Queens' Play (59 page)

A heap of red hair in an immaculate bed, the Queen of Scotland slept; but in her mother’s room the candle burned and spluttered by the outflung arm of a sleeper who had counted most of the night hours away. Beyond, Margaret Erskine lay still with open eyes.

In the Vieux Château, Lymond’s two warders, both Constable’s men, were having an unexpectedly tedium-free night. The tall one, rattling the dice box, was the more impressionable. ‘That’s a good song.’

‘This is a better,’ said Lymond; and sang it, while they listened to each bawdy verse, whimpering. At the end, sitting curled on his pallet, Francis Crawford spoke idly. ‘Anton, why does a man leave his mistress?’

‘He loves another,’ said the tall gaoler promptly, and threw.

The short one chimed in. ‘Or
she
does. Or she grows fat and ugly, or pesters him for marriage.’

‘Or has too many children,’ said the tall gaoler gloomily.

Lymond’s face remained grave. ‘And why, do you think, might a mistress part from her lover?’

‘Your case?’ asked the tall man, and laid down the dice.

Lymond shook his head. ‘Another’s.’

‘She leaves him for a better lover,’ said the short one aggressively.

‘No,’ said Lymond gravely. ‘That has been tried.’

Curiously, the eyes of the tall gaoler searched the cool face. ‘For money, then? Marriage? Position?’

‘That has been tried, too.’

‘She’s not a mistress, that one; she’s a leech,’ said the short gaoler, and he picked up the dice.

‘She suffers the child in man,’ said Lymond. ‘I would guess, because she thinks with his shoulders in the clouds, his head must see further than other men. But in time—’

‘She finds his eyes are shut,’ said the short man, and threw

‘Or that she has been invisible for so long that he has forgotten she is there. The clear skies above all that cloud no longer bewitch her. She looks for a man with a God-sent vocation, a brilliant vocation but a different vocation, who will either put her before it … or change it for her.’

‘And then she will leave her first lover. It sounds unlikely to me,’ said the tall man, and threw in his turn.

‘It is beginning to sound unlikely to me,’ said Francis Crawford after some thought. ‘What about another song?’

Much later, when the short guard was asleep and Lymond, stretched prone on his face, lay open-eyed and abstracted in bed, the tall man swung his chair to the floor, saying, ‘But would she be happy with him?’

The fair, bloody head jerked round.
‘What?
Who happy with whom?’

‘With the other. If he altered his ideals, would the woman stay even with him?’

‘Christ,’ said Lymond. ‘Mild and eloquent Balder, the woman would never even think of him. His office is purely to sunder; neither he nor any man has power to do more than that.’

‘Then where is his reward?’ said the tall gaoler, and began to swing rhythmically again.

‘Round as Giotto’s “O”,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘His reward is nothing, nullity, negation, an absence, a lack. His golden reward, equal to its own weight of shaved beard, is this, that the lady did not accept him.’

‘She is ugly?’

‘She is beautiful as the tides of the sea,’ said the pleasant voice from the bed. ‘Warm, silken and fathomless; and familiar with mysteries.’

‘They all are, the bitches,’ said the tall man, and went on rocking, slowly, in silence.

The Inn of the Trois Mariés, outside St. Julien-de-Vouvantes and nine miles from Châteaubriant, had brought Maître Gaultier as close to his clients at Court as the congested billeting situation would allow. He was not disturbed, confident in the belief that a needy gentleman will sniff out a usurer, as the mastiffs of Rhodes were said to distinguish Turk from Christian by the smell.

The O’LiamRoe, launched upstairs with the first sunlight, was given audience without question; but Georges Gaultier’s listening face was vacant. He heard the Prince of Barrow through, hummed a line of some obscure monody, his patched eyebrows scaling his brow, then disappeared without excuse.

Ten minutes later O’LiamRoe found himself greeting the tall, brooding figure and eaglet face of the Dame de Doubtance, seated at a little spinet and picking out with one thin, tight-cuffed claw the notes of an astonishingly bawdy song O’LiamRoe hoped she had never heard sung. Clearly Gaultier had conveyed all his news. The flat, downturned mouth tightened, then moved as she swung round for his bow. ‘The woman is a fool.’

He faced her out, all his clothes whitened with dust, and dust in his wild golden hair. ‘You will never see a braver,’ he said.

‘And you are a fool,’ said the Lady harshly. ‘She has the gift, that black-haired woman, and she gave herself like carrion, to feed her own pride.’

‘She has left him.’ His face thinned with sleeplessness, O’LiamRoe kept his temper.

‘
Left
him?
Dotard, schoolboy, unleavened bread, can you believe I speak of Cormac O’Connor?’

Erect, drawn to her full height, she peered down at him from her archaic headdress, the golden plaits thonged on her breast. ‘Ah, you are pleasant,’ she said. ‘Many a starving man will come to you, seeing you starving and able to laugh. You appear pleasant, as drowning leaves in a pond.’

Anger had gone. ‘He has shown me,’ said O’LiamRoe.

‘He has shown himself; that is all that matters,’ said the Dame de Doubtance. ‘Artus Cholet lives with the woman Berthe at St. Julien. The house is thatched; with St. John over the door.’ Still speaking, she reseated herself, the long robes shifting, and resumed at her spinet.

Stiff-backed, O’LiamRoe stood and watched. ‘If man can do it, I shall save them both.’

‘Run, then,’ she said encouragingly. ‘And try hard. I would have told this sooner … I might have told this sooner, but Artus Cholet is my sister’s son, though a fool. You may kill him. He has come to the end.’

He left her, predatory, frowning over her fingering hands. As he closed the door he heard her address them: ‘Sleep, mes enfants—but can you not sleep? This day you must wake fresh as a rosebud. Right hand, you have left hand to meet in the lists.’

Out of the inn; through the stirring life of a country road, and past the unlocked door of a cottage with St. John over the threshold.

Berthe, fat, frightened and wary, had been sleeping alone, but another head at some time had crumpled the pillow and, outside, a horse had recently been watered and fed. He threatened her, hoarseness and tension disguising his lack of skill, until she spoke.

Artus had left early for Châteaubriant; where and for what purpose she did not know. She knew nothing of use, it appeared, but his description; and this, cringing, she gave.

There was another mare in the littered stable. O’LiamRoe changed saddles and, freshly mounted, started back. He had had to beat her, in the end; but it was plain she knew nothing more. After all his efforts, after the agony at Mistress Boyle’s, after the ride to the inn and to St. Julien, he was no further on. The man he wanted had vanished into Châteaubriant, and by the time he came back to his Berthe, it might well be too late.

Flying through the first heat of the morning, double-printing the track he had taken such a short time before, it came to O’LiamRoe that it was no longer one man’s work. Lord d’Aubigny notwithstanding, the English visitors notwithstanding, despite the Queen Dowager and the delicate balance of power she had betrayed Lymond to preserve, his share in all the bitter complexity of the day’s work was to beat the drum; to rouse the jungle; and to call friend and enemy alike into the open.

His bones ached, under the sun; and when carters cursed him, he did not turn.

On the new lake, the painted boats moved no more than a mirage, barring the satiny water with candy-bright troughs. Mary, solid and rosy with heat, was being dressed by a cat’s cradle of nurse, governess, maids of honour, femmes de chambre, valets, pages, grooms and a drum she had fallen in love with the previous evening and had demanded, screaming, to attend her at dawn. Quickly, and with tact, Margaret Erskine got rid of him before he passed the outermost door of the suite. Today, none but trusted faces were allowed in these rooms; no food or drink passed the child’s lips that one of them had
not tasted; none but friends and servants would surround her when she walked abroad.

The Queen Dowager came in, the Cardinal cool and fair at her back; kissed the child, and went out. This morning, her rôle was to wait.

In the darkness of the Vieux Château, Lymond waited, too, with tired patience. Miraculously, after a while he slept, in the shirt of coarse wool which was all they could bring him.

He was sleeping when the Countess of Lennox came upon him, his head buried in his bare arms. She had come prepared to bribe handsomely for the ten minutes’ pleasure she wanted, but had found the tall gaoler surprisingly modest in his needs. His smile had puzzled her, too.

Then the cell door closed behind her and locked, and she watched but could not tell what second he woke, for he looked up lazily after a moment and said, ‘Welcome, Countess.’ And added immediately, swinging with grace to the floor, ‘Lady, this is most indiscreet. Warwick’s brutish eye is everywhere, you know.’

‘They are gathering for the ceremony.’ He looked neither anxious nor angry, damn his kingfisher soul. ‘I feared we might not meet before you suffer at last for your crimes.’ She seated herself on the bare bed he had vacated, arranging her gown. ‘You see what happens when you lose your head.’

‘You warned me.’ He bowed in acknowledgment; the odd shirt over his long hose recalled, involuntarily, the cloth of gold tabard at Hackney. He said dryly, ‘Don’t look so surprised.
Coronez est à tort
, granted; but not for the first time in the world. Let’s not sing a fourpenny dirge over it.’ He twitched up a stool and perched on it, patiently embracing his knees. ‘Well. On which aspect of our ill-advised doings are we about to lecture each other? I have very little to say. As I recall, I exhausted the matter on several other occasions.’

‘But this godlike magnanimity is new.’ Under the high-dressed, green-wheat hair, Margaret Douglas’s eyes were wary. ‘Such forbearance, when your own Queen has forsaken you!’

‘Identify your Queens,’ said Lymond promptly. ‘You forget, we have a pack. The cells are bearing Queens as if every one were a coining iron, with a fat, laurel-wreathed face in the wax. If you mean the Dowager—’

‘Of course I mean the Dowager,’ said Margaret.

‘—She is a tough lady to woo. Matthew will tell you. Jenny Fleming’s stepfather, even. King Henry of England—’

‘I had not supposed,’ said Lady Lennox sarcastically, ‘that you were asking her hand. Your practices are quite other.’

Abruptly Lymond got up. ‘Oh, no. Not this. Not again. If you must dispute, dispute the living issues: Rome and Mary Tudor, Lutherism and Scotland, Spain and the German princes, France and Suleiman’s new empire, the rich new world and starving Ireland, and everywhere the new steel-founder’s war. These are the events you and Matthew are moving. I don’t want to know how small the mainspring may be.’

She had risen as well. ‘Then you would have done well to have found out. For that is why you are here, my dear: because you will not learn that in each of us the mainspring is the smallest thing in the world—is just the single word “I”.’