Queens' Play (21 page)

Behind them, on their tours, sauntered the Douglases. Once, as Thady Boy leaned his idle weight on a table, a hand came down sharply and silently on his wrist, pinning it on the rich wood where the flexible fingers lay exposed in relief. Holding it thus, ‘Don’t you sometimes regret, John, that something like that can’t be bought?’ said George Douglas. ‘Or can it, I wonder?’

After the first second, Thady Boy’s right hand lay relaxed in his grip. The others all turned to look. O’LiamRoe grinned, but Stewart, forced to look at that elegant hand, found rising within him a profound and inexplicable annoyance. He said nastily, ‘They’re not so bonny on the other side, are they? I doubt Master Ballagh caught a few knives wrong end up when he was learning to juggle.… Yon’s the arcade his lordship was speaking of.’ Lord d’Aubigny cleared his throat; Sir George, smiling, loosed his hard grasp; and the little party, dismissing the scene, shuffled after.

And once, when Lord d’Aubigny touched with a certain wit on Stewart’s recent ordeal by fire, Sir George smiled. ‘Life at Court seems to be uncommonly risky. I hope, Stewart, both you and your rescuer had read your Pynson. You know it?
The Art and Craft to Know Well to Dye
:

The greater part of his audience looked amiably blank. O’LiamRoe picked up a piece of rock crystal and whistled. The book Douglas mentioned, he seemed to remember in the unfiled rubbish heap of his mind, dealt not with mortality but with tinting. A grin of pure joy lined the smooth, egg-round face; and the Prince of Barrow, returning the crystal, addressed his ollave over his shoulder. ‘Busy child, you have surely read that.’

‘Ah,’ said Thady. ‘The Douglases are expert on titles. I would never contradict them.’

And paid for it that same evening when, neatly noosed by courtesies and polite insistence, he was drawn alone into Sir George’s room and heard the door close crisply behind him.

‘And now,’ said the most intelligent of the Douglases, removing his superb cloak and smoothing his doublet, while watching the fat, sweep-headed creature before him. ‘And now, Francis Crawford of Lymond, let us talk.’

From his black head to his scuffed mockado shoes, Thady Boy was relaxed. A point of light from the fire danced under his lids. ‘You are speaking, maybe, to the fairies?’

Moving with grace, Douglas dropped into a tall tapestried chair and put his fingers together. ‘You forget. I know your face, my dear Crawford. I know it better than any of my colleagues do. I had the pleasure on several occasions of causing you trouble, and I bear you no grudge for having on occasion made use of me. At times, as I remember, we have even helped one another. For the future.… Who knows?’ His eyes rested thoughtfully on Thady Boy’s calm face. ‘I thought the Queen would have had you at today’s meeting. Doesn’t she trust you yet? Or is it the other way round?’

The room was exquisitely furnished. Detaching himself in all his bleary satin from the door, Thady Boy took from the wall an Aztec mask fiery with jewels, its nose and ears of beaten gold. He put it on.
The bone teeth grinned, and his voice came hollow through the metal. ‘Quetzalcoatl, Lord of the Toltecs.’

Sir George waited, but the voice added nothing more. ‘Shall I spell it out, then?’ he said. ‘The Queen Dowager of Scotland and her brothers had a meeting with King Henri this morning. They reached an agreement, as a result of which our dear Scottish friend the Earl of Arran will be asked to give up the Governship of Scotland, on the promise that if little Mary dies childless, he will rule Scotland as King. And in Arran’s place the new Governor of Scotland in Mary’s minority will of course be that well-known Frenchwoman, the Queen Dowager Mary of Guise.… Interesting?’

‘Very.’ The mask had descended.

‘So that at all costs the little Queen must be kept alive so that her mother, during the minority, may run Scotland as she wishes; so that Mary in time may marry the heir to the French throne; and so that the Dauphin may in time become King of France, Ireland and Scotland, with the entire family of Guise at, if not on, his right hand. This conception of the future is not universally popular in the kingdom of France.’

‘Do you tell me?’

‘No. Diane, it is rumoured, is becoming a little jealous of the de Guises, and did she know what, for example, some ladies of my acquaintance suspect, she would be very angry indeed.’

‘They’re easy vexed, so, the women here.’

‘On the other hand, the Constable is said to favour reducing the power of both the de Guises and Diane, and marrying the little Queen off to a lesser duke instead of to the Dauphin as planned.’

‘There does be a power of scheming among the grand, high folk there are,’ said Thady Boy humbly.

‘—Finally, Queen Catherine, we know, dislikes sharing her husband with Diane, with the de Guises, and even with his old crony the Constable, though she’s capable of allying with the Constable at a pinch. She dislikes England intensely. She has seen to it that d’Aubigny here, for example, will never rise in the hierarchy since his brother Lennox, my revered relative who hates you, my dear Lymond, so cordially, is at the English Court and a strong contender, if not a strong favourite, for both the English and the Scottish crowns. He, we must not forget, is descended from Scottish Kings, and his wife—my niece—was niece also to the late King of England. No one shakes the King’s loyalties lightly. The Constable was made to release d’Aubigny from prison because the King loved d’Aubigny. The love has perhaps weakened, but the regard is still there. Neither Catherine nor the Constable can injure d’Aubigny; but they will see that he is kept out of the royal mind.

‘The King has other favourites besides the de Guise family. You
know them well. St. André. Condé and d’Enghien. The absent Vidame. Each in turn hates his or her rival; nearly all without exception hate the de Guises. So that if someone is trying to kill the little Queen, the little Queen’s mother is in quite a predicament. The foreign assassin is soon dealt with. But the assassin within the Court is another matter entirely. For example, if it were Queen Catherine herself?’

With a smooth rustle, Thady Boy slid down his stool, settling his potbelly on his knees and gazing at the segmented ceiling.

Or Diane?’ said Thady Boy.
‘Vieille ridée, vieille edentée?
As you see, I know a verse about her too.…’

‘I have no doubt you do,’ said Sir George, his voice grating very slightly. ‘Do I have to be more precise? The Queen Dowager has to protect her daughter. And she must do it covertly, without knowledge of King or Court. So the man she chose, unknown to the King, is pranking at his very table.
Are you listening?’

The ollave’s blank stare, very slightly unfocussed, dropped from the ceiling. ‘Am I not here sober, celibate and buttoned like a March stag? What must I do else?’

‘Dance,’ said Sir George succinctly.

A smile, starting somewhere on the scalp, crawled downwards over the dark, slovenly skin. Thady brought his chin down and his hands up, and sketching an unmistakable gesture, replied. ‘The answer is a doux Nenny, my dear.’

A refusal, sweet or otherwise, was no use to Sir George. He sat up. ‘You understand at least what I’m talking about?’

‘Devil a word,’ said Thady Boy cheerfully. ‘But three months in this fair land have taught me something, surely. Five words, to be precise. A doux Nenny, my dear.’

For a moment Douglas was silent. But he was not of a race easily daunted. He said pleasantly, ‘You would find it helpful to have the friendship of the next Scots Ambassador in France.’

The smile, remaining, matched the abandoned lilt in the voice. ‘Does the Queen Mother know who the next Ambassador is to be?’

‘She will, when you have told her,’ said George Douglas. ‘Myself.’

‘Otherwise—?’

‘Otherwise Henri of Valois, Second of that name, will be told why Queen Mother of Scotland has brought a spy with her, and who he is.’

Thady Boy’s soft voice was sad. ‘It all sounds terrible unlucky.
Would it not be a better thing, surely, to put the problem to the Queen Mother yourself? Or would the tale, maybe, fall faint on her ears? I doubt you have axe-land to cultivate there, my hero.’

‘It wouldn’t fall faint, I dare think, on the ears of King Henri,’ said Douglas comfortably. ‘As you are aware, the Queen Mother will disown you instantly.’

Thady Boy shook his head. ‘Logic, logic; why then should the lady ever agree to your wants?’

‘It wounds me to say it, but for quite a sound reason I believe,’ said Sir George Douglas. ‘She disapproves of me, I do believe; but she wants Lymond more.’

There was a thoughtful silence, filled with the hiss and crack of the fire. Thady Boy stirred. He rose to his feet, picked up the Aztec mask, and clapping it on, Janus-like, back to front, surveyed Sir George who also had risen, not quite so smoothly. ‘ ’Tis a neat, pretty scheme; but you overrate friend Quetzalcoatl here and underrate the Queen Mother. If his stock were as high as you think, he would have been at this meeting you speak of, surely. And to exert pressure and still be refused would be intolerable, would it not? So that it is lucky that there is no Quetzalcoatl, but only a Druimcli of the seven degrees with a simple negative in his mouth.’

He strolled away, replaced the mask, and turned to the door. Sir George Douglas followed him. They understood each other. Lymond knew that Sir George would take just as much as he could snatch, this side of danger; and Sir George knew that Lymond had quite cheerfully called his bluff. The situation, however, was still full of plums for the picking. He said mildly, ‘The seven degrees of self-confidence, I take it. You deserve to be made a little uncomfortable, my friend.’

‘Dhia
, you are forestalled,’ said Thady Boy absently, his hand on the latch. ‘I will add, however, a true piece of advice.

‘The country is stronger than the lord, noble Douglas. Stronger than the lord and equal to the power of her songs—Do you sing, now?’

Sir George did not sing. He turned to Quetzalcoatl, empty-eyed on the wall, and as the door shut, exchanged a bald grin.

The Douglas was sufficiently piqued to retaliate next day, when maliciously he dragged the small talk to Scotland, the third baron Cutler and his Irish wife, and the third baron’s brother and heir, Francis Crawford of Lymond, Master of Culter.

The secret of Lymond’s identity, Sir George believed, was his own and O’LiamRoe’s. But surprisingly, O’LiamRoe with a flood of animated questions was his ally. Drumlanrig, who disliked the
Culters, was typically gloomy and the Archer Stewart looked merely angry and bored. But Lord d’Aubigny, surely, knew that Lymond was a notorious enemy of Lennox, his brother in London, his name even having been linked with Margaret, Lennox’s wife.

Yet far from slandering the Culters and unwittingly giving help with the baiting, Lord d’Aubigny listened almost without comment, and only once contradicted. ‘The fellow’s yellow-headed, surely; the same as my brother. That’s why my dear Matthew found it infuriating when Margaret—’ He broke off. Margaret, he had perhaps remembered, was George Douglas’s niece.

It was what Douglas had been angling for. ‘Yellow hair can be dyed, John. They say the man is now somewhere in France.’

There was a dreary silence; to his irritation he felt the topic founder at his feet. Lord d’Aubigny said with surprise, ‘My dear George … must we pass the whole day talking about a provincial adventurer, a galley slave even at one time, I believe? The man Ouschart is coming, and I was hoping Master Ballagh here would play for us.’

‘Ah, tattheration. Any day of the week you can hear Thady Boy; there is nothing like a good, stout tale of a rogue.’ O’LiamRoe, elaborating, was not going to let his private entertainment lapse.

Prone on the window seat, his instrument on his stomach, Thady Boy took no part in the discussion. Later, after some brilliant rope dancing by Thomas Ouschart, whose other name was Tosh, Thady Boy beat O’LiamRoe unmercifully at backgammon, gave a brief and unquestionably fine recital for his host, and then in company with O’LiamRoe, Robin Stewart and Piedar Dooly took his departure for Blois, the visit ended.

They were to break their journey at Neuvy. Sir George Douglas, who was returning to Blois via Chambord, along with Sir James and Lord d’Aubigny, returning to duty, let the ollave go without comment.

On the journey, Stewart edged up to Thady. ‘Your Prince was awful interested in this fellow Lymond.’

The ollave was patient. ‘Your Lord d’Aubigny is terrible interested in Italian silver. ’Tis the same thing; only O’LiamRoe collects useless facts.’ His eyes were on Stewart’s bony, tight face. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘Italian silver!
A small trifle by Primaticcio,’
mimicked Stewart viciously. They had all caught the edge of a flaming row conducted behind closed doors between Lord d’Aubigny and the Archer. ‘What would he do, faced with a hunting cat in the grass? Throw a bracelet at it?’