From the room below came faintly a sound of footsteps, accompanied by a noise as of something being trundled.
“It will be my servants in my room—putting it to rights.”
“To what purpose since you do not sleep there tonight?” he asked. He raised his voice and called his page.
“Why, what will you do?” she asked him, steadying her own alarm.
He answered her by bidding the youth who had entered go see what was doing in the room below. The lad departed, and had he done his errand faithfully, he would have found Bothwell's followers, Hay and Hepburn, and the Queen's man, Nicholas Hubert better known as French Paris—emptying a keg of gunpowder on the floor immediately under the King's bed. But it happened that in the passage he came suddenly face to face with the splendid figure of Bothwell, cloaked and hatted, and Bothwell asked him whither he went.
The boy told him.
“It is nothing,” Bothwell said. “They are moving Her Grace's bed in accordance with her wishes.”
And the lad, overborne by that commanding figure which so effectively blocked his path, chose the line of lesser resistance. He went back to bear the King that message as if for himself he had seen what my Lord Bothwell had but told him.
Darnley was pacified by the assurance, and the lad withdrew.
“Did I not tell you how it was?” quoth Mary. “Is not my word enough?”