Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [84]
It was warm. Whatever decision King Philip might be taking at Ham it would not, unfortunately, owe anything to the inclemency of the late autumn weather. The poplars at the edge of the forest were yellow, but the other trees were barely tinged yet with russet: there were full-blown roses still in the formal gardens round the Old Château, foursquare in its red-trimmed cream stone, with the modern balustrades and urns trimming its roof-walk. Beyond that were the half-built walls of the New Château, rising on its terraced gardens above the loops of the Seine. From there, one could see the roofs of Paris, and even the white towers of Saint-Denis where the royal owners of Saint-Germain would one day be laid to rest. Some kings enjoyed the reminder more than others.
Mary of Scotland received her subject the dilatory Mr Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny in her bedchamber, which had recently acquired a new stucco frieze and a set of gold-fringed bed hangings for which she had been campaigning for months. In the nine years since she had been sent, a child of six, to take shelter with her kindred monarch in France she had never had enough money to spend: never dresses as resplendent as the little French princesses; never a household as lavish; never a governess she had really liked since the King had been indiscreet with Mary Fleming’s mother and instead of tolerating it, the Queen and Madame Diane had made her go back to Scotland.
There was no reason in the world why gentlemen should not take their pleasure with ladies of their own rank, provided it was properly done, and etiquette was not openly flouted. But it remained a pity that the King, by doing so, had thoughtlessly deprived Mary of Scotland of Lady Fleming’s assistance. And the bastard, Harry, was five, and freckled, and peevish.
She had told them to admit Mr Crawford, when he came, without chattering to him. The chin-cough being intermittent, she was not in bed. She had arranged herself picturesquely in a low, sling-seat chair with a fur rug over her knees and her auburn hair brushed out under its cap, so that it lay like raw silk on her shoulders. She sat haughtily still, because when she moved, it broke into snake-locks. Then the chamberlain’s knock came at the door, and Janet Sinclair looked up from her sewing while la Fleming, as instructed, answered it.
Mary of Scotland, who had extremely sharp hearing, noted that she did not chatter, but that the incoming gentleman paused and greeted her with an amiability verging on the irregular. Then he turned, waited for his introduction, and walked forward to kneel, with correctness, by her wolfskin.
He was far fairer than the Cardinal. The hair below her hand was breathtaking in its brightness, and his blue eyes were lashed like a woman’s.
‘We had expected you before, Mr Crawford,’ said Queen Mary of Scotland. ‘We wished to congratulate you on your courageous efforts to help his Majesty the King prepare against the enemy, in the absence of Monseigneur my uncle in Italy. He will wish to commend you.’
She had rehearsed it, and so she said it. But Mary Fleming, watching from her place beside the nurse and Beaton, whose mouth was slightly open, guessed what hardihood it had taken.
‘Thank you,’ said Lymond; and kissed the hand offered him, a little belatedly, and rose. ‘Is there some manner in which I may serve you?’ It was not, now, the man she remembered from the days of her childhood.
Mary of Scotland moved, dislodging the pools of combed auburn. It was the stifled end of an impulse to rise. She had learned to laugh and talk and even confide in messeigneurs her uncles the Duke and the Cardinal of Lorraine, but although she was a Queen and they were only princes of the blood still they towered over her, golden, invincible, filling the room, like an organ, with the invisible roulades of power.
This man was the same. Perhaps he had been the same six years ago and not the pretty courtier, decorating