Queens' Play

  From his chair, in absolute disbelief, O’LiamRoe saw the alabaster box coming, cast with casual accuracy to pitch against the limbs so exquisitely exposed by the high cut of the tabard. It was a right-handed catch, for a quick man. Lymond flung up his left hand to intercept the blow, but it was O’LiamRoe’s arm, shooting forward, which diverted the box. It brought him down on his knees, blundering unavoidably against Lymond’s chair as he fell. The heavy case, grazed by his hand, shot off sideways, half-opening its alabaster mouth, and struck the monkey hard on the neck.

  The blow was mortal. Without a sound, the furry thing dropped; and O’LiamRoe, crouching, caught it loose in his hands and laid it down, the winking chain dangling. Above him Francis Crawford, his face like a mask, bent too, but looked at neither O’LiamRoe nor the monkey. Lingering helpfully, after one curious glance, the Prince of Barrow looked at the white and tawny beauty of Margaret Lennox and thought of another animal and another death.

  ‘He smelt,’ said the Countess, and sitting back, watched O’LiamRoe resume his seat. Lymond, scooping up the dead monkey, laid it on the table beside his chair. ‘But at least we have enjoyed, my dear, the harrowing display of your impotence. What do you wish of me? Money? Or work?’

  ‘… For to give good smell and odour to the Emperor, and to void away all wicked airs and corruptions? Margaret, this air of chaste reproof—you have joined the Reformed religion, I know it. No more transubstantiation and other naughtiness? Matthew has turned Lutheran?’

  In some way, in his turn he had silenced her. He added chidingly, ‘No?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then I should advise,’ said Lymond gently, ‘that he should give it serious thought. Meantime, to save you the trouble of asking him to leave, I have come for The O’LiamRoe.’ And the Prince of Barrow, thinking fast, found his former ollave addressing him. ‘Will you come to Durham House with me? I can wait outside while Piedar packs.’

  They were involving him in something bitter and dangerous, in which he had neither responsibility nor concern. O’LiamRoe had no intention of spending a minute more than he need now at Hackney. But equally he was bent, single-mindedly, on shutting Francis Crawford’s affairs out of his life. He had no wish to go to Durham House. He would go to an inn. He intimated this last, briefly.

  Margaret smiled at them both, her ribboned sleeves slack in her lap. ‘My dear man, your charming juggler, your Abdallah al Kaddah here, won’t allow that. He wants you to help him take Robin Stewart back to France.’ And holding the herald’s eyes with her own, she laughed.

  His bright head resting on the chair, Lymond watched her undisturbed. ‘Would you care to wager?’ he said.

  ‘Wager with me.’ It was a new voice: a grating tenor, breaking in from the open door at their backs. O’LiamRoe turned as Matthew Lennox came in, his pouched eyes glittering, something black and gold turning between his white hands. ‘Your boy was loth to give it up, Crawford, but I felt you might need its support.’ He threw the herald’s baton lightly, and Vervassal caught it. ‘Wager with me,’ said Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, standing hands clasped before the fire, his bright gaze on them all. ‘I have more to lose.’

  Then, smoothly, he moved to refresh their wine. ‘If you set foot in France you will be arrested as the late Master Ballagh, who designed the treasonable accident in Amboise castle. George is no lover of yours.’

  ‘George’s son’s wife is now the heiress of Morton,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘And however much anyone may suspect that Thady Boy Ballagh and I are one, no one can prove it.’

  ‘Forgive me,’ said O’LiamRoe. They all looked at him, and he twiddled his fingers. ‘ ’Tis over-curious I am, that I know—but tell me, why should any of us escort Robin Stewart to France? Has he not confessed?’

  Lennox smiled; and after a moment Lymond acknowledged it. ‘Yes, quite. Thus perishes a minor state secret, que Dieus assolile.—He has confessed, Phelim; but for his own manly reasons Warwick is unlikely to provide us with a copy of the confession, however expurgated. It is, after all, the only direct evidence against Stewart, and if Warwick withholds it, Stewart might be persuaded to be discreet in what he says about his lordship himself. And lacking that confession, my dear, Stewart might possibly prove hard to convict. Hence the desire for your testimony.’

  ‘What a shame, now,’ said O’LiamRoe blandly, his smooth face milk-warm in the sun, his shining elbows raised, smoothing his hair. ‘The ill-lucky thing that it is; but I shall be needed straight back in the Slieve Bloom this summer, and time to travel to France I have not.’

  ‘You needn’t trouble,’ said Matthew Lennox. ‘You won’t be needed. Stewart’ll never leave the Tower alive.’

  O’LiamRoe was tired of being regarded as foolish. ‘Do you say so? I would say, from my reading of matters, that Warwick’s whole standing depends on Stewart getting safely to France.’

  It was the Countess who answered, out of the brittle silence, her husband knew so well how to induce. ‘Naturally Lord Warwick wants him alive,’ she said. ‘No one is more concerned about this than his lordship. But Stewart, you see, has attempted suicide twice and is now trying to starve himself to death.’ She rose slowly, a tall woman, splendidly built. ‘Matthew, the Prince is leaving us. Forgive me; I have things to arrange.’

  In this vast house, packed with servants, there was no need for her to go. Lymond’s voice pleasantly said, ‘Don’t retreat, Countess. You are not being pursued.’

  She halted, her head up; but her husband broke in. Where do you go, O’LiamRoe? To an inn?’

  ‘The Master of Culter will maybe advise me.’ In this bandying of titles he had remembered, suddenly, Lymond’s own.

  ‘Who?’ It was Lady Lennox’s voice. Then she laughed, a laugh of free and genuine amusement, her eyes not on him but on Lymond, his head back, his gaze perfectly unmoved. ‘Prince, you have a good deal to learn. Did you think he was a gentleman’s heir, with his borrowed tabard and his gems? Ireland has triumphed, O’LiamRoe—the traditional stab in the back. Mariotta, Culter’s wife, has given birth to a son. A per robert, my dear. Whose, of course …’

  There was a tiny silence. Then O’LiamRoe saw her take a quick breath, her eyes flying to Francis Crawford, but Crawford was not looking at her. Between Lennox and Lymond there passed something unsaid: a single, white-hot flash of enmity that could be felt. Then with a curious, smooth-looking twist, Lymond got to his feet. ‘Do these things matter?’ he said.

  ‘Dhia, they matter to the lucky ones, so,’ said O’LiamRoe placidly. ‘There’s Lady Fleming, now. The news came down from Scotland just yesterday, and the whole court agog. A boy, it is. A fine, bastard boy for the great King of France.’

  It was well meant; but although he knew quite a lot, the reaction found him nonplussed. Standing still at his side, his clothes aflame in the sun, his eyes half-closed against the glare, Lymond turned, and laying the herald’s baton deliberately down, stood empty-handed before the Countess of Lennox. Her face pale, her eyes sparkling, she laughed. ‘The Flemings? Whores to a woman,’ she said.

  Her husband, O’LiamRoe saw, had moved away. Francis Crawford said nothing. But his gaze, even and cold, continued to hold hers until, in the end, the woman’s eyes shifted. ‘Some love for a living,’ said Lymond. ‘And some kill.’ And raising the corpse of the monkey in his jewelled hands, he laid it in her arms like a chrisom child, and bending the golden head, bowed.

  They left together in the end; O’LiamRoe outwardly calm over a jumble of uneasy emotion, fidgeting to be free of this rare and troublesome ghost but chained, for the hour at least, by the burden of a vague and indefinable debt. In the street Lymond, his page dismissed, said, ‘There is an inn not very far away. I don’t suggest that you stay there, but we could rent a room for an hour and talk. I’m sorry you had to witness so much private unpleasantness, as well as my sudden resuscitation. I might have guessed she wouldn’t have told you.’

  He paused again and said, ‘If you were enjoyin
g your stay, I must apologize again. But they have fallen out with Warwick, and in fact would have found it unwise to keep you much longer. But you probably have gathered a little about all that.’

  ‘A little,’ said O’LiamRoe. After a moment he said, ‘Is it far, this inn?’ And when Lymond did not answer him, he said, ‘Give me your reins.’ But at the touch of his hand the other man, withdrawing suddenly, said, ‘Good God, no. It isn’t far. The chimney pots there, over the trees.’ And they rode on after that, separately in silence.

  It was O’LiamRoe who sent for food and wine and O’LiamRoe, in the end, who ate, discoursing at gallant length in his most prodigious blossoming of whimsy, on every topic in heaven and earth open to a literary-minded Celt in their private room at the Swan. In between eating, he scowled at Piedar Dooly who, in between serving, scowled at the bleached and resurrected ollave, blazing with undeserved riches that would have dazzled the Pope, who lay on his back before the jumping wood fire, his tabard off, his head sunk in a cushion, juggling absently, over and over, one-handed, with a crown and some testons.

  O’LiamRoe, who had expected to find him a good deal less formidable lying flat like a schoolboy under his feet, became aware, as he ended his meal, that Lymond was merely waiting for him to finish. The Prince of Barrow got up, remarked, ‘Piedar Dooly, let you look for a fine lady scowler somewhere else down below,’ and as the door slammed, came and curled his comfortable unhandy person at the end of the hearth.

  ‘Talk away,’ he said. ‘So long as this thing is quite clear. A week on Tuesday, ’Tis the Slieve Bloom for me. Neither England nor France, I find, is quite to my taste.’

  The little coins showered through the thin fingers. Trapping the crown piece, Lymond flipped it sideways into the flames and lay with one arm under his head, watching the silver run, the king’s face sagging over his armour, miserably, until it mixed with his horse. ‘What did they offer you for your goodwill and your horse and your kernes and your gallowglasses?’

  ‘Enough,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Or even too much, depending on how you look at it. I didn’t care for the look of the Irish pages they have. I admit the Slieve Bloom isn’t Upper Ossory, but it would be a sad, unnatural thing to beget a silly foreign creature like those to sit at my fireside and table.’ He paused, and then said, ‘They are in a queer taking, surely, over this man Stewart. Why should they not wish him convicted?’

  Lymond, who had turned, moved his eyes back to the fire. ‘Because Warwick is working hard towards a closer alliance with France; and he greeted with just a little more warmth than he would have anyone know Stewart’s offer to dispose of Mary in return for cash and favour and a nice little manor somewhere. He must, sooner or later, hand him over to France. But Warwick has probably offered at least to hold back all the English evidence against Stewart, if Stewart keeps quiet. There is no other proof worth speaking of, and Stewart can always claim that Harisson was mad. He might have a chance.’

  ‘Well, God save you. Whether they can prove it or not, the French won’t let him out of their sight,’ said O’LiamRoe easily. ‘There seems little need to chew up your tongue on that score, unless it’s dead set you are on flaming swords and the like. Did you suspect Stewart in France, now? Was that why he poisoned you?’

  An odd expression, half-understanding, half-rueful, rested for a moment on Lymond’s face. Then he said, ‘I did. But that wasn’t why he tried to kill me.’

  ‘Why then?’ O’LiamRoe, speaking in idleness, recalled suddenly Stewart on his knees, in that bedroom in Blois.

  ‘He had found out who I was. He knew, you see, that it was one of us. He guessed at the wrong one.… But you knew that, Phelim.’

  He had known. Open-eyed, staring across the fireplace to the blank plaster wall, he saw the flaming curtains of the Porc-épic, the tennis court, the looming galliasse, the helmeted footpads jumping out of the shadows in a dark street in Blois. But his roused understanding showed him the edge of something else too, which fumblingly he tried to disentangle, his face blank as the wall. Lymond said quickly, ‘But the point was that the attacks didn’t stop when you and Robin Stewart left. They simply transferred to me.

  ‘Since, at the end of it, I was supposed to be dead, I let it appear that I was dead. And to make quite sure that I should inconvenience no one any longer, the rumour has been put about that I was the author of the accident in the first place. Hence Lennox’s kindly suggestion that I should find it difficult to re-enter France. We shall see. In fact, apart from the Erskines, the Queen Dowager and my brother, and one or two allies, only one person that matters knows for sure that I’m not dead.’

  Lymond had not moved. He spoke into the fire, lucidly as O’LiamRoe had heard him sometimes in the early days demolish some wild argument of Michel Hérisson’s. Yet the Irishman, his soft hands clasped firm on his knees, felt his stretched nerves begin to play with his breathing. He said, striving to push it all aside, ‘You are saying there is another man in it, who wished the little Queen dead?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Francis Crawford, and turning, looked with reflective eyes at the flushed fair face of O’LiamRoe. ‘I’ve given you no reason, I suppose, to think me other than bent on sport or revenge. But the facts are these. Robin Stewart had an employer. I hoped to draw him away from this man, and failed. Whether of his own accord, or because the two quarrelled, Stewart abandoned his principal and fled home to try to sell his services elsewhere. Whatever happens to Stewart, somewhere in France there lives still a man who has sworn to try to make away with the little Queen. Stewart knows who he is. So does one other person who might talk. I have to choose which to … persuade.’

  O’LiamRoe didn’t know that his face had suddenly grown white. Sharply he said, ‘That great silly fellow would be wax in your hands. There he is in the Tower, and you a herald with all your great powers. What ails you to visit him?’

  There was a little silence. Then Lymond moved, drew a sharp breath, and relaxed. ‘I have, Phelim,’ he said. ‘He won’t see me. And he is fasting to death.’

  ‘The devil choke him,’ said O’LiamRoe deliberately. ‘I am not going to France.’

  It was an admission; as the words left him, he realized it. But Lymond took it no further. He merely said, staring still into the fire, ‘I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to visit Robin Stewart in the Tower, and either to get from him the name of his patron, or force him somehow to see me.’

  Retreating wildly, bruised already by the forces gathering about him, The O’LiamRoe said, ‘I thank you kindly, but I’ve had my true fill of secrets. With the whole force of these old Queens behind you, and Warwick half out of his skin in case the poor fellow dies, you can hardly fail, surely.’

  ‘I think not,’ said Lymond. O’LiamRoe could hear the hiss as the other man let go his breath; then with a movement on the surface perfectly easy, Lymond turned over at his feet and, lying still, his head invisible beneath his long fingers, said, ‘Tell me. Why would you not go back to France?’

  So this was how it was coming. With a grimness new to him, O’LiamRoe said, ‘Let you be still. There is nothing more of this to discuss.’

  ‘We shall discuss no more than is necessary,’ the even voice said. ‘Why would you not go back? You must know that she tried to protect you. She tried to keep you from returning to the castle that night. And she offered you … almost anything you desired, I would guess, to go away from Blois. Your face told as much.’

  The name of Oonagh O’Dwyer, lying like a banked fire under their words for these ten minutes past, had never yet been spoken. There was no need. Illumination and despair equally in his heart, O’LiamRoe said, ‘After the accident … she helped you too?’

  Bronze as a penny in the firelight, the head at his feet moved assent. Then without looking up, Lymond said, ‘She knows for whom Robin Stewart was working—she was working for the same man herself. If Stewart dies, either you or I must go back to France and force her to tell us.’

  ‘No!?
?? said O’LiamRoe sharply.

  The hands came down flat from Francis Crawford’s face, but he stared still at the rug. ‘No? Why not? She likes you. We must find out what she knows. Or the child dies.’

  ‘I have told you.’ O’LiamRoe’s own voice was colourless. ‘I will not go back.’

  ‘Why, Phelim? Why? Why? Why?’

  Blazing, blue, the eyes fastened on him like live things in Lymond’s uplifted, white face. ‘Why?’

  ‘Because,’ said O’LiamRoe baldly and terribly, ‘she is the mistress of Cormac O’Connor.’

  In the face below him there died slowly both the anger and the light. Other changes were there, but in the shadows O’LiamRoe could not see them: only the top of Francis Crawford’s head, held in his hand. Then Lymond spoke, without triumph, without indeed any emotion at all. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, ‘whether you knew.’

  The circle was complete. All the turmoil of feeling sown in him by the creature lying at his feet slammed and spouted in a gush of pure, boiling anger: the anger of abused innocence and hurt pride and stubborn blindness leaping back from the light. O’LiamRoe stuck out a booted foot, and with a jerk that nearly sent him on his own face, threw Lymond head and shoulders back to the light. ‘You’re so damned brilliant,’ said Phelim. ‘You know everything. It’s hard-set you’d be to give yourself a dull Saturday afternoon. We’re all puppets—not the old Queens only, but the rest of us, man, woman and child, looking the fools of the world.’

  ‘Not of my making,’ said Lymond. His eyes, in the full light, were animal-bright.