Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [86]
‘How can we believe that?’ Mary said. ‘If we ask you to perform a service for us, and you will not do it?’
‘You mentioned two services,’ Lymond said. ‘You asked me to return to Scotland and I have to say there, with regret, that his Majesty of France has asked of me the opposite; that for the promised twelvemonth I should stay here at his side at the French court. You asked me also, I believe, if I would refrain from annulling my marriage.’
He paused, and Mary did not interrupt. The interview, which had seemed so unpromising, looked like continuing at least with some frankness. It did not necessarily mean, thought Mary Fleming, that she would obtain what she wanted from it.
Lymond said, ‘There, I must lay two points before your highness. My wife is English and therefore less acceptable, both in Scotland and in France, than a French lady. And secondly the relationship between man and wife is, I humbly put to you, a private one, and not subject to the wishes of princes. In this instance, much as I revere your grace, nothing could bring me to alter my decision.’
She never really knew when she was beaten. ‘We thought,’ said Mary of Scotland, ‘that a man of war must be flexible? You forget, M. de Sevigny, that we know your wife. She is fully acceptable in France and, as we know from our aunt, has been made welcome in time of peace over the Border. Perhaps we know her better than you do. Would it not help you, before closing your mind, to spend more time with her?’
‘Perhaps. But she is on her way home to England,’ said Lymond easily. ‘And in any case, it does not affect the prime issue. I remain in this country, your highness.’
‘I see. Then,’ said the thin, clear voice sweetly, ‘we must be content, we suppose, with your presence. Since this is so, we may expect to see you more frequently?’
‘As often,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘as my duties and the commands of the king will allow.’
The Queen glanced at Mary Fleming, who came forward. Lymond, rising, threw her a look of mild inquiry. Jenny Fleming’s daughter saw it, but dared not answer it. The Queen said, ‘You may leave. There are some persons in the chamber of audience who wish to see you. Fleming will conduct you.’
He made her a full and graceful bow, and looked at Mary Fleming again, as she opened the door of the presence chamber. But the Queen was watching, so she said nothing; only allowed him to enter.
It was a small room. In it was a short, ruddy man with a grey beard whom she introduced as Master Michael Nostradamus, the Queen’s barber-surgeon from Provence.
The other person in the room needed no introduction, being the one young woman he trusted had left France and himself for ever.
The Queen, wilful to the end, had sent for Philippa.
Chapter 4
Qui par fer pere perdra nay de Nonnaire
De Gorgon sur la fera sang perfectant
En terre estrange fera si tout de taire
Qui bruslera luy mesme et son enfant.
For a girl of twenty to fall in love with an experienced dilettante ten years her senior was nothing out of the way. It was perhaps rarer for such a girl to make up her mind, as did Philippa in Lyon in one night of bitterest soul-searching, that such a relationship was out of the question, and that henceforth his life and hers must lie in different directions.
There had, of course, been sentimental attachments before in her childhood: to an apothecary, a ballad-monger and a boy from the Abbey who had shared the same teacher. All she remembered, looking back, was the delicious anguish, the laborious subterfuge: to be in the garden when he happened to call; to be in the market place on the day he might ride through. The smile one treasured; the box of glutinous ointment one bought but did not use, because his fingers had touched it.
The boy from the Abbey was the only one who even learned her name; and he was interested in someone else very much older. She had produced a tear or two for her pillow on occasion, and had wasted a great many hours on devious plans which came to nothing, under the impression that each tender secret was hers only. She remembered