The Rafael Sabatini Megapack. Rafael Sabatini

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СКАЧАТЬ through to him of the Craigmillar bond. He had been told that a letter drawn up there had been presented to her for her signature, which she had refused. Thus much he told her, adding that he could not believe that she would do him any hurt; and yet why did she desire to bear him to Craigmillar?

      “You have been told lies,” she answered him. “I saw no such letter; I subscribed none, nor was ever asked to subscribe any,” which indeed was literally true. “To this I swear. As for your going to Craigmillar, you shall go whithersoever you please, yourself.”

      He sank back on his pillows, and his trembling subsided.

      “I believe thee, Mary. I believe thou’ld never do me any harm,” he repeated, “and if any other would,” he added on a bombastic note, “they shall buy it dear, unless they take me sleeping. But I’ll never to Craigmillar.”

      “I have said you shall go where you please,” she assured him again.

      He considered.

      “There is the house at Kirk o’ Field. It has a fine garden, and is in a position that is deemed the healthiest about Edinburgh. I need good air; good air and baths have been prescribed me to cleanse me of this plague. Kirk o’ Field will serve, if it be your pleasure.”

      She gave a ready consent, dispatched messengers ahead to prepare the house, and to take from Holyrood certain furnishings that should improve the interior, and render it as fitting as possible a dwelling for a king.

      Some days later they set out, his misgivings quieted by the tenderness which she now showed him—particularly when witnesses were at hand.

      It was a tenderness that grew steadily during those twelve days in which he lay in convalescence in the house at Kirk o’ Field; she was playful and coquettish with him as a maid with her lover, so that nothing was talked of but the completeness of this reconciliation, and the hope that it would lead to a peace within the realm that would be a benefit to all. Yet many there were who marvelled at it, wondering whether the waywardness and caprice of woman could account for so sudden a change from hatred to affection.

      Darnley was lodged on the upper floor, in a room comfortably furnished from the palace. It was hung with six pieces of tapestry, and the floor was partly covered by an Eastern carpet. It contained, besides the handsome bed—which once had belonged to the Queen’s mother—a couple of high chairs in purple velvet, a little table with a green velvet cover, and some cushions in red. By the side of the bed stood the specially prepared bath that was part of the cure which Darnley was undergoing. It had for its incongruous lid a door that had been lifted from its hinges.

      Immediately underneath was a room that had been prepared for the Queen, with a little bed of yellow and green damask, and a furred coverlet. The windows looked out upon the close, and the door opened upon the passage leading to the garden.

      Here the Queen slept on several of those nights of early February, for indeed she was more often at Kirk o’ Field than at Holy-rood, and when she was not bearing Darnley company in his chamber, and beguiling the tedium of his illness, she was to be seen walking in the garden with Lady Reres, and from his bed he could hear her sometimes singing as she sauntered there.

      Never since the ephemeral season of their courtship had she been on such fond terms with him, and all his fears of hostile designs entertained against him by her immediate followers were stilled at last. Yet not for long. Into his fool’s paradise came Lord Robert of Holyrood, with a warning that flung him into a sweat of panic.

      The conspirators had hired a few trusted assistants to help them carry out their plans, and a rumour had got abroad—in the unaccountable way of rumours—that there was danger to the King. It was of this rumour that Lord Robert brought him word, telling him bluntly that unless he escaped quickly from this place, he would leave his life there. Yet when Darnley had repeated this to the Queen, and the Queen indignantly had sent for Lord Robert and demanded to know his meaning, his lordship denied that he had uttered any such warning, protested that his words must have been misunderstood—that they referred solely to the King’s condition, which demanded, he thought, different treatment and healthier air.

      Knowing not what to believe, Darnley’s uneasiness abode with him. Yet, trusting Mary, and feeling secure so long as she was by his side, he became more and more insistent upon her presence, more and more fretful in her absence. It was to quiet him that she consented to sleep as often as might be at Kirk o’ Field. She slept there on the Wednesday of that week, and again on Friday, and she was to have done so yet again on that fateful Sunday, February 9th, but that her servant Sebastien—one who had accompanied her from France, and for whom she had a deep affection—was that day married, and Her Majesty had promised to be present at the masque that night at Holyrood, in honour of his nuptials.

      Nevertheless, she did not utterly neglect her husband on that account. She rode to Kirk o’ Field early in the evening, accompanied by Bothwell, Huntly, Argyll, and some others; and leaving the lords at cards below to while away the time, she repaired to Darnley, and sat beside his bed, soothing a spirit oddly perturbed, as if with some premonition of what was brewing.

      “Ye’ll not leave me the night,” he begged her once.

      “Alas,” she said, “I must! Sebastien is being wed, and I have promised to be present.”

      He sighed and shifted uneasily.

      “Soon I shall be well, and then these foolish humours will cease to haunt me. But just now I cannot bear you from my sight. When you are with me I am at peace. I know that all is well. But when you go I am filled with fears, lying helpless here.”

      “What should you fear?” she asked him.

      “The hate that I know is alive against me.”

      “You are casting shadows to affright yourself,” said she.

      “What’s that?” he cried, half raising himself in sudden alarm. “Listen!”

      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 СКАЧАТЬ