Queen's Own Fool (17 page)

“Why is it that people who have the least to say are those who take the longest to say anything?” I complained in a whisper to Jolly Mary, who had come up behind the queen.

“You must be patient,” she whispered back. “This Maitland is a diplomat and so is prone to flowery speech.”

I made a face. “I think diplomats are like chameleons,” I whispered back. “They change color wherever they stand.”

The gist of Maitland's welcome was that fair winds had brought us from France more swiftly than expected. The royal palace of Holyrood was not yet ready. We were to be fed there at Leith while preparations at the palace were completed.

Not ready for the queen!
In France all royal houses were kept in a constant state of readiness.

Not a good beginning
, I thought.

 

It took until late that afternoon before we proceeded on to Holyrood Palace. The queen seemed to take everything in stride, but I became increasingly angry. As did the chronicler Brantôme.

In rapid French, Brantome cursed the Scots, the cold, the sea fog—which everyone here called a haar—and the Scottish tongue.

“They are brutes,” he said.

“Beasts,” I countered.

“Fleas on beasts,” he said.

“Fleabites!” For a moment I felt as I had with my cousin Pierre, and smiled at Brantôme companionably. But he turned away, still muttering to himself.

The city elders then presented a grey palfrey to the queen. I was appalled all over again. In France she had been used to the finest, swift-running, spirited steeds, with shiny coats. This small, bowed horse seemed an insult.

I was not the only one to think so.

“Your Majesty, you cannot possibly accept such a horse,” said Brantôme. “To sit on it would be like placing a lily on a dunghill.”

“Hush,” the queen said. “He is a lovely boy. Aren't you?” She whispered into the horse's ear while feeding it a handful of grain. Then she looked back at Brantôme. “The dunghill encourages much growth, my old friend. Do not despise it.”

I was glad then that I had said nothing. It is awful to be rebuked in public by the queen.

Brantôme continued to grumble as the queen was helped into the saddle, but the palfrey seemed to take on a certain pride with the queen on its back, like that humble donkey carrying Our Lord through the streets of Jerusalem.

And indeed, with the wind teasing out a stray curl from her cowl, the queen was as beautiful as I had ever seen her, set on that humble little horse.

Perhaps
, I thought,
I have been too quick to condemn.
If the queen on her little palfrey could find the good, so could I.

 

With Maitland and Lord James flanking her, the queen set off along the road to Edinburgh. The four Maries and the noblemen rode directly behind on small mountain ponies.

I was near the rear of the procession, perched atop a wagon-load of royal baggage, swaying perilously as we made our way along the muddy, rutted road. From so high up, I could see mobs of people—families with young children, gangs of young men, giggling clusters of girls, settled groups of elderly women and men—all gathered on the road waving at Queen Mary and calling her name.

Though it was August, the onlookers were dressed in heavy, coarse woolens of two and three colors in checkerwork, rough country wear. Many had broad blue caps with sprigs of holly and hawthorn, myrtle or yew. Their long embroidered mantles were pulled tight against the cold. I shivered in my lighter, more fashionable dress and envied them their heavier wear.

The closer we drew to Edinburgh, the denser and more boisterous grew the crowds. I could see them jostling one another to get closer to the queen on her palfrey and I could hear wild applause and enthusiastic cheers as the royal party neared the city gates.

“The queen!” people shouted. “Long live Mary!”

“She be a rare beauty!” called out a redheaded man, and his words were quickly picked up and echoed through the crowd.

The people were still cheering when my wagon reached them, and they cheered me, too. I smiled and waved, calling back to them in my broken Scots. “Happy to be here. It was a lang, lang journey. ”

A ruddy young man thrust a handful of flowers up at me. I took the bedraggled bunch, waving them at the sea of rough but friendly faces. The hoorays in the crowd grew louder. I could only suppose that not knowing who I was, they assumed I was someone of importance because I was riding in the cart.

Either that or fools were held in high esteem in Scotland.

 

We crossed an iron drawbridge to the palace of Holyrood. Its towers and turrets reminded me of a French château, and for a moment homesickness washed over me. Then I scolded myself roundly:
I will not disgrace Her Majesty. I will take this as a good sign, a welcome.

I looked then for things to like. There was a row of thirty-five windows in the castle's long facade. I counted them! And a series of gardens beyond the walls.

But when we came to the stone gate and I looked at the lintel, I began to tremble, for there was a carving of a stag with a cross set between its antlers, the same as at the little church in Amboise.

“That is the holy rood, the cross of Christ,” Lord James explained loudly, pointing to the carving. “King David the First saw such a deer at this very spot and so had the palace built here.”

“Is that true, Jamie?” the queen asked.

“Every word, Majesty,” said Lord James, bringing his fist in a salute over his heart, but he smiled as if to put a lie to it.

I wondered then if the Scots lords all lied with smiling faces. Even if no one else was on the lookout for them, I would make it my duty to find them out and protect my queen.

 

Holyrood Palace lay a good way outside the city walls, under the protection of a long, looming, rocky hill. Every window in the palace seemed guarded by iron gratings.

“And what are these for,” I asked in French when I caught up with the Maries. “Proof against thieves and brigands?”

“Perhaps against wolves and bears,” Pretty Mary replied in Scottish, gesturing up at the great rocky expanse behind Holyrood. “It is said such beasts live up there on Arthur's Seat.”

I gasped and she laughed at my frightened face.

“La, Nicola, be happy for the protection of the iron bars. Do not borrow dangers once danger is past. Did you see how the Scots all love the queen?”

I remembered Lord James and his hooded eyes. And the small ponies. And the palace not ready in time. I thought again about the iron bars. “They did
seem
to.”

“They are friendly enough today,” Pious Mary warned, whispering in French, “for now they have an excuse for celebration. But when the light fades, the queen's enemies will sneak out under cover of darkness, mark my words.”

 

Once inside the palace, I was escorted by an unsmiling maid to my little room. How would I ever make it feel like a home? The hangings on my bed here were simple woolen plaid, not the embroidered damask of France. There was no private water closet, only a closestool hung with coarse sacking in the common room I shared with Eloise and the other ladies' maids.

Shivering and exhausted, I climbed into bed, a hot water bottle at my feet, and tried to sleep.

I awoke in the middle of the night with a fearful start, thinking that Pious Mary's prophecy had come true all too soon. Outside the palace walls came a bloodcurdling wail and an awful chant of dissonant voices as if the spirits of the dead had risen from their graves to drive us back to France.

“Mother of God,” I whispered, flinging aside the covers. I jumped up, took the crucifix from over my bed, and, holding it before me, threw open the window.

What a sight greeted me!

Below, hundreds of Scots-men and women alike—capered and sang and played loudly upon their ill-tuned instruments. Some sawed away vigorously at fiddles and rebecs. Others bore strange pipes such as I had never seen before, that had not one but four tubes for fingering and blowing sticking out from a kind of bladder.

The resulting noise was an earsplitting wail more suited to the battlefield than a serenade.

Not ghosts, then, but a happy crowd, made happier—I am certain—by much drink. The songs drifted from reverent psalms to bawdy ballads and back again. In between were cheers—for the queen, for Lord James, for the four Maries, and even, when someone spotted me at the window, for me!

Three rooms from where I watched, the queen stood on a balcony, wrapped in a violet robe, gazing down at the revelers with a smile, like a mother looking proudly upon her boisterous children.

One huge woman raised a tankard and shouted, “Mary, lass—I drink yer health. Yer father was a generous man.”

In France such familiarity might have cost the woman her head.

The queen clapped her hands and called out in perfect Scots, “Haste ye back, my people. Come again tomorrow.”

My one thought was:
What an invitation! What if they take her up on it?

But luckily they soon left for their own beds.

I crawled into my uncomfortable cot, and fell gratefully into a dream.

 

But the next night and three nights after as well, the people of Edinburgh took the queen at her word, robbing us all of our much needed rest, until even they finally had had enough.

Surely,
I thought each night as I tried to sleep with my head under the covers,
surely no queen was ever so beloved by her people.

19

MASS AND MOB

B
ut, as I soon found out, not everyone so loved the queen.

That very first Sunday in Holyrood, as we went to mass, this was revealed to all of us.

The queen walked slowly at the head of our small congregation towards the chapel royal, stepping daintily through the mud. She did not speak but read her breviary as she went.

The four Maries came dutifully behind her, Regal Mary with her skirts hiked well above her ankles so as not to drag her hem through the mire.

I strode along next to the black-robed acolyte, Michel, who clutched the fat white altar candles to his chest. He had a shaven head, protruding front teeth, and the look of a frightened rabbit.

Directly in back of us came several of the queen's French servants, who had been given permission to attend Catholic worship with us. They were carrying a gold altar cloth.

Suddenly the queen stopped and Regal Mary, eyes on her own hem and the mud, almost crashed into her back.

I was too far back to know at first what was happening, though I heard angry muttering, so I slipped from my usual place and ran towards the front.

It was then that I saw our way was blocked by a knot of men.

“Blasphemer!” cried one, his face red with anger, or drink. He raised his fist and waved it in the air like a weapon.

“No more idolaters!” cried another, who actually spat at us. Though, as he was too far away for any precision, the spit fell on his own boots.

“Hang the priest!” shouted a third, a thin-lipped man with narrowed eyes. Leaving the safety of his fellows, he dashed forward and tried to seize the candles from Michel's hands.

“I am ... I am no priest!” cried Michel. For a moment, he held on to the candles before dropping them in terror.

At that, half a dozen of the men ran at us, grabbing the cloth and ornaments from the serving girls, who screamed and let go without a struggle.

“Stop!” I cried out in French. “Stop it, you monsters!”

But laughing at me, and mangling my French back at me, the men trod the cloth into the mud until it was brown and ruined.

“Run!” Michel cried in a high rabbity voice. “There is sanctuary in the church. Run! Run!”

And suddenly we were all running headlong towards the chapel, which meant running through the mob. So intent were the men on their little acts of destruction, they let us go, though the spitter caught up a serving girl and kissed her, despite her screams.

All of us ran. Me, too. And when I turned to find the queen, I saw that she had maintained the same stately pace she had had before, head held high, breviary now closed and clutched to her breast. She walked right past the laughing men. None of them dared lay a hand on her.

When she reached the church door, she turned to face them. There were two bright spots of color on her cheeks. I knew that look.

The queen was not afraid. She was furious.

Suddenly Lord James, who had been waiting inside the church, came out and stood by the queen's side. He puffed out his broad chest like a frog on a lily pad, and looked both comical and fierce. With him were two soldiers, like angels of the Lord, swords drawn.

Lord James glared at the mob with those great hooded eyes. “What loathsome wolves have we Scots become?” he thundered. “Chasing down women and boys as if they were rabbits on the hill.”

At his words, a number of the men glanced away, or down at their feet. No one answered his challenge.

“I have given my word,” said Lord James, “and with it the word of Scotland, that the queen may worship as she will in the safety of her own house. And no men as small as ye—shall make a liar of me.”

The men stood silent but restless before him.

Then Lord James put his head to one side. “I know ye, Patrick Lindsay. And ye. And ye.” He pointed to one after another, naming them all. “Go home, lads, and sober up. Or go to the kirk and ask the Lord and his preacher John Knox to forgive ye, for I canna.”

One by one, the members of the little mob sneaked away, looking thoroughly chastened, though Patrick Lindsay threw down the fattest of the altar candles like a gauntlet at Lord James's feet.