The Queen said: ‘Get up, child, and find me the page who was in the cabinet last night. I saw him try the entry, and he ran in when—when.... It was Baptist, I think.’
She spoke in an even voice, as if the occasion had been a card party. This frightened Mary Fleming, who began to quiver, and to say, ‘Oh, ma’am, did Baptist see all? ’Twill have scared away his wits.’ And then she tried coaxing. ‘Nay, ma Reinette, but you must rest awhile. Come, let me stroke your cheek’—a common way with them of inviting sleep to her.
But the Queen said, ‘I have had too much stroking—too much. Now do as I bid you.’ So the maid clothed herself in haste and went out with a lamp.
Outside the door she found the two youths asleep—Des-Essars on the floor, Gordon by the table—and awoke them both. ‘Which of you was on the door last night?’
‘It was I, Mistress Fleming,’ said the foreigner. ‘All the time I was there.’
‘Come with me, then. You are sent for.’
He followed her in high excitement into the Queen’s bedchamber. There he saw Margaret Carwood asleep on her back, lying on the floor; and the Queen propped up with pillows, a white silk shift upon her—or half upon her, for one shoulder was out of it. She looked sharper, more like Circe, than she had done since her discomforts began: very intense, very pale, very black in the eyes. And she smiled at him in a curiously secret way—a beckoning, fluttering of the lips, as if she shared intelligence with him, and told him so by signs. ‘She was as sharp and hard and bright as a cut diamond,’ he writes of this appearance; ‘nor do I suppose that any lady in the storied world could have turned her face away from a night of terror and blood, towards a day-to-come of insult, chains and degradation, as she turned hers now before my very eyes.’
She did not say anything for a while, but considered him absorbingly, with those fever-bright eyes and that cautious smile, until she had made up her mind. He, of course, was down on his knee; Mary Fleming, beside him, stood—her hand just touching his shoulder.
‘Come hither, Jean-Marie.’