Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [195]
They would not get the little Queen for Edward, of course. Or if they were offered her at all, it would be on terms so ruinous that he could not accept. But even so, the Queen Dowager of Scotland could not be too pleased about any sort of alliance between her enemy and France, even an alliance on paper as frail as this would be. And she and her family were a power in France. They could point to Edward, schismatic, excommunicated, as no fit bridegroom for Elizabeth or Mary. And they might seize any excuse, any false step on Warwick’s part, to persuade the French King to drop these overtures of friendship.
On the other hand he knew from Mason, the faithful Mason, that Scotland was becoming restive under the French yoke; that they watched with mistrust the rebuilding of forts which might turn out to be as much for their discipline as their defence. And in France, the de Guises had their ill-wishers. The Constable, notoriously, wanted the proposed wedding between Mary and the Dauphin deferred, and even the King had jibbed at presenting the Queen Dowager with the whole of her annual fifty-thousand-franc pension to take home in gold. Last month, Northampton knew the Receiver General of Brittany had been heard to comment that nearly two million francs had so far been spent on the Queen Mother, and he wished that Scotland were in a fishpool. Northampton, irritable with his responsibilities and the delay, wished the same.
Sir Gilbert Dethick, Knight, alias Garter Principal King at Arms, tried not to think either of fishpools or rivers. For twenty shillings a day, he had to take and deliver to His Majesty of France the two trunks with the livery of the Noble Order of the Garter, all wrapped in a pair of fine holland sheets with a couple of taffeta sweet bags inside. They had crossed the Channel safely. But it was with a heart chafed raw with anxiety that he contemplated confiding them for two long, slow weeks to the Loire.
Scattered between Angers and Châteaubriant, where grandstands, spectacles and temporary housing had been six weeks in the making, the French and Scottish Courts accordingly took their time, having purchased leisure, cheeringly, at English expense.
The Queen Dowager’s party, although not Mary of Guise or her daughter themselves, spent two nights in the fields outside Candé and enjoyed it. Reclining in the garden of France under the soft sky of June with half the Privy Council given up and gone home, they slept, ate, read, talked, and did a little desultory hawking, denigrated their hosts and the English with some thoroughness and dispersed a good deal in gentle company. In the free air, the bickering sank and died.
Nothing could have suited Robin Stewart better. During the second day, moving quietly from cover to cover, he found where, among the cockleshells of buckram, Lymond shared his pavilion. Now, at leisure, you could see how pitilessly right had been the whirling impression of the boar ring, the distorted glimpse at the Tower. Under the honest earth of Thady Boy was somebody’s precious gallant quite alien to the uproarious creature of the hunt and the race. It made it in a way quite easy to kill the one without even touching the image of the other.
Thady Boy—Lymond—had been called over by a group of his fellow countrymen. He was treated, Stewart saw, with the easy familiarity due his name, and with a certain guarded respect. What Lymond would do, in the end, with himself and his