Today's offering is an except from the novel THE LAST KNIGHT and the Queen of Scots, from the Chapter "Two Marguerites". The Knight of Grange has been exiled from Scotland by Marie de Guise and has distinguished himself as a soldier and a gentleman at the Valois court. He has abandoned his efforts to reconcile with his estranged Scottish wife Margaret Learmonth, who has failed to respond to his many letters. Then Margaret suddenly appears in Paris. This is one of my favorite parts of what to date has been the least read of my books in the Queen of Scots Suite.
**
For
years afterward, he was haunted by the memory of Margot framed in the doorway
of the darkened annex to the armory where she had left him less than an hour
before. The first thing he saw was the radiance of her smile. She carried a reed basket that swayed under
its weight, giving off the aroma of cheeses and fresh-baked bread.
`“Kirkcaldy, we must hurry or we will miss the
sunset!” she called as she took three steps into the room before her eyes adjusted
to the dark and froze. Tears came to him in an instant. Hers took longer. Margaret stood beside him.
She moved yet closer, her hand grasping his forearm, a proprietary
gesture. Then came the introductions
that were at best superfluous
.“Madame,
this is Lady Margaret Learmonth. My
wife,” he added awkwardly. Then he spoke
words directed to Meg, but his eyes never left Margot.
“Meg, this is Princess Marguerite, Duchess of
Berry, and sister of the King.” He was aware of the nodding of his wife’s head,
but no words were spoken by either of the women. Margot’s smile had faded to an
expression of quizzical disbelief. She
did not hold it long, for she was a Valois princess, namesake of Marguerite of
Angouleme, and pride was inbred. Quietly she placed the basket on the floor.
“Well,
I will leave you two alone to reacquaint yourselves,” she said as she spun in
her riding boots and left the room.
Margaret released his arm and retreated to the bench where she had
deposited her gloves and satchel, deflating like a child’s balloon.
“I
should have written,” was the best she could offer.
It was not his wife’s feelings that tortured
Will. Joy had turned its back on him when Margot left. He would have done
anything to move time backwards to the day when Knox suggested that he put his
unresponsive wife aside. Had it not been
for his little daughter, he would have done so.
“I
should not have let this happen,” he said, more for his benefit than for hers.
Margaret had regained some of her natural diffidence.
“You
always did aim high, Will,” she said.
“Would
you have preferred me to have directed my attentions to a laundress or one of
the scullery maids?”
“It
would be easier if you had.”
` Kirkcaldy
did not argue the point. After minutes of strained silence, he began to pace
back and forth, befuddled as to what to do next. Margaret gathered her few things and walked
towards the door, stooping to inspect the basket.
“The
very best cheeses and a fine bottle of wine. The bread is still warm,” she said
as she bent to touch it. “A lover’s
repast,” she added almost as if an afterthought.
“Leave
it where it is, Meg.”
“It
should not go to waste. We could take it
to your Uncle James’s lodgings where I have arranged to stay.”
He
was more than annoyed by the insensitivity of her frugality and her
indifference to the situation. That she
had somehow involved James Melville in the debacle angered him even more. The
notorious gossip Melville, who knew everything about everyone, should have
warned him. His mother should have warned him.
“Leave
it,” he repeated. “It is already
wasted,” he added, unable to discipline his tongue. She pushed past him and
marched outside into the February chill
“It
is not I who should be groveling, Will Kirkcaldy. You are the one who has sinned.”
He
grabbed her hand and pulled her back inside the room. There was nothing gentle in the gesture. Once inside, he took her by the shoulders and
held her firmly at arm’s length. She stuck her Learmonth chin out and looked
him in the eyes, her own eyes communicating a defiance that needed no
words. What he saw reminded him of her
stern Papist mother, whom he had never really liked.
“Madame,
I will not do you the dishonor of leaving you to your own devices, but neither
will I apologize for seeking warmth and companionship from someone who filled
the void created by your silence and neglect.”
“What
I saw flash between the two of you went far beyond warmth and
companionship. I am no fool.” She sunk to the floor, and much to his
surprise, she began to tremble.
“This
is not the place for you to do your weeping, Margaret. You’ll soil your
gown.” His ingrained sense of chivalry
invaded him, and he extended his hand to help her to her feet. “We will go to Melville’s lodging and sort
this out,” he said, dragging her from the room.
In the distance he saw Margot riding astraddle at a dangerous clip,
jumping the hedges as if it she were in a tournament. There was absolutely nothing he could do to
bring her back.
He
recalled Montmorency’s words of the year before. The heir to a lairdship in
impoverished Scotland was not a match for a French princess, no matter how each
of them had joked of it. But both of them had faced the bittersweet
inevitability of a tearful parting, not the unanticipated appearance of an
estranged wife.
When
they arrived at Melville’s lodging in the Scottish quarter, he was not at
home. James had made the avoidance of
unpleasantness an art form. His
housekeeper escorted them to one of the spare bedchambers on the second floor,
where Kirkcaldy saw that Margaret’s baggage had already been deposited, her
chest opened and partially unpacked.
“I take it you intend to park yourself here,”
he chided. She walked to the sea chest and began refolding her belongings, as
if operating on rote. She did not turn
to face him, and with her back turned, he could hardly hear her words.
“You should have put me aside, Will. It would have been better for both of
us. There are aplenty protestant-leaning
priests who follow Knox in Scotland now.
You would have been able to persuade one of them that our marriage was a
sham to protect the legitimacy of our child—that there never was a hand
fasting.”
When
he approached her, there was a solitary tear rinsing the travel dust from her
cheek.
“I would never do that to my daughter,” he
said. There was no compassion for Margaret included in his declaration. He towered over her and with his closed right
fist, tilted her head upward, forcing her to look him in the eye.
“Why are you here, Meg?” His demeanor announced that this was not a
question born of curiosity. It was an
interrogatory. “Why now?”
She
did not shirk away. Her dark eyes
challenged him, and while she spoke, they never drifted from his own.
“I
am in France to escort my mother to the convent of Saint Pierre les Dames in
Reims. It has been her lifelong dream to
see the cathedral there and after my father perished at Pinkie, her desire was
to settle in the convent. The Dowager
and her brothers have arranged it with their sister Renee, who is the abbess. But that is not really your question, is it,
Sir? I am in Paris because your mother
insisted that I come here, to explain my estrangement to your face. On my own, I would have endured my agony
without any help from you, but I owed it to your mother to do what she had
asked of me. I did not know that you
loved this woman.”
“The
woman you mentioned with such distain is the Princess Royale,” he scolded.
“From
where I stand, Sir, it makes little difference who she is.”
Kirkcaldy
realized that he was the focus of a family conspiracy, betrayed by the one
person he trusted beyond all others. He
was not surprised that the Guise had instigated Meg’s unfortunate visit. What
vexed him most was the fact that they had engaged his mother as an
accomplice.
“Why
would my mother sponsor such a pathetic ploy?” he asked.
“Oh,
make no mistake, Sir. I have not turned
your mother away from you, nor made her any different than she always has
been. She is still your champion,
William. And she is still devoted to her
principles of forthrightness and honesty.
But she knew that I had never shared my anguish with you, Sir, and she
could not forgive that in a wife. She
has never deceived the laird, as well you know.
For that reason, she urged me to share the truth with you, so you would
know that my silence was not because of contempt of you, but because of my
failure as a proper wife.”
Kirkcaldy withdrew his fist from her chin.
“Let’s
have it, Meg. What is it that would cause a daughter of the laird of Dairsie to
estrange herself from her husband? Was
it popery that came between us?”
He
gestured to the bench near the fire and while she composed herself, he sought
some brandy. She took a sip and put her
glass aside, then dropped her hands into the lap. She no longer locked upon his gaze.
“When
little Janet was born, I remained in Dairsie for my laying-in. My old room became a birth chamber. I chose Dairsie because I felt the need of a
priest and I knew that your mother would suffer a crisis of her conscience were
I to bring one into her house. I was
attended at the birthing by my brother Patrick’s wife, who brought a midwife
from the village. When the pains began,
I felt I was going to die, but I believed they were natural to the
condition.
On the dawn of the third day, they brought
nausea and unconsciousness, but when I was awake, I noticed strained whispering
between my sister-in-law and the midwife.
The pains were intense, but I judged that no bairn was coming with them.
Although they did not consult with me, they sent a servant to bring the barber
from the village, a man who had in the past performed births in the manner of
Caesar’s on the corpses of women whose wombs could not expel their bairn.
I tried
to raise my head to speak to them, to ask for a priest, but each time I did so,
I fell into a swoon.
Sometime
around the noonday, my frail mother escorted a priest into the chamber,
followed by the barber. While the priest
was administering the rites, I saw the barber shooing the midwife away from the
foot of the bed. There came a pain so
intense that I cannot describe it to you, and I was aware of something invading
me before I lapsed into an infinite white glow that I believe is heaven. Then the darkness came, and in my belief, I
passed from his life to the next.
“…What
happened in the room while I was with the angels was told to me by my mother,
who had had knelt near the foot of the bed in mourning of my passing. The
barber, who had pulled back the birthing sheets that had twisted around my
bloody legs, whispered something to the midwife, then took his hand and shoved
it inside me, and according to the report, grabbed our daughter, placing his
finger in the infant’s tiny mouth, as he rotated the child’s shoulders within
the womb as gently as he could until the head was down and she was facing
properly. When my unconscious body began
to spasm, he pushed upon my belly, and expelled the child’s head. He quickly cut away a wider opening, and the
bairn came into the world without the need of a Caesarian birth from which no
Scotswoman has been known to survive.
However, much blood came along with it, and afterward, tissue that was
not afterbirth. He and the midwife did
what they could to patch me up. My
sister-in-law later said that she believed a part of my womb had been expelled
with the afterbirth, but the barber repositioned it into my insides as best he
could. He also sewed the incision he had
made to widen the birth canal, and cleansed the wound. Although he did his best, there was still
much bleeding, and little expectation that I would live.
“… I lay in a coma for two days, and even when
I awakened, my mother believed I would only live long enough to see our
daughter, and would bleed to death soon after. By then, Lady Janet had arrived. I saw her kiss the ring of the priest and
hand him a purse of coin. She directed
my mother and the women to rest, and she stayed beside me until I was well
enough to take some broth flavored with garlic and thyme, and to keep it
down.
She rubbed my body with an herbal oil and
rubbed garlic on my wounds. She changed
my dressings as soon as they were soiled and no one was allowed to touch me
without washing. She would not allow me
to raise my head without help, and forbade me to sit up.
She
massaged my legs and arms, and kept me clean of the blood. Often she would read to me, sometimes in
Scots and sometimes in French.
She told me stories. Three times each day she
had the wet nurse bring Janet to my side, but she would not let me nurse the
child until three days had passed. Then she put Janet briefly to my own breast,
because she believed it would help me heal.
At first when she did so, I would feel a gush of warm blood, but as the
days passed, it subsided. It was weeks later when she and my brother helped me
to my feet, and miraculously, there was no bleeding….
“…At the end of the month, your mother returned
to the Halyards, but before she left, she and my poor mother converged upon my
bedside and together they told me that I would bear no further children. On
that day I willed myself to die. Only the presence of our child kept me from
finding a sgian dubh and ending my
life. That is why I could not write to you. I could not bear to tell you that I
could not provide you with an heir. I
was certain that some sin of mine had brought this upon us. I did not wish to
taint little Janet or let her suffer from my morose, so I forced my brother to
send her to Halyards, to your mother.
“When my father died and Patrick became laird
of Dairsie, I joined our daughter at your parents’ manor house, but whenever I
saw her, I began to cry. I was not fit
for mothering, and I was not to be allowed a second chance. You would never
have heard this story had your mother not insisted that I tell it to you
myself. She and your father wanted me to
tell you when you were in Haddington, but I could not find the courage, and I
made both of them promise not to reveal any of this to you. I thought it better than you believe yourself
saddled with an uncaring, hateful wife, bitter from the separation that
followed the fall of Saint Andrews. Part
of me hoped you would find a way to end our marriage, to put me aside and find
a healthy woman to give you sons. John
Knox would have helped you with a divorce. But Lady Janet insisted that should
you make that choice, you needed to do it with full knowledge of why I had
rejected you.”
Then,
for the first time during her sad narrative, she began to sob.
… “I
have every one of your letters tied together with little green ribbons that I
wore in my hair on the day of our hand fasting.
I am saving them for Janet when she is old enough to read them. Your poetry I know by heart. I often sing the
verses to Janet as she sleeps.”
Kirkcaldy
drew her into his arms and held her while she wept. It was the least that he
could do.
