Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett
It was said seriously, but she caught the glint in his eyes, and laughed. Then she sobered. ‘But are you sure The O’LiamRoe will choose to stay in France? Won’t he find it too humiliating? You will be with the Court, and he will be on the fringes.’
‘It needs a little energy to be humiliated,’ said Lymond dryly. ‘He will stay.’
Margaret was on her feet, making at last for the door, blind with fatigue. He was committed to help the Queen. She could report it thankfully to Tom before he left, to the Dowager, to her mother, and to all those in the Queen’s inner, most trusted circle with whom he would be working henceforth. Lymond had risen too, still talking, his face fine-drawn with tiredness.
Margaret Erskine spoke abruptly. ‘I seldom quote Tom, but not because he isn’t capable of producing hard common sense. He thinks you’re mad to tie yourself to O’LiamRoe. The Prince may be a wag, but he’s lazy and foolish and unreliable to boot. Tom says he’s so damned harmless he’ll kill you.’
‘Nonsense,’ said Lymond. ‘Why should I suffer moral blackmail and The O’LiamRoe escape unfettered? He is an educated man. He has a brain. He shall be made to use it. I shall make him drunk on the palm wine of power,’ said Lymond sweepingly, ‘until he falls out of his tree.’
Part Two
DANGEROUS JUGGLES
The person is exempt who multiplies the juggling spears up, or the juggling balls up. If they be dangerous juggles, there is a fine of foul-play for injuries for them. ‘Dangerous juggles’ means all juggles in which pointed or edged instruments are used.
I: Rouen to St. Germain: The Inexpugnable Drone
II: Blois: Red Tracks in the Wood
III: Aubigny: Boldness of Denial
IV: Blois: All the Mean Arts
V: Blois: Wickedness Is the Rule
VI: Blois: The Forfeited Feast
I
Rouen to St. Germain:
The Inexpugnable Drone
It is not easy for Brehons to decide concerning bees that have taken up their lodging in the trees of a noble dignitary; with respect to which it is not easy to cut the tree.
THE news of Thady Boy’s unlooked-for success was brought his employer the next morning by Robin Stewart, who had risen very early for this privilege. O’LiamRoe, listening, scratched his feathered golden head.
At the end, he looked pleased. ‘Ah, ’Tis a tearing fellow, a noble champion itself. To the devil with your pearldrops and your parroty manners. A filled mind and an apt wit will earn you all the respect any man has the means to deserve.’
‘Man, ye canna trust them. Look how choosy they were with you thon day at the tennis. And now they expect you to sit here on suffrance while the wee smart fat ones go about arm in arm with the dukes,’ said Robin Stewart, employing tact much as O’LiamRoe employed fine clothes as a blandishment.
His cheekbones grinding, the Irishman yawned. ‘If Thady Boy is desperate to squeeze kisses on to princesses, my dear, O’LiamRoe won’t begrudge it.’
‘You’ll scour France at his shirttails, and sit behind the closed door? They’ll have him at every supper like physic. I’ve seen a fancy take them before.’
‘I believe you. He’ll be clean worn down and fit to pass through a dog stirrup before he sees Ireland again. What of it? I’ll not lack entertainment.’
Quarrelling with the Prince of Barrow was like fighting a curtain. Robin Stewart gave up.
It was a busy day for O’LiamRoe. His next caller was d’Aubigny, bearing the King’s deferential request for the continued company at Blois of the Prince of Barrow’s gifted ollave, Thady Ballagh. No mention was made of O’LiamRoe’s mooted departure, but the letter implied, and Lord d’Aubigny confirmed, that he himself would be at O’LiamRoe’s service, and that on the journey south and beyond, he need have no worry about tolls, fares or fodder, or about his nights’ lodgings. O’LiamRoe was delighted. ‘Dhia! It’s like being cuckolded.’
With Lord d’Aubigny was the small, red-haired, pretty woman O’LiamRoe had first met at Rouen on the other side of a whale. Jenny Fleming had seized the excuse to survey him.
The Prince of Barrow’s interest in Lymond’s affairs was minuscule. But he knew wilful curiosity when he saw it. She and d’Aubigny seemed on good terms: he was, after all, also of royal Stewart descent; their forebears were the same. Her liveliness and her graces fitted elegantly into the fiddling pattern of her kinsman’s behaviour The reservoirs of his speech flowed freely for her entertainment; his voice mellowed. Listening, you could guess how he had impressed the gauche boy who became King.
O’LiamRoe amused her with Irish nonsense, let her tease him, and contrived one or two exchanges with his lordship which almost reached the dignity of serious conversation and probably startled both men. In fact, a shade of puzzlement occasionally crossed d’Aubigny’s face and once, unexpectedly, he addressed Lady Fleming less than civilly.
She had been talking of home; but at the tone she lifted her clear eyes to his lordship. ‘John, if you wish to leave so badly, you may wait for me below.’
And huffily, to O’LiamRoe’s mild astonishment, Lord d’Aubigny left. As the door closed behind him with unnecessary firmness, Jenny, triumphant, turned to the Irishman. ‘And what do you make of our darling?’
She had come, breaking every prohibition, to talk about Lymond. O’LiamRoe, amused, picked up her furred cloak and said, ‘Thady Boy? He’ll be in crumbs in a year, with all that scurrying about; but he makes a middling good Irishman.’
‘Then don’t show me a bad one. He came to my room and read me a lecture this morning—’ She broke off. It was no part of Jenny’s technique to destroy her own charming image.
Affairs of status meant nothing to O’LiamRoe. He hitched the cloak round her straight shoulders, and patted it, dispatching her. ‘He’s a quaint fellow, to be sure; but dead lucky with women.’
She must have realized then that no confidences would be forthcoming. He was simply not interested.
At the door, she paused. ‘Don’t tell him I came. Or he’ll do it again.’
O’LiamRoe, who knew a little more about Lymond than she bargained for, noted that occasionally Lady Fleming had a conscience. ‘I don’t need to,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all over Court by nightfall, surely.’
He was right. Tom Erskine was among the first to hear it, and the news added to a certain uneasiness which already tinged his confidence in Thady Boy Ballagh. The situation made him hesitate, but it was nearly time to leave on his embassy to Augsberg. He made his final calls, formal and informal, and at the end of them lost his escort and slipped unseen into the room where Thady Boy Ballagh as guest of the kingdom of France had spent his interrupted night.
Hindered by visits from the Constable, from Madame de Valentinois’s matron of honour, and from the Queen’s page, Lymond was preparing, among the ruins of an uneaten meal, to return to the Croix d’Or, where he and O’LiamRoe were to stay until the Court left. At the click of the latch he looked up.
‘Sacré chat d’Italie!’ said Francis Crawford. ‘The wife, the wife’s dam, and now the husband. Let’s have the Schawms of Maidstone in a pack on the doormat. Secrecy was your idea, wasn’t it?’
Erskine might bow to a superior brain, but he had no patience with temper. ‘The visit to Jenny, I understand, was initiated by you.’
‘My dear Thomas,’ said Lymond, ‘any man can visit Lady Fleming without comment. Unhappily she formed a low opinion of the night’s events, or lack of them, and took her complaints, I suspect, to O’LiamRoe. The much revered mother of your wife needs to be turned on her stomach and bladed on the back of a captured Bacchante.’
Erskine was sharp. ‘I’ve been taking formal leave of the King. And it was d’Aubigny who took Jenny to visit O’LiamRoe.’
‘Why?’
‘They get on well together.’
‘Well, get her away from him. Tell her it’s incest. And keep her apart from O’LiamRoe as well. She would have her work cut out anyway. He could t
‘—Particularly as he knows just who Jenny is, and no doubt, admires your restraint more than she does. This is rubbish. You’re talking as if she were someone from the Pont Truncat. We’ll interfere with you as little as possible; have no fear. Remember that you also have accepted an obligation.’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Lymond. ‘Margaret worked very hard last night; you should be proud of her. I gather that if our deceased friends and lovers could see us, they would be proud of us. Even including, she seems to believe, Christian—’
Erskine’s face stopped him. For a moment their eyes met; then Lymond turned away, his lip curling. ‘All right. You’re leaving for Brussels and Augsburg and Margaret stays. You’ll be back when?’
‘After Christmas. Then home via England. Meanwhile, the little Queen, so far as we can manage it, will stay with the Queen Mother and not the royal children. All the safeguards you suggested will be applied. Everything she eats and everything she does will be watched; there will be a day and night guard. It can’t be complete, for above all, we must work invisibly. It mustn’t look as if we don’t trust her safety in France. That is our work. Yours is outside.’
Lymond said nothing. He had finished his sketchy packing and was lounging discouragingly by the door. Erskine wondered if he knew what was ahead of him. He said, ‘It’ll take God knows what time to get to Blois. You’ll go mostly by river, stopping off at lodges and palaces and staying exactly as long as the game lasts in each place. Nothing in this lunatic country matters as much as the hunt. Fifteen thousand people, this man’s father went about with, their beds, their clothes and their furniture on their backs, signing state papers on horseback and heralds running after him yearning in couples. They never stayed above fifteen days in one place, unless they were at war, and every ambassador in Europe hated hunting for life.’
It was a favourite subject; but something in Lymond’s manner made him stop. ‘But of course, you know France quite well.’
‘Once,’ said Lymond, ‘when I had too much money, I laid out some of it here. Sevigny is mine.’
Nicholas Applegarth of Sevigny was a friend of Tom Erskine. He began cautiously, ‘But Nick—’
‘—Is a tenant of mine.’ The tone of voice was dismissive. ‘And how will the Queen Mother’s coup d’état prosper when you go?’
It was then that Tom Erskine, finding a mine at his feet, temporarily lost his wits. The Queen Dowager’s purposes in France were many, but only one of them could properly be called an attempt at a coup d’état, and that so far was strictly secret. It must be obvious enough, God knew, that the Scots lords were being honoured: that pensions were hailing down indiscriminately like rice at a wedding, while Governor Arran’s heir, without a syllable of French, was now captain of the Scots troops in France and drawing twelve thousand crowns a year.
But no one could know for certain what he knew: that a meeting between the Queen Mother of Scotland and Henri of France would presently settle once and for all whether France would help the Dowager towards her greatest ambition—to oust the Earl of Arran from the Governorship of Scotland, and to rule as Governor herself for the rest of her daughter’s minority.
The Queen Mother wanted Lymond, and Lymond suspected the truth. Now, if ever, in this delicate matter of state, was the time to engage his concern. But she wanted him, as Erskine knew, for his sword-arm, not his mind. In her tortuous ways, a trained and meddlesome intelligence was the last thing she sought.
So, his hands tied, Tom Erskine hesitated, and delivered the fateful rebuff. ‘The Queen Mother’s affairs are her own, as you probably know. We can trust her, I think, to do what is best. In any case, there is really no alternative.’
Crawford of Lymond raised his delicate, dyed brows. ‘There is union with England.’
He had guessed, then, what was afoot. ‘There is suicide,’ said Tom Erskine, his voice flat.
‘Not while you may come to me,’ rejoined Lymond, and rising elegantly, sketched a sardonic bow. ‘And buya fit of mirth fora groat.’
There was nothing to say. Erskine didn’t need that to tell him that, somehow, at some level too subtle to be understood, he had not done quite well enough by the Dowager, and perhaps in some way by Lymond himself. In his heart he knew that if Lymond had not chosen to speak coarsely of Christian, his impulse would have been different. It did not help to guess that Lymond’s words were not a matter of impulse at all.
Robin Stewart arrived, just after Erskine had gone, to escort Thady Boy to the inn. He was the picture of cynical amusement. ‘You’ll be fairly joco this morning?’
‘I am, then.’
‘Dicing for you all night, they tell me.’
‘So I’ve been told three—no, four—times. No one mentions the only aspect that interests me. Who won?’
‘I believe,’ said the Archer stiffly, ‘it was the sieur d’Enghien,’ and watched disapprovingly as Thady Boy choked with laughter. ‘In some circles, vice doesna matter,’ said Robin Stewart. ‘Some people will do anything to get into a certain type of company, never mind is it coarse as cat’s dirt.’
‘It’s little I’d know,’ said Thady Boy, his eyes guilelessly clear. ‘I’ve not been at either end of this trade up till now.’
The austere voice softened. ‘Some people,’ said Stewart, ‘get carried away when the women behave yon way, and think their fortune’s made, and that from now on they’re something special. They don’t know French ladies. I’ve seen them turn in a night, and what they fancied before they’ll fling in the moat. You’d be as well to understand—’
‘I understand,’ said Thady Boy concisely, ‘that I have a headache. Come along.’
Lymond, as it happened, spoke the truth. Looking narrowly, Stewart launched the theme which was to dog Thady Boy, in tenor and soprano, for four stricken months. ‘Man, you’ll need to watch that! You’ll need to cut down the drinking! They’ll egg you on for sheer devilment and it can fairly strip your inside.… Did ye get those burns looked at?’
‘Yes. My tail is plaited like a Barbary ram. Do you want to see it? Mary Mother, come on.’
At the Croix d’Or, having shaken off the solicitous Stewart, Lymond arrived at last at the door of O’LiamRoe’s room and stepped inside, closing it quietly behind him. The silence, as the two men stared at one another, was fat with danger. Then a smile pulled at the corner of O’LiamRoe’s whiskered mouth and he gave tongue mellowly.
‘Busy child, if I read it right, there is the father and mother of all headaches on you which you surely deserve. Sit down. As you may have forgotten, in the long dereliction from your duty, I had better remind you that Phelim O’LiamRoe is the unnatural sort of fellow who has no need to be handled and who can even on occasion hold his tongue. I hear you are the finest lute player since Heremon. You can prove it to me tomorrow.’
’Thank God for that,’ said Lymond. He passed by, resting his hand for a moment on the other man’s shoulder, and dropped limply into a chair. In five minutes, he was asleep.
In the ten days still left in Rouen, they learned the rudiments of Court routine which would affect them both, willy-nilly, for four months. The King rose at dawn, held his levée, read his dispatches and talked them over with his Privy Council before ten o’clock Mass. Then the privileged traffic began: the secretaries and couriers and ambassadors and heralds and diplomats and soldiers and clergy with news and courtesies and gifts and complaints.
Routine reports came in: from the master masons on the King’s building work, or Madame Diane’s; from St. Germain about a valued bird fallen sick; a gentle reminder, routed through the Constable’s kind offices, that someone had been promised a present of wine, and someone’s butler had come for it; news of the children, with a painting. News of a death in Paris that left a benefice vacant; you could see by the new face lined up waiting who had already bought that titbit of news from the dying man’s d
Dinner was at noon. After it, the General Council might meet, but not now with the urgency of the days when France still had high hopes of Italy, and when, triumphant over England, they were engaged in tweaking Boulogne from her tail. Not that the prospects for next year were particularly serene, in spite of the nominal peace with England’s little King; the new Pope and the Emperor Charles, France’s traditional Hapsburg enemy, were too friendly for that.
At the beginning of his reign and his freedom, Henri had found it intoxicating to fondle his favourites. Diane, the Constable, St. André, d’Aubigny and the rest had half-emptied the treasury among them. But the proper exercise of the King’s divine power, obviously, was to encourage upheavals in Germany. By linking arms with Protestant and pagan—German princeling and Turkish infidel—he might defeat Charles. Unfortunately, the money was lacking. All the General Council could propose was prevarication—prevaricate with his dear sister Scotland; hold off his eager Irish friends; and make a cool social gesture or two in the direction of England, herself split in two with the old story, the struggle for baronial power during small Edward’s minority.
Henri of France could prevaricate without even thinking. He attended the Queen’s evening parties, gave large suppers, spent what time he could, which was quite a lot, with Diane; and in rare moments of privacy could be heard practising his lute. The rest of the waking hours, for these ten days at Rouen, were filled with ceremony.
The capital of Normandy, perfectly capable of turning down flat a Grand Sénéchal wanting an Entry on the eve of vacation, was prone by the same token to extract the last ounce from a really royal occasion, once they had set their minds to it; particularly with Lyons to outshine. There was the State Entry of Queen Catherine; the speech-girt presentation of vase and saltcellar and other tabernacle-like trifles; the solemn dinner and the lugubrious farce by one of the two Rouen burlesque societies, torn between pride and a natural anxiety to do with the disappointed company.