Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [143]
It was one of the great royal mansions of France, and once housed the Queen of Scotland’s young father, twenty years before also a bridegroom. The comte de Sevigny’s friends were not overawed. ‘It’s known as Plumbago Corner,’ said Jerott in a lofty welter of consonants. ‘You have to produce a ticket of entry that says you’ve fought all the statues.’ Jerott was drunk as a Templar and happy. Neither he nor Danny nor Adam had had a care in their heads for a fortnight, other than prosecuting with uninterrupted efficiency all the affairs of their companies and ensuring, under the unwinking supervision of Archie Abernethy, that Lymond was never alone.
But then, it transpired that he had no particular desire to be alone, being occupied in congenial company in various activities which happened to satisfy him. The golden optimism, the dreaming absence of stress that followed the campaign of Calais communicated itself to those at Court also. To Philippa it drifted like a temporizing incense above all she did in the four weeks before Lymond came back to Paris.
She made no attempt to obtain her release and go home as he had asked her. To Kate, inquiring guardedly about her non-return, Philippa replied that she saw no reason to miss the momentous spectacle of the Dowager Lady Culter embracing the entire bewildered court of France, if not her difficult son.
In this she spoke the truth. However able, however superb the elements of the family Crawford undoubtedly were, individually they were going to require someone’s help before this prospective visit to France was completed. She had promised herself to stay with the Queen until she saw some hope of rapprochement between Catherine d’Albon and Francis Crawford. She had hoped to find, before now, a thread of history, however spurious, which might reconcile him to Sybilla his mother.
In this she had been unsuccessful. If Lymond had been right, and his betrayal at Ham had been at the hands of Leonard Bailey, Mr Bailey had made no other baneful appearances. The only unhappy accident occurred at Court in the first weeks of February when, kept indoors by the snow, the Dauphin shot out the eye of M. de Bouccard his equerry in the course of an afternoon’s games, and the King had to ask M. de Bouccard’s pardon. His royal bride-to-be watched in smiling commiseration, her jewelled hands hardened together. The most excellent princess Mary, Queen of Scotland, had forgotten her concern for M. de Sevigny’s marriage.
The Cardinal of Lorraine, as it happened, had not. Shortly after his return from the faintly delirious celebration at Calais he had a long, flattering talk with the comtesse de Sevigny about her talented husband and received, with baffled admiration, the same artistic degree of response which Mistress Philippa had learned to allot the Head Eunuch. Considering that nothing but compliments were extended on both sides, it was hard to say how she also made him aware of the fact.
She was not short of employment. The two cousins Schiatti were in Paris still, and the Duke of Lorraine et Bar, and young Paliano, and Arthur Erskine, and a handful of others ready when she might have a free moment to throw snowballs from the town walls, or skate on the ditch, white as tables of Phrygian marble.
Indoors, she indulged the cast of mind she now knew was her own. She listened to Thevet, the Queen’s almoner, talk of his travels. She spoke of the Far East to Postel of the Collège Royal; she sat elbows cocked at a table, watching Nicolas de Nicolay design a new map. She listened to Jean Bodin, not yet thirty, talk of politics and astronomy, philosophy, magic, the Talmud.
The answers she carried to Catherine. Already agreeably trained in all the gentle and scholarly arts, Catherine d’Albon received in this interim a new and specialized education in all those areas of the mind in which her prospective husband had chosen to roam.
The daughter