Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [255]
Silence.
‘He can deal with foreigners who interfere with his justice. You’ll find yourself in the Bastille—you, next. And what will Warwick make of you then?’
Silence again.
‘Did I ever tell you,’ said Lymond pausing on the afterthought, on his way to the flap, ‘that that aunt of mine once hatched an egg?’
He paused, deep in thought, and walked slowly to the door before turning again. His lordship of Aubigny, staring after the vanishing form of his brother, received the full splendour of Lymond’s smile.
‘It was a cuckoo,’ said Francis Crawford prosaically, and followed Lennox out.
He rode with him, in borrowed clothes, as far as the town so that he and Lennox could be seen and the rescue, as Lymond pointed out with some irony, should not have been made in vain. Once, outside the tent, Lord Lennox had betrayed a leaning to violence … and had stopped short, halted by the hilarious blue eyes, and the recollection of what he was doing. Thereafter he said not a word.
Outside the grounds they parted, by Lymond’s desire; Lennox riding tight-lipped back to his royal wife. Fate, this time, had been rough-fingered with the Lennoxes.
Lymond rode on, and in a leisurely way set about keeping his belated appointment with Robin Stewart.
Phelim O’LiamRoe saw him come; and before he saw him, saw the avenue of trees lift and curtsey to the passing of his horse. There was no one with him.
He had taken all the time he needed, O’LiamRoe saw, to change and wash; to call on Michel Hérisson, probably, and discover O’LiamRoe had not returned; to obtain directions and follow them competently, well-dressed, beautifully mounted, his affairs now doubtless fully in order. How he had got out of d’Aubigny’s jealous grasp, O’LiamRoe could not guess, and at the moment did not care.
Lymond noticed him, smiled, and dismounting, strolled across the humped grass. ‘Hullo. You needn’t have waited. The man will be prowling his tedious way round Châteaubriant, muttering threats. To tell you the truth,’ said Lymond, dropping full length on the sweet grass and rolling over, face to the green light, ‘I’ve had a surfeit of Stewarts, one way or another.’
There was a pause. ‘I expect,’ said O’LiamRoe grimly, ‘that one or two of the Stewarts might feel the same way.’
Lymond’s eyes were shut. For a while they stayed shut; then he opened them very slowly, his blue gaze heavy and firm on O’LiamRoe’s. ‘Well?’
Standing still and sturdy in the little clearing, the triphammer of his heart beating the bones out of his flesh, O’LiamRoe inclined his head to the blank and glossy panes of the cabin. ‘Robin Stewart is in there,’ he said.
The movement that brought Lymond to his feet was so immediate that O’LiamRoe missed its component parts. He only saw him running, neat-footed over the grass, as fast as he had run today from his prison to the lakeside; running to the shut door, where he fetched up short, silent, a hand on either post. He raised his fingers to knock, but dropped them; and instead, pressing the handle slowly like some living thing he might crush, Francis Crawford opened Stewart’s door and went in.
Mice had been at the table. The new cheese and the horny bread were half eaten, and the scrubbed table was scattered with mice dirt and crumbs. The fire was out. But all the rest of the room was as Robin Stewart had left it: the mended chair and the clean floor, the perfect pack and the shining sword; the signs of thought and decision and a painfully meticulous striving. ‘As one gentleman to another,’ had said the neatly penned note O’LiamRoe had pieced together in his sick time of waiting, ‘I offer apologies with my meat.’
He lay before the hearth, the author of it all, the scoured hands idle on the floor, the dagger fallen, his lifeblood jellied on the blade. The loose-jointed sprawl was Robin Stewart, characteristic, not to be helped, outwith