Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
The Duke de Nemours was put down, with much ribaldry, to partner the prettily pregnant wife of the Duke de Guise in the dances after the wedding breakfast instead of Mademoiselle de Rohan who, as everyone knew, was also plein’ comme un oeuf, and bellicose with it.
On April 15th, the same prettily pregnant wife of the Duke de Guise was delivered of a son, six months after the Duke’s return from the Italian wars, and no one made any public comment at all, although perhaps for an interval it drew Queen Catherine and Madame de Valentinois imperceptibily closer.
A rumour that the Sieur de Brissac was to return to Piedmont in order to support the Turkish fleet and twelve thousand Janissaries in a landing at Genoa was officially scotched.
The Prévôt and échevins of Paris were formally invited to attend what the sieur de Chémault, Master of Ceremonies, had begun to call the most celebrated marriage ever made and visited the Cardinal of Lorraine to inquire about dress. Happily, the Cardinal of Lorraine informed them that they were to wear silk robes of the town livery, at the monarch’s expense. There followed, among themselves, a long and lethal quarrel on the subject of collars.
A rumour that the Sultan of Turkey entertained hopes of suborning the new French Grand Master in Malta turned out to be true, to the joy of Danny Hislop, in whom was budding a sharp curiosity about the Order.
M. de La Rochefoucauld, calling at the Palais to attend on the King, informed Madame la comtesse de Sevigny that some packets for Lord Grey had arrived at his house from England, and that the courier had expressed a wish to see her. Madame de Sevigny, rising sharply in the middle of a financial discussion on the usufruits of the duchy of Touraine and the comté of Poitou, sat down again, and continued to be bodily present throughout the entire remainder of the dowry conference, but absent as soon as it ended.
The courier, a merry gentleman with a brown beard, gave her some cheerful greetings from Sir Henry Sidney, some others from a Spanish gentleman called Alfonso Derronda and two kisses, which he delivered, from Jane Dormer and Nicholas Chancellor. He also gave her, from inside his pourpoint, a letter with the Sidney seal.
It bore, within it, a brief note from Sir Henry, certifying that the paper inside had come from the banker specified by Marco Schiatti, and represented a document deposited there by one Leonard Bailey of the manor of Gardington, England.
She took it to her room in the Palace to open it, but in the end she found she need not have troubled. For this paper, too, was a blank.
*
Strange to sit in her chamber, among the plotting, the laughter, the fighting, the lovemaking, the dancing, the luxury, the sycophancy and feel alone and afraid, bereft of judgement and confidence.
Stranger still to remember, with a dull and damnable irony, that under this roof another human being was alone and beleaguered, in a sense she had never yet known. And that they could not bring comfort to one another.
For an hour, she had held him between her hands, his hair under her cheek, his racked body gripped and sheltered by hers. The proximity which, half an hour before, would have destroyed him had come and gone disregarded in the landslide of action and anxiety. Afterwards there was no harvest for the long, aching nights: no recollection of the geometry of a lissom back, or of the firmness and warmth of filmed lawn under her steadying fingers. And Francis, she supposed, must be empty-handed as she was.
And now, this further burden, of which he knew nothing as yet.
What to do?