Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [237]
‘But this godlike magnanimity is new.’ Under the high-dressed, green-wheat hair, Margaret Douglas’s eyes were wary. ‘Such forbearance, when your own Queen has forsaken you!’
‘Identify your Queens,’ said Lymond promptly. ‘You forget, we have a pack. The cells are bearing Queens as if every one were a coining iron, with a fat, laurel-wreathed face in the wax. If you mean the Dowager—’
‘Of course I mean the Dowager,’ said Margaret.
‘—She is a tough lady to woo. Matthew will tell you. Jenny Fleming’s stepfather, even. King Henry of England—’
‘I had not supposed,’ said Lady Lennox sarcastically, ‘that you were asking her hand. Your practices are quite other.’
Abruptly Lymond got up. ‘Oh, no. Not this. Not again. If you must dispute, dispute the living issues: Rome and Mary Tudor, Lutherism and Scotland, Spain and the German princes, France and Suleiman’s new empire, the rich new world and starving Ireland, and everywhere the new steel-founder’s war. These are the events you and Matthew are moving. I don’t want to know how small the mainspring may be.’
She had risen as well. ‘Then you would have done well to have found out. For that is why you are here, my dear: because you will not learn that in each of us the mainspring is the smallest thing in the world—is just the single word “I”.’
In the dim light they faced each other. ‘God help us both,’ said Lymond, his mouth straight, his eyes level for once. ‘But if I live, and if you live, I will bring you a nation of souls that will give you the lie.’
But he recovered his good humour, it seemed, quickly; for as she left she could hear his voice, at ease with villancico, carolling Ninguno cierre las puertas behind the grille of his door.
Muffled under the tinsel of birdsong, the bells for Tierce ran their oiled course. Robin Stewart heard them at the door of his cottage, the green light flecking his groomed hair and the painstaking white of his shirt; in the deep grass his boots shone, nutbrown, vigorously tended in their turn.
Inside, it was the same. Hard work had turned a hovel into a soldier’s room, clean, orderly and shining; the one chair mended, the bed folded, the scrubbed table spread with the best food he could buy or steal: farm butter and milk in a crock, a cheese, a board of patties and a thick jug of wine. In the corner, his canvas bag lay, packed like a surgeon’s, with his spurs and sword like silver beside it. On the long, rawboned unshackled frame as he waited lay pride and confidence and calm expectation. The scrubbed hands hung at his side and the angry eyes, sunk in skin darkened by harsh work and harsh purpose, were serene.
The Queen was to die during the Investiture, which would open at ten. An hour earlier, he had asked, Lymond should bring the King’s troops to take him into the custody which would prove to the world that of this, at least, he was innocent. And through his information, Artus Cholet would be taken in the act; d’Aubigny would be inculpated and the shadow of Thady Boy’s guilt removed from Lymond himself.
He would bring perhaps a dozen Archers; or perhaps only a few of the Constable’s own men from the castle, with an officer. There must be an officer, so that the testimony would be quite clear. He would hear them coming: first the pealing alarm of the birds, then the drum and rustle of hoofbeats; and the trees would lift above the helmeted heads, toss and curtsey and lift again until they were all past. Then Francis Crawford and the officer would dismount and come forward, and he would offer them food.
He would say nothing, but the new face of Thady Boy would note everything, the clean shirt and the hard work; and