O’LiamRoe cleared his throat. ‘You go too fast for me. Stewart named two men. One was Lennox, and he’s denied it. Who was the other?’
Lymond rose, and O’LiamRoe watched him come, walking like a cat over the polished floor, his hands clasped, his fair head tilted, his face grave. There was no trace of a limp, and a world of malice in his eye. ‘Oh, come, Phelim,’ he said. ‘You’ve spoken to Stewart. If he’s going to France for your sake, he’s surely bequeathed you some of his handsomer secrets.’
And the Prince of Barrow was silent, for Lymond was perfectly right. He knew, and had known since leaving the Tower, that the man behind the conspiracy was John Stewart, Lord d’Aubigny, Robin Stewart’s own captain—the foolish sybarite who was thrown into prison and then inadequately soothed; the man with whom Robin Stewart had quarrelled, and through whose wiser, subtler, clever English relatives the whole wasteful business had probably started.
Part Four
THE LOAN AND THE LIMIT
The law of loan among the Feine: A loan with limit; viz, Yield me my property after this limited day. A loan without limit, its time not tied or determined, is the right of him who takes it. For the world even is the loan of a house to man; for from this is the world: God gave it to thee. Thou gavest it to me. Until God shall reckon whose right it is, I shall not take it.
I: Dieppe: Illegal After Screaming
II: Angers: Boarshead and Apple
III: Châteaubriant: A Bed-Tick Full of Harpstrings
IV: Châteaubriant: The Price of Satire
V: Châteaubriant: Proof Without Love or Hatred
VI: Châteaubriant: Satin and Scarlet
I
Dieppe:
Illegal After Screaming
She is free to the man with whom she has made an assignation until she screams, and after she screams. The man with whom she has made no assignation is safe till she screams; but it is illegal after screaming.
ON FRIDAY the 14th of May, Francis Crawford and Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, took ship for Dieppe, France, for the second time together. Under the fond grey-green wind of the west, the sea set to hissing like silk, the timbers dipped, and the wheaten canvas ripe in the pod spilled cold air into the poop, where O’LiamRoe sat and sneezed.
Intimations of doom had attended the Prince of Barrow at last. There was a woman he did not intend to see; a hypocrite he meant to see chastened; an autocratic courtier he wished to chastise. Grimly bolstered by these evidences of his caprice, O’LiamRoe was being hard pushed in private to deny he was going to France because, like sawteeth on a crown wheel, his destiny was locked hard in theirs.
Lymond, ranging the boat, his neat head stirred by the wind, tended rather to song. (‘Les Dames de Dieppe font Confiâmes qui belles sont.’) Presumably, he knew perfectly what was before him. Nothing of violence; d’Aubigny’s guilt would take care of that. But a fine ripping of masks and shredding of tinsel: the awful denunciation of the elegant herald as none other than their old drinking crony Thady Boy.
He would be able, in his own defence, to quote all that he had done to capture Stewart and expose d’Aubigny. A waste of breath. The embarrassed rage of his lords and lovers would rise to him in his safe place, thought O’LiamRoe lyrically, and tarnish every shallow spur of pseudo-gold.
From Portsmouth to Dieppe, no responsible word passed between O’LiamRoe and his former ollave. In the city of limes, the Prince of Barrow and Piedar Dooly would take horse for the Loire, there to enjoy the hospitality of Scottish Queens and French King alike until Robin Stewart should arrive for his reckoning.
Francis Crawford was not travelling with them. Lymond, it seemed, had business first in Dieppe. He paused once to explain that the name of his business was Martine.
‘Busy child,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, and in his voice was the sharp derision of their earliest acquaintance. ‘Do you not be plotting too hard, or the strings of your charm will fall down.’
They parted, with dry exactitude, on the quay; and by afternoon O’LiamRoe was on his way south.
La Belle Veuve, whose other name was Martine, took an open breath, the two dimples like fingermarks in her cheeks, and half shut the door on the princely dark blue silk on the threshold. ‘Wait, monsieur. Do I remember you?’
‘Let us see,’ said Lymond helpfully. She had forgotten how quickly he moved. ‘You remember me now. The travelling gleeman.’
The demonstration was brief and rather savagely efficient. Wrenching free, composed, bright-eyed, to lead him into her parlour she said, ‘Well, Dionysius. You are yourself again.’
He was uninformative. ‘Bathed overnight in a pan of new milk. And you needn’t think I am here because of the manifest comforts. My mind is purely on commerce.’
‘Mine also,’ said La Belle Veuve placidly. She was a slender, clever woman, no longer young, who had been salaried gouvernante to the filles publiques in the old King’s day, when a travelling army of young and distinguished prostitutes was by no means easy to rule. ‘But pray be seated, none the less. We thought you had been roasted to death.’
‘Singed a little, I must admit,’ said Lymond. ‘But you should have seen the Druid.… Has she come in?’
‘A week ahead of time.’
He did not need to explain. The Flemish galliasse of that September attack on La Sauvée, repaired at her home port and dispatched then abroad, had been a care of Martine’s for many months, and it was she who had found the one jettisoned matelot who had told them all they so far knew. She listened now to the particular oath Lymond used and said, ‘Is it now of such moment?’
He laughed, his annoyance gone, and examined the fine rings on her hand. ‘Have you seen the Three Queens and the Three Dead Men? You will, if this doesn’t succeed. Did Mathhias come to you?’
Mathhias was captain of the Gouden Roos, which had had orders, all these months ago, to ram and drown O’LiamRoe. La Belle Veuve watched Lymond from under her long lashes. ‘I went to him,’ she said. He would not, and did not, think it necessary to comment on the magnitude of the service. She added, ‘The Roos was financed by Antonius Beck of Rouen.’
‘A French merchant controlling a Flemish trading ship?’
‘His father came from Bruges. He has made a fortune in illegal trading and a second fortune out of piracy. That is Mathhias’s work. The Spanish treasure ships don’t begin to run until they see the cannon mounted. This is where he stays in Rouen.… Why are you laughing? Francis,’ said Martine, who in her own way was a great and powerful woman, ‘You are Hell’s own Apollo.’
‘Quetzalcoatl,’ said Lymond, and shutting his eyes, crowed like a fiend. ‘Ma belle, ma belle, you have rebuilt the walls of Rome.’ And setting himself, lightly, to please her, he would explain nothing else.
From Rouen he sent her a little barrel, plated with gold, with a string of twelve-carat pearls in it, from which she guessed he had discovered the warehouses of M. Antonius Beck.
The presses were silent and the house empty of society when Lymond called at the Hôtel Hérisson, Rouen; for the sculptor was working, the chisel sweet as a dulcimer over the rumbling ground-bass of oaths.
The name Crawford of Lymond meant nothing to him. The chime of the chisel stopped and, waiting outside the cellar door, his visitor listened with amusement to a profane exchange between Michel Hérisson and the steward sent to announce him. After a moment, Lymond pushed open the door and wandered down the steps by himself.
The statue was of the giant Tityus, felled and twisted, with the vulture sitting on his chest. Lymond had seen it, hewn into half-detailed torment when gout, in classical retribution, had forced the sculptor to break off. The gout, you could see, had not left him. He was working in spite of it, his thick forearms knotted in his white fustian gown, an old dust-cap buttoned under his chin, the grooves in his broad, high-coloured face wet and silted with dust. Round his neck, as he turned, was visible a sad rag half stuffed into his collar. Lymond recognized it, shrunken and sweaty, as Bri
ce Harisson’s smart, braided doublet. He said quietly, ‘I have a message from the Prince of Barrow, M. Hérisson. I shall not take up much of your time.’
Below tufted brows like his brother’s, Michel Hérisson’s hot, round eyes ran over his visitor, from the brushed yellow hair to the dark jewels and the thoughtful clothes. He said, ‘My god, a Fatimite!’ without undue force, and dismissed the steward with a thumb. Francis Crawford’s eyes were on the Tityus. There in the dust-filled cavity of the mouth, the arched ribs and splayed hands, the stony gougings of gut was all one needed to know of the mind of Michel Hérisson, whose late brother Brice had so gallantly served his country by exposing Robin Stewart’s perfidy to the French.
‘Damn you,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘I’m working like a horse treadle in an iron furnace. Look again.’
The big, dirty face glared, suddenly impatient. ‘Christ—’
Through the haze their eyes met, and held. ‘Christ.’ repeated the sculptor with an intonation totally different. ‘It’s Thady Boy Ballagh!’ And with a roar of joyous recognition, Michel Hérisson leaped to embrace him.
Unconstitutional activity was Hérisson’s life-force. It was enough for him to be told Lymond’s purpose in France and to shriek at his assorted escapades and at the whole inspired lunacy of his masquerade without requiring to know for whom, if anybody, he was doing these things. The visit had been worth the risk. Michel Hérisson’s kind of morality was highly personal and was based on fierce and passionately defended convictions. He would have hounded to death for bowelless principles and shoddy thinking any man setting out to murder a child from some sort of distorted crusading zeal. For Robin Stewart and his hurried, muddle-minded expediencies, he had nothing but careless contempt, tempered by a fairly accurate understanding. In the fallen giant and the vulture were all that the sculptor would ever say of the sword stroke with which Robin Stewart had killed his brother.
Rumour had told Michel Hérisson what all France knew, that the Archer was on his way now to Court; the sad embassy from London with Brice’s effects had told him part of that story. He now heard for the first time of Lord d’Aubigny’s share, and his own hurt exploded into fury against Robin Stewart’s corrupt master. Lymond nursed it, delicately, and introduced the name of Antonius Beck.
‘Yon raddled neep-end!’ said Michel Hérisson, overflowing joyfully into the doric. ‘Keeps his lordship supplied with stolen silver at half the market price. Used to buy off me, too, till I found what he was up to. By God, I could tell you—’
‘Do,’ said Lymond; and at the end of a vitriolic recital, related what he knew of him. ‘I want proof from him, Michel, that it was for d’Aubigny that he arranged to wreck La Sauvée last year.’
The sculptor, spread on a box with his swollen feet on a bracket, looked from under his eyebrows at the other man. ‘Stewart will tell everything about d’Aubigny, won’t he? D’ye think his lordship will wriggle out of it?’
‘Yes,’ said Lymond placidly.
The round eyes continued to stare. ‘I see. Have you seen Beck?’
‘He’s not at home. I haven’t managed to trace him in three somewhat rigorous days. And I can’t afford to stay any longer.’
‘Have you any other source of proof, man?’
‘One. A last resort, only.’
‘With that lamentable mess,’ said Michel Hérisson tartly, ‘nothing should be a last resort. If it’s proof, use it. I’ll look after Beck. I know enough about him to bring his scalp out in quills. He’ll confess … once I find him. But if I were you, man, I would go and make sure of your witness.’
‘With a bloody great chisel,’ said Lymond.
At the tone, the sculptor’s light lashes flickered. ‘A woman, is it? Why get dainty over that? The alchemy’s different, but the claws are the same.’
‘Not my property,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘The alchemy, at least. I’ve had a taste of the claws. Right so came an adder out of a little heath bush, and it stung the knight on the foot. You confine yourself to tearing the God’s truth in handfuls out of the elusive M. Beck.’
Hérisson got to his feet. ‘Christ, I’m going to enjoy it. Let’s go and eat. Man, I wouldn’t have known you. You’ve—’
‘—Sinned against my brother the ass. I trust the rulers of France are going to be equally deceived. My brother is at Orléans, waiting for me with the Court news. O’LiamRoe was to arrange that.’
‘You think you can fool them a second time?’ Michel Hérisson, his gaze critical, helped himself, limping, to Lymond’s near shoulder. ‘… God, I’m glad I’m not your brother. If they find out you’re Thady Boy and d’Aubigny’s still in favour, then—’
‘Then how happy we shall be,’ said Lymond gently, ‘to have the confession of M. Beck.’
In Orléans Richard Lord Culter, whom Michel Hérisson did not envy, awaited his brother in the inn called the Little God of Love; a choice on Lymond’s part reassuring in its felicity. Elsewhere in the inn also awaited the main portion of Vervassal’s considerable luggage, his page, his valet, his trumpet, his three men at arms and his groom, as supplied by the Queen Dowager, dispatched directly to await their master’s arrival.
Richard, admitted late to the Queen Mother’s confidence and owing the better part of his new information to O’LiamRoe, could find nothing either chastened or repentant in the image Phelim had drawn for him—an account in which O’LiamRoe had not seen fit to include any mention of Oonagh O’Dwyer.
With mild curiosity therefore, and no more, Richard from the Dowager’s side had noted the coming of another Irishman brought by George Paris to the hospitable Court of France: a burly man of great height, with filbert cheeks, black brows and a round calyx of satin-black hair trimmed just above. After his initial reception at Court, Cormac O’Connor stayed at Neuvy, with the Irishwoman Richard had already met: a retiral advised because he proved greatly given to fighting, a pastime which also appealed to the Queen Dowager’s disgruntled Scotsmen.
The Queen Dowager approved of Cormac O’Connor; the Prince of Barrow did not. In his mind’s eye Richard cherished a picture of the only occasion, to his knowledge, when O’LiamRoe and Cormac O’Connor had so far come face to face. O’Connor, from his meaty eminence, tanned shiny as horn, had turned narrow eyes on the washed and rose-pink person below him, and had said, ‘My faith, but the Slieve Bloom have been hard put to it, surely, to pick up a prince. Did they feed you well, now, in London?’
‘Nearly as well,’ said O’LiamRoe mildly, ‘as in the Slieve Bloom, in the one year in six that some bodach isn’t making his hero’s mark battle-marching across it.’
‘Fair weather after you,’ the big man had said, with something approaching a laugh. ‘If slavery with a full belly appeals to you. You will excuse me if Cormac O’Connor is not in it.’
‘Ah, the silly fellow you are,’ had replied O’LiamRoe, opening his pale eyes wide, the growing hair silky over his brow. ‘What for would I be wanting Cormac O’Connor any time of my life, or any possession of Cormac O’Connor’s, or any ambition of Cormac O’Connor’s, or any thing which he thinks he has and he does not have at all?’
And the big man, at that, had raised the glazed brown back of his hand as if to strike the other; but Richard had moved forward and Cormac, wheeling, had marched without speaking away.
‘Ah, ’tis a Crawford,’ the Prince of Barrow had said, an odd, breathless look on his tender-skinned face. ‘Gallant champions all. If you catch sight of a girl called Martine, you might tell her to make short work of it; for the steam is fairly beginning to come off the darling situation here.’
Then Francis arrived, exactly on time. In the private room he had hired, sparing comment on either illness or recovery, ‘You incredible liar,’ said Lord Culter calmly. ‘You promised to be out of the country by Lent.’
‘Always excepting a damnum fatale. I had a damnum fatale,’ said Lymond, settling luxuriously in a doublet as soft as a glove. ‘I’ll take you to Sevigny some day. Nic
k Applegarth looks after it for me—he left a leg on one of our common battlefields. And how is Robin Stewart, by nature privily mixed?’
‘On his way to Angers, I understand,’ said Richard. ‘Throwing off confessions like a fire stick. His best so far was at Calais, so they tell me. A copy is on its way to the King now.’
Recently Lymond had acquired a direct gaze which his brother found vaguely disquieting. ‘So O’LiamRoe’s testimony will not be required,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘And where is the Prince of Barrow now studying the hazels of scientific composition?’
‘He’s going to Angers as well. He got an informal welcome, but not unfriendly,’ said Richard. ‘He and Dooly are in lodgings, but come to Court quite a lot,’ And he related the tale of the great confrontation.
‘Oh, God,’ said Lymond. ‘O’Connor will toss him one-handed from Neuvy straight into Tír-Tairngiri. And the Queen? D’Aubigny won’t attempt anything now, of course. He must be sitting at home in quite a ferment wondering whether Robin Stewart will denounce him.’
Lord Culter said sharply, ‘I thought he had already.’
‘He has hinted to Warwick. But he’s unlikely to amplify the hint. It makes no difference to him; he’s going to die anyway. And where his dear John Stewart is concerned, the King as you know would believe nothing without proof; and probably nothing with it either. And proof is what I have come back to find.… Other people have been working for d’Aubigny, after all,’ said Lord Culter’s brother, his gaze limpid. ‘I have hopes of tracing one of them already. Someone in Dieppe has found out for me a connection between d’Aubigny and the owner of the galliasse which nearly sank O’LiamRoe and myself on arrival—a man called Antonius Beck, who has probably done a good deal, one way or another, for d’Aubigny. I have a friend in Rouen who seems to think he can trace Master Beck without any trouble, and who is quite certain he can make him confess. And in addition,’ said Lymond, doing his work thoroughly, ‘there is a woman who knows at least as much as Robin Stewart about what has been going on. I shall deal with her myself.’