‘Madam, I have no more to say.’
She took a scrap of paper and scribbled on it with a pen. ‘Read that, if you please, and take it with you back again.’
‘Show to the Earl of Morton,’ he read, ‘that the Queen will hear no speech of the matter arranged with him.’
Bothwell laughed to see the dropped jaws, aghast at this rebuff. But she, confident in the help of high Heaven—which had plucked her, as she said, from the brink of the pit—had recovered all her audacity. And so she waited, almost happy again, for the return of her messenger.
Des-Essars was gone for more than a week; it was not until the ninth day from his departure that he brought back his report. I know not what she had expected—some miraculous dealing or another by which God was to signify that she was set free to follow her desires; but whatever it was, the young Brabanter could not end her suspense. So far as the doctors could judge, the King’s illness might be sweated out of him: they were trying that when he left. The fever must run its course; no one could say that it must needs end fatally. Her Majesty was to hope, said the doctors; and so said Des-Essars, giving the word a twist round. To hope! She was worn thin with hoping.
The King was horrible, he told her, and wore a taffeta mask. He was peevish, but not furious; had not enough strength left him for that. He lay and snapped at all who came near him, harmlessly, like a snake robbed of its fang. The light hurt his eyes, so he lay in the dark; but, being extremely curious about himself, he had a candle burning constantly beside him, and a hand-glass on the bed, in which he was always looking at his face: a sign of morbid affection of the brain, the doctors considered. The Queen said carelessly, ‘Why, what else hath he ever cared for in life but his own person?’
She asked what he had replied to her message of excuse. Des-Essars, who had not been allowed to talk with him, and had only seen what he did see when the sick man slept, had delivered it by Standen. Through Standen also came the answer. The King’s words were, ‘This much you shall say to the Queen: that I wish Stirling were Jedburgh, and Glasgow the Hermitage, and I the Earl of Bothwell as I lie here; and then I doubt not but she would be quickly with me undesired.’
She flushed, but not with shame. ‘Doth he think me at Stirling? He is out there; but otherwise, my dear, he is right enough.’ She turned away with a sigh. ‘Well, what can I do but wait?’ She was not allowed to wait long.
Bothwell came to see her, and stayed till near midnight in secret talk. It was wild and snowy, much like that night, as Des-Essars remembered, in which Davy had been slain, near a year ago; one of those nights when the mind, unhappy and querulous, calls up every nerve to the extreme point of tension. The young man, apprehensive of any and every evil, kept the watch. He heard the door shut, Bothwell’s step in the corridor; he flew to the antechamber, hoping that she might send for him. But though he waited there an hour or more in miserable suspense, neither daring to show himself nor to leave the place, he heard nothing. Between two and three o’clock in the morning he fell asleep over the table, wrapped in his cloak. As once before, she came in, a candle in her hand, and awoke him by touching his head.