‘They say—under the breath I speak it—that of late he hath cast his eyes above him. Ah, and how high above him, and how saucily, let others tell your Majesty.’ Queen Mary’s hot ears needed no telling. ‘They say it drove my lord of Arran into raving fits. Fie then, and out upon you, Bothwell, if Majesty cannot be a hedge about a lovely woman! But so it hath ever been with all that disordered blood of Hepburn: thieves all, all thieving greatly. I need not go back far—and yet they tell the tale of the first Hepburn of them, and of Queen Joan, widow of our first James. What did those two at Dunbar together?’ At Dunbar—a Hepburn and a dead Queen of Scots—alack! and what had done this living Queen with her Hepburn there?
‘A pest upon them all!’ cries Reres; ‘for what did the son of that Hepburn with a Queen? And the father of our James Bothwell, what did he? For if James Bothwell’s father loved not your Majesty’s own mother, and loved her not in vain—why should our man find himself a straitened earl at this day? But so it is, they say, and so is like to be, that every Hepburn of Bothwell dieth for love of a Queen of Scots. Foh, then! and is our man to vary the tide of his race? Oh, madam, I could tell your Majesty some deal of his prowess! Listen now: he loved my sister Buccleuch, and me he loved. Greedy, greedy! Oh, there’s a many and many a woman hath greeted sore for him to come back. But he never came, my Queen of Honey, he never came! And let not her,’ she darkly said, ‘that hath him now, think to keep him. No, no, the turtle hath mated too high. He is like the king-eagle that sits lonely on his rock, and fears not look at the sun: for why? he bideth the time when he may choose to fly upward. Did he mate with my sister—a Hob to her Jill? Mated he with me? God knows whom he will mate with or mate not. He has but to ask and have, I think.’
‘Pull the curtain, pull the curtain,’ says Queen Mary; ‘the light vexes my eyes.’
‘And stings your fair cheek, my Honey-Queen,’ says wise Lady Reres, and gives her a happy kiss.
So it is that a woman of experience, who carries her outlay gallantly, approves herself to her junior, who wishes to carry her own as gallantly as may be. But Mary Livingstone—Mistress Sempill, as they called her now—mother already and hoping to be mother again, used to bounce out of the bedchamber whenever Lady Reres entered it with her James Bothwell on the tip of her quick tongue.
In the drowsy days of mid-June the Queen suffered and bare a son. First to know it outside the castle-hive was brisk Sir James Melvill, who had it from Mary Beaton before they fired the guns on the platform; and that same night, by the soaring lights of the bonfires, rode out of Lothian to carry the great news into England. No man saw Queen Mary for four days, though the castle was filled to overflowing and the Earl of Huntly walked all night about the courtyards, telling himself that for the sake of mother and child the vile father must be kept alive. The King was lodged in the castle by now; and one good reason for Huntly’s vigil may have been that his Majesty and his people had swamped the house-room. The Earls of Moray, Argyll and Mar were there; Atholl also and Crawfurd (to name no more)—the two last linked with Huntly against two of the first, and all alike watching Lord Moray for a sign. It seemed, now this child was come, no man knew just what line he should take. So each looked doubtfully at his neighbour, and an eye of each was linked to Moray’s eyes of mystery. At the end of her four days’ grace the Queen sent for her brothers first among men—the three black Stuarts, James, John, and Robert; and two of them obeyed her.
In the dark, faint-smelling chamber, as they knelt about her bed, she put her thin hand over the edge that they might kiss it, and seemed touched that they should do it with such reverence. They could see her fixed eyes—large now, and all black—upon them, seeking, wondering, considering if their homage might be real. As if no answer was to be read out of them, she sighed and turned away her head. She spoke faintly, in the voice of a woman too tired to be disheartened. ‘You shall see your Prince, my lords. Fetch me in the Prince.’
The child was brought in upon a cushion, a mouthing, pushing, red epitome of our pretensions, with a blind pitiful face. Lady Mar and Lady Reres held it between them, passed it elaborately under the review of the lords; and as these looked upon it in the way men use, as if timid to admit relationship with a thing so absurd—here is a James Stuart to be taken, and that other left!—the Queen watched them with bitter relish, turned to be a cynic now, for the emptiness of disenchantment was upon her. To win this mock-reverence of theirs she had laboured and spent! With this, O God, she had paid a price! Now let all go: for they looked at her prize as at so much puling flesh, and had kissed her hand on the same valuation. Pish! they would scheme and plot and lie over the son as they had over the mother—and the only honest fellow in all Scotland was Death, who had just made a fool of her! The child began to wail for its nurse, and pricked her into a dry heat. For it is to be known that she could not nurse her baby. ‘Take him, take him, good Reres. I cannot bear the noise he makes, nor can ease him any. And you, my lords, shall come again if you will. Come when the King is by.’ Here, as if suddenly urged by some anxiety, she raised herself in the bed. They saw how white she was, and how fearfully in earnest. ‘Fail me not, brothers, in this. I desire you to be with me when the King is here.’
When they had both promised, they left her to sleep; but she could get none for fretting and tossing about.
Mary Livingstone said, How could she sleep? She was ‘woeful that she could not nurse her baby.’