Rizzio: A Novella

Early Saturday evening · 9th March, 1566 Mary’s supper room

Mary, Queen of Scots is six months pregnant, warm and young. She is hosting a supper for her friends in a small turret room on the second floor of the James V Tower, just off her bedroom.

Every day brings her closer to safe.

Edinburgh is cold, but spring flickers at the corner of the eyes. The light has started to change: grey is giving way to blue, the days are longer, the rain feels less spiteful. The hint of renewal is echoed in Mary’s body. Her breasts are full, her cheeks are flush with extra blood, her long slim body is slowly forming into an S.

New life is coming.

She doesn’t know that, right now, half the nobles of Scotland are downstairs, silently storming her Palace. They are skittering around in the dark, two hundred of them, crowding the entrances and overwhelming the guards. They’ve already confiscated all the keys and secured the gates. At this very moment, as she raises a morsel of meat to her mouth, Lord Ruthven and his man Henry Yair are taking the stairs to Darnley’s apartments on the floor below Mary’s.

No one in the supper room hears anything over their kindly chat.

Mary is reflecting brightly to her illegitimate half-sister, Jean, Countess of Argyll, that Edinburgh is cold but that this is the false despair that signals the end of winter. Change is coming, good change. She grew up in Paris and there, she says, the months glide into one another. Here the change of seasons are dramatic. Jean says she likes the drama of it, the stark differences; it’s easier to rejoice in the new rather than something constant and isn’t awareness half the work of gratitude?

Mary likes Jean. She is bright and philosophical, an educated woman, unashamed of being clever or pursuing her interests. Lady Huntly is at the table with them. Mary is not so keen on her. She’s old, and so much has passed between them that Mary can’t quite believe Lady Huntly doesn’t hate her. She never expresses an opinion and she never leaves Mary’s side.

Mary’s suite of apartments, directly above Darnley’s in the tower, is a mirror of his. Both have a large formal audience chamber served by the same grand staircase, and both have a connecting passage from that room to their respective bed chambers. A private staircase joins their bed chambers so that they can visit each other without anyone else knowing: they may be heads of state but they’re also a young married couple. Each of these bedrooms has two small rooms leading off into the turrets that make up the corners of the James V Tower.

Mary likes her little turret rooms. They’re cosy and informal and warm, and this is where she’s hosting her twelve guests this evening.

The guests with highest status are gathered at the table. Various servants and retainers stand or sit against the wall, waiting for a turn at the food.

It’s Lent, and Catholics are fasting, denying themselves for the forty days leading up to Easter to emulate Christ’s sacrifice, but Mary is exempt because she’s pregnant. She can even eat meat. A haunch of venison is sweating in a tureen on the table and the smell of gravy fills the room. It’s rich and sweet and dense. The second flank of diners, those against the wall – several of whom are not Catholic and are free to eat meat anyway – know that whatever their betters don’t eat will come to them so there is an excitement in the air. There are also breads and pies and dried fruit and a warm almond milk pudding that exudes the scent of vanilla and cloves.

The room smells of love and conviviality.

Mary listens to Jean talk on the subject of gratitude, nodding as her sister runs out of thoughts, nodding still as Jean falls silent and picks at her plate. The women’s eyes meet and they smile their fondness for each other. Mary flattens a hand on her belly and feels the baby quickening under her palm. A jump, a kick, a languorous stretch. She savours this moment, this small precious pocket of time when all is well, because who knows what will happen next. Maternal mortality is so common that women of means are urged to make wills when they enter their third trimester. This is why Mary is so keen to finalise the settlement in Parliament before her confinement. It’ll be done in two more days. She has almost won. By Tuesday evening it’ll be settled, and she can retire to have the child for whom the peace was fought.

Awareness is half the work of gratitude. Mary knows that she is warm and young and eating supper with friends. She knows that spring is coming, that they have meat and bread and health, and she is carrying a new life.

Thank God, she thinks, and she smiles and pats her stomach softly with her fingertips. Thanks be to God.

There is a companionable pause in the conversation and Rizzio fills it with a question. Everyone must answer, he says: What is the sweetest portion of music you have ever heard and why? And Mary smiles and drops her hand from her belly and draws a breath to answer.

This is a hanging moment in history – anything could happen…

On the floor below, in response to a gentle tapping, Darnley opens the door to the formal stairs and finds Lord Ruthven and his man, Henry Yair, standing there. Ruthven’s cheeks are hollow and a cadaverous green, his lips thin and a strange womanly shade of burgundy.

Darnley looks at what Ruthven is wearing. ‘What is that on your head?’

Ruthven reels on his heels but he doesn’t answer. Behind him eighty men are creeping up to Mary’s apartments. They’re crouched, ordered to be silent, and holding their swords, halberds, pistols and jacks with two hands to stop them hitting the stone stairs and giving them away. No one else is dressed like Ruthven. Some of them titter at his outfit; others look annoyed, embarrassed to be led by this ridiculous man.

‘Let me in,’ hisses Ruthven. His breath smells of turned milk and cat piss. Ruthven, Darnley’s uncle by marriage, is forty-six and has been in bed for two months, dying. Tonight his gaze is unfocused, his complexion yellowed, eyelids speckled with sweat.

Darnley admits the two men and quietly shuts the door behind them.

Ruthven staggers into the audience chamber, then just keeps going, tripping, side-stepping over his own feet as he makes it all the way across to the passage, leading by the shoulder. He sallies on into the bed chamber, swaying and rattling softly. Yair scurries close behind, hands out as if he expects Ruthven to topple backwards.

The conspirators have nominated a corpse to lead them. Darnley is annoyed: it suggests they have no faith in the scheme and no one cares whether Ruthven gets killed. He’s almost dead already and unpopular because he’s so charmless. A suspected necromancer, Ruthven is just as power-mad as the rest of them but without the finesse to dress it up as religious fervour or concern for the Commonwealth. He’s so unlikeable that his wife, who knows he’s dying, has just formally left him. Couldn’t wait another minute and no one blames her. Ruthven is an intolerable man. And he’s wearing that. For the love of God, why is he wearing that?

Still, Darnley is young, a stranger to self-doubt, and already quite intoxicated. He decides to just plough on with the plan.

The arrangement is simple: they are to go upstairs by the private stairs, cross Mary’s bed chamber and enter the audience room, unlock the main door to the stairs and let the soldiers into her parlour.

‘Come on.’ Darnley leads them to the tapestry wall by his bed. He sweeps the fabric aside to reveal a small doorway which leads to the narrow stairs that spiral up to his wife’s bed chamber. Then he stands back to let them pass.

‘No,’ croaks Lord Ruthven, ‘you go first.’

Darnley is surprised by this.

He shouldn’t be first through the door into hostile territory. All around him he can hear the muffled noise of the men moving around in the Palace and he’s not certain that Mary’s company haven’t heard it too. Surely he’s the most important person here. He will be made King by the business of tonight and Ruthven and his man should be protecting him above all else. He most certainly should not be going first.

He motions to Yair. ‘You go first,’ he says.

Yair looks to Ruthven but Ruthven raises an arm in front of him. ‘No,’ Yair says, nodding to Darnley, ‘you.’

Even Yair? Ruthven’s man is more important to this scheme than Darnley?

This is how Darnley finds out that he is a pawn and not a king. The conspirators are using him. He will not be king when this is done. That was never their real plan, he thinks, was it? But Darnley’s drunk and the Palace is full of soldiers and if Darnley doesn’t do this his father will be very angry. It’s too late to back out now.

He lifts his leg, teeters forward and takes the first step up to his wife’s bedroom.

The warmth in the supper room is suddenly cut by the curtain being yanked aside. Darnley barrels in and everyone stops talking. With uncharacteristic concern for the guests, he carefully shuts the door behind him and lets the curtain fall back. That makes them suspicious. Darnley is never considerate of draughts. He walks into every room and leaves the door wide open for a minion to attend to. Ruthven told Darnley to do this. They need the door shut so that Yair can cross the bed chamber unseen and go and open the main door for the soldiers.

Mary sees Rizzio’s eyebrows rise slowly and Jean’s lips tighten.

In the sudden brittle silence of the supper room Darnley has an odd, vacant smile on his face. He walks across to a heavy oak chair against the wall and drags it noisily to the table, parking it next to Mary. He can’t quite believe they haven’t heard the army on the stairs and, still smiling and holding Mary’s eye, he picks the chair up and drops it loudly. The sound rattles around the tiny room.

His smile vanishes. He juts his chin defiantly as he sits down next to his wife, then he reaches over and snakes his arm right around her waist until his hand on her swollen belly in a move reminiscent of their dancing the volte together. It’s as though he’s about to lift and swing her over his calf, head held high. Mary stiffens and puts her hand on his to stay it. She catches herself, resisting the urge to slap his hand away.

She breathes. She raises her chin and turns regally, three quarters on, to face her husband and lord.

For a fleeting moment they present the company with a tableau of a perfect handsome couple, milk-skinned and fine-featured, both long and slim and straight, until Darnley catches the faces of their audience. What he sees there is universal disdain and quickly averted eyes. They have no respect for him. They don’t want him to be King either.

Too much has happened. He doesn’t talk to the Queen or use the back stairwell at night or eat with her any more. And Mary doesn’t want him here, doesn’t trust him. She doesn’t have enough faith in their relationship to confront him or ask him to change: she just wants him to go away. They all do.

But they are married.

Someone politely offers Darnley food but he says no, he’s already eaten. They all sit in silence waiting for the lumbering interloper to do what he came here to do: have a tantrum, impart insults, make a new demand.

He squeezes Mary’s waist as if being affectionate, well aware that no pregnant woman wants her womb to be squeezed, fondly or otherwise. Mary flinches and jams her thumbs under his palm, trying to loosen his grip. She breathes a tiny ‘non’ and Darnley pretends he is offended that she is rebuffing his affection.

‘Cherie…’ he says unkindly, and suddenly every single person in the room is on edge. Darnley never calls anyone anything that isn’t demeaning. Is something very bad about to happen?

Oblivious, Darnley is thinking about how sorry they’ll all be when he is King. They’ll all be sorry then. He’ll see they are.

Outside the supper room, Ruthven slumps against the bed-chamber wall. His knees are buzzing from climbing the steep steps. He’s been in bed for two months and he’s not getting any better. He’s never felt like this before, this abiding weakness, this aching in all his joints and the strange intermittent fog in one eye. He knows he’s dying. He looks up at the Queen’s bed and suddenly remembers the plan – what they’re doing here.

A face materialises out of the shadows at his shoulder, a long pale face that seems to glow, with wide eyes, whites visible around the pupil. Candlelight catches the texture of the bumpy, dry sclera. Ruthven is troubled that the man doesn’t blink, just looks at him searchingly, eyebrows tented. It’s Yair. It’s his man, and Ruthven remembers afresh why they are here.

‘Go!’ Ruthven hisses, sweeping his hand to the passage. ‘Go and let them in!’

Yair creeps across the room and opens the bed-chamber door. The corridor is only four feet long. It ends in another door which opens out into the beautifully panelled audience chamber, hung with bright drapery and furnished in velvets designed to impress visiting dignitaries. Yair has never been in here before – few have – and he steals an awestruck look as he crosses to the huge oak double doors that open out onto the staircase. He passes a cabinet of books, a trunk carved with a hunting scene, a warm fire that still throbs red in a hearth large enough to roast a pig in. A statue of Our Lady of Grace looms from the far corner.

Yair stops.

He looks at her.

The statue is life-sized, its robes gilded with gold and silver that flicker, reflecting light from the dying fire. The Madonna is so beautiful that Yair’s throat aches, his dry eyes brim. For a breath-catching moment he remembers with love and shame his profound Marian devotion, how deep and utter his love for the Holy Mother once was.

Her hands are upturned in entreaty. Her head is tilted, her eyes sleepy and hooded. She steps towards Yair, emerging from the dark, a bare foot of pale glistening flesh with toes poised to take her weight. But she isn’t stepping towards Yair, she’s crushing the serpent writhing across a blue enamel sea. Her lips are a soft pink. Her cheeks peach. He wants to kneel before her, cleave to her, hide his sinful face in the floor.

This is what idolatry does to men.

This is the danger of the serpent’s work: a wrong way, a wrong seeing, a misreading of the word of God.

Yair hurries to the doors. He can hear them shuffling out there, whispering, the muffled clank of swords and the men who will stop this sinful misdirection for ever. He spits on the shaft of the heavy iron bolt to soften the sound of metal on metal before he slides it back and pushes the massive oak doors outward. Eighty heavily armed men press in on him, shoving him back inside.

Within the bed chamber Ruthven hears the hubbub and clatter of feet on the audience-chamber floor. When he hears it he knows he’s safe, that it’s finally happening.

This is Ruthven’s cue.

Holding out a steadying hand in case his weakened legs buckle, Ruthven clanks over to the supper-room door, wrenches it open, sweeps back the curtain inside and stands there, filling the doorway.