Queens' Play

  Lymond said, ‘And now, tell me: which of your charming colleagues came with the Queen Mother from Scotland?’

  Erskine’s face cleared. ‘By God, Francis, that’s a pack of weasels she has in her train this time … the whole Privy Council, pretty nearly. All the rogues she can’t trust at home. You’ll need to be careful.’

  There was a little inlaid spinet in the corner. Lymond had put down his wine; getting up, he wandered over to the instrument and perched before it. ‘They won’t know me. Who?’

  Erksine reeled them off. The Earl of Huntly was amongst them; and Lord Maxwell, and Lord James Hamilton, heir to the Governor of Scotland. He added, watching Lymond, ‘And two Douglases. James Douglas of Drumlanrig and Sir George.’

  Francis Crawford and the Douglas family were old opponents, and he looked pleased. ‘This is promising. Anyone else?’

  ‘A pack of Erskines.’ Tom was grinning. His family, father to son, were among the staunchest next the throne. Margaret his wife was here as a lady of honour; Jenny, Lady Fleming, his wife’s mother, was the little Queen’s governess; his wife’s young sisters and brother were her playmates. His own two brothers were in the train, and his father, now invalided and absent, small Mary’s guardian since she came to live in France.

  He went over the dispositions, and Lymond listened and remarked, ‘And with Erskines so plentiful, what am I doing here?’

  ‘Playing the spinet,’ said the Special Ambassador. ‘Too damned well.’

  The neat and tingling flow of notes continued. ‘It will cover our voices. None of your friends realize how gifted you are.’

  ‘Practically all of my friends know I can’t play on that thing. What else do you want to know? You don’t need to be told what the French court is like. It’s the most—’

  ‘It’s a hand-set maggot mound,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘I could teach you more than you would want to know about it.’ His fingers running over the keys, he spoke without rancour. ‘The universities, the prisons, the boudoirs and the brothels, the palaces and the paintings, the serenades, the banquets, the love-making, the hoof and hair of a heretic frying. Bed-talk and knife-talk and whip-talk. I know where it breeds. If there’s danger, I’ll find it. —I must go.’

  Rising at the same time, Erskine controlled his impulse to protest. Lymond had engaged to report his presence in France, and no more; and he had come promptly to his appointment. Tom said, ‘Have you been waiting long in Dieppe?’

  He caught Lymond’s raised brows; but the answer was perfectly matter-of-fact. ‘Five hours, that’s all.’

  Comprehension, like a searing stir in hot water, ran stinging over the skin. ‘Christ … you didn’t come in today with that boat with the hole?’

  ‘Come in?’ For a moment Lymond showed genuine feeling. ‘I damned nearly paddled in with the thing in my teeth. There was a catastrophic collision in the roads; the tavern flooded; nineteen dead and twenty-five injured; the master a ninny and the comite with enough bhang inside him to float an anvil.’

  In his excitement, Erskine strode to the windows and back. ‘I saw it. Saw her come in on her ear with the cannon all to port and her anchors rigged abeam, dammit. Rammed by a galliasse, weren’t you? Nine-tenths bad seamanship, they said, and one-tenth filthy luck.’

  ‘The Gouden Roos thought it was bad luck, I should think,’ said Lymond, amused. ‘After all, she was paid off to sink us.’

  Erskine sat down. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Has it occurred to anyone else?’

  ‘I doubt it. You’ve heard the accepted version of the crash.’

  Roused, Tom Erskine’s verdict was blunt. ‘This Irish masquerade is madness. How can you work if you’re being assaulted before you’ve even begun? Do I take it you are using the name of an actual person?’

  ‘Yes, of course. But one whose appearance is little known. Credit us with a little intelligence.’

  Lymond’s Irish sister-in-law Mariotta would have helped. Erskine exclaimed. ‘And so you are proceeding to the French Court to be indoctrinated by the French Crown on how to kick the English out of Ireland.’ He broke off. It was, he had always felt, the scheme of a power-drunk idiot. But he did not say so, and received the rare compliment of an explanation.

  ‘Yes. It remains,’ said Lymond, ‘a simple way of reaching the inner circle unidentified. My guess is that King Henri will allow O’LiamRoe a long, luxurious stay in which to savour the delights of an alliance with France. I hope so.’

  Erskine’s voice was still sharper than he knew. ‘And what about this attack? You can’t ask French protection and have a bodyguard dogging your heels. Who’s behind it?’

  Lymond’s voice was pure malice. ‘Won’t it be amusing to find out? What do you think the Queen Mother fears for most—her alliances or her life?’ He withdrew the bolt from the shuttered windows.

  ‘Without French troops and French money, she thinks Scotland will never fight free from the English.’

  ‘And there is a faction in France, they say, which disapproves of the de Guise family sending good French money abroad. I hope,’ said Lymond opening the window, ‘that nothing serious occurs. My intentions are purely frivolous.’

  Standing beside him, Erskine put a blunt question. ‘Why did you come here? Not because the Queen Mother asked it?’

  ‘The Queen Mother,’ said Lymond, ‘as you and she are well aware, has suggested this entirely as a means of committing me to her party, and is going to be disappointed. She has a hundred informers to hand.’

  ‘And every one of them watched,’ said Tom Erskine dryly. ‘Including my wife.’

  ‘I am aware,’ said Lymond distinctly, ‘that I am expected to do nothing in particular but raise the devil with ten pitch candles and a pipe of dead children. But I am prepared to spread my small benignities among my friends. I have time to spare.’

  There was a pause, heavier perhaps than either man intended. Then Lymond raised his hand and laid it, unjewelled and unfamiliar, on the Councillor’s broad shoulder. ‘Go to Flanders and your contracts, and leave the orgies to me.’ He withdrew his gaze and turning, slipped over the window-sill. ‘Sweet Clotho, where are you?’

  The night was dark. Tom Erskine, leaning out, saw the grim goddess suffer a flamboyant embrace; then the shadows moved, and the affronted fates were alone.

  Later that same night a watchman, passing the Porc-épic, saw one of its latticed windows glow red. He hammered on the door; the kitchen boys roused the house, and cooks, ostlers and turnspits surged upstairs to The O’LiamRoe’s room.

  The bed hangings were a whispering curtain of flame, and seams of fire had begun on the panelling. With brooms and carpets and pails they rushed to the bed, the bitter smoke in their eyes, and hurled the flaming cloths wide.

  The bed was empty, but for a shrivelled, untenanted nightshirt.

  The stabler himself, with Robin Stewart, led the wild search which went on while the fire died. They found Master Ballagh fast asleep in his cupboard bed reeking of aqua vitae; and left him there. They discovered The O’LiamRoe in the loft, curled up in the straw next to Dooly. He viewed with mild surprise the circle of lamplit faces above him, and as the agitated tale unfolded, slipped in his graceful condolences to the stabler. He had felt, he explained, a touch of cold between sheets, and had climbed out to join Piedar Dooly in his nest where, praise be, they were sleeping in no time as cosy as two new-laid eggs. He rose and, wrapped in his salt-splashed frieze cloak, went to look at the damage.

  The cross-questioning, the accusations, the polite enquiries went on for an hour between the servants, the innkeeper, the night watch and O’LiamRoe before Stewart finally forced the incident shut and sent everyone off to bed. Two things only had emerged from it. The inn staff were probably guiltless, and were convinced that some wild Irish practice had started the fire. The O’LiamRoe had no idea who started it, and was enjoying the excitement too much to care.

  When the throng had left him in
his room, alone with a new bed and Thady Boy, aroused at last, to share it with him, Phelim O’LiamRoe threw back his golden head, yawned, and letting the frieze cloak fall where it would, climbed into bed. The ollave’s dark face watched him. ‘Saints alive! Was that the one nightshirt you brought to the fair lands of France?’

  ‘True for you. And wasn’t it the lucky thing I didn’t have it on me at the time? D’you think that was an accident?’ said O’LiamRoe from the pillow.

  ‘I do not.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t? And,’ said the Prince of Barrow, one mild blue eye unexpectedly open, ‘did you think the sinking this afternoon was an accident?’

  The sweet-stringed timpan hardly bothered to look up. ‘I doubt it,’ he said, and drawing his outer garments carefully off, rolled them into a ball. ‘Your quarrels are your own affair. But I would say there is a lad or two anxious that you should not reach the King of France.’

  The Chieftain stretched, clasping his hands behind his uncouth head. ‘I was wondering,’ he agreed. ‘Yet can I think of a single slieveen who would work at it the like of that. Take a peck at me, maybe, with a morsel of steel on a black night; but it’s mortal lazy the worst of them are in the Slieve Bloom.’

  ‘What about the English?’ suggested Thady.

  ‘True for you. They’re the boys for being uncivil at sea. But I think,’ said O’LiamRoe, grinning quietly on the pillow, ‘that the English would rather have me on their side, and alive, than two rows of teeth on the underside of a boat. How would you fancy a free stay in England as well?’ And as the ollave shrugged, Phelim added, ‘Come here, lad.’

  Slowly, Thady Boy approached the bed. O’LiamRoe leaned on one elbow, and for a moment his blue eyes studied the dark, self-contained face of his secretary. Then he said, ‘Regretting you took the post, is it?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘You are so, Master Ballagh. A spruce, tender prince of a master the like of a dead sheep for quietness would suit your book better, would he not?’

  The ollave did not move. ‘Are you turning me off?’ he said.

  ‘God save you, no,’ said O’LiamRoe hospitably. ‘Would I live with one eye? It’s no secret that I haven’t a word of French and my English sprains its elbow now and then in the rush. Stay by all means if you want.’

  The ollave’s attentive face relaxed. He turned, and shying his coat neatly into a chair, continued to undress. ‘If Piedar Dooly has managed for twenty years, I can subsist, surely, for a matter of months,’ he said.

  ‘Piedar Dooly’s a born liar. Never look for a true word out of a man with his two front teeth crossed. It’s a poor omen when his very dentures are scandalized with the tales of him. Did you hear his latest?’

  ‘Was it worth hearing?’

  ‘It was, too. At the time of the fire, our Piedar heard someone open a window, and he cast about outside afterwards for traces. You know the false sea they’re putting up in the market-place?’

  ‘I remember.’

  ‘Our inflaming friend in a hurry did not. He fell into it, and left great muddy footprints all up the street until Dooly lost him.’

  ‘If he lost him, it was hardly worth telling.’

  ‘True for you, except for this thing: the footprints were of a man lacking the right heel.’

  ‘Or with his heel hurt?’

  ‘If you had set fire to the bedcurtains of a guest of the King of France and were running away, there would be a time or two when even a sore heel would hit the ground; and his did not. I wonder,’ said O’LiamRoe thoughtfully, ‘why he didn’t just stab me outright, now.’

  ‘Because you weren’t there?’ suggested the ollave, with a certain acidity.

  ‘I have a notion,’ said O’LiamRoe comfortably, ‘that it was a fright only they were hoping to give me,’ and turning over, he closed his eyes.

  There was silence. Thady Boy brooded. Then he scratched his dusty curls, ran a soot-blackened hand over his chin; considered, clearly, having a wash and thought better of it; and then, lifting up the ball of his jerkin, delved into a recess and brought out a bottle of spirits. He glanced across at O’LiamRoe. O’LiamRoe was fast asleep.

  ‘And devil the splash of fright there is on you, you great marmalade puss,’ said he. ‘And for an Irishman, you have the sorrow’s own want of common sense. So.’

  And he blew out the candles.

  The next day at breakfast, they had flattering news. A Court dignitary was arriving that morning to escort them, with Stewart, to Rouen. O’LiamRoe was pleased and interested. He had already admired the inn, the food and the Archer, whose padded silver and white, with spotless collar, fine hose and soft riding boots filled out a figure far from robust.

  No thought of his own attire, clearly, had crossed O’LiamRoe’s cloudless mind. The carpetbags, when pulled out to the linings, had produced one change of clothes; but though whole and clean, the Prince of Barrow’s dress was as bizarre as before; and Mr. Ballagh was in threadbare black and one or two smears from his breakfast. Only Robin Stewart appreciated that their appearance and manners constituted an emergency, and knew that Lord d’Aubigny had been called in to deal with it.

  Before he arrived, O’LiamRoe was asking eager questions. Would his lordship, for example, have the English?

  ‘Yes. He’s a Scotsman by origin,’ had said Stewart painstakingly. ‘Of the same surname as myself.’ He wondered how much about John Stewart of Aubigny he could suitably tell. That he was a cultivated gentleman who had once captained the King’s Garde de Corps of a hundred Scottish men-at-arms, but was now a Gentleman in Ordinary of the King’s Chamber, with a company of sixty lances to his name?

  John Stewart had once been his own captain. He was still, in a sense his superior—on duty the Archer was answerable, more often than not, to the behests of the King’s Gentlemen. So he could have told the fools more than they wanted to know of this Stewart, of royal name, whose ancestors had been Kings of Scotland. One branch of the family had remained in Scotland, and as lords of Lennox, had been among the greatest in the land. The other had married in France—powerful marriages, which made John Stewart now the relative, if only distantly, of both the Queen of France and the King’s mistress, Diane. And they had served France brilliantly in war, captaining the King’s Bodyguard for generations and giving France a marshal as famous as Bayard: services rewarded with position, money and land.

  All this, the Great John, present Lord d’Aubigny, had inherited, and it had done him as much good as Robin Stewart’s old suit of armour. For his brother the Earl of Lennox, having failed to marry the Queen Dowager and obtain the power he wanted in Scotland, had defected to her enemy England, with 10,000 stolen French crowns in his pocket, and had thereby forfeited all his Scottish estates. Brother Matthew, as it happened, had come out of all that little the worse, having had the forethought to marry Margaret, King Henry VIII’s niece, which brought him wealth and asylum in England, and the promise that one day he would govern Scotland on Henry’s behalf.

  But the King of France, where young Lennox had grown up, had been in no mood to be charitable, especially about the lost money; and since he could not touch Lennox, had seized his brother, John Stewart of Aubigny, instead, and thrown him into prison, deprived of office and honours. From there the present King had released him, on coming to the throne. The incarceration, in Stewart’s view, had not done his former captain much good.

  ‘A Scotsman!’ O’LiamRoe was saying. ‘Then roll out the Latin, boy! Air your astronomy! We mustn’t let down the old country before the great chief ones, with the silver buttons like mill wheels on their shirts!’

  Very soon after that, Lord d’Aubigny arrived, very creditably got up in blistered velvet, with a curled beard, and a diamond or two, and a neat, small cap on his head, sewn with pearls. With him were two young noblemen and a priest.

  Stewart smelled the scent even before they came in, and knew which of the boys had come. They had amused themselves dressing in full court style, with th
eir fans; as the introductions were made he saw O’LiamRoe’s eyebrows shoot up. The priest, master of the hydrography school, started to bow and considerately stopped; the young men, with joyous accord, bowed three times each, right knee bent, bonnet low in the left hand, gloves gripped at the stomach in the right.

  O’LiamRoe smiled widely. Lord d’Aubigny sketched a bow, advanced steadily and kissed the Prince of Barrow on both cheeks.

  ‘Man, you smell nice,’ said The O’LiamRoe appreciatively as they sat. ‘I see how it is. The O’Donnell, God save him, came back from France the very same, tasselled like a cushion and with a particular smell. Excuse me.’ And grasping his secretary, he drew him into the circle. ‘My travelling ollave. You’ll forgive him. He had the manners all bled out of him in the water, and is dead sober on me today besides. He can talk Greek itself when he has the drop in: I got him to sing at the milking and every cow in it gave off pure alcohol.’

  Lord d’Aubigny was not quick-witted. For a moment he was wordless, the big handsome face reddening under the pearls. Behind, the two gallants were scarlet; and it was the priest who stepped in, his eye twinkling. ‘We are all glad to see you; and sorry to hear of the shocking voyage into harbour.’

  ‘Shocking! A Flemish galliasse. You can’t trust them. Criminally poor seamanship. Letters have been sent,’ said Lord d’Aubigny sharply, to reduce the levity he sensed behind him and suspected in front. ‘The King himself will make amends.’

  ‘Ah, no apologies,’ said O’LiamRoe, his oval, soft-whiskered face alight with freckles and good humour. ‘If you’d seen Thady Boy saving the navy: a kick, step and a lep and his hocks over the yardarm like a handful of syboes.…’

  Master Ballagh stood for a good deal; but he brought that to a halt. He said sourly, ‘The O’LiamRoe is sensible of course, my lord, of the honour done him by his grace the King in inviting him to France. Ireland is not a country of wealth naturally. Our crops are few and our roads are bad, so that—’