Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [238]
Falkland Palace, the old royal hunting lodge where the Queen Dowager’s husband had died, was all hers now: the lovely grilled French façade; the courtyard lined on three sides by the wings of her husband’s father and grandfather with their medallions and their high decorated dormers; with the butts, the royal tennis courts, the stables, and the thick, flowery forest of Falkland with its echoes of Stewart voices between the lawns and the river. It was hers, and it was where she preferred to stay, above all else.
And because it was crowded, because it was private, because it was hers, her lords of the Privy Council and her Governor loathed it. But Mary of Guise was here, and her friend the French Ambassador was here, and his Grace the Earl of Arran, Governor of Scotland, had gone north in June and would be in Aberdeen for at least a month yet, so the Queen Mother had no intention of moving.
She had no intention, either, of allowing Francis Crawford to live any longer without enduring, for once, the full and forbidding dominance of the throne. But if Lymond suspected it, he gave no sign at all. He stood on the threshold of the Queen’s Presence Chamber as his names were announced and made the first of the three required bows, the last of which brought him automatically to her feet below the dais of her chair. The usher closed the big doors. The Chamberlain, her secretaries, her women around her, the Queen Dowager of Scotland stared down at him, perspiring a little under her wired cap, her big hands on her knees. The dull morning light, filtering through the leaded west windows, jumped from ring to ring as her hands tightened. She said, ‘You may remain on your knees, M. le Comte. It will remind you that we are royal.’
‘Your Grace,’ said Lymond obediently. ‘I have a glove belonging to our sovereign Lady your daughter which reminds me daily.’ His eyes, slipping past the dais for a second, recognized the presence of Margaret Erskine, newly on duty that day, and then returned to the Queen’s unfriendly face.
The allusion to his past services to the child Queen Mary was not, at the moment, what she wished to hear. In her strong French voice Mary of Guise said, ‘You have, I am told, a fully trained armed force in camp at your home, consisting of thirty officers and now six hundred mercenaries, to whose numbers you are adding as necessary?’
At fourth hand, renewed all winter and spring, he had had her standing offer to buy himself and his company. It was the permanent army she craved. Behind her, a door opened silently and the Baron d’Oisel, the French King’s Ambassador and Lieutenant in Scotland, slipped into the room. ‘You have been correctly informed,’ said Lymond.
The pale blue eyes scanned his calm face, and the hand lying open and relaxed on his raised knee. The little plume of his hat, held loosely in his other hand, lay quite still on the floor. The Queen Dowager drew air, hard, through the high, bony ridge of her nose. ‘Then,’ she said, and inclined her head to M. d’Oisel, arrived at her side, ‘I have to tell you that your company must be paid off and disbanded, the officers dispersed and the mercenaries shipped back at your own expense to wherever they belong. Further, the buildings at St Mary’s are to be pulled down, saving only the castle your home, and the arms stored therein confiscated by the Crown.’
Ten months’ brilliant and bitterly hard work had dissolved with a breath. There was a moment of complete silence. Margaret Erskine’s hands closed on the hardest thing she possessed, an engraved pomander, and gripped it achingly.
On Lymond’s serene and respectful face there was no change whatever. He said, ‘Is it permitted your Highness’s humble servitor to know why?’
The Queen Mother glanced at M. d’Oisel again. ‘We consider such a highly trained force, under a commander such as yourself, to be a threat to the public safety. Damage has been done through your livestock; lives have been lost through your machinery; minor cases of rivalry among the Border