Rizzio: A Novella

Henry Yair is standing inside the supper room as they drag David Rizzio past him to the door. He sees the wasted meat scattered and trampled on the floor, the shocked Queen over by the window. Her eyes are fixed on the empty doorway, hand slapped to her neck. Darnley is still squeezing her belly as tight as he can. He’s drunk and he’s not smiling any more; there’s something in his face – Yair can’t quite decipher it, but he fears for the woman. He thinks she might not live through the night.

Compassion betides him. A proud young woman, visibly with child, is attacked by men working in concert. We are cowards, he thinks, what we’re doing is wrong. The men are enjoying this. Our Queen is trampled meat.

But then he remembers that she’s Catholic and they are here to save the soul of Scotland. It is the right and godly thing to do. She gave them no choice. Empathy drains out through the soles of his feet. His doubt about what they’re doing here is a splinter of ice in his heart: it melts quickly but the damage remains.

She’s an unrepentant Catholic. He looks her up and down, bold, looking for things to hate. But she’s comely, and her child shows through the bodice of her dress, a perfect roundel on her slim frame. She’s only twenty-four and she’s terrified, and her eyes flick back and forth from the doorway to the food on the floor to her drunk husband.

Yair doesn’t have children. He longed to be a father. As a priest he prayed for the desire for children to be taken from him, that he might be more useful, and here is Darnley trying to squeeze his own child from his wife. But it doesn’t matter what Yair thinks; he can’t do anything about it anyway. Exhausted by sadness, he turns his peasant back on the frightened Queen and goes towards the noise of jeering. He crosses the bedroom to the passage and enters the audience chamber.

There he finds eighty men pressing in around Rizzio. They punch and thump him, shove and kick him diagonally across the room. The men are grinning, the candles licking up the draught from the stairs, flickering and animating the face of the Lady of the Graces. She’s shocked, she’s bored, she’s afraid, she’s laughing.

Everyone in the room has their knives out. The blades flash, spitting light around the room.

Rizzio is down. They’ve cornered him in a window nook next to the stairs and they crowd around him on the floor. He sees these flashes on the floor, the ceiling, the walls. He has eight seconds left to live.

Everyone has their knife out because everyone is going to stab him. That’s the deal. Caesar was stabbed by all the great men of Rome. Only one of the wounds was fatal; most were just shallow nicks, tentative little gestures of implication. The collective nature of the act meant that everyone was tainted, that no one could be prosecuted because their fates are conjoined. If anyone were punished for the deed the entire class would fall.

These men are cowards.

Rizzio came here alone and he will die alone.

A blade enters his shoulder, his lung, his hand.

These men are cowards.

David Rizzio walked here from the northern shore of the Mediterranean. He saw the world and was himself. He loved a lord. He held true to his faith.

These men are grubby little cowards.

A boot hits his face, breaking his nose; there’s a knife in his back, his neck.

He prays to his God, an assertion of faith, until a rough dagger is thrust into his side and the pain overwhelms him and he is suddenly blinded by a white flash of light, his body deluged by powerful sensations.

Blinded and alone, Rizzio is stabbed in the neck, the arm, the stomach and legs. Blood slides from his wounds and he’s gone.

But they keep stabbing him. It takes quite a long time for everyone to have a go. Men queue up, men move forward and bend down and retreat.

This is a roll call of Scotland’s great men. Great men stab and, having done their duty, they step back, make eye contact with other men. Sometimes they smile at each other reflexively as they move away, as if they’re giving way at a urinal.

After the initial frenzy an eerie silence falls.

Henry Yair watches. A man pulls his knife free and looks panicked, but then he giggles as he steps away from the body. He can’t believe he’s allowed to do this, that he’s getting away with this. Yair sees they’re wilding, revelling in doing something terrible with no consequences. He knows at least some of them are thinking about the martyrs of the Reformation and hoping they are like them. But they were valiant, heroic, reckless men. This is not like that. This is pathetic.

Yair scans the room for Rizzio and spots him between the feet of the men. The shadows in the room are fluid. He sees what he thinks is the back of Rizzio’s head, but someone shifts, light changes, and he realises that he’s looking straight at Rizzio’s bloody face.

Horribly swollen eyes that look like mouths, lips slack and bloody. As the face resolves, Yair sees the spike of an upturned quarter stave slice in through Rizzio’s cheek, pass through his jaw and sink into the wooden floor below. Someone tugs the wooden handle, trying to get it back out, and the pull on the blade drags Rizzio’s head off the ground, but the tip is held by the floor. The head drops back down. They try again, shaking the body with their foot, rocking the pole back and forth. The same foot presses hard on Rizzio’s head, squashing his lips into a grotesque pout, and the blade finally relinquishes its hold on the floor, sliding out of his face. Legs shuffle, shadows shift; Yair cannot see Rizzio any longer.

Yair was once a priest. He gave up much to convert to the new faith but, watching this, he can’t recall knowledge of God or the comfort of faith. He can’t recall anything good or clean or redemptive. A heavy black melancholy cowls him – it bends his neck and turns his face to the floor.

He hears feet shuffling and grunts, metal being sheathed and unsheathed. He hears women sobbing back in the supper room, the shrill trill of Ruthven’s voice. He’s too sad to make out the words.

Yair shouldn’t feel this way. He thought this blackness came from his fallacious faith, that God was prompting him to turn. He should be saved now. He shouldn’t feel like this. Maybe God hates him. These men are not the elect. Yair is not among the elect. These men are not marked for salvation. These men are animals. He is among animals.

But he wants to believe in what they are doing, that they’re doing this for a reason: to save Calvinism from foreign spies and petty treasonists who want to suppress God’s truth. The Queen is the fault.

He thinks of all the ways she is culpable but it brings no comfort, so he pushes himself off the wall and stands upright. He walks behind the stabbing animal men to the grand stairs and drops heavily from step to step, falling, falling, over and over, down and down. The cold of the stone is a cleansing wash that rattles up through him until he feels that he might be dead too.

The supper room has emptied. Everyone rushed out the moment the soldiers left, running for whichever stairwell they could get to and leaving Mary and Darnley and Ruthven and Jean.

Mary has her arms circled around her belly to protect it. ‘You brought that here!’ she shouts at Darnley, pointing at Ruthven. ‘You brought him here to frighten me, your wife, your Queen, when I am with child.’

Darnley sees how it looks, all the levels of wrong on top of each other, and counters with: ‘You were fucking that Italian pricklet anyway. You know you were.’

‘Henry,’ she snaps, ‘you know that’s a lie.’

He does but he says, ‘No, I don’t.’

Mary leans in close to him and whispers so that Jean can’t hear, ‘Who was intimate with the Italian? Who?’ And then she tips her ear to him, pretending to listen for an answer. Darnley can’t meet her eye.

‘But I did love him,’ she says, tears coursing down her cheeks. She knows what his silence means. ‘I loved him for the man he was and his grace and kindness and sweetness. I could see those things because I’m not stupid or blind, and I don’t trust what my father tells me I’m looking at before my own eyes. I did love David. It was not me who fucked the man.’

Jean is still holding the candle high. She pretends not to hear this conversation, busies herself toeing the broken furniture and eyeing the food squashed on the floor.

Quite suddenly, Ruthven grabs a chair and sits down.

It’s a breach of etiquette, quite a major one.

He raises a hand. ‘Bring me wine!’ he calls, addressing a servant who isn’t there. His hand drops and he slumps.

Mary takes it as a potential sign that she has been deposed but actually, Ruthven had started to fall over and styled it out by grabbing the chair. He’s very unwell.

‘Stand up, Ruthven,’ orders Darnley.

Ruthven looks at them. His lower eyelids have come away from his eyeballs. Sweat drips from his chin. ‘I can’t.’

Jean gets him a draught of wine and holds the cup for him. While Mary glares at Darnley Ruthven thanks Jean with a look.

Mary is cupping her belly and shouting, ‘Don’t deny what you did. It’ll look worse when the plan is known. You brought them here!’

‘Madam, if I might?’ Everyone is surprised to hear Ruthven’s voice again. ‘Having been husband to a lady of some strength of character…’ Ruthven’s wife is a sap. Everyone knows it. She’s nice but stupid; she wouldn’t have married him otherwise. ‘My own lady is sometimes of a mind to disagree with my own good self.’

‘Oh no…’ mutters Jean in a flat voice.

Ruthven rambles on. ‘A wife must listen to her husband and give him obedience. Is it not in the marriage vows: to love, honour and obey? If so, is it not a contravention of the wedding contract to disobey? And in this way is it not the case that the marriage cannot be said to be a continuing conjoining if the wife is disobedient? Abeyance to her husband being central to the contract and the wedding vows being sacred? It is God’s will that, if a woman defies a man, they must be divorced in the eyes of God. Has not God said so?’

Mary is listening now because of the implication. The suggestion that she is not married is a direct threat. Her baby must be born into a valid marriage and must be admitted by Darnley as his. Otherwise it will be denied the security of the throne. Without those seals, even if the baby makes it to the throne, it will surely be usurped, and that always leads to murder.

But what Ruthven is saying is legal nonsense. Mary looks to Darnley to refute the point, to say she is his wife, that this is his child, shut up, Ruthven. Darnley doesn’t.

Darnley is Lennox’s son. He tried to lift her by her belly to make her miscarry. He is going to hold her belly hostage, withhold an admission of paternity to get the crown. He’s a Lennox. She remembers all those nights when they would whisper quietly and he would say, ‘Save me from them, sweet Mary. Save me from this family of mine, this nest of vipers, this yoking sophistry, save me sweet Mary.’

He is his father’s son and nothing is beneath his spite, not even infanticide.