Queens' Play (22 page)

Then they came to Neuvy. Mistress Boyle’s modest, pretty château
where they broke their journey that night was stretched to the jowls with relations and visitors and rocking these two days with the news that the great Cormac O’Connor himself was coming to stay with them. Francophiles and Anglophobes to a woman, the Boy les and the O’Dwyers would always worship a rebel. O’LiamRoe, ollave and servingman, stepping into the ferment, were welcomed with the bursting of kisses and passed a night there that never hinted at a pillow through midnight to dawn, so fierce were the arguments. Thady Boy shone; O’LiamRoe spoke fitfully. Oonagh was not at home. She had gone to Blois itself two days before, staying with a second cousin, to attend a function at Court.

Next morning, dressing, Thady Boy was unduly entertaining on the subject of O’LiamRoe’s reticence.

The Prince of Barrow, putting on his snubnosed boots, got up, stamped each foot with great care, and spoke with some deliberation to his ollave. ‘It would be a great saving for everyone, would it not, if you passed a little time on your own affairs, before you came interfering with mine.’

Shocked, Thady Boy looked round. ‘ ’Tis my affairs I am returning to Blois for, surely.’ And then, after a moment, added indulgently, ‘But to take heed to the luck of another, Prince of Barrow, ’Tis a true friend you are.’

‘I’m happy you think so,’ said O’LiamRoe dryly. Behind him, the eyes of his ollave were tenderly blank.

T
HEY returned to Blois to find the Court full of women. The King, together with Lord d’Aubigny and his officers, was boar-hunting at Chambord. To the ladies at home the arrival of Thady Boy, all pale acid and invention, was as welcome as the warty toad with his ruby.

Tired of walking in the frosty labyrinths and exchanging stale barbs round high fires of rosemary and juniper, tired of the tumblers, tired even of watching Tosh and Tosh’s donkey in their wooden harness skimming from steeple to steeple, they closed around him in clouds of patchouli, and peeled his brain like a walnut. O’LiamRoe found Oonagh at her friends’ house, riding, hawking, playing chess with her suitors, and attached himself, jocular and uncomplaining, to their number. He had bought her a new wolfhound. It was good, but not a Luadhas.

Just before the King returned, Queen Catherine invited O’LiamRoe to one of her afternoon entertainments. The offence of the tennis court, it was clear, had been nearly effaced by his ollave; soon the last ban might be lifted. He attended, pink, smiling, verbose. The tumult of luxury entertained him: the blasts of chypre from the birds, the hissing farthingales and Hainault lace, the net stockings and gem-stuck pumps, the headdresses starched and spangled and meshed and fluted, the plucked eyebrows and frizzled hair, the lynx, genet and Calabrian sable stinking in the wet, the gauzy cache-nez drawn over nose and chin in the gardens and referred to in the careless vulgarity of the mode as
coffins à roupies
. Thady Boy, absent on this occasion, translated after.

Afterwards, he was presented to the Scottish Dowager. The meeting took place in her own rooms, and only Lady Fleming and her
daughter Margaret attended. O’LiamRoe, who had been stubborn about changing his saffron for one of Thady Boy’s clever old women, was conscious, under the lightly detached calm, that she hadn’t even noticed the frieze cloak. The interview was formal and pleasant. At the end, with a suddenness which alarmed him, she thanked him in her firm, strongly measured English for creating and preserving the
alter ego
of Crawford of Lymond.

The Prince of Barrow had drawn a certain mild amusement from the idea of flouting authority. He had preferred to forget that if Lymond was the Queen Mother’s busy tool then so, to a certain degree, was he. As if guessing his thought, Mary of Guise said, ‘I am sorry he has proved a little … unorthodox.’

‘But, ma’am,’ said O’LiamRoe, touched on his dearest theory. ‘When a man draws the blood out of his heart and the marrow out of his bones to make an art, there’s little sense in bemoaning the frayed suit or the poor table or the angular manners. ’Tis the liberty of mind, and annulment of convention and a fine carefree richness of excesses itself sets the soul whirling and soaring.’

‘You’ve certainly hit on Thady Boy’s receipt,’ said Lady Fleming with asperity. ‘I should think his soul is whirling and soaring like a Garonne windmill. His habits are low enough.’

O’LiamRoe smiled, but the smile turned a little absent on his face. He had noticed a rag doll left asprawl on a cabinet, its linen split, its hair torn, its head limp. And in his stomach, smooth, clean, washed in wholesome juices and diligent as the churns in a dairy, something altered in beat.

Next day, the King came back. Archembault Abernaci stopped fussing with his cages in the outer reaches of the château gardens and retired to the town lodging he shared with his assistants, several bears and the saltimbanque Tosh. The donkey, foreseeing hard days ahead, brayed irritatingly from the castle terrace. Oonagh O’Dwyer, on her second last day in Blois, received her second last visit from O’Li mRoe. And the brothers of Bourbon and the other young gentlemen, released like puppies from the whalebone of Chambord, raced upstairs to Thady Boy.

By now, they expected something more than his music. He gave them freely an idea which had occurred to him at Neuvy and they embraced it instantly and fell to planning.

What he proposed was a race in pairs, from the cathedral hill to the castle, following a route determined by clues which some of the King’s Guards could lay. News of it spread uncommonly fast. By evening, with the Court settled to watch its after-supper wrestling, the Guard alone was seething with it; and Lord d’Aubigny, one of
the few men on duty with long experience of such things, was clearly suspicious of the general air of vivacity. An Archer was brought in with a broken leg, and the hilarity increased. The King had not been made aware of the project—a natural precaution in this sort of race. It was Thady Boy’s idea that they should run it at nightfall, over the housetops of Blois.

The evening wore on. The wrestlers ended. The Queen rose; the King retired; and half the French Court, with torchbearers, Archers, men-at-arms, servants and a few discreetly cloaked women, melted out of the château precincts and uphill to the highest region of Blois. At its head, along with the Marshal de St. André and the Colignys and the young Bourbons and the young de Guises and the musicians, trotted Thady Boy Ballagh explaining, to their polite applause, why he wished to break his journey halfway in order to deliver a serenade.

The Hôtel Moûtier in the Rue des Papegaults, with its turrets and dormers, its fountain and its orange trees, its courtyard paved with Venetian mosaic and its small-paned windows with the marble sills, was built high in one of the precipitous lanes which plunged downhill from the Cathedral on the far side of Blois. All the way up from the Carrefour St.-Michel the walled houses faced each other, leaning together so close over brick paving and worn steps that dormer breathed into dormer and the inlaid chimneys mingled their juniper-scented smoke. Sometimes a man of property might bridge the street with his own windowed gallery. Behind the moving shadows of the trees, gargoyles and griffins and painted cherubim flickered in the lantern light from the courtyards. Here the rich merchants lived, the town officers, and the great officers and their families from this Court and the last. Condé’s own house was nearby; and the de Guises lived further down the hill nearer the foot of the castle plateau.

Although thickly crowded, the Rue des Papegaults was not noisy. Late at night, horsemen were rare. The sound of the hooves would patter like sea spray off the brick paving and walls; three streets away a group of riders would sound like the muted rumble of a storm. But most people kept inside after dark, or walked with swords and torchbearers; and a party intending to launch a serenade or run a race, if they valued privacy, would travel on foot.

Hélie and Anne Moûtier were leaving Blois next day to winter in the south, as was their custom; and Oonagh O’Dwyer, accordingly, was on the point of returning to Neuvy and her aunt. All her suitors free of duty at Court had come to the Hôtel Moûtier for her last evening in Blois, together with a good number of the friends of her host and hostess. Among them was Phelim O’LiamRoe, proving
himself capable of a questionable branle and endless good-natured obstinacy.

By midnight the dancing was over, the wine had been drunk and the guests had departed. All except O’LiamRoe. Before the hissing, murmuring fire where Hélie sat, mouth open, hands clasped on unlaced doublet, fast asleep beside his young wife, O’LiamRoe stretched his mud-splashed shanks beside the brocade table and raised an eyebrow at Oonagh O’Dwyer, her black hair tumbled by the dance, who sat dreaming in a high chair. The firelight winked on the silver on the cloth at his elbow and touched on gilding and well-kept wooden panels, waxed against heat and smoke, and slid over the carving of the high chimney cope. Hélie Moûtier, even half-undressed looked what he was, a prosperous mercer; and Anne, now frankly asleep at his side, had her sleeves set with pearls.

O’LiamRoe turned. Oonagh, her head laid back in the deep velvet, was handsomely gowned too, but she wore it all like sea riches, prodigally and carelessly, leaving the rack to bring her fresh gifts tomorrow. The fire, merciless in its glare, printed two sleepless arcs in a face otherwise vacant of moulding. It was the first time since the Croix d’Or that he had ever had her undivided attention; and he spoke quietly, not to waken her cousins. ‘ ’Twas a queer thing, now, to come to France to pick a husband; and all the splendid Saxons and the susceptible Celts and the endless mixtures of the one and the other ye might come across in Ireland?’

In the revealing firelight a small muscle moved; but neither irritation nor animation showed in her voice, and she did not stir when she answered. ‘It is a better thing, surely, than sitting in a mud hut with salt herring and garlic and kale boiled in a soup bowl between your two knees? Why else are you here?’

‘My grief, for the change of company, surely,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Ever since our great lord Henry the Eighth of England and Ireland went to his account, it has been a thought crowded in the green fields, with the secret French emissaries, and the secret Scots emissaries and the secret Papal envoys, all anxious to lead the old country into the rare pathways of independence and light.’

Her head turned. ‘You have no truck, yourself, with independence?’

‘My own self?’ said O’LiamRoe, shocked. ‘No, no. Politics are for the politicals, and the sons of Liam are content with a castle and a spread of heather and the chance of a good talk over a dried cod in the Slieve Bloom—leavened, you understand, with the occasional gadding to neighbouring heaths.’

Her black brows drawn in thought, she turned from him to the fire and, her grey-green eyes on the flames, considered the phenomenon. ‘You are happy under the rule of English Viceroys and the Star
Chamber. It doesn’t disturb you to know that you can be sent to London and executed or imprisoned untried. The Scots occupy Ulster from the Giant’s Causeway to Belfast and James MacDonnell himself rules the Glens of Antrim beside ten thousand Hebridean Redshanks. You have no care. You are content with the garrisons and the debased coinage and the fact that no Parliament has sat in Ireland for seven years?’

There was a pause, broken by O’LiamRoe’s mild voice. ‘The last supreme King of Ireland,
mo chridhe
, was three and a half hundred years ago. And
rig-domna
I am not.’

The blood, rare under the white skin, suffused her face unexpectedly to the eyes. Hélie, sunk deeper in his chair, had begun to snore. Oonagh’s retort, across the rich table, was necessarily low. ‘You have no care for your country, none at all? I find it hard to believe.’

O’LiamRoe was gently reproving. ‘Ah, with all the great brains and fine lords fussing over it, what for should I add to the noise? Caritas generi humani I can understand; if you press me, I’ll lend it my passive support. But where would balance, where would detachment, where would proportion end up did no person stroll here and there outside the fence, and put his chin on the gate from time to time, to click his tongue?’ His tone was severe. ‘There’s no chance of inciting me, my dear. As the Pope said of Hippolito, “He’s crazy, the devil; he’s crazy. He doesn’t want to be a priest.” ’

He was unmistakably sincere. There was a blank interval, then she said accusingly, ‘Then why stay in France? It must surely be obvious—’

He broke in quickly. ‘It is obvious. But I have a plan to present you, between now and your wedding, with seven hounds with chains of silver and a golden apple between them—do I ever get them to you alive—so that when you race through the woods and fell your deer and see him undone and brittled there, you will bethink you of O’LiamRoe.’

The words were wry, but the tone, with whatever effort, was one of lightest amusement. Her mood opened to him suddenly, the white brow patterned with fine, dry lines which had not been there before, and her eyes searching his. ‘I have had dogs enough, O’LiamRoe; and lovers enough.’