it is. You know from your own life. I fell in love with him, un coup de foudre. I was mad for him.”
Silently, I shake my head. I have been married four times and never yet been in love. For me, marriage has always been a carefully considered business contract, and I don’t know what coup de foudre even means, and I don’t like the sound of it.
“Well, voilà, I married Darnley, partly to spite your Queen Elizabeth, partly for policy, partly for love, in haste, and regretted it soon enough. He was a drunkard and a sodomite. A wreck of a boy. He took it into his stupid head that I had a lover and he lighted upon the only good advisor I had at my court, the only man I could count on. David Rizzio was my secretary and advisor, my Cecil if you like. A steady good man that I could trust. Darnley let his bullies into my private rooms and they killed him before my very eyes, in my chamber, poor David…” She breaks off. “I could not stop them, God knows I tried. The men came for him and poor David ran to me. He hid behind me, but they dragged him out. They would have killed me too: one of them held a pistol against my belly, my unborn son quickening as I screamed. Andrew Kerr his name was—I don’t forget it, I don’t forgive him. He put the barrel of his pistol to my belly and my little son’s foot pressed back. I thought he would shoot me and my unborn child inside me. I thought he would kill us both. I knew then that the Scots are beyond ruling, they are madmen.”
She holds her hands over her eyes as if to block out the sight of it even now. I nod in silence. I don’t tell her that we knew of the plot in England. We could have protected her, but we chose not to do so. We could have warned her but we did not. Cecil decided that we should not warn her, but leave her, isolated and in danger. We heard the news that her own court had turned on her, her own husband had become corrupt, and it amused us: thinking of her alone with those barbarians. We thought she would be forced to turn to England for help.
“The lords of my court killed my own secretary in front of me, as I stood there trying to shield him. Before me—a Princess of France.” She shakes her head. “After that it could only get worse. They had learned their power. They held me captive; they said they would cut me in pieces and throw my body in bits from the terrace of Stirling Castle.”
My women are aghast. One of them gives a little sigh of horror and thinks about fainting. I scowl at her.
“But you escaped?”
At once she smiles a mischievous grin, like a clever boy. “Such an adventure! I turned Darnley back to my side and I had them lower us out of the window. We rode for five hours through the night, though I was six months pregnant, and at the end of the road, in the darkness, Bothwell and his men were waiting for us and we were safe.”
“Bothwell?”
“He was the only man in Scotland I could trust,” she says quietly. “I learned later he was the only man in Scotland who had never taken a bribe from a foreign power. He is a Scot and loyal to my mother and to me. He was always on my side. He raised an army for me and we returned to Edinburgh and banished the murderers.”
“And your husband?”
She shrugs. “You must know the rest. I could not part from my husband while I was carrying his child. I gave birth to my son and Bothwell guarded him and me. My husband Darnley was murdered by his former friends. They planned to kill me too but it happened I was not in the house that night. It was nothing more than luck.”
“Terrible, terrible,” one of my women whispers. They will be converting to Papacy next out of sheer fellow feeling.
“Yes indeed,” I say sharply to her. “Go and fetch a lute and play for us.” So that gets her out of earshot.
“I had lost my secretary and my husband, and my principal advisors were his murderers,” she said. “I could get no help from my family in France, and