Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [218]
The words used by the Bektashi in the ceremony of the tekke: how could any group of student singers know these?
No longer cold: drugged with musk and amber and the dizzy languor of fasting emotion, Philippa looked hazily round her.
Jerott she could see nowhere, but she caught Adam’s eye, and felt that for some minutes, he had been watching her. Even then, when the next song had started, he did not look away.
But by then, anyway, she knew who had written those words and set them to music. Once, Francis Crawford had sung with Les Amis de Rabelais.
Looking at him, she saw that Catherine, smiling a little, was still sitting below him. And that his absent fingers, their movement almost imperceptible, were caressing the smooth, creamy skin between her neck and her shoulder.
Andreas was singing alone. Philippa looked away, her face drawn, and watched him. ‘Wyatt,’ Danny murmured beside her.
It was Wyatt’s verse. It was also the bitter outburst of a wronged and unforgiving mind much nearer than that of Wyatt:
The piller pearisht is whearto I lent
The strongest staye of myne unquyet mynde;
The lyke of it no man agayne can fynde,
Ffrom East to West, still seking thoughe he went,
To myne unhappe! for happe away hath rent
Of all my joye the vearye bark and rynde.
It was a safe scourge to use. No one beyond himself and Sybilla should have been present to know its significance.
Sybilla was weeping, the tears running so fast that she placed both hands over her face. Richard, astonished, leaned to put his hands on her shoulders. And Lymond …
Lymond, his golden head bent, listened smiling to something Queen Mary was saying while his hand, with that hardly visible movement, told over promises on Catherine d’Albon’s beautiful neck.
Soon after that, the Queen left, her host escorting her. The doors closed. The company rose from its various obeisances. The atmosphere brightened.
Piero Strozzi, disentangling himself from his girl friend, seized a lute from the consort, drained his wine and uplifted his voice in the first verse of an interminable Court lampoon aimed at Condé. His audience, still on their feet, faintly dazed, took a moment or two to revive. Many trays appeared, laden with goblets. Concupiscence gave way to satisfaction, and the first chorus had a commendable complement, if one not quite so melodious as that of the professionals:
Ce petit homme tant jolly
Tousjours cause et tousjours ry
Et tousjours baise sa mignonne.
Dieu gard’ de mal le petit homme!
Madame de St André was laughing. So, fortunately, was the little man himself. Philippa Somerville said to the other little man standing behind her, ‘Where is Jerott Blyth?’
Danny jumped. ‘Asleep under a piece of paper saying La musique recrée l’homme et lui donne volupté, signed Calvin. I laid him to rest under the gryphons. He can’t sing a note; he can’t really.’
‘Your nerves are weak, aren’t they?’ Philippa said. ‘So tell me. Where is Marthe? Or haven’t you dug her out yet?’
He was reluctant to talk. Four of the sixteen verses about Louis de Bourbon were achieved before she told him what she wanted, and eight more before he had agreed to it. They were still roaring the chorus when she made her way across to Sybilla.
‘How do you stop them?’ said Robert Reid, Bishop of Orkney, when Lymond, free of his royal guest, returned to the midst of the gallery.
‘I distribute large sweetmeats,’ Lymond said. ‘As you see my footmen are doing. And I ask the wittiest and most senior statesman present if he would honour us with a short closing speech.’
‘Ha!’ said Reid of Orkney. ‘You know what you are about. Not a long, sodden aftermath exchanging coarse epigrams about one’s betters? I have heard the one about de Brissac three times already.’
‘No. Let us save everyone’s faces,’ Lymond said, ‘while we can. And before Master Buchanan is hurled