Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [135]
The dulcet voice floated out to Scott, sitting wrathfully in hiding. So that was the scheme. And if Margaret Douglas was sent back to England, who was Lymond proposing to offer to Grey in exchange for Harvey? He felt a surge of sympathy for the Countess of Lennox.
She was saying in a numb kind of voice, “I’ll pay as much as … I’ll pay more than the Scottish Government to save the boy,” and the Master promptly agreed.
“I could get the money that way, of course; but without quite the same moral effect. It would be rather refreshing to upset the Earl of Lennox and enter the good offices of the Earl of Arran at the same stroke. Frankly, I doubt if I could resist it.”
There was a short, tortured silence.
Lady Lennox made a limp gesture with her hands, and suddenly the tears were there, blurring her picture of him before the fire, his hands loose at his sides, his head a little bent. “These things we’ve heard about you—how can this have happened in five years?”
“Cinders dressed up are still cinders. Like Petroneus, perhaps, I take pleasure in committing suicide at leisure.”
She shook her head, the tears streaking her cheek. “When you know the art of living, you don’t look for death, or half-death; you don’t hide in a hole like a chub. One accident; one reverse! You had only to force your way through it, and what mightn’t you have been?”
He shrugged, one arm along the mantelpiece. “Who can tell? One enjoys being the most debauched chub in the kingdom.”
Loosened by the headshake, her thick woven hair was falling loose across her shoulders; she had forgotten both it and her shift, glancing white through the blue cloak. Stung by his tone she said, “You blame me. You blame me for what happened.”
“Why should I? I’ve escaped the grand mal and the petit mal and even the Duke of Exeter’s daughter …”
Her hands were gripping each other hard. “We had to send you to France for your own security. You must remember. Your friends would have killed you. We had to get you away from London. I didn’t even know you were being taken—it was the King who—”
“Who arranged my convalescence in the English fortress at Calais whence, by stupefying bad luck, I fell into French hands. And none of it would have happened but for that very ill-timed dispatch.”
Margaret bit her lip. “I heard about it. The one the Scots found, that our man left by mistake. After the convent was destroyed.”
The blue eyes, unveiled, were directly on hers. “By mistake?”
“But—yes! The destroying party took your letter to follow your instructions, and when the leader was killed it was found by his body.… What else could have happened? What else did you think? There was no double-dealing on our part, I would swear to it.”
“Could you swear to your uncle’s share?”
“The King?” She looked startled. “Surely not. He could be violent, but not—”
“But not what? Was there anything he was not?” said Lymond. “Henry of England had all the virtues and all the faults, and solved the contradiction by making scapegoats and sin-eaters of half his entourage. If it suited him to discredit me between breakfast and dinner he would, like a shot from Buxted.”
He stopped as she laid impulsive hands on his arms, crushing the thick silk. “How can we know what happened, so long afterward? We can’t drag young tragedies forever through our Uves, or carry our years like enemies, as you are doing.”
Extravagantly, the fair brows lifted. “Alas, my sweet nonage. But five years of these vigorous times would remove the bloom from Lord Lennox himself.”
“And bitterness is a new thing.”
“Not at all. My natural habit, like the squirting cucumber. Any further traces of rot?”
Her gaze holding his, she let her fingers slip down his arms until, touching his hands, she felt and turned them palm upward. They lay lax in her own. Then Margaret Lennox looked down.
Scott did not hear the sound she made