Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [326]
That was on the third day, when it was known that the mysterious illness was not the pest, but something whose symptoms included a gripping pain in the entrails and a burning fever, so that the victim could neither rest nor contain nourishment but called out for water, incessantly.
Of the five Commissioners on the Barbe the oldest succumbed the most quickly. Only the two young men, Fleming and Lord James Stewart, were able to keep on their feet; although Fleming made no other progress and moved from wall to wall of his room, suffering bout and remission without recovery.
The Queen’s brother, perhaps more worldly or perhaps simply quicker-witted, had drunk salt water at the first onset of sickness and had hung by his heels from his bed, so they said, vomiting out the infection before it had time to breed in him.
It was true, when he came to see Lord Culter at the small house he shared with Erskine that he was weak; but there was no fever in his brain as he lay back in the tall chair they offered him and said, turning his gaze round them all, ‘You do not suppose, do you, that this was an accident?’
He was the first to put into words the thought which had been present in all their minds for three days. No one expressed incredulity or even the mildest surprise. Richard said, ‘If it was not, why are we not all ill?’
‘Perhaps the cooks on the Soleil were honest,’ Lord James said. ‘Or perhaps those of the Roman faith were exempt from the mandate. Were Reid and Fleming not intended to go on the Soleil originally?’
John Erskine said, ‘I changed with Fleming at the last moment. I wish I had not. He is at the threshold of life.’
‘And you are thirty years older. He has a better chance,’ Lord James said.
Richard said, ‘Does the theory hold? I was never invited to go on the Barbe.’
‘No,’ said Lord James Fleming. ‘But de Sevigny is your brother.’
‘Perhaps so,’ said Richard curtly. ‘But it was he who sent us our only warning. I didn’t believe him. I may have been wrong.’
‘You know him better than I do. I don’t believe he had a hand in this poisoning. I do believe he has thrown his lot in with France, and that the de Guises believe they can probably influence all the Culters through him. I have no doubt,’ said James Stewart, ‘that this was an attempt to get rid of us; or notably, an attempt to get rid of me. Our return to Dieppe was quite unforeseen. We should have sickened at sea and quite probably died there, without suspicion or remedy.
‘I shall live to make them regret it. But Robert Reid will never see his garden at Kinloss bloom again.’
*
Robert Reid, Bishop of Orkney, was brought from his ship to the common room of the house in which he had twenty-four hours still to live. Because he had much gear and no servants, as well as a longing to see the faces of friends about him, he had his bed placed there, with his coffers beneath it, and was able to talk, weakly, when Richard went to see him, and Beaton and John Erskine and finally, Lord James, the best-liked and most respected of all the new generation of his antagonists.
It was Lord James who, shocked at the nature of the room, urged him to have himself taken upstairs but Reid, following his lips, only smiled. ‘I am well where I am, so long as I can tarry. Long have you and I, my lord, been in plea for purgatory. I think I shall know before long whether there be such a place or not.’ And as Lord James began to speak of religion—‘No, my lord—let me alone, for you and I never agreed in our life, and I think we shall not agree now at my death.’
‘Will you go home?’ Lord James said. ‘My lord of Cassillis has asked for it.’
‘I am a naturalized Frenchman,’ Bishop Reid said, ‘or so they tell me, and the years of my learning in France have not been unhappy ones. Why should not this carcass stay here, instead