Queens' Play (54 page)

Her throat dry, Oonagh spoke. ‘Save your steel for those you trust. They are the ones who will carry your bier; the men who cannot hate, nor can they know love. Send away the cold servants.’

The red mouth had opened a little; the knife hung forgotten in her hand. ‘I would,’ said Mary, surprised. ‘But I do not know any.’ And, anxiously demonstrating her point, she caught Lymond by the hand.

Between Oonagh’s closed lips was forced a sound—a cry, a sob, a laugh—no one present could tell. She stopped it herself, her teeth clenched, and turning swiftly left them, walking fast. The door opened and closed. She had gone.

‘Quoi?’ said Mary, her round brow wrinkled, peering upwards past their clasped hands to Lymond’s still face.

‘Excellent,’ said that comely person smoothly. ‘She becomes easily upset. But was it necessary, my Queen, to prove me warm-blooded on the spot?’

The cut, made in her forgetfulness, was small, but the child, all contrition, rushed for wrappings. Silently Margaret Erskine held open the door. Lymond’s eyebrows shot up. ‘My dear, have patience. My wounds are to be salved.’

‘Go away and bleed to death,’ said his onetime saviour sharply. ‘On behalf of the female sex I feel I may cheer every lesion.’

The laughter left his eyes. ‘It was necessary.’

‘But it failed,’ she said.
‘Didn’t it?
—I sometimes think that dull, deformed or even wittingly vicious, you would be of more use to the Queen. Go.… Go. I don’t want you here.’

And as he followed after the Irishwoman, Margaret Erskine, most levelheaded of women, picked up a Palissy vase, looked at it earnestly and smashed it clean on the floor.

F
ROM then onwards, it was possible to trace the altering atmosphere, as Lymond caustically observed, by the periodic ringing of bells, and the deliquescence of O’LiamRoe.

Barred by conscience from denouncing Thady Boy, who would then pay for Lord d’Aubigny’s lapses, he found himself uselessly in France, in the same town as Cormac and Oonagh, whom he had forbidden himself to see, and without even his sour kinsman in misfortune, the Archer Stewart.

It was Piedar Dooly, who had no delicacy in matters of the heart, who informed him that Oonagh O’Dwyer had been at the château all night, and that her aunt was fit to swell up and blacken with rage. Châteaubriant was a small place. Issuing to seek balm for his raw soul, he met Lymond, on his way back from escorting his night’s companion to her home.

The fair, agreeable face and modest fortune about the clothes inflamed the Prince of Barrow beyond the point of caution in a public street. He said, ‘And had she any good in her now, or did she deserve the pasting she will be having from her other lover this morning?’

He expected a blow; he urgently wanted a fight. But after a second’s hesitation the other man only said, ‘She has told me nothing. Unfortunately. Phelim, go and get drunk.’

And he did.

There were a number of others at the Cher Saincte on the same errand. Its rooms, public and private, were filled with refugees from the nerve-storming, playing-card propriety of the Ambassage. The Archers not actually on duty, of which there were few, were forced indeed to share the same parlour as the Swiss Guard off duty, which had already led to some stridency.

Newly returned from a mission to Nantes, and by no means the quietest of that company, Lieutenant André Spens hardly noticed the beggar’s urchin at his elbow at first. It was not until the all-important words pierced the din that he jumped a little, thought, and after excusing himself with a few well-chosen oaths and a telling improvisation, followed the child out of the inn.

Half an hour later, in someone’s tumbledown shack outside the town, Lieutenant Spens came face to face with Robin Stewart, whom he had been instructed to befriend, keep in touch with, and eventually to kill. The delight on the lieutenant’s well-shaven face was only equalled by the pleasure on Robin Stewart’s, who was about to forestall him.

It was typical, even at this hour, of Robin Stewart’s farcical and humourless affairs that some two hours later the same urchin should return, with the same errand, to the crowded Cher Saincte; and finding the Prince of Barrow totally senseless in drink, should persuade Piedar Dooly to accompany him instead.

For his final dramatic intervention in the world’s affairs, Robin Stewart had taken residence in a stone and turf erection he had found in a forest clearing near Béré, just outside Châteaubriant and a little to the northwest. There, untroubled by monkish ghosts, dragons or nymphs, he had lived by his bow for ten days; a thing which gave him no trouble, but which gave a little extra savour, like garlic in the bowl, to his present relative affluence.

To Piedar Dooly, however, grim and silent, locked in his passionate Irish soul, the journey through the tepid summer trees with their market-day smell was something to get over quickly, so that he could return to where his master lay curled like a record roll on a rented table pushed in a cupboard. Storage of the eminent incapable was routine to the Cher Saincte.

He gazed acidly at the balding ground, the patch of sky, the fence, and the crumbling house, built for a hermit or a herdboy at acorn time; and when Stewart came to the door he observed nothing significant about his person or about the single room into which he was ushered when the Archer with a coin and a word had sent off the boy. Dooly said, ‘It’s cosy you are for a dead man, surely, and will make a beautiful corpse. Himself is busy.’

Gently Stewart hitched his long bones on the deep windowsill. ‘The lad says he’s fou’,’ said the Archer without rancour, but with a thread of contempt unconcealed in his voice. ‘It’s not to be wondered at. Anyway, you’ll do. I can’t get hold of Mr. Crawford … that was Thady Boy, ye ken. Him. He’s not at the castle. And I’ve a message for him about the Queen.’

The little man, barely listening, hopped to his feet. ‘Am I a pageboy, then? That man may learn it another way, or not at all.’

‘Do you want to go home?’ said Stewart quickly. And as the little servant stopped, watching, Stewart went on. ‘He’s staying, isn’t he, because of the brat? Then he’ll want to know this. It’ll be all done by tomorrow. They’re to finish her on the lake, while they’re all in their flichtmafleathers getting the Garter in the morning.’

‘How?’ said Dooly, his black eyes sharp. ‘And did you learn of it in this world or the next?’

‘I got it from an Archer, a fellow who helped me escape. It turns out,’ said Robin Stewart reflectively, ‘that he’s Lord d’Aubigny’s man. Or was.’

‘Goodness be about us.’ It was a sneer. ‘Has the poor man told all and perished?’ It was not long after midday, but his beard was there already, black under the skin. Until May, like his master, he had been whiskered.

‘Unhappily. Knifed in the back, I think,’ said Stewart complacently. ‘At least, dead with a knife in his back, a long way from here. The girl will be killed by the man who arranged the accident at the Tour des Minimes. D’Aubigny is as good as condemned. The man can be caught in the act. The ceremony’s at ten; she’ll go out on the lake just after. D’Aubigny himself will see she gets the idea, and they won’t oppose it. Provided the boat’s safe—and it will be—and she’s surrounded by friends—and she will be—they’ll see no possible harm. It’ll look the safest retreat there can be: the Lake of Menteith all over again.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Piedar Dooly, ‘what you’re blathering about. If it’s that safe it is, how is she killed? There’s only little boats on the lake, with poppin’s in them, ready for tomorrow night.’

‘That’s right,’ said Stewart cheerfully. ‘Clods, squibs, fire darts, bombards, and a floating ordnance store of gunpowder, packed in a full day before. She’ll be sent off birling like a wheel at a fair; and no one to know there was powder in it at all. A wee thing wasteful, but bonny to watch. It’s got to have pigment in it, and plasterwork, and a Latin verse or two to set it off, before his lordship can get cosy with a murder.’

His cheeks brown as two uncured hides, his eyes hollow, his mouth thin as a twig, Piedar Dooly heard, repeated over and over for clarity, all Robin Stewart had to tell him. And as he spoke, Stewart thought of the news reaching Thady Boy-Lymond; of Lymond’s quick grasp, his private surprise, his recognition of something vital, well done. He doubted if Dooly would read English, but he had written it all out, too: the times, the places, the name. Only when he was satisfied that the Irishman had grasped it all, did he come to the point of the highest importance.

‘And you must say,’ he said carefully, ‘that in giving this information I trust Mr. Ballagh—Mr. Crawford—to see I take no skaith and
no blame for it all. I shall need to give myself up, and before the explosion takes place. Mr. Crawford must come here, with a proper guard and officer, and I will put myself in their hands. Otherwise, he doesna need to be told, they’ll shoot me on sight.… I’ll wait here at nine tomorrow morning. Tell him I’ll expect him then, to share my bread. He won’t be disappointed in my table.’ He had written that, too, at the foot of his notes. And he had added, ‘I have been unfair no less than you; I can see it now. As one gentleman to another, I offer apologies with my meat.’

There was no understanding in Dooly’s fixed eyes, only contempt. ‘I’ll tell him,’ he said. ‘If he’s risen from his kissing couch yet.’

Suddenly Stewart was still. ‘The O’Dwyer woman? What did she tell?’

A chuckle, creaking and eerie, rose from the black Firbolg’s throat. ‘The darling devil that’s in her, she took all and gave nothing. She would not tell.’

The bony jaw-strings relaxed, the thin cheeks wrinkled, and Stewart smiled. ‘Women.… They’ll thin him like poor cloth, body and soul. Give him the message.’

‘There will be no trumpet in the country earning his shilling that will be equal to me,’ said Piedar Dooly, and spat.

When his servant got back to the Cher Saincte O’LiamRoe was already groaning. They needed the table for other gentlemen and were glad when Dooly dragged him, stumbling, to their lodging, where he applied various sobering agents at no great speed. Presently, soaked and silky head in his hands, The O’LiamRoe enquired the time, which was three o’clock, and swore fuzzily, getting to his feet. To him, but not to Cormac had been extended an invitation to the jousting that afternoon.

‘I must have slept in that damned inn for hours.—Holy Mother, my head. And do you tell me you sat beside me and made never a move? Did it never hit you to push me on a mattress, at least? I have the graining drawn on my haunches of every knot in the deal.’

‘ ’Twas a long, drouthy wait, and that’s no lie,’ admitted Piedar Dooly, his black eyes unwinking on the gold head. ‘But there’ll be a grand reward for my patience in heaven, since there’s no thanks for it here.… You will never take yourself to Court, then, in that state. Lie back, so, and sleep it off. I doubt will they miss you.’

‘No.’ Like a visitor at a sickbed, he had to be there, although he knew that under that caustic blue eye his detachment would become dense and dusty, like a stuffed owl foolishly glasseyed in its case. The birds of hell shall devour them with bitter breath; and the gall of the dragon shall be their drink, and the venom of the dragon their morsels … ‘No. The morning seems to be lost on us; let the devil do us good with the afternoon.’

Dooly did not try again to dissuade him. It would do no harm. By tomorrow the Scotch Queen would be dead and The O’LiamRoe on his way where he belonged, in the heather breasts of the purple Slieve Bloom, untroubled by all but the squirrel-hoarding of knowledge.

To Stewart and to Lymond he gave no further thought. He disliked them both, and found much stimulation in tearing up the Archer’s long message and sealing it inside his bags, in between attiring O’LiamRoe for Court. O’LiamRoe, noting a slight lift in the customary dourness, put it down to a willing wench at the Cher Saincte, and was aware, in passing, of a crabbed sliver of envy.

The French Court meanwhile was engaged, as ever, in a competition in courtesy, in etiquette and riches, in intelligence, accomplishments, in knightly prowess, in sport, and in the exercises of the mind. The King, carefree amid the hubbub of diplomacy, civil, legal, international, leaned as always on his dear confrères and amies the Constable, the de Guises, his distinguished mistress and his pregnant Queen, and his cherished sister of Scotland whose visit, surely, was drawing to a close.

He might, and did, feel impatience at times with them all; but he was a man whose love ran in deep channels. Not one of his dearest cronies would have seen a denouncement of Lord d’Aubigny or any other of that trusted circle as anything but suicide—social, financial and very likely actual as well.

Sir George Douglas, with whom the Lennoxes were staying, recognized the dilemma very well, and got a good deal of entertainment from it. The circle of the Queen Dowager did not.

Mary of Guise herself had had no interview with Lymond in recent days; so much Margaret Erskine knew. Of what went on in her mistress’s mind she had no inkling. More than ever she was missing the sane interpretations of Tom, now on his way to the English Border to conclude the formal peace between Scotland and England, with all the tangled and difficult issues this involved.

Tomorrow’s conference concerning Mary’s marriage appeared, of course, to be the crux of the stay; that and the money promised by the French treasury for the security of Scotland, over which daily haggling continued.

Once only, twisting the rings from her swollen fingers, the Dowager had said to her lady-in-waiting, ‘Why does that man believe the attack will be so soon? The guard for Sunday is prodigious.’ And then, hardly listening to Margaret’s answer, she had added suddenly, ‘If the child dies, every hour I have spent on French soil has been a folly, and every transaction a waste.’

In her carrying voice, more French even in its Scots, the weariness and the flat foreboding were plain. She was vain of Mary, and skilful in ready-made relationships: mother-daughter, mother-son. With the puppylike magnetism of the toddler far behind, Mary’s mother had found reborn no inconvenient torrent of warmth. In France the princes drugged the child Queen with gifts; her mother had no need to court her. ‘A folly,’ she said, and frowned, pinching her nose; then spoke incisively about something else.

The English were enjoying it rather more than they had thought. The technique was much the same as in England, though the monarch was older: show respect for his toys. And the food was good.