Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [210]
Philippa allowed polite regret to inform every muscle. ‘Whatever day it occurs,’ she said, ‘I feel I have a previous engagement.’
‘May I congratulate you,’ he said agreeably, ‘on your evident popularity.’
‘Anything I can do,’ Philippa said, ‘to save you from the exhaustions of pluralism.’
She watched him go, in a running flash of costly minerals.
He had seen no special threat in Elder’s presence. He had had three or four instructions to give her, and that was all that concerned him. He had gone as soon as he could. He had no way of knowing that the Lennoxes were tracing his parentage. Or that, until she intervened, Leonard Bailey had been on the point of selling them all he knew.
It was to pull down Francis Crawford and not merely to attend the royal wedding that John Elder was in Paris. And it was for her, with all the skills she possessed, to deny him that extravagant pleasure.
Part IV
En bref seront de retour
sacrifices.
Chapter 1
Second et tiers qui font prime musique
Sera par Roy en honneur sublimé
Par grace et maigre presque demi eticque
Rapport de venus faux rendra deprimée.
Very soon after that, M. le comte de Sevigny, Chevalier de l’Ordre, gave his promised banquet for the Scottish Commissioners to Queen Mary’s wedding, combining it, as indicated, with a supper for his future bride, Catherine. The economy also indicated did not leap to the eye.
Nearly thirty years before, a boy at the Sorbonne, Richard Crawford had hurled river-pebbles over the decorated wall of the Hôtel d’Hercule at the corner of the rue des Augustins. It was then already fifty years old and one of the finest houses in Paris, owned by the Prévôt of the town and his family. When the last du Prat died, it became the palace in which the Crown housed the foreign visitors it most wished to honour. He little thought then, that one day he would ride through its gatehouse arch with the flower of Scottish nobility at his side, to pay court to his young brother Francis.
The yard was arcaded, as he expected it, with majolica Roman medallions inset below the frescoes which gave the Hôtel its name. The stable officers, the grooms, the footmen and the ushers who waited there were all in livery, but not in azure and argent with the pheon and phoenix of Culter; nor did the achievement over the doors display the invected bordure denoting a younger son of that house. Instead: ‘The chaplet proper of Sevigny,’ said the Lyon King of Arms beside him. ‘A French coat of arms, of course, and perfectly correct, although it only tells half the story. The two achievements to which he is entitled should be conjoined paleways. I should be happy to advise him.’
The Earl of Culter did not answer, nor did his mother, to whom he gave his hand as, alighting, they made their way in procession through the square hall and up the wide caissoned staircase to the first floor of the mansion.
The entrance to the first of the Hercule’s sequence of galleries was enclosed in a porch of white wrought Gothic marble, in which the form of the hero arched and strove in the exercise of his classic talents. Sybilla shivered. ‘If he shows you any shadow of discourtesy,’ Richard said, ‘I shall leave, and take the Commissioners with me.’
For some reason the strain left her face and she smiled at him. He did not understand her. He wished she had not insisted on accepting the invitation. Braced for anything, he led her from the porch and into the delicate warmth of a long, exquisite room lit by sunlight through which moved, smiling, the faces of friends: Scottish friends. Men he had known long ago, before they left Scotland to teach and to study in France; to go fighting or merchanting; to join the French King’s royal guard of Scottish Archers; to serve the court or take up an inheritance. Important men like young Arran,