‘“I love you, Baptist, when you look at me like that, and your words find echo in your eyes. Now I will tell you that the joy of seeing you again had much to say to my good looks. But I think that women would always rather look well than be well.”
‘As soon as my Lord Huntly had come in and dined, we departed from Linlithgow. Her Majesty rode on with that lord, Lord Livingstone and the others, leaving me behind with Mr. Erskine and the ladies, to conduct the King’s litter safely to the house prepared for him. I did not see his face nor hear him speak, but understood that he was greatly better. His hand, which was often outside the curtains, waving about, looked that of a clean man. He kept it out there, my Lady Reres told me, in the hope that her Majesty would see and touch it. Once, when it had been signalling about for some while, her ladyship said, “’Tis a black shame there should be a man’s hand wagging and no woman’s to slip into it.” So then she let him get hold of hers; and he, thinking he had the Queen’s, squeezed and fondled it until she was tired. We got him by nightfall into a mean little house, set in a garden the most disconsolate and weed-grown that ever you saw. It was a wild, wet evening, and as we went down Thieves’ Row the deplorable inhabitants of that street of stews and wicked dens were at their doors watching us. As we came by they pointed to the gable of the house, and uttered harsh and jeering cries. Lady Reres screamed and covered her face. There was perched an old raven on the gable-end, that croaked like any philosopher in the dumps; and as we set down the litter in the roadway, he flapped his ragged wings twice or thrice, and flew off into the dark, trailing his legs behind him. The people thought it an ill-omen....’
Here, for the time being, I forsake Des-Essars, and that for two reasons: the first, that I have a man to hand who knew more; the second, that what little the Brabanter did know he did not care to tell. A more than common acquaintance with his work assures me that his secret preoccupied him from hereabouts to the end—that Secret des Secrets of his which he thought so important as to have written his book for nothing else but to hold it. We shall come upon it all in good time, and see more evidently than now we do another, and what we may call supererogatory secret, which is that he grew bolder in his passion for the Queen, and she, perhaps, a little inclined to humour it. But for the present we leave him, and turn to the brisk narrative of one who knew nearly everything that was to be known, and could hazard a sharp guess at things which, it almost seems, could never perfectly be known. I mean, of course, our assured friend French Paris—bought, once for all, with a crown piece.
French Paris asks, in his bright way, ‘Do you know that lane that runs straight from the Cowgate to the old house by the Blackfriars—the Blackfriars’ Wynd, as they call it?’ You nod your head, and he continues. ‘Well, towards the end of that same lane, if you wish to reach the convent house, you pass through the ancient wall of the city by a gate in it which is called the Kirk o’ Field Port. This will lead you to the Blackfriars’ Church, but not until you have turned the angle of the wall and followed the road round it towards the left hand. Within that angle stands another church, Saint Mary-of-the-Field, which has nothing to do with what I have to tell you. But mark what I say now. You go through the Kirk o’ Field Port; you turn to the left round by the wall; on your right hand, at no great distance along, you behold a row of poor hovels at right angles to your present direction—doorless cabins, windowless, without chimneys, swarming with pigs, fowls, and filthy children; between them a very vile road full of holes and quags and broken potsherds. That is called Thieves’ Row, and for the best of good reasons. Nevertheless, behind those little pigs’ houses, on either hand, there are gardens very fair; and if you venture up, above the thatch of the roofs you will see the tops of fine trees waving in a cleaner air than you would believe possible, and find in the full middle of this Thieves’ Row, again on either hand, a garden gate right in among the mean tenements. That which is on the right hand leads into the old Blackfriars’ Garden, a great tangled place of trees and greensward with thickets interspersed; the other, on the left hand, belongs to the garden of the house wherein they lodged the King when they had brought him from Glasgow. Above the gate could once be seen the gable-end of the house itself; but you will not see it now if you look for it. And if you stood in the garden of his house and looked out over the boskage, you could see the hotel of the Lord Archbishop of Saint Andrews, the Hamilton House. Usefully enough, as it turned out, there let a little door from the corner of the King’s garden right upon the Archbishop’s house.
‘To tell you of the King’s lodging, it was as mean as you please, built of rough-cast work upon arches of rubble and plaster, with a flight of stairs from the ground-level reaching to the first floor—the piano nobile, save the mark! Upon that floor was a fair hall, and a chamber in which the Queen might lie when she chose, wardrobe, maids’ chamber, cabinet, and such like. The King lay on the floor above, having his own chamber for his great bed, with a little dressing-room near by. His servants, of whom he had not more than three or four, slept some in the passage and some in the hall; except his chamber-child, who lay in the bedchamber itself, on or below the foot of the King’s great bed. Now those stairs of which I told you just now led directly from the garden to the hall upon the first floor; but out of the Queen’s chamber there was a door giving on to a flight of wooden steps, very convenient, as thereby she could come in and out of the house without being disturbed. All this I observed for myself, as my master desired me, when Nelson, the King’s man, was showing me how ill-furnished and meanly found it was to be the lodging of so great a gentleman.
‘To say nothing of the garden, which, in that winter season, was miserable indeed, I was bound to agree that the house wanted repair. Nelson showed me where the roof let in water; he showed me the holes of rats, the track of their runs across the floors, and the places where they had gnawed the edges of the doors. “And, if you will believe me, Paris,” said he, “there is not so much as a key to a lock in the whole crazy cabin.” This was a thing which I was glad to have learned, and to bring to my master’s knowledge when, at the last moment, he thought fit to acquaint me with his pleasure. I had heard, in outline, what it was, on the day before I went to the Queen at Glasgow; but I will ask you to believe that he told me no more until the morning of the day when I received his commands to go to work. This is entirely true; though it is equally true that I found out a good deal for myself. My master, you must understand, had not a fool under his authority. No, no!
‘I did not myself see the Queen for two or three days after the King’s coming in, though I took many letters to her and bore back her replies. When I say I did not see her, that is a lie: I did—but never to speak with her, merely as one may pass in the street. I was struck with her fine looks and the shrill sound of her laughter: she talked more than ordinarily, and never spared herself in the dance. Once, or maybe twice, she visited the King in his lodging—not to sleep there herself, though her bed stood always ready, but going down to supper and remaining till late in the evening: never alone; once with the Lords Moray and Argyll, and once with (among other company) her brother, the Lord Robert, and a Spanish youth very much in his confidence. As to this second visit, Monsieur Des-Essars, who was there, told me a singular thing,[8] namely, that this Lord Robert had been moved to impart to the King the danger he lay in—that is, close to the Hamiltons, and with my Lord Morton at large and in favour in Edinburgh. Now, for some reason or another, it seems that his Majesty repeated the confidence to the Queen herself just as I have told it to you. Whereupon, said Monsieur Des-Essars, she flew into a passion, commanded the Lord Robert into her presence, and when he was before her, the King lying on his bed, bade him repeat the story if he dare. My Lord Robert laughed it off as done by way of a jest, and the Queen, more and more angry, sent him away. Now, here comes what I call the cream of the jest. “You may judge from this, Paris,” said M. Des-Essars to me, “how monstrous foolish it is to suppose that the Queen devises some mischief against her consort, or shares the counsels of any of his enemies. For certainly, if she did, she would not provoke them into betraying her in his own presence.”
‘I thanked his honour, but when he had gone I burst out laughing to myself. Do you ask why? First of all, none knew better than M. Des-Essars how the Queen stood with regard to her husband, and why my lord of Morton had been suffered to come home. None knew better than he, except it were the Queen herself, that the King was to be removed, she standing aside. Very well: then why did M. Des-Essars try to hoodwink me, except in the hope to gather testimony on all sides against what he feared must take place? But why did the Queen bring my Lord Robert face to face with the King, she knowing too well that his warning had bones and blood in it? Ah! that is more delicate webbery: she was a better politician than her young friend. To begin with, there was no real danger; for the Lord Robert knew nothing, and was nothing but a windbag. His confusion, therefore (he was at heart a coward), would give the King confidence. But, secondly, I am sure she still hoped that his Majesty might be removed without my master’s aid. I think she said to herself, “The King gains his health”—as indeed he did, with his natural skin coming back again, and the clear colour to his eyes—“and with health,” she would reason it, “his choler will return. To confront these two, with a lie between them, may provoke a quarrel. The daggers are handy: who can say what the end of this may be? One of two mishaps: the King will kill Lord Robert, or Lord Robert the King; either way will be good.” Observe, I know nothing; but that is how I read the story.
‘Now, all this while my master was very busy, very brisk and happy, singing at the top of his voice as he went about his business—as he always did on the verge of a great enterprise; but the first precise information I had that our work was close at hand was upon 9th February, being a Sunday. My master lodging at the Lord Huntly’s house in the Cowgate, I was standing at the door at, maybe, seven o’clock in the morning; black as Hell it was, but the cold not extraordinary. There came some woman down the street with a lantern swinging, and stopped quite close to me. She swung her lantern-light into my face, and, the moment she saw that I was I, began to speak in an urgent way. She was Margaret Carwood, one of the Queen’s women.
‘“Oh, Paris,” she says, “I have been sent express to you! You are to go down to the King’s lodging and fetch away the quilt which lies on the Queen’s bed there.”