Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [260]
‘You dislike the Lennoxes,’ Richard said. ‘Is that why you oppose early and frank confrontation? To avoid any risk that the succession should fall to your enemies?’
For a moment Lymond stared at him, and Adam saw his muscles harden, as if he were about to turn and walk away. But instead he folded his arms and said only, ‘No. I have not been considering personal issues, either for you or for me. Or I would have mentioned the obvious fact, that the moment you and the other commissioners decide—should you decide—to take action, your lives will be in jeopardy. France won’t give up this wedding lightly.’
The long, critical scrutiny of the grey eyes did not alter ‘You have considered,’ Culter said, ‘that if the wedding doesn’t take place, France has no claim on England. And, therefore, if that is their first object, they will have perhaps less interest, not more, in interfering with Scottish affairs?’
‘It is a viewpoint,’ Lymond said. ‘I think that if she fails to produce a legal heir, she will make an alliance with Spain and try to take Scotland and England by force. But that is some distance away. At the moment both Spain and England are allied against France, and France is not going to risk having every Protestant in the country up in arms, as Jerott says, against the Queen Dowager; and in alliance with the Protestant faction, and eventually the Protestant monarch in England.
‘I think if you use this material, you will start a conflagration that will kill many thousands and may destroy Scotland more surely than a threat already hedged about with a fair number of contingencies. At least, before you talk to your fellows, will you give it grave thought? And I beg you, bind them to the most strict, the most rigorous secrecy. The pride and prestige of the de Guises all depend on this match being ratified.’
‘I understand,’ Richard said. He stood up. ‘I have to ask you again. How did you come by these papers?’
Elsewhere in the household other people, less occupied, were sitting at supper. The faint, savoury smell of hot food entered the gallery and lingered there, mixed with the other scents of cloth and warm metal and sandalwood, the traces of incense; the fragrance of juniper from the fireplace. The afternoon sunlight falling through the long windows latticed the velvet hangings with their flowered coronets; argent, a chaplet proper, debruised by a fess azure, invected … the device of Sevigny.
And the comte de Sevigny, without moving from where he stood in front of his brother, said, ‘They passed through four pairs of hands before they reached mine, and the person who started them on their way I can only guess at. There are many people who don’t like the de Guises. There are some who don’t want the Scottish wedding. I have had to take these papers on trust, because if I didn’t, the people who handled them would be cut off without compunction, and so would you. All I can say is that everything I know points to their being truthful copies of three genuine documents of State, and that the wording bears this out as well. I doubt if anyone outside the French secretariat would have framed them in quite such a way.’
‘I remember once,’ Richard said, ‘you made me march on Annan by telling me that I should go in the opposite direction. I have to think of my country, because I live in it. And I remember that the only other name I have heard shouted in the streets since I came, along with that of de Guise, has been your own.’
He stood, a broad-built man of unshaken purpose and integrity, and said roughly, ‘You must excuse me if I malign you. But you preach inaction, and still show me those papers. I think you mean the Commissioners to stop the wedding in order to cripple the power of the de Guise family,