Rizzio: A Novella

All night, the major players are gathered in Darnley’s audience chamber. Darnley’s father, Lennox, has appeared. He is there with Ruthven, Morton and all the lords who were overlooked and sidelined by Mary.

These men are all landed aristocracy. They’re all white, between the ages of twenty and sixty, and, literally, entitled. These are the men who fill history books with their squabbles and claims and resentments. The Great Men of History.

These men know they are great. They feel confident that they have just changed the course of history with their forcefulness and righteous vigour. They haven’t. Their plans will be usurped by a dumpy widow-woman carrying a piss pot.

But for now, these insurgents sit in Darnley’s audience chamber imagining themselves seen through the prism of time: great men standing up for each other, preserving their estates and turning Scotland to Calvinism. Lennox courted Mary’s mother in her widowhood but was rejected. He courted Mary but she was having none of it. He’s a power-worshipping, child-murdering pragmatist who can’t even commit to a side in the Reformation. He’s somehow Protestant enough for Henry VIII but Catholic enough for Bloody Mary.

Lennox dominates the conversation. He says less than everyone else yet every turn in the debate is driven by him, every decision set up by his few words.

He is tall, like his son Darnley. A long man, thin of body, slightly withered about the face. He fed Mary his idiot son and now he’s working him from the back. Persistence has paid off.

He can hear her pacing in her bed chamber upstairs and tells the company, ‘That’s the problem.’

‘That’s a problem,’ says Ruthven.

‘Like Rizzio,’ says Lennox. ‘A problem. Her and Rizzio’s baby.’ He smiles and nods to his cuckold son, who knows he is not a cuckold. Darnley smiles back, thinks there is nothing worse than his father smiling. No good has ever come of it.

‘Yes, but we wish the lady no harm,’ says Lord Lindsay, who is always the weak link. He’s standing in the middle of the room, a short, stubby man who does not take wine and no one knows why. He’s never drunk, and it makes him seem peculiar and annoying. ‘We will hold her and the baby prisoner in Stirling Castle.’

‘For how long?’ asks Lennox, letting Lindsay find the flaw in his own cloth.

‘As long as need be,’ says Lindsay.

‘How long is that then?’

‘Certainly for the rest of their lives if necessary. She’ll like it there. She can nurse it and go in the yard for exercise and shoot her new bow and do embroidery. That is fitting.’ And so Lindsay witters on, never cutting a thought short or wondering why, among all of these great men of the world, he alone is holding the floor. The rest of them know better than to talk too much.

‘So we will not kill her,’ says Lennox, apparently concurring.

‘That is decided,’ says Lindsay.

‘But what if the lords who have been visited by Lord Ruthven and let go this evening come back and try a counter-coup? Take the Queen from us and use her as their head?’

‘You mean if Stirling Castle is not secure enough? What then?’

‘Yes.’

Lindsay makes a sad face and glances at Darnley. ‘I can’t say…’

Darnley isn’t going to either. He pours himself a drink and turns away. Will they imprison him in Stirling Castle too? If they kill Mary will they kill him? Even his father being there is no guarantee that they won’t. Lennox wouldn’t hesitate to allow his own son’s execution if it were expedient. Darnley knows that.

‘And if she bears a boy…’ says Lennox, talking about his own grandchild.

‘Oh no, it’ll be a girl,’ says Ruthven. ‘I know it. I know the signs. There’s no threat in letting the infant live. So we won’t kill it. That would be improper.’

Thus Lennox and Morton and Lindsay all agree that they should not kill Mary or the baby because it’s only a girl and Stirling Castle is secure. Their cold eyes dart to Darnley. Definitely.

‘An Italian girl,’ muses Lennox, already developing a defence.

Mary is carrying Darnley’s baby. He knows that and so does Lennox. Darnley knew Rizzio. He had Rizzio many times. Darnley likes boys and girls, but Rizzio didn’t, and the baby Mary is carrying was conceived at the very start of their marriage, when Mary was infatuated with him. She adored him. ‘The best-proportioned long man I ever saw,’ she said of him. Darnley knows it’s his child they’re deciding not to kill, and he does care, but only in as much as the suggestion slights him. Not one iota more.

His father gives him another crooked smile. Darnley reciprocates. He may be drunk but he can see the other men’s hooded eyes and half smiles; he knows they don’t respect him. And Ruthven and Lindsay are sitting down again in his company, he realises. They haven’t even asked his permission.

Just then, Morton, the second man to Lennox, saunters into the audience chamber, without permission or invitation, as if he owned the place. Everyone in the company startles at the breach of etiquette, and Lord Morton realises what he has done and gives a small regretful cry. ‘Oh!’ he says, shuffling backwards. ‘Beg pardon!’ He looks to Lennox.

‘Come in, Morton… No, you’re most welcome.’ Lennox waves a hand towards a bench at a nearby table. Morton bows courteously, slips into the middle of the company and takes a seat.

There is a time lapse before Darnley realises what the fury in his chest is: Morton should look to him for permission to enter – not just because these are his rooms, not just because of that, but because he is the King. He will be their King from tonight. They should all remember who is in charge here, what the plan was.

Unsure of his authority, feeling himself threatened, he reaches for his dagger, just to touch it, to comfort himself as if he’s cupping his balls, but he finds it gone. He had it earlier. He knows he did.

He recalls the last time he felt powerful.

It was upstairs when they got Rizzio. Yes. He should give an order in front of everyone and then they’ll see that he’s in charge. He stands unsteadily and shouts to the guards to come in from the stairwell.

The Great Men of History stop talking and look up, interested but in no way bothered, as four of the guards enter through the doors.

‘Get David Rizzio’s body out of her rooms,’ he orders. ‘Take it downstairs.’

The guards leave. Darnley turns back to the company and, in the lull before the conversation restarts, they all hear the Queen pacing back and forth in her bedroom.

His wife is up there, waiting for the killers to come for her and the baby.

Then they hear the sound from the stairwell: outside the open door they hear Rizzio’s bloody corpse being rolled down the stairs. It slaps heavily from stone step to stone step, losing momentum as it flops to a stop outside the door of this chamber. It sounds very wet. Darnley wants to move away from the door but thinks that would a bad thing to do, an undermining thing. He drains his drink as the guards speak quietly out on the stairs. Someone grunts with effort. A sloppy thing shifts, there is a hissing as a wet weight is dragged across the sandstone. Another grunt, a heel shoving maybe, and the body flops down the next set of stairs. Darnley imagines the smeared red carpet it leaves in its wake. He remembers what they did to David, remembers passing the red mess of him crumpled in the window recess. He didn’t even look at it that closely but now he feels sick very suddenly and for no reason.

The Master of Guards comes back in alone. He sidles up to Darnley and whispers that they have done what he asked. He also tells him that the porter asked, and was permitted, to strip the fine clothes from the body.

Darnley doesn’t understand why the guard is telling him this. It’s a domestic detail and he’s the fucking King. He wants to slap the man in the face, but the guard keeps rattling out details: Rizzio’s bloody body is now naked and on display, lying over a trunk, and, per Lord Morton’s order, the only dagger left in the body is Darnley’s.

The guard holds his eye, bows and retreats.

Who was the guard? He was no one, a mean man of history, but he has changed the course of the night, snatched history from the hands of the Great, because on hearing this – Lord Morton’s order, only your dagger – the horrified realisation dawns on Darnley that they are putting his hand on all the dirty business. It’s a set-up. He will not be made King. That was never the plan.

He scans the room with inebriate eyes and admits it: these men don’t think he’s a king, they think he’s an idiot. But what can he do? Over the course of the next hour he gets so drunk that he passes out on his bed and wakes at six o’clock with a start. Before he even opens his eyes he remembers what happened last night.

He sits up, pain sloshing around his head, picks his steps through the retainers sleeping on his floor and makes his way upstairs. The door is locked on the other side.

‘Mary.’ He daren’t shout because the others mustn’t know he’s here. ‘Mary, let me in, please, it’s me. Please, Mary? Please? Let me in, let me talk to you. Mary?’

The door opens and the Queen stands there, bedraggled and red-eyed. She hasn’t been to sleep yet, and she grabs his shirt and pulls him into the bed chamber. She locks the door after him and turns and cups his hands in hers and hisses angrily at her husband, ‘I thought they killed you in the night.’

Darnley starts to weep, snivelling, frightened. She’s glad he’s not dead. She doesn’t mistake him for an ally but she still holds his hands as he sinks, sobbing, to his knees. ‘I’m so, so sorry. I’m sorry for last night.’

‘For David?’

‘For David, of course, for David.’

‘He loved you, Henry. He loved you, and you let these traitors kill him. He’s just a scapegoat.’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he laments, burying his face in her skirts. He isn’t really sorry. She knows it and he knows it and if Rizzio were alive he would know it too. There is something wrong with Darnley, something missing. He has none of the finer feelings a human being has. He is a different kind of thing. ‘Forgive me, Mary. Can you forgive me?’

‘You only repent what causes you trouble.’ She pulls her hands away. ‘You broke your oath to protect me. You lied and you’ll do it again.’

‘I won’t.’

‘I can’t trust you. I don’t know who I can trust now.’

‘Mary, Mary… Listen… I can show you that you can trust me. I can tell you things.’ He scrambles to his feet and dries his nose with his sleeve. ‘They talked all night. They’re planning to hold you hostage in Stirling Castle for the rest of your life. They’re going to keep you there, you and the child.’

Child hostages have a special resonance in his family. They both know this.

‘Not only us. They’ll hold you there too.’

‘I believe so.’

She watches his fine hands slapping tears from his cheeks. This is why he’s here. He got a fright and he wants to change sides. ‘But I can’t trust you, Henry.’

‘You can!’ He watches the door he came through, thinking but not saying, I can’t trust them.

Mary knows how to play him. ‘No, you’re a liar. Truth means nothing to you. Now, should you make some gesture to show me I can trust you–’

‘Wait,’ he says and pushes past her. ‘Wait for me.’

He scurries down the stairwell and comes straight back holding two vellum documents roughly folded in three. He hands them to her unblushingly, smiling, and Mary thinks he looks terribly weary. She opens the documents and reads. It’s the contract they all signed agreeing to this uprising, to the terms of it, detailing who is getting what, and it has a list of signatures of everyone involved and their respective seals.

Now she knows exactly who can be trusted and who can’t. Now she knows what they want.

‘You lied to me,’ she says.

Darnley has no defence but says very quietly, ‘I can lie just as well to them.’