Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett

Author:Dorothy Dunnett
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307762375
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2011-10-12T10:00:00+00:00

As always now, the reaction was almost more than he could bear. It took a major effort of will, after the messenger had gone and he had dispatched his brother’s two abashed nursemaids, to return to the inn for the drink which would smother it and let him go on. When he got there, braced for the buffeting jocularity which would greet his return, Francis Crawford found a fresh idea had already caught fire.

St. André had challenged the Prince of Condé, who led the Aztecs against the Turks, to swim his team from the Isle d’Or to Amboise: a challenge which, if you knew the currents under that smooth river, added an intriguing new chapter to the story of the key and the Marshal de St. Andre’s wife.

To this, Lord d’Aubigny, leader for the day, had added refinements. The route was to be reversed. Mexicans and Turks, heralded by a nearly sober young captain with curling hair, would seek admission to the King’s castle of Amboise, would foregather at the top of the Tour des Minimes, and racing down the spiral carriage ramp for which the Tower was famous, would debouch over the drawbridge on to the shore and across the near arm of the river to finish midstream at the Isle d’Or, where they now were.

The nearly sober young captain, who had to ingratiate himself with the Queen Dowager and the King’s commander, had gone; and to keep him nearly sober, an Archer called André Spens had gone with him.

In due course the rest of the grotesque party followed too, howling, over the second bridge, Thady Boy in the thick of them. He was not, by then, thinking very clearly, part of his mind being distantly occupied with analysing the significance of what he had just learned. Another part, philosophically, recognized that the crisis he had been waiting for was probably on him, and that he had sent his brother’s men home. The rest of him did not care; for by then he was blessedly, exceedingly drunk.

He retrieved the mask from Lord d’Aubigny who seemed, with reason, to have lost his fancy for it, and tried and failed to order his vagrant senses as they rode up the incline from the bridge and through the Lion Gate into the castle.

By then, the mist had risen higher, glooming off the dark river like pillowed figures. Mattresses of fog lay round the castle and behind them the lanterns showed faded, with cannibal rainbows, hazy and parched, all around them. Below, the river stirred, black and sluggish in the raw night air.

But no one crossed the Loire swimming that night. The tragedy happened in the castle itself, where all the Scottish Court gathered under the great awning outside the King’s lodging to watch the cavorting, careless delinquents of the King of France’s train.

The two processional towers of Amboise, up which carts and gun carriages could crawl, climbing the steep, cobbled slope, winding round and round a newel post itself nearly thirty feet wide, could take four horsemen abreast on its slopes.

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