The other queen

1569, DECEMBER, COVENTRY: MARY

Aletter came, while you were sleeping.” Agnes Livingstone wakes me with a gentle touch to my shoulder in the early morning. “One of the soldiers brought it in.”

My heart leaps. “Give it to me.”

She hands it over. It is a little scrap of paper from Westmorland, his pinched script blurred with rain. Not even in code. It says to keep my faith and my hopes high, he will not be defeated, he will not forget me. If not this time, then another. I will see Scotland again, I will be free.

I struggle to sit up and wave to Agnes to move the candle closer so I can see if anything more is written on the paper. I was expecting him to tell me when they would come for me, of his rendezvous with the Spanish. This reads like a prayer, and I was expecting a plan. If it had been a note from Bothwell he would have told me where I should be and at what time; he would have told me what I should do. He would not have told me to keep my hopes high or that he would not forget me. We never spoke so to each other.

But if it had been Bothwell’s note, there would have been no mournful tone. Bothwell never thought of me as a tragic princess. He thinks of me as a real woman in danger. He does not worship me as a work of art, a beautiful thing. He serves me as a soldier; he takes me as a hard-hearted man; he rescues me as a vassal serves a monarch in need. I don’t think he ever promised me anything he did not attempt.

If it had been Bothwell, there would have been no tragic farewell. There would have been a hard-riding party of desperate men, coming by night, armed to kill and certain to win. But Bothwell is lost to me, in prison at Malmц, and I have to trust to the protection of such as Shrewsbury, the determination of Norfolk, and the daring of Westmorland, three uncertain, fearful men, God damn them. They are women compared to my Bothwell.

I tell Agnes to hold the candle close and I bring the note up to the flame, hoping that I will see the secret writing of alum or lemon juice turning brown in the heat. Nothing. I scorch my fingers and pull them away. He has sent me nothing but this note of regret, of nostalgia. It is not a plan; it is a lament, and I can’t bear sentiment.

I don’t know what is happening; this note tells me nothing, it teaches me nothing but dread. I am very afraid.

To comfort myself, without hope of reply, I write to the man who is utterly free of sentiment.

I fear that Westmorland has failed me and the Spanish have not sailed and the Pope’s bull dethroning Elizabeth has not been published. I know that you are no saint, worse: I know that you are a murderer. I know you are a criminal fit for the scaffold and you will undoubtedly burn in hell.

So come. I don’t know who will save me if you do not. Please come. You are, as before, my only hope.

Marie