Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [264]
So Mary of Guise had come to recognize that she needed help. ‘If he is in France for the term of my visit, I shall be satisfied,’ she had said of Lymond, without pretending to mean it. ‘In one year’s time, his allegiance must be mine,’ she had added, and had meant every word.
But she had cast him, in her mind, simply as a picturesque adventurer; and that, grimly, was what he had shown her from first to last. Only in London, after O’LiamRoe’s message had come and her hand had been forced had he sardonically accepted and brilliantly played the role which at last had come fitly to his hand. And then, that done, had come back to the confines of his undertaking.
His undertaking was to save Mary, and that he had done. What secrets he had listened to on the loving shoulder of France she did not know; what the cajoleries of the Constable and the Queen might lead to she could only fear; what the flatteries of her brothers and the growing attention of the King might stir in him she could only guess.
She had designed the incident of the boarbaiting for her own ends: to prove to the suspicious her lack of regard; to give her, if need be, an excuse to beg clemency in the end, were he to be exposed; to present to him a stage on which he might exhibit himself, as he seemed to delight, to the best advantage, a promise of the applause and admiration in store for him, a favourite at her side.
And when she had read the disgust in his eyes she had known, again, that she had been wrong. She had been wrong; and she had lost him. He had saved Mary and he had safeguarded England’s new burgeoning relationship with France. He had discredited the Lennoxes and won the attention of the French Council. He had George Douglas’s admiration, for what it was worth; had he come in time, he could have swayed Jenny Fleming, she knew. What he had been busy about in the affairs of O’LiamRoe and Ireland she could only suspect. He had only to exert himself and he could make a following in Scotland; he had only to stay, and he could draw together for her all the Scottish allegiance in France.
In that queer afternoon audience, she had said none of this. Instead, she had spoken with feeling of all he had done, leaning lightly on the performances and the risks, stressing heavily the political sense and perception, coming as near humility as a Queen and a princess of Lorraine might safely do over the stupidities and exigencies of her station. And all the time she knew that it was not for her sake that he had kept quiet, when she denied him, but for her adopted country.
She had spoken of her plans. Soon she would return home. Only, meantime, her son was not well. And she waited to hear, with anxiety, what news the Marshal de St. André would send of his offer to England of her daughter in exchange for the English possessions in France.
He had known about that. It shook her, again and again, to discover how much he knew. They will never give up Calais on a promise as vague as that,’ he had said. ‘You need have no fear.’
And then she had asked him to stay in France. ‘Men fall short of your desire, and so you abandon men. The Crown falls short of your expectations, and you abandon the Crown. A leader with no following is an aerolite unloosed, M. Crawford, its power blinding and blistering where it wantonly falls, until it burns itself out. To take a puny man and make him great is your gift. I offer you a child to fashion and make worthy of your soil.’
She had added much more. There would be a knighthood. His estate of Lymond should be made great: French architects