Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [183]
‘Faith,’ said the big man, laying a broad hand on Jean de Bourbon’s satin shoulder. ‘There is no finer gentleman on Irish soil or under it than the like of yourself. If you had thirty in your purse, it would clear my honour of a sore offence of a debt. And he is with the Constable, you say?’
‘Who?’ said Condé, who was losing, and willing to beguile his brother’s attention from the game.
‘The herald. Crawford of Lymond. The Scot you were discussing.’
‘Oh.’ D’Enghien was examining the contents of his purse. ‘He carries London dispatches.—I believe so, yes.’
The Prince of Condé, sitting in the only chair with a back to it, leaned back and laughed. ‘Ask him for forty, my dear. Then ask him what de Chémault’s secretary scribbled under the report he sent the other week. C’est une belle, mais frigide. Une belle, vois-tu!’
For a second, the third man’s narrow eyes, their contempt undisguised, ranged over the two careless, painted faces. Then, his voice flattened with effort, he said, ‘A smooth-skinned bag of curds, brought up by an Edinburgh dominie and turned silly on a cup of pear juice. The red blood is all run out of the Lowlands, they say.’
‘My brother,’ said the Prince of Condé maliciously, ‘has had a sufficiency, I believe, of red blood. Better make it fifty crowns, my dear.’ The game was his, after all.
‘—No dissensions, my lords, I pray you,’ said an unannounced voice, of serenest reproach. ‘Mother Church has enough to bear. Faut-il que Père Éternel gagne Pater Noster, et Haile Carolus suit Ave Maria quandmême?’
In the doorway, an elegant gentleman smiled at d’Enghien, and d’Enghien, to his own delight, blushed. Mr. Crawford, Vervassal Herald, had arrived.
Fate and Francis Crawford, in wary collaboration, had arranged that the re-entry of Thady Boy Ballagh should take place in two steps.
First, he was to deliver de Chémault’s dispatches at Chinon, rocky fortress south of the Loire where King Henri and his favourite gentlemen were plunging through the forests and vineyards of the Chinonais in pursuit of venery. Thus in new dress, new colouring, new name and new accent, he would meet the King and the Constable, the Vidame and St. André, Condé, d’Enghien and the rest in a new setting also.
Then he would accompany the Court west along the Loire to Angers, where the Scottish Court and the rest of the French courtiers waited with the Queen. For Angers was the last station in the Court’s pilgrimage to meet the English Embassy next month near Nantes. It was also the prison where Robin Stewart, nearing the end of his own abject journey from London, was being purposefully brought. Which meant that The O’LiamRoe would be there too.
Arriving at Chinon, its Plantagenet masonry thick on the sky, Lymond showed no apprehension, and his followers, unaware of past reincarnations, certainly expected none. Scaling the steep streets to the escarpment, he was received with courtesy at the castle, and taken presently to the Grand Logis, where the Constable awaited him. The King was out hunting.
The roebuck season had opened at Easter; so had the season for evaluating the current shifting of power, ecclesiastical and temporal, in the wealthier regions of Europe, and the chances of benefiting thereby. It was approaching the time when the well-fed, well-rested and well-exercised in the kingdom with ambitions to satisfy began looking for trouble; and old men turned up old antagonisms like truffles, and dressed them in valorous tinsel to lure on the brash.
It was approaching the time too when, sniffing cautiously, the old war dogs of England and France should cease their circling and approach. The Ambassage Extraordinary now setting out from London was to do much more than invest the French King with the highest English Order of Chivalry; and a similar embassy soon to leave the Loire for London under the Marshal de St. André would carry