Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [236]
‘Run, then,’ she said encouragingly. ‘And try hard. I would have told this sooner … I might have told this sooner, but Artus Cholet is my sister’s son, though a fool. You may kill him. He has come to the end.’
He left her, predatory, frowning over her fingering hands. As he closed the door he heard her address them: ‘Sleep, mes enfants—but can you not sleep? This day you must wake fresh as a rosebud. Right hand, you have left hand to meet in the lists.’
Out of the inn; through the stirring life of a country road, and past the unlocked door of a cottage with St. John over the threshold.
Berthe, fat, frightened and wary, had been sleeping alone, but another head at some time had crumpled the pillow and, outside, a horse had recently been watered and fed. He threatened her, hoarseness and tension disguising his lack of skill, until she spoke.
Artus had left early for Châteaubriant; where and for what purpose she did not know. She knew nothing of use, it appeared, but his description; and this, cringing, she gave.
There was another mare in the littered stable. O’LiamRoe changed saddles and, freshly mounted, started back. He had had to beat her, in the end; but it was plain she knew nothing more. After all his efforts, after the agony at Mistress Boyle’s, after the ride to the inn and to St. Julien, he was no further on. The man he wanted had vanished into Châteaubriant, and by the time he came back to his Berthe, it might well be too late.
Flying through the first heat of the morning, double-printing the track he had taken such a short time before, it came to O’LiamRoe that it was no longer one man’s work. Lord d’Aubigny notwithstanding, the English visitors notwithstanding, despite the Queen Dowager and the delicate balance of power she had betrayed Lymond to preserve, his share in all the bitter complexity of the day’s work was to beat the drum; to rouse the jungle; and to call friend and enemy alike into the open.
His bones ached, under the sun; and when carters cursed him, he did not turn.
On the new lake, the painted boats moved no more than a mirage, barring the satiny water with candy-bright troughs. Mary, solid and rosy with heat, was being dressed by a cat’s cradle of nurse, governess, maids of honour, femmes de chambre, valets, pages, grooms and a drum she had fallen in love with the previous evening and had demanded, screaming, to attend her at dawn. Quickly, and with tact, Margaret Erskine got rid of him before he passed the outermost door of the suite. Today, none but trusted faces were allowed in these rooms; no food or drink passed the child’s lips that one of them had not tasted; none but friends and servants would surround her when she walked abroad.
The Queen Dowager came in, the Cardinal cool and fair at her back; kissed the child, and went out. This morning, her rôle was to wait.
In the darkness of the Vieux Château, Lymond waited, too, with tired patience. Miraculously, after a while he slept, in the shirt of coarse wool which was all they could bring him.
He was sleeping when the Countess of Lennox came upon him, his head buried in his bare arms. She had come prepared to bribe handsomely for the ten minutes’ pleasure she wanted, but had found the tall gaoler surprisingly modest in his needs. His smile had puzzled her, too.
Then the cell door closed behind her and locked, and she watched but could not tell what second he woke, for he looked up lazily after a moment and said, ‘Welcome, Countess.’ And added immediately, swinging with grace to the floor, ‘Lady, this is most indiscreet. Warwick’s brutish eye is everywhere, you know.’
‘They are gathering for the ceremony.’ He looked neither anxious nor angry, damn his kingfisher soul. ‘I feared we might not meet before you suffer at last for your crimes.’ She seated herself on the bare bed he had vacated, arranging her gown. ‘You see what happens when you lose your head.’
‘You warned me.’ He bowed in acknowledgment; the odd shirt over his long hose recalled, involuntarily, the cloth of