Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [103]
They had done all that a long time ago. The boxes, stacked in Jenny’s garde-robe, full of thick fingers dusted sugary white, had become fewer and fewer, until less than half a dozen were now left.
With Jenny silent beside him, Lymond pulled out box after box, piling them opened on the floor. All looked innocent and all looked alike. From the last one he lifted some of the sweetmeat, marked the lid, and closed it. Then he left the room and Jenny could hear his voice, two doors away, and one of the loyal grooms, Geoffrey de Sainct, answering. Her son James, whom she had sent away earlier in the night, suddenly appeared, sleepy-eyed from next door, and she made him go back. Then Lymond returned.
‘Put the boxes away in your own coffer, and lock it. Tomorrow, search everything in these rooms and tell me if anything has been disturbed. We shall know shortly if the cotignac was touched.’
‘How?’ Her face, drained of its vivid daytime colour, was still pretty and positive.
‘The old lapdog has been given some. You needn’t weep for him.’ The hostile, soft voice made not the slightest concession. ‘He deserves an end to his misery.’ He paused. ‘You realize, of course, that the Queen’s life is in danger; that poison is known to be missing; and that every morsel she has eaten since she came to Blois has been protected, tested and passed as safe first, except for your cotignac? Do you expect your love child to inherit the throne?’
Roused, she answered with asperity. ‘If we are to be serious, we still needn’t be silly. If you think something has gone wrong, then do what you can to put it right. I shall help as far as I can. But to be frank, I think this commotion is a little foolish. You have no shadow of proof that the cotignac or anything else has been touched.…’ Her voice softened. ‘The romantic trappings of leadership are hard to give up, are they not? Francis?’
He had not even listened; had only paused, half turned to the door, to run his eyes for the last time over her possessions: the table, the bed, the coffer, the shelves, the prie-dieu, the chairs. Between his eyes, a thin line of sleeplessness showed.
Jenny said again, ‘Francis? I am going to need help. I don’t want to quarrel.’
‘Are we quarrelling?’ said Lymond.
‘We were insulting one another like brother and sister.’ She paused. ‘I must go to bed, my dear. Am I forgiven?’ She had laid her hand, still endearingly young, on his steady arm. Now she slid her fingers up, and drawing him gently downwards, kissed him full on the mouth.
Under hers, his lips were taut and wholly inexpressive. But her own kiss was warm and loving, and she held him lightly, so that he breathed in her natural freshness, her costly scents and her human harmlessness.
She had thought, if she had thought at all, that he was tired enough to respond. But his fingers opened and he stepped smoothly back, boredom and a jaded, forbearing courtesy dry as meal on his face. ‘I ceased discriminating a long time ago. Good night, Lady Fleming,’ said Lymond; and in the precise pressure on her name and her title she glimpsed at last the chasm that lay and always would lie between them. Then the door closed at his back.
Behind him, as he crossed the courtyard, the night sky was already aware of the dawn. Beside the black coil of the staircase, the guardroom windows were lit, and opposite, men’s voices stirred from the chapel. The guards, appointed at