Queens' Play (48 page)

Lymond’s soft, even voice paused a moment to give point to this, and then went on unaltered. ‘Robin Stewart in prison is an embarrassment to him. Robin Stewart dead,’ as we have seen today, would be better. Robin Stewart free would be best of all. Phelim, have you seen Stewart?’

‘Since the boar fight? No,’ said O’LiamRoe politely. ‘They’re taking him to Plessis-Macé tomorrow, you know?’

‘Have you tried to see him?’ said Lymond directly.

O’LiamRoe flushed. Then he said, ‘I have, then. He’s in the north tower this minute, with a power of young men guarding him. No one is allowed through.’ He paused, his lips pressed with uncommon firmness against their wreathing habit of irony, and then said, ‘You may as well know this thing: that Stewart and myself—’

‘Oh, the pact. I know,’ said Lymond with brief contempt. ‘God, did you think there was anything new in it? And you are going home now, are you?’

‘You have the right of it.’ It was amusing to note, said the Prince of Barrow’s mind to him angrily, that whatever humanitarian impulse prompted him that afternoon, he was getting no thanks for it. ‘I am for home after the execution,’ O’LiamRoe continued, ignoring Abernaci’s jerk of surprise. ‘I owe it to the fellow to stay the length of that, at least.’ He did not add,
You can live for seventy hours on the wheel
.

‘And the woman?’ said Lymond.

He had expected that. He had known, when Stewart’s denunciation of Lord d’Aubigny failed, that all this pitiless excellence would turn against Oonagh. ‘The woman is no concern of mine,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Nor of yours either, if you are wise.’

‘If you won’t go to see her, my dear,’ said Lymond, ignoring the threat, ‘you may be quite sure that I shall. Haven’t you seen Cormac O’Connor?’

‘I have done more than that,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, and his pleasant voice was quite changed. ‘I have seen Oonagh O’Dwyer; and I have written her a letter asking her would she say nothing at all about either Lord d’Aubigny or herself.’

‘That was large-spirited of you,’ said Lymond. ‘And his lordship may now do as he fancies?’

‘I am sure,’ said O’LiamRoe on a deep breath, ‘that you or some other busy fellow will find a way of stopping him. Go and sit in front of his lordship and show your little sharp teeth. He might even confess.’

‘Oonagh O’Dwyer knew beforehand about the Tour des Minimes,’ said Lymond. ‘If she knows the name of even one man to connect it with d’Aubigny, it is enough. Your opinion of O’Connor is so high, I gather, that you are willing to concede him the lady and the run of
your native land? Or are you afraid that once you have her, you cannot hold her, so you prefer to resign? If she is any man’s leavings, you may be right.’

O’LiamRoe was on his feet, the pale eyes shining. ‘You have a delicate way with a lady’s name, for a hired sniffer at chairs and a licker of footmarks.’

‘It’s damned picturesque,’ said Lymond bitterly, ‘but it doesn’t alter facts. Is that cunning, crib-biting lout your notion of a prince or a lover? And if I’m warned off, what do you mean to do? Wait for the execution, and then leave for home? “You owe it to the fellow”.’ The mimicry was merciless. ‘What do you owe to Ireland? To yourself? To Oonagh O’Dwyer?’

The Prince of Barrow, standing foursquare and steady, lifted his smooth chin. ‘The grace to leave her alone, my deaf and blind apostle of frenetic employment. Alone with her chosen life
and her bruised face and the white and red weals on her arms.
’

It was a hit. He saw it, bread to his famished ego, in the flicker of Lymond’s eyes. He let the silence lengthen and then said, ‘Go and see her. They live quite near at hand. After all, you can’t be after making a pudding without slitting a—’

‘You
left
her with him?’ said Lymond.

‘She has no desire to leave him,’ said O’LiamRoe simply. ‘Whatever he thinks fit, she will accept.’

‘And O’LiamRoe also.’ For a long moment Lymond stared at him, then got up and with a rigid, exasperated gesture, laid both fists on the chimney piece. ‘Phelim, Phelim—a normal man would be there making knife handles out of his bones.’

‘And of her a keening vampire at a martyr’s grave,’ said O’LiamRoe, his face pale. ‘Or become any man’s leavings.’ His lids fell; he looked, with a familiar vagueness, at Lymond’s flat back. ‘I have some business to do. Stay and have out your talk with Mr. Abernaci if you wish. I leave you to whet your tools and to pluck up the weeds and to cut down the tree of error.’ He stared at them both for a moment, then with Dooly behind like a shadow, he left his own room.

Lymond, his head between his arms, continued to look at the fire. After a while: ‘He’s sore in love with that one, the fushionless loon,’ said Abernaci, not without sympathy. ‘You’re smitten a wee bit yourself, I shouldna wonder.’

‘Maybe.’ It was not the voice of a man in love.

‘She was his father’s before she was his; that’s why she won’t leave him.’

‘I know. But if we give her up,’ said Lymond, straightening, his white face full of mockery, ‘as with Faustina, we give up her dowry the Empire.’ He paused, smiling with charm, at Abernaci’s chair. ‘What would you give to change places with me?’

‘A night in my lioness’s cage,’ said Abernaci calmly. ‘Robin Stewart’s skin is saved, but the lass is let suffer?’

‘I have a spare card up my sleeve,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘In case of need. And if you are comparing the two, I did Robin Stewart no service today, and I shall probably do none for Oonagh O’Dwyer tonight. Thus I distribute my favours impartially.’ A little later he left; and after a suitable interval, the Keeper also departed.

O’LiamRoe himself came back to the house very late and rather drunk. The next day, reporting thickheaded to the castle, he found the Court in labour, preparing yet another majestic move. Robin Stewart, under heavy guard, had already left for his last prison at Plessis-Macé, where the King was also due that day.

The news was given him by an Archer. Pausing irresolute outside the guardroom, where the blue-tiled city lay spread below him, the smooth Maine to his left, the cathedral spire lifting ahead, he heard the rattle of a hard-ridden horse on the cobbles and was there still, intuitively waiting, when the rider, dismounting, flung himself indoors to announce that Robin Stewart had escaped.

Liking or sympathy for that difficult man The O’LiamRoe could never find. But he did understand, in part, the mark left on him by Crawford of Lymond’s careless hand. His first reaction to the news was relief and even pity: no sort of life remained now for Robin Stewart but the life of a failure and an outlaw. Then he realized, with a slow chill in his stomach, the one inevitable and Damoclean result. With Robin Stewart at large, the would-be killers of Mary had been given carte blanche to finish their work.

B
Y this time, the English Ambassage Extraordinary, three hundred strong, with its aching diplomacy and its groaning digestions, with its cliques, its amateurs, its professionals and with the Earl and Countess of Lennox, was already at Orléans, not much more than two hundred miles away.

Except for the Lennoxes, they were all Warwick’s men. Most of them were familiar with France, because you could not be a soldier or a statesman under Henry or Edward without sitting at a French siege or a French conference table at some point in your career. By the same token, most of them had also fought in Scotland.

None of these facts was at all likely to embarrass the Embassy or its distinguished leader and chairman, William Parr of Kendall, Marquis of Northampton and Lord Great Chamberlain of England, and brother to the old King’s last wife; a grand gentleman of limited gifts who had never quite lived down his military shortcomings during the recent rebellion.

So far, all had gone smoothly. A week ago, they had been met at Boulogne by a charming and efficient Gentleman of the Chamber who had escorted them to Paris and then further south with their trains of horses and mules, their wagon teams and guard dogs and their interminable luggage.

They had been feted. They had been entertained. At each town on their route, mayors and échevins had made their speeches of welcome; presents had been exchanged. The political factions in the
Embassy kept to themselves; the diplomats were diplomatic; the arguments—even the arguments in and on Greek—had been staid.

My lord of Northampton hoped to God it would remain so. For they were ahead of time. In a fortnight’s time, the Embassy was due at Châteaubriant, and before them lay only a simple journey by boat down the Loire.

They were due at Châteaubriant for the symbolic service of Investiture. They were due also for other and momentous affairs: to arrange a treaty of strict alliance and defence between England and France; to demand the Queen of Scots in marriage with the King of England and in the event of refusal, to solicit the hand of the King’s daughter Elizabeth instead. They were due to appoint commissioners to visit Scotland and settle all the vexed points not yet comprehended in their treaty there; and they were due to introduce Sir William Pickering, the new English Ambassador to France.

And now, the retiring Ambassador, Sir James Mason, wrote anxiously from Angers enjoining delay. The Marshal de St. André had not even left on his duplicate journey to England; the great preparations at Châteaubriant were unfinished still.

The Marquis of Northampton read this dispatch, ejaculating at intervals, with his gentlemanly face flushed. The Scottish Archer accused of attempting to murder the young Queen was at Angers, and had been condemned. He knew enough to be thankful that the affair was to finish, it seemed, without any awkward revelations implicating the Earl of Warwick more closely in the attempt. The Earl and Countess of Lennox, for whom he personally had little time, were attached to his Embassy, he well knew, in case such a thing happened. If England were accused, by Stewart or anyone else, of helping or condoning Stewart’s murder attempts, Northampton’s orders were to saddle the Lennoxes with the blame. Lennox himself was in no doubt, presumably, about the situation, but was in no case to protest.

They would not get the little Queen for Edward, of course. Or if they were offered her at all, it would be on terms so ruinous that he could not accept. But even so, the Queen Dowager of Scotland could not be too pleased about any sort of alliance between her enemy and France, even an alliance on paper as frail as this would be. And she and her family were a power in France. They could point to Edward, schismatic, excommunicated, as no fit bridegroom for Elizabeth or Mary. And they might seize any excuse, any false step on Warwick’s part, to persuade the French King to drop these overtures of friendship.

On the other hand he knew from Mason, the faithful Mason, that Scotland was becoming restive under the French yoke; that they watched with mistrust the rebuilding of forts which might turn out
to be as much for their discipline as their defence. And in France, the de Guises had their ill-wishers. The Constable, notoriously, wanted the proposed wedding between Mary and the Dauphin deferred, and even the King had jibbed at presenting the Queen Dowager with the whole of her annual fifty-thousand-franc pension to take home in gold. Last month, Northampton knew the Receiver General of Brittany had been heard to comment that nearly two million francs had so far been spent on the Queen Mother, and he wished that Scotland were in a fishpool. Northampton, irritable with his responsibilities and the delay, wished the same.

Sir Gilbert Dethick, Knight, alias Garter Principal King at Arms, tried not to think either of fishpools or rivers. For twenty shillings a day, he had to take and deliver to His Majesty of France the two trunks with the livery of the Noble Order of the Garter, all wrapped in a pair of fine holland sheets with a couple of taffeta sweet bags inside. They had crossed the Channel safely. But it was with a heart chafed raw with anxiety that he contemplated confiding them for two long, slow weeks to the Loire.

Scattered between Angers and Châteaubriant, where grandstands, spectacles and temporary housing had been six weeks in the making, the French and Scottish Courts accordingly took their time, having purchased leisure, cheeringly, at English expense.

The Queen Dowager’s party, although not Mary of Guise or her daughter themselves, spent two nights in the fields outside Candé and enjoyed it. Reclining in the garden of France under the soft sky of June with half the Privy Council given up and gone home, they slept, ate, read, talked, and did a little desultory hawking, denigrated their hosts and the English with some thoroughness and dispersed a good deal in gentle company. In the free air, the bickering sank and died.

Nothing could have suited Robin Stewart better. During the second day, moving quietly from cover to cover, he found where, among the cockleshells of buckram, Lymond shared his pavilion. Now, at leisure, you could see how pitilessly right had been the whirling impression of the boar ring, the distorted glimpse at the Tower. Under the honest earth of Thady Boy was somebody’s precious gallant quite alien to the uproarious creature of the hunt and the race. It made it in a way quite easy to kill the one without even touching the image of the other.

Thady Boy—Lymond—had been called over by a group of his fellow countrymen. He was treated, Stewart saw, with the easy familiarity due his name, and with a certain guarded respect. What Lymond would do, in the end, with himself and his talents mattered,
after all, more to these men than to anybody. And this singular, if temporary, metamorphosis as a state servant of the Queen Mother’s would have been analyzed from Chinon to Candé.

It was the first chance many of them had had of meeting Francis Crawford of Lymond. Stewart guessed, from the gravity of his face, that he was playing with them. He saw George Douglas, bland, ironical, his manner verging on the exhibitor’s, abandon all his attitudes with a thud as some intellectual morass received him, leaving him to climb out with what dignity he could. Lymond was evidently not feeling patient tonight.

The day had been hot. Lying among the lukewarm grasses, stifling his hunger as dusk fell. Stewart watched the cones of marquees all silken yellow with candlelight; and beyond, the sprinkled windows of Candé, the village and castle all ablaze. In the meadows, there was still a whole tapestry of space-dwindled noise. Men spoke and laughed; pails clanked; dogs and horses responded, and the forked banners changed direction under the light evening wind with the soft night-noises of birds. A blackbird sang.

When the light had gone, and the fires gave gold and red to the eye like the jewels of an icon, Stewart held his stolen cloak tight at the throat with his one free hand, and walked forward from under the trees.

Somewhere, a company was parting. A tent flap stirred; hosts and guests, stooping, came out, rimmed and vesicled with flurried light, the words and laughter unmasked by the cloth. The clear, pleasant voice refusing escort was immediately recognizable, accentless though it was. Someone made a faintly edged joke. ‘—
Le monde est ennuyé de moy, Et moy pareillement de lui
. I would prefer, forgive me, to promenade my bad humour alone.’

And turning, his hair edged with silver and his face faintly amused, like some professor escaping a dull class, Francis Crawford walked steadily through the tented grass and out beyond, to the open flanks of the meadow. For a long time he stood there alone, his back to Stewart, his eyes on the ranks of tents, now extinguished and dim; and Stewart in the distant shadows waited, watching, his throat closed, blinded, exalted by the peerless moment of victory.

Then the longbow came, cool and heavy to his hand; the clothyard nocked, razor-sharp, the aspen with its grey goosefeathers smooth to the touch. Noiselessly Robin Stewart drew the cord to his ear, the lovely instrument aiming true, the even weight of the pull on each finger pad, every muscle answering by instinct the one skill above all others he had been made to acquire. He aimed, and shot.

The whine of the flight was no more than an indrawn breath in the night; the whicker as it buried itself as soft as a harp. Vibrating, the arrow sank into the ground a yard from Lymond’s right hand and
Lymond himself, collected suddenly like an animal, turned his head.

In the broad, dark meadow he was alone. The tents were silent: no sentries had seen. With a puff of dust the second arrow, bracketing him, had arrived.

He might have shouted, or run, or drawn his sword, or done all three—all equally useless. There is no reply, in clear terrain, to an archer in cover. But Lymond made no sound, though his face, colourless in the moonlight, was turned to the trees whence the second arrow had come. Neither did he draw a weapon. Instead, silent on the grass, he began to run towards the source of the flight.

Robin Stewart’s mouth was paper dry. Somewhere, for the first time, a tremor began within his worn nerves. But he raised the bow for the third time, nocked his bodkin point, with its four barbs and its sweet chisel head, and standing tall, rawboned, firm, aimed and let fly for Lymond’s breast as he came.

It struck him true, in the centre of the breastbone, and fell to the ground. For an instant, the running man checked. Then, one hand firm on his scabbard, choking the rattle and keeping the bastard sword out of his way, Lymond came steadily on. Which meant only one, devastating thing: he was wearing shirt of mail. And he was coming now so quickly that Stewart halted with the shock, had no time left to aim. As Lymond hurled himself into the wood the Archer threw aside his useless bow, and drawing the sword singing from its sheath, plunged forward under the trees to meet and slice the vulnerable, pale flash of bare hands and face.

Lymond had not drawn his sword. For a second they confronted each other, Stewart’s blade descending already. Then the other man swerved violently, the steel grating on his protected shoulder, sparks glinting blue from the mesh; and disengaging, ran on into the shadows away from Stewart, deeper and deeper into the wood.

He had no chance of escape. The Archer’s long legs pounded behind him, losing ground sometimes a little, sometimes baffled by the echelonned trees; but always led, like a drumbeat, by the crackle and thud of Lymond’s light feet. Then, a long way out of earshot of the camp, where the trees thinned for a space and the moonlight fell like frost on the grass, Stewart overtook him, and Lymond turned, his sword drawn, at bay at last. For a moment the steel glowed in the darkness, caught in the queer opal light like green fire; then Robin Stewart raised his own sword and cut.

They breathed like animals, the sweat streaming down Stewart’s face, a moment ago so dry and cold. From the beginning, no word had been spoken. None was necessary. Lymond had expected him; Stewart knew that now. Equally, he supposed, Lymond realized that this was the end. The death of a herald could mean nothing to a man with nothing to lose. The chain mail couldn’t save a man’s
legs. It couldn’t save his hands, or his head, or his eyes. It couldn’t save his neck. Using all the lying shadows, the floating beech boughs, the leaded moonlight, Robin Stewart, gaunt and invincible, crossed swords with his private devil at last.

He had never been brilliant, but he was thoroughly trained in a hard school. He knew the joy of the first sweet tingle of contact which taught you your enemy’s calibre. There was a long, fiery exchange, the sparks red in the darkness; a pause; and then a briefer one. Stewart fell back, the dried saliva stiff round his grinning mouth. They were matched. And he, who had nothing on earth left to fear, had the stronger will of the two. He paused, on an involuntary snort of pleasure that closed the back of this throat, swallowed, renewed his grip on the pommel, and began to play, delicately, for one thing only: the pale skin of the other man’s face.