‘No indeed, madam,’ he agreed; ‘but it is the only easy road for a young and delicate lady.’
‘Let my youth, brother, be as God made it,’ she answered him; ‘but as for my delicacy, I am thankfully able to bear fatigue and to thrive upon it. If my good sister, or you, my lord’—she spoke very clearly—‘think to keep me from my own by threats of force or warnings of danger, I would have you understand that the like of those is a spur to me.’
This was a thing which, in fact, he had understood perfectly.
‘I am not a shying horse,’ she continued, ‘to swerve at a heap of sand. I believe I shall find loyalty in my country, and cheerful courage there to meet my own courage. There be those that laugh at danger there, as well as those who weep.’
He said suavely here that she misjudged him, that only his tenderness for her person was at fault. ‘We grow timid where we love much, madam.’
At this she looked at him so unequivocally that he changed the subject.
‘If your Majesty,’ he pursued, ‘knows not the mind of the English Queen, or misdoubts my reading of it, let application be made to Master Throckmorton. I am content to be judged out of his mouth.’
Master Throckmorton was English Ambassador to the Queen of Scots, a friend of the Lord James’s. His lordship, indeed, had the greater confidence in giving this advice in that he had already convinced Master Throckmorton of what he must do, and what say, if he wished to get Queen Mary into Scotland—as, namely, decline to help her thither; decline, for instance, a letter of safe-conduct through English soil.
‘Let application be made presently, brother,’ said the incensed young lady, and gladly turned to her pleasures.
She had been finding these of late in a society not at all to the mind of the Lord James. Three days before this conversation the Earl of Bothwell, no less, had come to court, making for the North from Piedmont.