Child Royal. D. K. Broster

ection>

       D. K. Broster

      Child Royal

       Historical Novel - The Story of Mary Queen of Scots

      e-artnow, 2021

       Contact: [email protected]

      EAN: 4064066387419

Table of Contents

       The Picture

       The Story

       I. Archer of the Guard

       II. The May Tree at St. Germain

       III. Malise Graham’s Son

       IV. Par Heur et Malheur (1)

       Par Heur et Malheur (2)

      To

       Miss Jane T. Stoddart

      In gratitude, since, without

       her book on Mary’s girlhood,

       this story would never have

       been written.

      THE PICTURE

       Table of Contents

      Before the flames so lamentably had their will of Garthrose House in 1896, there used to hang in the hall a small painting which caught the eye at once by its unlikeness to any of the more important-looking and better executed portraits of a later date, the Allan Ramsays, or the Raeburn, or even to the dark-backgrounded family pictures belonging to periods nearer to its own. Childish visitors in particular were sure to be attracted to this painting, and their questions were generally identical in substance: “Why is there another little picture painted inside this picture, please?” “Who is the little girl in it?” “Are the lady and gentleman her father and mother?” Or sometimes it would be, not a query, but a request: “Grandfather, will you show us the funny picture?”

      And to the questions Sir Patrick Graham would answer: “No, my dear, the lady and gentleman are not the parents of the little girl; they are my ancestors—and yours as well,” he would add, if the case required it. Then, if the small visitor were below a certain stature, he or she might be lifted up. “Suppose we look closer. You see that crown on the frame of the picture of the little girl? Now can’t you guess who she is? . . . Mary Queen of Scots when she was quite small, between eight and nine years of age, though she looks a good deal older, doesn’t she, in that stiff bodice and that tight-fitting head-dress? The whole picture was painted when she was a child in France, before she was married to the little boy—the Dauphin—with whom she was brought up, and who became, you know, King Francis II of France.”

      “Is that why there is a crown on the frame?”

      “No, the crown is there because Mary was a Queen already. She had been Queen of Scots since she was a week old.”

      “Did she have to do lessons, like us, when she was little?”

      “Indeed she did, and when you go to Paris you will see her Latin exercise-book in the great library there.”

      “But did she have toys, too?”

      “Yes, and a great many pets, and dresses and jewels, because she was a very important little person, although she was only a child like you.”

      “And why are those two people with stiff white things round their necks holding her picture like that?”

      “Because they both had to do with her in those days, and they were very fond of her.”

      And the child would gaze at that other child whose name at least was familiar, and perhaps her fate, too. The lady and gentleman in the painting, who were Sir Patrick’s ancestors, sat either side of a small table covered with a dark velvet cloth reaching to the floor. They were looking neither at the spectator nor at each other, but towards the oval picture of the little Queen, along the top of which the farthest hand of each was laid, thus holding it upright on the table.

      It would probably be an older visitor to Garthrose who would observe further details in this somewhat unusual picture. On the front of the table-cloth was emblazoned a shield with the family quarterings, the scallop-shells and roses, surmounted by the mailed hand holding a rose branch which was the special cognisance of Graham of Garthrose, under the scroll bearing the motto which went with it, Par heur et malheur. There was nothing out of the common about this heraldic display, but what was apt to excite a connoisseur’s curiosity was the presence on the floor in the foreground of a sort of plaque, showing the same shield traversed by the bend sinister of illegitimacy. Near it lay an open letter across which a little snake was crawling.

      And to one such visitor old Sir Patrick said with a sigh: “Yes, some fated natures throw an early shadow. Even as a child Queen Mary was, through no fault of her own, the cause of anguish to those who loved her. We had cause enough in my family to know it. . . . You are familiar with her own chosen motto: In my end is my beginning? I sometimes think it should have been reversed.”

      “That same thought has come to me before now,” answered his hearer. “There is, of course, a story—a dark story, perhaps—in that enigmatical picture?”

      Sir Patrick Graham bent his handsome grey head in assent. “You shall hear it to-night, if you care to.”

      THE STORY

       Table of Contents

      I. ARCHER OF THE GUARD

       Table of Contents

      (June-December, 1548)—(1)

      The dogs were still barking down below in the court-yard, so recent was Ninian’s arrival. He was not too late; that much he had learnt from old Gib, all a-tremble with agitation and surprise, who had admitted him, and from his young sister Agnes also, now preparing their mother for his visit.

      And while he waited in the oriel-windowed chamber overlooking the strath, the wind which had just brought him from France, and which was now sporting with the pennons of Monsieur d’Essé’s fleet in the Firth of Forth, buffeted the House of Garthrose with a good will, and, entering by various imperceptible crannies, set swaying on the wall the tapestry of Queen Semiramis and her train, so familiar to Ninian Graham in his boyhood. Staring at it now, on this June afternoon of 1548, he could scarcely believe that nearly seven years had passed since he had been home to Scotland. When last his eyes had rested on those bannered towers upon the wall, squat and formal behind the casques and spears of the Assyrian warriors, the catastrophe of Solway Moss was yet to come, and the disaster of Pinkie also; Leith and Edinburgh had not yet been sacked, nor hundreds of Border villages destroyed, and Jedburgh and Kelso, Dryburgh and Melrose, those fair abbeys, still stood inviolate. Then, also, the crown of Scotland had rested upon the brow of a King, not, as now, upon that of a little maid of five and a half. The queen in the arras, even though in the act of resigning her diadem to her son, still had the advantage