Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [37]
“He was a nice monk,” said the child, with a single inflection neatly robbing the statement of all value. She bit the pomander, spat, and relented. “He said the rhyme, and he knew my name.”
“But …” said the Dowager Queen.
“But …” said Mariotta.
“I wonder,” said Lady Culter, recognizing defeat, “if it could be Dean Adam back from Cambuskenneth? He went last Monday, and I suppose—Or a wandering Observant? Oh well, he did her no harm—I think her screams were annoyance when Elspet lost her head and tried to get her into the boat and back.”
“They found no one?”
“No one. Lady Christian herself had been walking there, and heard no one at all in the gardens.”
“Can I,” said the Queen’s Most Noble Majesty, with urgency, “say it now?”
“What … I suppose so,” said Maman, her brow still furrowed.
“Eh bien,” said Mary smoothly. She recited.
“Hurble purple hath a red girdle
A stone in his belly
A stake through his arse
And yet hurble purple is never the worse.
“What is it, what is it, what is it?” roared the Queen.
There was a shaken silence.
Then Lady Culter, in a voice preternaturally grave, said (rather unkindly), “I think—it’s a hawthornberry, is it not, chérie?”
Her Majesty’s face fell.
* * *
Christian laughed outright. “How absurd … ‘Comment le saluroye, quant point ne le congnois?’ Of course I recognized who it was. Credit me with ears, at least.”
There was a moment more of the kind of constraint she remembered from their last interview in the cave, then the man beside her gave a mock sigh. “Forgive my obtruseness. My voice again? Crying the coronoch on high. I’m sorry about the uproar. I didn’t expect company, but even so, all would have gone well if that blasted girl hadn’t snatched the child so suddenly. Magnificent lungs for her age.”
They sat in the short grass in the middle of the maze a previous Earl of Menteith had designed on the north shore of the lake. Dusty box hedges with an unused air shut off any view of the water: from the rear a folly in marble overhung them.
It was warm and still, as it had been at Boghall, where, as her prisoner and her patient, he had played the lute and sung to her of frogs. Christian hugged her knees. “But how did the child find you?”
He answered ruefully, “I fell asleep. Considerably more than doth the nightingale. And the next thing I knew she was sitting on my chest.”
“What did you say?” said Christian, fascinated.
“She said, ‘M. l’abbé’ (you’ll have gathered I’m dressed like a magpie)—‘M. l’abbé, you ’ave greatly insufficient of tonsure.’ And I said, ‘Madame la reine d’Ecosse, you are greatly in excess of tonnage.’ After which exchange of pleasantries …”
“She got off?”
“Not at all. She bounced like a cannon ball and said that Dédé—”
“Her pony.”
“—That Dédé had long yellow teeth; and did I know—”
“That,” said Christian in chorus, “you can tell a person’s age from their teeth. That’s a favourite one.”
“Oh. Well, as you say. So she opened her mouth, and I pronounced her seven years of age, and she admitted to five. (What is she—four?) Then I opened my mouth—”
“What was it, a pebble?”
“—I opened my mouth and received inside it a small fish, still resisting delivery to its Maker. After that—”
“But what did you do? With the fish?”
“I pretended to eat it,” he said simply. “Then we played a game or two, and sang a bit, and discussed a number of subjects. Then the nursemaid, or whoever she was, arrived, and whipped off the child, crowing like the cocks of Cramond. And you know the echo, to boot.”
“I wish I’d been there,” said Christian. “Had you been waiting long? I’d walked to the far end of the garden.”
“Not very long. But I have been, and am, all a-quiver like goose grass. My dear lady, you mustn’t toss the secret of the Queen’s hiding place at the feet of a complete stranger. It’s not in the rules. Quite apart from perjuring yourself on my behalf just now.”
She said regretfully, “I make some terrible mistakes. But then I’m a very hasty person. You see, they wouldn’t let me bring Sym, and I’d no one to send, even if Tom Erskine had found out by Tuesday