Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett
‘Don’t be a fool. Come back.’
‘Afraid?’
The Archer tightened his thin lips. ‘Come down, you fool. Let the others be killed if they want to. It’s not your damned country.’
‘Or yours. Show them what your country is like. Come on up.’
A crude catcall from below reached them both. Stewart began to say, his upturned eyes white in their horny sockets, ‘It takes a lot more courage not to do a crazy thing than it does to fall in with the—’
Crisp, pod-shaped and fiend-inspired on the ceiling of Blois, Lymond kicked off his shoes in two shining arcs into the packed causeway far below. Then he knelt, hand outstretched. ‘Friend Robin.… Come running with me.’
He went.
It was a night Robin Stewart would recall all his life. It was a night memorable too for the Prince of Barrow, striding home with Piedar Dooly at his back, struggling with a new emotion and an untoward rebellion of the mind, and unmindful of the shadows shifting unseen in corners. Memorable for Jenny Fleming, in her pretty room at the castle, where she was not lying alone. And memorable, at last, for Oonagh O’Dwyer, sitting alone and unseeing for half that long night in the Hôtel Moûtier before a dead fire.
V
Blois: Wickedness Is the Rule
The King is exempt from liability for accidents caused by a chasm that he may have in his green. If the chasm be one that could have been made safe by levelling or filling, up, but was not, wickedness is the rule respecting it.
FEW of those running ever finished the course. But ten pairs started, moonlit and insubstantial as fawns on the slanting roof of the Inn of St. Louis, in their white shirts and long hose and brief, elegant trunks. Below, the narrow streets were knee-deep in discarded velvets, and the gutters sparkled with shoes. Then St. André leaned over and shouted for torches.
Like fireflies they sprang into the air, the red sparks jerking and darting below; and the young men on the roof caught them, cursing and laughing, and sprang erect, each pair with a cresset held high.
Thady Boy caught his last. Within the sluttish casing, the indulgently fat body, Robin Stewart recognized the white blaze of vitality which had struck at his manhood at Rouen, at St. Germain, at Blois. It drove him to make one final attempt. Stone sober—alone of the twenty—he stretched out an arresting hand. At the touch, Thady wheeled, read his face, and without listening to a word that he said, drew the Archer’s wide-brimmed hat from his head and set fire to it. ‘You won’t need that. Gare le chapeau!’ And holding it between finger and thumb, he dropped the flaming thing into the street as d’Enghien’s hand, this time, held him fast.
‘Set fire to the rest of him, my dear, and drop him below.’
Thady’s teeth shone white, and his eyes blazed with drink and with laughter. ‘Robin is my partner, monseigneur.’
The ringed fingers on his shirt tightened. ‘You are racing with me.’ In his smiling, sleepless face, d’Enghien’s eyes were black and glittering. ‘You’re very drunk, my dear. Entrust to me those beautiful hands. We must not risk a fall.’
Lymond, staring back, did not move. ‘Find yourself a new lámdhia. My hands are for the only fellow among you who has not had the drop in him since suppertime.’
Jean de Bourbon, sieur d’Enghien, no more vicious than the rest, had his own style of wildness. He answered the rebuff quite simply by a neat jab which knocked Robin Stewart staggering down the roof. At the gutter he fell. As the edge struck his back Thady Boy flung himself full length in the gulley and brought his arm hard down on the somersaulting body. Then a hand beneath his head gave Stewart the leverage he needed. He swung himself half round and, using a gargoyle at his hand, threw his weight up and back to the roof. Thady Boy gave him a parting shove and sat up, rubbing his grazed palms and gazing sardonically at d’Enghien who was standing still, breathing rather hard.
Of the rest, only St. André was clearheaded enough to have noticed. He gripped the young man’s satin arm, speaking briefly, and d’Enghien answered tartly; then, staring at Robin Stewart, made a three-word apology and turned his back. St. André, catching Thady Boy’s eye, smiled and shrugged and then, to a roll on the side drum, bent in the sudden silence to catch a white packet thrown up from below. In it were the first clues. The rules they knew. To set foot on ground level was to be disqualified. Each clue would lead them to a fresh house. In each house was a new clue and a word they must memorize. The couple to reach the château first, over the rooftops with the whole message, would be the winners.
On the roof, in the red glare of pitch torches, the heat was surprising. Below them, splayed, crooked, jostling, the impacted rooftops of Blois like some dental nightmare sloped down from the hill to where the plateau of the château rose blue-black against the green-black of the sky, iced and prickled with lights. On their left, beyond serried chimneys, the river Loire lay like pewter, braided with dark trees. Above, it was cool, sparkling and silent: a gracious winter sky below which earth’s younglings could rest. With a roar that rattled the windows, the steeplechase began.
At first the danger lay in the numbers. They ran shoulder to shoulder, pushing, joking and jostling for position along the flat-topped sloping roof, twisting past the hot chimney, and sliding down the blue tiles. The next house, a yard away, was lower. Stewart hesitated but beside him Thady Boy leaped into space and landed, bouncing on the crown of the thatch. Stewart jumped, was caught, and ran.
For the space of three houses, the levels were uneven, but just feasible. At the fourth they were faced with a blank wall, a brick and stone house a full three stories above their heads. It was just possible to get a toehold among the packed bricks. Thady Boy watched the leaders start to climb. Then he looked up at the sky, glanced back at his partner, and backing a little, deliberately put out his torch. Turning his face to the street, he started to run. Stewart saw him launch into his jump from the gutter, arms outflung, hurtling across the narrow gap of paving below. The width was not excessive; the roof opposite was flat. Tumbling, he landed on the edge, somersaulted forward and leaped up as Robin Stewart, elbows flailing, arrived smash in his wake. When the Archer got to his feet Thady Boy, running lightly, was already halfway down the street. Stewart followed, his teeth clenched and a splendid schoolboy bravado burning bright in his breast.
They re-crossed further down the road and found by the bobbing torchlight they had gained two housetops by the manœuvre. Then they were in the Carrefour St.-Michel, and next to the high sloping roof of Diane de Poitiers’s town house.
She was not there; always at Blois she slept at the château when the King was in residence. The clues they sought, one for each pair, were in the attic. It was a tricky climb round the twisted columns of the dormer and on to the carved sill. Thady Boy moved in like a marmoset while Stewart waited, anxiously watching the torches; and the next two competitors arrived as the ollave climbed out and up. He gave de Genstan a deft flick with his toe as he went, so that the young Franco-Scot, shouting, dived neatly into the room; and then, grinning, joined Stewart on the rooftop to read the clue by the bright moon. He stayed for some moments—too long for Stewart’s liking—before saying, ‘All right. Come on …’ and hurling the crumpled paper to the street. Stewart followed blindly. Acrostics in French or acrostics in Hebrew were still Greek to him.
The Rue des Juifs led out of the square, and this time the house they wanted was at the far end. Their lead now was much reduced. Three couples were hard on their heels: d’Enghien, with his brother Condé as partner; Tom Erskine’s brother Arthur with Claude de Guise, Duke of Aumale; and St. André, running with Laurens de Genstan. More distantly were two others, and behind that four more partners were following slavishly, having failed either to enter the attic or interpret the clue. These alone now kept their torches; the leaders, like Thady Boy, had preferred to trust to darkness. And lacking the word cypher the others had memorized, they had no chance of winning, although they might be ready to run for the sport.
Be
Then, minutes ahead of their rivals, they stood high on the pinnacle of some merchant’s house, looking across a twelve-foot gap to the roof slope of the house they next wanted, soaring high over their heads to the fretted, stalk-chimneyed ridge and plunging below to inaccessible gutters, below which was the only window in the whole facing wall. It was a large window, with a small balcony, and the balcony rails ended in spikes. On either side of the two men, the roof they were crossing planed down, blue and silver in the moonlight, to overhang the packed street. It offered a standing jump across twelve feet to a gradient too steep to walk on; and it was impossible.
Stewart, clinging to his side of the chimney and breathing fast, found Thady Boy had hardly hesitated. Sliding, slipping, using his hands as brakes, he made his way down the overlapping Angevin tiles to the roof’s edge and with infinite care swung himself over. Then, his fingers in the gutter, his shadow moving and jerking on the cobbles far below, he began to move along the timber face of the building.
Stewart followed. He let himself down, found a toehold in the wood, and instantly found what Thady Boy had seen from above: a window facing out across the gap they must cross, with a balcony. To reach it meant leaving the gutter: for some steps their only foothold and their only grasp would be the uneven surface of the wood. Stewart, spread-eagled, his heart cold, saw the dark head turn towards him and something gleam. Then Thady Boy, pressing his soft bulk against the building, felt downwards with one shoeless foot, found a toehold and began to transfer his weight. Then there was another spark of metal, a thud, a spiderlike flurry of movement; and Thady Boy was on the balcony. In the moonlight, the haft of a knife glinted, deep in the timbering: he had left a new-made handhold for Stewart.
Years of summer expeditions, of interminable chases, of public tournaments and duty matches with bow and stave had made the Archer physically as adept as his shambling frame and harried spirit would allow. With thought bludgeoned from his brain he concentrated on crossing to the balcony, foot here and here and here as Thady had done; and did the extra thing that last week, last month, last year he would never have dreamed of: he clung sweating to the wood and jerked the knife out, taking it with him in his last spring.
He arrived. The balcony windows were open, the shutters gaped and inside, very close, a woman’s voice said ‘Ah!—Ah! Assassin! Voleur!’
‘O faix, be quiet, woman dear,’ said the voice of Thady Boy Ballagh, cheerfully drunk. ‘For if you let out but one weeny screigh you’ll have eighteen of us here; and yourself with your teeth on the table and your hair on the bedpost and your sense just nowhere to be seen at all … God bless this good house and all belonging to it.’ Then, under Stewart’s horrified gaze he emerged, a halo of auburn curls straddling his black head and under his arm a prodigious roll of somebody’s tapestry.
The crowd below had reached the house now. Torches jogging they swarmed round its foot, their heads upturned to the night. With a flap and a crack the canvas flew out, to drop and fix itself on the spiked balcony. Then, as Thady held it secure, the Archer half scrambled, half slid down the soft matlike bridge to the balcony as leaping figures poured over the skyline.
D’Enghien began to descend the roof in their wake just as the Archer clenched the spiked slack in his fists and nodded. After one swift glance upwards, Thady gripped the strong cloth at either corner and dropped.
Like some forgotten flag, the tapestry with its load plunged between the two houses, stretched taut, kicked, and swung back with the strain. Above, hoarsely ripping, the fabric gave way at one spike. The others held. Jerkily, hand over hand, gripping the cloth with knees and feet, Thady began to climb up; and a moment later Stewart seized him. As d’Enghien and the Prince of Condé, dropping on to the balcony opposite, met a screeching beldame, bald as an egg, the ollave ripped the cloth free and flung it into the street. A moment later he was indoors and the window was empty but for the auburn curls of a wig, fluttering free on a spike.
The clue was easy to find. Thady Boy read it, grinned, and led the way upstairs. ‘Pierre-de-Blois next. How is Condé?’
‘Across. They’ve got some rope from his own house nearby. They ringed a spike with it and then pulled it in after them.’
‘Do you tell me,’ said Thady Boy, and under the sleek lids his blue eyes were graceless. ‘ ’Twould be an uneasy day in Heaven, now, if two mortal sinners such as that had the good of it much longer. Do you agree with me, Robin?’
Light, well-knit and agile in spite of the drink they were carrying, the Prince and his brother were capable of making expert use of their ropes; and each high-born gentleman, for his own reasons, was coolly intent on taking the lead in this race with as little obvious effort as possible.
The rope made for speed. The Rue Pierre-de-Blois was lined with a jumble of houses. Turrets and gables, flat roofs and sloping, balconies and galleries, machicolations and turrets met one another in a confusion of angles and levels sometimes easy, sometimes accessible by crawling, sometimes by leaping from chimney to chimney, and sometimes only feasible by rope.
Where the others, Thady and Stewart among them, had to make use of the bridges which now and then crossed the street, or descended a storey or more for a foothold, Condé and his brother swung across, looped to grilles, to chimneys, to butcher’s hooks straight to their object.
This time they were first at the clue. Reading it where they found it, by an inside window in the dim moonlight, they heard nothing of the soft footsteps entering overhead. Only when they made fast their rope and throwing one end out of the window, prepared to climb down, were they dumbfounded when the rope-tail dangling under them was whipped out of their grasp, hooked from above by the long shaft of a candle snuffer. Above their heads a blade flashed, and the frayed stub of one of their two great cartwheels of immaculate cord sharply expired at their feet. Thady Boy, from the window above had captured the rest.
At the third clue, with ten to go, the two leading couples had a coil of rope each, three couples had dropped out and five were still following, with St. André partnered by Laurens de Genstan leading Arthur Erskine and Claude de Guise. Running softly for the Place St.-Louis, his hand on Stewart’s arm, Thady Boy spoke in his ear. ‘My dilsy, I foresee trouble now. We are too even, and some fine fellow is going to try and set that to rights. Go as quiet as you can. If one is held up, the other goes on. There is a word with each clue to memorize, as certain proof we have seen it, and you have a stark sober mind to hold them. Honneur, Espérance and Noblesse are behind us, and were I to choose, I would surely nominate Régurgitation the next.’
It was, in fact, Renommée, nestling with its clues in the carved frontage of a draper’s house in the Place; and when the next, in the Rue du Palais, turned out to be Justice, Stewart saw what he meant.
Ballagh had been right also about the horseplay. They were all on top of one another again, and it was both drunken and rough. Ropes were hacked at without mercy for those suspended; gutters kicked down and tiles dislodged; elbows, knees and feet brought brutally into play. Stewart, tripped up neatly from the shadows, had a fall of twenty feet, ultimately and safely ended in thatch. De Genstan, who perpetrated it, was caught, as he ran along an exposed upper gallery, by the contents of some sleeper’s slop bucket, hurled with a soft Irish benediction full in his face.
Stewart himself saw it, his eyes shining. Outside himself at last, he had no fear. Even when hurtling down among the chimneys he had an absolute belief in his own salvation, and rose unharmed and unshaken.
It was as well, for a new chal
And here, taking over as the Constable’s nephews, the Colignys and the de Guises—tripping each other up, exploding into laughter, clattering down the rooftops on tin trays and pelting one another with eggs from some long defunct nest—began to lose the sharp sense, of contest, were Jacques d’Albon, Marshal de St. André, and de Genstan his partner. Courtier, diplomat and fighting man, hated by the King’s father and most dearly loved by the King, St. André was trained to an inch, sinew, muscle and brain. As windows lit behind them in street after street, as the spectators, the admirers, the rabble coursing below them along the route roared their acclaim; he began to press forward.
Many of the locations properly vacant in the daytime were far from so in the middle of the night. Ten little girls in a convent dormitory giggled, squealed, or hid under the bedclothes, as one by one, the window was darkened by six or seven gallants, each in turn dropping to the floor and subjecting the fireplace to a search. The Mother Superior arrived running as the last well-muscled leg shot round the shutters and, trapped in a fog of hysteria, did not find until morning the discarded shift blatant on the highest finial of all.
It was about this time that St. André and de Genstan passed them and Thady Boy, who had prepared for the circumstance two streets ago, cracked a jar of rose attar and lobbed the contents at the Marshal as he went. The crowd yelled; the victim swore, choking, in rivers of pomade; and Robin Stewart laughed till he cried.
Then it was their eleventh call, in the market square near the quays, with the Loire running black under the arches of the bridge. Above and behind them loomed the high town they had left. They were nearly home.