‘Whose is the vulture-mind in this?’ she asked, but received no reply from her stony brother. She bade them stop their nasty play and deliver up the corpse to Lady Huntly to be buried. Then she learned that the widow and her daughter and the condemned lord had been present. She turned pale: ‘I had no hand in this—I had no hand!’ she cried out breathlessly, and was for telling the mourners. Adam Gordon told her that they would be very sure of it.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘I will trust them to be as true-minded as thou.’
She shortly refused to allow Gordon’s execution, and told her brother so.
‘You and your friends,’ said she, ‘have paddled your hands long enough. Go you to your homes and wash. The Lord Gordon shall go to Dunbar to await my pleasure.’
‘Tell him,’ she said to Adam, ‘that because he asked not his life I give it him; and say also that I trust him to make no escape from Dunbar. Remind him of his words to me aforetime. If I trust him again he must not prove me a fool.’
They say that, at this pungent instance of royal clemency, Lady Huntly broke down, fell before her, and would have kissed her feet. The Queen whipped them under her gown.
‘Get up, madam. But get up! That is no place for the afflicted. You do not see your daughter there.’
It was very true. Lady Jean stood, composed and serious.
‘How shall I find the way into that fenced heart?’ thinks the Queen.
But now she turned her face eagerly towards England, whither, Mr. Secretary Lethington assured her, ran an open, smiling road.