Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [194]
Liking or sympathy for that difficult man The O’LiamRoe could never find. But he did understand, in part, the mark left on him by Crawford of Lymond’s careless hand. His first reaction to the news was relief and even pity: no sort of life remained now for Robin Stewart but the life of a failure and an outlaw. Then he realized, with a slow chill in his stomach, the one inevitable and Damoclean result. With Robin Stewart at large, the would-be killers of Mary had been given carte blanche to finish their work.
III
Châteaubriant: A Bed-Tick Full of Harpstrings
A woman who offers upon a difficult condition: she offers herself for a wonderful or difficult dowry; i.e. a bed-tick full of harpstrings, or a fistful of fleas, or a white-faced jet black kid with a bridle of red gold to it, or nine green-tipped rushes, or the full of a carrog of fingernail scrapings, or the full of a crow’s house of wren’s eggs.…
There is no fine for forcing these women.
BY this time, the English Ambassage Extraordinary, three hundred strong, with its aching diplomacy and its groaning digestions, with its cliques, its amateurs, its professionals and with the Earl and Countess of Lennox, was already at Orléans, not much more than two hundred miles away.
Except for the Lennoxes, they were all Warwick’s men. Most of them were familiar with France, because you could not be a soldier or a statesman under Henry or Edward without sitting at a French siege or a French conference table at some point in your career. By the same token, most of them had also fought in Scotland.
None of these facts was at all likely to embarrass the Embassy or its distinguished leader and chairman, William Parr of Kendall, Marquis of Northampton and Lord Great Chamberlain of England, and brother to the old King’s last wife; a grand gentleman of limited gifts who had never quite lived down his military shortcomings during the recent rebellion.
So far, all had gone smoothly. A week ago, they had been met at Boulogne by a charming and efficient Gentleman of the Chamber who had escorted them to Paris and then further south with their trains of horses and mules, their wagon teams and guard dogs and their interminable luggage.
They had been feted. They had been entertained. At each town on their route, mayors and échevins had made their speeches of welcome; presents had been exchanged. The political factions in the Embassy kept to themselves; the diplomats were diplomatic; the arguments—even the arguments in and on Greek—had been staid.
My lord of Northampton hoped to God it would remain so. For they were ahead of time. In a fortnight’s time, the Embassy was due at Châteaubriant, and before them lay only a simple journey by boat down the Loire.
They were due at Châteaubriant for the symbolic service of Investiture. They were due also for other and momentous affairs: to arrange a treaty of strict alliance and defence between England and France; to demand the Queen of Scots in marriage with the King of England and in the event of refusal, to solicit the hand of the King’s daughter Elizabeth instead. They were due to appoint commissioners to visit Scotland and settle all the vexed points not yet comprehended in their treaty there; and they were due to introduce Sir William Pickering, the new English Ambassador to France.
And now, the retiring Ambassador, Sir James Mason, wrote anxiously from Angers enjoining delay. The Marshal de St. André had not even left on his duplicate journey to England; the great preparations at Châteaubriant were unfinished still.
The Marquis of Northampton read this dispatch, ejaculating at intervals, with his gentlemanly face flushed. The Scottish Archer accused of attempting to murder