Elizabeth (23 page)

“Hold your tongue or I'll blow you and your brat to hell …”

There was a convulsive tug at her dress and then she closed her eyes, her senses failing at the sight of Rizzio being dragged by his arms and his jacket, still howling like a wounded jackal, his blood making pools on the floor.

When she opened her eyes, there was only Darnley and the Earl of Lindsay in the room. She had a wild impulse to spit straight into her husband's face; she stopped because she remembered the child and knew that if she did it he would knock her down.

“He's dead.… He's dead at the bottom of the stairs and bleeding like the pig he was!” She saw Ruthven's face, shining with sweat, the eyes glazed as if he were drunk or sodden with lust, and he was staring at her, wiping his dagger on his sleeve.

“One word from you, and you'll join your dirty little lover.… Cry out,” he hissed, his breath on her face until she shrank even though it was against Dudley.… “Make a to-do, my Lady, and I'll cut you into collops.…”

“You killed him,” she said. “You filthy murdering dogs!”

To her humiliation the last words were broken as she began to sob and cry hysterically, shaking so violently that Darnley pushed her towards a chair.

“Control yourself,” he mumbled at her. “The cur is dead, no harm is meant for you. Your rooms are surrounded; what was done was by my order; my good friends here have avenged my honour. If you behave yourself sensibly, Madam, I'll see that nothing happens to you.”

Ruthven was laughing, and taking long drinks out of the jug of Spanish wine. The others were back in the room, dishevelled and muttering and looking at her sideways. At that moment the City tocsin began to ring. The tocsin only sounded in moments of civil crisis. Someone must have heard that she was in danger and gone out to warn the citizens and bring them to her defence. She made a movement towards the window and was flung back into the chair so violently that she cried out.

“Stay where you are!” Morton shouted, and the pistol was rammed into her again until she fought it off with her hands in the effort to protect the child he was trying to injure.

“You!” he turned to Darnley. “Go to the window.” Darnley obeyed him, his movements unsteady.

“They're streaming into the courtyard,” he said and his voice was shaking. “There are hundreds of the people, and they're armed.”

Mary could hear them shouting up, demanding to know that the Queen was safe, demanding to see her. She saw the murder in Morton's face and the hand of Ruthven creeping to his knife, and stiffened in her chair.

Darnley turned round, his face pasty with fright. “Someone gave the alarm,” he stammered. “They want to see the Queen or they'll attack the Palace.”

“Well they won't see her,” the Earl of Lindsay snarled. “Unless they catch her body when we throw it to them over the wall. Tell them to go home, you fool. Go on, damn you, open the window wide and tell them she's safe and they're to go home.”

Mary could hear Darnley shouting above the clamour which rose to the open window; he was telling them the alarm was a mistake and she was well and trying to sleep, giving them his word as her husband that no harm had come to the Queen or the prospective heir, telling them to return to their homes. When she heard the window shut the sounds of the crowd were already diminishing as they turned and began leaving the courtyard. After a few moments there was silence outside; Darnley stood awkwardly in the middle of the room, looking from one to the other of the Lords. He was sober now; and she could tell that he was afraid of more than the mob which had dispersed. He glanced at her and she saw with hysterical horror that there was some kind of appeal in his eyes.

The Countess of Argyll had been released; she knelt by Mary's chair rubbing her hands, repeating over and over again that she must keep calm and remember the danger of miscarriage. It was her insistence that finally moved the Earl of Lindsay to tell her to take the Queen into her bedroom; but it was Morton who refused to let the Countess stay with her. Mary heard the key turn in the outer door. For the next seven hours she was alone, in the room where Rizzio had been stabbed to death.

They expected her to miscarry; during the early hours of Sunday morning she began to scream with such effect that some of the armed men placed on guard all round her apartments were heard muttering and the Earl of Lindsay went in to her and reported that she was holding her side and looked likely to lose the child. As a great concession the old Countess of Huntley was allowed to come and attend her, and the Countess was astonished when the ashen, delirious woman who fell weeping into her arms, suddenly whispered fiercely that she was not as ill as she appeared, and to tell her what had happened outside the Palace. Mary's eyes, reddened with tears and sleeplessness, lit up as if electrified when she heard that both the Earls of Huntley and Bothwell had escaped from Holyrood on the night of the murder and were preparing to rescue her. While the Countess undressed her and persuaded her to go to bed, the two women whispered. Lady Huntley was ordered out again, but she returned to her own house where Bothwell and her son were hiding with the news that the Queen was alive and unharmed, and prepared to take any personal risk or stoop to any measure to revenge herself. The plan she had whispered to Lady Huntley was the seduction of her husband into helping her escape.

“And that, Madam, is the whole sorry story.” Sir Nicholas Throckmorton had given a personal account of the murder of Rizzio and the subsequent events to Elizabeth in her private room at Greenwich. Cecil and Leicester were with her; the two familiars were so utterly unlike and yet it was difficult to imagine the Queen without one or both of them beside her.

“They killed him in her presence,” Elizabeth repeated. “And they used violence against her … and you say Darnley
held
her!”

“He did.” Throckmorton nodded. “They're all trying to deny the details now, saying no one laid hands on the Queen and that Rizzio was pushed into another room and murdered there out of her sight.

“But I have heard from eye witnesses that her clothes were covered in blood and she was shut up for seven hours in the room where the stabbing was done, without even a woman to attend her.”

“And her Lord husband helped them, and held her by force.” Elizabeth swung round to Cecil, her eyes blazing. “By Jesus, I'd have taken the dagger out of his belt and stabbed him to the heart with it!”

“She paid the penalty of her own folly,” Cecil remarked, and to his surprise she rounded on him angrily.

“Oh, for God's sake, hold your tongue for once …
You're
pleased with this business, we all know that.”

“Not really, Madam,” he said quietly. “I have no interests except yours; I have no room for sympathy with the Queen of Scots however pitiful her position. And it is a good deal less pitiful since she's escaped and placed herself under the protection of the Earl of Bothwell.”

“She has the Tudor blood,” Leicester broke in, “and the Tudor wit, too, to persuade that miserable clown Darnley to abandon his friends and help her get away.”

“She must have nearly choked on her own gall to speak to him without spitting in his face,” the Queen said. “I doubt if I could have done it, and God knows I'm mistress enough of myself!”

“She promised him a full reconciliation,” Throckmorton explained. “She must have pointed out to him that he was as much a prisoner of the Lords Morton and the rest as she was, and persuaded him that his only hope of safety lay in escaping with her, before they decided to murder them both. She saw her brother, the Earl of Moray, when he returned to Edinburgh the day after the murder, and she completely deceived him with tears and pleas for his protection.”

“And she has gone to Bothwell,” Elizabeth said. “What kind of man is he?”

“Not much better than those who burst into her room that night. A Border ruffian, with more brain and a better education than most. He's been loyal to her mother and to her for most of his life—he's about thirty-two years old, I suppose. He's a bitter enemy of Lord Moray's and he hates Darnley. The Huntleys are a powerful clan and they are with him; so too is the Earl of Rothes. She sent for him and he has deserted the rebel Lords and gone over to her in exchange for a complete pardon. With these men behind her, she may yet get back her power; more especially since the other Lords who returned with her half-brother are quarrelling among themselves. But she's shown no sign of vindictiveness for the outrage committed against her. It may be that her spirit is broken; but she still carries the next Stuart heir, and that's weighing heavily in her favour.”

“Nine women out of ten would have miscarried on the spot,” Leicester remarked. He glanced across at the impassive Cecil, wondering how much he had known of the plot and its intention before it was carried out. More than he had told the Queen, he thought suddenly. Much more. Cecil never showed his feelings; he had a face like a mask. But it was too expressionless, too guarded. He had thought Mary would be dead, and he was deeply disappointed. And he was disconcerted by the attitude of his mistress towards her mortal enemy.

He was finding her sympathy for Mary difficult to reconcile with all the poisoned shafts of diplomacy that Elizabeth had personally loosed against her; and none more lethal than the bridegroom who had just behaved with such infamy that even Leicester was shocked. He allowed himself a slight smile. For all his genius and his ability with men, Cecil was still very ignorant at times about the functioning of the female mind. It was satisfying to know that all clever men have a blind spot, and Cecil's was an extraordinary inability to see one vital characteristic of the mistress he otherwise understood so well.

Cecil would talk about the disasters which had befallen Mary Stuart since her marriage and in the next breath begin his constant urging of Elizabeth's own marriage. And he would see nothing incongruous in his arguments, or realize that her natural antipathy to male domination was permanently justified by her cousin's example. She would never marry; Leicester knew that and he was content. She indulged in flirtations with Heneage and a new gallant called Christopher Hatton who flattered her and wrote her impassioned love-letters, but Leicester was certain that their relationship with her was as sterile as his own. Passion was dead in Elizabeth if it had ever truly been alive, and looking back upon the stormy, frustrated period of their early lives, Leicester now saw the amatory dabblings at their real value. A relationship based upon the senses was certain to be the most ephemeral any man could enter with her because the head and not the body ruled Elizabeth, and she was normal enough to sicken of preliminaries which she was emotionally incapable of carrying to their right conclusion. She enjoyed flattery, but she was not deceived by it; she enjoyed her unique independence more than anything a man could give her, but she was feminine enough to amuse herself by pleasantly deceiving the deceivers. She knew that he was Lady Essex's lover; she had remarked quite calmly one evening when they were dining together that she understood the appetites of men, but preferred not to have the participants under her nose. And she considered the Countess to be a particularly rank smell which must not come to Court.

That was all; he nodded without saying anything and their conversation continued as before. Lettice was furious, and perhaps a little piqued that the Queen should accept her position as his mistress so lightly, and at the same time refuse her the excitements of attendance at Court. He had offered to end the liaison, but she surprised him by refusing. They met frequently in spite of the ban, and in spite of the objections of Lord Essex, who was conveniently away in Ireland for long periods. And they were happy together. Her sensuality amused Leicester; she reminded him more and more of a soft little cat, with the cat's sheathed claws. She was a witty, amiable companion as well as a lover; he relaxed in her presence like a man sitting peacefully in the sun, after being buffeted by the high winds and sudden squalls of temper, the constant air of tension and stimulation which epitomized his life in the company of Elizabeth. He could not imagine existing without the Queen; he would have been equally miserable without Lettice as an antidote.

On June 19th, 1566, Mary Stuart gave birth to her child at Holyrood Palace. It was a son, and the little Prince entered a world which belied the violence and upheaval which had threatened his birth a few months earlier. The Queen suffered abominably, but her brother Lord James, the loyal Earls of Huntley, Mar and Crawford, and Argyll were staying at the Palace with her, all apparently reconciled. The men who had killed her secretary and threatened her own life were exiles under pain of death, and the chief conspirator, who had betrayed his wife and then his friends, moped in his rooms, forbidden to attend the birth of his child or to torment Mary by intruding upon her. He was lost, and Darnley knew it. She had tricked him with promises, playing upon his cowardice after that dreadful night, until he believed that Morton and Ruthven were about to murder him, and that if he redressed the wrong done to Mary and escaped with her, they should begin their lives again with everything forgiven.

Now he realized that she had lied to save herself and that the hatred of the Scottish Lords of all parties who knew what he had done was only matched by the mortal enmity of Mary. He had no friends, no one whom he could trust or who would trust him, and when he heard that she had borne a son, he broke down and wept with pity for himself.

He had thought that he knew Mary; he knew she was quick tempered and mercurial and inclined to act upon impulses of love or hate, but she had become a stranger, a cold, embittered woman who treated him with withering contempt. She had welcomed her treacherous half-brother, James, back into her favour as if he had done nothing to encompass Rizzio's murder; she had pardoned her enemies right and left with the exception of those who had actually been in her room that night, and the result was his own horrible isolation. When she looked at him out of those narrow changing eyes he knew that he was doomed, as he had doomed the miserable Italian. It increased his agony that he had no idea what form his punishment would take or when it would fall on him. And his teetering brain, unbalanced by drink and debauch and cruel inferiority, added a wild jealousy to his fear, when he saw the look in Mary's face when she spoke to the Earl of Bothwell. Bothwell had taken her on his own horse the night they escaped from Holyrood; Bothwell had been beside her ever since like some menacing bird of prey outlined upon a highland crag. The male dominance, the rough, ruthless personality of the man who had remained loyal to her from the beginning of her reign, seemed to fill the whole Palace, as his men filled the City. All that was left to Darnley was the intuitive sense of self-preservation, and it warned him that Mary was in love with Bothwell, and that Bothwell knew it. Every look and gesture betrayed her infatuation with the man.