Queens' Play (30 page)

A rustle passed along the cushions. The ranks of dancers suddenly cleared to give an excellent view of Thady Boy Ballagh giving a spirited rendering of New World agility, flanked on one side by a nude Brazilian and on the other by an Archer, stripped to his netherstocks and crimson with shame and a violent determination to win the wager undoubtedly in the offing.

The Brazilian, who probably had hopes of a square meal at last, was making the best job of it, and in any case could not understand the braying Archers by the wall. But he was nearly matched by Thady Boy. Glassy-eyed, light as a spider, O’LiamRoe’s ollave kicked and flung like a maid shaking a mop; and at every stamp, a forest of feathers would fly fighting out of his boots … stuffed full at some point today, or yesterday, or the day before, against the cold and never removed.

O’LiamRoe gazed. This thick-faced Silenus, pouch-eyed, diligent, was something he had glimpsed in the privacy of his room, but had never, even in nightmares, expected to witness here. He felt the hairs of his neck rise, and his stomach lodged in his throat. Then he took in the fact that the King was laughing.

The figures came nearer. The dancers, shuffled into bewildered disorder, had already made way. In a vortex of ecstatic improvisation Thady Boy led, scraping a phrase from a snatched fiddle, dousing the steaming Archer with a wine jug, directing a figure from a table top; dancing suddenly in a flicker of parodied styles which brought each its calls of recognition and laughter. He began to dance a Volta
with the Archer. Then, grasping an arm each of of his acolytes, Thady Boy whirled them faster and faster and then set them at each other. Helpless, captive and Scot cracked together in a ringing of skulls and slithered bemused to the floor. Thady Boy sat straight-legged, looking up, the blue, blurred eyes unfocussed; then he closed his mouth, climbed into one of the dog baskets and fell firmly asleep.

He may have thought the performance sufficient, but the courtiers did not. O’LiamRoe, watching dumbly, saw St. André and someone else slide the basket to the door and shake him awake, the black head joggling back and forth on his shoulders. Thady Boy came to life suddenly, with a snort, and burst into song.

In O’LiamRoe’s ear, his lordship of Aubigny had hardly ceased to pour a stream of amused comment, tolerant, civilized and worldly-wise. He seemed not in the least put out by anything they had just witnessed; he gave more the appearance, in fact, of enjoying within himself some enormous private joke. O’LiamRoe, his nerves on edge, found it intolerable. Did they imagine that this was how Ballagh ought to behave? Or think that he knew no better? Then he saw that, during the act which followed the dancers, Thady Boy had been taken into the King’s own circle.

They were just within earshot. The earlier part of the evening had been made memorable for O’LiamRoe by the famous faces pointed out round the King: Turnèbe and Muret from Bordeaux and Paris, de Baïff, Pasquier the lawyer and Bodin the philosopher. Already, on the edge of their conversation the Irishman had heard, without being near enough to share, the stir and swirl of ideas; through the condition of human society, the nature of liberty, the purpose of law, to the topical sciences: astronomy, medicine, natural history. They spoke in Latin, so that all might understand; but the quotations they flung at each other were Greek and Hebrew, Turkish, Persian. At the mention of Budé, caps were touched.

But they had accorded Thady’s music the perfect compliment of silence; and produced for him, when he joined them, a genuine interest which expressed itself in a patter of dry, courteous and intellectual questions about his art. It evidently annoyed Thady Boy to be questioned about his art. Selecting the oldest and the most persistent of his enquirers, the ollave replied politely in a phrase off the streets.

More than taken aback, the professor glanced first at his colleagues, then tried again. Thady Boy’s answer this time was coarse;
but wittily coarse. Even the King smiled inadvertently and Thady Boy himself dissolved into laughter. Almost immediately it became apparent that no one thought it necessary to rush to the scholars’ defence. Vinet, finding St. André at his elbow, said dryly, ‘The catgut has got into their manners, I see. A pity. The years of English rule have stamped something out.’

As the King’s guest, the Prince of Barrow had to stay. He sat through the short farce, and a cushion dance, where Thady invented the forfeits, and some impromptu versemaking which defined the tone of the evening more harshly than anything so far had done. Thady Boy gave no sign of remembering that his employer was there. In between bouts of frenzy his bloodshot eyes were now perfectly glazed. He sat in disarray, regurgitating wind and brushing off minor, well-meaning helpers until a burst of vitality stirred him to movement again. Through it all, consistently, he drank.

It seemed unlikely that this could go on indefinitely. Yet there was no move to stop it; and O’LiamRoe suddenly had the feeling that all this had happened before, and that the evening was to be exactly delineated by Thady Boy’s capacity. By now everyone was restive, roused by the neurotic gaiety. Even with the coolest temperaments—Queen Catherine’s, Charles de Guise’s—some degree of involvement had been reached. The young men suddenly had become wild, and a series of violent Italian games had started. Thady Boy, now showing a marked tendency to slip quietly to the ground, was shaken awake and made to play. Sallow faced and unsavoury he clowned, his feet tripping each other, until presently he turned a somersault in his wine-soaked satin, fell, belched, and rolled soggily at O’LiamRoe’s feet.

A nimble, glowing, sleepily loving little person, springing out from among the heaped cushions, caught the ollave’s threshing arm, and with her own two white hands began to tug him to his feet. ‘Master Ballagh, juggle for me! Master Ballagh, I know your riddle!’ Lulled to sleep by the music, Mary, Queen of Scotland, had sunk nodding and forgotten by Jenny Fleming’s generously cut skirts and had awaked, rapt-eyed, to find her mountebank delivered clean at her feet.

With immense trouble, Thady Boy got on to his feet. He took a step, paying no attention to the little girl. He took another, and lines of worry engraved themselves on his lathered brow. ‘
Dhia
, my best right leg’s broken.’

She clasped her hands round his arm and swung on it, as she had at St. Germain, forgetting, in the sleepy strangeness of the hour, to bother with her royalty. ‘The monks and the pears? You said each took a pear and there were still two left?—I know why.’

Stiltedly Thady Boy was progressing down the room, one leg buckling short under him, worry crumpling his face. ‘My leg is broke … that’s for sure.’

Upturned to his, the pointed, fresh face lost the first brightness of her joy. She loosed one light hand to brush the red hair coiling at her brow and said, a thread of appeal in her broken childish French, ‘One of the monks
was called Chascun
. Am I not right? So that only one took a pear?’

He paid no more attention than if she had been a ewer-servant. Margaret Erskine, moving swiftly forward, caught the little girl by the shoulders and turned her completely away.

Thady Boy continued on his agonized march. His face hollow with worry, he plodded short legged to his friends, fell over, got up, was sick, was set on his feet, prodded, given more wine and made to walk. Limping, lurching and whining he knocked over a torchère, crashed into royal chairs and flattened a royal dog while Fernel, the royal physician, was sent for.

This was likely to be, O’LiamRoe saw, the accepted end of the entertainment. There was no doubt that they thought of him as their protégé: round him as he lay whimpering on the floor was a close circle of women and more than a few men, all eager to help. Catherine remained in her chair, faintly smiling, but the King, genuinely concerned, walked with his doctor to the injured man.

Fernel, his nightshirt showing underneath his doublet, displayed commendable patience. The shortened leg was examined all over and the boot drawn off, without finding anything amiss. Then the other leg was first prodded, then raised. Something red beaded to the rim of the leather and trickling, soaked into the dirty stuff of the hose.

With a deft movement, his face grave, Fernal slipped off Thady’s boot. The ollave, craning, started to moan. Then with his knife the physician peeled off the soaked stocking and, cleaning his way gently down the crippled limb, revealed every inch of it to be intact and enjoying the most unsullied good health.

There was a blank pause. It was d’Enghien, idly fondling one of the mastiffs, who sensed the canine worry in the air. Fastidiously he lifted the bloody calfboot; ruminating, he peered into it; and triumphantly he plucked out and held high a nice portion of giblets, squeezed quite flat by the bardic toes. The mastiff barked.

As the shrieking laughter seared through the air, O’LiamRoe damned etiquette and escaped. He was in his room when by considerate royal command, twenty drunken young men, raucous and singing-merry, swept out of the Salle d’Honneur with Thady Boy limply weaving in their midst, and set out to take his ollave to bed. John Stewart, Lord d’Aubigny, was among those who watched, standing at the tall windows as the chosen escort surged down the twisted staircase and across the broad courtyard outside, screeching, struggling and swaying, and letting down all the
cross-hung oil lamps as they passed in order to drink from them one by one.

And it was Lord d’Aubigny, shaking his handsome head, who pronounced the epitaph on the evening.
‘Per qual dignitade,’
said his lordship sorrowfully to anyone who would listen,
‘L’uom si creasse.’
Margaret Erskine was among those who heard him; but she could not trust herself to reply.

By the time Thady Boy was brought to his door, O’LiamRoe was completely packed.

Piedar Dooly, summoned brusquely from the kitchens, had found the carpetbags open on the bed, and their meagre belongings heaped on the floor. When the stamp and slither of a score of unsteady pairs of feet, a volley of bumps and a cackle of uninhibited laughter arrived outside the door, and then burst through it, he was finished. With a jerk of his combed golden head, O’LiamRoe dismissed Dooly, with saddles and bags, and addressed the incoming party. ‘Leave him and get out.’

They revolved round him like Bacchantes, screeching, and one whipped off the bedsheet and, draping himself in a rough copy of O’LiamRoe’s tunic and frieze, released a squall of synthetic Erse. They sang, harangued one another, and vomited, clinging to the bedposts and the prie-dieu; they scuttled round the room in search of more wine and, finding it, poured it over each other and attempted to pour it over him. Then they aimed roughly at O’LiamRoe’s door and fell through it.

The door slammed shut, leaving the Prince of Barrow in the stinking wreck of his bedroom, standing alone over Thady Boy, heaving drunk on the floor. In a voice unrecognizable even to himself, he said, ‘Get up.’

He had to repeat it twice before anything happened, and then, conquering a disgust which possessed him like a sickness, he had to touch him, to wrench him by the defiled and oozing stuff of his sleeve. Then Thady Boy lurched to his feet, spluttering, his eyes oily black under slack lids.

Without turning, O’LiamRoe unhooked the Irish harp from the wall and flung it. It struck the other man, jangling, and fell uncaught to the floor. Thady Boy, blankly aggrieved, sank after it, precipitated into his most undignified spasm yet. ‘Take it up, then!’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘What about the
Prelude to the Salt!
Sing me the
Riding of O’Neill!
Are the great, epic songs not to be in it tonight?… Mother of God, Francis Crawford of Lymond, you’ve made a slut of your art, have you not, as well as a whore of yourself?’

Through the harpstrings, like an inebriated jackdaw’s, one
distended eye cocked skittishly at O’LiamRoe; but the next moment Thady Boy had lost interest, was on his feet and single-mindedly setting off somewhere else.

There was a keg of wine in Piedar Dooly’s cabinet. O’LiamRoe in two calm strides barred the way as his ollave tacked towards it. One hand on both his wrists was sufficient to hold Thady off. ‘Tell me a thing. Why did you ever come to France? Can you recall?’

The two wet hands twisted in his. ‘To see how the rich people live.’ Below the dyed hair, his face was blotched with crimson and lard. O’LiamRoe, his pulse hammering, could not take his eyes from its ruined intelligence. Thady Boy began to buckle gently again. Even the frenetic gaity had now evidently worn off, and his closing eyes showed a sort of sluggish content. O’LiamRoe pulled him erect. ‘You
are
rich. Or so they tell me. Have you forgotten who you are? What is your name?’

The sodden mass hung obedient from his hands. ‘I don’t know,’ said Thady Boy.

‘You are the Master of Culter, God forgive you and all who made you. Why are you here?’

There was a long pause. ‘I can’t remember,’ said the drunk man very courteously.