Queens' Play (56 page)

They returned to the château. Mary was still safe. She looked from her window at dusk as the long cavalcade left, apple-green under an apple-green sky, the torches like embers amongst them, to hunt the red deer in the forest.

You would not think it possible to isolate one man out of hundreds, to illumine him with accident, admiration, solicitude, so that in every episode of the hunt the French Court was made aware of Lymond. He dropped back finally, melting into the darkness in preparation for a quick return home; and d’Aubigny’s Archers blocked the way with an unanswerable request. The King desired his presence, with the Queen Dowager’s, at supper.

Douglas, never far away, touched Lymond on the shoulder then. ‘Christ, get away, man. Feign sickness. You mustn’t think of going. They’ll take your ashes away in a tigerskin sack.’

The voice of Quetzalcoatl answered him. ‘Be calm! Be calm!’ said Francis Crawford soothingly. ‘To dispel doubt and error, one must exercise the light of supreme wisdom. If his lordship is really determined to expose me tonight as Thady Boy Ballagh, nothing I can do will stop him.’

‘You can escape,’ said Douglas.

‘To do what?’ In the torchlit darkness, under the green and black trees, the jewels bright in his ears, Lymond laughed. ‘Mary is as well guarded as love and duty can make her. The information that will save her will save me. Three people can do it—Oonagh O’Dwyer, Robin Stewart, or Michel Hérisson from Rouen. Perhaps they will do for me on my prison pallet what they would not do for me in my—’

‘You’re a naughty, cold-blooded devil named Jeroboam, son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin,’ said George Douglas dispassionately. ‘And you know that if they recognize you as Ballagh and convict you of the Tour des Minimes and the rest, they’ll light a large fire and toast you brown on a dungfork.’ He looked curiously, in the torchlight, at the other man’s unrevealing serenity. ‘What do you hope for that you haven’t got? What can that child give you?’

There was a little silence. ‘A virgin audience for my riddles, I believe,’ said Lymond thoughtfully, at length. ‘But it certainly poses an ungallant question. Shall we join his grace?’

And riding off through the long layered ranks of warmcoated kill, he reached the wide spaces, filled with firelit satin and jewels, where the supper was; and as lute, rebec and vihuelas played like unborn voices through the trees and gilded Pan children danced, he fumbled the scented oranges they threw him, or tossed them away, and defended his long-fingered dexterity from the charms of legerdemain. And yet, as the bright, tempting fruit left his hands, the Vidame, stretched loose on the grass, looked nowhere from that moment but at the profile above him; the Duchess de Valentinois, at the King’s side, broke off once or twice to watch, and the Prince of Condé and his brother exchanged looks.

It was the Princess de la Roche-sur-Yon, no friend of the Constable’s, whose very castle of Châteaubriant he had filched from her hands, who leaned over at last, and laid a lute on his lap. ‘M. Crawford, you cannot deny that you play. Honour us.’

They had hung arras between the barks of the trees, and laid velvet over the dried roots and beaver tracks; in this forest clearing in the exhausted heat of midnight, every accustomed artifice was imposed. From their wreathed tables the Embassy, slackly comfortable, shifted a little, sensing a change, sniffing at abature and blemish to distinguish the prey.

O’LiamRoe, watching, wondered fleetingly, since exposure had to come, if Lymond would not have preferred to stand on his scholarship: to reveal himself in argument with Pickering or Smith or Thomas rather than as a tumbler, a clown, a singer.

Lymond himself gave no sign, but took the lute and touched the strings, thinking. O’LiamRoe became aware of many eyes watching:
of Catherine, of the Dowager, of her brothers the Duke and the Cardinal, of the Constable himself. By now, surely, they knew or guessed. Refusal itself was an admission by now.

Couched within the torches they had brought him, head bent over the dark lute on one knee, Lymond struck one scattered chord. The sound of it attracted wandering eyes, and silence enough. The first phrase with its unaltered texture named the singer, and to a blind man had described the proper contours of his face.

Easily, bright with irony, the voice rose and fell, and the lute lapped it like water.

Relaxed after the hunt, warm under the limpid trees, a little stirred by the romance and the artifice, the English Ambassage lay listening, smiling, and watched the young man who had given Sir John Perrott a poor game, but had clearly been selected by the Scottish Queen for quite different talents.

Lord Lennox, thumb to cheek, heard the opening and then found matters to discuss, low-voiced, with his neighbour. Beside him, his wife’s eyes, leaving the singer, explored the cushioned groups on the spread tapestries and the faces turning like leaves in a light wind to watch. Then, pulled by another gaze, Lady Lennox looked round and in her turn met the wordless challenge of Margaret Erskine’s flat stare as the song ended.

He did not allow them to applaud him. As the notes died, he forced his thumb through the strings, then again, then again, hurling them into a fury of sound, and launched like an armed man into battle, into one of the paramount Irish epics, the greatest perhaps of all, which he had given them again and again unstinted from his extravagance. O’LiamRoe, drunk, had listened to Thady Boy, drunk, creating this passion and had wept, snorting unawares, the oval face caged with tears. Then he had wept for himself; for the human pain and valour and grief he knew and recognized in the song. This time he did not weep, but pressed his lips on his clenched hands with a stubborn pain in his throat, for he had never heard it as, cold sober,
Lymond created it now. And about him, involuntarily, each listener tightened as if called into tune. The double pull on sense and intellect was final, exposing the small places of self to universal challenges. The Queen Dowager of Scotland looked away; George Douglas, his brows raised, studied his knees; and Margaret Lennox, her eyes wide on the singer, sunk her teeth in her lip.

Lymond himself flung what he had made at John Stewart of Aubigny, standing broad and still by the King, ornamental as some Ionian pillar, perfect in column and capital, waiting.

The paean ended, properly served, dying until the brush of the forest leaves hid it. There was a vacant quiet into which all their bruised emotions pooled and ran, filling it, splash by splash, with exclamations and the stir of revived movement, and the mounting dash and eddy of applause. From his stance behind the King, Lord d’Aubigny moved forward smiling and dropped on one knee. No one in the Scottish Court heard what he said, but it was cut short by the King’s own hand summoning the singer.

Only Margaret Erskine, close to Lymond, saw that he was shivering. He waited a second until the fires of his own making left him; then with a minimum of gesture he rose, laid the lute neatly down and walked across the soft dunes of tapestry. The torchboys followed the tabard, bright as a wave breaking at night, their shadows chequered in the cross lighting. Lymond knelt.

From Northampton’s circle, it looked merely like a called-for bestowal of praise. King Henri, keeping his voice level, preserved the illusion. ‘M. Vervassal. How are you called?’

‘My name is Francis Crawford of Lymond, your grace.’ The reply also was sober. ‘I commend me to your justice.’

‘Francis Crawford of Lymond. You are known also as Thady Boy Ballagh?’

‘I have been so,’ said Lymond. Beside the King, the sieur d’Enghien looked suddenly up and away again; the King’s sister had not removed her gaze throughout. D’Aubigny smiled.

The bearded, fine-drawn face of the King studied the other man at his feet; and in Henri’s hardened muscles and pressed nostrils was plainly the temper he did not propose to unleash. ‘Here is a matter for judges,’ he said. ‘My Archers will bring you before me tonight. Go.’

And Stewart of Aubigny, bending, raised the former Thady Boy Ballagh to his feet and drew him among the guard with a grip framed expressly to cripple. Lymond sustained it, his eyes alight, while the applause broke out again, and across the carpet someone held out his lute. But Henri, smiling briefly, indicated the interval closed. It was time to stir, to leave the night and prepare to return.

Francis Crawford turned his fair head on Lord d’Aubigny’s
shoulder and looked up at him, with his right arm hanging numb and the bog-gravel irony of Thady Boy plain in his face. ‘A bull for the cows in time of bulling; a stallion for the mares in time of covering; a boar for the sows in time of their heat. A foot for a foot; an eye for an eye; a life for a life,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘So says the Senchus Mor, my darling. And Robin Stewart is still free, and hot bent on revenge.’

Piedar Dooly heard, and spat, grinning, as the yellow head in a huddle of Archers took to horse. Far through the forest, on the flank leading to Bére, Robin Stewart, he supposed, was waiting patiently for his fine guest tomorrow. O’LiamRoe heard too, his mind busy. As Thady Boy’s master, he would have some explaining to do. But not as much, Christ, as Lymond. With thought working, cold as acid, on the stately procession home, the King would not rest, nor would his lords, the perfect image of learning and chivalry, until this small and festering dart was removed from their side.

It was done in the King’s cabinet at Châteaubriant that night.

When they brought O’LiamRoe into the brightly lit room, lined with bitter night-faces, the Prince of Barrow’s tongue was creaming over with quip and insult to let fly at the master figures. It was for this that he had stayed.

—Of course he knew Thady Boy was no ollave; what of it? he would say. Thady Boy only existed because the Queen Dowager of Scotland desired it. Lymond had risked his own safety to remain and protect the child and draw off her enemies so that the Franco-Scottish talks might proceed unimpaired, and no dire change of crown or impolitic accusation might destroy them.

That in exposing himself, Francis Crawford had foundered—that, surely, they could understand. If he had no positive evidence of another’s guilt, he had indirect evidence of his innocence: the elephants at Rouen, the impressive performance in London, the injuries he had received in the Tower at Amboise. Jenny’s son could speak of the arsenic.… But no, Jenny’s son was perhaps better left out. And to summon Abernaci would destroy his livelihood; to call Tosh would be to endanger his safety. And Oonagh …

Thought stopped, and restarted, freshly armoured. They would laugh at the old women, he and Lymond. He and Lymond, outside the fence together, shrugging off involvement and the poison all run out.

Then Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, was ushered into the little cabinet, through the heat and the drawling, arguing voices, to find Lymond standing tabardless, his hair in his eyes, his scraped hands lashed tight behind him; and saw foolishly that there are
circumstances under which it is a little hard to sparkle with provocative wit. ‘Et dis-donc’, said the King, his voice flat with distaste. ‘Whom do you serve?’

With a slow and studied exasperation, Crawford of Lymond shook his head. His eyes, brilliant in his pale face, passed over O’LiamRoe, ignoring him; rested for a second on the Queen Mother, and flickered back again. What message he had received or conveyed, O’LiamRoe could not tell. ‘I sell experience … and buy it; and pay due tax on the merchandise as you see. I serve my own whims, that is all.’

‘You are here,’ said the slow voice, ‘as an accredited herald to Madame ma bonne soeur, the Queen Dowager of Scotland. It would appear to us that Madame my sister is your mistress and that the Prince of Barrow was your knowing accomplice.’