Page 45 of The Changeling

Greatly daring, I slid my hand down and touched him through the velvet of his breeches. He was hard as rock within. He groaned, wrenching at his laces, pressing himself between my thighs. Something nudged at me, stiff and insistent. I tried to help him, lifting my hips, reaching down to position him. Robbie drove hard within me. A sharp stab of pain, and I cried out. He drove again, but I was slick now and it did not hurt so much. I grasped his shoulders, urging him on. He shuddered, arched his back and cried out. A few more wild lunges, then he collapsed on me, panting. We lay entwined under the sweet-smelling hawthorn, skin to skin, stroking each other in a kind of dazed wonderment.

‘I never knew,’ he murmured. ‘I never knew it was like that.’

‘Me either,’ I whispered back.

‘I feel … I feel …’

‘What?’ I ran my hand down his jaw. The rough bristle against my skin made me shiver. ‘What do you feel, Robbie Graham?’

He turned his head so he could kiss my palm. ‘I feel different.

I feel … utterly undone.’

We lay in silence a while, and then his hand crept over the curve of my waist. ‘How do you feel? You have bled a little. Did I hurt you?’

I was sore, but I shook my head. He took my hair and wrapped it around his hand so, when he tugged on it, I had to bring my mouth to his.

‘I want to do it again,’ he whispered. ‘And again and again and again.’

I smiled and pressed myself against him. He bent his head and kissed the ribbons tied about our wrists. ‘You are bound to me now, Caiti NicNeven,’ he murmured in my ear. ‘I am yours and you are mine, for one year and a day.’

Back at the castle, I simmered the hawthorn flowers with sugar and water, stirring languidly while I thought of our afternoon together. Pouring the syrup through muslin, I smiled, seeing again his face when I asked him if he dared kiss me. Creaming eggs and sugar, I remembered the way his hands had braced my waist, how he had walked me backwards, how he had lain me down; as the butter sizzled, heard his whisper, I’m on fire for you; felt the exciting scrape of his bristled jaw on my skin as I grated lemon zest; and, as I slid the cake pans into the oven, felt again the sudden urgent thrust of his body into mine. As the cakes rose, I remembered how the mere touch of my hand had aroused him, and wondered at my power over him. I drizzled the warm cakes with sweet hawthorn syrup, pressed white crystallised blossoms into their soft sticky mounds, and longed for him so ardently I could not bear the hours till I could be with him again.

That night, at the queen’s supper party, every tiny bite-sized cake was devoured eagerly, even the crumbs licked from the dampened tips of fingers. Robbie followed me from the room and kissed me in the shadowy hallway, pressing me up hard against the wall. We were tearing the clothes from each other’s bodies even as Robbie found a door, shoved it open and kicked it shut behind us. We made love against the wall, fast and frantic, trying to muffle our cries, only a few steps away from discovery and dishonour.

I drifted through the following day, occasionally sliding my fingers inside my sleeve to caress the braided cord doubled about my wrist. Slowly I noticed that everyone seemed different too. Everywhere I looked, couples flirted, laughed, touched, whispered. The queen gazed at Lord Darnley as if she had never seen him before. They danced very close together that night and, when Darnley felt ill the following morning, she spent the day by his bedside. The week passed, and the queen spent all her free time with her cousin, while Robbie and I snatched every chance to kiss, to touch, to make love.

Soon the court was buzzing with speculation. The queen had fallen in love with her own cousin, they had already lain together, they had been handfasted in a secret ceremony conducted by the Italian Signor Rizzio, who was a spy for the Pope, they plotted together to restore Catholicism, they meant to seize the English throne and depose the English queen. When Lord James heard the rumours, he quickly returned to court. It was too late. Mary was determined to marry Darnley. They argued hotly, and Mary swept out of the room in a temper.

‘This is madness,’ Lord James cried. ‘Surely she has been bewitched!’

He turned to stare at me with hard suspicious eyes, as I knelt by the fire, simmering mead with mayflowers in my claw-footed cauldron.

V

An Arrow to His Heart

I had not meant to bewitch the queen. I had not meant to make her fall in love with her cousin, and risk everything to wed him. Somehow I had stirred my desire for Robbie into my mayblossom cakes, and I did not know how to undo the spell. My guilty secret burned within me, and I dared not confess to anyone.

They would call me a witch and put me to death.

‘They think to tell me who I am allowed to marry,’ Mary said, striding back and forth in her presence chamber. ‘I am done with being told what to do. I am the queen of Scotland! I snap my fingers at all those who think to command me, and will have my way despite them.’

‘But, madam,’ I said, ‘you hardly ken Lord Henry, you’ve only just met him. Why do you no’ wait, take the time to consider …’

Mary turned and paced back. ‘I am twenty-two years old! Soon I will be past my prime childbearing years. It is my duty to marry and bear an heir. For three years now, my lords have been throwing suitors at my head, telling me I must marry, and now I have decided to do so, everyone tells me to wait. I do not want to wait!’

She ordered her heralds to announce she and Lord Henry were to wed, and defiantly conferred the dukedom of Albany upon him, so her bridegroom might be closer to her in rank.

If she hoped that Lord James would acquiesce to her marriage once it was declared, she was wrong. The earl of Moray was irrevocably set against it. Darnley was Catholic, he said, for all that he paid lip service to the Kirk. Pastor Knox would never forgive the queen marrying a papist, and neither would Queen Elizabeth.

‘And what do they have to do with my marriage?’ Mary answered icily. ‘I am queen of Scotland, no-one else. Let the queen of England manage her own affairs, and I shall manage mine. As for the Kirk, I have sworn that all in my realm may worship as their conscience dictates. Does Pastor Knox dare call me a liar?’

‘Pastor Knox declares that any prince who exceeds their power must be resisted,’ her half-brother flashed back. ‘So doubly must be resisted the monstrous regime of women!’

Then Lord James quoted words known to him by heart: ‘For who can deny that it is repugnant to nature that the blind shall be appointed to lead those that see? That the weak, the sick and the impotent should lead the whole and the strong? That the foolish, mad and frenzied should govern the discreet and sober of mind? Such be all women, compared to men …’

Taken aback to hear Pastor Knox’s most virulent words being spouted at her by her own brother, Mary could find no words to answer. Lord James spun on his heel and stormed away, insulting her by turning his back upon her.