Des-Essars knelt down and kissed the other’s hand. ‘My lord, you have given me a schooling in great love. If the time comes when there shall be need of me, I hope to prove myself your good pupil.’
‘Get up,’ said Huntly, not pleased with this tribute; ‘they serve best who talk least. But you may be sure that the time is at hand when there will be need of more than you and me.’ He looked sadly out of window, across the red roofs, out into the slowly brightening sky. Des-Essars was silent.
They announced the Earl of Bothwell. The Queen put back her hair and wiped her eyes—for Mary Livingstone had thawed her hard grief. She covered herself up to the neck. Bothwell came in, with a low reverence at the door, and made room for Livingstone to go out. She swept by him like a Queen-mother. Queen Mary beckoned him to the bedside, and gave him both her hands to hold. ‘Oh, you have come to me! Oh, you have come to me!’ was all she could say. She could not speak coherently for her full heart. He bent over and kissed her; and for a time they remained so, whispering brokenly to each other and kissing. ‘Have you heard Huntly’s tale?’ she asked him aloud.
He was now sitting composedly by her bed, one leg over the other.
‘Yes, yes, long ago! We have had our talk together.’
She fingered the counterpane. ‘Belike he told you more than I could win of him. He will name no names.’
Bothwell laughed shortly.
‘He is wise. Names make mischief. I could wish his own were as well out of that as mine is. Heard you of Archie’s shoe?’
She had not. He told her of Paris’s discovery in the garden; they both laughed at Archie’s mishap. Bothwell supposed it would cost him five hundred crowns to redeem. We know from Paris that it cost him six.
My Lord Bothwell’s opinion, which he expressed with great freedom, was that Morton and the Douglases had killed the King soon after he had been put to bed. The body had been cold when Paris found it—cold and stiff. Then there was a woman, who had been talking with her neighbours, and found herself under examination in the Tolbooth before she could end her tale. She lived in Thieves’ Row. She declared, and nothing so far had shaken her, that a tick or two after midnight she had heard the scuffling of many feet in the road, and a voice which cried aloud, ‘Pity me, kinsmen, for the love of Him who pitied all the world!’ She heard it distinctly; but, being in bed, and accustomed to hear such petitions, did not get up, and soon after fell asleep. Also there had been heard a boy crying, ‘Enough to break your heart,’ she said. But it had not broken her rest, for all that. This was the story, and——‘Well, now,’ says my Lord Bothwell, ‘what else are you to make of that?’