The Other Queen Read online

  Silently, I shake my head. I have been married four times and never yet been in love. For me, marriage has always been a carefully considered business contract, and I don’t know whatcoup de foudre even means, and I don’t like the sound of it.

  “Well,voilа , I married Darnley, partly to spite your Queen Elizabeth, partly for policy, partly for love, in haste, and regretted it soon enough. He was a drunkard and a sodomite. A wreck of a boy. He took it into his stupid head that I had a lover and he lighted upon the only good advisor I had at my court, the only man I could count on. David Rizzio was my secretary and advisor, my Cecil if you like. A steady good man that I could trust. Darnley let his bullies into my private rooms and they killed him before my very eyes, in my chamber, poor David…” She breaks off. “I could not stop them, God knows I tried. The men came for him and poor David ran to me. He hid behind me, but they dragged him out. They would have killed me too: one of them held a pistol against my belly, my unborn son quickening as I screamed. Andrew Kerr his name was—I don’t forget it, I don’t forgive him. He put the barrel of his pistol to my belly and my little son’s foot pressed back. I thought he would shoot me and my unborn child inside me. I thought he would kill us both. I knew then that the Scots are beyond ruling, they are madmen.”

  She holds her hands over her eyes as if to block out the sight of it even now. I nod in silence. I don’t tell her that we knew of the plot in England. We could have protected her, but we chose not to do so. We could have warned her but we did not. Cecil decided that we should not warn her, but leave her, isolated and in danger. We heard the news that her own court had turned on her, her own husband had become corrupt, and it amused us: thinking of her alone with those barbarians. We thought she would be forced to turn to England for help.

  “The lords of my court killed my own secretary in front of me, as I stood there trying to shield him. Before me—a Princess of France.” She shakes her head. “After that it could only get worse. They had learned their power. They held me captive; they said they would cut me in pieces and throw my body in bits from the terrace of Stirling Castle.”

  My women are aghast. One of them gives a little sigh of horror and thinks about fainting. I scowl at her.

  “But you escaped?”

  At once she smiles a mischievous grin, like a clever boy. “Such an adventure! I turned Darnley back to my side and I had them lower us out of the window. We rode for five hours through the night, though I was six months pregnant, and at the end of the road, in the darkness, Bothwell and his men were waiting for us and we were safe.”

  “Bothwell?”

  “He was the only man in Scotland I could trust,” she says quietly. “I learned later he was the only man in Scotland who had never taken a bribe from a foreign power. He is a Scot and loyal to my mother and to me. He was always on my side. He raised an army for me and we returned to Edinburgh and banished the murderers.”

  “And your husband?”

  She shrugs. “You must know the rest. I could not part from my husband while I was carrying his child. I gave birth to my son and Bothwell guarded him and me. My husband Darnley was murdered by his former friends. They planned to kill me too but it happened I was not in the house that night. It was nothing more than luck.”

  “Terrible, terrible,” one of my women whispers. They will be converting to Papacy next out of sheer fellow feeling.

  “Yes indeed,” I say sharply to her. “Go and fetch a lute and play for us.” So that gets her out of earshot.

  “I had lost my secretary and my husband, and my principal advisors were his murderers,” she said. “I could get no help from my family in France, and the country was in uproar. Bothwell stood by me, and he had his army to keep us safe. Then he declared us married.”

  “Were you not married?” I whisper.

  “No,” she says shortly. “Not by my church. Not in my faith. His wife still lives, and now another one, another wife, has thrown him into prison in Denmark for breach of promise. She claims they were married years ago. Who knows with Bothwell? Not I.”

  “Did you love him?” I ask, thinking that this is a woman who was once a fool for love.

  “We never speak of love,” she says flatly. “Never. We are not some romantic couple writing poetry and exchanging tokens. We never speak of love. I have never said one word of love to him nor he to me.”

  There is a silence, and I realize she has not exactly answered me.

  “And then?” one of my entranced half-wit women whispers.

  “Then my half brother and his treacherous allies called up their army to attack Bothwell and me with him, and Bothwell and I rode out to battle together, side by side, as comrades. But they won—it is as simple as that. Our army drained away as we delayed. Bothwell would have fought at once and we might have won then, but I hoped to avoid bloodshed of kin against kin. I let them delay us with talks and false promises and my army slipped away. We made an agreement and Bothwell got away. They promised me safe conduct but they lied. They held me as a prisoner, and I miscarried my twins; two boys. They made me abdicate while I was ill and broken with grief. My own half brother claimed my throne, the traitor. He sold my pearls, and they have my son…my boy…” Her voice, which has been low and steady, wavers now for the first time.

  “You will see him again, for sure,” I say.

  “He is mine,” she whispers. “My own son. He should be raised as a Prince of Scotland and England. Not by these heretical fools, not by the murderers of his own father, men who believe neither in God nor king.”

  “My husband says that you will be restored to your throne this very summer, any day now,” I say. I do not add that I think him mistaken.

  She lifts her head. “I shall need an army to get back my throne,” she says. “It is not a question of simply riding back to Edinburgh. I shall need a husband to dominate the Scots lords and an army to hold them down. Tell Elizabeth when you write to her that she must honor her kinship to me. She must restore me. I shall be Queen of Scotland again.”

  “Her Majesty doesn’t take advice from me,” I say. “But I know she is planning for your restoration.” Even if Cecil is not, I think.

  “I have made mistakes,” she concedes. “I have not judged very well for myself, after all. But perhaps still I may be forgiven. And at least I do have a son.”

  “You will be forgiven,” I say earnestly. “If you have done anything wrong, which I am sure…and anyway, as you say, you do have a son, and a woman with a son is a woman with a future.”

  She blinks back the tears and nods. “He will be King of England,” she breathes. “King of England and Scotland.”

  I am silent for a moment. It is treason to speak of the queen’s death; it is treason to speculate about her heir. I shoot a hard look at my women, who are all, wisely, eyes down on their sewing now and pretending they cannot hear.

  Her mood shifts, as quickly as a child’s. “Ah, here I am becoming as morbid as a Highlander!” she cries out. “Lady Seton, ask a page to come and sing for us and let’s have some dancing. Lady Shrewsbury here will think herself in prison or in mourning!”

  I laugh, as if we were not in truth in prison and bereft, and I send for wine and for fruit, and for the musicians. When my lord comes in before dinner he finds us in a whirl of dancing and the Scots queen in the middle, calling the changes and laughing aloud as we get all muddled up and end opposite the wrong partners.

  “You must go right! Right!” she calls out. “Gauche et puis а gauche!”She whirls around to laugh at him. “My lord, command your wife! She is making a mockery of me as a dancing tutor.”

  “It is you!” he says, his face reflecting her joy. “No! No! Truly it is you. You shall not accuse the countess, indeed you shall not.Gauche means left in English, Your Grace! Not right. You have been commanding them the wrong way round.”

  She screams with laughter and falls into my arms and kisses me the French way, on both cheeks. “Ah, pardon, Lady Bess! Your husband is ri