Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [218]
The English were enjoying it rather more than they had thought. The technique was much the same as in England, though the monarch was older: show respect for his toys. And the food was good.
By Saturday afternoon, when The O’LiamRoe had joined them, pink-nosed, his eyelids half-fixed like a boa’s, the daily exhibition of craft, dexterity and brawn was well under way. Like a man answering the beat of a drum he made for the jousting ground laid out along the great lake in the parks of Châteaubriant, followed by the silent Piedar Dooly; and pressing unhandily past the ranked knees, joined the Scottish Court in the streamered pavilion.
To reach his vacant place he had to pass George Douglas. ‘Smile, my prince,’ said the lazy voice. ‘You have the better part. Samson en perdit ses lunettes; Bien heureux est qui riens n’y a!’ Beyond him, a woman laughed; he did not need to struggle with the French to divine the subject of the joke.
The woman was Margaret Douglas, Lady Lennox. Passing, he bowed, his oval face blank. By the holy cross of Jesus, how did these things become known? She was dressed in a light, blowing robe, in white, her splendour bold in the sun. ‘Samson is below there’—her voice, gay and fresh, followed his buffeting scabbard—‘if you desire him. His own desires are humble today, I am told.’ During the preposterous journey she had had time to shape her attitude, both to Francis Crawford and to O’LiamRoe.
He turned. ‘There is a laughing time, and a time for speech. I am in my hour for breathing only.’ She laughed again, but not with her eyes.
When he sat down, not six rows behind the Scottish Dowager, with her daughter and Margaret Erskine at her side, he found the airy yellow head a little below him on the right; and from all the poisoned corridors of his lazy senses, dislike ran fuming.
Because of Francis Crawford he was here, tail docked, pepper in the nose, turned loose for minstrels to pursue. Watching, with vacant mind, the impact of metalled monsters, feathered, gauntletted, on aproned horses, flying past the coloured barriers, he wondered what Lymond was thinking. Round the little feathered hat bobbing on the Dowager’s left was a thicket of Fleming heads; beyond the ladies, the Dowager’s own suite pressed closer. The little Queen was well guarded.
But in George Douglas’s voice had been a chord of something other than mockery; in Lady Lennox’s, a glitter of tension. Fear was in the air: fear of nothing so explicit as a single killing, but an almost pleasurable fear that somewhere, this day or the next, a wanton hand would snip, and the whole frail net of treaties, understandings and expediency over states German and Italian, over England, Scotland and Ireland, over divided France herself, would sink to the ground.
Bruised with loathing, O’LiamRoe could yet comprehend the real issue; and through the tilting his eyes were on the man on whose shoulders the whole burden lay. Lymond was half-turned, his wrist on the rail, listening to Chester Herald, leaning over to comment. Phelim could hear Flower’s Yorkshire accent from where he sat. Lymond said something, and the herald laughed. On the tilting ground, there was an English victory. Sir John Perrott, brawling bastard of the English King’s father, flung back his vizor, grinning, and stuck a foot in mock heroics on his fallen foe, while the French politely cheered. He allowed a page to unhelm him, loosing the rough chestnut hair to the breeze, and strode off bellowing: bluff King Hal, wearing out his ten horses a day.
A Gentleman of the Household, smiling, left the royal