Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [0]
Dorothy Dunnett’s
LYMOND CHRONICLES
“Dorothy Dunnett is one of the greatest talespinners since Dumas … breathlessly exciting.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Dunnett is a name to conjure with. Her work exemplifies the best the genre can offer. It combines the accuracy of exhaustive historical research with a gripping story to give the reader a visceral as well as cerebral understanding of an epoch.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Dunnett evokes the sixteenth century with an amazing richness of allusion and scholarship, while keeping a firm control on an intricately twisting narrative. She has another more unusual quality … an ability to check her imagination with irony, to mix high romance with wit.”
—Sunday Times (London)
“Expert entertainment.… Dunnett can describe a duel more convincingly than Dumas.”
—The New York Times
“A very stylish blend of high romance and high camp. Her hero, the enigmatic Lymond, [is] Byron crossed with Lawrence of Arabia.… He moves in an aura of intrigue, hidden menace and sheer physical daring.”
—Times Literary Supplement (London)
“A masterpiece of historical fiction, a pyrotechnic blend of passionate scholarship and high-speed storytelling soaked with the scents and colors and sounds and combustible emotions of 16th-century feudal Scotland.”
—Washington Post Book World
“With shrewd psychological insight and a rare gift of narrative and descriptive power, Dorothy Dunnett reveals the color, wit, lushness … and turbulent intensity of one of Europe’s greatest eras.”
—Raleigh News and Observer
“Splendidly colored scenes … always exciting, dangerous, fascinating.”
—Boston Globe
“Detailed research, baroque imagination, staggering dramatic twists, multilingual literary allusion and scenes that can be very funny.”
—The Times (London)
“Ingenious and exceptional … its effect brilliant, its pace swift and colorful and its multi-linear plot spirited and absorbing.”
—Boston Herald
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1997
Copyright © 1964 by Dorothy Dunnett
Copyright renewed 1992 by Dorothy Dunnett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Cassell & Company Ltd., London, and in the United States by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1964.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunnett, Dorothy.
Queens’ play / Dorothy Dunnett. — 1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
Second novel in Dunnett’s Lymond saga.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76237-5
1. Mary, Queen of Scots, 1542-1567—Childhood and youth—Fiction.
2. Scotland—History—Mary Stuart, 1542-1567—Fiction. 3. France—History—
Henry II, 1547-1559—Fiction. 4. Queens—Scotland—Fiction.
I. Title.
PR6054.U56Q4 1997
823’.914—dc21 96-46882
Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1_r1
Dedicated, for their passing entertainment,
to the Dunnetts,
who are stuck with reading it, anyway
GEORGE SINCLAIR DUNNETT
ALASTAIR MACTAVISH DUNNETT
DORIS MACNICOL DUNNETT PATERSON
THE LYMOND CHRONICLES
FOREWORD BY Dorothy Dunnett
When, a generation ago, I sat down before an old Olivetti typewriter, ran through a sheet of paper, and typed a title, The Game of Kings, I had no notion of changing the course of my life. I wished to explore, within several books, the nature and experiences of a classical hero: a gifted leader whose star-crossed career, disturbing, hilarious, dangerous, I could follow in finest detail for ten years. And I wished to set him in the age of the Renaissance.
Francis Crawford of Lymond in reality did not exist, and his family, his enemies and his lovers are merely fictitious. The countries in which he practices his arts, and for whom he fights, are, however, real enough. In pursuit of a personal quest, he finds his way—or is driven—across the known world, from the palaces of the Tudor kings and queens of England to the brilliant court of Henry II and Catherine de Medici