Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [270]
It was Francis Crawford, of all the silent circle of Scotsmen, who walked off abruptly and waited, his head bent, his arm on the wainscoting, until the epithalamia had ended.
Then the dancing started again. For half an hour, it was necessary to stand and applaud as the Queen of Scots, her eyes brilliant, her cheekbones pink in her white face, again led the slow chain, her blue-green train, carried for her, interweaving its velvet with the cloth of gold, the silk and the tissue of the princesses.
Two Parliamentary councillors, discovering the Russian commander beside them, began an eager, deferential conversation about trading concessions. When he could, Lymond moved away.
Adam, watchful, saw him twice after that: once with d’Estrée and de Thermes and another gentleman of the Order, the four shoulder-chains of silver cockle shells sparkling fluted together, and once with Perrot, the Prévôt des Marchands, who was reliving, one would say from his hands, the defence of Paris.
He was not difficult to follow. The crimson velvet clasped with rubies and vented with gold was the only brutally vulgar dress Adam had ever seen Lymond wear, but he had known better than to comment on it. Now he watched it progress, constantly impeded, from point to point of the vast salon; now with the Duke de Nevers and some of his captains; now with Madame Marguerite; now with the Marshal de St André, never more attentive than now, when his foolish daughter had broken the formal bond between them. And then, returning laughing to her chair, the bride had called him and was complaining, with mock severity, that he was not wearing her glove.
Mary Fleming, who had a closer view than Adam Blacklock, saw the Queen’s hand on Lymond’s arm, and the eyes of the Cardinal of Lorraine, watching them. Then someone was brought forward to be presented and unexpectedly the daughter of Jenny Fleming found that the man James admired above all others was standing beside her and asking her, with charming irony, how she was bearing the strain of so many suffocating pleasures.
She answered, and he entertained her, briefly for a moment or two longer before he said, ‘Mary: where is Philippa?’
‘Did you notice? I don’t know,’ said Mary Fleming. ‘The heat turned her head a little and she slipped away to her room while the tables were being drawn, but she isn’t there now. In fact, according to Euphemia, Philippa didn’t go to her chamber.’
‘If she was dizzy, perhaps she didn’t reach it. Have you looked?’ said Lymond curtly. And then, seeing her flush, he added quickly, ‘I beg your pardon. Of course it has been impossible for you. May I ask a favour of you? Will you take me to her room and allow me to speak to Euphemia? And could you send another page perhaps to look for her, without creating any alarm?’
But Euphemia, yellow of face, had already sent several maids and had been out herself in the network of passages searching for Mistress Philippa, whom she had been enjoined, on pain of a beating, never to let out of her sight. ‘And I never did!’ wailed Euphemia. ‘Day and night, I never did! How could they expect me to get into the King’s Grand’ Salle to watch her?’
For, it seemed, a cloak was missing. A heavy, enveloping cloak which had been carried, in case of rain, on the short procession from Notre-Dame to the Palais, and must therefore have been removed during the fuss when the Queen was being combed and prinked prior to the banquet. ‘She’s outside,’ said Euphemia, her eyes filled with unbecoming and horrified tears. ‘She knew before the banquet she was going out. It is a trick. It is an assignation!’
The gentleman in crimson velvet, whom she did not know, did not rebuke her. He only stood perfectly still and said, ‘Do we know where she might be going? Have any messages reached her?’
‘None! None!’ said Euphemia, horrified. ‘She was not permitted to receive messages! Her family … the Lord