“I am aware,” she said, “that to most of you—to most of the people who fight for me and against me, and for and against the Protector—the royal line is a certificate of birth, and a circlet of metal; a pawn astray on her own board and more used to domination and a ruthless handling than the weakest of her subjects.
“To me, it is a little girl, fresh and warm, holding surprises and knowledge and happy years in her palms. When armed invaders come and men die and are captured and plot and betray, she is still a small girl, crying because she has wakened in the night.” Her eyes dropped for a moment to her hands and her lip trembled for a moment, and then became firm.
“By all your efforts this year you have kept the Scottish crown safe from capture—yes, of course. What I remember, I, is that you have won me a year of my daughter’s company.
“The last year, perhaps. She is safe. You, sir, with courage, kept the secret that allowed her ships to sail. Yesterday the wind moved from the south: autumn is coming, and a colder season perhaps than we have known yet. Yesterday my daughter set sail from Dumbarton: with Lord Livingstone and Lord Erskine, with her brother, with Fleming, Beaton, Seaton and Livingstone and Lady Fleming, she set sail for France, to live there and, in time, to marry the Dauphin.
“… Some will say, we should have admitted England, this importunate bridegroom; and kept unspilled blood and whole hearths for our dowry. I think not. I hope that we are choosing wisdom as well as pride, and a long peace as well as a quick harbour.”
“And England?” It was Lord Culter’s voice.
“The King of France has taken this kingdom in perpetual shelter. He will demand of England peace between our three nations; and that all enmity between England and Scotland should cease.”
Outside, dawn had come, pale and wind-torn, with stars set tardily in its brightness. In the yellow glare of the lights, Lymond’s gaze had turned to his brother. “So they lose, after all,” he said. “All the King’s knights. Lord Grey and Lord Wharton, Lennox and Somerset, Wilford and Dudley, Sir George Douglas, Angus and Drumlanrig. Such plotting and striving and discomfort and distress; so much gold spent; so many peoples moved across the face of Europe to confront us. It’s a sad thing to woo with cannon and to lose.”
Mary de Guise had her mind as well as her eyes bent on the intent, fair face below her. “I wonder, are you with me?” she said.
The guarded eyes lifted instantly. “Yes … I think so. There is a divine solution, but we are only human, and Scots at that. Which means we dote on every complexity.”
“And what award shall we give you,” said Mary de Guise gravely, “for all you have done for us? Apart from the unqualified love of my daughter?”
Lymond’s charming smile entered his blue eyes as he stood, experienced and passive, before her. “I have no other desires, and can imagine none.”
“No?” said the Queen Dowager, and rising, swept Francis Crawford out of the room, ignoring her statesmen stumbling in surprise to their feet; leaving Richard faintly smiling and Lauder cursing with determination. “No other desires? Au contraire. There are some that I shall expect to find out and one, assuredly, that I know,” said the Queen with decision; and opened a door.
In a lifetime of empty rooms, this was another.
Then there was a whisper of silk, a perfume half remembered, a humane, quizzical, intuitive presence; and a wild relief that deluged the tired and passionate mind.
Sybilla was there. She saw her son’s eyes, and flung open her arms.
Reader’s Guide
1. For discussion of The Game of Kings
The Game of Kings is the first of six books in the Lymond series based on the imagery of chess. Who would you say are the gamesters in this novel? Do the kings “play” the game or are they pieces in the game? Given the way suspense is created and information hidden, how is the novelist at some level engaged in a chess game with the reader?
2. The brothers Francis Crawford of Lymond and Richard Crawford of Culter appear to be rivals in every field: love, war, politics, family. Which scenes make you feel you’ve seen the heart of this relationship? Has Dorothy Dunnett managed to create in Richard a character with a fullness of his own, aside from his function as “foil” to Lymond? Is Richard as “romantic” a character as his brother? More romantic?
3. Lymond’s Spanish disguise at Hume Castle is only the most theatrical and public of the flamboyant hero’s many masquerades; what are some of the others? Besides the multiple political or military purposes, what do you think are some of the deeper psychological reasons for Lymond’s brilliance at, or even addiction to, “acting”?
4. Lymond likens sixteenth-century Scotland to a wren caught between crocodiles. How do the character and choices of Wat Scott of Buccleuch mirror, and affect, what’s happening in Scotland? What about Andrew Hunter of Ballaggan? Would you call Agnes Herries, later Maxwell, such a “wren”?
5. Perhaps the most poignant relationship in the novel is that between the protagonist, Lymond, and young Will Scott, the heir to the lordship of Buccleuch. What are some of the lessons Will must learn during his “apprenticeship” with Lymond?
6. Startlingly enough, in the course of this novel the glamorous and dangerous protagonist has no lovers and no sex, delivers only one kiss, and ends up in the embrace of his mother. What are some of the ironies here? What does the romantic triangle created between Richard Crawford, his wife Mariotta, and Francis Crawford seem to be saying about “romance”? About love?
7. Why does Lymond put himself in the hands of his enemies to redeem Christian Stewart, held hostage in England? How is this relationship, as Lymond says, “made possible” by her blindness? How does the blind girl help the reader more truly “see” Ly-mond?
8. The scene at the climax of the novel cuts back and forth between a legal hearing and a game of tarot cards—a game associated with the mystic, occult, and fateful. How do the contesting parties in the legal game and in the card game mirror one another? What might Dorothy Dunnett be suggesting by this pairing of the legal and the occult worlds?
9. A good popular novel should, arguably, have some strong villains: Who qualifies for this role in The Game of Kings? Is it easy to distinguish treason from patriotism—or patriotism from ego-ism—in the world of the novel?
Dorothy Dunnett was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. She is the author of the Francis Crawford of Lymond novels; the House of Niccolò novels; seven mysteries; King Hereafter, an epic novel about Macbeth; and the text of The Scottish Highlands, a book of photographs by David Paterson, on which she collaborated with her husband, Sir Alastair Dunnett. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth appointed her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Lady Dunnett died in 2001.
Books by Dorothy Dunnett
THE LYMOND CHRONICLES
The Game of Kings
Queens’ Play
The Disorderly Knights
Pawn in Frankincense
The Ringed Castle
Checkmate
King Hereafter
The Photogenic Soprano (Dolly and the Singing Bird)
Murder in the Round (Dolly and the Cookie Bird)
Match for a Murderer (Dolly and the Doctor Bird)
Murder in Focus (Dolly and the Starry Bird)
Dolly and the Nanny Bird
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise
Send a Fax to the Kasbah (Moroccan Traffic)
THE HOUSE OF NICCOLÒ
Niccolò Rising
The Spring of the Ram
Race of Scorpions
Scales of Gold
The Unicorn Hunt
To Lie with Lions
Caprice and Rondo
Gemini
The Scottish Highlands (with Alastair Dunnett)
The Dorothy Dunnett Companion Volume I (by Elspeth Morrison)
The Dorothy Dunnett Companion Volume II (by Elspeth Morrison)
THE LYMOND CHRONICLES
BY DOROTHY DUNNETT
“The finest living writer of
historical fiction.”
—The Washington Post Book World
THE GAME OF KINGS
Dorothy Dunnett introduces her irresistible hero Francis Crawford of Lymond, a nobleman of elastic morals and dangerous talents whose tongue is as sharp as his rapier. In 1547 Lymond returns to defend his native Scotland from the English, despite accusations of treason against him. Hunted by friend and enemy alike, he leads a company of outlaws in a desperate race to redeem his reputation.
Fiction/978-0-679-77743-4
QUEENS’ PLAY
Once an accused traitor, now a valued agent of Scottish diplomacy, Lymond is sent to France, where a very young Queen Mary Stuart is sorely in need of his protection. Disguised as a disreputable Irish scholar, Lymond insinuates himself into the glittering labyrinth of the French court, where every courtier is a conspirator and the art of assassination is paramount.
Fiction/978-0-679-77744-1
THE DISORDERLY KNIGHTS
Through machinations in England and abroad, Lymond is dispatched to Malta, to assist the Knights Hospitallers in the island’s defense against Turkish corsairs. But he shortly discovers that the greatest threat to the knights lies within their own ranks. In a narrative that sweeps from the besieged fortress of Tripoli to the steps of Edinburgh’s St. Giles Cathedral, Lymond matches wits and swords against an elusive villain.
Fiction/978-0-679-77745-8
PAWN IN FRANKINCENSE
Lymond cuts a desperate path across the Ottoman empire of Suleiman the Magnificent in search of a kidnapped child, an effort that may place this adventurer in the power of his enemies. What ensues is a subtle and savage chess game whose gambits include treachery, enslavement, and torture and whose final move compels Lymond to face the darkest ambiguities of his own nature.
Fiction/978-0-679-77746-5
THE RINGED CASTLE
Between Mary Tudor’s England and the Russia of Ivan the Terrible lies a vast distance indeed, but forces within the Tudor court impel Lymond to Muscovy, where he becomes advisor and general to the half-mad tsar. In this barbaric land, Lymond finds his gifts for intrigue and survival tested to the breaking point, yet these dangers are nothing beside those of England, where Lymond’s oldest enemies are conspiring against him.
Fiction/978-0-679-77747-2
CHECKMATE
Francis Crawford returns to France to lead an army against England. But even as the soldier-scholar succeeds brilliantly on the battlefield, his haunted past becomes a subject of intense interest to forces in both the French and English courts. For whoever knows the secret of Lymond’s parentage possesses the power to control him—or destroy him.
Fiction/978-0-679-77748-9
VINTAGE BOOKS
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, MAY 1997
Copyright © 1961 by Dorothy Dunnett
Copyright renewed 1989 by Dorothy Dunnett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1961 and subsequently in Great Britain by Cassell & Company Ltd., London, in 1962.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunnett, Dorothy.
The game of kings / Dorothy Dunnett. —1st Vintage Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76232-0
1. Scotland—History—Mary Stuart, 1542–1567—Fiction. I. Title. PR6054.U56G36 1997
823′.914—dc21 96-46867
Random House Web address: www.randomhouse.com/
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Dorothy Dunnett, The Game of Kings
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