‘Take your victual, take your victual, my lady,’ says the Master, ‘I’ll be back just now.’ He was his own cellarer, prudent man, and was apt to excuse himself by saying that one lock was better than two.
The wine brought back the colour to her cheeks and loosened the joints of her tongue. All he had now to do was to listen to her troubles: and he did listen. It is likely that, had she been less charged with them, she had been warier; but she was indeed surcharged. He soon understood that it was the coming of the Earl of Bothwell that had caused her return.
‘Not that I would not have braved him out, you must know, Master—bristling boar though he be, dangerous, boastful, glorious man. It would take a dozen of Hepburns to scare me from my duty. But oh,’tis herself that scares me now! So changed, so sore changed. You might lay it to witchcraft and be no fool.’
‘’Twill be the lying-in, I doubt,’ says the sage Master. ‘You mind how hardly my sister Menzies took her first. Ay, ’twill be that.’
Mary Livingstone would not have it. ‘There are many that say so, but I am not one. No, no. I know very well where to look for it. Witchcraft it is, night-spells. I mind the beginning o’t. Why, when I first saw her, all dim as I was with my tears, her heart went out to me—held out to me in her stretched hands. She took me to her sweet warm bosom, and I could have swooned for joy of her, to be there again. “Oh, Livingstone, my dear, my dear! Come back to me at last!” And so we weep and cling together, and all’s as it had ever been. For you know very well we were never long divided.’
‘Never long enough for me, Mary, in my courting time.’
‘She was expecting her wean from day to day, and I tell you she longed for the hour. She was aye sewing his little clothes—embroidering them—ciphers and crowns and the like. She worked him his guiding-strings with her own hands, every stitch—gold knot-work, you never saw better. And all her talk was of him.’
‘Likely, likely,’ murmured the Master.
‘She never wavered but it was to be a prince, for all that we teased her—spoke of the Princess Mary that was coming—or should it not be Princess Margaret? She smiled in her steady way, as she uses when she feels wise, knowing what others cannot know. “No other Mary in Scotland,” she said. “There are five of us now, and Scotland can hold no more. My Prince Jamie must wed with a Margaret if he needs one.” No, she never doubted, and you see she was right. Oh, she was right and well before the magic got to work!
‘To me she used to talk, more nearly than to the others. Poor Fleming! You’ll have heard of her sore disgrace—for favouring that lank Lethington of hers. She is suspect, you must know, of seeking his recall, so hath no privacy with our mistress. Beaton and Seton were never of such account; so ’twas to me she spoke her secrets—over and over in the long still forenoons, wondering and doubting and hoping, poor lamb. “Do you think he’ll lippen to me, Livingstone?” she would say. “Did your own child laugh to see his mother? I think ’twould break my heart,” she said, “if he greeted in my arms.” She intended to be nurse to him herself: that I will hold by before the Thronéd Three on Doomsday. Not a night went by but, when I came to her in the morn, she bade me look, and try, and be sure. I told her true, she could do it. And what hindered her, pray? What drove away her milk? Eh, sir, I doubt I know too well.