‘If my lord need me,’ she went on, ‘he can send you to Linlithgow, where I shall lie one night. Thence I shall go directly to Craigmillar with the King’s litter. It is late, and I must go to bed, if not to sleep. Other women lie abed, comforted, or to be comforted before daylight; but that cannot I be as yet. Now go, Paris.’
He said, ‘Madam, be of good heart. All things come by waiting.’
She sighed, but said nothing. He made his reverence, and away.
CHAPTER VI
KIRK O’ FIELD
The Earl of Bothwell returned to Edinburgh the day before the Queen was to leave Glasgow, and sent for Des-Essars to come to his lodging. ‘Baptist,’ he said, ‘I understand that her Majesty will be at Linlithgow this night, with the King in his litter. She will look to see me there, but I cannot go, with all my affairs in this town out of train and no one to overlook them but myself. I desire you, therefore, to go with the escort that is to meet her, and to give her this message from me: “It has not been found possible to accommodate the King at Craigmillar, but a house has been got for him near Saint-Mary-in-the-Field, and properly furnished. Please your Majesty, therefore, direct his bearers thither.”’
He made him repeat the words two or three times until he was sure of them; then added, ‘If the Queen ask you more concerning this house, with intent to know more, and not for mere curiosity, you shall tell her that it is near the great house of the Hamiltons, in the which the Archbishop now lodges. She will be satisfied with that, you will find, and ask you no more.’
Des-Essars understood him perfectly; but in case the reader do not, I shall remind him that this Archbishop Hamilton of Saint Andrews was brother of the old Duke of Châtelherault, of whom he used to hear in the beginning of this book—one of the clan, then, which disputed the Succession with the Lennox Stuarts and was regarded by the King as an hereditary enemy, with a blood-feud neither quenched nor quenchable. That same Archbishop, when the Queen was at Stirling for the baptism, scaring of the King, recall of Morton and the rest of the deeds done there, had been restored to his consistorial powers, and put at liberty to bind and loose according to his discretion and that of Saint Peter his master. There had been some talk at the time as to why he had been so highly favoured, and the opinion commonly held that he was to divorce the Queen from the King. That was not French Paris’s opinion, for one. In Edinburgh now, at any rate, was this Archbishop Hamilton with the keys of binding and loosing in his hands, not as yet making any use of them, and lodging in the great family house without the city wall.
Well, the escort departed for Linlithgow, Des-Essars with it. This is what he says of his adored mistress: