‘We spake of the earldom of Mar,’ she said drily. ‘That other, I understand, is claimed by my Lord of Huntly, as a right of his, under my favour.’
He added nothing, but bit his lip sideways, and looked at his white hands. She had done more wisely to give him Moray at once; and so she might had he but asked for it. But when she opened her hands he shut his up, and where she spoke her mind he never did. She ought to have been afraid of him, for two excellent reasons: first, she never knew what he thought, and next, everybody about her asked that first. Instead, he irritated her, like a prickly shift.
‘Am I to knock for ever at the shutters of the house of him?’ she asked of her friends. ‘Not so, but I shall conclude there is nobody at home.’
Healthy herself, and high-spirited, and as open as the day when she was in earnest, she laughed at his secret ways in private and made light of them in public. It was on the tip of her saucy tongue more than once or twice to strike him to earth with the thunderbolt: ‘Did you hasten me to Scotland to work my ruin, brother? Do you reckon to climb to the throne over me?’ She thought better of it, but only because it seemed not worth her while. There was no give-and-take with the Lord James, and it is dull work whipping a dead dog.
Meantime the prediction of Mary Livingstone seemed on the edge of fulfilment. Queen Mary ruled Scotland; and her spirits rose to meet success. She was full of courage and good cheer, holding her kingdom in the hollow of her palms. Honeypot? Did Mr. Knox call her so? It was odd how the name struck her.
‘Well,’ she said, with a shrug, ‘if they find me sweet and hive about me, shall I not do well?’
She made Lethington Secretary of State without reserve, and remarked that he was every day in the antechamber.
The word flew busily up and down the Canongate, round about the Cross: ‘Master Knox hath fitted her with a name, do you mind? “She is Honeypot,” quoth he. Heard you ever the like o’ that?’ Some favoured it and her, some winked at it, some misfavoured; and these were the grey beards and white mutches. But one and all came out to see her make her entry on the Tuesday.
One hour before she left Holyrood, Mr. Knox preached from his window in the High Street to a packed assembly of blue bonnets and shrouded heads, upon the text, Be wise now therefore, O ye Kings—a ring of scornful despair in his accents making the admonition vain. ‘I shall not ask ye now what it is ye are come out for to see, lest I tempt ye to lie; for I know better than yourselves. Meat! “Give us meat,” ye cry and clamour; “give us meat for the gapes, meat for greedy eyes!” Ay, and ye shall have your meat, fear not for that. Jags and slashes and feathered heads, ye shall have; targeted tails, and bosoms decked in shame, but else as bare as my hand. Fill yourselves with the like of these—but oh, sirs, when ye lie drunken, blame not the kennel that holds ye. If that ye crave to see prancing Frenchmen before ye, minions and jugglers, leaping sinners, damsels with timbrels, and such-like sick ministers to sick women’s desires, I say, let it be so, o’ God’s holy name; for the day cometh when ye shall have grace given ye to look within, and see who pulls the wires that sets them all heeling and reeling, jigging up and down—whether Christ or Antichrist, whether the Lord God of Israel or the Lord Mammon of the Phœnicians. Look ye well in that day, judge ye and see.’
He stopped, as if he saw in their midst what he cried against; and some man called up, ‘What more will you say, sir?’