Queens' Play (43 page)

Lymond had not moved. He spoke into the fire, lucidly as O’LiamRoe had heard him sometimes in the early days demolish some wild argument of Michel Hérisson’s. Yet the Irishman, his soft hands clasped firm on his knees, felt his stretched nerves begin to play with his breathing. He said, striving to push it all aside, ‘You are saying there is another man in it, who wished the little Queen dead?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Francis Crawford, and turning, looked with reflective eyes at the flushed fair face of O’LiamRoe. ‘I’ve given you no reason, I suppose, to think me other than bent on sport or revenge. But the facts are these. Robin Stewart had an employer. I hoped to draw him away from this man, and failed. Whether of his own accord, or because the two quarrelled, Stewart abandoned his principal and fled home to try to sell his services elsewhere. Whatever happens to Stewart, somewhere in France there lives still a man who has sworn to try to make away with the little Queen. Stewart knows who he is. So does one other person who might talk. I have to choose which to … persuade.’

O’LiamRoe didn’t know that his face had suddenly grown white. Sharply he said, ‘That great silly fellow would be wax in your hands. There he is in the Tower, and you a herald with all your great powers. What ails you to visit him?’

There was a little silence. Then Lymond moved, drew a sharp breath, and relaxed. ‘I have, Phelim,’ he said. ‘He won’t see me. And he is fasting to death.’

‘The devil choke him,’ said O’LiamRoe deliberately. ‘I am not going to France.’

It was an admission; as the words left him, he realized it. But
Lymond took it no further. He merely said, staring still into the fire, ‘I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to visit Robin Stewart in the Tower, and either to get from him the name of his patron, or force him somehow to see me.’

Retreating wildly, bruised already by the forces gathering about him, The O’LiamRoe said, ‘I thank you kindly, but I’ve had my true fill of secrets. With the whole force of these old Queens behind you, and Warwick half out of his skin in case the poor fellow dies, you can hardly fail, surely.’

‘I think not,’ said Lymond. O’LiamRoe could hear the hiss as the other man let go his breath; then with a movement on the surface perfectly easy, Lymond turned over at his feet and, lying still, his head invisible beneath his long fingers, said, ‘Tell me. Why would you not go back to France?’

So this was how it was coming. With a grimness new to him, O’LiamRoe said, ‘Let you be still. There is nothing more of this to discuss.’

‘We shall discuss no more than is necessary,’ the even voice said. ‘Why would you not go back? You must know that she tried to protect you. She tried to keep you from returning to the castle that night. And she offered you … almost anything you desired, I would guess, to go away from Blois. Your face told as much.’

The name of Oonagh O’Dwyer, lying like a banked fire under their words for these ten minutes past, had never yet been spoken. There was no need. Illumination and despair equally in his heart, O’LiamRoe said, ‘After the accident … she helped you too?’

Bronze as a penny in the firelight, the head at his feet moved assent. Then without looking up, Lymond said, ‘She knows for whom Robin Stewart was working—she was working for the same man herself. If Stewart dies, either you or I must go back to France and force her to tell us.’

‘No!’
said O’LiamRoe sharply.

The hands came down flat from Francis Crawford’s face, but he stared still at the rug. ‘No? Why not? She likes you. We must find out what she knows. Or the child dies.’

‘I have told you.’ O’LiamRoe’s own voice was colourless. ‘I will not go back.’

‘Why
, Phelim?
Why? Why? Why?’

Blazing, blue, the eyes fastened on him like live things in Lymond’s uplifted, white face.
‘Why?’

‘Because,’ said O’LiamRoe baldly and terribly, ‘she is the mistress of Cormac O’Connor.’

In the face below him there died slowly both the anger and the light. Other changes were there, but in the shadows O’LiamRoe could not see them: only the top of Francis Crawford’s head, held
in his hand. Then Lymond spoke, without triumph, without indeed any emotion at all. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, ‘whether you knew.’

The circle was complete. All the turmoil of feeling sown in him by the creature lying at his feet slammed and spouted in a gush of pure, boiling anger: the anger of abused innocence and hurt pride and stubborn blindness leaping back from the light. O’LiamRoe stuck out a booted foot, and with a jerk that nearly sent him on his own face, threw Lymond head and shoulders back to the light. ‘You’re so damned brilliant,’ said Phelim. ‘You know everything. It’s hard-set you’d be to give yourself a dull Saturday afternoon. We’re all puppets—not the old Queens only, but the rest of us, man, woman and child, looking the fools of the world.’

‘Not of my making,’ said Lymond. His eyes, in the full light, were animal-bright.

‘Ah, no, my fine, busy fellow. But you have them there, on their strings, all curled tight to your littlest finger; and you little heeding as you swing them what soul you may bruise. Francis Crawford knows all about Oonagh, does he? Or enough to send her rocking on her dizzy bit thread, while he shifted the rest of us to and fro?

‘I was sorry for the unchristian drouth on you, and the slack hand on your duty. When did you decide to put pity on me for that? And why? When you used the small girl herself, pricking Robin Stewart, or O’LiamRoe, to tumble them like sheep’s knuckles the way you would want? I would not wonder,’ said O’LiamRoe, his bitterness flooding his voice, ‘did Robin Stewart kill himself this day or the next. You have roused your bright words before him the like of a king, and you a halflin gallowglass in the top folly of youth, with a tongue to make the blood leap from the bone only.… She nursed you well, did she?’ The deepest place of his hurt, unaware, burst into words. ‘And you two laughed over your secrets?’

‘She held me bound and drugged in the Hôtel Moûtier for Cormac O’Connor to deal with. Nothing but violence would make her talk about her share or his.’ Deeply breathing, lying still on his elbow, face averted, the other man hadn’t stirred.

‘And since you cannot cast me now in the role of lover, violence is what you are planning to use?’

There was a pause. Then in a voice unlike his own, ‘I have my duty,’ Crawford said.

O’LiamRoe swore. Swearing, he got stumbling to his feet, and striding over the floor, picked up his hat and his cloak and the bag Piedar Dooly had not yet unpacked, flung some coins on the table and returning, stood astride the golden head and the holland shirt and the long hose as Vervassal reclined still, watching his rings frosty in the light, his face groomed and inexpressive, pastured by the costly jewels in his ears.

‘Robin Stewart was little joy ever to me, or to himself, I would suppose; but there is not the least heart in me to see him rolling fish-cold and choking in the great, godly stream of Francis Crawford’s duty. I will go to the Tower. There is money on the table,’ said O’LiamRoe, in one of the rare, consciously wounding attacks of his life, ‘to pay for your keep this evening. I cannot afford more than one night of you.’

T
HEY had put Stewart in one of the tall towers, in a thick flagged stone room with a window and a fire, for he was an Archer, a political prisoner, and the citizen of a friendly power.

To The O’Liam Roe, climbing the worn stairs with Markham, the Lieutenant, the place smelled less of despair than of a sort of threadbare vanity—the damask powder over the dirt. Markham was muttering about the conditions: ‘He’s suicidal. How do they expect me to keep him in a room like a boudoir? I’ve had to put one of my best men in to live with him, wasting his time.’ Then, as O’LiamRoe was silent, the Lieutenant said irritably, ‘I hope at least you’ll have more success than the last man they sent. When we got in, the prisoner had slashed his wrists. Blood everywhere. The fellow had to leave without setting eyes on him, and we had all the mess to clear up.’

Lymond hadn’t told him that. Heavily, his accustomed insouciance dead within him, O’LiamRoe wondered just how he had expected to rescue Stewart from the egotistical shadow of Francis Crawford when disillusionment itself was the reason for Stewart’s despair. Then Markham stopped in front of a door and put his key in the lock.

Stewart had heard the voices, dreamlike, as a child in bed hears older children speak and laugh in the free air outside. He recognized O’LiamRoe’s, but this time he was tired. For three days he had refused his food and on Friday half his blood had drained from him; he had no energy for the surge of passion with which he had heard the soft cadence of Thady Boy Ballagh’s voice outside his door. Stripped of its brogue, he would yet have recognized it at the ends of the earth. Sometimes, after he had killed Harisson, it had come to him that
the little traitor was lying. For Ballagh—Lymond—was surely dead.

But he was not, and it was true. Afterwards, his wrists bandaged, a guard brought, sulkily, to watch the door, he had lain in the window and watched them leave, down below. Markham had come out first, half-turning, fussily expatiating; and then a silvery head he did not know. They had gone off together under the trees: Markham and his slender companion—the latter with a stick, Robin noticed, in his hand. Then unexpectedly the limping figure had turned, and in the uplifted face, drained of colour by the wide, pale sky, he had seen the ghost of Thady Boy Ballagh. For the moment, he had the illusion that the searching eyes looked straight into his; then presently the fair head had turned and the man he, Stewart, had poisoned walked steadily away.

He had sent O’LiamRoe now, presumably to gloat, perhaps to persuade him to tell the thing that Warwick had promised him his life to keep quiet, perhaps to try to force him to live until he could be gratifyingly punished, in France. Warwick’s offer to suppress his confession had no meaning for Stewart; he was going to die anyway. But he saw no reason to oblige O’LiamRoe with that or anything else.

So the Prince of Barrow entering the small, lived-in room with its heavy table, its stools and its boxes, its camp bed set up in a corner, its barred sunlit window, its pale fire, was conscious of the worn, inexorable barrier of Robin Stewart’s enmity even before the door was locked fast behind him, leaving them quite alone. But he spoke steadfastly; only his vowels were perhaps a shade rounder than usual. ‘I want your help,’ O’LiamRoe said, ‘to trim a bowelless devil named Francis Crawford until there’s a human place on his soul to put the mark of grace on.’

This was, of course, a trick. Sunk in his chair, his eyes fallen on bone, the folds pressed dark and moist in his wrecked face, Stewart lay without speaking while the Irish nouns buzzed in his ears like bees laboriously moving a hive.

For a long time he did not listen at all. The voice swung to and fro, like sealight on driftwood, without affecting him, crushed hard as he was in the blackness, his nostrils crammed with the endless, sliding rubble of his failures and his inadequacies. Robin Stewart had resented all his life the fact that he, of all others, was always imposed upon; that he had been forced to work hard for all he possessed, without the magical mercy of accident or fortune to make smooth the path.

Three times, from this undeserved isolation, he had found another man to broach the gap into the golden world of smooth affairs and easy friendships, and three times he had been abandoned and betrayed. And now he knew, with dry finality, that these things
happened, not because of what he was not, but because of what he was. He was a painstaking fool with less than average gifts, who had been led to believe that hard work would take you anywhere you wished to go.

It did, if you were a person of ordinary, likable disposition, whose talents could be made to grow. His lay stopped within him, mean and static and immalleable, and would never alter while he lived. He did not care to live. Then he realized, as the warm, patient rubbing of O’LiamRoe’s voice went on, that the Prince of Barrow was relating, slowly, clearly and without expression, the whole story so far as he knew it of Lymond’s mission in France. And as it continued, it came to Robin Stewart, with the first dull stirring of thought, that here was a fellow victim.

O’LiamRoe told him all he knew, all that a night’s hurtful thought had made plain to him. Lymond had used him and had dispatched him, in his own lordly way, when his usefulness was done; administering a passing kick of adjustment as he went. All had been seized upon and used, even his friendship with Oonagh O’Dwyer.

O’LiamRoe brought out the name flatly. This tale, told to a man he had no time for, and searching into the personal minutiae instead of the great verities which were his proper concern, was the hardest thing—perhaps the only hard thing—he had ever done in his life. Stewart, listening, felt whisper within him, as in the old, difficult days, the sardonic, bitter flame of accusation and jealousy. He said, ‘You were fair away with yourself over that cold-faced kitty, weren’t you man? God …’ And feeling again the strong hands holding him, that vital, glorious night on the rooftops in Blois, ‘You and me—we’re damned ninnies both. She’s O’Connor’s whore … she tried to kill you. You know that?’

Schooling the naked, baby’s face, O’LiamRoe said, ‘She tried to kill O’Connor’s rival.’

‘Ye should have whipped her,’ said Robin Stewart, with a faint and sluggish contempt. ‘Whipped her and taken the woman and O’Connor’s place both. You have men and land and a name of your own; you’re as good a man as Cormac O’Connor to rule Ireland, if rule Ireland you must.’ From the stark threshold he was crossing, advice was easy and problems were light.

‘There is no wish on me to rule Ireland,’ said The O’LiamRoe with, astonishingly, the vehemence of utter honesty in his voice. ‘I wish only to be rid this day of the devil on my back.’

The colourless grain of the starving man’s skin moved; the lids lifted; the Adam’s apple moved convulsively and the dry lips opened. Robin Stewart laughed. ‘He’s sucking the blood from out of you as well, the bastard, isn’t he? What do you want me to tell you? I’d make a rare teacher, so I would, on how to handle Crawford of
Lymond. An empty sack won’t stand, man. And I’m empty, scoured, drained and cast aside. Do you fancy the road? It’s easy taken. You put faith in one other man of Crawford’s sort, or maybe two, and you end up here.’

‘You dealt with Harisson,’ said O’LiamRoe.

Stewart’s eyes, in their darkened cavities, were fleetingly bitter. ‘Because I was meant to. They stood aside, Warwick’s men, and let it happen. So that Harisson and his evidence needn’t trouble him any more. D’you think I haven’t had time to realize that?’

‘But you settled the score,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘If you did no more with the others who cast you aside, there’d be little in it to complain of.’

‘It’d be grand, wouldn’t it, if it were as simple,’ said the sick man’s slow voice. ‘With me, ye ken it’s never simple. If there’s a man I would fain send to hell, there’s another that would pluck cream and kisses out of the sending. God give him lack … My curse on Francis Crawford is my silence.’

Nothing showed in O’LiamRoe’s blue eyes. He said, ‘I am sorry. I had come to beg for your tongue. It seemed to me that once you and I were back in France, there are a powerful lot of people who would be shocked to know that the fine herald Crawford was the fellow who fooled the whole Court of France as Thady Boy Ballagh.’

Low behind the extinct spirit, something was burning. ‘Expose him?’

‘Why not? Himself will be waiting for you in France. And it would give that great champion,’ said O’LiamRoe, ‘some small thing to think about other than the moral aptitudes of his fellow men.’

With a sharp effort, the rickle of bones that had been Robin Stewart, Archer of the Scots Guard of the Most Christian Monarch of France, struggled up in his chair. ‘Who would believe me? Unless yourself … Would you back me?’ he said.

‘With the four quarters of my soul,’ O’LiamRoe replied.
‘Provided that you denounce the man you have been working for, too.’

There was a long pause. ‘Whatna man?’ said the Archer slowly.

‘Father in Heaven, how would I know?’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘But it’s an open secret, you may as well know, that there’s someone, and I dare say you and he would as soon do each other an ill turn as not. I’ve a mind to see that child safe, and she won’t be, with another of your adventurous brotherhood abroad. I’m not asking you for his name. But denounce him, tell all you know of him once you’re in France, and I’ll support all you want to say about Thady Boy Ballagh.’

Halfway through this painstaking speech, he knew that he had won.

Then, ‘Christ,’ Stewart said. ‘Christ …’ His eyes starry, hooded
with bone, his thin chest pumping, he saw something beyond the stone walls that lit the seams and hollows of hunger in his long face and fired his dull eyes. ‘I could soup them up clean. First the tane, then the tother. Christ, I’ll have the two of them yet.’

The hollow eyes, shifting, found the window, dancing in the bright sun, with the smells of dust and greenery and horses and all the life of the great, living fortress bursting soft on the wind. Then Stewart turned, and his gaze, newly clear, rested on O’LiamRoe’s pale, placid face. ‘Sakes alive,’ said the Archer, and stared. ‘Whatever came to your whiskers? Man, man, you’d break the heart of a fresh-clippit yowe!’

Back at his inn, where he had booked a private room indefinitely, O’LiamRoe wrote a brief message for Francis Crawford at Durham House. It said simply, ‘He will travel to France, and he has agreed to give evidence against his employer, but so far will mention no names. His only condition is that you should not travel with him but that both you and I should be at hand, if not present, when he answers these charges before the French King. This I have promised. It is for you to arrange. I can be found at this address when the time comes to leave.’

Then he settled to wait. His summons came in the end; but not for three weeks—weeks during which Stewart, aided by his gaolers, nursed himself back to health while both the French Ambassador and Lymond awaited instructions from France. On the 7th of May they came. Nestling among expressions of fierce delight and admiring pleasure in the stout English honesty thus displayed was King Henri’s demand that the person of Stewart be delivered across the Channel forthwith (at English expense) and a signed confession with him.

The English King and Council, reiterating horror at the whole affair and favouring the severest punishment as an example and a deterrent, thought that the French Ambassador ought to take charge of the crossing. M. de Chémault demurred. The English Council argued. There was a polite and pointed wrangle, ending in agreement to send Stewart to Calais, under strong English guard, from whence he would be the responsibility of France. England would also obtain and hand over a written confession.

The written confession, however, never materialized. Twice approached on de Chémault’s behalf, Warwick was both honest and apologetic but produced only promises. In the end, on a windy, grey morning in the middle of May, the Ambassador went himself to Holborn to see his lordship. Later on the same day, O’LiamRoe received his summons to Durham House.

The stick had gone, and with it any undue need to exercise the
humanities. ‘I got your note,’ said Lymond, inclining his fair head and crossing smoothly to the study fireplace where O’LiamRoe stood. ‘How did you persuade him? A pact of resistance aimed at me?’

‘More or less,’ said O’LiamRoe steadily.

‘Of course.’ The steely, restless figure dropped into a chair. ‘Well, think twice before you do anything piquant. Our nations, yours and mine, are exceedingly open to hurt, and I personally am not. You realize, of course, that O’Connor will be there?’