The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots (29 page)

We went along the wet street past John Appleyard’s house with its flaring torches, sputtering in the rain, to the small old church of St. Ethelburga’s. On the side away from the house, a narrow set of steps led downward into darkness. It was the entrance to the crypt.

Red Ormiston went first, prepared to have to use force or stealth to move the ancient door. Archibald followed, carrying a torch that provided very little light, its flame burning low. But to our surprise the door yielded to Red’s touch, and we crossed the threshold into a room that smelled of dust and mold and time-ravaged bodies.

Archibald raised his torch and we saw at once that the room was full of stone tombs—and that we were not alone.

I hardly had time to gasp in surprise before I felt my arms pinned behind my back and saw that Red Ormiston, with a deep cry of outrage, was being overpowered by three strong men. Archibald dropped fainting to the floor while Anna, knife raised, held two attackers at bay but was not quick enough to threaten the others that grasped her from behind and soon disarmed her and tied a cloth around her mouth.

I felt and saw all this, yet amid my shock and fear I could not take
my eyes from the thin figure that stood in the center of the room, a wooden casket on the stone floor in front of her. She was taking papers out of the casket one by one and setting them alight from a burning brand she held. So absorbed was she in her task that she seemed to ignore our presence, though Red Ormiston continued to struggle and kick out against his captors and swear strong oaths and Anna too did her best to scream, though the cloth that bound her mouth shut reduced her screams to weak grunts.

It was Elizabeth who was burning the papers, wearing the shining blue satin cloak I had made for her years earlier, its bold design of red and pink roses, yellow and purple tulips glowing vibrant in the torchlight. When she moved I could see the gleam of gold spangles on the underside of the cloak. She, or her tirewomen, had gone to much trouble to preserve that carefully made garment, I thought, even as my heart was pounding and I was also thinking, she’s going to kill me now for certain.

As if to confirm my dark imagining I saw Baron Burghley standing in a corner of the room, and beside him, sitting heavily on a bench, her arms and legs bound, her posture forlorn, was another familiar figure: Bess Shrewsbury!

Elizabeth paused in her work of destruction and said in the low, commanding tones I remembered hearing at Buxton spa, “So my friend Rose Pinto has brought you to us, as I trusted she would.”

She regarded me coolly from across the room, and I did my best to gaze steadily back at her, taking in the gray hair streaked with white, the masklike face drained of color, the sharp bones that stood out from the deep wrinkly mesh of her neck. How she had aged! And not only aged, but withered; there was so much less of her than on the last occasion when we met.

“I congratulate Mistress Pinto,” I managed to respond, all too aware that my voice shook a little. “She is a fine actress, even if she does betray the memory of her mistress Amy Dudley.”

“She is loyal to her sovereign.”

“Her present sovereign, not her true sovereign.”

At this I saw Baron Burghley take a step toward me, and I flinched.

“He does wish you ill,” Elizabeth said with a wry smile, meanwhile setting fire to each paper in turn, then dropping the burning ash into a wide-mouthed urn. “Had I left your fate to the baron, you would not be here now.”

I heard the sound of crying, and realized that it was coming from Bess.

“Ah, Mistress Shrewsbury, all this talk of death upsets you. Yet you were eager enough to prepare those stag pies you made for our good Amy on the day of her dreadful accident, were you not? The pies with an added ingredient in them—a deadly ingredient—”

Bess shook her head violently, sobbing. “I didn’t know,” she cried. “I didn’t know.”

“Of course you knew! And one day you will pay for all you knew, and for letting my little French cousin slip through your fingers and be taken off to Rome, where she plotted against me, and planned my death, just as Baron Burghley now plans hers.”

I felt faint. Had I not been held firmly by the men on either side of me—men who reeked of beer and sweat—I would have fallen to the floor.

“Oh yes, she has been plotting my death for years,” the queen went on, as if musing to herself, in her menacing low monotone. “My spies have kept me well informed of all she has said and done. Where she has gone, whom she has been with—”

Oh God, I thought. Not Marie-Elizabeth. Not Grandmamma Antoinette. No!

“There is a little farm in France, I am told. A charming place, tucked away where no one would be likely to find it. No one but the baron’s men, who are there even now, waiting for a message from me. I wonder what message I ought to send them?”

It was too much for me. Trembling, I wept—and at the sound of my weeping, Bess joined me.

“Come now, ladies. Where is your courage? If I did not weep when my mother was taken from me, and shown no mercy, and killed by my father—if I did not weep when I was raped by the man I loved and trusted most, the tall, handsome Thomas Seymour—if I did not give in to tears when my bloody sister threw me in the Tower—why then, surely you can show some restraint now.”

Somehow I found my voice.

“Do not make us pay for the wrongs you have suffered.”

“Bravely said. But now, revenons à nos moutons, as the French expression goes. There is, as I was saying, a little farm in France, where a child lives, a child who bears my name along with her mother’s. I was not asked to be the godmother of this child when she was born—indeed I did not know of her existence until quite recently. But now that I do know, I must decide what should be done with her.”

With every word out of the queen’s mouth I felt my dread rise. It was hard for me to breathe. I prayed silently, frantically, desperate for help.

“It would be easy to remove her; no one knows who she is, or where she is. You and your clever grandmother have kept her a great secret. But you ought to know by now, nothing can be kept secret from me, not for long.”

“Except one thing,” I whispered. “The secret of happiness.”

“What was that?” Her voice sharpened.

But I was silent.

“Make her speak!” she cried, and I cringed, waiting for blows to fall.

“No—not yet.” She was clearly agitated. She stopped burning the papers and, with an impatient gesture, kicked shut the lid of the wooden casket.

“You have a choice, cousin,” she resumed after a time. “You can preserve the life of this unknown girl by swearing to give up your treasons, or you can continue to conspire against my throne. If you do that, the girl will die.”

“How do I know that any of what you say is true?”

At a nod from the queen, a large cloth was brought forward into the light. It was the wall hanging Marie-Elizabeth and I had worked on for so many months, the carefully embroidered intertwined story of our lives. The words ONE LIKE THE LIONESS stood out in the dimness.

At the sight of the embroidery something within me gave way, and I felt the heavy weight of despair. There is no hope now, I thought. It is Elizabeth who is one like the lioness now, not my mother, or me, or my lovely daughter. And she has us all at bay.

I was distraught. I hung my head. Lord, into thy hands I place my fate. Save me, O Lord, from the lion’s maw.

“Yes,” I said quietly. “I will agree to what you ask.”

“Louder! Swear before all those here.”

“Yes!” I shouted, my voice shrill, cracking with emotion. “Yes, I vow it! I will not conspire against you!”

My shouting roused Archibald from his faint. He lifted his head, looked around the room, his eyes wild with surprise and fear. “No, Mary, no!”

And then, before my horrified eyes, the guards beat and kicked and pummeled him until his breath was gone and there was no more strength in him.

I went into a darkness on the day the queen recaptured me and threatened me, a darkness from which I did not recover for a very long time.

It was a darkness of the spirit. A sort of little death, as I thought of it later. Something deep inside me, a reservoir of faith and trust, dried up, never to be completely restored. Only those who have suffered such a blow can understand what I mean. If you can understand, I ask you to pity me.

I am told that my hair turned gray quite quickly, and my eyes grew more deep-set and pouched, wary and full of fear and sorrow. I could not see this transformation, I was not allowed any pier glass in the small room where I was kept. My new warder did not approve of vanity. But I am certain that my suffering, my disillusionment, was carved into my face, the pain evident in the tightening of my mouth, the curving of my spine that had once been proudly straight, the hunger—a hunger not only for food, but for hope—evident in my sunken cheeks. My once white skin became sallow and puckered, my teeth fewer and yellowed. The breath that came from my mouth, at one time as sweet as apples and honey (so Jamie told me) became rank, and my words, once honeyed, were often bitter and sharp as knives.

My physical pains increased and multiplied: the stabbing pain in my side, the soreness in all my limbs that worsened when the weather turned foul, my weak, injured knee that buckled under me when I tried to lift anything—all cried out for succor. I needed the larks’-tongue balm that Jamie had provided for George Shrewsbury. I needed ease for my tired flesh and above all, healing for my wounded spirit.

I bit my nails until they bled. I read my Bible. I fastened a heavy gold rosary around my waist and told my beads many times a day, sometimes kneeling (when my knee allowed), sometimes standing at the small barred window which gave me my only view of the outer world, and sometimes, in the worst hours of the cold night, lying in my hard bed, sleepless and beset by dejection, impatient for the dawn that never seemed to come.

It was only when I learned, through the French ambassador in London, that my cousin was thinking of putting me on trial once again that I began to come out of the fog of pain and despair that surrounded me for so long and attempted to grapple with the world again.

My imprisonment was so harsh and so isolating that I had very little news, but I was allowed to communicate with the French ambassador, who was then the Baron de Châteauneuf. He informed me that my cousin Elizabeth was becoming more and more frightened, so frightened that her fainting fits were increasing and she had acute stomach pains. She was convinced that the Catholic powers, especially King Philip of Spain, were filling England with spies. It was only a matter of time before these spies found their way into her own council, and betrayed her. There was no one she could trust, no one except Baron Burghley, who had been telling her for many years that she had to put me to death, because I was her principal rival for power.

If only she would die, I said aloud as I read the ambassador’s
message. If only she would catch the plague, or eat one of Bess Shrewsbury’s special stag pies, or just succumb to the consumption her physicians say will carry her off before long. Once she died, the ambassador assured me, my son James would be king. There was a firm agreement between the royal councils of England and Scotland that the throne would pass to James. Once Elizabeth was in her tomb and James ruled in England, surely he would liberate me from my captivity and let me live out my life in comfort. In my dejected state I no longer aspired to rule myself, it would be enough that my son should govern both realms, and leave me to live out my remaining years in peace.

My aspirations had changed, but so had my cousin’s plans for me. I was to be tried, and judged, and swept away, like the irritating piece of chaff I had become.

One morning I had just completed my toilette, putting on the black gown and white veil that had become my daily apparel, and fastening the gold rosary around my waist, when I was rudely interrupted by my warder and informed that I was to be moved to Fotheringhay castle in Northamptonshire. My servants hastened to pack my few possessions and load them onto a cart. Then, under heavy guard, I was escorted to the castle where I was shut in a small plain room and told that my trial would soon begin.

I never forgot the peril I was in—and the danger in which my growing daughter Marie-Elizabeth stood. I had sworn not to conspire against my cousin the queen, yet I could not control the conspiring of others, and I had been warned that if any plot against the queen’s life came to light, whether or not I knew of it or was involved in it, I would be put to death and my daughter would disappear. I lived each day, indeed each hour, with this dread knowledge in my thoughts and pressing on my heart.

So it was with the greatest anxiety that I learned, just before my departure for Fotheringhay, that several young men had been executed for undertaking to kill the queen, and executed in the most
cruel and brutal way possible, suffering the pain of having their bowels cut out and their privates cut off before being hacked into bits like dying animals at a slaughterhouse.

This gory news struck me like a blow, frightening me so that I had difficulty breathing and had to reach for one of the servants to steady me. I had visions of terrible recriminations to come, of Marie-Elizabeth being stabbed and mutilated and even my dear grandmamma having her aging body violated by cruel men with axes and bludgeons. It had happened before, I knew. I had read in my history books—I spend much time in reading now, to pass the time—about the execution of Henry VIII’s poor elderly relative Margaret Pole, who was nearly seventy years old when she was charged with treason, her head and neck hacked repeatedly by a bungling executioner, her death an excruciatingly painful ordeal.

The recent revelations of conspiracy against the queen my cousin were not the first such plot that I knew of; my Guise relations in France had attempted, in vain, to cause a rising in England and one Francis Throckmorton had been executed for his part in this conspiracy. The Baron de Châteauneuf had implied, in his infrequent messages to me, that other plans and plots were constantly forming and unraveling in the murky world of Catholic intrigue.

Yet the cruel executions and the decision to put me on trial convinced me that with each plot, the threat to my cousin’s throne was being taken more seriously. I wondered whether the revelations about the most recent plot were true. Did the young men who had been put to death really mean to carry out the murder of the queen? Or was it all just a devilish invention of Baron Burghley, eager as always to create a reason to order my death?

Like the queen, I had little trust in anyone, save the Lord who had preserved me and continued to preserve me. I was praying on the afternoon my warder and three of the queen’s privy councilors came to tell me that my trial would soon begin. I was to be judged, they said, by a commission of twenty-four peers of the realm and government
officials and men of law. These men would determine whether there had indeed been a plot to kill the queen, a plot undertaken in my name. If they determined that such a plot did exist—and they assured me they had proof that it did—then I would be put to death. I was not to be permitted any advocate of my own, I was told, nor any witnesses to swear on my behalf.

They did not say “you must prepare to die,” but there was no mistaking what they meant. I was being told that my time had run out. I was to be sacrificed for the sake of the queen’s peace of mind. There would be no leniency for me, as a condemned traitor to the throne.

The men left, and before long my supper was brought to me. I could eat nothing. I sat before the fire in my small cold room, staring into the low flames like one deprived of sight and hearing, speech and thought.

I was to be condemned to die. There was to be no escape. No hope of escape. The baleful destiny long ago predicted for me had come upon me at last.