Queens' Play

  And that was over. Northampton, withdrawing without ever having advanced, asked for and was granted the hand of the Princess Elizabeth, Henri’s daughter of six, for his junior King. Provided a suitable dowry could be agreed.

  The matter was at length finished. The compact of mutual alliance and defence was virtually sealed. And here in the privacy of his chamber was his Constable, producing witness after witness and argument after argument to demand that Stewart of Aubigny should be put under arrest.

  The accusation was true. Even the wronged boy of the Spanish prisons could understand that; its very obstinacy in being blatantly true blinded him with rage. However the Constable gentled him, however calmly Catherine reasoned, the hurt pride was there. Stewart loved him.… Had loved him, once.

  ‘You have appropriated Scotland today for your son,’ said the Constable painstakingly. ‘To keep by your side Mary’s murderer would be an insult no nation would bear.’

  ‘Let her leave, the Queen Dowager, if she does not like it. Let her take her begging train back to Scotland.’

  ‘Insult her people?’ asked the Constable.

  ‘Insult her family?’ said Catherine’s collected voice.

  ‘Then,’ said the Constable thoughtfully, ‘there is the charming M. Thady. He will wish satisfaction, and no doubt will expect a reward. My men are daily discovering interesting news of M. Crawford of Lymond. You know he owns the manor of Sevigny?’

  ‘He is my dear sister the Queen’s,’ said Henri.

  Catherine smoothed her fine dress with small, thickly ringed hands, and pursed her big mouth. ‘My guess is—not yet,’ she remarked.

  There was a little silence. ‘Then we shall make of Sevigny a comté,’ said the King; and Catherine, smiling, played with her jewels. ‘It is in my mind also to give his lordship of Aubigny work for his company of lances to do, on the frontiers.’

  The Constable shifted his elderly bulk. ‘Yes. But he must be shown, Monseigneur … It must be publicly understood that …’

  ‘As you know,’ said Henri abruptly, ‘we have placed a ban on duelling in this kingdom. A ban not as perfectly kept as I should like.… It does not apply, of course, to sport in the tilting ground, with blunted steel. Before supper, we had planned a display of this kind. It shall be held in place of the water pageant. Advise Lord d’Aubigny and M.… M. de Sevigny that they will be permitted to relieve any hard feelings between them harmlessly in this fashion … and that Lord d’Aubigny, since he, I understand, received the first blow this afternoon, is in the position of challenger.’

  Silently the grizzled face of the Constable turned to the Queen and silently, without lifting her eyes from her lap, Caterina Maria Romola smiled acknowledgment.

  The Constable would take the news to Francis Crawford, Comte de Sevigny; the Constable, not Diane nor the de Guises, would report the King’s wisdom and clemency.

  A new star was being born. Not a star of Lorraine, or of Stewart, or Douglas; and she and the Constable were its sponsors. She looked on her husband’s black head, and in the shallow, prominent eyes was love.

  The hot, brilliant day was sinking at last. In Châteaubriant, the lights sprang small and pale; in the castles, new and old, there were more; and a beading of lamps lined the walks. In the parks, the lake shone like a scale from the sky, buttoned with unwanted boats, black sitting on black without motion. Next the water, the great stand was unlit and silent, gazing emptily at the moving lights from the menagerie, where the small, clear jungle sounds, the chink of chains, the easy phrase of command, dwindled in the still air.

  But between the lake and the châteaux, an arena sprang to the eye. The tiltyard, twenty-four yards long and forty wide, was garlanded with lights. Pale as new stars under the rosy sky they wreathed without illumining the great rectangle: the long, flower-packed stands for the Court; the tents to right and left for the champions; the striped silk raised like panniers to display the gilt stools; the gilded towers at the four corners for the pursuivants-at-arms.

  Rose and pewter, flat as puppets under the great, dwindling sky, the audience bobbed and gestured and swarmed under the dark eaves, their splendours drained to grisaille; grey and grey among the small lights. Flatly the morions shone, pearly in the dead light; the silver trumpets, greyly flagged, were grey as water. Into all the riches of tissue and gems, into the silver brocade of the Archers edging the stand, into the bullion of the canopy, the cloth of gold on the champions’ table, the armoured squires in the lists, sank the thin, pellucid light, levelling as ashes, ancient as the dry air from some staring rock.

  Then the long day exhaled its last, and blue, liquid night rushed in. Then the clusters of lights shone golden as fruit, and the diamonds blazed. Then in the bed of each light, colour—living, vibrant—was suddenly reborn; then the warm, painted faces nodded and laughed; then the drums beat and rolled. Lovely night had come; and the lists were open.

  They opened gallantly, gay as France could make it gay. The laughing companies came and went in their plumes and bright skirted armour: the side of youth, flamboyant, vicious against the side of riches; the side of the Bretons against the teams of the Loire. They shot at an inch board under the flaring torches and tilted at the ring in their ballroom dress, with diamond rings in their ears. Black-bearded, smiling, the King watched from his tribunal in the middle, the English Commission on his right.

  Since the royal summons directly after their return, O’LiamRoe had not laid eyes on Lymond. The story he heard was the story put about all the Court: that after some unfortunate breach of conduct, Lord d’Aubigny and Mr. Crawford were to settle their differences formally in the arena, for the sport of the King. The charges of theft and treachery laid against Mr. Crawford, it was understood, had been dismissed.

  That being so, it seemed a queer way of congratulating the quick-witted swimmer of the morning. It was, perhaps, more in the way of a last, sour riposte to the memory of Thady Boy. So thought The O’LiamRoe, sitting cautiously where he was placed, alarmingly near the lockjaw splendour of the Ambassage Extraordinary. Queen Catherine, to the left of the King, caught O’LiamRoe’s wandering blue eye with a flutter of her fan, and smiled. The Prince of Barrow, amazed, produced a bow. He at any rate, it seemed, had entered the fairy circle.

  The Queen Dowager’s ceremonial thanks he had already, for the second time, received. Faith, thought O’LiamRoe. And not a decent creature among them thought to say that the only rule in it is for a man to have a fine, steady seat for an elephant.

  Lennox sat stiffly, blond head facing front, sagging mouth pursed; looking neither to Warwick’s fool Northampton nor to the Scottish seats, where Sir George’s smooth face was turned, feasting on subtle discomforts.

  The voice in Lennox’s ears was not that of his brother; it was the voice of Robin Stewart, an unknown Archer now, pray God, dead, who had bleated to Warwick. Who had told Warwick that they could easily enter Scotland, having at their hand Lennox, nearest the crown after the Queen.

  But Warwick had settled for alliance with France. And he and Margaret had saved their necks—if they had saved their necks—at brother John’s expense. He hated them both: John Stewart, who had put him in this ludicrous quandary; and Lymond, of course, Lymond, But if the fight had been real, he would have wished his brother first dead.

  The jousting was over, with all the buttoned lances; the foot matches with vizors open, with blunted lances and swords, had ended too. Pages were running; horses trotted off, tassels swaying; sheared plumes were recovered, sand reswept.

  Music replaced the trumpets for the space of the interval, and there was a tumble of dwarfs. Brusquet, a little wary, not now so carefree as of old, was among them.

  ‘Well, my dear,’ said Sir George Douglas to Margaret Erskine at his side, ‘this, I believe, is when the holy relics at St. Denis are usually taken down and exposed, by all right-minded people, against fiends, bogles and your friend Mr. Crawford. The fatal cartels have been exchanged by heralds, I hear, no less. A
nd his Most Christian Majesty in his desire to look all ways at once, has forgotten the most vital thing of all, which is—’

  ‘What?’ Pushed into this extended strain, angry and worried, as she had been angry and worried for eight months about her wild, wayward protégé, on top of the shattering relief of knowing that at last Mary was safe, Margaret Erskine had begun to feel above all else the need to get out of France; to fly back to her own cool, green country, her baby, and the gentle, loving steadfastness of Tom.

  She had sat by the hearth, as she had promised, but the other promise she had made to Lymond she had never meant to keep. He was afraid of his power; he had had to learn to live with its effects. Three people had suffered by his presence in France, and she had done nothing to help them or him, for the strength to sustain this burden was the very backbone of leadership, and he had to acquire it.

  She knew now, from O’LiamRoe, how Lymond had been forced to face this issue at length. She knew, too, that other barriers had gone. He was free at last of all constraint with herself; and free too of Sybilla his mother, whose wits were as sharp as his own, and whose company he had precipitately left because it was so congenial and safe. Thinking of something else O’LiamRoe had once said, she had asked Francis Crawford that afternoon, ‘And now will you marry?’

  He had looked startled, and then amused. ‘And whom do you suggest?’

  ‘Is there no one?’ she had said.

  ‘A name has been put forward,’ he had answered, looking even more entertained. ‘If I could remember what it was.’

  She did not know what he meant; she did know that he was not interested. At her expression, evidently, he had laughed aloud then. ‘Better to be whipped than humoured; better to be crushed than cherished.… It was a woman told me that. I live in a world of men, my dear,’ Lymond had said. ‘I love you all, but I shall never marry you.’

  And so, looking up at Sir George, Margaret Erskine snapped. ‘He has forgotten what?’

  ‘My dear, never underestimate a Stewart. He has forgotten that my dear Lord of Aubigny can prescribe the choice of weapon. As defender, Lymond has got to supply every piece of armour, every weapon, every item of horseflesh that his lordship conceives he might need to fight with. And if I know d’Aubigny, his requirements will be so large and so elaborate and so inordinately, impossibly expensive that Lymond will be able to do nothing but ingloriously retire. Sad,’ said Sir George cheerfully, ‘but as Periander and your friend Francis also once said, “Forethought in all things.…” ’

  ‘When is he coming?’ said Mary, Queen of Scots. ‘And will he have the black hair again?’

  ‘How did.… No,’ said Mary of Guise, a little helplessly. ‘M. Crawford has no black hair now. You must watch.’

  The dwarfs had gone. ‘Will they kill each other?’ asked Mary.

  ‘No. Naturally. This is mock fighting only, my child. Be quiet,’ added her mother.

  There was a brief silence. Then—’Do they fight for a lady?’ the girl demanded.

  The impatient reply did not leave Mary of Guise’s lips. She hesitated, looking down. ‘In truth, no. But if you wish it, one of them might wear your gauge. Do you wish it?’

  ‘Oh, mon dieu yes!’ said Mary, carried slightly further than she intended, her hazel eyes enormous. ‘A scarf! Maman, I have no—’

  ‘Tais-toi. Your glove. Madame Erskine, procure me a large pin,’ said the Queen Dowager of Scotland. ‘I have yet to meet a man who can lay hands on a pin when there is need for it.’

  The banners came first, as the trumpets proclaimed them down the lists to the royal tribune: Stewart of Aubigny and Crawford of Lymond, never before side by side.

  And after them, the double line of servants: d’Aubigny’s lances, steadily marching in the Stewart livery, halberds precisely angled, glittering in the streaming light; and Lymond’s retinue, in new colours, in dress which Margaret Erskine found vaguely familiar and which Lord Northampton wakened up slightly to admire. They reached the table and there divided, so that the two protagonists stood revealed, walking steadily forward to the King.

  John Stewart of Aubigny, on trial as he knew before his enemies, succoured as he believed by the clemency of his King, stood before him in all the riches of his heritage and estate. Below his justaucorps his shirt was embroidered and re-embroidered with gold; his dress of satin was sewn an inch thick with oystered pearls, and diamond-fire leaped on his shoes.

  Beside him, Lymond had the desperate expression which more spectators than he knew in that audience recognized as a devastating impulse to laugh. With d’Aubigny’s imperial grandeur he had simply not troubled to compete; either that, or had shrieked down all efforts to compel him.

  He had no need. Lymond wore black silk, the shirt edge at neck and cuffs snowy white, and a twelve-thousand-ducat diamond on his shoulder, pinning a little girl’s glove. On the glove, specific in the dazzle, the crown of Scotland was plainly embroidered. They bowed, the heralds stepped forward with the Master of the Lists, and the ceremony was under way.

  Lymond lifted his eyes. All over the stand were faces he knew: the Dowager and her lords, who had so busily courted him at Candé; the child—he smiled and bowed, hand elaborately on heart; Margaret, the quiet, deep woman who was older now than her own mother ever would be; George Douglas, whom France had treated kindly, and who might not find Scotland so kind.

  The Lennoxes, Margaret blanched in the light, staring at him; he bowed lightly to her too. Diane, enemy of the Constable and of Jenny Fleming, who had not unbent. The de Guises, who had freed him—how Mary of Guise had laid her subtle stress on that point—but who had lost the diplomatic threads, in the end, to another faction.

  The allies and good companions: O’LiamRoe, grinning sardonically, his new-grown whiskers gold in the lamps; Michel Hérisson, squashed in a corner, shouting something and being silenced by a Guard; and lurking among the performers, the flags, the tents, the stands of armour, the rare crooked smile of Abernaci and the shameless stare of Tosh.

  Inescapable in the herald’s strong, trained voice, his extraordinary title. Francis Crawford of Lymond, Comte de Sevigny. No longer Master of Culter as he had always been.… Well, that was an old story now. Mary of Guise, too, had heard. He had accepted from Henri the title he would not have from her; and that only for his brother’s sake, she had guessed. His loyalty, if loyalty he had, was given to the lions, not to the Crown. He would not join, he had said politely, handsomely and finally, as a satellite of divinity, even for sweet Mary’s sake.

  He had said a great deal else that afternoon, and so had she. She had been so sure. It was true, she had hoped for his craft and strength only; she had refused him, out of very fear for her own eminence and her own policies, any exercise of his other abilities.

  Thirteen years before, she had been married by proxy here on the Loire at Châteaudun to the King of Scotland, and for thirteen years had made Scotland her home. Châteaudun had not changed; but coming back, long-widowed, hungry for troops, for money, for power to fashion and maintain an undisputed and orderly throne for the grandson who one day, surely, would reign over Ireland, Scotland and France, she had found that in thirteen years France had altered.

  With her eyes on the riches of Italy, and with her old enemy England weak and busy with internal struggles for power, France was no longer so tender towards Ireland or towards Scotland itself. France would have been content, she found, to have her abandon her self-imposed, stormy exile and stay with her child, while a Frenchman governed in Edinburgh in her place and Frenchmen remained inexpensively garrisoning the country’s best forts, without pouring gold and promises, as she was doing, into the pockets of her Scottish nobles to buy their allegiance for their Queen.

  Her brothers opposed that; but her brothers’ power, though great, was not unlimited. The King was obstinate; there were times when neither the Duke nor the Constable, when not Diane herself, could move him. She had been right, whatever happened, to take her own measures, in secre
t, to safeguard Mary; there had been no one in this, her own country, to whom she could give absolute trust.

  And few enough in Scotland. The Erskines: plain, honest, undemanding—she did not need to be told what she owed to her Chief Privy Councillor and Special Ambassador. Ten days ago at the kirk of Norham in England her well-beloved Thomas, Master of Erskine, with Lord Maxwell and the Bishop of Orkney and the French emissary de Lansac, had concluded a peace treaty between Scotland and England with the Bishop of Norwich and Sir Robert Bowes. In it, England contracted to give up the southern fortresses and her Tweed fishings within Scotland; had engaged that the debatable land in the west marches between the two nations should be neutral as before; and had agreed to release without ransom the hostages lying in English prisons since the fateful battle of Solway Moss nearly ten years before. Erskine, writing wryly, had quoted the English preamble. Though England, by conquest might justly claim enlargement of its own limits; yet the King agrees to a friendly and indifferent view of the old, true bounds; and that these should be the same as before the late wars.’ Thus England in four years had shrunk.

  But at the same time, England had become the refuge of the new religion, and a greater temptation to her own unsettled nobles—for intriguers like Balnaves, for so long a prisoner in Rouen himself; for Kirkcaldy of Grange, whom she knew to be in France, earning English pay. Douglas’s allegiance she had, temporarily at least. Maxwell, though discomfited, was at the moment hers. Lord Chancellor Huntly was staunchly Catholic and a present support, but his ambitions were great. The Governor had been soothed with a dukedom, and a post for his young heir in France, but it would be hard to reconcile him, she knew, to abandoning his title to her.

  The Earls of Glencairn and Drumlanrig were both of uncertain loyalty, and both had been displeased with their stay in France. Cassillis also was unhappy with his rewards, but might have enough to do, together with Maxwell and Huntly and the Douglases, in settling their own long-standing feuds at home. Livingstone, the stalwart guardian of her daughter, had died in France. Lord Erskine, her other guardian, was ill. Her husband’s bastard sons, growing up, were restless already.… If Edward of England died, his successor would be the Catholic Mary Tudor, and her nobles could look for no sympathy there. On the other hand, Mary Tudor had the Emperor her cousin’s support, and England might well be forced to break her new friendship with France, thus cutting off Scotland again. And the Lennoxes, Catholic, royal, and potential usurpers, were Mary Tudor’s dear friends.