Читать книгу The Duel of the Queens - Elizabeth Louisa Moresby - Страница 4

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“She is the greatest lady in the world,” said George Buchanan, tutor in Latin to the young queen of Scotland soon to be queen of France.

“She is the loveliest lady in all the world,” responded Ronsard, poet of beautiful women and all lovely things. “I have heard her French Majesty, Queen Catherine, declare: ‘That little Scots whippersnapper of a queen has only to smile to turn the heads of all my good Frenchmen. It is a folly, but so it is!’ ”

“If her Majesty made that remark the whole world may swear it is true. For there is no love lost——”

“S-sh!” said the Bishop of Orkney with a discreet finger on narrow lips. “Her French Majesty has been a loving mother to our little queen ever since her own French mother sent her to France from Scotland, a hunted baby fleeing from the Scots lords in English pay. But, gentlemen, you commend her for beauty and rank. Now, I who am a churchman commend her for wits and learning. She is the most brilliant little lady for her young years in all the world.”

They looked a little doubtful on that, these gentlemen gathered in the embrasure of one of the stately windows of Fontainebleau. All can understand that beauty sways mankind like a moon serene above climbing waves. All, that rank is a sceptre apart from beauty’s, and independent. Both united are omnipotence. Master George Buchanan was extremely susceptible to the latter. Ronsard, the young poet, was the passionate, the fanatic poet of beauty. All day he would sit in the rose-wreathed alleys of the garden to catch a glimpse of the tall young maid walking with her Marys, laughing softly, telling her little secrets softly among them—too young as yet to be conscious of her terrible power; unripe; an apple tree in sweet white blossom under blue skies.

But who could admire learning in a budding beauty? Venus and Minerva have never assorted well and the owl has no affection for the dove.

They stared a little contemptuously at the Scots bishop as he spoke with the gravity of a man of God. He had, however, come as one of the Scots commission to arrange her marriage with the dauphin, the future king of France, and was to be respected.

“Mother of Christ! my lord, what should she do with learning?” said Ronsard. “Set wrinkles between her velvet brows and dull her sweet eyes and put an edge to her exquisite smile? No, by God! Leave learning to ladies who have nothing else to recommend them.”

Another gentleman intervened—a man broad browed, with strange piercing eyes, eagle faced and ironic. He wore a doublet of purple velvet laced with silver, warm against the chilly spring winds. Brantôme, the keen-eyed historian of that gay and wicked court.

“My lord Bishop speaks well. This lady, as I would have you know, gentlemen, is unrivalled in every quality. She is a lordly jewel, cut and polished in every facet. It may be enough for a lesser lady to be a beauty and indeed it is much. I own it. And it is dominance if a lady be queen of France and Scotland like this one. All knees indeed must bow, for she will shape the world to her pleasure. But there is more. Should not such a beauty and such a queen have wisdom for her guide——”

“Not if wisdom blights charm,” put in Ronsard sharply. “It is the law of beauty to be beautiful and that is more than queendoms. We ask no more. Our cup brims. Wisdom is not for this girl. Rather a divine folly——”

“You forget, gentlemen,” said Brantôme gravely, “that she is to be no toy for a husband’s pleasure, but the greatest lady of all. She will crown our dauphin king of Scotland on her marriage day. She is also in her own right queen of Scotland and England, for the old harridan Mary, now on that throne, is not only bastard by her father and Parliament’s will but is incapable of children, and her sister Elizabeth in the same plight both ways. There is no king in the world can match her Majesty, though, marrying our heir, she will be second to him in France. Such a princess must not be ignorant of the world she rules.”

“Rehearse her gifts!” said the bishop, smiling. “We have some reason to be proud of our little Scots queen.”

Brantôme threw himself into an oratorical attitude with the bust of Cicero for a background.

“Since one day I shall pen her glorious history, I speak. When that unequalled princess was fourteen she spoke and understood Latin perfectly. You, gentlemen, were not present, but these ears heard her address the King of France in a Latin speech on the intellect of women and the hills of learning they may climb if they choose to use their pretty feet.”

Ronsard laughed mischievously.

“The little lovely mignonne! She has a rare memory, and it is not for nothing that the learned Master George Buchanan is her tutor!”

“Allow me!” interposed the sour-faced Buchanan. “It is true I corrected a word or so. No more. The girl was a prodigy of wits. A critic might object that it was not Latin of the best period, but she reads Latin like a scholar. But so do the barren Elizabeth of England and her shrivelled sister, Queen Mary. With royal women it is the fashion nowadays to be learned.”

Brantôme turned to his supporter.

“Well, Messire Ronsard, I, like you, took her for a pigeon, disgorging with exquisite grace the stuff which Master Buchanan had crammed down her young throat, and I went apart to Antoine Fochain and said: ‘Sound the pretty one on some learned subject. Speak in Latin! Take her at a disadvantage. It will do her no harm, for if she falters she will win all hearts with her lovely hesitation. This girl is a winner of hearts, do what she will.’ And Antoine, whose learning has blinded him to every beam of beauty, addressed her on—guess!”

“Love,” said Ronsard. “What else? The arrows in her own quiver? The girdle of Venus.”

Brantôme smiled drily.

“By no means. You little know; Antoine is a chip of dry wood. He took her as a young arrogant scholar that must be made to know his place. He said (but in Latin): ‘Most learned young lady, what is your opinion on the science of rhetoric?’ I own the court tittered as far as it dared. Even the King smiled and Madam Diane de Poitiers beside him giggled aloud. That lady would not have been sorry to see the young queen abashed! Gentlemen, she stood forth bright and clear as a dewy rose at dawn and in her voice of crystal replied—in Latin always: ‘Your Majesty, lords and ladies, and learned Master Fochain, bear with me while I say I do not respect the science of rhetoric. It is a woman’s weapon, for it can make the worse appear the better reason by its false ornaments. It is a flatterer, a false guide, misleader of men’s senses that love to be misled. No. Give me plain words eloquent in truth and justice only, and let those who will play with the false Circe while I woo the Goddess of Clear Wisdom and few words!’ Enchanting! In thought the whole court kissed her! Sure none but a French girl could be so ready! Her mother, a French princess, has given her ready wit in spite of a Scots father!”

“Her poetry certainly comes from us. She writes verses honey-sweet,” said Ronsard with dreaming eyes. He would have given much to have heard what Brantôme described. That was the quick flash in her that could never be at a disadvantage, swift as summer lightning in the night, but below that lay what won him more—her passion for lovely words, for the music of them stringing on thought like pearls on gold, for the wistfulness that lay beneath and spoke of the deep waters of the heart, sometimes bitter, sometimes sweet. These quenched in him the deepest thirst with which a poet’s heart can burn, the yearning for perfect sympathy. No one hung on his words like this royal girl; no one dwelt on a phrase nor worshipped the achievement like “la Reinette d’Ecosse.” Small wonder he loved her. Who did not?

There was a slight commotion outside and clear cries of mirth. The four gentlemen crowded into the window each with a mullioned pane to himself.

Below on the green lawn was the girl they had been discussing. She was playing ball with her four Marys, five happy Scots girls, darting, dipping like swallows in flight, stooping like lapwings to catch it as it sped along the grass. Most unlike the stately decorum of the French princesses this one wore her skirts ankle short and ran until her face flushed and dark chestnut locks fell over her eyes, and she tossed them back with her hands and panted through laughter and leaped like a boy at the ball when Mary Seton flung it to Mary Fleming and took her chance with the rest whether she missed or got it, and finally flung herself on the grass sitting and clasping her knees after she had flung a rose instead of the ball in Mary Seton’s laughing face. They sat close about her talking eagerly, heads together, as girls will.

“You beauty! You beauty!” muttered Ronsard, leaning breathless from the window and did not know he had spoken aloud. He loved her as Venus incarnate, not as a woman. Flowers and incense for the altar! Love of men for the burnt offering! That was the way with her now—a maid apart. He knew she was to go to men’s heads like a madness of the gods driving them to crimes and follies unheard of. And this, her power, she was never to understand all her life long because she meant so well and had no thought of triumph. Now, pure maid, she charmed like a bed of lilies hidden in green leaves, exhaling clean loveliness and perfume fresh as dawn—surely a mortal delight that earth can grow such a blossom for God’s pleasure.

She was then fifteen, tall, though she had not reached the stateliness of her height, slender as a willow wand, and the thin silken folds falling about her showed her long limbs like running water. She was bareheaded, for it was a frolic for the Scots young folk to play thus carelessly in the gardens, and therefore the late afternoon sun found her unguarded from his kisses and illustrated her face in gold.

No man living or, what is more to the point, no woman could fault her. She had the sensitively shaped features of the true ruler of hearts. Her face was exquisitely pale and she knew her business too well to use the fards and rouges which clogged the skins of the French court beauties—it was the transparence of blood seen through pearls. Men were to vow later that when she drank red wine it flushed her throat. “A lily among thorns,” said Ronsard. Be that as it might, this pallor set off her singularly long brown eyes darkened with curled lashes and set under lovely brows to match the hair, which was perhaps a chief beauty. For there, gold of her Scots father brushed the black of her French mother and they blended into darkness that gave lights of red amber when sunlight burnished the waves. We come to her mouth, sweet and most sweet, love’s own rose not to be described otherwise for no man who loved it (and they were many) but attempted a description after his own heart, and indeed, as Madam Diane de Poitiers (the King’s madam) observed, it was all things to all men, though in no case after her Goddess-ship’s meaning.

She wore her hair simply parted on the brow and rolled back in two shining waves, making a frame for the pale face where all beauty sat promising that more yet was to come of it. This was truth, for the charm that sways not only men but women grew in her daily giving her the world for her lover and history for her slave. That could not as yet be foreseen in its fulness. But the Scots lass was known already as the most royal maid in all the world by nature as by birth. She would certainly play a great part. No sparkling beauty, but young laughter mixed as yet with a girl’s timidity when taken unawares.

She sat among her Marys: Mary Beton, reserved and stiff with much dignity and much ambition to prop it, a proud brunette in spite of youth. Mary Livingstone, a milky blonde with flaxen Scots locks curled in the mode and eyes blue as forget-me-nots in shadow; Mary Seton, truest of them all, brown haired and hazel eyed with a tender heart shining in those eyes as she looked at her queen. And Mary Fleming, red haired and green eyed, the most spirited of the band and the hardest to keep in charity with all men—a noble spitfire if she let herself go as she did often enough. These girls of high blood made much of the romance of the Queen’s little court and stories of the hearts laid at their young feet, and the great matches preparing for them were current all over France, Scotland, and England—these charming guardians of the beauty of the Mary of Marys, who superseded all need for stiff duennas! She was fated to this. Romance attended her as her slave from the cradle to the grave, and nothing happened to her as it did to others, but always with some shining unexpected drama and fanfare that made men hold their breaths and marvel.

The gentlemen at the window saw the group increase. A party of men came up through the rose alleys and joined the girls, and all rose ceremoniously to their feet, for heading the men was Francis, dauphin of France and future king—a tall pale boy with hollow wistful eyes fixed on his young love so soon to be his wife. He could not take them off her, and that was not singular, for men and women alike watched her, hoping to turn some new page in the book of love in deciphering the secret of effortless charm. She laughed and talked with him, trying to strike sunshine into his wistfulness on such a day of June.

“He should not have her!” said Ronsard between his teeth. “He is unripe. He has no knowledge to taste the flavours of her sweetness. She needs a man and a strong one to rule that wild kingdom of hers and to teach her the innermost meanings of love. She will be a woman before he is a man and then——”

Ronsard was privileged. He might criticize even royalty, but the bishop smiled superior.

“Thrones marry thrones, monsieur, the poet! If our queen does not marry your king it must be some great Englishman who shares her Tudor and Plantagenet blood. Remember she is queen of England now, if right had its own, and all the Catholics own it, and many Englishmen besides.”

“Englishmen—pouf!” said Ronsard with scorn. “They are never lovers. They are pedigrees, policies, treaties. Good fighters for all three, but—lovers—never! Give her a lover or she must find one!”

He turned away and the bishop shrugged his shoulders. He was of opinion that riches and rank should be a sufficient guarantee for any woman’s chastity and the future king of France a good enough match in any case even for the beauty of all time. His only concern was that such terms should be made as would strengthen Scotland and give her the full fruition of the alliance. And indeed the conditions fluttered all the statesmen of Europe.

Reams of parchment rose like walls about the little queen. Should she bear a son he must rule all the realms. If daughters, Scotland claimed the eldest for her queen, and so forth. Men who had not seen her thought of her only as a pledge, a treaty to be turned to account. Men who had—— But that must wait.

Horses were called for, and she ran in with her girls, the pages legging it to keep up with them. She returned in riding dress and plumed hat and mounting her Arab galloped off, leaving a trail of laughter, to the green woods of Fontainebleau with her following of youth and gaiety. The Frenchmen at the window dreamed of inevitable triumph, for she inspired such dreams in all but those whose veins ran ink, who wielded no weapons but pens.

“But truly she makes politics even more dangerous,” said the voice of a man who had come up behind them. “A princess of such royalty should be ugly, dull, stupid, to have her affairs conducted with any sanity. She will drive herself and her ministers mad with her wine of beauty and be a world’s wonder in more ways than one. Remember Helen and Guinevere! How can Venus usefully hold any but a sceptre of flowers? It is the most preposterous situation! She wants her doves and roses, and they give her treaties and protocols. Heaven help us all! She will set Europe aflame.”

He was a young man, handsome as Narcissus. Another poet, Chastelard, of whom more later. He and Ronsard sang her in verse that still lives. But the bishop was extremely angry with both.

“Sir, you will find that the commissioners of the Queen of Scots who have come from Scotland to arrange the terms of her marriage are extremely sane persons and know the value of their sovereign lady, and therefore——”

“No one could know her value unless he loved her for life and death and eternity, my lord Bishop. She is no mere woman. She is beauty, royalty, love. She is all that each means. She is a light that will burn in the world’s eyes and dazzle them while words live and history lasts. She is a world’s bane or blessing. She——”

The bishop looked with smiling pity at the young man’s flushed face and shining eyes.

“She is a very handsome girl,” the bishop said, “and queen of Scotland. And these rhapsodies are very exceedingly out of place. She should be spoken of respectfully and not like a naked goddess!”

That was the trouble. The men who loved her, and they were legion, could never remember that she was queen of Scotland. The fire of her loveliness consumed her royalty. And the men who did not love her thought of her only as queen of Scotland and cared nothing that she had a heart to break and a woman’s life to live. Between them it was likely enough that they would ruin her one way or another.

In the forest of Fontainebleau the pair rode softly together, the others having fallen behind to give them the chance of a word, these lovers on the eve of marriage. He rode so near that his foot brushed her stirrup.

“Marie, ma mie, ma bien aimée, are you glad that it will be so soon?”

“Glad, my heart!” she answered, leaning a little toward him. She had the instinct to lean and conciliate always where she trusted, and also the instinct to trust where she should not. A woman indeed! “I do not like all the pomp and bustle,” he said nervously. “It is enough to break lovers’ hearts who would have their joy to themselves. Love should be secret.”

“But we are great princes!” she said with astonished eyes. “How can it be otherwise? We are a picture for the people—a poem. In us they see all their wants and hopes expressed in beauty. I would not disappoint them for the world—no, not I! I will be beautiful that day if never again.”

“You can never be anything else, but—but look at me! Am I anyone’s want and hope? Lean, long legged as a crane, hollow in the cheek, dull of eye, I shall make a poor show beside the grace of my princess. You should have chosen better, my heart’s love.”

“I have chosen. But we neither of us could choose!” she said. “France and Scotland must wed. If we had hated each other that must have been. It was lucky our hearts went with it. Do not fear, Francis. When the time comes for the great ceremony in Nôtre Dame you will remember nothing but our love and what the people long to see, and you will be France. What could be more wonderful?”

But the boy looked down with tears that she must not see in his eyes. His weak health impeded him at every turn and he saw the cruel keen eyes of his evil mother, Catherine de’ Medici, watching it and greedily calculating her long regency over her second son Charles, a boy of nine who must succeed him if he died and left no son. She had no love for Francis. Such a wife as Mary Stuart would be his queen and ruler as well as queen of France. But if he died—and there was no promise of long life about him—then she herself would reign over the boy Charles and gain her heart’s desire. Her black Italian eyes narrowed and glittered with a cat’s expectation of cream. Two lives only stood between her and her hopes—her husband’s, Henry, King of France, who was besotted on the fair Diane de Poitiers, and this Francis, the dauphin, lover of Mary Stuart. Well—fate had been good to her—the mere daughter of great Italian bankers yet queen of France. It might be better yet. She could be passive awhile.

The two rode a little way in silence—their followers far-off bright spots of colour down the long green glade, and as they passed a bed of pale anemones Mary leaned toward them.

“They remind me of Scotland. They grew in the little island of Inchmahome, where they kept me guarded from the English. In those days I shuddered if the English were named. They began to torment me—so soon. King Henry VIII, my great-uncle, was the ogre of my dreams.”

“Tell me, ma mie!” said Francis, drawing so near that he brushed her saddle. “You talk so little of those days. Had you orders for silence from Madam your mother?”

“Yes, orders, my heart. She does not think it well to disparage the English, whom I must rule one day. But, oh—their cruelties!”

There was a catch in her breath like a sob; he pressed nearer and took her disengaged hand in his. She slipped off her riding-gauntlet and it lay cold and white as a snowflake.

“Tell me!” he pleaded. “They have let me hear so little!”

“No good luck to tell. I killed my father. After the battle of Solway Moss, when the English conquered us, his one hope, his one prayer, was for a son to gather Scotland up again in soldier’s fashion. And when they brought him word that I was born in Linlithgow he cried aloud so that they could hear his heartstrings crack, and he groaned out: ‘It came with a lass and it will go with a lass!’ He meant Scotland, my heart, which a princess you know not brought for her dowry, and he believed it would slip from my hand and so cried: ‘Alas!’ It may. God knows! Two or three days afterward he died. I had killed him.”

She stopped with a fated look later to be stamped upon her descendants. Her eyes explored the green solitudes for peace. She found at all events courage—she never lacked for that—and went on.

“And then my brute of a great-uncle, the Eighth Henry of England, claimed my little body for his puny son, Edward. He thought to get Scotland that way. But the Scots and my mother would not—not they! They sent their ambassador from England and he said: ‘Give us the little queen and we will bring her up royally in England and the realms shall be one.’ But my mother said: ‘Yes, as when the wolf has swallowed the lamb. One indeed! Tell me—if ours were the lad and yours the lass, would you ask it? No. You would not have our lad for king of England, and we refuse yours for king of Scotland. The child is ours and here she stays!’ ”

“I like that well!” said Francis, laughing, as she stopped for breath with sparkling eyes. “How did he take it?”

“He said a cruel thing, my heart. He said: ‘A bairn’s life is a slender thread. They say your lass is a sickly thing not like to live.’ ”

The dauphin frowned.

“The brute! But Englishmen are like that. They should have flogged him from the castle gate.”

She laughed proudly.

“My mother did better. She swept her chair about, and it had hid my cradle and me. And she caught me naked to her lap and held me up mother naked to the Englishman, and she said: ‘My girl will live when your sickly boy rots in Westminster, and she shall be queen of more than Scotland. Go, tell this to your master that would have her to kill as he has slaughtered his wives.’ ”

The pale young dauphin meditated and chilled her; she was too young to make allowance for his ill health that made him slow and dull in kindling. The fire in her own face died, but she went on, pouting a little at his lassitude.

“So then they had to send me to France, for the English would have harried all Scotland to find me, and but for this we had never met, my heart.”

Francis leaned forward and kissed her hand tenderly.

“There, I bless the butchers, ma mie! How beautiful you are when you tell your story! Shall we stop and gather anemones? Let us wait till your girls come.”

Vaguely she guessed that this was a shy boy’s love and no man’s. But she knew no other, being a bud sheathed in cool green from the sun. They waited, and the Marys rode up with their ardent cavaliers, eyes wooing, hot hands seeking; and the silence of the woods rang to their joy, and old unhappy far-off things were forgotten in the coming marriage and its pomps.

What a wedding—what a bride! What a queen for bridal glory! Queens consort must kneel to their husbands for a crown, but this would crown hers. As a baby the crown was held on her head; her hand took the sceptre; the sword of State was girt about her middle like a king’s. Already the English leopards were borne upon her shield—and why not—she whose great-grandfather was the Seventh Henry of England? Who was the bastard Elizabeth, daughter of a mere slut of an Anne Boleyn, to stand in her way? What but triumph could await her when the breath left the harried body of Bloody Mary of England? The English would repudiate the Protestant bastard Elizabeth; and Mary of Scotland and France be called to reign over a united island!

Did she believe it? Did life even then hold out such brilliant promise? Difficult to say. She had a strain of melancholy in her sweetness which fed itself on dreams and previsions of which she did not speak. There had not been much in her childhood to give her faith in joy, and her mother, steadily guarding her throne in Scotland from English intrigues, she had seen but once since she sailed, a child of six, from black Dumbarton, escaping the hawking English ships with difficulty on the way. Would life be always like that? Promise and doubtful fulfilment? No, she could not think it. Queens have queens’ luck. Her great marriage was a shout of triumph in the world’s face—not promise but proudest fulfilment, a defiance to English plotting, a challenge to all human obedience.