Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [63]
There was a solemn procession to the Palace to hear a case on the King’s Bed of Justice which gave Brusquet his only real chance of the visit. After a morning of well-rehearsed speeches by the advocates and the King’s procureur-general—‘Levez-vous: le roi l’entend’—and an equally well-rehearsed judgment thick with classical and flattering allusions, a private burlesque of the whole thing was performed extempore by the King’s fool in the empty chamber for the benefit of the royal ladies in their box.
They laughed, but not quite enough. The King changed his clothes, made appearances diligently, patiently and with charm, and entertained himself and his Court in privacy with the music of Thady Boy Ballagh, his breath sweet as a rose chafer and his lyrics strenuously unexceptionable. Thady Boy was working quite hard.
O’LiamRoe was amused. As rumours of the long evenings of romances eruditos and romances artísticos reached him, he was heard on occasion to express a left-handed pride that the sweetest finger that ever slid upon a fingerboard here should be Irish. At length the King left to make his State Entry to Dieppe, and then, by Fécamp and Havre, back to the River Seine for the water journey south.
Five Kings had wintered on the shores of the Loire, as it flowed wide and sandy through central France from Orléans to the Atlantic with castle and palace, town and village and vineyard, mill and fishery and hunting lodge on its mild chalky banks. For twelve hundred years pilgrims had gone by river and river bank to Tours, one of the holiest shrines in Europe after Rome; and the Gallo-Romans had built their villas there, and the Plantagenets for a while had made it English until their overthrow, when a grateful France had replaced them with Scots.
But it was a long time since a Douglas had ruled in Touraine. The Kings of France had developed a taste for the country and made it their centre. They governed from Blois and Amboise and Plessis and came back there from their wars to plant their booty and rear their children and try out their notions of modern building. The Chancellors, the Treasurers, the Admirals and the Constables built their houses there too; park and chase and garden were laid out; and even when, latterly, Henri’s father had turned aside to use Paris and Fontainebleau more and more, the well-worn journey was still made: Rouen, Mantes, St. Germain, Fontainebleau, Corbeil and Melun; overland to Gien like a migration of guinea fowl, cart, mule, horse and litter, the packs of servants and gentlemen, the endless baggage train, the men at arms, the filles publiques whose prescience about morning moves was both marked and relied upon.
And from Gien, through Châteauneuf, Orléans, Amboise, Blois, the barges floated them home. Pleasant, equable, healthy and full of red deer, the valley of the Loire was a place where many an unwanted embassy had grazed its knees and barked its knuckles and gone home unhappily neither satisfied nor affronted. The Court of France was going there to spend Christmas.
It started off, but amoeba-like, before it arrived its one cell had split into two. Louis, the King’s two-year-old son, died at Mantes. The royal household and the officials involved stayed or returned. The staff, the grooms and the younger element of the Court, among whom was the Irish party, continued to St. Germain-en-Laye.
As guide and conductor, vice Lord d’Aubigny, of Phelim O’LiamRoe’s trio, Robin Stewart had sensed, long before then, that the mignons were out for Thady Boy’s blood. O’LiamRoe as a garrulous and discredited foreigner they ignored. But Condé and de Genstan and St. André and d’Enghien, with their friends, had taken cool note of undue diligence among the monarchs. Stewart, who had discovered Thady Boy before anybody, watched sardonically as d’Enghien, young, witty, ambitious, lightly unfaithful