Queens' Play (55 page)

By Saturday afternoon, when The O’LiamRoe had joined them, pink-nosed, his eyelids half-fixed like a boa’s, the daily exhibition of craft, dexterity and brawn was well under way. Like a man answering the beat of a drum he made for the jousting ground laid out along the great lake in the parks of Châteaubriant, followed by the silent Piedar Dooly; and pressing unhandily past the ranked knees, joined the Scottish Court in the streamered pavilion.

To reach his vacant place he had to pass George Douglas. ‘Smile, my prince,’ said the lazy voice. ‘You have the better part.
Samson en perdit ses lunettes; Bien heureux est qui riens n’y a!’
Beyond him, a woman laughed; he did not need to struggle with the French to divine the subject of the joke.

The woman was Margaret Douglas, Lady Lennox. Passing, he bowed, his oval face blank. By the holy cross of Jesus, how did these things become known? She was dressed in a light, blowing robe, in white, her splendour bold in the sun. ‘Samson is below there’—her voice, gay and fresh, followed his buffeting scabbard—‘if you desire him. His own desires are humble today, I am told.’ During the preposterous journey she had had time to shape her attitude, both to Francis Crawford and to O’LiamRoe.

He turned. ‘There is a laughing time, and a time for speech. I am in my hour for breathing only.’ She laughed again, but not with her eyes.

When he sat down, not six rows behind the Scottish Dowager, with her daughter and Margaret Erskine at her side, he found the airy yellow head a little below him on the right; and from all the poisoned corridors of his lazy senses, dislike ran fuming.

Because of Francis Crawford he was here, tail docked, pepper in the nose, turned loose for minstrels to pursue. Watching, with vacant mind, the impact of metalled monsters, feathered, gauntletted, on aproned horses, flying past the coloured barriers, he wondered what Lymond was thinking. Round the little feathered hat bobbing on the
Dowager’s left was a thicket of Fleming heads; beyond the ladies, the Dowager’s own suite pressed closer. The little Queen was well guarded.

But in George Douglas’s voice had been a chord of something other than mockery; in Lady Lennox’s, a glitter of tension. Fear was in the air: fear of nothing so explicit as a single killing, but an almost pleasurable fear that somewhere, this day or the next, a wanton hand would snip, and the whole frail net of treaties, understandings and expediency over states German and Italian, over England, Scotland and Ireland, over divided France herself, would sink to the ground.

Bruised with loathing, O’LiamRoe could yet comprehend the real issue; and through the tilting his eyes were on the man on whose shoulders the whole burden lay. Lymond was half-turned, his wrist on the rail, listening to Chester Herald, leaning over to comment. Phelim could hear Flower’s Yorkshire accent from where he sat. Lymond said something, and the herald laughed. On the tilting ground, there was an English victory. Sir John Perrott, brawling bastard of the English King’s father, flung back his vizor, grinning, and stuck a foot in mock heroics on his fallen foe, while the French politely cheered. He allowed a page to unhelm him, loosing the rough chestnut hair to the breeze, and strode off bellowing: bluff King Hal, wearing out his ten horses a day.

A Gentleman of the Household, smiling, left the royal benches and sidling along the packed seats, addressed the Queen Dowager. The King wished her Scottish lords to show their skill now against these Englishmen. ‘He hears,’ said the gentleman affably, ‘that your herald Mr. Crawford is a notable warrior and would have him take the field, if you will permit, at the quintain.’

Along the bench, Flower’s laugh rang out again. The straight, plump back of Margaret Erskine had become quite still; and O’LiamRoe, his attention cuffed into place, thought of a fat black figure at St. Germain, flying like a witch on a broomstick at a barrel of hot water, lance couched.

They had seen Thady Boy’s style then; and how often since? ‘Pray tell his grace,’ said Mary of Guise kindly, ‘that our herald is notable for much, but not as a performer in the field. If he will allow us, we shall find another.’

With enviable polish, the emissary hid his surprise. ‘He excels perhaps at national sports? The King would willingly see him matched at putting the stone, or the bar of iron perhaps?’

A long hand touched the King’s Gentleman on his stooped shoulder. ‘My mistress the Queen feels perhaps that she has tested her herald’s valour sufficiently in the boarpit at Angers. Allow me to take his place.’ And bowing to the Dowager and to the envoy, Sir George Douglas strolled down to the field, his attendants struggling after.

Chester Herald, drawing out of his story, laughed again, clapped Vervassal on the shoulder, and turned off. Lymond, swinging back in his seat, caught Sir George’s eye and with perfect naturalness bowed. The Douglas, well-built, handsome, a notable knight in his day, returned the smile, mocking, and went off to pay his self-imposed debt to the Queen.

He was joined by others. Uneasily O’LiamRoe watched the grim playfulness with lance and spear and blunted sword, with iron and stone, between the great houses of Scotland and the soldier-diplomats, the soldier-scholars, the knights of England: Dethick who had marched with Somerset to the bloody massacre of Pinkie and Throckmorton who had been knighted for taking news of it to the King; Rutland who had demolished the walls of Haddington and Sir Thomas Smith whose historian’s voice had helped form the English claims of feudal sovereignty over Scotland; Essex whose son had been killed in the Scottish wars. The blows were hard and the laughter loud, but nothing unseemly occurred; Mary of Guise just then had power to ride them hard. And Lymond, at ease, chatting soberly with his neighbours, hardly watched.

It was nearly over when the cold-eyed face of Sir John Perrott laid itself, like a prime kill on a slab, on the ledge of the Queen Mother’s stand, and addressed Crawford of Lymond. ‘Sir, they tell me you wrestle, and I have much surplus energy and some skill at the craft. If your mistress permits, will you try a fall with me?’

Cool under the awning, the herald rose. Knightly pursuits were, or should be, part of his calling, temporary though that calling might be. Neither he nor the Queen Dowager could ignore an invitation twice. For a fleeting moment, O’LiamRoe saw the pale head lift to where, among his Queen, his mistress, his great officials, his courtiers and his friends of the heart, Henri King of France waited, with Lord d’Aubigny, beautiful, modest, detached, at his side.

Then Lymond said, ‘With pleasure; if my lady will allow?’ And the Queen Dowager, her eyes not on him but on some angering sight at his back, gave her slow nod. To protect him with her refusal would have argued complicity; he had accepted to save her that, as it was. For plain as the white sun in the purple-blue of the lake, as the green grass and the red dust and the jingling colour of shield and standard, flags, pennants and canopies, as the Court robes, serried, bright as bolsters in a sultan’s rich playbed, was the truth, plain to them all, that Lord d’Aubigny had chosen today, here, now, to open his war, his series of broadsides which would reveal Francis Crawford and Thady Boy Ballagh to be one and the same man.

Jacketless in the sunlight, the Queen’s herald stirred no meaty chords of remembrance; there was no whiff of Thady’s highhanded flavour in all this pale precision. But to O’LiamRoe, his heart
beating sodden inside its pink cushion, the dilemma was without solution. Fight well, and Lymond would invite comparison, by every trained move that he made, with the twin moves of Thady Boy. Fight badly, and he brought his Queen into ridicule, invited suspicion, offered himself even to injury. And in his freedom and mobility lay their last hopes.

He had stripped quickly. As they waited for Perrott, the trumpets soared; the talk and laughter rushed round. It was the last fight of the day, and already the pleasures of evening were pressing on them: the torchlight hunt of red deer, the midnight supper. There was a ripple of movement in one of the passages, and a lady-in-waiting bent down and spoke to Sir John Perrott’s page, who trotted off. A moment later Perrott himself reappeared, and the English stands were restrainedly enthusiastic.

‘Happy mortal,’ observed Sir George Douglas, his eyes on Lymond, his neckband black with sweat, sliding into the vacant seat at O’LiamRoe’s elbow. He had used his lance more than adequately, enough at any rate to match any of the late King Henry’s illegitimate sons. ‘Happy mortal, invariably licensed to lechery, forced by duty like clockwork into sin and indulgence.… Even here, all he need do is fail.’

‘After the boar fight?’ said O’LiamRoe sardonically. But the two men on the field had closed with one another, and Sir George Douglas, his hands unconsciously fast on his chair, said nothing at all until some long minutes later, when releasing his pent breath softly, he observed, ‘Well, Irishman, if he is wise he will get himself thrown, fast. I fancy Sir John has had a little advice. He is following the same moves exactly as our friend the Cornishman.’

If the same thought had occurred to Vervassal, it was obvious that, short of throwing himself abjectly on his back, there was very little he could do about it. Sir John Perrott was built on the same scale as his father, and to weight was added training and temper. Perrott was angry, he was out to do damage, and he was being very careful indeed not to throw his opponent too soon.

This left Lymond, clearly, to improvise a series of defences which should be safe, unspectacular, and quite unlike his habitual responses to the recognized moves.

There are not so many ways of solving a sudden problem of leverage; especially when the problems are presented in prearranged sequence. The Englishman, his fringed jaw like a quarry block, hugged and hoisted, heeled and thrust with knee and foot, and was parried with an adequacy which was less than enthusiastic. After a good deal of this, when both men were blotched with bruises but otherwise unimpaired, Sir John Perrott released the Queen Dowager’s herald, rasped, ‘Well, here is a bastard, sir, who will dirty his hands on
you,
’ and opened his thicketed hands.

Arrested for the second, whether in admiration for Lord d’Aubigny’s inventiveness or in a kind of silent snort of hysteria at the prodigies expected of him—a condition, O’LiamRoe recognized, to which Lymond was all too prone—Francis Crawford was off guard for the one moment that mattered.

In the pavilion, attention already weakened by the Breton sports, the tilting, the jousting, was left cold by the undistinguished contest, spiderlike on the big field to all but the nearest benches. People were moving, tongues were chattering. Although no one physically could leave until the King rose, mentally most were by now back in the castle and climbing into their next change of clothes.

So perhaps only those who had heard Lord d’Aubigny mention Vervassal’s supposed prejudice against bastardy, only those sharing willy-nilly the King’s diplomatic engrossment, and those, finally, who knew who Thady Boy was, saw the quick succession of moves that brought Lymond to the ground under hip, knee and calf locked in a tightening wedge intended to crush.

For an agile man, there was one feasible retort: the move which had put the Cornishman’s neck under Thady Boy’s hand and then broke it. Watching the two immobile, straining figures, O’LiamRoe in his anxious ignorance jumped to hear Sir George Douglas swear. ‘He can choose,’ said Sir George informatively, ‘between having his leg snapped and declaring himself to be Thady Boy. Full of interest, isn’t it?’

In the rows about the Queen and the Queen Dowager silence had fallen. Across the passage, the faces in the King’s pavilion, sewn like freshwater pearls on its tapestry, were turned also on the Englishman’s broad back, straining pink through the oiled film of his shirt; on the rough russet head and fat hips, sinuous under the cloth; and on the jagged line of pelvis, elbow and throat belonging to the Queen’s herald, gripped fast underneath. And Lymond made no move, for the only one he could make would have branded him, like a confession, as Thady Boy Ballagh.

At the edge of the field, someone in the de Guise colours moved quickly; a man bent over the King. Then, unexpectedly, a trumpet blew, and the rattle of conversation hesitated and stopped. The King’s baton fell and rose again; the King got up. The fight had been ended.

Sir John Perrott had not noticed, or hearing, had decided to ignore. He lifted his body a little, giving them a glimpse of his ripe, beaded skin, the splendid teeth bared in stress and eagerness. Lymond’s hands, resisting, were white to the bone and O’LiamRoe said, ‘Mother of God, that leg—’ and stopped.

From in front, Will Flower, Chester Herald, turned round, his plain Yorkshire face animated with knowledge. ‘A good fellow, that
is. His own people sent to stop it, and I can’t say I’m sorry. He has some war wound, they say, and he’s not just himself again yet; and you’d want to be at your best, my word you would, to stand against Perrott. A brave effort, I’d say; and no shame to the lad—no shame at all.’

Into the silence: ‘No shame to him; but a very great pity. Since he was at it,’ said George Douglas succinctly, ‘he might as well have broken Sir John Perrott’s neck.’

It was true. Watching as the Constable’s officers smoothly prised the combatants apart, O’LiamRoe realized that this opening round Lord d’Aubigny had won. For in spite of all Francis Crawford’s care, the association of Lymond with recent injury alone was enough to make an observant man think. In saving him, the Queen Dowager had opened the breach.

On the pavilions, everyone had risen, shaking their skirts, regrouping, embracing. Perrott, dragged up, had marched off across the clearing field without a salute. Vervassal, after waiting a moment, rose in one collected movement and was standing, with extreme care, looking towards the King’s bench.

There, among the baring seats, someone else stood, the sun, through a chink in the awning, proclaimed the day’s blue dress of the Household. To John, seigneur d’Aubigny, Lymond raised his left arm in formal salute and then, moving smoothly, walked off the field.

Mary was still safe.