Queens' Play (28 page)

Tosh, filling it, laughed. ‘If you believe Abernaci, there’s hardly room on him for a fresh-made scar anyway. You’ve seen his hands. And the galleys fairly made a show of his back.’

Robin Stewart sat still, his hands on his knees, his feet planted apart on the littered floor. After a pause he said, ‘I never heard he was on the galleys.’

‘I don’t suppose he’d go about describing it,’ said Tosh with
passing irony. ‘But he’s got the brand on him. The cowardie saw it at Rouen, for one.’ He glanced at Stewart’s frowning face and grinned. ‘A queer customer, Thady Boy Ballagh. But aren’t we all? You’ll need to get him into a rowboat and see if he’ll show you his paces.’ He finished packing the balm jar in linen and turning, studied the Archer, lost in meditation. ‘It’s likely no secret. The fancy bitches up yonder’d find it thrilling, I shouldn’t wonder.’

He had no need to put Thady Boy in a rowing boat. Crisp in Stewart’s ears rang that decisive ‘
On va faire voile
’ which had commanded the struggling half-wreck of
La Sauvée
four months ago. He said, making his voice pleasant, ‘What else do you know about our Irish friend?’

But Tosh had only met the ollave through Abernaci, and told Stewart nothing else that was new. From the litter on the floor, the Archer selected an old, used woodblock and fiddled with it. He had assumed that Thady Boy’s history was all his, as well as his friendship. The ollave had been far from overflowing with his confidences, as The O’LiamRoe was, but he had not been reticent. And this violent and blighting episode in his life, for so it must have been, had not been entrusted to Stewart.

The Archer, stirring from his insubstantial dream of mutual confidence, waited for the familiar plucking of pain at his guts. Tosh was still talking when Stewart got up and, taking his leave a good deal more abruptly than was polite, strode off, forgetting his ointment.

When he went back for it later he found, to his relief, that the blunt little Aberdonian was out.

The Archer’s first impulse had been to go up and have it out with the ollave. Instead, he went directly to Lord d’Aubigny and presently got himself a mission which took him away from Blois for the six days before he was due to leave with George Paris for Ireland. A message, bald in the extreme, was sent to Thady Boy announcing the date and time of his departure.

Puzzlement, as he read it, showed briefly through the disordered rubbish-heap of Thady Boy’s face. Then he brushed it aside, and swept into the bizarre and engrossing activity of the moment.

Then, at last, O’LiamRoe was on his way back to Blois.

He had his last ride with Oonagh the day before, jogging out through the park at Neuvy, the new wolfhound loping at their side. It was one of the few times they had been alone together since the unfortunate night of the serendade, when O’LiamRoe had appeared, dogged and apologetic, his arm streaming blood on the Moûtiers’ threshold. Now they trotted, shoulder to shoulder, finding silent pleasure in the stinging air, the thin woods worn dry and silver with
wind and ice, the spent grass rustling at their knees. Soon they reached open ground and the horses pulled unchecked into a canter, and then a gallop, racing neck and neck, his frieze billowing alongside her black hair and her furs.

Side by side they jumped ditches and followed dykes, and fled at last down a dry-tussocked hillside full in the yellow sun, leaving their breath white behind them, the blood whipped bright under the skin. Then, at the edge of another copse, they drew rein in pity for the sweating horses, and he walked them and then hobbled them while Oonagh flung herself among the bracken and the thin, dead spokes of bush and branch and bough which nested the ground.

There was a flask at his saddlebow. Kneeling, he offered it and she drank deeply, like a man. When he had drunk and laid it by, he came back and, finding a boulder at her side, leaned on it looking down at her. Throughout the morning, against the whole grain of his being, he had hardly spoken. Now it was she who broke the silence, her green eyes watching him. ‘I have news for you, O’LiamRoe. Your ollave is leaving you.’

‘Is he now?’ He waited. They had never discussed Thady Boy, or spoken of the serenade.

‘I heard today. Robin Stewart leaves for Ireland on Friday, and has threatened, it seems, to take Ballagh with him. The attachment I gather, is a little one-sided, so you may preserve your suite intact yet. On the other hand, Thady Boy may simply be waiting to persuade you to go, too.’

‘He would sooner help to ship me off, I am sure, and stay on here for ever, indulging himself. Has he wearied so soon? The life must all have run out of him with his songs.’

‘Or maybe he has a sense of responsibility?’ suggested the black-haired woman. ‘Ah now, but I forgot. You believe there is no such thing at all. Only a fool’s craving for power, the dream of the officious, the corruption of the mediocre. There is no natural leader alive who should not have this throat slit directly he has led.’

‘You have a bully of a memory,’ O’LiamRoe agreed peacefully. ‘I never knew a being on two legs yet that got a pennyworth of power and so much as treated his hound-dog the same. Or his women.’

She almost did not answer; but she could not quite keep her temper from showing. ‘Men have taken up that particular burden who would give their souls to be able to shed it.’

O’LiamRoe’s retort was mild and sunny and disbelieving. ‘Who? Who has there ever been? Do you know such a one?’

The wild colour had come up under her skin; couched in it, her two eyes looked like clear, green-grey water. She said, ‘You cut Luadhas’s throat for the sake of a Queen who is no more than a senseless baby, and a foreigner at that. Are your own people worth less to you?’

His head cocked, he was revolving on his knees his broad, helpless pink thumbs. ‘Now that you mention it, I had never thought of the King of England’s sheriffs as so many cheetahs.’

She raised herself on one hand and swung round to lean her back on the rock where O’LiamRoe sat. Her head tilted back, she watched him, her expression not unfriendly. ‘You feel for the man you can see; not the nation you cannot.’

‘You may have the right of it,’ said O’LiamRoe. It was not the wittiest of ripostes. Against the rock, her head was very close. He could by moving his arm have brushed the warm, heaped, blue-shining black of her hair. He tried again. ‘I find it difficult, for example, to feel for the Kingdom of France. You peel it away, as you might an artichoke—the music, the sculpture, the pictures and the palaces—and there, soggy at the bottom, are hereditary parliaments and absolutism, a dumb States-General, the primitive taxes, the gifts, the favouritism. England breathes a coarser air, but it seems healthier to me.’

Lazily, she replied. ‘Do not delude youself, Phelim O’LiamRoe—or me. Were you faced with eternal night and chaos you would poke up the fire and theorize till your blood itself boiled under the skin. Why stay if you no longer enjoy it? Go back to your heathery nook on the Slieve Bloom, where Edward’s sheriffs pass you by; and take Ballagh with you. If you have a new master, someone doubtless will tell you.’

O’LiamRoe’s gaze, for once, was unreadable. He said, ‘I didn’t say, I believe, that I was wearying. I told you once why I intended to stay.… And I asked you a question, but we were interrupted.’

‘Then ask it again,’ she said.

There was a long silence. At the side of his neck, in the baby’s skin, a pulse was beating, although outwardly he was still perfectly tranquil.
‘And do you like me or do you love me at all?’
he had asked, that night in the Hôtel Moûtier. ‘If I were fifteen years old again, I might,’ he said. ‘But now I know the answer.’

‘Do you? I think you should know,’ said Oonagh, ‘that you are not alone in your view of the artichoke.’

Looking down, he could see her high brow, her thinking eyes, the firm body under the piled, thick folds of her robe. He said innocently, ‘That might make it awkward when you take a French husband.’

One angular, boy’s wrist lay on her lap; the other hand was tucked under her head. He saw the tendons sharpen suddenly, and was not surprised when she said, ‘I have had dogs enough.’ There was a little interval; then she added, hearking back still to their previous talk, ‘I have reached a queer conclusion. There is a thing or two worse than sitting in a mud hut with salt herring and a kale bowl between your two knees.’

O’LiamRoe did not know that he himself had turned rigid. He said only, ‘I always said it. It depends on the company.’

She did not remove her eyes. Instead she gave a little twist so that instead of her back, she had one elbow on the rock, the other hand laid idly on the grass. Dead leaves, like flotsam on a web, scattered her fur. Unbelieving, he read in her eyes a kind of testy, unassumed kindness. ‘I like you, Phelim O’LiamRoe. For my own good, I ought to love you.’ She scanned his face. On it were small unaccustomed marks; of strain, of some measure of need or defence. She said with wholly unexpected anger, ‘You are the very soul of detachment, are you not? Can you do nothing to make me love you, since you are so wise?’

There was a racking silence. Then he slipped to one knee beside her, crushing her dress, and, catching her idle hand, drew her into his arm. She came lightly, holding up her face for the kiss.

It was a strange embrace. The woman, it was clear, was the more experienced of the two; and she made no effort to hide it. O’LiamRoe’s own simple nature came to his rescue. At this ultimate moment he felt no awkwardness; nor did he strive fora sophistication beyond his means. Instead, his own basic qualities, his speculative mind, his adventurousness, his essential decency, all brought to that first kiss something perfectly well integrated, of its kind; and to Oonagh O’Dwyer, quite new.

So new that for a moment it confused her. He sensed something wrong and broke away, his whole face shaped in a queer, unaccustomed way; then found her hand on his back had hardened disturbingly. She brought her other hand up, the heavy sleeve falling back, and drew his head down to her own. During this kiss she let him know, without speaking, that what he wanted, he could have.

Humility … intelligence … insecurity: one of them spread its message through his brain, and then his nerves, and made his hands slacken, his head move, his eyes open. She did not realize it. She lay lithe in the grass, where she had slipped, and said in a gentling voice, her brogue broadened and warmed, ‘Are you afraid of bankruptcy? I’m not asking the impossible, my dear. You will go to Ireland with Stewart and wait for me. This is a beginning; not an end.’

He sat back on his heels. Among the silken down of his hair, the features were still not his own, and oddly held, as if broken against some unheeding obstacle, and clenched again into defect and misshapen pain. ‘You are very kind,’ he said; and it was impossible to tell whether or not he was being sarcastic. ‘But as it has not begun, it can be neither a beginning nor an end.’

He had moved himself out of her field of vision, whether for her relief or his own, she did not know. Lying quite still, her taut gaze on the sky, she said, ‘What is it? You had better tell me what it is.’

‘Nothing,’ he said. Her outflung arm was very white. On it, he could see the impress of his rough frieze, a pink trough of interlocking chainwork, where she had gripped him so hard. Her own dress was so fine, he bore no marks anywhere. He said conversationally, ‘It is the first time, surely, that my poor, negative principles have brought me anything so charming. I doubt I couldn’t bring myself to collect a revenue on them. I had thought them worth something less, or something more.’

Then she sat up; and he saw that she was pale, her brain behind frowning eyes following the possible burden of his. ‘I have nothing more to give that you would take.’

‘I would take honesty,’ said O’LiamRoe. And after a pause, ‘Or should I change my principles and turn firebrand first?’

He had been right. Her impulse had been kind. But it had not been selfless, and she was exceedingly proud. Her first reply to him died on her lips. Instead, she said, ‘Change them if you want to; why not? No one will ever notice the difference, and the exercise will surely do you some good.’

On the way home, she did not speak at all. Nor did O’LiamRoe make any attempt to put it right. And no one but he knew that under the thick frieze cloak, he was shivering.