Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [105]
Jenny’s son, wooden-faced and straight, made his report. ‘The dog is dead, sir.’
‘I see.’ Lymond did not stir. ‘So a hundred grains of arsenic would have been taken by the Queen before she left Blois. Who do you think did it, James?’
Lord Fleming avoided looking at Dooly. ‘Anyone could have. There was no guard.’ He hesitated, and then went on doggedly, ‘I was to say: she is exceedingly upset. She is, sir. And to ask you what to do.’
Lymond’s uncomfortable manner slackened, and straightening, he dropped his arms. ‘I know she must be upset. Tell her to burn the cotignac and the boxes, that’s all. I’ll do the rest.’
‘What will you do, sir?’
His eyes were shining. Francis Crawford turned his head away, letting his gaze dwell instead on the saturnine Irish face at his elbow. ‘Tell The O’LiamRoe from me, friend Piedar, that I wish him Godspeed at Neuvy, for what it is worth.…’
Dooly had risen to go. Fleming, lingering, was hoping still for an answer. Lymond rubbed his strained eyes with the back of one filthy hand, and measured the distance between the fireplace and the bed. ‘As for me: there have been enough scapegoats, and a damned nuisance they are. From this time on, God help me, I shall be my own bait.’
They left; and as dawn lit the scuffed, the tileless, the broken and well-trodden rooftops of Blois and pricked at the eyelids of its weary sleep-ridden citizens, Francis Crawford of Lymond at last rolled into bed.
VI
Blois: The Forfeited Feast
There are three banquets: godly banquets, human banquets and demon feasts; i.e. banquets given to the sons of death and bad men; i.e. the lewd persons and satirists and jesters and buffoons and mountebanks and outlaws and heathens and harlots and bad people in general; which is not given for earthly obligation and is not given for heavenly reward. Such a feast is forfeited to the demon.
AT Neuvy, O’LiamRoe’s arm healed. He stayed there longer than he had intended; rode, hunted, argued and played chess with Mistress Boyle, with Oonagh and their friends, and was not further molested. When Cormac O’Connor did not arrive as expected, he was far from disappointed, but wise enough not to take undue advantage of the vacancy. He sent word, by a fellow house-guest, that he would come back to Blois within the week.
The message was brought to Blois by George Paris, a rangy Irishman gifted with considerable powers of intrigue, who happened to be on his way home to Ireland. But first he had an interview with the Constable; and another with the King, accompanied by the Duke de Guise, who charged him with errands of a diplomatic sort, and promised him Robin Stewart as escort.
For some time, Stewart was ignorant of this. He had not carried out his threats to leave the Court and now knew that as long as Thady Boy was there he was unlikely to do so. But the decayed brilliance that had infected the Court since the moonlight steeplechase that night was beginning to frighten the Archer, as it had already frightened Margaret Erskine. Tom, returning fresh from the Low Countries with a peace treaty signed and a six years’ war ended, had been disquieted, though he did not say so, by the disciplined strain on his wife’s face; and when he spoke lightheartedly: ‘I’ve brought you herbs, as you wanted, for your fiend-sick patient,’ she said, with a grimness new to her, ‘Have you brought enough for the whole Court of France?’
At Court, everything halted for Christmas. Financial worries might be pressing, but at least both the season and the threat of penury made it unnecessary to think of war. Honour could be sought in other fields: in wrestling, in leaping, in tilting at the ring, in jousting and casting the bar, in hunting and hawking, in shooting at rounds and at rovers, in tennis and pall-mall and bear fighting and dancing, in dressing as gypsies and Greeks and Arabian knights.
They gambled and sang and made love lightly and expertly. In all they did, they were experts. The men about the King were chosen for their