Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [344]
To Lymond he said, ‘The King has told you to leave France. It is not for me to darken his mind with the truth of this sojourn of yours, which seemed at the beginning so felicitous. Nor will I dismay those who fought and risked their lives for you. I shall merely add a promise to what his grace the King has already said. You will leave this country of France, not to return. If ever you cross the frontier, you will be brought to me, and I shall place before the ecclesiastical courts the papers I have prepared about you. They will condemn you. And your punishment, I promise you, will do justice to the nature of your error.’
‘I should try,’ said Lymond, ‘equally to rise to the occasion while wearing, I assume, my sash of the Order which may only be relinquished on death. The situation is understood and has, I think, been laboured enough. We may leave?’
‘You may leave. I do not,’ said the Cardinal, ‘wish you to call upon the Reine Dauphine in Paris.’
‘Your pardon. I have already written her requesting an audience, and have her answer granting it. Do you wish me to tell her,’ said Lymond, ‘that you have rescinded it?’
There was a pause. Then, ‘No, M. de Sevigny,’ said the Cardinal. ‘In that case you may continue with your arrangement to see her. But I would ask you to be very careful, both in your dealings with the Queen’s grace, and in your doings when you return to Scotland. I have a long arm.’
‘Monseigneur: you have no arm at all,’ Lymond said, ‘unless England allows you a sleeve for it.’
*
Outside, Lymond said, ‘I do not, as it happens, wish to swoon in the public street. There’s a tavern.’ And after that, did nothing to help except walk, after a fashion, into the private room Richard got for him. Some time after that, he read Willie Grey’s letter.
‘What was it?’ said Richard, who had needed the flagon of wine almost as badly as his brother.
‘A warning, from Lord Grey of Wilton. Much along the lines we have heard. If I don’t behave, they’ll have me indicted for heresy.’
‘But they daren’t,’ said Richard.
‘They daren’t,’ Lymond agreed. He put away the letter. ‘The diatribe we just heard was for your benefit, my Calvinist friend, not for mine.’
‘Maybe,’ said Richard. ‘But they’ve tried to use poison already. I really don’t think we need, do we, to move around like the new moon in the arms of the old quite for ever? They can’t try it twice. In any case, who am I running from?’
‘Raveand Rhamnusia, Goddes of Dispyte,’ said Lymond acidly. ‘I am trying to get you home, vide the shiten shepherd and the clene shepe, with your woolly chops spotless. The only drawback to date is that the bloody sheep is going to have to carry the shepherd, so far as I can see,’
But he walked, and suffered no nerve-storms; and next day, by easy stages, he and his brother set off for Paris.
The Cardinal, who saw everything and heard everything, watched them go. Then, calling his secretary, he gave into his care a letter, carefully sealed, addressed to her grace the Countess of Lennox at the castle of Settrington, England.
Chapter 10
Le changement sera fort difficile,
Cité, province au change gain fera:
Coeur haut, prudent mis, chassé lui habile,
Mer, terre, peuple son estat changera.
In the comfortable manor house called Flaw Valleys, set among its yards and its gardens in the valley of the Tyne in northern England, Philippa Somerville lived through September, motionless as a lead suspended in busy waters while her mother, deeply troubled, watched her in silence.
From France had come back a courtly woman who kissed but did not throw herself into the arms of her relatives; whose elegance was beyond anything she had acquired at Hampton Court or at Greenwich, but whose conscious mind was as far beyond communication as that of a bird lying stunned in the reeds.
With her had come Austin Grey, the charming, diffident boy one remembered from long ago, cosseted by his mother in the tall old house in the next valley. One supposed, in