Rizzio: A Novella

Night has fallen in the Palace and Mary is trapped. She is fully clothed, sitting on the side of her bed in her emptying chamber, ordered to retire by Ruthven. Everyone is leaving. She still doesn’t know for certain that Rizzio is dead but she thinks he must be. She heard laughter and cheering from her audience chamber and now it has gone quiet out there. She looks at Darnley and Ruthven.

Darnley comes over and tells her to cooperate. Then he goes away again.

Ruthven clunks over and tells her the baby will have no father if she divorces the bairn’s father by defiance before it is born.

Jean, who has never left her side since supper, catches her eye, and Mary can see her mouth twitching and her eyes saying: look at this daft old fool who doesn’t even understand how bastards are made. A bastard is conceived out of wedlock, not born.

Ruthven keeps sitting down in her presence, another impertinence, and Darnley leans over to talk to him in low tones. They look around furtively – it’s pathetic – not wanting her or anyone else to hear what they’re saying. Her husband is an imprudent idiot. He’s going to get them both killed.

Lady Huntly comes in. She’s been allowed to take out the broken crockery, to tidy up and straighten things.

She approaches Mary and looks at her intensely.

‘David?’ asks Mary.

Lady Huntly glances back to the audience chamber.

‘Out there?’

Lady Huntly nods and bows her head sadly.

There is no noise coming from the room. Mary looks to Lady Huntly, imploring her to say it isn’t true. But it is, and they both know that.

Lady Huntly does an uncharacteristic thing now. She puts her hand on Mary’s wrist; it is less of a caress than a brief transfer of heat from an old body to a young one, and she snorts through her nostrils, loud as a horse.

‘God rest his soul,’ she says.

Mary looks at the door to the passage. David is in there, and if David is in there, David is dead.

David Rizzio walked most of the way from Nice to Edinburgh. It took him three months. He came in the diplomatic train of the Count of Moretta, sensing that the Scottish capital was a place where a fortune could be made. He didn’t come from a rich family, but his father spent all his money on education for David and his brothers, and it showed. He was the smartest man Mary ever met, chic in his dress, pretty in his manners, and he could sing so well that the other choristers called him David Le Chant. She always knew David loved Henry. She saw the way he looked at him, eyes tracing his profile, the turn of his soft chin, the wonder of his well-turned leg. David saw what she saw in Darnley: his ethereal beauty and cruelty, the pettiness and the grace.

Lady Huntly sees that Mary understands. She pats her wrist and lifts her empty basket, goes into the supper room and noisily gathers spoiled food and smashed plates.

Lady Huntly, née Elizabeth Gordon, is fifty-three, old enough for no one to look at her. She was married to Scotland’s richest man, George Gordon, Earl of Huntly, but he died of a stroke on the battlefield fighting against Mary.

Lady Huntly was made to attend his posthumous trial for treason, at which his embalmed body was propped up and adjudicated over by the full Parliament. At the same trial Lady Huntly’s seventh child, her son John, was condemned to be executed on the Queen’s orders. Giving Lady Huntly a position among Mary’s ladies was supposed to be a sign of the Queen’s clemency. But part of the embalmed Earl of Huntly’s punishment for rising against her was the forfeiture of a great many furnishings and tapestries and wall-hangings, velvet padded beds, and gold and silver ware. All of those things came here, to Holyrood Palace. Lady Huntly sees them all every single day as she waits on the Queen, these remnants of her past life when she wasn’t a widow and her son John was still attached to his head. Every moment here is a penance. She comes out of the supper room with a basket of broken things and the guard at the door lets her out.

Mary watches her leave. She sits down on the bed and cradles her belly. They’re going to kill her tonight. Once they’ve built up their courage, once they’ve discussed it and sorted out the ramifications, they’ll try to kill her and then Darnley. It’s the prudent thing to do. It’s what she would think to do. She needs to stop this.

Darnley comes and sits next to her. He looks chastened.

She whispers, ‘Is our David dead?’

He shrugs a stupid shoulder because he knows he is dead. He’s just too cowardly to admit it.

Across the room, Ruthven gets up. He’s exhausted, and his armour is heavy and he staggers a little, but he catches himself and then raises a hand to Darnley.

‘Go down,’ he says, sweeping an arm from Darnley to the private staircase.

At first Darnley thinks he is delirious. He snorts and looks at Mary for confirmation that she saw Ruthven give him an order.

Mary tips her head. What do you expect? she thinks. You’re a hostage as much as I am.

‘Let’s go downstairs, Lord Ruthven,’ he says loudly, as if it was his idea all along, but Ruthven is already rattling across the room to the staircase.

As Darnley passes her, Mary reaches out and grabs his forearm: it’s as intimate as she can bear to be with him right now.

‘Stay with me tonight?’ she whispers.

He knows she wants to try to convince him to turn back to her side. He smirks at her and pulls his arm away. No, he says, and takes a step beyond her towards the stairs.

She whispers so quietly that only the two of them can hear it: ‘They’ll kill you too.’

But Darnley walks away, through the doorway and down the stairs and she doesn’t even know if he heard her.

She bolts the door behind him but it’s symbolic. The guards are still in her audience chamber. They won’t let her out of this room.

Mary is left sitting on her bed as all the lights die away. Lady Huntly’s duties now should be to help her undress. When they know they are alone she comes over to her Queen and sits on the bed next to her, thigh pressing to thigh, and takes her hand. They listen to strange noises in the familiar space. Doors closing, feet on stairs, yells in the quadrangle, the rumble of voices below.

The two women hold hands, and Lady Huntly weeps silently. Mary doesn’t weep; she can’t relax enough for that. But she doesn’t withdraw her hand. They sit there for a long time.