Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [205]
SANDY WAS IN Paris, but not packing. With him was Hearty James, the King of Scotland’s half-uncle, sent to hold diplomatic talks with the King, find out what the hell was happening, and bring Sandy back. He seemed to think it was Nicholas’s fault that he hadn’t come back long since. James Stewart of Auchterhouse, Earl of Buchan, was called Hearty James because of a certain absence of frivolity in his nature. It is no joke to be only half-royal, with six sisters.
He was feeling in an even less jocular mood now. In the absence of Nicholas, Sandy had finally made up his mind. He was not going home. He objected, as a Scot of royal blood, to the servility which prompted his brother to make an ally of the enemy England. No one pointed out that Sandy’s royal Scottish blood was half Flemish, or that his grandmother (and Buchan’s mother) was English. It would have made no difference anyway. He was staying in France, all expenses paid, and the King had offered him a wife from a dish full of Bourbons. Wolfaert had picked one. Everybody in France had a Bourbon. They made good middle-range brides, without skimming off the best cream. Hearty James was furious. Wolfaert had once married his sister.
It was not at all clear what, beyond staying in France, Sandy intended to do. The King sent many warm messages to his dear cousin of Scotland, and begged him, once again, to remember how close was the friendship between them, and how France would benefit in her dark hour, were his serene highness to end the English peace and attack the bastards instead. (These were not the terms used.) Were this to happen, it was hinted, a happy reconciliation between the King and his brother could be guaranteed.
The King was also gracious to Nicholas, and hoped to see him return. He knew that he could rely on M. le comte—ah, no, it was still M. de Fleury?—to explain what the Duke of Albany saw so clearly: the hurt to Scotland’s pride, her reputation, her glory, perpetrated by this pusillanimous peace.
Sandy said goodbye, in a word, and Nicholas attached himself, and his crate, to the Earl of Buchan’s departing retinue. The voyage to Scotland was undertaken in silence: gloomy on Hearty James’s part, and contemplative on the part of that European manipulator Monsieur de Fleury who, justifying all the Patriarch’s strictures, was increasingly thinking of mattresses.
Chapter 25
The tavernar, this man of hostillarye,
Before the alphyne suld he stand, for quhy
In thar placis oftsys discord is sene.
Neir-by the iugis tharfor suld he bene.
THIS TIME, WITH a royal prince at his side, there was no hope that Nicholas could enter Leith unobserved. The King had sent a cavalcade with his own Guard to fetch them. Henry, his chin elevated, his gaze straight ahead, was among them. If you’re about to be hanged, I don’t know you. They were then delivered, at a fast trot, to the Castle, Hearty James being accorded royal honours, and the Burgundian who fled to France with the Duke of Albany with pointed suspicion. His crate, being unwieldy, was to follow along with his baggage.
Rushed to the Presence, he contented himself with endorsing what he had already persuaded Hearty James was the case. His grace the Duke of Albany had felt in conscience opposed to his country’s policy, and had hoped to enlist the help of the King of France to persuade his royal brother to renounce his friendship with England. The King of France was, of course, sympathetic for many reasons, and proposed to send an emissary soon to make the same point, and to urge the King of Scotland to heal the rift with his brother. It was highly unlikely that the King of France would expect more from this than a polite refusal. One could see that such exchanges might go on for some time. But the truth was that the King of France was wholly unable to send more than an envoy. His war with Maximilian occupied all his forces. Whatever the Duke of