Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [260]
Silently the grizzled face of the Constable turned to the Queen and silently, without lifting her eyes from her lap, Caterina Maria Romola smiled acknowledgment.
The Constable would take the news to Francis Crawford, Comte de Sevigny; the Constable, not Diane nor the de Guises, would report the King’s wisdom and clemency.
A new star was being born. Not a star of Lorraine, or of Stewart, or Douglas; and she and the Constable were its sponsors. She looked on her husband’s black head, and in the shallow, prominent eyes was love.
The hot, brilliant day was sinking at last. In Châteaubriant, the lights sprang small and pale; in the castles, new and old, there were more; and a beading of lamps lined the walks. In the parks, the lake shone like a scale from the sky, buttoned with unwanted boats, black sitting on black without motion. Next the water, the great stand was unlit and silent, gazing emptily at the moving lights from the menagerie, where the small, clear jungle sounds, the chink of chains, the easy phrase of command, dwindled in the still air.
But between the lake and the châteaux, an arena sprang to the eye. The tiltyard, twenty-four yards long and forty wide, was garlanded with lights. Pale as new stars under the rosy sky they wreathed without illumining the great rectangle: the long, flower-packed stands for the Court; the tents to right and left for the champions; the striped silk raised like panniers to display the gilt stools; the gilded towers at the four corners for the pursuivants-at-arms.
Rose and pewter, flat as puppets under the great, dwindling sky, the audience bobbed and gestured and swarmed under the dark eaves, their splendours drained to grisaille; grey and grey among the small lights. Flatly the morions shone, pearly in the dead light; the silver trumpets, greyly flagged, were grey as water. Into all the riches of tissue and gems, into the silver brocade of the Archers edging the stand, into the bullion of the canopy, the cloth of gold on the champions’ table, the armoured squires in the lists, sank the thin, pellucid light, levelling as ashes, ancient as the dry air from some staring rock.
Then the long day exhaled its last, and blue, liquid night rushed in. Then the clusters of lights shone golden as fruit, and the diamonds blazed. Then in the bed of each light, colour—living, vibrant—was suddenly reborn; then the warm, painted faces nodded and laughed; then the drums beat and rolled. Lovely night had come; and the lists were open.
They opened gallantly, gay as France could make it gay. The laughing companies came and went in their plumes and bright skirted armour: the side of youth, flamboyant, vicious against the side of riches; the side of the Bretons against the teams of the Loire. They shot at an inch board under the flaring torches and tilted at the ring in their ballroom dress, with diamond rings in their ears. Black-bearded, smiling, the King watched from his tribunal in the middle, the English Commission on his right.
Since the royal summons directly after their return, O’LiamRoe had not laid eyes on Lymond. The story he heard was the story put about all the Court: that after some unfortunate breach of conduct, Lord d’Aubigny and Mr. Crawford were to settle their differences formally in the arena, for the sport of the King. The charges of theft and treachery laid against Mr. Crawford, it was understood, had been dismissed.
That being so, it seemed a queer way of congratulating the quick-witted swimmer of the morning. It was, perhaps, more in the way of a last, sour riposte to the memory of Thady Boy. So thought The O’LiamRoe, sitting cautiously where he was placed, alarmingly near the lockjaw splendour of the Ambassage Extraordinary. Queen Catherine, to the left of the King, caught O’LiamRoe’s wandering blue eye with a flutter of her fan, and smiled. The Prince of Barrow, amazed, produced a bow. He at any rate, it seemed, had entered the fairy circle.
The Queen Dowager’s ceremonial thanks