Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [167]
‘Or ask them,’ Lymond said. ‘I have no concern with Midculter. It has its own master and mistress. And if it did not, I should still have no concern. If Richard dies of an apoplexy, you should find a good steward and marry him.’
‘Then why,’ said Sybilla, ‘did you come here today?’ Sevigny! came the noise from the courtyard.
He closed the window. In the swirl of air the candle flames fluttered and guttered. He walked to the door in the silence and turned, his hand on the post.
‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I had a sense, I believe, of indebtedness. But someone trussed it in black felt and kicked it to death, as the Turks do.’
He looked at Richard. ‘I am glad you are safe. If you wish any help before Sunday, I shall be at the Castle with M. de Fors. I don’t imagine there is anything personal we need to discuss after this, either during your visit or later. On behalf of his Most Christian Majesty, we shall attempt to make your stay in France a pleasant one.’
Neither replied. He closed the door and found a servant a short way off who brought him to the maître d’hôtel and his horse.
Ross Herald was there also, anxious to be of assistance. ‘I hear the banquet is nearly over. The Commissioners’ll be fashed tae have missed you. But you saw the Earl and his mother.’
The noise was all round them by this time, but somehow, he caught it. Lymond turned. He said, ‘I saw Lord Culter. Has he … has his title by some chance been altered?’
‘God save us!’ said Alec Ross, and talked fluently for three unbroken minutes.
Lymond listened, focusing his attention with infinite trouble. Just before leaving Scotland, his brother had been given the Crown lands adjoining Midculter and the barony had been raised to an earldom. Richard was now in rank the first Earl of Culter, although neither he nor Sybilla had mentioned it.
So that Alec Ross had not intentionally misled him. Nor had Sybilla. She had merely discovered that he thought Richard dead, and had continued to let him believe it. I thought I was the excuse for your whole way of life, she had said to him. Her ripostes, on the whole, had been more successful than his.
Or perhaps she, too, was feeling like this.
Alec Ross said, ‘You see, the word has got round that you’re here. You could go by the back ways, my lord, but it’d be a pity to disappoint them. There’s an escort from the household waiting.’
There was, in the livery of the corps de garde of the town, and already mounted. Ross was right. For the sake of the Commissioners, if not for himself, he would have to make the short ride across the town publicly. A fresh horse, a little restive with the uproar, stood awaiting him. They had even brushed his heavy coat, soaked with the long overnight journey. It was a day and a night since he and Piero Strozzi had tried to rescue the Hôtel de Ville’s hilarious victory feast and since, in Philippa’s presence, he had forced Marthe to do what he wanted by the only means at his disposal.
He had better make the ride. One could not outrage everyone: spurn every overture; deny every generous emotion. He had discovered that, if nothing else, before he left Russia.
Dunbar, on his heid-ake:
My heid did yak yester nicht
This day to mak that I na micht …
Not everyone was in the narrow streets. Men were about their business, whether it was fishing or privateering, or laying the keel of a new vessel over the river, or drawing an old into harbour, trudging rope over shoulder as the tall masts slid upriver behind it. Work did not stop in the potteries, or the kilns, or the brew houses; or in the yards where, thickly gasping, the rape oil coiled in black reeking boilers.
But there were many who did come to the doors, wiping their hands: the sailmaker; the carpenter with his astrolabe, the women with lace in their hands and flax caught on the nap of their aprons.
So sair the magryme dois me menyie,
Perseing my brow as ony ganyie …
The skinners came out,