Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [358]
‘I am going to walk out of the door, and send in the four men who are to take you to your place of imprisonment. I shall not come back. I do not expect to see you again. I hope, when what is about to happen happens to you, that you will think of me. And crow. Crow on your bloody dunghill, if you can still do it.’
The four men who came in were heavily armed, down to mail coat and steel gloves and morions. They wasted no time on speech but advanced on him. He stood up.
He had no weapons other than his hands, and against the steel they were of little use. He managed to break someone’s nose, and mark another unshaven face with his knuckles before he was beaten half-stunned to the floor and kicked senseless.
They shackled him all the same, and put him into a cart, and took him to his destination while he was easy to manage.
*
It was the piercing cold, penetrating and even overwhelming the pain of his stiffened body which brought him finally back to consciousness. He lay with his eyes closed for a long time, as his training taught him to do, seeking the augurs of danger. He was lying, stripped to the waist on stone flags and stuck there, so far as he could feel, by the dried blood from recent contusions. He was not fettered.
After a while, when it was fairly certain that he was alone, he opened his eyes and found himself in a bare, circular room, served by two doors and one window, barred and set high in the wall. One of the doors, securely locked, gave probably on to a staircase. The other he was grateful, for the sake of dignity, to find led to a primitive office of necessity. Within the room itself, there were no furnishings.
He was in an unused tower, and it was daylight, but how far advanced into the day he did not know, nor if the tower was part of a habitable building. The window was too high to look out of, and the floor too cold to lie upon, so he sat, curled like a cat in the corner under the window, and concentrated all his senses on listening.
After a long time he did hear some sounds far below which indicated that there was life of some sort in the building. And that therefore he had not perhaps been abandoned to starve. At first, this seemed a matter for relief; and then, when he thought about it, of little consequence. When, several hours later, footsteps sounded quite clearly mounting the staircase, and there came the rattle of keys, and the sound of men’s voices, echoing, he was shivering so uncontrollably that his teeth rattled if he closed them. He stood up, slowly, as the door opened, and John Elder entered the chamber.
He was smiling: the raw smile one remembered from all the tedious receptions preceding Queen Mary’s marriage. Behind him were the four armed men he had met before, one of them with his nose in a plaster. Lymond gazed at it, pursing his lips, for a long and insolent moment, and then turned his attention to Elder.
‘M. le comte de Sevigny,’ said the secretary. His smile had grown, if anything, wider. ‘I am happy to see you. I am to ask you if you will have the goodness to come downstairs and join the Countess of Lennox directly.’
*
They gave him his shirt back for the occasion, but his fingers were too cold to lace it, and for Margaret Lennox, in any case, there were well-defined limits to the trouble he would take. From her jealous concupiscence at twenty-seven for a boy eleven years younger had come all the ills that had dogged him.
He wondered if she had ever come to regret that seduction, as again and again his life had collided with hers, and always to her detriment, or that of her husband, or her husband’s family. Through him, her husband’s brother had been brought to ruin at the French court; her father’s Scottish inheritance had been denied to her. Restored to Scotland, he could baulk all her family’s hopes of ruling there. He could do more. Once her lover, he could cast doubt on the very legitimacy of her heir, the boy whose claim to both the Scots and English thrones was far from negligible.
It was small wonder that Margaret Lennox had paid a fortune to have him discredited,