Queens' Play (16 page)

‘It’s little I’d know,’ said Thady Boy, his eyes guilelessly clear. ‘I’ve not been at either end of this trade up till now.’

The austere voice softened. ‘Some people,’ said Stewart, ‘get carried away when the women behave yon way, and think their fortune’s made, and that from now on they’re something special. They don’t know French ladies. I’ve seen them turn in a night, and what they fancied before they’ll fling in the moat. You’d be as well to understand—’

‘I understand,’ said Thady Boy concisely, ‘that I have a headache. Come along.’

Lymond, as it happened, spoke the truth. Looking narrowly, Stewart launched the theme which was to dog Thady Boy, in tenor and soprano, for four stricken months. ‘Man, you’ll need to watch that! You’ll need to cut down the drinking! They’ll egg you on for sheer devilment and it can fairly strip your inside.… Did ye get those burns looked at?’

‘Yes. My tail is plaited like a Barbary ram. Do you want to see it? Mary Mother,
come on
.’

At the Croix d’Or, having shaken off the solicitous Stewart, Lymond arrived at last at the door of O’LiamRoe’s room and stepped inside, closing it quietly behind him. The silence, as the two men stared at one another, was fat with danger. Then a smile pulled at the corner of O’LiamRoe’s whiskered mouth and he gave tongue mellowly.

‘Busy child, if I read it right, there is the father and mother of all headaches on you which you surely deserve. Sit down. As you may have forgotten, in the long dereliction from your duty, I had better remind you that Phelim O’LiamRoe is the unnatural sort of fellow who has no need to be handled and who can even on occasion hold his tongue. I hear you are the finest lute player since Heremon. You can prove it to me tomorrow.’

’Thank God for that,’ said Lymond. He passed by, resting his hand for a moment on the other man’s shoulder, and dropped limply into a chair. In five minutes, he was asleep.

In the ten days still left in Rouen, they learned the rudiments of Court routine which would affect them both, willy-nilly, for four months. The King rose at dawn, held his levée, read his dispatches and talked them over with his Privy Council before ten o’clock Mass. Then the privileged traffic began: the secretaries and couriers and ambassadors and heralds and diplomats and soldiers and clergy with news and courtesies and gifts and complaints.

Routine reports came in: from the master masons on the King’s building work, or Madame Diane’s; from St. Germain about a valued bird fallen sick; a gentle reminder, routed through the Constable’s kind offices, that someone had been promised a present of wine, and someone’s butler had come for it; news of the children, with a painting. News of a death in Paris that left a benefice vacant; you could see by the new face lined up waiting who had already bought that titbit of news from the dying man’s doctor. Gossip about a new lawsuit in Toulouse, brought by an ambassador anxious to ingratiate himself; and you could tell by the needy face absent at supper who had borrowed enough money to go there and try to buy it.

Dinner was at noon. After it, the General Council might meet, but not now with the urgency of the days when France still had high hopes of Italy, and when, triumphant over England, they were engaged in tweaking Boulogne from her tail. Not that the prospects for next year were particularly serene, in spite of the nominal peace with England’s little King; the new Pope and the Emperor Charles, France’s traditional Hapsburg enemy, were too friendly for that.

At the beginning of his reign and his freedom, Henri had found it intoxicating to fondle his favourites. Diane, the Constable, St. André, d’Aubigny and the rest had half-emptied the treasury among them. But the proper exercise of the King’s divine power, obviously, was to encourage upheavals in Germany. By linking arms with Protestant and pagan—German princeling and Turkish infidel—he might defeat Charles. Unfortunately, the money was lacking. All the General Council could propose was prevarication—prevaricate with his dear sister Scotland; hold off his eager Irish friends; and make a cool social gesture or two in the direction of England, herself split in two with the old story, the struggle for baronial power during small Edward’s minority.

Henri of France could prevaricate without even thinking. He attended the Queen’s evening parties, gave large suppers, spent what time he could, which was quite a lot, with Diane; and in rare moments of privacy could be heard practising his lute. The rest of the waking hours, for these ten days at Rouen, were filled with ceremony.

The capital of Normandy, perfectly capable of turning down flat a Grand Sénéchal wanting an Entry on the eve of vacation, was prone by the same token to extract the last ounce from a really royal occasion, once they had set their minds to it; particularly with Lyons to outshine. There was the State Entry of Queen Catherine; the speech-girt presentation of vase and saltcellar and other tabernacle-like trifles; the solemn dinner and the lugubrious farce by one of the two Rouen burlesque societies, torn between pride and a natural anxiety to do with the disappointed company.

There was a solemn procession to the Palace to hear a case on the King’s Bed of Justice which gave Brusquet his only real chance of the visit. After a morning of well-rehearsed speeches by the advocates and the King’s procureur-general—
‘Levez-vous: le roi l’entend’
—and an equally well-rehearsed judgment thick with classical and flattering allusions, a private burlesque of the whole thing was performed extempore by the King’s fool in the empty chamber for the benefit of the royal ladies in their box.

They laughed, but not quite enough. The King changed his clothes, made appearances diligently, patiently and with charm, and entertained himself and his Court in privacy with the music of Thady
Boy Ballagh, his breath sweet as a rose chafer and his lyrics strenuously unexceptionable. Thady Boy was working quite hard.

O’LiamRoe was amused. As rumours of the long evenings of romances eruditos and romances artísticos reached him, he was heard on occasion to express a left-handed pride that the sweetest finger that ever slid upon a fingerboard here should be Irish. At length the King left to make his State Entry to Dieppe, and then, by Fécamp and Havre, back to the River Seine for the water journey south.

Five Kings had wintered on the shores of the Loire, as it flowed wide and sandy through central France from Orléans to the Atlantic with castle and palace, town and village and vineyard, mill and fishery and hunting lodge on its mild chalky banks. For twelve hundred years pilgrims had gone by river and river bank to Tours, one of the holiest shrines in Europe after Rome; and the Gallo-Romans had built their villas there, and the Plantagenets for a while had made it English until their overthrow, when a grateful France had replaced them with Scots.

But it was a long time since a Douglas had ruled in Touraine. The Kings of France had developed a taste for the country and made it their centre. They governed from Blois and Amboise and Plessis and came back there from their wars to plant their booty and rear their children and try out their notions of modern building. The Chancellors, the Treasurers, the Admirals and the Constables built their houses there too; park and chase and garden were laid out; and even when, latterly, Henri’s father had turned aside to use Paris and Fontainebleau more and more, the well-worn journey was still made: Rouen, Mantes, St. Germain, Fontainebleau, Corbeil and Melun; overland to Gien like a migration of guinea fowl, cart, mule, horse and litter, the packs of servants and gentlemen, the endless baggage train, the men at arms, the filles publiques whose prescience about morning moves was both marked and relied upon.

And from Gien, through Châteauneuf, Orléans, Amboise, Blois, the barges floated them home. Pleasant, equable, healthy and full of red deer, the valley of the Loire was a place where many an unwanted embassy had grazed its knees and barked its knuckles and gone home unhappily neither satisfied nor affronted. The Court of France was going there to spend Christmas.

It started off, but amoeba-like, before it arrived its one cell had split into two. Louis, the King’s two-year-old son, died at Mantes. The royal household and the officials involved stayed or returned. The staff, the grooms and the younger element of the Court, among whom was the Irish party, continued to St. Germain-en-Laye.

As guide and conductor, vice Lord d’Aubigny, of Phelim O’LiamRoe’s trio, Robin Stewart had sensed, long before then, that the mignons were out for Thady Boy’s blood. O’LiamRoe as a garrulous
and discredited foreigner they ignored. But Condé and de Genstan and St. André and d’Enghien, with their friends, had taken cool note of undue diligence among the monarchs. Stewart, who had discovered Thady Boy before anybody, watched sardonically as d’Enghien, young, witty, ambitious, lightly unfaithful even to the fortunate succession of friends who maintained him, decided calmly to teach his prize a small lesson. Thady Boy Ballagh was to be given, rumour affably reported, a good bob with the bag.

The bag was the quintain, a wooden Saracen on a post, to be charged on horseback and hit three times with a lance. A poor hit, because of its pivoting arrangements, gave the rider a crippling clout on the ear. It was a popular spectator sport.

How Thady Boy was brought to compete, Stewart never knew. But on a mild grey afternoon in October The O’LiamRoe and the Archer and every idle sophisticate on the premises turned their backs on the newly renovated castle of St. Germain, on its wide terraces above the flat panorama of the Seine, and strolled off to the tilting ground to see the courses.

Far from being technical, the talk in Stewart’s vicinity was largely about someone’s new boots, straying lightly now and then into the recent boudoir history of the combatants. But whatever they sounded like, they were soldiers judging soldiers. There was some wit on the changes which other times and other alliances had brought to the quintain itself: instead of the Turk there hung a crude painted barrel with eyes, nose, chin and a string midriff to mark the points of high scoring.

It rocked slightly in the light wind, causing a moment’s alarm to those in the plot, who had gone to a great deal of trouble to struggle it off and fill it up to the brim with cold water.

And of course, the first rider selected by blind fate to try his three stabs at the wood was Thady Boy Ballagh, hatless and gently fuddled on what appeared to be the highest peak of a very tall horse.

There were a hundred paces of a run up to the barrier. At the far end the barrel gaudily swayed; the circle of judges and spectators was suspiciously wide. Thady Boy stuck his heels into the tall horse; along the fence the hoofbeats redoubled; beyond the fence the stout post with its burden lay in wait.

The squat, black figure reached it, raised its lance, aimed and thrust. So far from scoring, the mark was not even over the belt. The lance nocked into the wood, with a thud which could be heard, and came out fast as Thady Boy ducked to dodge the swing of the pivot. A great and derisive cheer rose into the clear air of the St. Germain plateau, and Jean de Bourbon, sieur d’Enghien, flushed. No icy douche had soaked Thady Boy from the gash. The barrel, inexplicably, was dry.

Three times Thady Boy Ballagh ran the prescribed course, and the mignons applauded the cheerful constancy of his incompetence and rallied Condé and his brother in the same merciless breath on the collapse of their scheme. Since no other entertainment offered, the tilt continued. D’Enghien himself trotted up as Thady Boy came back, and spurred into the first course.

Slender and dark, with his pretty lashes and red, Bourbon lips, the sieur d’Enghien was an expert jouster. The lance, aimed true and straight, transfixed the very nose on the staves. There was a thud, a hiss, a light puff of steam, and from the stab in the wood a trembling arc of hot water started to play on the noble rider below.

They made him run the three prescribed courses before cutting down and examining the barrel. It had been floored midway and top-filled from a copper; Thady Boy, he remembered, had aimed consistently low.

Music, seeping out from the lounging throng of his friends, told Jean de Bourbon where to find his ingenious prize. His fur weeping, his boots full of water, d’Enghien for a moment looked like sinking his teeth, like the Archbishop of Pisa, in his neighbour. On second thoughts he bent, arm on elegant knee, and said, ‘For that, my dear, I shall want my revenge.’

Thady Boy looked up. Garlanded with young men, he sat squat on the grass, boots crossed, expression pure as a halcyon hatching an egg. ‘
¿Con que la lavaré, La tez de la mi cara
…?’ he sang, and smiled at the unfolded hair and the sleek, wet painted face. ‘… That depends on the sport.’

They all stayed five days at St. Germain, and St. Germain would as soon have suffered a plague. From the quintain they passed to rovers, played with hackbuts until someone’s page came out at dusk to complain of the noise. They reverted, all contrition, to their bows and resumed silently at dawn, with whistles tied to their barbs. The graveyard screech that unfurled every sleeper was a deathless victory for Thady Boy.