Read Ebook: Bothwell; or The Days of Mary Queen of Scots Volume 3 (of 3) by Grant James

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Ebook has 852 lines and 63408 words, and 18 pages

CHAPTER

There was not a sound heard in the mansion, which, at that moment, had no other occupants than the doomed prince, his two pages, and five other attendants,--William Taylor, Thomas Neilson, Simpson, Edwards, and a boy. These occupied apartments at the extremity of the house, but on the same floor with the king. All the other attendants had absconded, to partake of the festivities at Holyrood, or had gone there in the queen's retinue.

"French Paris--Nicholas Hubert," said Bothwell in a husky voice, "the keys!"

Hubert produced them from beneath his mantle. They were a set of false keys which had been made from waxen impressions of the originals. The door was softly opened, and the conspirators entered the lower ambulatory, on each side of which lay a vaulted chamber.

Bolton thought of Hubert's sister, and his heart grew sick; for the brother knew not that his sister was at that time above them, in the chamber of Darnley.

"Come, Master Konrad," said Ormiston, tapping him on the shoulder; "if we are to be friends, assist us, and make thyself useful; for we have little time to spare."

Thus urged, Konrad, though still in profound ignorance as to the object of his companions, and the part he was acting, assisted Ormiston and French Paris to unload the sumpter-horse, and to drag the heavy mails within doors. These he supposed to contain plunder, and then the whole mystery appeared unravelled. His companions were robbers, and the solitary house, about and within which they moved so stealthily, was their haunt and hiding-place. With affected good-will he assisted to convey the mails into the vaults, where, some hours before, Hubert had deposited a large quantity of powder, particularly under the corner or ground stones of the edifice.

While they were thus employed, and while the ex-Lord Chancellor and Whittinghame kept watch, the Earl and John of Bolton ascended softly to the corridor of the upper story, where, by the dim light of a small iron cresset that hung from the pointed ceiling, they saw Andro Macaige, one of the king's pages, lying muffled in his mantle, and fast asleep on a bench.

"Confusion!" said the Earl fiercely; "this reptile must be destroyed, and I have lost my poniard!"

"Must both the pages die?" asked his companion, in a hollow tone.

"Thou shalt soon see!" replied the Earl, who endeavoured, by imitating Ormiston's careless and ruffian manner, to veil from his friends, and from himself, the horror that was gradually paralysing his heart.

They passed the sleeping page unheard, as the floor was freshly laid with rushes, and entered the chamber of the young king--that dimly-lighted chamber of sickness and suffering; where the innumerable grotesque designs of some old prebend of St. Mary, seemed multiplied to a myriad gibbering faces, as the faint and flickering radiance of the night lamp played upon them. The great bed looked like a dark sarcophagus, canopied by a sable pall; and the king's long figure, covered by a white satin coverlet, resembled the effigy of a dead man; and certainly the pale sharp outline of his sleeping face, in no way tended to dispel the dreamy illusion.

Bothwell's fascinated gaze was riveted on him, but Bolton's turned to the page, who was half seated and half reclined on the low bed, and, though fast asleep, lay against the sick king's pillow, with an arm clasping his head.

They seemed to have fallen asleep thus.

The thick dark hair of Mariette fell in disorder about her shoulders; her cheeks were pale and blanched, and blistered by weeping; her long and silky eyelashes were wet and matted with tears; and there was more of despondency than affection in the air with which she drooped beside the king. Her weariness of weeping and sorrow had evidently given way to slumber.

For a moment a blindness fell upon his eyes, and a sickness on his heart; and the Earl said to Hepburn in a hollow accent--

"Thy poniard--thy poniard! Thou hast it! The king, the king! and I will grasp this boy."

At that moment Mariette started, awoke, and uttered a shrill cry of terror on perceiving two armed men with their faces masked.

The king turned uneasily in bed; and, filled with desperation by the imminence of the danger, and the necessity for immediate action, Bothwell approached, the couch. But either Darnley had been awake or instantly became so, and with all his senses about him; for like lightning he sprang from bed--his long illness and attenuation making his lofty stature appear more colossal; he snatched a sword, and, clad only in his shirt and pelisse, rushed upon the intruders. On this, a frenzy seemed to take possession of both conspirators.

Parrying a sword thrust with his mailed arm, Bothwell threw himself upon the weak and powerless Darnley, and struck him down by a blow of the maul he carried.

The wretched king uttered a piercing cry; another and another succeeded, and Bothwell, animated by all the momentary fury of a destroyer, stuffed a handkerchief violently into his mouth, and at that moment he became insensible.

Meanwhile, Bolton, trembling with apprehension, jealousy, horror, and love, clasped Mariette in his arms, and endeavoured to stifle her cries; but she uttered shriek upon shriek, till, maddened by fear and excitement, all the despair of the lover became changed to hatred and clamorous alarm. A spirit of destruction possessed his soul; his nerves seemed turned to iron, his eyes to fire.

He became blind--mad!

She gave him one terrible glance that showed she recognised him, and made one desperate effort to release herself, and to embrace him.

"O Jesu Maria! spare me, dearest Hepburn--spare me! I love thee still--I do--I do! Kill me not--destroy me not thus--thus--with all my sins! Man--devil--spare me! God--God!"

She writhed herself from his hands, and sank upon the floor, where, vibrating between time and eternity, she lay motionless and still. Hepburn's senses were gone--yet he could perceive close by him the convulsed form of the king, with Bothwell's handkerchief in his throat. He was dead.

The terrible deed was done! They sprang away, stumbling over the body of Macaige the page, whom Hay of Tallo had slain in the corridor; and, descending the stairs almost at one bound, came panting and breathless to the side of the cool and deliberate Morton, who, with his sword drawn, stood near Ormiston, and superintended the laying of a train to the powder in the vaults. Then, by the light of the red-orbed moon, that streamed full upon them, did the startled Konrad perceive that Bothwell and Bolton, whose masks were awry, appeared stunned and bewildered. The eyes of the Earl were glazed and haggard; his hands were clenched, and his brow knit with horrible thoughts; his companion was like a spectre; his eyes rolled fearfully, and his hair seemed stiffened and erect.

Konrad recognised them both, and immediately became aware that some deed of darkness had been perpetrated.

"Thou hast done well!" said Ormiston, surveying them grimly.

"Ah, Mariette!" groaned the repentant Bolton; "thy dying cry, and the last glare of thy despairing eyes, will haunt me to my grave!"

"Cock and pie!" cried Ormiston, with astonishment and exasperation; "have we here two bearded men, or two schulebairns blubbering over their Latinities? May a thousand yelling fiends hurl ye both to hell!" he added savagely. "Away! disperse--while I fire the train. The match--the lunt! Hither, Paris--Hubert--thou French villain! quick!"

"Separate!" said the Earl of Morton; "disperse--I go to Dalkeith on the spur. Away!" and, leaping on the horse that had borne the powder, this noble Earl, who at all times was extremely economical of his own person, galloped away, and disappeared over the brae to the southward.

Broad, red, and lurid, on the shadowy night, through all the grated windows of the house of the Kirk-of-Field, there flashed a volume of light--dazzling and blinding light--eclipsing the full-orbed moon and all the sparkling stars--revealing the forms of the shrinking conspirators, and every surrounding object. Full on the massive ramparts of the city, tufted with weeds and blackened by the smoke of years, fell that sudden glow, revealing the strong embrasures that stretched away into far obscurity, the grim bastel-house close by, with its deep-mouthed gunport and peering culverin--on the ivied aisles of Mary's lonely kirk--on the shattered tower of the Dominicans--and displaying even for a gleam the distant woods of Merchiston. The fields quaked--the walls of the mansion shook; and then came a roar, as if the earth was splitting.

The solid masonry rent from copestone to foundation in a hundred ruddy fissures; the massive vaults yawned and opened; the window-gratings were torn asunder like gossamer webs; and a gigantic column of fire and smoke, dust and stones, ascended into the air, as if vomited from the mouth of a volcano, to descend in ruin and darkness on the earth; and a vast pile of rubbish was all that remained of the house of St. Mary-in-the-Fields!

"Ho! ho!" cried Ormiston, with a wild laugh. "Like a bolt from a bow, there goeth Henry Stuart, Lord of Darnley, Duke of Albany, and King of Scotland!"

For a moment Bothwell felt as if he neither lived nor breathed; but Ormiston hurried him away, while all their appalled comrades dispersed in various directions. Konrad, although the whole affair was an incomprehensible mystery to him, acting by the natural instinct of self-preservation, on finding himself deserted by companions whom he dreaded and abhorred, instead of returning to the city, struck into a narrow horseway that led southward, and hurried with all speed from the scene of this terrible explosion; for the whole bearing of those who had so suddenly left him to his own reflections, informed him that it would neither be conducive to his safety or honour to be found in a vicinity so dangerous.

Ignorant of the country, and with no other object than to leave the city far behind him, he traversed the rough and winding path, on one side of which lay a vast lake and the ruins of a convent; on the other, fields marked in the ancient fashion by high rigs, having between deep balks or ditches, where the water lay glistening in the moonlight. Then he entered upon the vast common muir of the burgh, that in the gloom of the night appeared to be bounded only by the distant hills.

At the verge of the muirland, near where a little runnel meandered between banks overhung by reeds and whin and rushes, there stood a little chapel, dedicated in the olden time to St. John the Baptist, having a crucifix and altar, where the wayfarer might pause to offer up a prayer. There a hermit had once resided; and the charter of foundation mentions, that he was clothed "in a white garment, having on his breast a portraiture of St. John the Baptist, whose hermit he was called." The chapel had been partly demolished to pave the road; and even the stone that marked the anchorite's grave, had been torn out for the same purpose. The windows were empty, and the grass grew where the cross had stood on the altar; but there was no other resting-place, and Konrad entered the little ruin with caution.

A lamp was burning on the altar, but the oratory was quite desolate. The nuns of St. Katherine of Sienna had kept, in other days, a light ever burning on the Baptist's shrine, to which they made yearly pilgrimages; and one poor old survivor of the scattered sisterhood still tended the lamp with the labour of religious love.

Uttering a prayer to Heaven for protection, overcome by weariness and exhaustion, Konrad laid by his side the sword given him by Ormiston, and, wrapped in the other gift of the same remarkable personage, composed himself to sleep, leaving to the morrow the study and development of his future plans.

How little he knew of the deed in which he had that night been so unwittingly a participator!

Of Darnley's attendants, all were buried among the ruins save Neilson, who was taken alive from amid the debris next day, and William Taylor the page, whose body was found lying beside the king's. They had both been carried through the air, over the lofty ramparts of the city, into the garden of the Blackfriars, where they were found in their night-clothes, within a few yards of each other, without much external injury, save a wound made by the maul on the king's forehead.

Such was the generally received account of this affair, though the recent and able historian of Scotland asserted, that he had seen documents which proved that the young king had been first assassinated, and then carried into the garden; after which the house was blown up--a useless and dangerous means of causing a more general and immediate alarm.

"Now, Lord Earl," said Ormiston, as they paused breathlessly near the Pleasance Porte; "which way wendest thou?"

"Faith! to my own lodging. Thou knowest that I byde me at the Netherbow, in the turnpike above Bassandyne, that rascally proclamation printer; and we must enter the city separately." The Earl sighed bitterly. "Cock and pie! what dost thou regret?"

"To-night."

"Then, what dost thou fear?"

"To-morrow."

"These scruples come somewhat late, my lord!" said Ormiston, scornfully. "Dost thou doubt the faith of me, or of French Paris? Surely thou knowest my zeal!"

"True! but faith and zeal are very different things."

"'Sblood! Lord Earl, dost thou doubt mine honour?" said Ormiston, laying hand on his sword. "Though I owe thee suit and knight's service, nevertheless I am a baron of coat-armour, whose honour brooks no handling. But let us not quarrel, Bothwell!" he added, on seeing that the spirit of his ally was completely prostrated for the time. "Suspicion will never attach to thee; besides, that Norse knave is abroad, with the well-known cloak and sword of Darnley, which Hubert stole me from his chamber. These, when he is found again, will turn all the vengeance on him; so let us to bed ere the alarm be given--to bed, I say, in peace; for we have the alliance of ten thousand hearts as brave as ever marched to battle."

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