Queens' Play (65 page)

No one breathed; but under the bent mask of Abernaci’s face, something cracked.

Lord d’Aubigny said, ‘So they’re mad in the whorehouse as well, are they? And how many mad brats have you sired?’

‘Ask your sister-in-law,’ said Lymond. ‘Do they ever rule England, you can be proud.…’ But before he finished, he felt the silence alter, and turned. Framed in the doorway was Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, Lord d’Aubigny’s dear older brother, white hatred in his face. Behind him, shadows outside his tent, were his men. Slowly, unshackling his white hands, Lord d’Aubigny rose.

They had been brought up as boys together in the long exile in France. Because of Matthew, three years of John’s life had passed in the Bastille. Nine years since, John had elected to stay, his great-uncle’s heir, and Matthew had gone to betray France, to betray Scotland, to marry England in his frantic search for a crown—a crown which had seemed within reach, but for one weak child’s body; a crown a younger brother, surely, could share.

‘I have come,’ said the Earl of Lennox, ignoring Lymond, staring straight at the bright-fleshed face of his brother, ‘to escort this man to receive the praise and thanks of all good citizens, whether of England, Scotland or France. It is plain that you serve no one in keeping him in custody, and I take upon myself the duty of release.’

‘The King has sent you?’ The cultured voice was harsh.

‘No one has sent me. The banquet continues. Sergeant, untie him.’

Fast-moving in spite of his size, formidable in spite of his dress, John Stewart strode forward and placed himself, his hand on his hilt, between the man-at-arms and the prisoner. ‘Are you crazy? No one has sent you? Then, by God, you’ll have to use force first. You’ve no right to take this man!’

‘I am taking him by right,’ said Lennox coldly, ‘of the grave doubts now expressed about your own past conduct, and my judgment, as a citizen, of your unfitness to continue in this post.
For God’s sake, are you tying or untying him?’

The sergeant, who had simply sidestepped Lord d’Aubigny to go on with his task, stepped back, rope in hand. ‘He’s free, sir.’

And free he was. Bare, dirty, unsteady with fatigue, Lymond looked from one brother to the other, brows raised, as he massaged his arms, and glancing beyond, to the Keeper’s dim corner, allowed one heavy eyelid to droop. Lord d’Aubigny, rigid, remained where he was, all the implications of the events dizzy in his brain. He was outnumbered. And in any case, what use to resist? This, before him, was Matthew disowning him; draining his future, like blown
bladders rupturing his hopes. There was no purpose in anything now, except revenge. He said harshly, ‘Leave him. Damn you, leave him. The King will take you to law over this.’

Silence.

‘He can deal with foreigners who interfere with his justice. You’ll find
yourself
in the Bastille—you, next. And what will Warwick make of you then?’

Silence again.

‘Did I ever tell you,’ said Lymond pausing on the afterthought, on his way to the flap, ‘that that aunt of mine once hatched an egg?’

He paused, deep in thought, and walked slowly to the door before turning again. His lordship of Aubigny, staring after the vanishing form of his brother, received the full splendour of Lymond’s smile.

‘It was a cuckoo,’ said Francis Crawford prosaically, and followed Lennox out.

He rode with him, in borrowed clothes, as far as the town so that he and Lennox could be seen and the rescue, as Lymond pointed out with some irony, should not have been made in vain. Once, outside the tent, Lord Lennox had betrayed a leaning to violence … and had stopped short, halted by the hilarious blue eyes, and the recollection of what he was doing. Thereafter he said not a word.

Outside the grounds they parted, by Lymond’s desire; Lennox riding tight-lipped back to his royal wife. Fate, this time, had been rough-fingered with the Lennoxes.

Lymond rode on, and in a leisurely way set about keeping his belated appointment with Robin Stewart.

Phelim O’LiamRoe saw him come; and before he saw him, saw the avenue of trees lift and curtsey to the passing of his horse. There was no one with him.

He had taken all the time he needed, O’LiamRoe saw, to change and wash; to call on Michel Hérisson, probably, and discover O’LiamRoe had not returned; to obtain directions and follow them competently, well-dressed, beautifully mounted, his affairs now doubtless fully in order. How he had got out of d’Aubigny’s jealous grasp, O’LiamRoe could not guess, and at the moment did not care.

Lymond noticed him, smiled, and dismounting, strolled across the humped grass. ‘Hullo. You needn’t have waited. The man will be prowling his tedious way round Châteaubriant, muttering threats. To tell you the truth,’ said Lymond, dropping full length on the sweet grass and rolling over, face to the green light, ‘I’ve had a surfeit of Stewarts, one way or another.’

There was a pause. ‘I expect,’ said O’LiamRoe grimly, ‘that one or two of the Stewarts might feel the same way.’

Lymond’s eyes were shut. For a while they stayed shut; then he opened them very slowly, his blue gaze heavy and firm on O’LiamRoe’s. ‘Well?’

Standing still and sturdy in the little clearing, the triphammer of his heart beating the bones out of his flesh, O’LiamRoe inclined his head to the blank and glossy panes of the cabin. ‘Robin Stewart is in there,’ he said.

The movement that brought Lymond to his feet was so immediate that O’LiamRoe missed its component parts. He only saw him running, neat-footed over the grass, as fast as he had run today from his prison to the lakeside; running to the shut door, where he fetched up short, silent, a hand on either post. He raised his fingers to knock, but dropped them; and instead, pressing the handle slowly like some living thing he might crush, Francis Crawford opened Stewart’s door and went in.

Mice had been at the table. The new cheese and the horny bread were half eaten, and the scrubbed table was scattered with mice dirt and crumbs. The fire was out. But all the rest of the room was as Robin Stewart had left it: the mended chair and the clean floor, the perfect pack and the shining sword; the signs of thought and decision and a painfully meticulous striving. ‘As one gentleman to another,’ had said the neatly penned note O’LiamRoe had pieced together in his sick time of waiting, ‘I offer apologies with my meat.’

He lay before the hearth, the author of it all, the scoured hands idle on the floor, the dagger fallen, his lifeblood jellied on the blade. The loose-jointed sprawl was Robin Stewart, characteristic, not to be helped, outwith his last desperate control. But from the burnished hair so laboriously cut to the straight hose and waxed boots he was Lymond; Lymond in a last furious attempt to defy his stars; Lymond even in the privacy of his failure.

That O’LiamRoe had recognized also, in the two hours he had waited. He sat down now heavily, with a fierce emotion that was very near pleasure, and watched Francis Crawford pass in through the door.

Mors sine morte, finis sine fine
.… Dim through the mesh of birdsong in the trees, the bell for Nones boomed and stopped. No sound came from the hut. What was he doing?

At Châteaubriant, the conference must be under way. Soon it would be over, and Lymond, the hero of the day, Lymond would be missed.

What was he doing? Contemptuous, angry, defensive, whatever his mood, you would expect him to turn and come out, and make of O’LiamRoe his first audience. But still he did not come.

Presently, his own heat gone, his heart shrunk in his throat, his hands cold, O’LiamRoe got up and went in.

Nothing was changed. Stewart lay in death as he had fallen; the
man for whom he had waited was not likely to rouse him now. The carefully spread table was the same, and the pack. Then he saw Lymond, at the deep side window, his hands clasped before him on the sill. On his face, a little averted, were none of the more dramatic aspects of anger or remorse. He stood staring down at his linked hands as a man might, merely considering a disturbing problem, had you not seen Stewart’s blood on his shirt, and his knuckles and nails yellow-white with presssure on the cold whitewashed ledge. He did not move, although aware surely that O’LiamRoe had come in. The Prince of Barrow, suddenly in deep water, hesitated, his well-fed body too tight an envelope for his lungs and his heart.

Once, philosophy in hand and irony buried as best he could, he would have walked forward confidently and dealt with this. As it was … What Lymond’s philosophy might be, he did not know. In irony he could outmatch himself, in width of vision he was, he suspected, his peer.

What was there left to say? Take him by the shoulder, said the O’LiamRoe of a year ago, the small parchment figure, complacent in its two dimensions, and say, kind but firm, ‘When you got his message, it was already too late. There was nothing before him, anyway, but exile and the gallows. He was not even worth saving. He was a murderer. He was a man who thought of himself only, who, if it suited him, would brush anything from his way, busy, unthinking—even a child … even his friends … even you.’

It was the new O’LiamRoe who answered grimly. ‘But the issue is quite other. The issue is that Francis Crawford set out to capture the mind of this man, and having used it, dismissed it like one of his whores. Had the message come in time, he would quite probably have ignored it. To say that he did not realize how far Stewart was his was no justification; he should have made it his business to know.
Nous devons à la Mort et nous et nos ouvrages
. That, thought O’LiamRoe bleakly, was one piece of French at least he had learned to understand.

‘Thinking hard, Phelim?’ said Lymond suddenly, and turned. ‘There must be
some
excuse you could mention.’ His face was brutally composed, his eyes wide open in the gloom.

‘You learn,’ said O’LiamRoe’s voice quietly, of its own accord.

‘I do not,’
said Lymond without expression, his eyes on the thin, badly jointed shoulders on the floor. Presently he said, ‘I seem to be armoured with scythes no one can see. Every breath I draw seems to twist some blameless planet from its orbit.’ And after a moment, ‘I suppose you are right. A cell is safest; or a tower, or a bog. To discuss the world of men, and laugh at it, or even pray for it. But not to meddle with it.’

O’LiamRoe braced his tired bones. ‘Pause,’ he said, ‘for a sympathetic groan of assent. From Will Scott of course, at the very least. And from the shade of Christian Stewart. From Oonagh O’Dwyer. And certainly, the man at your feet.’ And cutting short, again, the blank pause which followed, he said sardonically, ‘You won’t have noticed, but the argument you’ve just used used to be mine. I’m a graduate of your academy too. You might have the grace to wince at my little, fledgling scythes.’

Lymond, still resting with his back to the window, put up a hand suddenly for no obvious reason, and dropped it again. He said coolly, ‘How did you know about these people?’

‘Margaret Erskine,’ said O’LiamRoe dryly. ‘She made sure from time to time I knew exactly whom I was damning to hell.… God knows why I should cosset your conscience, but I could tell you, as a last piece of interference, some advice that the same sensible woman gave me once about you.’

‘Spare me,’ said Lymond briefly.

He had said already, in spite of himself, more than he wished; no one but himself need be obsessed by the clever decision to lay by soft handling, so that Stewart might stand up for himself. ‘
I wish you had come to me five years ago. You would have hated me, as you do now; but the Stewarts might have found themselves with a man’ …
God.…

Then it struck him that O’LiamRoe deserved to know something, and he said, ‘I could have forced him to tell me all he knew the other week, but—Christ, how bloody pompous can you be?—I thought he would hate himself so much.… He ought to be left to tell me out of his own conscience and conviction, not out of—’

‘—Love for Francis Crawford,’ said O’LiamRoe quietly.

‘It wasn’t love,’ said Lymond in a queer, rather desperate voice. ‘It was a kind of … oh, God, I don’t know. Hero worship, I suppose. It’s the only oozing emotion I seem able to inspire. It leads to nothing but misery.’

‘Yet but for that,’ said O’LiamRoe concisely, ‘Robin Stewart would be alive, and none of this need have happened. I should be back in the Slieve Bloom with no past and no stake in the future. And Oonagh O’Dwyer would be with O’Connor still.
You see, you did right.’

He paused. Lymond, breathing shallowly and fast, lifted his chin suddenly but did not speak. O’LiamRoe went on. ‘You were angry with Margaret Lennox because she mocked my first, stumbling steps in the way of human responsibility. And an hour later, you had to draw me a picture of your duty as you knew it, that you believed would poison the very word in my mouth. I am telling you now that you did right with Robin Stewart and I am telling you that the error you made came later, when you took no heed of his call. It was too
late then, I know it. But he should have been in your mind. He was your man. True for you, you had withdrawn the crutch from his sight, but still it should have been there in your hand, ready for him. For you are a leader—don’t you know it? I don’t, surely, need to tell you?—And that is what leadership means. It means fortifying the fainthearted and giving them the two sides of your tongue while you are at it. It means suffering weak love and schooling it till it matures. It means giving up your privacies, your follies and your leisure. It means you can love nothing and no one too much, or you are no longer a leader, you are the led.’