Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [201]
He stopped again, his eyes running over the rigid, tattered figure on the log. ‘I wish,’ said Lymond with the same surgical incisiveness, ‘I wish you had come to me five years ago. You would have hated me, as you do now, but the Stewarts might have found themselves with a man.’
‘Created by you!’ Rising, Stewart’s head blocked out the moon.
Lymond’s voice sardonically deferred. ‘You don’t need to excel at anything in order to teach.’
‘Except hypocrisy,’ said Robin Stewart. ‘You taught me to respect you, and all the time you were a spy. What did you teach O’LiamRoe?’ He laughed, quite out of his usual key. ‘I notice he’s shaved. He broke his oath to me without a backward glance the day you got hold of him again. He’s neither the seigneur nor the practical man either, is he?’
‘On the contrary,’ said Lymond, ‘he is very nearly both.’
‘And by the time Francis Crawford has finished with him he’ll be neither,’ said Stewart. His hands swung loose at his sides, unregarded, like rough-tackle. ‘He’ll be kneelin’ greetin’ at your feet.’ The thick voice choked, cut off with self-loathing, then with a new breath Stewart said, ‘You’re gey unsympathetic with bastardy, aren’t ye, man? Gey unwilling to let us crawl over the clean floors until our manners have been trimmed? What does Richard Culter say to that?’
Silence. Then—‘To what?’ said Lymond quietly.
‘To the habits of his famous grandfather. By all accounts a grand family man, if a mite careless where he slept. How does his lordship enjoy all the rumours?’
Lymond rose. Not quite as tall as the Archer, he had a voice which cut the space between them to ribbons. ‘What rumours, Stewart?’
The Archer, fleering, did not answer directly. ‘The new heir to the title’s cried Kevin, is he not? I heard the Erskine woman talk of it once. The old lady wouldn’t have Francis, and she wouldn’t have it after your da. You can understand it, right enough.’
He didn’t see Lymond’s right arm go back. He only felt the brutal snap of the blow on the ridgy bones of his face. The moon dissolved into a powder of planets and the air swept his cheek as he fell.
When he woke he was alone, in the thick of the bushes, with his sword and his bow at his side. The bow must have taken some time and trouble to find.
Robin Stewart rolled over, and pressing his fists to his face, cursed Francis Crawford with hate and yearning raw in his voice.
It was hot. At Châteaubriant, in the new palace and the old feudal fortress, with their gardens and parks, where the old King’s mistress had lived until her husband had opened her veins, where the poetry they wrote each other spoke still in the air, the garlands drooped and the new paint boiled into tremulous cabuchons. Here, in one of the Constable’s splendid castles, the Court was to gather and the principal members of the Ambassage Extraordinary were to stay. In hall and audience chamber and arcade, outside in the new tilting ground, the new lake, the tone was one of severe efficiency: ceremonial inventiveness stiff-corseted—propped up sometimes, indeed—by precedent and etiquette.
The Marshal de St. André, bound for London with a