Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [219]
Along the bench, Flower’s laugh rang out again. The straight, plump back of Margaret Erskine had become quite still; and O’LiamRoe, his attention cuffed into place, thought of a fat black figure at St. Germain, flying like a witch on a broomstick at a barrel of hot water, lance couched.
They had seen Thady Boy’s style then; and how often since? ‘Pray tell his grace,’ said Mary of Guise kindly, ‘that our herald is notable for much, but not as a performer in the field. If he will allow us, we shall find another.’
With enviable polish, the emissary hid his surprise. ‘He excels perhaps at national sports? The King would willingly see him matched at putting the stone, or the bar of iron perhaps?’
A long hand touched the King’s Gentleman on his stooped shoulder. ‘My mistress the Queen feels perhaps that she has tested her herald’s valour sufficiently in the boarpit at Angers. Allow me to take his place.’ And bowing to the Dowager and to the envoy, Sir George Douglas strolled down to the field, his attendants struggling after.
Chester Herald, drawing out of his story, laughed again, clapped Vervassal on the shoulder, and turned off. Lymond, swinging back in his seat, caught Sir George’s eye and with perfect naturalness bowed. The Douglas, well-built, handsome, a notable knight in his day, returned the smile, mocking, and went off to pay his self-imposed debt to the Queen.
He was joined by others. Uneasily O’LiamRoe watched the grim playfulness with lance and spear and blunted sword, with iron and stone, between the great houses of Scotland and the soldier-diplomats, the soldier-scholars, the knights of England: Dethick who had marched with Somerset to the bloody massacre of Pinkie and Throckmorton who had been knighted for taking news of it to the King; Rutland who had demolished the walls of Haddington and Sir Thomas Smith whose historian’s voice had helped form the English claims of feudal sovereignty over Scotland; Essex whose son had been killed in the Scottish wars. The blows were hard and the laughter loud, but nothing unseemly occurred; Mary of Guise just then had power to ride them hard. And Lymond, at ease, chatting soberly with his neighbours, hardly watched.
It was nearly over when the cold-eyed face of Sir John Perrott laid itself, like a prime kill on a slab, on the ledge of the Queen Mother’s stand, and addressed Crawford of Lymond. ‘Sir, they tell me you wrestle, and I have much surplus energy and some skill at the craft. If your mistress permits, will you try a fall with me?’
Cool under the awning, the herald rose. Knightly pursuits were, or should be, part of his calling, temporary though that calling might be. Neither he nor the Queen Dowager could ignore an invitation twice. For a fleeting moment, O’LiamRoe saw the pale head lift to where, among his Queen, his mistress, his great officials, his courtiers and his friends of the heart, Henri King of France waited, with Lord d’Aubigny, beautiful, modest, detached, at his side.
Then Lymond said, ‘With pleasure; if my lady will allow?’ And the Queen Dowager, her eyes not on him but on some angering sight at his back, gave her slow nod. To protect him with her refusal would have argued complicity; he had accepted to save her that, as it was. For plain as the white sun in the purple-blue of the lake, as the green grass and the red dust and the jingling colour of shield and standard, flags, pennants and canopies, as the Court robes, serried, bright as bolsters in a sultan’s rich playbed, was the truth, plain to them all, that Lord d’Aubigny had chosen today, here, now, to open his war, his series of broadsides which would reveal Francis Crawford and Thady Boy Ballagh to be one and the same man.
Jacketless in the sunlight, the Queen’s herald