Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [222]
‘You can escape,’ said Douglas.
‘To do what?’ In the torchlit darkness, under the green and black trees, the jewels bright in his ears, Lymond laughed. ‘Mary is as well guarded as love and duty can make her. The information that will save her will save me. Three people can do it—Oonagh O’Dwyer, Robin Stewart, or Michel Hérisson from Rouen. Perhaps they will do for me on my prison pallet what they would not do for me in my—’
‘You’re a naughty, cold-blooded devil named Jeroboam, son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin,’ said George Douglas dispassionately. ‘And you know that if they recognize you as Ballagh and convict you of the Tour des Minimes and the rest, they’ll light a large fire and toast you brown on a dungfork.’ He looked curiously, in the torchlight, at the other man’s unrevealing serenity. ‘What do you hope for that you haven’t got? What can that child give you?’
There was a little silence. ‘A virgin audience for my riddles, I believe,’ said Lymond thoughtfully, at length. ‘But it certainly poses an ungallant question. Shall we join his grace?’
And riding off through the long layered ranks of warmcoated kill, he reached the wide spaces, filled with firelit satin and jewels, where the supper was; and as lute, rebec and vihuelas played like unborn voices through the trees and gilded Pan children danced, he fumbled the scented oranges they threw him, or tossed them away, and defended his long-fingered dexterity from the charms of legerdemain. And yet, as the bright, tempting fruit left his hands, the Vidame, stretched loose on the grass, looked nowhere from that moment but at the profile above him; the Duchess de Valentinois, at the King’s side, broke off once or twice to watch, and the Prince of Condé and his brother exchanged looks.
It was the Princess de la Roche-sur-Yon, no friend of the Constable’s, whose very castle of Châteaubriant he had filched from her hands, who leaned over at last, and laid a lute on his lap. ‘M. Crawford, you cannot deny that you play. Honour us.’
They had hung arras between the barks of the trees, and laid velvet over the dried roots and beaver tracks; in this forest clearing in the exhausted heat of midnight, every accustomed artifice was imposed. From their wreathed tables the Embassy, slackly comfortable, shifted a little, sensing a change, sniffing at abature and blemish to distinguish the prey.
O’LiamRoe, watching, wondered fleetingly, since exposure had to come, if Lymond would not have preferred to stand on his scholarship: to reveal himself in argument with Pickering or Smith or Thomas rather than as a tumbler, a clown, a singer.
Lymond himself gave no sign, but took the lute and touched the strings, thinking. O’LiamRoe became aware of many eyes watching: of Catherine, of the Dowager, of her brothers the Duke and the Cardinal, of the Constable himself. By now, surely, they knew or guessed. Refusal itself was an admission by now.
Couched within the torches they had brought him, head bent over the dark lute on one knee, Lymond struck one scattered chord. The sound of it attracted wandering eyes, and silence enough. The first phrase with its unaltered texture named the singer, and to a blind man had described the proper contours of his face.
‘My lute, awake! perform the last
Labour that thou and I shall waste
And end that I have now begun:
And when this song is sung and past
My lute! be still, for I have done.…’
Easily, bright with irony, the voice rose and fell, and the lute lapped it like water.
Relaxed after the hunt, warm under the limpid trees, a little stirred by the romance and the artifice, the English Ambassage lay listening, smiling, and watched the young man who had given Sir John Perrott a poor game, but had clearly been selected by the Scottish Queen for quite different talents.
Lord Lennox, thumb to cheek, heard the opening and then found matters to discuss, low-voiced, with his neighbour. Beside him, his wife’s eyes, leaving the singer, explored the cushioned groups on the spread tapestries and the faces turning like leaves