Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [200]
Commonplace words, to achieve what they did. But, straining, Stewart at last had made out his enemy’s features. There was no fear in Lymond’s face. The thin, long bones of it were set in thought, and there was a line between the shadowy eyes. It all said, plainly enough, that Francis Crawford did not know what he, Stewart, would do; and that patiently he was giving Stewart himself time to decide.
The sheer weight of the blade in his hand reminded the Archer. Tightening his grip, he lifted it afresh. The soft light, like strung sequins, spilled off its edge. Lymond said impersonally, ‘Are you happy?’ and the leaden tangle between Stewart’s ribs, where every bearing rein of his body was whipped hard and knotted, grew until his thin throat with its coarse tendons and its comic Adam’s apple shut tight. He dropped to his knees, the sword falling flat and unheeded on the dark grass, and clapping his two bony hands to his beaten face, wept.
Francis Crawford, who had his own laws, did not move. ‘Je t’en ferai si grant venjance Qu’on le savra par tote France,’ someone had once written. ‘I shall wreak such a vengeance that all France shall know it.’ It had a noble ring.
There was nothing noble about the dishevelled head snivelling harshly at his feet. After this show of cleansing emotion, Stewart would doubtless feel much restored. Already, wiping his smeared face with his hand, he had opened his eyes, glaring, on the earth and was catching his breath to speak.
It was going to be sentimental; the very cast of the mouth foretold it. The bloody fool could not realize, even yet, that anyone trained as Lymond was could have outplayed him, disarmed him and manhandled him back to camp shirtless, swordless and without intervention from half-naked young idiots with their mistresses or anybody else.
The Archer lifted his furrowed face to speak, and Lymond said, ‘But really, bastardy is no excuse for all this. Look at Bayard. And who was your father? The last lord of Aubigny? Old Robert?’
The other man’s face stayed upturned, the mouth half opened. The resemblance to d’Aubigny was not striking, but that would explain it. The great-uncle had been a vigorous old man. Stewart swallowed. Then he said hesitantly, ‘I canna prove it. Anyway, she was out of the bakehouse; they didna marry. Had they married—’
‘You would have been Lord d’Aubigny. Not, I suppose, an uncommon trouble really. Would you have made a good seigneur, do you think?’
Stewart, who had been caught on all fours, crept to a log and sat down. He said roughly, ‘As good as him, then.’
‘Do you think so?’ said Lymond idly. ‘You might have harried your Protestants—yes—but would you have cherished your beautiful buildings and dressed them with works of art? Would you have spent your money on jewels and fine clothes, on music and tapestries? Neither of you can lead. Neither of you has made a wild success of the profession of arms. If you are not going to be practical, you must perfect the lusty arts of leisure.’
‘Living on what?’ With the tingling resurgence of anger and prejudice the Archer stiffened like a hog. ‘John Stewart of Aubigny will live on manchets and muscatel all his days, out of his parents’ marriage lines. The same as you did. You treat life, all of you, as if the world was a tilting ground. The lusty arts of leisure! When you’re born to a mean spoon and a worn thread, when the only food in your mouth and the only clothes on your back and the only turf on your roof is your own bloody sweat, you get good heart out of all your braw hours of leisure, I can tell you!’
‘In other words,’ said the voice in the darkness, profoundly unimpressed, ‘your enforced métier was to be practical. Very well. When you ran that roof race with me you started with one stocking marked, a loose row of bullion on your hoqueton, and your hair needing a