Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [67]
‘Why did they come?’
‘It was about a leveret, a sick leveret that needed a dose. They’re aye giving her wee things. Pellaquin’s about daft with it, because she won’t turn them off when they’re full grown. He’s having a grand time, I can tell you, with a full-sized she-wolf the now … Oh. The Marshal de St. André was with her, and his wife. The leveret was their present. Nobody else … No. I’m telling a lie. George Douglas came to pass the time of day and speir whether I knew my friend Master Ballagh was the sensation of Rouen. The midwife should have clipped yon one’s mouth with black ants.’
‘The Queen Mother’s very words. What a pity; they’ve got the gate open. That’s Stewart’s carping tract of sweet Berla-speech, I’ll swear. And that’s the final tally? How very competent, Archie. Unless someone simply wants to put down some mice, we have at least a list of possible culprits.’
Abernaci grinned. At the door he said, ‘Well, look out. It’s tasteless, and there’s just about no known antidote.’
For a moment Lymond, irritated, did not answer. Then he said succinctly, ‘Every crumb the little Queen eats has been tested first, from the time she left Rouen.’
The Keeper snorted. ‘What d’you test it on? Her aunty?’
‘One of your animals. If you’re dead keen, I’ll make it the she-wolf,’ said Lymond. ‘In Brehon Law, they call it setting the charmed morsel for the dog. We want to see them try out that arsenic. Because then, with a little luck, my dear, we shall know who they are.’
They were packing the monkeys in baskets as, returning, the three Irishmen and Robin Stewart passed the little garden of pets. Mary was helping, a piece of bandage on her other hand, and her red hair streaked over her face. The she-wolf was still in its cage, and a bear, together with a wild pig and the female parent of the leveret, wearing a small, gold-chased collar. Its name, Suzanne, was picked out visibly in stones uncommonly like emeralds. The twenty-two lapdogs now whirling in squeak-girt and telepathic unrest in the castle were collared also, Robin Stewart informed them, in precious ore. His grimly ossified face relaxed, however, when the little girl turned, and he answered her questions as readily as acute uneasiness would allow. Robin Stewart was unused to children.
‘Vernom-tongue of Loughbrickland,’ said The O’LiamRoe to his secretary, ‘you did not tell me she was a pearl in a clear glass of mead.’
Her grace the Queen of Scotland was not much interested in O’LiamRoe, although he got a practised smile and a fine-grained, downy wrist to kiss. She said immediately to Thady Boy, ‘It is you who throws eggs in the air?’
Thady Boy’s hands were still over his small, shoddy stomach. ‘Question me, doorkeeper. I am a sorcerer.’
She instantly flung back her head and looked down her stained nose. ‘I am no doorkeeper.’
‘It would be a terrible presumption, would it not, to call you so. I was speaking of an old tale, noble person, which you may hear one day.’
With Janet Sinclair behind her, and the little girls standing waiting Mary dropped like a twig on to a pile of sacking and folded her hands. ‘Tell me,’ she said.
‘Please your noble grace,’ said O’LiamRoe, his face solemn. ‘But it is a terrible long tale, that one; and I hear the juggles of him are the wonder of the world. He is better than Aengus the Subtle-hearted, that drew live frogs out of his ears.’
Lady Fleming had come across to the group, and with her, her son and the Dauphin. Sallow and ill-grown, smaller and feebler than his red-haired fiancée, François of France crossed to ask her a question. She answered him in her disconcerting Scots-French and, gabbling absently through the courtesies, pulled him peremptorily down beside her. Jenny retreated to the nurse’s side and Robin Stewart, backing also, attached his joints to the small menagerie fence. If anything went amiss, he couldn’t be blamed.
‘Juggle,’ commanded