Chapter IX: The Washing of Hands

To a woman’s affair flocked matron and maid, till the castle seemed a hive of rock-bees. Afar off, it was said, you could hear them humming within; on sudden alarms out they came in a swarm, and ill fared physician or priest, or discreet, wide-eared gentleman sent by his wife to get a piece of news. June was in and well in, skies were clean, the twilight long in coming and loth to go. Queen Mary lay idle by her window, and watched the red roofs turn purple, the hills grow black, the paling of the light from yellow to green, the night’s solemn gathering-in, the star shine clear in a dark-blue bed out there over Arthur’s Seat. Her time was short—but one could scarcely tell. She often felt that she scarcely cared to tell when this crowning hour was to come.

Quick-spirited, sanguine young woman, she bade fair to be weary of matron and maid alike, with their everlasting talk of ‘the promise of Scotland,’ their midwifery stories, their nods and winks, their portentous cares over what she had supposed a pretty ordinary business. It was to be seen that she was fretting, and the truth was that she was in much too good health: bodily ease had never been pleasant to her, and never been safe. Her mind grew arrogant and luxurious at once, felt itself free to range in regions unlawful; and so did range, the lax flesh playing courier. So while the humming and swarming of the household bees went on over and about her listless head, while she snapped twice at the maids for every once the matrons chafed her, in her mind she walked where she fain would have had her body to be: and then, sick of this futility, she grew peevish and wished she had never been born. Upon such a crisis, intending for the best, Mary Beaton superinduced a stout, easily-flushed, gamesome lady, her aunt Lady Forbes of Reres.

Mary Beaton was now the wife of Mr. Ogilvy of Boyne; but this aunt of hers was of the father’s side. A Beaton, she, niece of the great murdered cardinal, sister of the witch-wife of Buccleuch, and in these, no less than in her own respects, a lady to be aware of. She was in her days of silver and russet now, who before may have been of dangerous beauty—of that quickly-ripe, drowsy, blowsy, Venetian sort, disastrous to mankind. Of it, indeed, the clear ravages remained, though cushioned deep in comfortable flesh; traceable there, as in the velvety bosses of a green hill you mark the contours of what was once a citadel of war. Her grey hair she now wore over her ears, to conceal (as the Queen averred) members which were so well stuffed with gallant lore as to be independent for the rest of their lives. She had a pretty mouth—a little overhung—and dimpled chin, light green eyes, fat, pleasurable hands, a merry voice and a railing tongue. Thanks to the combination, she could be malicious without ceasing to amuse. To those who know—and by this time I hope they are many—it is good evidence of her abilities and merits alike that Mary Livingstone could not abide the woman.

It was not required that she should. The Queen, too languid to judge her, listened to the savoury tales of this Reres by the hour together, neither laughing nor chuckling, but for all that fully content. So one might watch audacious archery, and admire the barbed flights, even when some pricked oneself. Lady Reres was of that kind of woman who can never speak of men without marking the gender of them. All the persons on her scene wore transparent draperies; to hear her you would have supposed that the one business of man were to pursue his helpmate, and of woman to stroke her own beauties. She spared neither age nor sex from her categories: all must be stuffed in somewhere; nor did the very throne exempt the sitter from service. The throne of Scotland, for instance! She made it sufficiently appear to Queen Mary that her royal father had been a mighty hunter. She knew the romantic origin of all the by-blows—‘Cupid’s trophies,’ as she called them (O my Lord of Moray!)—and did not scruple to reveal them to the ears of Lady Argyll, herself the daughter of Margaret Erskine, and quite aware of it. Then she must adventure Queen Marie of Lorraine—the one saint whose lamp had never grown dim upon her daughter’s altar—and hint that she had been consciously fair and not unconsciously pursued. ‘And I speak as one who should know, sweet madam,’ said this old Reres; ‘for the Cardinal, fine man, was of my own kindred, and differed noways from the rest of the men. I mind very well—’twas at Linlithgow, where you were born, my Queen—Queen Marie sat by the window on a day, her hand at her side, at her foot a dropped rose. But oh! that flower was wan beside the roses in her face. Your Majesty hath not her hues—no, but you favour the Stuarts. “Dear sakes, madam,” say I, “you have dropped your rose.” So faintly as she smiled, I heard her sigh, and knew she could not answer me then. “Some one will pick up what I have let fall,” saith she at last—and then, behind the curtain, I see a red shoe. I touched my lips—they were as red as your own in those days, madam—and slipped away, knowing my book. Hey! but red was the hue of the Court at that tide—with the tall Cardinal, and the tall rosy Queen, and the dropping, dropping roses.’ The Queen let her talk. She had a soft, wheedling voice—a murmurous accompaniment to luxurious thought.

No doubt, when the body is unstrung you pet your thought, and indulge it in its wanton ways. There is no harm in dreaming. The Queen lay waiting there, thrilled faintly with the sense of what was to come upon her, softly served and softly lapped. And in soft guise came into ministry the figures of her dreams, inviting, craving, imploring, grieving, clinging about her. She communed again with all her lovers, the highest and the lowest—from Charles of France, Most Christian King, a stormy boy, who frowned his black brows upon her and kissed so hotly on that day she saw him last, down to slim, grey-eyed Jean-Marie-Baptiste, whom by kindness she had made man. Others there were, stored in her mind, a many and a many—and any one of them would have died for her once. What of Mr. Knox, of the great hands? What of John Gordon, fiercest of old Huntly’s sons? What of George Gordon, romantic, speechless lover at this hour? To each his own sweetness, to each the secret of his own desire: she savoured each by each as she lay, turning and snuggling and dreaming among her pillows. And when the cooing old Reres by the bed spoke of Lord Bothwell, she listened, sharply intent; and wondered if there were light enough left to betray her, and hoped not. Dangerous, desperate, hardy man! He was a theme upon which Lady Reres descanted at large. Let his draperies be as they would, his gender was never in doubt.

Reres had known James Bothwell—so she always called him—for many years; for although his only numbered thirty yet, and she confessed to five-and-forty, he had come into blossom as quick as a pear-tree in a mild Lent: at fifteen and a half James Bothwell——! She lifted up her hands to end the sentence.

‘They say—under the breath I speak it—that of late he hath cast his eyes above him. Ah, and how high above him, and how saucily, let others tell your Majesty.’ Queen Mary’s hot ears needed no telling. ‘They say it drove my lord of Arran into raving fits. Fie then, and out upon you, Bothwell, if Majesty cannot be a hedge about a lovely woman! But so it hath ever been with all that disordered blood of Hepburn: thieves all, all thieving greatly. I need not go back far—and yet they tell the tale of the first Hepburn of them, and of Queen Joan, widow of our first James. What did those two at Dunbar together?’ At Dunbar—a Hepburn and a dead Queen of Scots—alack! and what had done this living Queen with her Hepburn there?

‘A pest upon them all!’ cries Reres; ‘for what did the son of that Hepburn with a Queen? And the father of our James Bothwell, what did he? For if James Bothwell’s father loved not your Majesty’s own mother, and loved her not in vain—why should our man find himself a straitened earl at this day? But so it is, they say, and so is like to be, that every Hepburn of Bothwell dieth for love of a Queen of Scots. Foh, then! and is our man to vary the tide of his race? Oh, madam, I could tell your Majesty some deal of his prowess! Listen now: he loved my sister Buccleuch, and me he loved. Greedy, greedy! Oh, there’s a many and many a woman hath greeted sore for him to come back. But he never came, my Queen of Honey, he never came! And let not her,’ she darkly said, ‘that hath him now, think to keep him. No, no, the turtle hath mated too high. He is like the king-eagle that sits lonely on his rock, and fears not look at the sun: for why? he bideth the time when he may choose to fly upward. Did he mate with my sister—a Hob to her Jill? Mated he with me? God knows whom he will mate with or mate not. He has but to ask and have, I think.’

‘Pull the curtain, pull the curtain,’ says Queen Mary; ‘the light vexes my eyes.’

‘And stings your fair cheek, my Honey-Queen,’ says wise Lady Reres, and gives her a happy kiss.

So it is that a woman of experience, who carries her outlay gallantly, approves herself to her junior, who wishes to carry her own as gallantly as may be. But Mary Livingstone—Mistress Sempill, as they called her now—mother already and hoping to be mother again, used to bounce out of the bedchamber whenever Lady Reres entered it with her James Bothwell on the tip of her quick tongue.

* * * * *

In the drowsy days of mid-June the Queen suffered and bare a son. First to know it outside the castle-hive was brisk Sir James Melvill, who had it from Mary Beaton before they fired the guns on the platform; and that same night, by the soaring lights of the bonfires, rode out of Lothian to carry the great news into England. No man saw Queen Mary for four days, though the castle was filled to overflowing and the Earl of Huntly walked all night about the courtyards, telling himself that for the sake of mother and child the vile father must be kept alive. The King was lodged in the castle by now; and one good reason for Huntly’s vigil may have been that his Majesty and his people had swamped the house-room. The Earls of Moray, Argyll and Mar were there; Atholl also and Crawfurd (to name no more)—the two last linked with Huntly against two of the first, and all alike watching Lord Moray for a sign. It seemed, now this child was come, no man knew just what line he should take. So each looked doubtfully at his neighbour, and an eye of each was linked to Moray’s eyes of mystery. At the end of her four days’ grace the Queen sent for her brothers first among men—the three black Stuarts, James, John, and Robert; and two of them obeyed her.

In the dark, faint-smelling chamber, as they knelt about her bed, she put her thin hand over the edge that they might kiss it, and seemed touched that they should do it with such reverence. They could see her fixed eyes—large now, and all black—upon them, seeking, wondering, considering if their homage might be real. As if no answer was to be read out of them, she sighed and turned away her head. She spoke faintly, in the voice of a woman too tired to be disheartened. ‘You shall see your Prince, my lords. Fetch me in the Prince.’

The child was brought in upon a cushion, a mouthing, pushing, red epitome of our pretensions, with a blind pitiful face. Lady Mar and Lady Reres held it between them, passed it elaborately under the review of the lords; and as these looked upon it in the way men use, as if timid to admit relationship with a thing so absurd—here is a James Stuart to be taken, and that other left!—the Queen watched them with bitter relish, turned to be a cynic now, for the emptiness of disenchantment was upon her. To win this mock-reverence of theirs she had laboured and spent! With this, O God, she had paid a price! Now let all go: for they looked at her prize as at so much puling flesh, and had kissed her hand on the same valuation. Pish! they would scheme and plot and lie over the son as they had over the mother—and the only honest fellow in all Scotland was Death, who had just made a fool of her! The child began to wail for its nurse, and pricked her into a dry heat. For it is to be known that she could not nurse her baby. ‘Take him, take him, good Reres. I cannot bear the noise he makes, nor can ease him any. And you, my lords, shall come again if you will. Come when the King is by.’ Here, as if suddenly urged by some anxiety, she raised herself in the bed. They saw how white she was, and how fearfully in earnest. ‘Fail me not, brothers, in this. I desire you to be with me when the King is here.’

When they had both promised, they left her to sleep; but she could get none for fretting and tossing about.

Mary Livingstone said, How could she sleep? She was ‘woeful that she could not nurse her baby.’

Hereat the Queen took her by the arm and hurt her by her vehemence. ‘What honesty is left in this world but Death?’ she croaked in her misery. ‘When your blood-brothers compass your downfall, and your husband is a liar declared, and your own breasts play churl to your new-born child—oh, oh, oh, I would open my arms to bonny leman Death!’

Mary Livingstone, blind with tears, hung over her, but could not speak. The Queen drove her away, and had in the reminiscent, the caustic, the fertile Reres.

At two in the afternoon of a later day a great company was admitted; and the King, coming in last with an Englishman of his friends, stood for the first time these long weeks by the Queen’s bed. She was prepared for him, gave him her hand, but flinched evidently when he saluted it. The Countess of Mar brought in the Prince, having settled this function of honour with Reres as best she knew, and handed it about in the throng.

‘Give it to me, my Lady Mar,’ says the Queen in that dry, whispering voice of hers. All the spring seemed gone out of her, so much she dragged her words. The moment she had it in bed with her it began its feeble wailing.

‘There, sir, there then! ’Tis your royal Mother has you!’ says Lady Mar; and the Queen, bothered and sick of the business before she had begun with it, grew deadly hot as she held it, rocking it about. The King gazed solemnly at his offspring: he blinked, but no more foolishly than any other man. The courtiers admired, happily not called upon to speak; in fact, nobody spoke except the infant, and Lady Mar, who pleaded in whispers. Nor did she whisper in vain, for presently the crying stopped, the Queen held up the child in her arms and searched vaguely the King’s face. I say, vaguely, because those who knew and loved her best could not in the least understand that questioning look, nor connect it with the words she spoke. She used no form of ceremony, neither sir’d nor my-lorded him; but poring blankly in his face, ‘God hath given you and me a son,’ she said.

The King was observed to blush. ‘And I thank God for him, madam,’ was his answer, as he stooped to kiss the child. He achieved his honourable purpose, though the Queen drew back as his face came near. Who did not see that?

Again she said, ‘You have kissed your very son.’ There was a silence upon all, and then she added in a voice aside—‘So much your son that I fear it will be the worse for him hereafter.’ Coming at such a time, from such a mouth, the words dropped upon that hushed assembly like an Oracle. No Scot of them all durst say anything, nor could the French Ambassador find phrases convenient. The King may or may not have heard her—he was slow. But plain Sir William Stanley in his Lancashire voice cried out, ‘God save your Majesties, and the Prince your son!’ She looked about to find who spoke so heartily, and they told her the name and station of the man. She observed him with interest, held up the child for him to see.

‘Look upon him, sir, for whom you pray so stoutly. This is the prince I hope shall first unite two realms.’

‘Why, madam,’ says Sir William, ‘shall he succeed before your Majesty and his father?’

He meant well, but did unhappily. The Queen gave back the child to Lady Mar before she replied.

Then, ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think he shall, and for this reason. Because his father has broken my heart.’

Not a soul dared to move. The King started—as one jerks in first sleep—grew violently red, looked from face to face, found no friendliness in any, and broke out desperately: ‘Is this your promise? Is this your promise? To forget and forgive?’

She was as hard as flint. ‘I have forgiven,’ she said, ‘but I shall never forget. Would that I could! But what if I had died that snowy night? Or what if Fawdonsyde’s pistol had shot my babe in me?’

‘Madam,’ said the King, ‘these things are past.’

She threw herself back, face to the wall. ‘Ay, they are past. Well, let them go.’ She shut her eyes resolutely until they were all gone out; and when that, which seemed the only thing to be done, was well done, she opened them again, with a new and sharp outlook upon affairs. She sent one of the women for Des-Essars, another for the physician.

To this latter, who found her sitting up in bed with very bright eyes, she said, ‘Master Physician, I feel stronger, having done all the disagreeable duties which seemed expected of me. I wish for your consideration of this matter: when can I rise from this bed?’

He gravely pondered. ‘Madam, in these heats I dare not advise you to be moved. Nourishment and repose should work wonders for your Majesty, as indeed you tell me that they have.’

‘At least, they would if I could get them,’ she replied.

‘All Scotland would give herself to provide them, madam, for your solace.’

‘They are the last things I should look for from Scotland,’ said the Queen. ‘Nourishment and repose! I shall leave my bed to-morrow.’

‘Madam,’ said the doctor, ‘I have but done my duty.’

‘Ah, duty!’ she said. ‘And have I not done mine? Now, good sir, I intend my pleasure.’

Dismissing him, she turned to Des-Essars, who stood erect by the door. ‘I desire to wash my hands, Jean-Marie. Bring basin and towel.’

As he served her at the bed’s edge, she dipped and rinsed her hands—carefully, formally, smiling to herself as at the good performance of some secret rite. This might have been lustral water, Jordan’s, or that sluggish flow of Lethe’s. She held up her wet hands before the lad’s face. ‘Do you see any speck?’

‘Oh no, madam.’

‘Be very sure,’ she said; ‘look well again. These hands, mark you, have been in Scotland four years.’ She rinsed again and wrung them of drops; smelt them, and seemed pleased. ‘Roses they smell of now—not Scotland,’ she said. ‘So I am free of Scotland.’ She dried her hands and sent him away with the service—‘But come back soon,’ she said; ‘I have more for you to do.’

Des-Essars returned. ‘Wait you there,’ said she, ‘while I write a letter.’ She wrote, pausing here and there, looking wisely for a word or two—sometimes at the prim-faced youth, as if she could find one there—scoring out, underlining, smiling, biting the pen. She ended—did not re-read.

‘Bring taper and wax.’ She sealed her letter with her signet ring, and held it out. ‘Take this incontinent to my lord of Bothwell. At Hermitage in Liddesdale you shall find him. Be secret and sure. You have never failed me yet, and I trust you more than most. I trusted you four years ago, when you were a boy: now you are nearly a man, and shall prove to be fully one if you do this errand faithfully. Ask for French Paris at your first coming in—thus you will get at my lord privily. Now go, remembering how much I entrust you with—my happiness, and hope, and honour.’ He made to leave her, but she cried, ‘Stay. You love me, I think. Come nearer—come very near. Nearer, nearer, foolish boy. What, are you so timid? Now—stoop down and kiss me here.’ She touched her cheek, then offered it.

He flushed up to the roots of his hair and had nothing to say; but he was never one to refuse chances. She said, ‘You have kissed a Queen. Now go, and earn your wages.’ He marched from the room, grown man, and took the way in half an hour.

At his castle of Hermitage, deep in the hills, the Earl of Bothwell frowned over his letter, and having read it many times, went on frowning as he fingered it. ‘Now, if any faith might be given to a princess,’ he thought to himself, ‘those two should never be together again man and wife. The pledge is here, the written word.’ He chuckled low in his throat, then shrugged like an Italian. ‘The word of a prince, the bond of a weathercock! Let the words go for words—but the heart that devised, the head that spun, the hand that set them here—ah, a man may count on them!’ He sprang to his feet, went to the window and looked out far into the sunny brown hills. He shook his fist at the blue sky. ‘Oh, Bastard of Scotland, James misbegotten of James! Oh, my man, if these words are true, there shall come a grapple between you and me such as the men of the dales know not—and a backthrow for one of us, man James, which shall not be for me.’ Leaning out of the window, he roared into the court for his men. ‘Ho, Hob Elliott! Ho, Jock Scott! Armstrong, Willy Pringle, Paris, you French thief! Boot and saddle, you dogs of war—I take the North road this night.’ He strode a turn or more about the room, shaking his letter in his hand. ‘Better than a charter, better than a sasine, bond above bonds!’

But he went to his wife’s bower. ‘My heart,’ saith he, ‘I must leave thee this night—I am called to town. God knoweth the end of the adventure. Read, my soul, read, and then advise.’

She read the French slowly, he behind her, his face almost touching her cheek, prompting her with a word or two; but so eager as he was, he was always in front, and had to come back for her, mastering his impatience. At the end she sat quietly, looking at her hands. His excitement was not to be borne.

‘Well, my girl, well?’

‘Go to her, my lord.’

‘You say that!’

She replied calmly, ‘No, it is she that says it—it is veiled in these lines.’

He took her face between his hands. ‘But it is thou that sendest me—hey? Be very sure now what thou art about. If I go, I go to the end. I stay never when I ride out o’ nights until I have the cattle in byre.’

Her deep eyes met his without faltering. ‘Let her have of you what she will. I have what I have.’

Now she had made him wary. He could not be sure what she was at—unless it were one thing.

‘Dost thou send me,’ he asked her, ‘to be her bane? art thou so still and steadfast a hater?’

‘I send you not at all,’ she answered. ‘It is she that calls. Remember that against the time when you have need to remember it.’

He caught her up and kissed her repeatedly. ‘Sit thou still, Jeannie, and watch,’ says he; ‘keep my house and stuff, and have a prayer on thy lips for me. Never doubt me, my dear. Doubt all the world to come, but doubt not me.’

She said, ‘I am very sure of you—both of what you will do, and what you will not do.’

He kissed her again, and left her. She did not come out to see him ride away.

* * * * *

Cantering on grass through the hot starry night, he called Des-Essars to his side and questioned him closely about the letter. How did she write it? What did she say? Who was by?

‘My lord,’ said Baptist, ‘I myself was by. No other at all. She bade me take it straight to your lordship, surely and secretly. She wrote it herself and sealed it with the ring on her forefinger. But she wrote nothing until she had washed her hands.’

‘Why, my lad,’ says he, ‘were her hands so foul?’

‘My lord, they were the fairest, whitest hands in the world. But she washed them many times, until, as she said, they smelt of roses, and not of Scotland.’

‘The plot thickens, God strike me! What else, boy?’

‘Nothing more, my lord, save that she gave me the letter, as I have told your lordship, and sent me directly away.’