Queens' Play (57 page)

No one spoke. In the recesses of the silence crowded all the weary weeks of this sojourn in France; the gold almost promised, the marriage contract almost confirmed, the regency almost achieved. In it lay coiled the absent power of Cormac O’Connor, the beckoning fame and treasure of the Italian wars, the sweet compliance of England, balm to smooth minds overfretted by Scots.

Lord d’Aubigny had less patience than the others. Stretching his well-kept hand, he removed the whip from the sergeant beside him, and with an easy snap, touched the flat back across and across, like a lion tamer.

Lymond turned, so fast that he almost took the last lash in his face, and d’Aubigny, taken by surprise, stepped back.

‘If you have a case, make it. If you have a question, put it. It is interesting, I admit, but it would take more time than you can spare to thrash me into compliance.’

A whip cracked again, a small whip, razor-sharp across the legs, and one of the Queen’s dwarfs, hopped back sniggering, ‘Keep a civil tongue in this gathering,’ said Catherine de Médicis coolly in the Italian-French she had had to learn so quickly after her marriage, together with the patience she had afterwards taken so long to master. ‘You cannot deceive us. The Queen your mistress is here.’

Her long chin sunk on her chest, Mary of Guise shook out her sleeve smartly, and laying her wrist on her knee, engaged Catherine and then the King with her strongly marked brows. ‘The old women that are in it,’ said O’LiamRoe’s mind to him softly; and his memory said, ‘
You’d better play tennis with them on Tír-nan-óg
,
my dear, if you’re going to call thirty-five old.’
And it added, ‘The Queen Mother isn’t going to stir a little finger in this affair … and I’m not at all sure that I want to meddle in hers.’ The whip cracked, thoughtfully.

‘I love a brave man,’ said the Queen Dowager of Scotland. ‘And the Crawfords are brave men who have served me well in the past.
But a sly, high-stomached swaggering man I cannot abide. Had I known a Scot of mine was engaged in this mummery I should have sent you his tongue and his hands. As it is, you are welcome to pluck your restitution from him as you wish. I cannot believe him guilty of theft and prodigal of murder. I do find he has mocked both you and me, gentle brother, in deceiving us boldly not once, but twice in this fashion. Do as you wish with him.’

She had repudiated him. The unspoken words filled O’LiamRoe’s mouth. In Lymond’s face there was no line of anger or surprise; even dusty and uncombed he contrived to look acidly collected. He gazed at Mary of Guise through half-shut, lazy lids and said, ‘Madame, what king should I sing to in Scotland? Even Lyon is old.’

She had repudiated him and he had accepted it. Drawing breath, the Prince of Barrow felt the warning pressure on his arm. Margaret Erskine had moved up beside him. The Queen Dowager icily answered. ‘Had you come as Francis Crawford, you might have done your country honour. Instead of taking all Ireland in your mouth and spitting it at our feet.’

‘But Francis Crawford,’ Lymond said simply, ‘was not invited.’

‘And Francis Crawford is known,’ said Lord d’Aubigny. The late hour had made no hollows in his well-furnished face, but the spread of pink was uneven from cheek to brow; he was, after all, breaking a desirable vessel.

‘We are not forgetting the jewels he had ready to take, the rope in his room, the friendship with my wretched man Stewart. Robin saved his life, climbing—many of you saw that. They worked hand in glove over the pretended accident of the cheetah. Only because M. d’Enghien held the reins was he made to run in the forefront of that ride downhill in Amboise—he intended, I am sure, to be safe behind. And Crawford and his friend O’LiamRoe between them, I am told, rescued Stewart yet again from near death in the Tower and persuaded him that he should do better to live and return to France. And mysteriously, as soon as he reaches the Loire, Stewart escapes. If his Irish disguise was simply a discourteous and foolish masquerade,’ said Lord d’Aubigny, his voice shade high, ‘why did Lord Culter his brother, of that brave and so serviceable family, refrain from halting these excesses, or at least informing the Queen his mistress of Mr. Ballagh’s real name?’

The prominent brown eyes of Queen Catherine, tight-rimmed in the sleepless white skin, moved to stare at the Dowager. ‘Why, indeed? Look to your lords, my sister. The family appears to be less reliable than you thought.’

The old women! For the second time, O’LiamRoe opened his mouth. To his left, Piedar Dooly, his strained black eyes intent, stirred at his side. At his right, Margaret Erskine moved, her body
blocking his view of the King, her eyes nearly level with his own. ‘He does not want it,’ she said, in a voice which carried only to him. ‘He does not want it. How can you help him unless you are free?’

Lymond laughed. Shivering round the small room it sounded indelicate, like the rubbing of crystals over some robust Arabian couch. ‘The worthy Prince of Barrow left France on the day he discovered my identity, and has been trying to make amends for me ever since. Do you suppose any accomplice of mine would have risked total exile from France as he did within the first week of our stay? M. O’LiamRoe, as you have found for yourselves, despises diplomacy, laughs at statesmanship, pokes fun at pretension, ridicules wealth. You did not know what a jewel you had. A man who wanted nothing from you but fuel for his wit.
Phelim is welcome
, you should have said—’ The light voice indulged in cool parody:

‘Lovely, eager bull,’
said Lymond lingeringly again, this time in Irish; and O’LiamRoe, the ducts of his brain half choked by the mud and gold Lymond had flung him together, said clearing his throat, ‘Bad scran to it. What about you? There is great music in you, I can tell you now. A new-made angel put beside you would sound like an old nail scraping on glass.… What call had you to name yourself an Irishman, and use the first chance to let drink and decadence murder your gifts?’

The innocent, deceiving eyes turned to the Prince. ‘Art cannot live without licence.’

There was a little silence. O’LiamRoe grasped that the barbarous spectacle of accusation and blow had somehow been replaced by a match of quite another kind, to which the Court was tacitly granting a hearing. He hesitated only a moment before letting his own worn-out theories slip for the last time through his hands. He said, ‘Ah yes, my fine
gean-canach
, but how much licence? A man’s art is only as good as his liver. Who decides when to stop?’

‘The artist?’ said Lymond, his voice grave, his eyes nakedly derisive.

‘He knows the inspiration he needs to begin, but after that you’d be hard set to halt his little indulgences. Death alive, you know that.
Then you’ll have nothing out of him but bad art and worse manners, fit to be copied by every journeyman who can dip his brush in a paintpot or stitch together a tavern lampoon.’

‘Does that trouble you?’ said Lymond. ‘It won’t trouble posterity.
Nous devons à la Mort et nous et nos ouvrages
, you know. Both ourselves and our creations are a debt owed to Death. If you sober us and church us and rob us of our Bella Simonettas and our Vittoria Colonnas at this pace, there will be no inspiration and no works of art left to hand on.’

‘Not every artist that’s in it must find balance in drink or drugs or nameless indulgences.’

‘But those who do? Must they be stopped? Must posterity suffer in the cause of the corruptible present?’

O’LiamRoe was silent. Here lay the core of the matter. The accusations of theft and treason Lord d’Aubigny had made were without real foundation; however eagerly the Court had seized on them to salve their raw pride, it was not on these counts that Lymond would be condemned.

He would be crushed for the trick he had played on them, for the power he had held over them, and for the attentions he had forced them to pay him. To save his skin, since he would not call on either the Queen or O’LiamRoe, Lymond was salving their pride. For that, he had turned against O’LiamRoe just now every argument O’LiamRoe himself had used in order to show the French Court to itself in a new light: not as his companions, his victims in some deliberate essay in decadence, but as ministers to his art. And arguing against him, playing his part, O’LiamRoe heard his own philosophy in another man’s mouth, and found it lacking. ‘… Feeling,’ Lymond was saying, ending his exposition on the inspiring properties of drink, debauchery and general freedom from convention, ‘feeling needs a respite from thought, and thought returns refreshed after.’

‘Yes, M. Crawford.’ It was Catherine, her fine ankles crossed, her ringed hands still. ‘But example kills, and the example of genius kills quicker than any.’

‘And the artist with them,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘The holocaust which nearly sieved your flesh through its bones at the Tour des Minimes was your salvation, and you know it. When you kicked out your self-control, your art walked out after it.’

‘I came to France to find freedom,’ said Lymond. About him, the Archers had fallen back, leaving him standing alone, his arms bent to the lashing. Impatience had gone; he looked alive and alert in the soft light.

‘You have found a prison, it seems,’ said the King, and let his eyes rest for a moment on the still face of the Constable, his old compère. Then he drew a long breath and let it hiss as a sigh in the quiet room.
‘Is this not the truth then; that such a talent, working only when freed, must also be caged? From adversity, illness, poverty, persecution, comes the discipline necessary for perfect creation?… And yet,’ said the careful voice thoughtfully, ‘you do not appear a man lacking in self-control. This is, perhaps, a man who studies other men, and himself in relation to other men? An amateur of modulated conduct; a man who traps mutations, freakish properties of the soul and sets them in conflict; a keeper of menageries …’

He paused. ‘You did this, intending theft or worse, for which your doom will be death; or you did this with no purpose other than mischief inspired by the devil. I should condemn you if you had meddled with potboys on these terms. It may please you to think that, had you not succumbed yourself, you might have pushed apart the fabric of a nation and turned our very greatness against us. I regret,’ said Henri of France, turning his dark eyes to the Dowager, upright and still in her chair, to his wife, the Constable, the silent faces of all his courtiers and the pale oval grimness of O’LiamRoe and addressing at length the contained presence of Thady Boy Ballagh, who had been their treasure, ‘I regret; but art without conscience is a hunting cat no mansuetarius alive should be expected to tame. At a place appointed you will be broken; and your music with you.’

With no purpose other than mischief!
‘Mother of God!’ said O’LiamRoe furiously, and took three thrashing steps towards Mary of Guise. The big, passive face did not even turn.

‘My dear Phelim.’ It was Lymond who had moved, his voice prosaic, a shade of irritation and something else in his face. ‘I appear to be committed, even though you may not be. Since you cannot improve matters, at least allow me the fruits of my own husbanding. Go and get drunk.’

It was said quite kindly. Phelim O’LiamRoe and his ollave stared at each other for a long moment, blue eyes meeting blue; then the Prince of Barrow turned and, uncaring whom he buffeted, strode headlong from the room.

Piedar Dooly had been caught unawares. Unfolding hastily in a pentagon of angles, he jumped behind his master, whistling under his breath. ‘Heaven protect us, there’s some sense in the creatures,’ said O’LiamRoe’s familiar, scurrying along. ‘And where now, Prince of Barrow?’

The face that turned on his he hardly knew for Phelim O’LiamRoe, Chief of the Name, so angular was it with purpose and a kind of harsh and miserable anger. ‘The likes of you, fortunate man, will be going home to your bed,’ it said.

For a moment, in his surprise, Dooly dropped back. Then catching up, he put his question cautiously. ‘And yourself, Prince? Where do you be going?’

‘To the house of Cormac O’Connor, fellow. Where else?’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, artist in living, the very core and prototype of detachment.

It was already Sunday, the 20th of June; and the first grey-veiled light of the new day would hint soon at the trees in Châteaubriant park, and breathe on the dark confines of its lake.

T
HEY would not admit him: who would unlock to a foolish Irishman, a moonstruck compatriot, at half-past three in the morning? Mistress Boyle’s hollow-faced steward slammed the grille, and O’LiamRoe climbed two walls, forced a shutter and tumbled into the parlour where Cormac O’Connor lay felled and snarling in sleep among all the spilled ashes, where the night before he had rustled drunk from the table.

O’LiamRoe gazed at him with interest; then stepping over his buttocks, threw open the hithermost door.

Green moonlight filled a bedroom, unperfumed, undecorated, filled with a woman’s clothes and the scoured, herbal smell of the schoolroom. Without stopping, Phelim strode to the wooden travelling-bed, dim in the corner, where the sleeper, cramped under thin sheeting, lay drowned and veiled in the black weeds of her hair.

Next door, a candle still guttered. With a taper deftly lit, O’LiamRoe walked from bracket to bracket, from lamp to torchère in both bedroom and parlour, binding light upon light until the air gasped and glittered in a tourniquet of searing dazzle and Oonagh O’Dwyer, white face and black brows, white pillow and black hair, white elbows and black, sodden shadow where the sharp bones, urgent, pressed down the limp bed, stared at him dazed, with distended eyes black as flowers in her white face, and said harshly, ‘Is he dead?’

‘Tres vidit et unum adoravit
. He’s before the fire, my dear, like a
pricked pudding … if that is the he you mean.’ And his eyes, round, pale, innocent, dared her to deny it.

She obliged him, direct and stormy, without a second thought, both palms flat on the bedclothes. ‘You know what I mean. Why are you here? Is the Queen killed, then? Why has he sent you?’

‘ ’Tis pigeons you have got in your head. Sweet, fat pigeons,’ said O’LiamRoe warmly. ‘No one sends me, and the Queen is not killed yet. But Thady Boy Ballagh,
ochone
, is sent by royal command to be broken as whipping boy for his lordship of Aubigny, of unsullied fame, and no one but you and I, my love, no one but you and I can save that child now.’

The blurring of sleep was leaving her face; her eyes and brow and wide cheekbones clearing, precision restored to her spare, warm lips. He remembered them, as she threw a bedgown over her robed shoulders, her gaze going beyond him. ‘Mary Mother … Put out those lights! The child is nothing to me, and will be as easy in the grave.’

‘I put them on,’ said O’LiamRoe agreeably. ‘I want O’Connor’s fine brain to help us convince John Stewart of Aubigny’s royal patron that the man is a would-be assassin and, I should wager, half-mad.’

Slowly Oonagh spoke. ‘Aubigny has exposed Lymond as Thady Boy Ballagh?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then accusing d’Aubigny won’t save him. His offences as Thady Boy alone would have him ended. You know that.’

‘Not,’ said O’LiamRoe, ‘if he could prove that his masquerade had the purpose of saving the Queen.’

‘Then go to the Dowager,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. ‘Or has she denied him?’ And as O’LiamRoe’s silence answered her, she widened her queer eyes and smiled. ‘And so do I. He is unlucky, our amateur, our sweet ollave.’

‘I would not have said that thing,’ said O’LiamRoe and, startlingly, she flushed. ‘In small things, yes. He will not ask the Queen Dowager to admit she called him to France to protect the small Queen. He will not call on me to admit I knew he was in France because of the Queen. That would be merely my word against theirs. He cannot suggest he came to France as his own master to do this work without accusing d’Aubigny, and he has no more proof against d’Aubigny than they have against him. So the word you and your friend here are going to give me will damn John Stewart and save the girl and deliver our sweet ollave, as you call him, all at once. As neat a conclusion as ever I saw.’

‘And when,’ said the woman in the bed, ‘did Francis Crawford become the friend of your soul?’

‘I was wondering myself.’ O’LiamRoe’s reply was perfectly
equable. ‘I rather fancy ’twas when it came to me that the black roaring Irishman we had there was only half the actor in Francis Crawford; the rest was that unnatural animal being human for once.’

‘Do you think so?’ For a moment the green eyes, diverted, looked at him curiously.

‘I think the rope at the Tour des Minimes—and your regard for him—saved him. You have protected us both, hate us though you may. There is one thing still to be done.’

‘I do not hate you. Nor do I delude myself I can read his mind, human or otherwise.… Go over,’ said Oonagh, her voice, clear and low, reaching his ears on a note of sudden, desperate anger. ‘Go over;
go home!
Whatever my body may be, my mind is my own. Let him pat and prick your soul as he wishes.
I will not be touched.’

Exasperated, O’LiamRoe raised his voice. ‘He has no wish to involve you.’

‘He is involving me this minute, fool that you are. Why else are you free? The rest of that person was human, do you say?
A mhuire!’
said the black-haired woman, her dry eyes wide and bitter. ‘Dacent crathur, go home. He is beyond you, that sweet ollave with the love of every girl in the breast of his shirt.… We are the fools, struggling, planning, begging at foolish doors, giving suck to the craven from all our sunken stock of force and eagerness and passion, while you court a strange brat and pare rhymes in Latin.’

She stopped, and for a moment O’LiamRoe faced her in silence. Then, ‘Wait you,’ he said evenly. ‘Since you are so hearty in handing forth blows, let me slip in a small dab of a word. To watch you would be sorrow’s own fun; but it is coming to me that I would not at all fancy being ruled by King Cormac.’

She studdied him, her mind only half arrested. ‘The French King would be your monarch.’

‘You’re complete,’ said O’LiamRoe heartily. ‘The first thing Cormac O’Connor will do when he kicks out the English is to kick out the Frenchmen who helped him. Cock’s bones, if England can barely keep off her elegant knees, what hope has France, with Scotland to look to, and the Pope and the Emperor gnawing at all her fine frontiers?’

‘You would rather have England?’ said Oonagh with contempt. ‘Or your own self, perhaps?’

‘The Cross of Christ,’
said a rolling voice, a round-bellied orator’s organ, just a little hoarse with drink. O’LiamRoe backed. The sleeper had been roused at last. In the doorway, swaying gently, thick-veined brawn enclosed in soiled shirting, his smallcut eyes sparkling, hung Cormac O’Connor.

‘The Cross of Christ about us.… Are we having visitors, girl, and meself not advised? Have you pleased my dilsy, Phelim O’LiamRoe?
She’s hard to please, but the kernel’s sweet—as others know.… Ah!’ said Cormac, and strode forward to the woman straight-backed in the bed, the classical, obstinate jaw plain as a melon from ear to chin. ‘Ah, is it your old nightgown you have … will you not make the least set to please us … and the fine, white jewels you have?’

And bending, in one jerk he ripped apart bedgown and robe, baring her from elbow to elbow between his two fists.

She was made small and white, like the green-eyed morrow Lymond had called her, and on the veined skin the week-old bruises were faded yellow. ‘The darling you are!’ said Cormac easily, and turned.
‘A mhuire.… Look at his face!
Sure, I woke up too early! Have you had none of the cream, Prince?… Have I given you an appetite?’ And looking from O’LiamRoe’s witless face to the stony one of the woman, he exploded into mirth.

She did not move; even when he flung the two torn edges of her nightrobe crossed and closed, and sank sprawling in her bedside chair, his beard stuck writhing skywards, his black head dug into her thigh. He said, still in a voice of laughter, ‘Or must you wait for a unicorn?’ and twisting, upside down, gave Oonagh a wink before returning to O’LiamRoe.

‘She sent to me—did you know, fine prince?—to set my mind at rest. She said “Cormac love”—and drawing her docile arm over his shoulder, he laid its long palm against his wet, bearded cheek—“Cormac, love, life is an illusion. The great lord of the Slieve Bloom is a blushing small virgin, one of nature’s doorkeepers. You have no rival to fear.” ’

‘Faith, you’re a modest man,’ said Phelim calmly. Throwing his battered cap on the nearest chest, he folded his arms and gazed at the two, his round shoulders comfortable against the wall. ‘Do you fancy that your fists will preach better than the honey tongue in your head? We are two reasonable men; and if you have the right of it, I just ask to be convinced.’ He stood at ease, the high collar hiding the slide of his gullet, and the folded arms over the fluttering ribs. ‘It would take a bold man, would it not, to claim the Six Titles?’

From Cormac O’Connor’s upturned throat came a fanfare of derision. The beard dropped, and the two knowledgeable eyes surveyed O’LiamRoe. ‘Ten years since, Henry proclaimed himself King of Ireland, and annexed us like a glove to the Imperial English Crown—
“From henceforth, Irishmen be not enemies, but subjects.” ’
Cormac swore, and laughed again, looking at O’LiamRoe. ‘It hardly stirs your thick blood, does it, it barely lifts your snout from the bog to see the Lord Deputy mouthing orders at Kilmainham, and the bought earls meek as mice in Dublin Castle hall?’

‘Three hundred years under England is a long time,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Even a French invasion, save you, is only an old tune in a
different key. Desmond tried to bring in the French thirty years ago, poor silly Ireland, to make war on Henry VIII, and Kildare himself boasted that he would do the same with twelve thousand Spaniards in his tail. Well, the great Earl of Kildare is dead, his family attainted, his heir a child with an Italian accent living in Florence these ten years. True for you, your own mother was daughter to the ninth Earl, your lands are gone, your father fast in the Tower, your ten brothers and sisters homeless or on alien soil; but ’Tis fifteen years since the English took Kildare’s son Tomas at Maynooth Castle and broke their pledged word to him; and three hundred and fifty years since an O’Connor was supreme monarch of Ireland.’

The black head had lifted, and Cormac’s brosy gourd of a face stared at the Prince. ‘There speaks the creeping son of the swamp. Fifteen years since Tomas an tSioda, my own mother’s brother, and five Géraldine uncles were murdered at Tyburn after they had surrendered in all good faith at Maynooth; and the heir to all Ireland escaping like a trickle of dirty water into the sea. ’Tis a throne for Gerald of Kildare that I and the woman there are after making.’

‘Does he speak English?’ enquired O’LiamRoe neatly.

The snarl of impatience echoed in O’Connor’s throat; but from behind him, Oonagh’s cold voice spoke for the first time since her lover had entered. ‘As much as the child Mary will speak,’ she said.

‘And will rule as freely, I take it,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘We’re become a nation of uncles. All Europe is a cradle of naked emperors lulled by a jackboot; Warwick and Somerset in England; Arran and de Guises in Scotland; the last of the Geraldines with us. Faix, two Earls of Kildare were Lords Deputy for England, and sore lords they were for both Ireland and her masters. “All Ireland cannot rule this Earl,” they told the Council, and “Then in good faith, this Earl shall rule all Ireland,” the Council replied. Young Gerald would be off the throne in a fortnight, in favour of some grand
buailim-sciath
such as yourself; and we should be tossed straight back into the midden of anarchy. Our royal tradition is broken. There is no living vein of divinity with us; there is no heritage but one of wind-seeded vivacity. Can you not rest,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, his oval face damp and rose-coloured, ‘and let the corn hear itself grow?’

Like sword cutting through glass, a high, hard voice said, ‘He loves them, the household of hell.’

Bundled cabbage-like in creased linen, the iron hair stiffly upholstered in two angry plaits, Theresa Boyle straddled the doorway, and her eyes on O’LiamRoe were shining with anger and hate. ‘He would kneel in his basket at an English lord’s hearth for a joke and a kind word; he would take the scarlet cloth and the silver cups they bring us wooing like savages, spurn the old Apish toys of Antichrist,
yoke malicious mischief to his heart, reject the laws of six hundred years and customs eleven centuries old—’

‘Were I eleven centuries old, I would follow them,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Today I would follow the man who raised good beasts and crops, who mined his own land, and cut passes and made roads and ploughed up moor and bog and barbered the woods. I’d follow the man who carded and weaved and brought in new seed, who used his own dyes and set his own silver and made old men as well as laws and medicine and poems in Latin: old men in good, decent houses, making fellowship with their neighbours whether Celt or Irish-Norman or Irish-English; whether in the sea ports or in the Pale. We are a million people lightsome from birth to death as the froth of the sea, and leaving no more behind us.… Seize your battleaxe and lead out the MacSheehys,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, hardily, his fists nail and bone at his sides. ‘Turn kern against kern, gallowglass against gallowglass, live the past, murder the future; and I promise you, when you have extorted your living tax of cracked pride and savage frivolity, France or England or Charles in his little suit of Florentine serge will stroll whistling across the bare fields, kicking the stones.’

‘ ’Tis a glorious poem, so,’ said Mistress Boyle. ‘And yourself, Prince, has cut off your fine whiskers to make bowstrings? You’ll oppose us, Lackpenny?’

‘He is deserting us. Alas, the loss of it!’ said Oonagh coolly. ‘He is Francis Crawford’s new lover.’

O’LiamRoe did not even look at her; he answered Mistress Boyle direct, his mild face sober. ‘I am opposing you.’