‘Madam,’ said the doctor, ‘I have but done my duty.’
‘Ah, duty!’ she said. ‘And have I not done mine? Now, good sir, I intend my pleasure.’
Dismissing him, she turned to Des-Essars, who stood erect by the door. ‘I desire to wash my hands, Jean-Marie. Bring basin and towel.’
As he served her at the bed’s edge, she dipped and rinsed her hands—carefully, formally, smiling to herself as at the good performance of some secret rite. This might have been lustral water, Jordan’s, or that sluggish flow of Lethe’s. She held up her wet hands before the lad’s face. ‘Do you see any speck?’
‘Oh no, madam.’
‘Be very sure,’ she said; ‘look well again. These hands, mark you, have been in Scotland four years.’ She rinsed again and wrung them of drops; smelt them, and seemed pleased. ‘Roses they smell of now—not Scotland,’ she said. ‘So I am free of Scotland.’ She dried her hands and sent him away with the service—‘But come back soon,’ she said; ‘I have more for you to do.’
Des-Essars returned. ‘Wait you there,’ said she, ‘while I write a letter.’ She wrote, pausing here and there, looking wisely for a word or two—sometimes at the prim-faced youth, as if she could find one there—scoring out, underlining, smiling, biting the pen. She ended—did not re-read.
‘Bring taper and wax.’ She sealed her letter with her signet ring, and held it out. ‘Take this incontinent to my lord of Bothwell. At Hermitage in Liddesdale you shall find him. Be secret and sure. You have never failed me yet, and I trust you more than most. I trusted you four years ago, when you were a boy: now you are nearly a man, and shall prove to be fully one if you do this errand faithfully. Ask for French Paris at your first coming in—thus you will get at my lord privily. Now go, remembering how much I entrust you with—my happiness, and hope, and honour.’ He made to leave her, but she cried, ‘Stay. You love me, I think. Come nearer—come very near. Nearer, nearer, foolish boy. What, are you so timid? Now—stoop down and kiss me here.’ She touched her cheek, then offered it.
He flushed up to the roots of his hair and had nothing to say; but he was never one to refuse chances. She said, ‘You have kissed a Queen. Now go, and earn your wages.’ He marched from the room, grown man, and took the way in half an hour.
At his castle of Hermitage, deep in the hills, the Earl of Bothwell frowned over his letter, and having read it many times, went on frowning as he fingered it. ‘Now, if any faith might be given to a princess,’ he thought to himself, ‘those two should never be together again man and wife. The pledge is here, the written word.’ He chuckled low in his throat, then shrugged like an Italian. ‘The word of a prince, the bond of a weathercock! Let the words go for words—but the heart that devised, the head that spun, the hand that set them here—ah, a man may count on them!’ He sprang to his feet, went to the window and looked out far into the sunny brown hills. He shook his fist at the blue sky. ‘Oh, Bastard of Scotland, James misbegotten of James! Oh, my man, if these words are true, there shall come a grapple between you and me such as the men of the dales know not—and a backthrow for one of us, man James, which shall not be for me.’ Leaning out of the window, he roared into the court for his men. ‘Ho, Hob Elliott! Ho, Jock Scott! Armstrong, Willy Pringle, Paris, you French thief! Boot and saddle, you dogs of war—I take the North road this night.’ He strode a turn or more about the room, shaking his letter in his hand. ‘Better than a charter, better than a sasine, bond above bonds!’