‘Ready, Traquair?’—the Queen’s voice.
‘All’s ready, ma’am.’
She fastened her hood, patting the bows flat. ‘Come, Seton, come, Baptist,’ she said, and gave her hand into Traquair’s.
He kissed it before he led her away. Des-Essars went first with a shaded lantern.
The great dark house was perfectly quiet as they went downstairs and through the chapel by the tombs of the kings. Just here, however, the Queen stopped and called back Des-Essars. ‘Where does he lie?’ she asked him; and he pointed out the stone—she was standing almost upon it—and for many a day remembered the curious regard she had for it: how she hovered, as it were, over the place, looking at it, smiling quietly towards it, as if it afforded her some quaint thought. Words have been put into her mouth which, according to him, she never said—melodramatic words they are, rough makeshifts of some kind of art embodying what was to come. According to Des-Essars, she said nothing, neither resolved, nor promised, nor predicted; nothing broke her smiling, considering silence over this new grave.
‘To see her there,’ he says, ‘in the lantern-light, so easy, so absorbed, so amused, was terrible to more witnesses than one. It opened to me secret doors never yet suspected. Was murder only curious to her? Was horror a kind of joy?’
But it frightened Mary Seton out of her courage. ‘Oh, what do you see in there, madam?’ she whispered. ‘What moves your mirth in his grave?’
The Queen turned her head as if shaken out of a stare. She met Mary Seton’s eyes in the lantern-light, and laughed.
‘Come away, madam, come away. Look no more. There’s a taint.’