Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [195]
All the way from Dieppe, the names of de Guise and of Sevigny had filled the air, through the speeches and the noise of the hackbuts and cannon. Lymond had sent for the Tapkana, his specially built canopied sledges, and the first part of their journey was spent Russian-style running over the flat snowy chalkfields, with pennants streaming and bells ringing in the crisp air.
He was not averse, his brother noticed, to reminding the populace who he was. Even d’Aumale’s jewelled hats and furred cloaks drew fewer eyes than the Voevoda Bolshoia in his black fox fur hat, balancing on his light sleigh, reins in hand. Along with everything else, Richard Crawford concluded, Lymond had come to enjoy adulation.
Except once, long ago, over an estrangement with his wife Mariotta, Lord Culter had never been jealous of the young brother he had seen grow from babyhood. Until the moment Francis had left home at sixteen, a prisoner of war to the English, Richard knew him solely as a blond and delicate boy, interested only, it seemed, in reading and music, whose apparent fragility concealed a will of steel, and a turn of phrase which could wound like a sword-cut.
Most of all, he remembered the hatred which lay between Francis and Gavin, his father. It was on the violent, heavy-witted older man that Francis had practised his verbal play, to no benefit to himself. Some of the floggings Sybilla prevented, for of course, Francis was always her favourite, and the favourite too of Eloise his sister.
But he had failed often enough to weather the storm, and had had to stand by while his books burned, or his lute lay in splinters. It was to be expected that when he became in turn a leader of men, Francis should prove hard on others; should observe no laws; should fight, regardless of method, for victory.
Hence had come the misunderstandings which had led Richard once to hunt down his brother in order to deliver him to the justice he thought he deserved. Later, learning to know him, a friendship had grown: odd, irregular; at times surprisingly deep. And at times marred, it seemed wantonly, by Lymond’s excesses and his own lack of trust towards Richard which again and again had caused his older brother anger and misery.
No one in Scotland was ignorant of Lymond’s growing stature: in France, in Malta, in his embassy for France to Turkey. It had seemed possible that he might outgrow his wildness: that the virtues he did possess, and the depth and constancy of his relationship with Sybilla might bring him at last to safe harbour.
But then, Francis had not come home after Turkey, and the tales of his doings there and in Africa were not slow in coming to Scotland. There followed Russia, and his brief visit home where it became finally clear that he had changed: that all the ground gained during those painful years had been lost. And most distressing of all, that the sheet anchor had gone: that he had made up his mind to break for all time with his mother.
It was this discovery which had led Richard last year to attack him: a futile reaction, and one he would never have been driven to make but for all the years of growing attachment between. For what Francis was doing to Sybilla, Richard believed there was no forgiveness.
He had hoped, after that bitter encounter at Dieppe, that the schism, painful but wholesome, would now be complete on Sybilla’s side as it was on Lymond’s, to see her through the coming difficult weeks. And certainly, the bloodless formality of the relationship Francis had since maintained with them made it easy for her to keep her distance, and her thoughts to herself.
But although she could dissimulate, Richard was wiser than once he had been. He watched her when Lymond was there, moving cordially among his eminent countrymen, agreeably talkative, encouraging Beaton or Rothes or Cassillis or Seton to tell him about their troubles in Scotland; amusing young Fleming, who still worshipped him;