Queens' Play (8 page)

Which was exactly the opinion of Francis Crawford of Lymond, accepting.

The house to which he had been so impulsively invited was not far off: a handsome, dormered merchant’s mansion behind a high wall, entered by a door recently widened. Outside, Robin Stewart stopped dead in his bony, marionnette’s walk to discuss Master Ballagh’s religion. ‘Have you strong views, maybe, on Lutherism and all yon trash?’

Thady Boy’s eyes were twin pools of maidenly blue. ‘I have strong views on nothing at all,
a mhic
, save women and drink, and maybe money. I can content me barefoot or bareheaded, and keep Lent or Ramadan, such little weedy views on religion do I have.’

‘Aye, well. The fellow we’re to visit is a sculptor. A retired sculptor. And an inventor. He whiles invents machines, you understand.’

‘Like Leonardo.’

‘Like Leonardo,’ agreed Robin Stewart with great promptitude, and knocked on the gates.

They were not admitted at once. There was a whispered colloquy, and a short wait; then a man with a lantern appeared and led them through the inner courtyard and into the house, talking amicably in good English as they went. They passed, at his direction, up a narrow wooden staircase and at the top stood dazzled in the light of a door already open. Two powerful hands reached for them; two powerful arms hauled them inside; and a rolling bass voice intoned, treading strongly, like monks at a vintage, on the mangled accents of Paris and
Perth: ‘Robin! My sweet conscience, my great buck in velvet, touch me at your peril. I’m all swelled like a foxglove with the gout, and damned glad to see you. Bring him in, whoever he is, and sit down.’

Michel Hérisson was a big man, with loose white hair lit by the spare wax candles behind, and powerful hands rubbed by the hafts and handles, the wood and metal and stone of his profession into premature cracked monuments of themselves. Shouting cheerfully, he made them free of a comfortable, chair-scattered room with a fire at one end, where three or four Scots and French, already gathered, rose and offered their welcome.

The room looked what it was: an unofficial club, where men of like mind and diverse background could meet away from the hubbub of public taverns. The greetings over, Stewart pulled Thady apart and seated him. ‘He’s a good fellow, Hérisson—a brilliant artist in his day, before the gout. His brother in London was one of the best friends I ever had.’ He picked up two tankards from the deep sill at his side and got up. ‘We help ourselves. Get your drouth in good order, Master Ballagh. It’s a grand wine Michel Hérisson serves, and he doesna measure your mou’.’ And he walked away, leaving behind him for five minutes the competent gaze of Crawford of Lymond.

One of the group before the fire was a minor member of the Queen Dowager’s train; he was talking, in fluent French, about Tom Erskine’s present embassy. From the number of used tankards, the circle had recently been much bigger; and yet the fire was quite fresh, with no long-seated bed of ash. Also, below the talk and laughter, and the chink of wood and metal on stools, there existed a rhythm that was no sound, but a pressure on the soles of the feet. No sooner had it made itself felt than it stopped; and Robin Stewart came back.

He spoke abruptly, after the first pledging draught. ‘Thank God O’LiamRoe isn’t to stay. I canna thole the man, Master Ballagh; and that’s the truth.’

‘It’s fairly dispiriting, I know,’ said Thady Boy, ‘when he makes a virtue of the very things that you would be after being sorry at him for.’

Stewart’s voice slid, aggrieved, into its common note. ‘Shambling here and yon, looking at the Seven Wonders of the world as if they were pared from his toenails, and making such a parade of his poorness and silliness that no man of feeling could bring himself to discomfit him. And all the while you’ve got a gey queer feeling that he thinks you’re the fool and he’s the wise, tolerant fellow laughing up the holes in his sleeve.’

‘Whereas it’s yourself is the wise, tolerant fellow,’ said Thady Boy; and ignoring the Archer’s sudden flush, he stirred a wine ring on the table with a long slender finger. ‘Tell me, since he’s such a wise, scholarly fellow—and he is, make no doubt of that—why he’s brought an ollave to France?’

‘Oh, to add to the splendour of his train, surely,’ said Stewart sarcastically.

‘While parading his lack of polish and his poverty? O’LiamRoe brought a secretary although he is a fairly good humanist, my dear, because he was afraid he mightn’t be quite good enough. He brought his saffron and frieze—’

‘That I respect,’ said Stewart. ‘I can see that. It was a matter of principle because the English proscribed it.’

‘The English proscribed it, true for you; but devil a man, woman or child in the whole of Ireland is paying any regard to it. The O’LiamRoe himself has six silk suits in his wardrobe, but none so grand, let you see, as the gentlemen have in France. Detached irony about the world’s work is O’LiamRoe’s rule; and that is where he is to be pitied, if you are dead keen to be pitying us some way.’

A calmness had come to Robin Stewart: a calmness wrought, had he recognized it, by a man used to dealing with men, who had taken time to feed the lions of envy, curiosity and aggression with these titbits and set them temporarily asleep. He said suddenly, watching the fat man’s dark face, ‘You’re a great one for dissecting, I can see. What do you make, I wonder, of the likes of me?’

‘Ah, the touch I have is only for Irishmen. You’ve no need of an outside opinion, surely. You know yourself, Robin Stewart.’

‘I know myself,’ said the Archer, and his bony hands tightened white on his tankard. ‘And I don’t need to like what I know. But, God, do we know other people?’

‘Who is it—d’Aubigny?—that you dislike? You needn’t see much of him, surely?’

‘He knows the secret of a good life—’

‘Has he taught you it?’

‘I can learn,’ said Stewart with the same suppressed violence. ‘I haven’t a title—I haven’t money or education—I’ve not even a decent name. I’ve got to learn; and I tell you this: I’ll work like a dog for the man that’ll teach me.’

‘Teach you what? Success?’

‘Success—or how to do without it,’ said Robin Stewart bitterly.

The ollave lay back. The waxlight shone on the black, lightless hair, the stained gown limp on his stomach and the hand, idly playing which still lay on the table. The trace of wine, like a jewel on the timber, was tremulous with a hundred wax lights. ‘And the best way to success—or the other thing—is an illegal printing press?’ said Thady.

By speechless instinct, the Archer’s hand moved to his sword. Then his face relaxed; his hand dropped. Here was a decent, drunken crony who would be gone in three days. The presses were not normally used at this hour; he had never contemplated Mr. Ballagh detecting
them. But Dod … what harm could a man do who would be thrown out on his ear if he so much as breathed on the King’s boots? Most of his thought lingering all too clearly on his face, he rescued the pause, just too late; saying, ‘How did you guess?’

‘Blubbering Echo, hid in a hollow hole, crying her half answer … In the cellar, is it?’ said Thady Boy. ‘I’ve heard the sound of night printing in Paris. What students of religion pay to read isn’t always ripe for a Faculty of Theology certificate; and a retired artist with a fancy for machinery is surely God’s gift to the theologians. Is there a great prejudice against ollaves of the more heathen sort; or could I see it, do you suppose?’ Master Ballagh enquired.

Stuffy, stinking, choked with tallow smoke and reeking of humanity and hot metal, the cellars of the Hôtel Hérisson resembled nothing so much as neap tide in a nailmakers’ graveyard. The half-cut sinews of monumental grey gods nursed tottering towers of type frames; from its seething copper, varnish fumes wreathed the eyelids of some armless oracle; a muscular goddess, hand outstretched, had a bucket of fresh-mixed glue on her arm.

And everywhere, like inky bunting, the wet, new-printed sheets hung; while presses chattered and clanged, supervised by Michel Hérisson, who, gouty leg notwithstanding, was turning out proscribed theological literature with one hand, and arguing its obscurer points with a ghoulish gusto the while. Milling, laughing, drinking, arguing around him, squashed and wadded among the litter, was the cheerful company which had left its traces in the parlour upstairs.

Robin Stewart was already running down the stone stairs to join them. Thady Boy, pod-shaped behind him, paused a moment on the landing, his heavy-lidded blue gaze on the gathering. No one from Court, obviously, was there. There were some richer tradesmen, one or two evident lawyers and a good many students. Somewhere German was being spoken, and somewhere, Scots. He saw Kirkcaldy of Grange, whose name he knew perfectly well, and who had made the afternoon’s clumsy approach in the tavern. There were some resident Franco-Scots, another Archer and Sir George Douglas and his brother-in-law Drumlanrig.

For a second Lymond paused, the thick smoke surging in the draught. The House of Douglas, splendid, ambitious, once the greatest in Scotland next to the King’s, had recovered once already from a long exile in the ‘twenties when George Douglas and the Earl of Angus his brother had been forced to abandon their plotting and hurry to France—where they were no strangers. More than 130 years before, Archibald, Earl of Douglas, had been created Duke of Touraine for helping to drive the English out of France, and many a
Douglas was among the Scottish veterans who settled in France with him then.

But it was a long time since then, and still longer since King Robert the Bruce had sent the Good Sir James Douglas to carry his heart to the Holy Land. The Douglas’s most recent crusades had been largely to do with cradle-snatching. Angus, head of the family, had seized his chance after Flodden to marry Margaret Tudor, widow of the Scots King James IV, and sister of King Henry VIII. The marriage was less than idyllic in practically every facet, and the resulting child, Margaret, had gone to England, married the Earl of Lennox and besides being a possible contender for several crowns, was embarrassingly prone to demand her father’s allegiance to England at moments when he was being made by main force to prove his loyalty in quarters quite different.

The Earl of Angus and his brother Sir George had tried to control the childhood of the late King James V, and of the present young Queen Mary; but despite English bribes and English pensions, they had failed. Now Angus was old, and there remained only Sir George, smooth, clever, nimble-witted; of dwindling account in the world of affairs, but with a son whose heritage he was guarding and for whom he snatched at what honours he could. And there was something else. In a fertile jungle of treachery and betrayal, George Douglas and Lymond had more than once matched their wits. Of all the Scots at Court except Erskine, Sir George alone knew Francis Crawford of Lymond really well.

There was still time to retreat. Robin Stewart turned round, enquiring, at the foot of the stairs. A rare smile flickered over the ollave’s dark face: and he ran downstairs lightly to join him.

Down below, the climate was scholarly, part-inebriated and wholly sporting. Michel Hérisson seized them both as they tussled through the back-thumping crowd, ale in hand: Stewart’s white silk shoulder was scarlet with claret and Thady Boy, squeezing in grease-spattered motley past a man killing himself on a double-bellows, was exuberant: ‘Ah, dear God: how The O’LiamRoe would come into his own here now. But’—as Stewart’s face froze—‘how could we risk it, and him born with thumbs on his feet: you would find him flat in the very next edition of Servetus, folded duodecimo.’

Michel Hérisson winked broadly at the Archer. ‘How’s your learning, Master Ollave? Have you Latin?’

‘Are you asking an Irishman? Do we breathe?’ said Thady Boy, and bent over the printed pages. ‘Ah,
dhia
, he was a woeful fool that one; and the words coming off him like a dog shedding mud.…’

The more precocious uses of a portable printing press held no interest for Michel Hérisson, whose cheerful and disrespectful exploit it was; but an attack on one of his authors was Nirvana. He and the
ollave plunged in, tongues flailing, while Robin Stewart stood by, full of proprietorial pride and black jealousy. In the end, he broke in. ‘You’ve a cellarful tonight, man. How in God’s name can you work in this crowd?’