Next day my lady had him up again to her chamber and gave him letters for Edinburgh: a large packet for a notary, one Balnaves or Balneaves, another for the Archbishop’s Grace of Saint Andrews at Hamilton House.
‘Deliver these with speed, Paris, and come back to me—but not here. I shall be at Crichton expecting you—and give you a packet for my lord.’
This is how Paris learned that process of divorce was begun. He dates it the 26th-27th April.
Demure, wide-eared scamp! he was not idle in town, I assure you; but ran from cawsey to cawsey, from tavern-parlour to still-room, into all churches, chapels, brothels, about the quays of Leith, up and down the tenement stairs, spying, watching, judging, and remembering. He was most amazed at the preachers, whose licence to talk exceeded all bounds of belief. There was one Cragg, well named for a rock-faced, square-hewn man, colleague of Mr. Knox’s: to listen only to this firebrand! This Cragg—Paris heard him—rocked screaming and sweating over the brink of his pulpit, and hailed his Queen a Jezebel, a Potiphar’s wife, a strumpet of the Apocalypse. ‘And I could have wrung his brazen neck for him,’ said Paris, ‘but that all the people stood packed about him murmuring their agreement. It would have been my death to have declared myself—and I was vowed to return to my lord.’
The city seemed to be in the governance of the Earl of Morton, unsuspected of any hand in the late crime, and of Lord Lindsay, whom all hot gospellers loved. Close in with them was Grange—Kirkcaldy of Grange—a very busy man, Marshal of the City, Captain of the Guard, who kept surveillance of Holyrood and the lower town. Paris perceived that he was lieutenant to Lord Morton, a cultivable person if willing to be cultivated. About his doors, every day and at all hours of the day, he saw messengers stand with horses ready. Now and again one would come out with his despatches bound upon him, mount and ride off—south, north, west. Similarly, others came in, white with dust, and delivered up their charges to the porter at the door. Paris, never without resource, inquired into the matter, and found out with whom Grange corresponded. With my Lord of Atholl at Perth! With my Lord of Moray in Paris! With Mr. Secretary Cecil in London! Why, this was treasonable stuff, hanging stuff, as he told his informant—Gavin Douglass, body-servant to Mr. Archie of the name—who knew it as well as he did.
‘Oh, ay, you make up your mind to the treason o’t, Paris,’ says Gavin; ‘but I recommend you let not my master catch you in this town. You have had six hundred gold crowns of his for the price of an old shoe—he has never ceased to talk of it, believe me. No later than yesterday he was at it, saying that pretty soon he could afford to give all his clothing to the world and stand up mother-naked as he was born, and be none the worse. “And to think,” says he, “to think I could be such a custard-faced loon as to buy back my slipper from a rogue I shall be hanging in a week.”’
Paris was indignant and hurt. ‘I can see,’ he said, ‘that the lords of Scotland are at their favourite game of beggar-my-neighbour. Dieu de Dieu! what else could we have expected? Your Scotch way: roguery upon roguery, thieves on thieves’ backs, traitors who betray their co-traitors—hogs and rats, one and all!’
He left Edinburgh much alarmed at the state of its affairs, determined to be done with the Countess at Crichton and back again in Dunbar as soon as might be; but, greatly to his annoyance, her ladyship, being busy with her law business, kept him four or five days kicking his heels: it was the 4th of May before she delivered him her packet. That was a coffer, strongly bound and clamped with iron, locked and sealed.
At the moment of his going Lady Bothwell said to him, ‘Tell my lord, Paris, that this day he and I are free of each other; tell him that here I am and here remain.’
Paris, always the servant of a fine woman, knelt upon one knee. ‘My lady,’ he said, ‘your ladyship has never loved me, but I take God to witness that I have ever honoured your ladyship. Albeit I am a poor devil of a lacquey, madam, I have wit enough to know a great lady when I see her.’