Anna, who, with her attendant, had been conducted to suitable apartments, had retired for the night, leaving Bothwell and his friends to pursue their political conversation, and to drink their wine undisturbed, which they did with the devotion of three Germans quaffing for a wager.
"And this is all thou knowest of the machinations of Moray? Ah! false bastard, I shall live to mar thee yet!" exclaimed the Earl, with kindling eyes, on hearing Balfour unfold the web of intrigue that surrounded the young Queen Mary. "And my barony of Crichtoun too! saidst thou, Sir Gilbert, that Morton had cast his gloating eyes on that?"
"Yea, and but for this late raid at Holyrood, had added it to his adjacent fiefs of Dalkeith and Vogrie."
"And so they have slain this Rizzio! I remember him well—a smooth-tongued old Italian, somewhat gay in his garb, but crooked in form, and weasoned in visage. Did he not succeed Monsieur Raulet as foreign secretary?"
"The same."
"And they slew him, poor knave!"
"It was on the evening of the 9th of March last, when the Queen's Grace sat at supper with her sister, the Countess Jane of Argyle, and Rizzio seated between their tabourettes twangling on his ghittern, when the High Chancellor seized the palace gates at the head of a hundred and fifty tall spearmen, in corselets and steel bonnets, while my Lords of Lindesay and Ruthven, with King Henry and a hundred more, in their armour, ascended by the secret stair to the turret chamber in James V.'s tower. The poor Italian skipped about like a maukin, and cried aloud in his native gibberish for mercy; but, by the mass! he found little of that, for they dragged him from the skirt of the shrieking Queen, and slew him within earshot of her Majesty, whom Andrew Kerr"——
"Of Fawdounside?" said Ormiston; "a stout man, and a bold—I know tall Andrew well."
"Is said to have handled somewhat roughly, for he bent a cocked pistolette against her breast."
"Of Mary?—of a woman about to become a mother!" said the Earl, grasping his poniard. "Would to St. Paul I had been within arm's length of him! but what hath drawn the ire of his most sapient Majesty and the Protestant Lords upon this poor Italian?"