Читать книгу The Queen's Quair; or, The Six Years' Tragedy - Maurice Hewlett - Страница 4

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Now, when they had been three days at sea, standing off Flamborough in England, the wind veered to the southeast, and dropped very soon. They had to row the ships for lack of meat for the sails to fill themselves; the face of the world was changed, the sun blotted out. It became chilly, with a thin rain; there drew over the sea a curtain of soft fog which wrapped them up as in a winding-sheet, and seemed to clog the muscles of men’s backs, so that scarcely way could be made. In this white darkness—for such it literally was—the English took the Earl of Eglinton in his ship, silently, without a cry to be heard; but in it also they lost the Queen’s and all the rest of her convoy. Rowing all night and all next day, sounding as they went in a sea like oil, the Scots company drew past St. Abb’s, guessed at Dunbar, found and crept under the ghost of the Bass, came at length with dripping sheets into Leith Road by night, and so stayed to await the morn. They fired guns every hour; nobody slept on board.

That night which they began with music, some dancing and playing forfeits, was one of deathly stillness. The guns made riot by the clock; but the sea-fog drugged all men’s spirits. The Queen was pensive, and broke up the circle early. She went to bed, and lay listening, as she said, to Scotland. As it wore towards dawn she could have heard, if yet wakeful, great horns blown afar off on the shore, answering her guns, the voices of men and women, howling, quarrelling, or making merry after their fashion; steeple bells; sometimes the knocking of oars as unseen boats rowed about her. Once the sentry on the upper deck challenged: ‘Qui va là?’ in a shrill voice. There was smothered laughter, but no other reply. He fired his piece, and there came a great scurry in the water, which woke the Queen with a start.

‘Was that the English guns? Are we engaged?’

‘No, no, madam; you forget. We are in our own land by now, safe between the high hills of Scotland. ’Twas some folly of the guard.’

She was told it had gone six o’clock, and insisted on rising. Father Roche, her confessor, said mass; and after that Mary Seton had a good tale for her private ear. Monsieur de Bourdeilles, it seems, the merry gentleman, had held Monsieur de Châtelard embraced against his will under one blanket all night, to warm himself. This Monsieur de Châtelard, a poet of some hopefulness, owned himself Queen Mary’s lover, and played the part with an ardour and disregard of consequence which are denied to all but his nation. A lover is a lover, whether you admit him or not; his position, though it be self-chosen, is respectable: but no one could refuse the merits of this story. Monsieur de Bourdeilles was sent for—a wise-looking, elderly man.

‘Sieur de Brantôme,’ says the Queen—that was his degree in the world—‘how did you find the warmth of Monsieur de Châtelard?’

‘Upon my faith, madam,’ says he, ‘your Majesty should know better than I did whether he is alight or not.’

‘I think that is true,’ said Queen Mary; ‘but now also you will have learned, as I have, to leave him alone.’

The Grand Prior—a Guise, the Queen’s uncle and a portly man—came in to see his niece. He reported a wan light spread abroad: one might almost suppose the sun to be somewhere. If her Majesty extinguished the candles her Majesty would still be able to see. It was curious. He considered that a landing might be made, for news of the ships was plainly come ashore. Numberless small boats, he said, were all about, full of people spying up at the decks. Curious again: he had been much entertained.

‘You shall show yourself to them, madam, if you will be guided by me,’ says Mary Livingstone. The Grand Prior was not against it.

‘Well,’ says the Queen, ‘let us go, then, to see and be seen.’

One of the maids—Seton, I gather—made an outcry: ‘Oh, ma’am, you will never go to them in your white weed!’

‘How else, child?’

Seton caught at her hand. ‘Like the bonny Queen Mab—like the Fairy Vivien that charmed Tamlane out of his five wits. Thus you should go!’

The Queen turned blushing to the Grand Prior.

‘How shall I show myself, good uncle?’

‘My niece, you are fair enough now.’

‘Is it true?’ she said. ‘Then I will be fairer yet. Get me what you will; make a queen of me. Fleming, you shall choose.’

Mary Fleming, a gentle beauty, considered the case. ‘I shall dress your Majesty in the white and green,’ she declared, and was gone to get it.

So they dressed her in white and green, with a crown of stars for her hair, and covered her in a carnation hood against the cold. Then she was brought out among the four of them to lean on the poop and see the people. A half-circle of stately, cloaked gentlemen—all French, and mainly Guises—stood behind; but Monsieur de Châtelard, shaking like a leaf, sought the prop of a neighbouring shoulder for his arm. It was modestly low, and belonged to Des-Essars, the new page.

‘My gentle youth,’ said the poet, after thanking him for his services, ‘I am sick because I love. Do you see that smothered goddess? Learn then that I adore her, and so was able to do even in the abominable arms of Monsieur de Brantôme.’

‘I also consider her Majesty adorable,’ replied the page with gravity; ‘but I do not care to say so openly.’

‘If your wound be not kept green,’ Monsieur de Châtelard reproved him, ‘if it is covered up, it mortifies, you bleed internally, and you die.’

Des-Essars bowed. ‘Why, yes, sir. There is no difficulty in that.’

‘Far from it, boy—far from it! Exquisite ease, rather.’

‘It is true, sir,’ said Des-Essars. ‘Well! I am ready.’

‘And I, boy, must get ready. Soothsayers have assured me that I shall die in that lady’s service.’

‘I intend to live in it,’ said Des-Essars; ‘for she chose me to it herself.’

Monsieur de Châtelard considered this alternative. ‘Your intention is fine,’ he allowed; ‘but my fate is the more piteous.’

Whether the people knew their Queen or not, they gave little sign of it. They seemed to her a grudging race, unwilling to allow you even recognition. She had been highly pleased at first: watched them curiously, nodded, laughed, kissed her hand to some children—who hid their faces, as if she had put them to shame. Some pointed at her, some shook their heads; none saluted her. Most of them looked at the foreign servants: a great brown Gascon sailor, who leaned half-naked against the gunwale; a black in a yellow turban; a saucy Savoyard girl with a bare bosom; and some, nudging others, said, ‘A priest! a priest!’—and one, a big, wild, red-capped man, stood up in his boat, and pointed, and cried out loud, ‘To hell with the priest!’ The cold curiosity, the uncouth drab of the scene, the raw damp—and then this savage burst—did their work on her. She was sensitive to weather, and quick to read hearts. Being chilled, her own heart grew heavy. ‘I wish to go away. They stare; there is no love here,’ she said, and went down the companion, and sat in her pavilion without speaking. She let Mary Livingstone take her hand. At that hour, I know, her thought was piercingly of France, and the sun, and the peasant girls laughing to each other half across the breezy fields.

Barges came to board the Queen’s galley; strong-faced gentlemen, muffled in cloaks, sat in the stern; all others stood up—even the rowers, who faced forward like Venetians and pushed rather than pulled the slow vessels. Running messengers kept her informed of arrivals: the Provost of Edinburgh was come, the Captain of the Castle, the Lord of Lethington, Maitland by name, secretary to her mother the late Queen; her half-brothers, the Lords James and Robert Stuart, and more—all civil, all with stiff excuses that preparations were so backward. She would see none but her brothers, and, at the Lord James’ desire, Mr. Secretary Maitland of Lethington. Him she discerned to be a taut, nervous, greyish man, with a tired face. She was prepared to like him for her mother’s sake; but he was on his guard, unaccountably, and she too dispirited to pursue. Des-Essars, in his Secret Memoirs, says that he remembers to have noticed, young as he was, how this Lethington’s eyes always sought those of the Lord James before he spoke. ‘Sought,’ he says, ‘but never found them.’ Sharply observed for a boy of fourteen.

Well, here was a dreary beginning, which must nevertheless be pushed to some kind of ending. Before noon she was landed—upon a muddy shore, the sea being at the ebb—without cloth of estate, or tribune, or litter, with a few halberdiers to make a way for her through a great crowd. She looked at the ooze and slimy litter. ‘Are we amphibians in Scotland?’ she asked her cousin D’Elbœuf. His answer was to splash down heroically into the mess and throw his cloak upon it. ‘Gentlemen,’ he cried out in his own tongue, ‘make a Queen’s way!’ He had not long to wait. A tragic cry from Monsieur de Châtelard informed all Leith that he was wading ashore. Fine, but retarding action! His cloak was added late to a long line of them—all French: the Marquis’s, the Grand Prior’s, Monsieur D’Amville’s, Monsieur de Brantôme’s, Monsieur de La Noue’s, many more. There were competitions, encouraging cries, great enthusiasm. The people jostled each other to get a view; the Scots lords looked staidly on, but none offered their cloaks.

Thus it was that she touched Scottish soil, as Mr. Secretary remarked to himself, through a foreign web. A little stone house, indescribably mean and close, was open to her to rest in while the horses were made ready. Thither came certain lords—Earls of Argyll and Atholl, Lords Erskine, Herries, and others—to kiss hands. She allowed it listlessly, not distinguishing friend from unfriend. All faces seemed alike to her: wooden, overbold, weathered faces, clumsy carvings of an earlier day, with watchful, suspicious eyes put in them to make them alive. Her ladies were with her, and her uncles. The little room was filled to overflowing, and in and out of the passage-ways elbowed the French gallants shouting for their grooms. No one was allowed to have any speech with the Queen, who sat absorbed and unobservant in the packed assembly, a French guard all about her, with Mary Livingstone kneeling beside her, whispering French comfort in her ear.

Above the surging and the hum of the shore could be heard the beginnings of clamour. The press at the doors was so great they could scarcely bring up the horses; and when the hackbutters beat them back the people murmured. Monsieur D’Amville’s charger grew restive and backed into the crowd: they howled at him for a Frenchman, and were not appeased to discover by the looks of him that he was proud of the fact. There was much sniffing and spying for priests,—well was it for Father Roche and his mates that, having been warned, they lay still among the ships, intending not to land till dusk. How was her Majesty to be got out? It seemed that she was a prisoner. The Master of the Horse could do nothing for his horses; the Master of the Household was penned in the doorway. If it had not been for the Lord James, Queen Mary must have spent the night on the sea-shore. But the people fell back this way and that when, bareheaded, he came out of the house. ‘Give way there—make a place,’ he said, in a voice hardly above the speaking tone; and way and place were made.

Two or three of the French lords observed him. ‘He has the gestures of a king, look you.’

‘You are right; and, they tell me, a king’s desires. Do you see that he measures them with his eye before he speaks, as if to judge what strength he should use?’

They brought up the horses; the Queen came out. Up a steep, straggling street, finally, they rode in some kind of broken order, in a lane cut, as it were, between dumb walls of men and women. Monsieur de Brantôme remarked to his neighbour that it was for all the world as if travelling mountebanks were come to town. Very few greeted her, none seemed to satisfy any feeling but curiosity. They pointed her out to one another. ‘Yonder she goes. See, yonder, in the braw, cramoisy hood!’ ‘See, man, the bonny long lass!’ ‘I mind,’ said one, ‘to have seen her mother brought in. Just such another one.’ Some cried, ‘See you, how she arches her fine neck.’ Others, ‘She hath the eyes of all her folk.’ ‘A dangerous smiler: a Frenchwoman just.’

She did not hear these things, or did not notice them, being slow to catch at the Scots tongue. But one wife cried shrilly, ‘God bless that sweet face!’ and that she recognised, and laughed her glad thanks to the kindly soul.

Most eyes were drawn to the French princes, and missed her in following them and their servants. The Grand Prior made them wonder: his stateliness excused him the abhorred red cross; but chief of them all seemed Monsieur de Châtelard, very splendid in white satin and high crimson boots, and a tall feather in his cap. Some thought he was the Pope’s son, some the Prince of Spain come to marry the Queen; but, ‘Havers, woman, ’tis just her mammet,’ said one in Mary Beaton’s hearing. The Queen laughed when this was explained to her, and remembered it for Monsieur de Brantôme. But she only laughed those two times between Leith shore and Holyroodhouse.

Her spirits mended after dinner. She held an informal court, and set herself diligently to please and be pleased. She desired the Lord of Lethington, in the absence of a Lord Chamberlain, to make the presentations; he was to stand by her side and answer all questions. He spoke her language with a formal ease which she found agreeable, betrayed a caustic humour now and again, was far more to her taste than at first. She saw the old Duke of Châtelherault and his scared son, my Lord of Arran.

‘Hamiltons, madam,’ said Lethington tersely, and thought he had said all; but she had to be told that they claimed to stand next in blood to herself and the throne of Scotland.

‘The blood has been watered, it seems to me,’ she said. ‘One can see through that old lord.’

‘Madam, that is his greatest grief. He cannot, if he would, conceal his pretensions.’

‘Explain yourself, sir.’

‘Madam, you can see that he is empty. But he pretends to fulness.’

‘And that white son of his, my Lord of Arran? Does he too pretend to be full—in the head, for example?’

She embarrassed Mr. Secretary.

Mary Livingstone, at this point, came to her flushed and urgent: ‘Madam, madam, my good father!’ A jolly gentleman was before her, who, in the effusion of his loyalty, forgot to kneel. ‘Your knees, my lord, your knees!’ his daughter whispered; but the fine man replied, ‘No, no, my bairn. I stand up to fight for the Queen, and she shall e’en see all my gear.’

Queen Mary, not ceremonious by nature, smiled and was gracious: they conversed by these signs of the head and mouth, for he had no French.

To go over names would be tedious, and so might have proved to her Majesty had not Lethington fitted each sharply with a quality. Such a man was of her Majesty’s religion—my Lord Herries, now; such of Mr. Knox’s—see that square-browed, frowning Lord of Lindsay. Mr. Knox had reconciled this honourable man and his wife. It was whispered—this for her Majesty’s ear!—that all was not well between my Lord of Argyll and his lady, her Majesty’s half-sister. Would Mr. Knox intervene? At her Majesty’s desire beyond doubt he would do it. The Duke of Châtelherault held all the west as appanage of the Hamiltons, except a small territory round about Glasgow, to which her Majesty’s kinsman Lennox laid claim. The claim was faint, since the Lennox was in England. It was supposed that fear of the Hamiltons kept him there; but if her Majesty would be pleased she could reconcile the two houses.

The Queen blinked her eyes. ‘Reconciliation seems to be your Mr. Knox’s prerogative. I have not yet learned from you what mine may be.’

‘Yours, madam,’ said Lethington, ‘is the greater, because gentler, hand—to put it no higher than that! Moreover, the Stuarts of Lennox share your Majesty’s faith; and Mr. Knox——’

‘Ah,’ cried the Queen, ‘I conceive your Mr. Knox is Antipope!’