Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [215]
‘There is a remedy,’ said the Queen’s half-brother.
‘Is there? I doubt it,’ said Reid of Orkney. ‘There might have been, in the past. But this hart is ten years too young, I fear, for his destiny.’
*
The entertainment, which came with the sweetmeats, consisted of feats of skill, performed by jugglers, dancers, acrobats and illusionists. All were dark or yellowskinned and none of them spoke any language that George Buchanan tried them with. Each act was executed in its proper order and without any visible flaw. None of them had been seen before. The guests stood, with the inclusion of the Queen of Scotland, to applaud their last exit.
The dancers did not perform a symbolic masque, and the consort of players was in tune. The singers entered unseen and Piero Strozzi jumped to his feet at the first surge of tight-pleated sound; at the low, throbbing band of the bass, and the counter-tenor planing, slow and bird-high through the harmony.
‘Hunno! Oswald! Andreas!’ Piero Strozzi yelled at his host, through the busy hum of a party astonished to be enjoying itself. ‘Fou enragé, you have sent for Les Amis de Rabelais?’
And ‘—Why not?’ murmured the Earl of Culter to Adam Blacklock, sitting beside de Nicolay behind him. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard better.’
‘It’s a long story,’ said Adam; and glanced across the handsome room to where he had last seen Jerott Blyth. He added, ‘And not one to mention in Austin Grey’s hearing. Francis once used Les Amis in order to try and leave France.’
‘And now, final irony, he is patronizing them. Where is Allendale?’ Richard said.
‘In the house somewhere, I believe. It isn’t the kind of celebration a sensitive prisoner would intrude upon. If Philippa were here, it might have been different.’
‘But she is here,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay behind him.
Adam stared and Richard, swinging round, examined the cartographer coldly.
‘You have failed, my lord, to allow for local deviation,’ said the little man blandly. ‘She came in five minutes ago, with Signor Strozzi. You will see, if you look, that the company has expanded itself in other directions also.’
Adam peered across the gentle, candlelit width of the salon. ‘The Prince of Condé,’ he suddenly said. ‘And el Vandomillo … the King of Navarre his brother. Christ.’
‘I also see,’ said the cartographer, ‘the Sieur d’Andelot and his wife and Monseigneur de La Roche-sur-Yon. And, I believe, M. de La Rochefoucauld. The Bourbons are here in strength. Who can have invited them?’
‘I did,’ said Piero Strozzi, coming and dropping with a thud on the cushion beside them. ‘This of your brother’s is too good a party, my lord, to keep to oneself. I sent out one or two discreet messengers. Mon petit François, I am sure, will bear me no ill will for it.’
‘You invited them without Lymond knowing?’ said Danny Hislop. He wriggled into the circle. ‘Can I be there when he hears about it?’
‘He cannot fail to know. We are not all blind,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay cheerfully. ‘But with the Queen of Scotland at his right hand and the King’s sister—you observed, of course, Madame Marguerite?—seated at his left, there is little he can do but appear delighted by it. At least, mon cher, you were obliging enough to refrain from increasing our numbers until the food was finished.’
‘It was not perhaps so discerning,’ said Richard coolly, ‘to compel his wife to celebrate the occasion. How did you induce her to come?’
‘Why, by telling her that mon petit François had sent for her,’ the Marshal said cheerfully. ‘There was a moment of, shall we say, incredulity when they met, but both parties rose to the occasion. She is being looked after by a number of attentive gentlemen from her own court and, of course, by the next incumbent, the charming Mademoiselle d’Albon.’
‘Christ!’ said Richard under his breath, and rising unobtrusively to his feet, began to make his way, with native persistence, to where Philippa Somerville, he now saw, was seated.
Danny got up as well.
Piero Strozzi, a single earring swinging against his dark face, looked up and