Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [31]
‘Teach you what? Success?’
‘Success—or how to do without it,’ said Robin Stewart bitterly.
The ollave lay back. The waxlight shone on the black, lightless hair, the stained gown limp on his stomach and the hand, idly playing which still lay on the table. The trace of wine, like a jewel on the timber, was tremulous with a hundred wax lights. ‘And the best way to success—or the other thing—is an illegal printing press?’ said Thady.
By speechless instinct, the Archer’s hand moved to his sword. Then his face relaxed; his hand dropped. Here was a decent, drunken crony who would be gone in three days. The presses were not normally used at this hour; he had never contemplated Mr. Ballagh detecting them. But Dod … what harm could a man do who would be thrown out on his ear if he so much as breathed on the King’s boots? Most of his thought lingering all too clearly on his face, he rescued the pause, just too late; saying, ‘How did you guess?’
‘Blubbering Echo, hid in a hollow hole, crying her half answer … In the cellar, is it?’ said Thady Boy. ‘I’ve heard the sound of night printing in Paris. What students of religion pay to read isn’t always ripe for a Faculty of Theology certificate; and a retired artist with a fancy for machinery is surely God’s gift to the theologians. Is there a great prejudice against ollaves of the more heathen sort; or could I see it, do you suppose?’ Master Ballagh enquired.
Stuffy, stinking, choked with tallow smoke and reeking of humanity and hot metal, the cellars of the Hôtel Hérisson resembled nothing so much as neap tide in a nailmakers’ graveyard. The half-cut sinews of monumental grey gods nursed tottering towers of type frames; from its seething copper, varnish fumes wreathed the eyelids of some armless oracle; a muscular goddess, hand outstretched, had a bucket of fresh-mixed glue on her arm.
And everywhere, like inky bunting, the wet, new-printed sheets hung; while presses chattered and clanged, supervised by Michel Hérisson, who, gouty leg notwithstanding, was turning out proscribed theological literature with one hand, and arguing its obscurer points with a ghoulish gusto the while. Milling, laughing, drinking, arguing around him, squashed and wadded among the litter, was the cheerful company which had left its traces in the parlour upstairs.
Robin Stewart was already running down the stone stairs to join them. Thady Boy, pod-shaped behind him, paused a moment on the landing, his heavy-lidded blue gaze on the gathering. No one from Court, obviously, was there. There were some richer tradesmen, one or two evident lawyers and a good many students. Somewhere German was being spoken, and somewhere, Scots. He saw Kirkcaldy of Grange, whose name he knew perfectly well, and who had made the afternoon’s clumsy approach in the tavern. There were some resident Franco-Scots, another Archer and Sir George Douglas and his brother-in-law Drumlanrig.
For a second Lymond paused, the thick smoke surging in the draught. The House of Douglas, splendid, ambitious, once the greatest in Scotland next to the King’s, had recovered once already from a long exile in the ‘twenties when George Douglas and the Earl of Angus his brother had been forced to abandon their plotting and hurry to France—where they were no strangers. More than 130 years before, Archibald, Earl of Douglas, had been created Duke of Touraine for helping to drive the English out of France, and many a Douglas was among the Scottish veterans who settled in France with him then.
But it was a long time since then, and still longer since King Robert the Bruce had sent the Good Sir James Douglas to carry his heart to the Holy Land. The Douglas’s most recent crusades had been largely to do with cradle-snatching. Angus, head of the family, had seized his chance after Flodden to marry Margaret Tudor, widow of the Scots King James IV, and sister of King Henry VIII. The marriage was less than idyllic in practically every facet, and the resulting child, Margaret, had gone to England, married the Earl of Lennox and besides being