Read Online The Memoirs of Mary Queen of Scots by Carolly Erickson - Free Book Online Page B

go to him when I needed money. Now that he is in heaven, I must turn to you.”
    “My mother keeps all the money. In a big chest under her bed.”
    “Do you have no treasurer of your own?”
    He shook his head.
    “Well then, I suppose I shall just have to ask your mother.”
    The king frowned. “No, don’t do that.”
    “Why not?”
    “It would not be safe. You are not safe.”
    “Is your mother’s astrologer casting spells on me?”
    “Perhaps. But I know that she asked her chef to feed you something that would make you sick.”
    The suggestion alone was enough to make my stomach start to churn, there in the dark little shed.
    “I hope you are not sick, Mary.”
    “No,” I managed to say, holding my stomach. “Now that you have warned me, I will be fine. Thank you, Your Highness.”
    “Would you like to watch Esme fly?”
    “Very much, but it will have to be another day. Thank you, I’ll be going now. I hope no one finds you.”
    “Goodbye Mary.”
    His tone was plangent. I made certain to close the door of the shed as I left.
    With the young king’s revelation all became clear to me: I had to get away from Queen Catherine before she poisoned me. I had to get as far away as I could, as quickly as I could. I would go to Scotland. I would be safe there, among my relations. Until I left I would eat nothing that had been prepared in the royal kitchens.
    I went to my mother-in-law’s moneylender and made over to him one of my estates in Poitou. He gave me ten thousand gold ecus. Then I went to Jamie and spilled out some of the flashing, glittering coins across the floor of his dingy room.
    “Here,” I said. “Here is enough money to pay the dowry of your tormentor, the one you call the Encumbrance. Your troubles with her are at an end. As for me, I am bound for Scotland, if you will take me, aboard the
Black Messenger.
”



THIRTEEN
    I had to wrap two warm woolen blankets around my shoulders when we entered the fog-shrouded roads of Leith harbor and Jamie took the pilot aboard. It was still summertime, in that August of 1561, but it felt like winter to me, accustomed as I had been for so many years to the sunny summers of France. A cold wind whipped through the shrouds of the
Black Messenger,
and before long a cold rain began to beat down, forcing me to go below and drink a goblet of heated wine with cinnamon and sugar to try to warm myself.
    Our welcome to Scotland was only slightly less chilly than the weather. My half-brother Lord James Stewart did manage, after several hours, to come to the harbor bringing half a dozen others with him and a ragtag cordon of mounted soldiers. But there were no crowds to greet me, no pageantry, no choirs singing or musicians playing or fountains overflowing with wine. There was not even a coach waiting to take me to Edinburgh.
    “My dearest sister,” brother James said in his deep, grave voice, bending low in a bow, “we did not expect you for several more days. I know the French think of us Scots as barbarians, and I am afraid this poor greeting will only make you think less of us.”
    “I am one of you, am I not?” I responded, taking Lord James’shand and raising him up. The men with him were looking at me appraisingly.
    “Our brothers Robert and John,” Lord James said, indicating a grinning, supercilious-looking young man and a shorter, darker companion. I barely recognized Robert, and John was a stranger to me. Our father King James had had many children, most of them bastards; I knew I was going to need to become acquainted with them.
    “The Earl of Arran, whom you know by his French title as the Duke of Châtelherault.” I felt my hands close into fists at the sound of the name. So this was the infamous Arran, the man who had put a spell on my mother and made her so terribly sick, the man who had led the rebellious Lords of the Congregation in fighting her and her French soldiers. The man who had burned Jamie’s castle and torched his fields. The