the skies, bursting red or green, gold or blue sparkles against the darkness. The wedding party and its guests made their way to the archbishop’s palace where a banquet was to be held in the great hall, which had been newly decorated for the occasion with tapestries from the Louvre.
A banquet table stretched from one end of the hall to the other. The king had been placed in its center beneath yet another embroidered cloth-of-gold canopy. To his right sat his mother. To his left, his sister, England’s new queen. The proxy bridegroom was placed on Henrietta’s other side. The bride was served by a high-ranking nobleman, her old friend from childhood, Baron Bassompierre, and two French marshals.
When the meal had at last ended, all the guilds of Paris paraded before the new queen, and her brother’s Swiss Guards performed an intricate drill. At eleven o’clock, the exhausted bride retired back to the Louvre. For the rest of the week, all Paris rejoiced, and celebrated the marriage that united England and France. There were balls and banquets so numerous it was difficult to get to them all. The finest, however, was given by the Queen Mother in her new and magnificent Luxembourg Palace.
Then, suddenly, George Villiers, the duke of Buckingham, arrived in France. He had come, he announced grandly, to escort England’s new queen home. Buckingham was very tall, and extremely handsome. His dark eyes when fixed upon a woman made her feel she was the only woman in the world. His wife was devoted to him, and while he was considered a terrible flirt, Lady Villiers had no cause for jealousy. Buckingham had such beautiful features that the late King James had given him the nickname of Steenie, because the old monarch said George Villiers had the face of St. Stephen, who had been noted for his beauty.
The French queen was openly admiring of the Englishman. The French male courtiers hated him on sight, for they considered Villiers arrogant. It was their opinion he behaved as if he were a king himself, and they could barely tolerate his presence. Their wives disagreed, sending the duke languishing looks each time he came their way; smiling invitingly, sighing over his chestnut curls, his exquisitely barbered mustache and little pointed beard. The queen and the other ladies of the court were always delighted to have the English duke among their company. He swept into their midst one afternoon wearing a suit of silver-gray silk, and gold tissue. The suit was sewn all over with pearls, but the pearls were forever dropping off, and rolling across the floor. As servants scrambled to retrieve the gems, the duke of Buckingham waved them away with a smile. The pearls were naught but trifles, he told them, implying there were plenty more where they came from. Keep them, he said.
“You have done it quite deliberately,” the duchess of Glenkirk scolded George Villiers. “These pearls are sewn too loosely so, of course, they will drop off. You are intent on annoying these poor French. What a wicked creature you are, Steenie!” They had known each other ever since Villiers’s very early days at King James’s court.
The dark eyes twinkled. An elegant eyebrow arched mischievously, and then he smiled at her, but he said not a word.
At last, on the twenty-third of May, the new queen of England’s great cavalcade finally departed Paris. It was made up of the several hundred people who would accompany Henrietta-Marie, including, besides the lords and ladies who were to make up her household, a large number of servants: cooks, grooms, a surgeon, an apothecary, a tailor, an embroiderer, a perfumer, a clockmaker, eleven musicians, Mathurine, her Fool, and twenty-four priests, including a bishop.
The king had an attack of the quinsy. His throat was so enflamed that he could barely speak. He bid his sister farewell at Compiegne, and returned to Paris to recuperate. At Amiens, Marie di Medici developed a fever. After a few days, it became obvious that Henrietta-Marie would have to leave her mother and travel onward with her great train by herself. Charles was already sending impatient messages to France requesting his bride come forthwith. Finally, they reached Boulogne where twenty ships were waiting to take the new queen and her retinue to England. There was also a party of English ladies and gentlemen who had come to greet the new queen, but while Henrietta-Marie was polite, she showed little warmth toward these members of her new court. They were Protestants, and must be avoided as much as possible, her foolish spiritual advisors warned her, little caring if she made a good impression on her new subjects as long as her soul was safe.
The duke of Glenkirk and his family had taken their leave of the young queen in Paris. They would see her in England, but it was not necessary that they be part of the great company traveling with Henrietta-Marie to her husband. They returned to the château with the St. Laurents so they might have a few more days with Lady Stewart-Hepburn, who would be spending the summer in France with her youngest daughter.
James Leslie tried hard to get his mother to return home to Scotland with them. “You dinna even know this Stuart king, Mother, and his parents, your last link wi the royal Stuarts, are both gone now. Come home wi us to Scotland. There is always a place for you at Glenkirk.”
Catriona Hay Leslie Stewart-Hepburn shook her head. She had been a dazzling beauty in her youth, and while time had aged her, she was still a stunning woman. Her honey-blond hair had turned a snowy white, just faintly tinted with gold. Her leaf-green eyes, however, had not changed. They were as clear and beautiful as they had always been. Now they fixed themselves on him. “Jemmie,” she said, “you are my eldest child, and I love you dearly, but I will not leave Bothwell, as I have already told Jasmine. Besides, as I have also said, my old bones are too used to the sunshine and the warmth of the south. Going home to Scotland would take ten years off my life. While I miss Francis, I am not all that anxious to join him yet. I enjoy my grandchildren too much, I fear.” She laughed, and patted his hand. “You have done very well all these years without me.”
“Do you not miss your children?” he queried her. “My brothers and my sisters hae given you grandchildren, too, Mother.”
“And all have at one time or another come to Naples with their families to see me,” she responded. “They do not need me, either, Jemmie. A woman raises her bairns, and then no matter how much she loves them, she must let them go on to live their own lives. A mother and father are like the sun around which their children move. Then one day it all changes. The bairns are grown, and become like the sun themselves, which means the parents must take a lesser position in their lives. There is no tragedy in this, for a mother wants her bairns to flourish and lead their own lives. They go on, and we go on. I loved all my bairns, but you were not my only life.
“Soon Jasmine’s three eldest will be ready to leave the loving nest you and she have built for them. You must let them go, Jemmie, as I let you, and your brothers, and sisters go. And you must let me go, my son. While you may not realize it, you did so years ago when I left Scotland, and you became head of the Leslies of Glenkirk. Seeing me after so long a time has but made you nostalgic.”
“I dinna realize how much I hae missed you, Mother, until now,” James Leslie said. “Will you nae return to Scotland ever?”
“You know I will never leave him,” she replied.
“He would like it if he were buried in the soil of his native land,” the duke of Glenkirk said slowly. Then he chuckled. “I’ll wager he was awaiting Cousin Jamie at heaven’s gate, and Queen Anne with him. She always liked Bothwell, Mother, didn’t she?”
Cat nodded. “All the women liked Francis,” she recalled with a small smile, “but if he were awaiting Jamie at heaven’s gate, surely the king thought he had been sent in the opposite direction from which he anticipated, although seeing his Annie might have reassured him.” She laughed, and then grew pensive again. “Aye, he would like to have been laid to rest in his native land, Jemmie.”
“Do you think he would object to being planted in Leslie soil?” the duke inquired of his mother.
“On the grounds of the old abbey,”
