Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [7]
Robin Stewart, feeling faint, and with his hands in his armpits, was counting heads. He had just found Piedar Dooly, chopping off leg irons, when a golden head rose from the benches and addressed the red evening sky.
‘Liam aboo!’ screeched Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow and lord of the Slieve Bloom, in princely paean to his fathers.
‘Liam aboo!’ returned his ollave concisely from the yardarm, and like a soiled raindrop, slid down to the deck.
II
Dieppe: The Pitfalls and the Deer
As to the pitfall of the unlawful hunter; the deer which he rouses and the deer which he does not rouse come equally to him.
DIEPPE, city of limes, was asleep. On the walls, at the bridge, on the broad city ports, the watch kept guard. The fishing boats had moved out. In the river, lanterns flickered where the galleys lay like whales, prow to quay, and the lighthouse shone over the bar. Inside, the streets smelt of herring and the new paint still fresh from the Scottish Queen’s visit; here and there an overlooked flag fluttered darkly, with the de Guise emblem on it.
All these dignitaries had now moved inland. Tomorrow the Irish guests of the King of France would follow them; but tonight the comfort of the Porc-épic’s mattresses claimed them after the rigours of the sea, and the windows were dark.
La Pensée, the beautiful house of Jean Ango, late Governor of the Castle, was not lit; but at least one man there was awake. Unmoving by the quiet fountains of the terrace, looking down on the moonlit river through Jean Ango’s bowers, glimmering with the marble bones of Attic deities, Tom Erskine waited without impatience for a visitor.
The uneasy peace lately fallen on Europe had meant hard travelling and harder talking for Scottish statesmen. Erskine was here now on his way to Flanders because he was his nation’s chief Privy Councillor, and because his common sense was the needle and the battering ram which Mary of Guise could trust him to use.
Common sense had not brought him out here on the terrace, but curiosity to discover what path his visitor would take. He lingered in the mild September night, square, good-tempered, reliable; but like the artist of quiet movement that he was, the other man arrived without sign or sound. There was somewhere a breath of laughter and a stirring of cooler air, and a pleasant, familiar voice spoke from the shadows. ‘How delicate, love! Shall we dally?’
‘Are you there?’ Tom Erskine turned quickly, searching the darkness. ‘Where are you?’
‘Sitting, as it happens, on Clotho’s distaff and keeping an eye out for the scissors. One of the rarer benefits of a classical education.’ And indeed, on one of the nearer pieces of statuary a dark shadow moved, swung, and dropped lightly to the ground. A cool hand took his arm.
‘Enter the wily fox, the widow’s enemy. Let’s go indoors,’ said Crawford of Lymond.
Lymond was masked. Slender in black silk, the bright hair hidden by cap and caul, he suited the room like a piece of Ango’s Florentine silver. He pulled off the mask, and Erskine was caught in the heavy blue gaze; saw again the ruthless mouth; the thinly textured fair skin neatly tailored over its bones.
Not for a moment, carrying the Queen Mother’s request, had he thought that Lymond would agree. Not for a moment, bringing back Lymond’s ultimatum, had he expected the Queen Mother to accept. And yet the absurd relationship, neither of employer and employee nor of allies nor of partners, had been born. Here, reporting his presence as a free agent, was Crawford of Lymond, who would remain in France for the winter of the Queen’s visit, and who would tell her as much or as little as he chose of the world of plots, of secrets and of intriguing he had undertaken to enter. On the other hand, the Queen