of the woman sitting up in bed, peaceful and expectant.<
br />
  She was inspired by the wine, the music of David Rizzio, the glances of Henry Darnley, by her own dreams, visions, and desires.

  Why had she not thought of this before — to escape from all of them, get away into a world of her own creating! If they would only leave her alone she had power to make everything beautiful and acceptable. Yes, if they would not interfere with her she could manage everything.

  She felt so free and happy away from the shackles of the court, the glance of Moray’s watchful eyes between the swollen lids, away from Maitland’s fine spying and subtle traps.

  She understood them so well, those two. They wanted her with a concealed passion, a possessive emotion that had neither heat nor light. But she was not for them.

  The heavy door creaked, then opened. She lay still, waiting.

  From out of the shadows the figure of a man moved, slow, hesitant, as if he followed some invisible guide. The door closed behind him and the Queen wondered that there was enough wind to move the heavy wood. The night was very still. The intruder, who seemed so timid and reluctant, as if he had really mistaken his way, was tall and heavy. The Queen knew him at once. He came to the bedstep, raised the curtain and looked at her in the veiled moonlight.

  She wondered what he could see of her; she must be a mere glimmer. He did not speak, but merely stood gazing. She recalled all that he had said in his letter … he was, then, lunatic with love, like a man ought to be.

  She spoke to him in French, a murmured string of endearments. He did not answer. She felt melted by tenderness, by affection, by a feeling that was surely spiritual. She gave a sigh of deep content as she saw the future in a rushing vision, herself wedded to masculine strength and resolution, facing her enemies, driving them here, there, before her just contempt. This prospect of revenge for every past slight and humiliation was sweet to her; it made her feel humble and grateful towards the man who would enable her to indulge her vindictiveness.

  He went on his knees on the bedstep and clutched the thick curtains so that the rings slid on the rods. Over his shoulder she could see the receding gleam of the fire. He began to ask her pardon, speaking English and in the tone of one who had no hope of mercy. It sounded as if he kept back tears.