Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [81]
For a moment, in silence, they faced each other. Then, without waiting for an answer, Ballagh opened the door and moving quickly and lightly, ran downstairs to the horses.
On a little river south of Orléans, at the eastern edge of the rolling green fens of La Sologne, lay the moated town of Aubigny-sur-Nère, given to John Stewart, High Officer of the Scots Army fighting in France, by a grateful nation a century and a quarter before this. Twice burned by the English and once by accident, it had risen on its ashes neat, prosperous and comely, with its statue of St. Martin, its shops, stables, gardens, houses, smithy, fountain, worksheds and its elegant castle where, beneath the lions and salamanders of a bygone Stewart the present owner, lordly in silk, welcomed the arrival of O’LiamRoe, Thady, Dooly and their guide Robin Stewart. And with Lord d’Aubigny were his two Scottish relatives by marriage, Sir George Douglas and Sir James.
Blandly, the visit began.
Once before, John Stewart of Aubigny had been surprised by the range of O’LiamRoe’s interests. Now, displaying his treasures to the trained mind of the ollave, he found again an unwilling kinship with the ollave’s queer master. O’LiamRoe could and did alarm with unseemly fables of the Gobbam Saer; but Delorme, god of masons, could reduce him to silence; and the names of Limousin and Duret, of Rosso and del Sarto, Cellini and Da Vinci, Primaticcio and Grolier rose familiarly to his lips. With Robin Stewart sour and Thady discreet behind him, he wandered happily though Castle Aubigny and, next day, through Stewart’s other beautiful house on the Nère, touching silverwork and embroidery, admiring paintings, savouring gem-bound books and tapestries, imported tiles and Milanese beds and Florentine marquetry, the frescoes and the grave, Italian marbles. The houses were large; the staffs—stewards, equerries, ladies-in-waiting to his wife, tutors and pages for his son, chambermaids, waiting women, priest, surgeon, butler, cook, gatekeepers and porters, baker, cobbler and baron-court sergeants of the wards—were immense.
Watching d’Aubigny, his big, firm hands turning over a piece of enamel, his cultured Scots-French voice expatiating on the Pénicauds, it was hard to imagine him in the field, his company of arquebusiers mounted behind him, the smell of horseflesh drowning the pomades. Yet he had fought; he had been in prison, if for political reasons only; he commanded a company. And judged by the unfairest standards, set against a scourging aesthetism bloodily acquired, his tastes were easy and his appreciation oddly slack.
He showed them, at La Verrerie, a Cellini saltcellar given him by the King. ‘Some years ago now, of course,’ said Lord d’Aubigny. ‘He has certain other continuing drains on his income. It isn’t easy for him to be as generous as he would like. Except in some quarters. Chenonceaux—have you seen Chenonceaux? Prettier than Anet, in my view. She’s hardly ever there. Thirteen thousand aubergines, she has in the garden; and nine thousand strawberry plants he sent her last year. It will be a pity if she spoils it. They like throwing money about. Have you seen Écouen and Chantilly? It’s a pity when the taste isn’t there. They talk a lot of the Queen—these pearls from Florence, the furniture she has there at Blois. Of course, Florence was at its height very recently. She married at thirteen, a cradle between two coffins—you won’t remember the phrase—and learned all she knows about a court under François au Grand Nez. And we know what that means.…’
Behind them, on their tours, sauntered the Douglases. Once, as Thady Boy leaned his idle weight on a table, a hand came down sharply and silently on his wrist, pinning