Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [178]
Intimations of doom had attended the Prince of Barrow at last. There was a woman he did not intend to see; a hypocrite he meant to see chastened; an autocratic courtier he wished to chastise. Grimly bolstered by these evidences of his caprice, O’LiamRoe was being hard pushed in private to deny he was going to France because, like sawteeth on a crown wheel, his destiny was locked hard in theirs.
Lymond, ranging the boat, his neat head stirred by the wind, tended rather to song. (‘Les Dames de Dieppe font Confiâmes qui belles sont.’) Presumably, he knew perfectly what was before him. Nothing of violence; d’Aubigny’s guilt would take care of that. But a fine ripping of masks and shredding of tinsel: the awful denunciation of the elegant herald as none other than their old drinking crony Thady Boy.
He would be able, in his own defence, to quote all that he had done to capture Stewart and expose d’Aubigny. A waste of breath. The embarrassed rage of his lords and lovers would rise to him in his safe place, thought O’LiamRoe lyrically, and tarnish every shallow spur of pseudo-gold.
From Portsmouth to Dieppe, no responsible word passed between O’LiamRoe and his former ollave. In the city of limes, the Prince of Barrow and Piedar Dooly would take horse for the Loire, there to enjoy the hospitality of Scottish Queens and French King alike until Robin Stewart should arrive for his reckoning.
Francis Crawford was not travelling with them. Lymond, it seemed, had business first in Dieppe. He paused once to explain that the name of his business was Martine.
‘Busy child,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, and in his voice was the sharp derision of their earliest acquaintance. ‘Do you not be plotting too hard, or the strings of your charm will fall down.’
They parted, with dry exactitude, on the quay; and by afternoon O’LiamRoe was on his way south.
La Belle Veuve, whose other name was Martine, took an open breath, the two dimples like fingermarks in her cheeks, and half shut the door on the princely dark blue silk on the threshold. ‘Wait, monsieur. Do I remember you?’
‘Let us see,’ said Lymond helpfully. She had forgotten how quickly he moved. ‘You remember me now. The travelling gleeman.’
The demonstration was brief and rather savagely efficient. Wrenching free, composed, bright-eyed, to lead him into her parlour she said, ‘Well, Dionysius. You are yourself again.’
He was uninformative. ‘Bathed overnight in a pan of new milk. And you needn’t think I am here because of the manifest comforts. My mind is purely on commerce.’
‘Mine also,’ said La Belle Veuve placidly. She was a slender, clever woman, no longer young, who had been salaried gouvernante to the filles publiques in the old King’s day, when a travelling army of young and distinguished prostitutes was by no means easy to rule. ‘But pray be seated, none the less. We thought you had been roasted to death.’
‘Singed a little, I must admit,’ said Lymond. ‘But you should have seen the Druid.… Has she come in?’
‘A week ahead of time.’
He did not need to explain. The Flemish galliasse of that September attack on La Sauvée, repaired at her home port and dispatched then abroad, had been a care of Martine’s for many months, and it was she who had found the one jettisoned matelot who had told them all they so far knew. She listened now to the particular oath Lymond used and said, ‘Is it now of such moment?’
He laughed, his annoyance gone, and examined the fine rings on her hand. ‘Have you seen the Three Queens and the Three Dead Men? You will, if this doesn’t succeed. Did Mathhias come to you?’
Mathhias was captain of the Gouden Roos, which had had orders, all these months ago, to ram and drown O’LiamRoe. La Belle Veuve watched Lymond from under her long lashes. ‘I went to him,’ she said. He would not, and did not, think it necessary to comment on