Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [81]
During the supper that followed, sumptuous as befitted the ending of a national emergency and the honouring of its manipulators, Francis Crawford asked for and received permission at last to leave Paris, and take up with the army his proper employment.
‘That is,’ said the King, his soft, wine-moistened lips smiling within the silken black beard, ‘we shall expect regular news of you at Saint-Germain. I have told you we are leaving also. The air in Paris is bad. Her grace the Queen is unwell. My daughter of Scotland has been abed coughing these three days, and asking, I understand, why her subjects take no trouble to visit her. I tell her Paris must come before Scotland.’
The Cardinal of Lorraine was not present. ‘And the crown of France before her princes,’ said Queen Catherine kindly. It was true, she did not look well. The white skin of which she was so proud had a sallow tint round the nose and the mouth: the prominent eyes, damp with the force of her coughing, were downcast.
Then she lifted them, and it was to be seen that the impression of submissive intelligence was one she was well used to conveying. She said, ‘Then you do not regret, M. de Sevigny, that our selfish affection has brought you honour in France, instead of in Russia? I remember well my uncle of Albany praising the abilities of your grandfather. Our Scottish friends over here have a saying, Ecosse notre foi; la France notre coeur, which moves me.’
There was a third part to that statement which none but her Scottish friends, Danny Hislop hoped, were aware of. Seated far down the company, he tried and failed to catch Lymond’s eye.
His mood was sardonic. Short; ugly; sharp as a razor, Danny Hislop the Bishop’s by-blow from Ayrshire had owned no superior before joining Lymond in Moscow and still struggled, from time to time, against the knowledge that in Francis Crawford he had perhaps met his match.
He had watched Lymond, under Jerott’s furious eye, accept yet another of the golden chains intended to keep him in France, and he wondered what game he was playing. There was no doubt that he had been hell-bent on getting to Russia. Chiselled into each of Danny’s eardrums was the precise language Lymond had used when they brought him back from Douai. And now, when you listened to him, the shifty bastard, there was never a damned fuero to be heard. Lymond said, ‘How could I have regrets, Madame? Thus poulticed with the gold of pleasure, and with such brave consolations?’
He did not, on the word consolations, look at the Queen’s ladies of honour, nor did Catherine d’Albon glance at him. But a little colour, Danny noticed, rose in her well-bred face as she sat, her hands in her lap, and her mistress, replying, smiled dryly. ‘I hear, my lord count, that your wife is leaving for England.’
‘She is travelling north,’ Lymond said. ‘She should pass through Paris in a day or two.’
‘While you are in Picardy. A charming young person,’ said Queen Catherine, ‘for an Englishwoman. I trust her kin will find her another mettlesome husband. And when she has gone, we must see that you have time for gentle companionship. The Maréchale tells me you have hardly spent more than the night hours at the Hôtel St André, and sometimes not even those.’
‘Not from choice, I assure you,’ said the King’s new commander, and this time, looking across, bowed gravely to the Maréchale’s daughter.
The girl acknowledged it with composure but her flush, Danny noted with interest, had become deeper. Pestered beyond endurance for information about Lymond’s intentions, Jerott Blyth had let fall a week ago that Catherine d’Albon did not play a part in them.
It turned out that Lymond had told him so. Danny Hislop, who was an unstinting admirer of Jerott’s appearance, his wife and his reputation, was still to be overwhelmed by his acumen. Any fool could see that the d’Albon girl and her money were the bargain clause in an invisible contract.