Queens' Play (3 page)

Stewart, glaring swollen-eyed at the masthead, dragged with the others a second time and a third at the sheet. Nothing moved. The galliasse nudged nearer. To leeward the sea suddenly bobbed with a cluster of heads; then more. The skiff, freed on a starboard roll, fell badly and overturned. The slap and crash of the sea, louder than wind-voice and wood-groan and the air-swallowed scream from the injured, rose to a thunder as the ships neared. Stewart, the burrowed skin white and red off his palms, pulled again in heart-gouging unison in vain.

Round, compact and shining with salt, a scrubby figure whisked up the loose foremast rope, its wind-torn black flying, its unclean hands warping the wind-scoured skies to its chest. Master Thady Boy Ballagh, ollave, poet, professor, the fifteenth and the nippiest, climbed straight to the yardarm, made his way to the peak, and sixty feet up over a listing deck, knife in hand, probed the lashings. He used his blade sparingly and with care; then sliding quickly back to the masthead, gave a signal. They pulled.

With a slithering crack, 400 yards of canvas dropped from the arm, swelled, and went tight.
La Sauvée
shuddered, throwing every last man of her 400 flat. She shuddered; she steadied; then, leaning softly from the wind, the ship raised her broken side from the sea, gathered strength, and heeling round the gross stern of the galliasse, drew tranquilly off. Behind, the
Gouden Roos
began to pick up the swimmers.

Robin Stewart, feeling faint, and with his hands in his armpits, was counting heads. He had just found Piedar Dooly, chopping off
leg irons, when a golden head rose from the benches and addressed the red evening sky.

‘Liam aboo!’
screeched Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow and lord of the Slieve Bloom, in princely paean to his fathers.

‘Liam aboo!’
returned his ollave concisely from the yardarm, and like a soiled raindrop, slid down to the deck.

D
IEPPE, city of limes, was asleep. On the walls, at the bridge, on the broad city ports, the watch kept guard. The fishing boats had moved out. In the river, lanterns flickered where the galleys lay like whales, prow to quay, and the lighthouse shone over the bar. Inside, the streets smelt of herring and the new paint still fresh from the Scottish Queen’s visit; here and there an overlooked flag fluttered darkly, with the de Guise emblem on it.

All these dignitaries had now moved inland. Tomorrow the Irish guests of the King of France would follow them; but tonight the comfort of the Porc-épic’s mattresses claimed them after the rigours of the sea, and the windows were dark.

La Pensée, the beautiful house of Jean Ango, late Governor of the Castle, was not lit; but at least one man there was awake. Unmoving by the quiet fountains of the terrace, looking down on the moonlit river through Jean Ango’s bowers, glimmering with the marble bones of Attic deities, Tom Erskine waited without impatience for a visitor.

The uneasy peace lately fallen on Europe had meant hard travelling and harder talking for Scottish statesmen. Erskine was here now on his way to Flanders because he was his nation’s chief Privy Councillor, and because his common sense was the needle and the battering ram which Mary of Guise could trust him to use.

Common sense had not brought him out here on the terrace, but curiosity to discover what path his visitor would take. He lingered in the mild September night, square, good-tempered, reliable; but like the artist of quiet movement that he was, the other man arrived without sign or sound. There was somewhere a breath of laughter and a stirring of cooler air, and a pleasant, familiar voice spoke from the shadows. ‘How delicate, love! Shall we dally?’

‘Are you there?’ Tom Erskine turned quickly, searching the darkness. ‘Where are you?’

‘Sitting, as it happens, on Clotho’s distaff and keeping an eye out for the scissors. One of the rarer benefits of a classical education.’ And indeed, on one of the nearer pieces of statuary a dark shadow moved, swung, and dropped lightly to the ground. A cool hand took his arm.

‘Enter the wily fox, the widow’s enemy. Let’s go indoors,’ said Crawford of Lymond.

Lymond was masked. Slender in black silk, the bright hair hidden by cap and caul, he suited the room like a piece of Ango’s Florentine silver. He pulled off the mask, and Erskine was caught in the heavy blue gaze; saw again the ruthless mouth; the thinly textured fair skin neatly tailored over its bones.

Not for a moment, carrying the Queen Mother’s request, had he thought that Lymond would agree. Not for a moment, bringing back Lymond’s ultimatum, had he expected the Queen Mother to accept. And yet the absurd relationship, neither of employer and employee nor of allies nor of partners, had been born. Here, reporting his presence as a free agent, was Crawford of Lymond, who would remain in France for the winter of the Queen’s visit, and who would tell her as much or as little as he chose of the world of plots, of secrets and of intriguing he had undertaken to enter. On the other hand, the Queen Dowager owed him nothing, and least of all protection if he were caught. It was an arrangement, it appeared, which pleased them both.

Lymond and Tom Erskine had little in common, and their personal exchanges took no longer than the pouring of two cups of the King of France’s wine. As they sat, Tom raised his in elaborate salute. ‘Welcome to France.’

‘Thank you. I gather our excellent Queen Mother arrived safely.’

‘Last week. The French King is outside Rouen, waiting to make one of those damned ceremonial entries. She’s off to join him, and they’ll install her in Rouen for the festivities. Then the whole Court goes south for the winter.’

‘While you go to Brussels: there’s no justice.’ There was a little silence, occasioned by the Special Ambassador wondering, rather despairingly as usual, how much Lymond knew. He was on his way to Brussels and Augsburg to conclude a peace treaty with the Emperor Charles, or with the Queen of Hungary on her absent brother’s behalf. It was a treaty not much wanted in Scotland, whose abler mariners liked to be able to raid Flemish galliasses in peace. But under French pressure, the Scottish Governor had agreed; and for that agreement, no doubt, the Queen Dowager of Scotland would receive due reward in due time from France.

It was a peace of which the Emperor himself, at Augsburg, was also wary, and of which he would be warier still if he knew that Tom Erskine was coming to him fresh from London, where he had just opened negotiations for a treaty with England, the Emperor’s current enemy. No peace treaty had yet been signed between Scotland and her neighbour, only a truce. Erskine could say, hand on heart, at Brussels, that there was no trade or contact between England and Scotland without safe conducts; that the Queen Dowager’s visit to France meant nothing more than a mother’s natural anxiety to see her daughter the Queen; that his own visits to France now and after this embassy were merely to satisfy himself for the Government as to the welfare of Mary of Scotland.

He hoped to God that Lymond believed so too; from the malice hardly concealed in his face he doubted it. But Lymond himself merely said, ‘And Mary Queen of Scots, our illustrious princess?’

‘With her mother.’ Erskine hesitated to go on, distrusting the other man’s tone. In the stiff ceremonies at Dieppe it had been one of the picturesque moments of the Queen Dowager’s arrival: the meeting with her child Mary, now seven, cheerful and self-willed after two years in France. Queen and Queen Mother had been in tears; the Dowager’s visit was limited, after all, and when she left Mary would still be in France, and in six or seven years would marry the King’s heir. She was the reigning Queen of Scotland, and had forgotten most of her Scots.

Lymond said, ‘And now, tell me: which of your charming colleagues came with the Queen Mother from Scotland?’

Erskine’s face cleared. ‘By God, Francis, that’s a pack of weasels she has in her train this time … the whole Privy Council, pretty nearly. All the rogues she can’t trust at home. You’ll need to be careful.’

There was a little inlaid spinet in the corner. Lymond had put down his wine; getting up, he wandered over to the instrument and perched before it. ‘They won’t know me. Who?’

Erksine reeled them off. The Earl of Huntly was amongst them; and Lord Maxwell, and Lord James Hamilton, heir to the Governor of Scotland. He added, watching Lymond, ‘And two Douglases. James Douglas of Drumlanrig and Sir George.’

Francis Crawford and the Douglas family were old opponents, and he looked pleased. ‘This is promising. Anyone else?’

‘A pack of Erskines.’ Tom was grinning. His family, father to son, were among the staunchest next the throne. Margaret his wife was here as a lady of honour; Jenny, Lady Fleming, his wife’s mother, was the little Queen’s governess; his wife’s young sisters and brother were her playmates. His own two brothers were in the train, and his father, now invalided and absent, small Mary’s guardian since she came to live in France.

He went over the dispositions, and Lymond listened and remarked, ‘And with Erskines so plentiful, what am I doing here?’

‘Playing the spinet,’ said the Special Ambassador. ‘Too damned well.’

The neat and tingling flow of notes continued. ‘It will cover our voices. None of your friends realize how gifted you are.’

‘Practically all of my friends know I can’t play on that thing. What else do you want to know? You don’t need to be told what the French court is like. It’s the most—’

‘It’s a hand-set maggot mound,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘I could teach you more than you would want to know about it.’ His fingers running over the keys, he spoke without rancour. ‘The universities, the prisons, the boudoirs and the brothels, the palaces and the paintings, the serenades, the banquets, the love-making, the hoof and hair of a heretic frying. Bed-talk and knife-talk and whip-talk. I know where it breeds. If there’s danger, I’ll find it. —I must go.’

Rising at the same time, Erskine controlled his impulse to protest. Lymond had engaged to report his presence in France, and no more; and he had come promptly to his appointment. Tom said, ‘Have you been waiting long in Dieppe?’

He caught Lymond’s raised brows; but the answer was perfectly matter-of-fact. ‘Five hours, that’s all.’

Comprehension, like a searing stir in hot water, ran stinging over the skin. ‘Christ … you didn’t come in today with that boat with the hole?’

‘Come in?’ For a moment Lymond showed genuine feeling. ‘I damned nearly paddled in with the thing in my teeth. There was a catastrophic collision in the roads; the tavern flooded; nineteen dead and twenty-five injured; the master a ninny and the comite with enough bhang inside him to float an anvil.’

In his excitement, Erskine strode to the windows and back. ‘I saw it. Saw her come in on her ear with the cannon all to port and her anchors rigged abeam, dammit. Rammed by a galliasse, weren’t you? Nine-tenths bad seamanship, they said, and one-tenth filthy luck.’

‘The
Gouden Roos
thought it was bad luck, I should think,’ said Lymond, amused. ‘After all, she was paid off to sink us.’

Erskine sat down. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Has it occurred to anyone else?’

‘I doubt it. You’ve heard the accepted version of the crash.’

Roused, Tom Erskine’s verdict was blunt. ‘This Irish masquerade is madness. How can you work if you’re being assaulted before you’ve even begun? Do I take it you are using the name of an actual person?’

‘Yes, of course. But one whose appearance is little known. Credit us with a little intelligence.’

Lymond’s Irish sister-in-law Mariotta would have helped. Erskine exclaimed. ‘And so you are proceeding to the French Court to be indoctrinated by the French Crown on how to kick the English out of Ireland.’ He broke off. It was, he had always felt, the scheme of a power-drunk idiot. But he did not say so, and received the rare compliment of an explanation.

‘Yes. It remains,’ said Lymond, ‘a simple way of reaching the inner circle unidentified. My guess is that King Henri will allow O’LiamRoe a long, luxurious stay in which to savour the delights of an alliance with France. I hope so.’

Erskine’s voice was still sharper than he knew. ‘And what about this attack? You can’t ask French protection and have a bodyguard dogging your heels. Who’s behind it?’

Lymond’s voice was pure malice. ‘Won’t it be amusing to find out? What do you think the Queen Mother fears for most—her alliances or her life?’ He withdrew the bolt from the shuttered windows.

‘Without French troops and French money, she thinks Scotland will never fight free from the English.’

‘And there is a faction in France, they say, which disapproves of the de Guise family sending good French money abroad. I hope,’ said Lymond opening the window, ‘that nothing serious occurs. My intentions are purely frivolous.’

Standing beside him, Erskine put a blunt question. ‘Why did you come here? Not because the Queen Mother asked it?’

‘The Queen Mother,’ said Lymond, ‘as you and she are well aware, has suggested this entirely as a means of committing me to her party, and is going to be disappointed. She has a hundred informers to hand.’

‘And every one of them watched,’ said Tom Erskine dryly. ‘Including my wife.’

‘I am aware,’ said Lymond distinctly, ‘that I am expected to do nothing in particular but raise the devil with ten pitch candles and a pipe of dead children. But I am prepared to spread my small benignities among my friends. I have time to spare.’

There was a pause, heavier perhaps than either man intended. Then Lymond raised his hand and laid it, unjewelled and unfamiliar, on the Councillor’s broad shoulder. ‘Go to Flanders and your contracts, and leave the orgies to me.’ He withdrew his gaze and turning, slipped over the window-sill. ‘Sweet Clotho, where are you?’

The night was dark. Tom Erskine, leaning out, saw the grim goddess suffer a flamboyant embrace; then the shadows moved, and the affronted fates were alone.

Later that same night a watchman, passing the Porc-épic, saw one of its latticed windows glow red. He hammered on the door; the
kitchen boys roused the house, and cooks, ostlers and turnspits surged upstairs to The O’LiamRoe’s room.

The bed hangings were a whispering curtain of flame, and seams of fire had begun on the panelling. With brooms and carpets and pails they rushed to the bed, the bitter smoke in their eyes, and hurled the flaming cloths wide.

The bed was empty, but for a shrivelled, untenanted nightshirt.

The stabler himself, with Robin Stewart, led the wild search which went on while the fire died. They found Master Ballagh fast asleep in his cupboard bed reeking of aqua vitae; and left him there. They discovered The O’LiamRoe in the loft, curled up in the straw next to Dooly. He viewed with mild surprise the circle of lamplit faces above him, and as the agitated tale unfolded, slipped in his graceful condolences to the stabler. He had felt, he explained, a touch of cold between sheets, and had climbed out to join Piedar Dooly in his nest where, praise be, they were sleeping in no time as cosy as two new-laid eggs. He rose and, wrapped in his salt-splashed frieze cloak, went to look at the damage.