Queens' Play (5 page)

‘Have I offended you?’ said O’LiamRoe, looking narrowly at his ollave.

‘Burnings!’ It was Lord d’Aubigny’s exclamation.

‘You have, so.’

‘But a small sup of wine, now, would put the extremities back into your bloodstream, Thady?’

‘It might, so,’ said the ollave, sulkily.

‘Burnings? What’s all this, Stewart?’

So, to the Archer’s chagrin, the news of the night’s unfortunate incident was prematurely unfolded, while Lord d’Aubigny’s handsome, high-coloured face set in extreme irritation. The fat fool and the thin fool, with their scarecrow wardrobe, were clearly of no consequence. The accident, obviously, had been slight; the guests of the King of France had been discomfited in no way that mattered. He cast a chastening glance at Stewart, uttered a few routine words of regret and began to move. The party was actually on its feet, its baggage collected, scores paid and horses engaged to take them to Rouen, when Lord d’Aubigny recalled Madame Baule.

He stopped dead. ‘Before we leave, O’LiamRoe, we’ve a call to
make first. There’s a countrywoman of yours in the house, a charming lady who’s going to Rouen for the Entry. She hoped to see you before you left.’

‘Oh?’ said O’LiamRoe.

‘Madame Baule, she’s called. Married a Frenchman years ago—he’s dead—and keeps a most unusual house in Touraine. A delightful person, an original; cherished, I assure you, in every well-bred home she visits. But of course, you know her,’ said Lord d’Aubigny, sweeping the two Irishmen incontinently into a side passage.

‘Do I?’ said O’LiamRoe weakly.

‘From the lady, I certainly assumed so. Here, I think.—Yes, the lady herself certainly knew all about you. Come along.’ And he scratched at the door. It opened, and he pushed the Prince of Barrow inside. ‘Here he is: The O’LiamRoe, lord of the Slieve Bloom, and his secretary. Madame Baule, late of Limerick. You two, I’m sure, are acquainted.’

Had he known it, Lord d’Aubigny was being amply rewarded for his embarrassments of a short time before.

On the wreathed marmalade figure in the doorway fell the pinlike scrutiny of two round, pale eyes in a firm, weatherbeaten face packed with teeth. There was an impression of piled, plaited hair, caterpillar-heaped with ornaments, of a square neck filled with nooses of jewellery. A broad hand gripped his lordship’s silvery sleeve. ‘Boyle!’ screeched a voice high as a bat’s, thin, jolly, encouraging. ‘Boyle! You can call yourselves d’Aubignys all you want, John, my darling, but keep your expatriate, hand-licking tongue off a good Irish name.… O’LiamRoe!’

‘Madam,’ said O’LiamRoe politely, and quite subdued.

The ropes swung and jangled. ‘You’ve the sorrow’s own whiskers on you, have you not?’

‘There’s worse at the back of me,’ said O’LiamRoe apologetically. ‘It’s two great-six-nights since I was clipped.’

‘Hum! I would never forget those whiskers,’ said Mistress Boyle in a light scream. ‘They would put nightmares on you, the moustaches alone. O’LiamRoe, we have never met, but here’s my hand to you. You may kiss me.’

It was a sight; and Robin Stewart, had he been there, would have been afraid to see the woman hooked there for ever, in uncurried skeins round his clavicles, had they not come suddenly apart, Mistress Boyle saying with composure, ‘Whirroo, that’s Irish blood you’ve brought with you past the ninth wave.… We were worn thin as a cat’s ear waiting for it … 
o’n aird tuaid tic in chabair
, as the old tale has it. And who’s the
cailleach-chearc
there at your back?’

‘Ah.…’Tis a bard out of Banachadee. My little, weeshy ollave, Mistress Boyle.’

‘Death alive! What’s your name, man?’ she screamed at Thady Boy. The secretary edged away. ‘Ballagh, mistress.’

‘One of the tinker tribes, surely. And you take no offence at the name
cailleach-chearc
?’

‘Buddha,’ volunteered Thady Boy unexpectedly, ‘was born in an egg. A fine duty,
a mhuire
, to lay on a henwife. The henwives are queens and kings, to be sure, in that country.’

‘But that country,
a mhic
, was not Ireland.’

‘Indeed, when was a god born that way in Ireland?’ said Thady politely. ‘With the loud-mouthed hens there are, and the folk with their two keen ears, one engaged for the hen and the other for the boil on the cooking water?’

She screamed like a kittiwake. ‘Oh! Oh! You have a sharp knife at your hip here, O’LiamRoe, and God attend you; for it’s the quick tongue and the clever tongue that’s all these poor French worship, the heathens, and heaven knows the Leinster pudding-brains that have shamed me this year. Sit and tell me of home. Is your mother well?’

So, innocently, was ushered in a formidable interrogation on the social history of Limerick and Leix. Stewart of Aubigny, half-listening, thought that between them, the two seemed to know more of genealogy and gynaecology both than any Scotsman would admit to. He had known Mistress Boyle for many years; did not dream of stopping her as she worried O’LiamRoe unstintedly about next, his corn, his fishings and his cattle. The Chieftain’s answers were quite cheerful, even when she went so far as to question them.

‘The Cross o’ Christ about us,’ said Mistress Boyle at length, sinking back in her chair. ‘But the great, gorgeous butterfly you’ll be among those quiet worker bees up at Court.’

‘Not so quiet,’ said Lord d’Aubigny, reasserting himself. ‘Antechamber’s full of Scotsmen, arguing like the damned. Half of them have seen Mason already.’

‘Mason?’

‘Sir James Mason, the English Ambassador. That small girl will be lucky if the Scottish throne waits for her to grow up. There are some of her mother’s nobles who would prefer a fine post under England to a shabby one under a Scottish queen. Are you uncomfortable, O’LiamRoe?’

‘No, no,’ said the Chief, sitting up quickly. ‘Only there is a kind of glitter in my head that has come straight off my eyeballs. Is there a dryad in the room?’

A woman had come in from her chamber. All her life, she had made men dumb by her presence, and she was young yet. Pausing, not shy, she stood by the rain-drenched window, and you could see she was Irish as a
Murrúghach
—not the wide-shouldered, fair
Milesian, but dark and neat-boned, with neck and shoulders a single stem for an oval face, wide at the cheekbones and light-eyed, with the black hair piled in pillows and coils about her crown and ears, and on the nape of her neck and down her back. She was dressed in dark blue, with no jewels; and when she saw them all on their feet, curtseyed to Mistress Boyle and Lord d’Aubigny, and stood waiting again.

Stewart of Aubigny, his fingertips together, watched her with a connoisseur’s eye. Thady Boy, liverish and morose, stared, unloosing his dark, stubbled jaw. Nor did O’LiamRoe acquire any pretensions to grace, but he rose, and his long-lashed blue eyes were wider and steadier than before.

‘Ah, the devil, bad end to the girl!’ screeched Mistress Boyle, spinning round, and ropes swinging, skirts swaying, she pounced on the newcomer, her face hot with delight. ‘Pay no heed to them, Oonagh. It’s a party of Irish come to Court; the very same kind of silly fowl you left in Donegal. You’re not to look twice at them. Gentlemen, my niece Oonagh O’Dwyer, over from Ireland to stay with her old aunt awhile and pick the flower of the French Court for a husband if I have my way. Oonagh, my child, The O’LiamRoe, Chief of the Name—ah, don’t curtsey too close, you’ll step on his whiskers … and Mr. Ballagh, his secretary. You should hear him. He can rhyme rats to death like Senchan Torpest himself.’

With a soft flush of blue wool, the girl sat, her calm gaze on the Irishmen, and said in Gaelic, speaking impartially between them: ‘They have been sparse in the woods, the ollaves, for this time past. Is the season on us again?’

With the change of language, the warmer impulses of chatter were halted. In a little silence, Master Ballagh coughed, and as O’LiamRoe glanced at him he plumped down, settling his shiny trunk hose in his chair, and said politely in English, ‘The ratio, now I think of it, is one ollave per inhabited and manured quarter of ground. Do you miss them, it may be that the other conditions are lacking.’

The young woman’s light eyes turned to O’LiamRoe. ‘The Prince of Barrow, as I heard it, had a bard called Patrick O’Hooley.’

‘You heard right,’ said O’LiamRoe composedly. ‘ ’Tis like the
Birach-derc
, now. Put Patrick O’Hooley on a boat and show him the blessed Saint Peter himself, and it would stretch four stout men with hooks to lift the lid of his eye.’

She was contemptuous. ‘He gets seasick.’

‘He does, too, and him a bard only, without lawful learning but his own intellect; whereas Master Ballagh here is a comely professor of the canon, a stream of pleasing praise issuing from him, and a stream of wealth to him. But would you grudge it, and the epigrams pouring off him like a man straight from the Inishmurray sweating-house?’

The talk was straying in these dangerous shoals when Robin Stewart came to the door, seeking permission to borrow or buy replacements for O’LiamRoe’s saddlery. On top of sheer old age and neglect, the salt air of the journey had completed its ruin; and in its present state no one at all could travel to Rouen.

Thankfully, Lord d’Aubigny left, taking O’LiamRoe with him, and the Irish accents rolled back along the passage, giving an untrammeled account of some fantasy-life of his horse harness. Mistress Boyle pulled in Robin Stewart and shut the door. ‘Come in, for the sake of God, and the two of you tell me something of that champion of the Slieve Bloom, that would fetch his price cut into two hairy hearthrugs and cured. I heard tell he was queer, but not as terrible queer as all that.’

She had poured them wine, and Thady Boy, working diligently, was almost restored to his normal condition. He relaxed. ‘You’ve seen him. What else is there? It was O’LiamRoe’s misfortune to be born a prince with a smart lot of followers instead of a little, mad-like professor with a wife and a pension and a shining day-long circle of pupil-philosophers; not a one over twelve. I met him at his castle, a great slab of wet rock with rats in it. He will talk you dry on any subject you wish; it’s all in his head. And, of course, he is the unhandiest thing in life. Not one finger of him is on speaking terms with the next.’

Stewart grinned. Thady Boy raised his wine in faltering salute to the girl, whose gaze had not moved from his face, and slammed it back on the chair arm as Mistress Boyle said, ‘You are nippy enough yourself, we were hearing, and a terrible smart fellow up a rope. Are they putting games on you, in the long training you have, now?’ And she shrieked with laughter. The girl did not smile.

‘And teaching us to run like the wind too; ’Tis fundamental’, said Thady Boy sourly. ‘And when serving such as the Prince of Barrow, it would be a great help and comfort to be invisible as well.’

Oonagh O’Dwyer got up. Silent as a cat, she walked over and removed from Thady Boy’s lax hands his dry cup. ‘Why come to France with him?’ she said. ‘To set your epigrams pimping for a little free drink?’

‘Free, is it?’ said Thady. ‘I thought I was paying for it.’

‘ ’Tis a little polished living the fellow is after,’ said Mistress Boyle comfortably.

‘Polished living! With The O’LiamRoe stuck on me, and the jaws of him going like the leper clappers?’

‘Ballagh’s here for asylum,’ said Robin Stewart, grinning. ‘He’ll tell you he’s come for the money, but it’s woman trouble, mark me.’

‘And O’LiamRoe, has he woman trouble too?’ asked Oonagh O’Dwyer of Thady.

Mr. Ballagh was exasperated. ‘Have I the second sight? I was one week at his castle, and there was no woman in it barring his ma and the kitchens; and two weeks at sea when he passed his time on his two knees splicing ropes like the wind in the barley fields. I never caught him so much as wink at the figurehead.’

The older woman sat back in her seat, chuckling; but Oonagh O’Dwyer spoke like an ancient goddess in her black hair. ‘He doesn’t mind being laughed at?’

‘Not if he can laugh first.’

‘Well, cock’s blood,’ said Robin Stewart with annoyance. ‘He was asked over to discuss ways and means of throwing the English out of Ireland. Is it a joke, just?’

‘Oh, he’s got a brain in him. He’ll talk all you want,’ said the ollave, wildly airy. ‘And maybe the King’ll get one or two good ideas off him, if he can stand him at all. But first and last and in the middle, The O’LiamRoe plans to treat himself to a small private survey on how the rich live … and it paid for by somebody else.’

Mistress Boyle shook with laughter and Robin Stewart was delighted. But the black-haired girl turned on her heel and walked out of the room.

V
ULNERABLE as a crab at the moult, The O’LiamRoe rode, mild, unwashed and hoary, into the splendid bosom of Rouen. And by the grace of all the old and mischievous gods, his arrival, with Thady Boy Ballagh and Piedar Dooly, passed that day unremarked by the townspeople. For four days, the Sacred Majesty of the Most Christian King of France, the most magnanimous, powerful and victorious King Henri, Second of that name, would enter his Norman capital for the first time in the three years of his reign, and the preparations for that joyous Entry had worn the Rouennois into tatters.

They were lucky to miss the Court, which had blocked the Rouen road all that morning, settling into the Priory of Bonne-Nouvelle across the river to sit out the days till the Entry. Lord d’Aubigny, who had escorted the Irish party from Dieppe and last night had secured them an unexceptionable inn for their comfort, took his leave there with his lances to join the gentlemen about the King, leaving Robin Stewart with his small retinue to see O’LiamRoe safely lodged in the city.

They had reached the suburbs in the plain of Grandmont when a whale came out of a house on a trolley and crossed the road, with four men pushing it. Every horse in Robin Stewart’s party snubbed its owner and O’LiamRoe’s mare reared. The Chieftain was nothing if not a good rider. He bore her down, the horsecloth all over him, and instantly bestowed his fond attention on the situation. ‘
Dhia!
I see you have a great care for your fishing industry, to improve them with wooden legs. Will you look at that, Thady?’

Mr. Ballagh leaned over. The whale at their feet, its plaster sides sweating in the sun, clapped open its jaws and a jet of Seine water hit the air. The horses, thoroughly shaken, plunged and danced to
the tune of Scots swearing, and O’LiamRoe this time very neatly fell off.

It was a scene of unqualified extravagance. Before them lay the lit walls of Rouen veiled with rigging; the crowded bridge and the yellow, slapping water; but the city was all but masked by the white canvas of tents and marquees sprung like land-ships on the near bank before them. A half-finished pavilion covered with crescents and fleurs-de-lis stood by the roadside, crawling with joiners, and behind, a square of horse lines was busy with men, and a knot of six or seven soaked geldings being rubbed down. Someone had left a streaky chariot in the mud, a trident stuck by a wheel; and inside one of the tents, where a city archer gossiped on guard, a dozen fresh green canvas fishtails were drying in a row.

The sandy mud of the banks boiled with dripping men and small boats; the islands were messy with scaffolding; and somewhere a rather poor choir was practising hard. The air was filled, like birds flying, with shouts and hammer blows and arguing voices, and at the entrance to the bridge a woman halfway up a ladder with a boy under her arm was screeching at a painter curled on a pediment high above, decorating a niche. The four men, no doubt regretting their exuberance, had disappeared with the whale to the water. Leaving his horse blithely loose, and with never a glance at his surroundings, O’LiamRoe followed.

Robin Stewart, of the King’s Bodyguard of Scots Archers, gave a hard-pressed sigh and turned to share his despair with his bowmen. Instead, the acid, droopbrowed face of the ollave caught his eye.

‘France, mère des arts, des armes et des lois,’
observed Thady Boy, without altering a muscle. ‘I take it you wish to enter Rouen. Unless you divert O’LiamRoe’s mind instantly, he will feed on his whale like a prawn on the seethings of drowned men.’ Robin Stewart opened his mouth.

But the diversion came from another direction. Over the bridge before them, two women came riding, satins fluttering and furs blowing; and the servants mounted behind were all in a livery Stewart knew as well as he knew the redheaded owner in front. It was Jenny Fleming.

Janet, Lady Fleming, was pretty, and Scottish, and a widow. She was a natural daughter of King James IV of Scotland. She was also royal aunt and governess of Mary Queen of Scots, whom she had brought to France two years before as a little girl of five, and whose mentor she had been ever since.

‘Governess’ as applied to Jenny Fleming was the most irrational of terms. Mary had her teachers for every art and science, and her faithful Janet Sinclair for nurse. Jenny, who could govern nothing, and least of all herself, was her companion in mischief. A king her
father, an earl her grandfather, her dead husband a great and wealthy Scots baron, she had been born like a honeycomb moth into silk and soft living; and despite seven children, had preserved in her thirties the vivid, autocratic and expensive sparkle of her youth.

Now, leaving her escort by the bridge, she plunged down with her horse to the shore, her companion following. She waved to Robin Stewart as she passed and Stewart flushed and waved back, and wondered who the quiet, plump young girl behind her might be. He did not know Margaret Erskine.

‘A whale! Does it swim? Does it spout? May I look at it?’

The enormous creature lay in the shallow water. As its attendants grinned and chattered, an impossible jaw dropped and the whiskers of O’LiamRoe rose, tadpole-like, from the Leviathan depths. He bowed, and smiled like a sickle. ‘’Tis better still inside: the Eighth Wonder surely, but a small bit damp for the very Rose of Jericho like yourself.’

She laughed at him, her firm, dimpled face sparkling. ‘You’re the Irishman!’

‘One of them. The other’s behind you.’

She turned. The unkempt figure of Thady Boy Ballagh stood gloomily waiting. ‘He’s angry. What’s he angry about?’ she said.

‘He wants to get to Rouen and start his drinking. But there was a serious situation here, will you note, to be dealt with first.… You’re a Scotswoman, surely. Do you stay here?’

Jenny was alight with mischief; had been joyous with excitement from her flaming hair to her cork-soled shoes since she arrived. She opened her mouth, but Margaret Erskine’s quiet voice forestalled her. ‘We stay at Court. Perhaps we shall have the pleasure of seeing you there. Mother, we must go.’

‘Yes, but we must introduce ourselves first. You are O’LiamRoe—I can tell. And this? Aren’t there three of you?’

‘The richest soil,’ said Mr. Ballagh’s cutting voice from behind, ‘is known for its three weeds. An old Irish saying. You will excuse us. We are expecting an audience with the King.’

A square body; a quiet voice; brown eyes in a plain, country-woman’s face—Margaret Erskine, twice-married at twenty and with a son of her own, controlled her mother as no one had done since her father died. She drew her now from this dangerous amusement as she had done many another; and gave no hint, as she and Jenny remounted, and called greetings, and moved off, that she knew whom she was facing.

The O’LiamRoe barely watched them go. He turned, rubbing his hands, to Thady Boy. ‘Is it not like the Great Fair of Carman, which the forty-seven kings came to?’

‘Would it strike you that the kings now and then ate?’ said the
ollave. ‘Here’s Master Stewart waiting for you like Job, and Piedar Dooly with the eyes in his face set with glassing bands. And where will you be if the King sends and you are not yet in your other frieze cloak?’

‘This is—’ began O’LiamRoe, and broke off, mildly annoyed. ‘There’s a powerful lot of fussing about the clothes on me.’

‘Faith, well,’ said Thady Boy patiently. ‘But it’s a prince he’s expecting, man; not a Water Sheerie.’ And they set off side by side to the horses, leaving the riverbank, the whale and the four men, one of whom, as any inquisitive passer-by might see, had no heel to one foot.

The party from Ireland, it was understood, was to be struck by the magnificence of the King of France, and by the wealth and loyalty of his subjects, as a prelude to any personal talks which might follow. So a bedroom and a parlour had been put at their disposal in the Croix d’Or, a large new inn off the Place du Marché; and that, as Robin Stewart remarked, was just about worth the monthly returns of Notre Dame, accommodation being what it was at an Entry.

He saw them settled in before leaving for Bonne-Nouvelle over the bridge. They had three days to wait in Rouen before the festivities. He had given up thinking too much about their habits and their clothes. He had been told to come each day and look after them, show them the sights, and fulfil their reasonable wishes. When the Entry was over, they would move with the Court to its winter quarters and the serious business of the visit would no doubt begin.

Robin Stewart, who above all things was fascinated by success, found no particular enjoyment in handling his Irishmen. He introduced them to the innkeeper, made Piedar Dooly acquainted with the kitchens, and left. As he rode out of the street a Gentleman of the Bedchamber rode into it, bearing a message for Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, from His Most Christian Majesty Henri II of France. He welcomed the party, in the heartiest terms, to the hospitable shores of France, and invited The O’LiamRoe to visit His Majesty at noon that day in the Priory of Bonne-Nouvelle,
dressed for tennis
.

‘Dear God,’ said Thady Boy Ballagh, when the courtly messenger had bowed himself out; and lowered his round form on the bed.

There had already been a remarkably sharp argument about what to do with the half-footed man: O’LiamRoe allowed that without proof they could make no accusations, but had decided in the end that Piedar Dooly might well be asked to keep an eye from time to time on the maimed Jonah and his whale. And now—‘Dear God,’ said Thady Ballagh, ‘you can barely walk as it is in that lather of
saffron and pig’s hair you’ve got on. How the tatteration will you lep about with a racquet, and those leggings, and the little wee ball that’s in it?’

The sun, bright for autumn still, fell on O’LiamRoe’s head as he stood at their parlour window looking down. Heads hooded and bare passed and repassed below; a scarlet plume in a man’s cap tossed, and satin gleamed; then white gauze and blue velvet from a woman’s head and cloak as she passed with her servant. A cart went by, full of beer kegs, and a maid with her trailing skirt black-wet came along from the fountain with a pail in one hand. A man strolled past and leaned on the doorpost opposite, stroking his black beard.

‘Ah, you’re a faint-heart, Thady Boy. If a man can give a breeze-fly a clap in a byre, he can smite a great baby’s plaything like that. But it’s a strange, heathen way to welcome a guest.’

‘He’s offering you the privilege of a friendly meeting before the formal courtesies,’ said his secretary patiently. ‘Dress as neat as you can, for the sake of us all, and stay outside the nets streaming flattery like a honey cane on the hot roof of the world.’

‘Look at this,’ said O’LiamRoe, instead of answering. Outside, the bearded man had moved. Taking off his plain black brimmed hat, he scratched a head of thick dark hair, while his gaze roved the rooftops with idle vagueness; the sun, patched with stack-shadows, fell on his opaque white skin and straight nose, and the black plangent eyebrows. He had a short, white coat, plainly cut and showing dark full sleeves and a coarse doublet under; but they lay on a big, heavy-shouldered form vaguely familiar. Bad drawings of the man were everywhere, and the coins in their two purses had his likeness.

‘It’s the King,’ said Thady Boy. ‘No, it can’t be.’

‘Then it’s his double,’ said O’LiamRoe.

There was silence, then a crooning sound broke from Thady Boy. ‘It is so,’ he said. ‘Of course. The terrible show on Wednesday they’re so full of. Was there not to be a chariot all done up with the double of the King and his family for the procession?’

He was right. Looking closely, you could see that a rough likeness had been emphasized by the exact trim of hair and beard; the man was a natural for the part. Unaccountably, O’LiamRoe was ruffled. ‘I’d have said it was damned dangerous to have two kings in a harebrained country like this one.’

The man darkly preening in the doorway, if he had had notions of practising a kingly fantasy, had quickly abandoned it. A child had hopped round the corner, a girl of seven perhaps, and flung herself with audible grief on her father. They could not hear what she said, but the black-haired man, rehatted, bent hastily and shook her, and as the ear-piercing whine continued, seized her arm and hauled her
off with the look of all fathers with publicly importunate young. Of the regal bearing of a moment since, there was no trace.

‘Thady Boy, you are right,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘And you are maybe worth your hire to me after all, for all the expense you are. Let you go downstairs and have a sup with Piedar, and I shall see what cloth I can put on my back for a game with those bloodsucking clegs in their gold lace, bad cess to them. Is he good?’

‘Who?’

‘King Henri. Is he a fair man with a ball?’

‘Middling good. He’s the best athlete in the kingdom, or thereby,’ said Thady Boy cruelly, and went out.