Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [156]
‘Yes,’ said Lymond, in the same pleasant voice.
‘Because if you don’t, it must be done in France, by whatever means they can find. Whoever employed Robin Stewart in the first place must still be in France, and you owe him a debt. I understand that. Go back to France after Stewart’s taken if you must—you can go quite openly as Crawford of Lymond, the Dowager’s herald. No one will connect you with Ballagh except those who know already. And if you’ve no wish to go, you can trust your brother to do what is best. He’ll stay with the Dowager until it’s all over.… You should be rather pleased,’ said Tom Erskine, ‘with O’LiamRoe?’
‘Well. Yes. He got drunk on the palm wine of power,’ said Lymond dryly. ‘That was all right. But it was I who fell out of the tree.’
At twelve o’clock on the following night, Monday the 19th of April, the French Ambassador waited again, behind the tall shuttered windows of Durham House, for Brice Harisson and his promised betrayal. With him were Lymond, de Chémault’s senior officials, and his secretariat.
They waited in vain. Half an hour passed of the new day, and then an hour, and no Harisson appeared. At three, taking a risk, de Chémault sent a junior to go on foot to the Strand. He came tack at dawn, to where Francis Crawford and the Ambassador waited alone in the library under splayed candles; eyes, throats and minds thick with long conjecturing and the consuming heat of the fire. He brought the news that at half past eleven the previous night, Brice Harisson had been arrested on Warwick’s command.
By midday, they knew that Harisson had been taken with two servants and lodged in the private custody of Sir John Atkinson, one of the two sheriffs of the City of London—a mark less of respect for the prisoner than for his nominal employer Somerset. By early afternoon, they knew the ostensible reason: three letters, written by Harisson to the Queen Dowager of Scotland and to two of her lords had been confiscated in transit. In them, Harisson had expressed his gratitude for the Queen’s promise to take him into her service, and had begged them all for their continued interest so that on leaving England, where he had handsomely benefited from the King, he would have means to live in the service of his gracious Queen.
One further item of news was forthcoming. The incriminating letters had been seized and taken to Warwick by one of the Earl of Lennox’s men.
V
London:
The Intentional Betrayal
Every betrayal, intentional or with concealment, is false: there are equal fines for the theft which is concealment, and the concealment which is robbery. Thou shalt not kill a captive unless he be thine.
HAD he been trapped by a peasant walking on all fours in a goatskin, Brice Harisson couldn’t have been more confused. His jostling languages littered chipped and useless in his mind, he passed his first days of polite captivity in Sir John Atkinson’s best room in Cheapside in a state of raging anxiety almost equalled by his burning wrath with the Lennoxes.
Matthew Lennox he had always disliked. Somerset had distrusted him, and had shown it; Margaret Lennox had crossed him again and again, and in the bank of ill will which now lay solidly between the two factions, Harisson had had his full share.
But who would have expected Lennox to intercept these damnable letters, and to have betrayed him in this way to Warwick? And, thought Brice Harisson, pacing round the packed furniture on Sir John’s polished floor, how could he hope to persuade Warwick that his correspondence with the Scots was to disarm suspicion only? Long before the apprentices’ bell in the morning, the two liveried bodyguards outside Sir John’s parlour door heard the secretary inside, exercising his worries.