The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots (15 page)

A thunderous, ear-splitting boom rent the night, shaking the walls of the palace and setting everyone in it, including me, to screaming.

Were we under attack? Were the walls going to come tumbling down around us? Terrified, I leapt out of bed, struggling to shake off the drowse of sleep. Then I remembered. It had to be the gunpowder. The gunpowder Jamie promised me would not harm us.

Expecting more explosions, I hurriedly put on my furred bedgown and slippers while my guardsmen rushed in to my bedchamber, uncertain where the danger lay but determined to save me from it.

“It’s the Cowgate,” I heard someone shout. “They’ve blown up the Cowgate!” I went to the window and looked out into the night. My subjects were pouring out of their houses and into the streets, in their nightclothes, carrying torches. There was a clamor of voices. Before long I thought I could hear, in the distance, the tramp of boots. I imagined it was the sound of soldiers coming along the Royal Mile from the castle on its height.

Then a messenger came.

“Your Highness,” he said, kneeling, “I have been sent by the constable of the watch to tell you some very bad news.”

“Yes?”

“I am sorry to have to tell you, Your Highness, that the body of the king your husband has been found in the garden of the house where he was staying, the old porter’s lodge in Kirk o’Field.”

It took me a long time to respond.

“He is dead then?” I said at length.

“Yes, Your Highness.”

“And the explosion we heard?”

“The lodge exploded. The constable believes it was a mine.”

Just then Jamie came into the bedchamber, wearing his nightclothes and looking perplexed.

“What is it? What’s happened? Somebody tell me what’s happened!”

Others in my household were rushing in, my equerry Arthur Erskine, some of the tirewomen, sleepy-looking grooms.

“Is a search being made for more mines?” I asked the messenger. “Have the guilty men been caught? And is my husband’s body being treated with the honor his rank deserves?”

“The men of the watch were in charge when I left,” he replied. “I do not know whether they have captured anyone, or what is being done with the king’s body.”

“Take an escort and go back to Kirk o’Field. Tell the constables that the queen sent you with these instructions.” I went to my desk and wrote a few lines, ordering that Henry’s body be brought to Holyrood and laid out in the chapel, and that a coffin be prepared immediately to receive it. I folded the paper and handed it to the messenger, who got up from his knees, bowed and left the room.

“Now then,” I said to the others, “leave me, all of you, except for Lord Bothwell. Guards, stay in the corridor. Arthur, let no one in except my brother James, if he should wish to see me. Kindly tell him the dire news, if he has not already heard it.”

Everyone left my bedchamber, except Jamie, who sat on a bench near the fire, yawning.

I sat also, looking at him but saying nothing. I kept expecting to feel something, anything. But I was numb.

“So he has been dispatched,” I said after a time. “And with the gunpowder you found in the cellar. Am I right?”

Jamie nodded.

“It was a sudden decision. After I left you I rounded up Red Ormiston and his brothers and about thirty of my men from Liddesdale who were in Ainslie’s Tavern, and we managed to get the barrels out of the cellar, every one of us fearing for our lives all the while. If one of us had dislodged a torch, or struck a spark from a bit of metal, or if, Lord forbid, there had been a stray coal from the kitchens or even straw lit in the stables for warmth, and a wisp of it blown out into the courtyard—” He shook his head at the dangerous thought.

“We got it all into carts. All those heavy barrels. But what were we going to do with them? We didn’t dare take them up toward the castle, we would have been seen for sure and challenged. People would have been frightened. Then I thought, if it was Darnley who was plotting to destroy you and your palace, then why not use his own weapon against him? What could be more just?

“So I told my men to get black felts from the storerooms and we covered the carts to look as though we were a funeral procession, and put on our own black cloaks and had Red Ormiston walk in front of us, carts and all, holding up a silver cross we borrowed from your chapel—mea culpa, mea culpa—and in that way we were able to go unhindered down into Blackfriars Wynd and across Cowgate and so to the old porter’s lodge.”

“No one saw you?”

“The watch, naturally. But don’t forget: I am the sheriff of Edinburgh!”

“So you are.”

“When we got to the lodge there were lights on inside but the men waiting there (all murderers, I am certain) must have all had
guilty consciences—or a want of arms, more likely—and so they fled like rats—like rats, I swear!—out into the night as soon as they saw us. We broke in and set our barrels in place and our fuses. Some of the neighbors came up to the edge of the garden but they didn’t dare bother us. Besides, we were swift.

“Darnley must have been hiding somewhere inside. I know he wasn’t in his bed, I looked. We lit the fuses and left. But I wanted to make sure the house went up so I stood and watched from a cow pasture a little ways away. I heard shouts and a challenge, coming from the garden of the lodge. Some of my men were still close by, but so were some Campbells and some Hamiltons, and even a few Douglases.

“Then the house went up and I thought, good, that’s the end of all Darnley’s scheming. He wanted you dead, and now he’s dead instead. Then I hurried back to the palace and put on my nightclothes and pretended I had never been away.”

“Keep pretending,” I said. “What a long day this has been! There is no peace anywhere any more.”

But Jamie was grinning. “There is for Darnley,” he said, with a malicious twinkle in his eye. “The peace of eternal rest.”

The wolves were howling, the wolves were closing in. All Edinburgh, it seemed, was convinced that I had ordered, perhaps even carried out, the murder of my royal husband.

My people, lords and commons alike, Catholic and Protestant alike, were united in condemning me.

The most daring among them accused me of being an adulteress, of plotting with my lover Lord Bothwell (for was he not my chief counsilor, and was I not often in his company?) to carry out my husband’s murder. They asserted it to one another, and the priests and pastors among them shouted it from their pulpits. Artists drew perverse sketches of me consorting with my paramour. My enemies devised a banner showing my late husband’s corpse, and our child, little Jamie, lamenting his dead father, and the word “JUSTICE” in large bold letters. Whenever I left the palace, or looked out of my windows, I saw this banner waving aloft.

And I felt guilty, for in fact I was guilty. To be sure, I had nothing to do with the placing of gunpowder in my palace cellars, which had put me in peril of death. Nor had I given orders that the gunpowder be moved to my husband’s dwelling. Nor had I been the one to strangle him as he fled the house (for he had not in fact died in the
explosion, as it turned out, but had been strangled, by a person or persons unknown, as he tried to get away). But I had compassed my husband’s death, as the legal phrase goes. I had discussed with my advisers how he might be eliminated. I had become one of the wolves, the feral Scottish wolves that turn on each other and rend each other with their sharp teeth. I did not mourn my husband, but neither did I rejoice in his death. Rather I blamed myself, and fell into melancholy.

Jamie was determined to raise my spirits.

“Listen to me, lass, and free your mind of these morbid imaginings!” he said, taking me by the shoulders and all but shaking me like a child. “What happened to Lord Darnley was not your fault—or mine, for that matter. It was entirely his own doing. He had made many enemies. It was only a matter of time before one or another of them killed him. David Riccio’s brothers were plotting to poison him. Nearly all the Scots lords hated him, even though they found him useful at times. And remember, the explosives that led to his death were his, he got them from the English (so I have heard). The crime was his—only at the last moment it was turned against him, by the hand of providence, or justice, or whatever name you choose to give to luck.”

On a sudden impulse I turned to Jamie. “Take me away from here,” I said. “Take me on board the
Black Messenger.
Let’s sail away. Far away. And never come back!”

“That’s my lass! That’s the spirit!” And he laughed his hearty laugh, and swept me up into a dance measure—only there were no musicians to play for us at that moment, more’s the pity, and we had to beat out the measure with our own kicking, flying feet.

The island loomed up before us, green and vast and empty, as we rounded the Ross of Mull and pulled into safe harbor. The
Black Messenger
had brought us safely around the northernmost tip of
Scotland and through the rough waters off the coast of Argyllshire, wetted under squalls of rain and buffeted by shifting, unquiet seas that slapped against the ship’s hull and threatened to overturn her.

“I’ve a friend with a cottage here,” Jamie said as we entered a protected bay and made safe anchorage. “Bit of a pirate, actually. At least he used to be. Oh—and he also used to be a bishop, but don’t mention that. It’s a bitter memory to him.”

“And how do you know this pirate who used to be a bishop?”

“He sort of brought me up. He was my tutor. He taught me my catechism—and other things.”

“Oh.”

The aging, white-haired man who met us as we climbed out of the dinghy was spry despite his years. He walked with a limp yet his voice was strong as he greeted us and the look he gave Jamie held the faintest hint of a leer. The leer of a man of the world, not a bishop.

“This is the lady you wrote me about,” he said, extending his hand to me in friendship. So he does not know who I really am, I thought. Otherwise he would bow and call me “Your Highness.” Or perhaps he does know, but has agreed to pretend ignorance.

“This is my lovely Orange Blossom, yes.”

“So mysterious!” the old man said with a wink.

“And this, my dear, is my godfather Archibald Skerriton, who owns most of the land hereabouts.”

“I thought this was Maclean country,” I remarked, remembering what I had learned of the Highland clans and their territories.

“It is. My mother was a Maclean—and then she married a Skerriton, and I was the sad result.” Jamie and Archibald both laughed loudly at this, and I smiled amiably.

“We have had a rough wet journey, and are in need of food and rest,” Jamie said.

“And your crew?”

“They stay on the ship. They fend for themselves. They are Norwegians.”

“Ah!” Archibald’s single syllable was eloquent. Evidently Norwegians were as respected for their self-sufficiency as they were for their ability to sail.

He led us to a small, isolated whitewashed cottage on a hillside, overlooking the inlet. The sun came out from behind the clouds to sparkle on the turquoise waters of the shallow bay.

“Here we are then, Mary,” Jamie said after Archibald left us and went back down the hill, whistling.

“Here we are then.” We looked into each other’s eyes, as we had so many times before. Only now, in the quiet of the cottage, there was no one to interrupt us, there were no demands to distract us.

I laid my hand on Jamie’s arm. His shirt was rough under my touch. I could feel the warmth of his strong arm beneath it. Slowly I moved my hand up his arm toward his broad shoulder, then on up to his neck. The cords of his muscles stood out prominently. He swallowed, keeping his eyes locked with mine.

As if in a dream I touched his bristled cheek—and then, as naturally as the rain that began to fall on the cottage roof, we came into each other’s arms and our lips met.

We kissed for hours, thirstily, until my lips were red and bruised with so much kissing. So much loving. We lay on the small bed with its sweet-smelling straw mattress, replete with lovemaking, drowsing in each other’s arms, murmuring softly to each other. So this is love, I thought. No wonder the poets make so much of it. But they do not do it justice. And I kissed him again.

We hardly left the little cottage for two days. Food appeared at our door—homemade loaves and fresh milk in a pitcher, oat cakes and salmon and seaweed prepared as I had never before eaten it, cheese and a paste made from pungent scarlet berries and—much to Jamie’s satisfaction—a jug of the potent spirit called, in Gaelic, the water of life.

We ate and drank, made love, slept, then ate and drank again. I lost myself in pleasure, I gave myself up to it body and soul. Jamie
became all to me: the sight of him, the feel of him, the taste and smell of him became my world, and when I slept, I dreamed of him and woke to find him smiling down at me tenderly, eager for our two bodies to become one yet again.

We said little, we who had always had so much to say, and had always said it so plainly. Instead, after the first few days had passed, we walked hand in hand, in silence, along the narrow stony paths that wound along the shore before rising into the mist-shrouded headlands of our island. We crossed the falling burns and skirted the small lochs that lay between green hillocks. Jamie frisked like a young animal, sniffing the air like an eager hound and turning his face to the showers that passed over us, leaving us damp and refreshed. Eagles flew above us, from tree to tree and across the open spaces between them. Their effortless soaring spoke to me in a language more eloquent than mere words: it said, come soar with us on love’s wings, come free yourself from the harsh bonds of earth, from all that entrammels you.

I lost count of the days, of the hours even. There was only the moment, one golden moment giving way slowly, lingeringly, to another. I could not bear the thought that it all might end.

One afternoon as a low mist closed in around the cottage windows and the only sound was the surge and splash of the waves against the jagged rocks on the shore below, we sat by the fireside and talked.

“My love,” I said, taking Jamie’s square, calloused hand with its short stubby fingers and thick palm.

“I know. We must decide what to do now. Now that we know—what we have always known.”

“Oh Jamie, my dearest Jamie, how I wish it had been you I married.”

“I was promised. And you were stubborn.”

I shook my head. “How I regret my foolishness!”

Jamie let go of my hand, got to his feet and stood by the fire, holding out his palms to its warmth.

“I think that we should marry now. You are going to need a protector more than ever.”

“I’m afraid I am going to need a whole army of protectors.”

He knelt down and took me in his arms. “But only one who loves you. Who would give his life for you. Who wants you here, in his arms, forever.”