But Tosh had only met the ollave through Abernaci, and told Stewart nothing else that was new. From the litter on the floor, the Archer selected an old, used woodblock and fiddled with it. He had assumed that Thady Boy’s history was all his, as well as his friendship. The ollave had been far from overflowing with his confidences, as The O’LiamRoe was, but he had not been reticent. And this violent and blighting episode in his life, for so it must have been, had not been entrusted to Stewart.
The Archer, stirring from his insubstantial dream of mutual confidence, waited for the familiar plucking of pain at his guts. Tosh was still talking when Stewart got up and, taking his leave a good deal more abruptly than was polite, strode off, forgetting his ointment.
When he went back for it later he found, to his relief, that the blunt little Aberdonian was out.
The Archer’s first impulse had been to go up and have it out with the ollave. Instead, he went directly to Lord d’Aubigny and presently got himself a mission which took him away from Blois for the six days before he was due to leave with George Paris for Ireland. A message, bald in the extreme, was sent to Thady Boy announcing the date and time of his departure.
Puzzlement, as he read it, showed briefly through the disordered rubbish-heap of Thady Boy’s face. Then he brushed it aside, and swept into the bizarre and engrossing activity of the moment.
Then, at last, O’LiamRoe was on his way back to Blois.
He had his last ride with Oonagh the day before, jogging out through the park at Neuvy, the new wolfhound loping at their side. It was one of the few times they had been alone together since the unfortunate night of the serendade, when O’LiamRoe had appeared, dogged and apologetic, his arm streaming blood on the Moûtiers’ threshold. Now they trotted, shoulder to shoulder, finding silent pleasure in the stinging air, the thin woods worn dry and silver with wind and ice, the spent grass rustling at their knees. Soon they reached open ground and the horses pulled unchecked into a canter, and then a gallop, racing neck and neck, his frieze billowing alongside her black hair and her furs.
Side by side they jumped ditches and followed dykes, and fled at last down a dry-tussocked hillside full in the yellow sun, leaving their breath white behind them, the blood whipped bright under the skin. Then, at the edge of another copse, they drew rein in pity for the sweating horses, and he walked them and then hobbled them while Oonagh flung herself among the bracken and the thin, dead spokes of bush and branch and bough which nested the ground.
There was a flask at his saddlebow. Kneeling, he offered it and she drank deeply, like a man. When he had drunk and laid it by, he came back and, finding a boulder at her side, leaned on it looking down at her. Throughout the morning, against the whole grain of his being, he had hardly spoken. Now it was she who broke the silence, her green eyes watching him. ‘I have news for you, O’LiamRoe. Your ollave is leaving you.’
‘Is he now?’ He waited. They had never discussed Thady Boy, or spoken of the serenade.
‘I heard today. Robin Stewart leaves for Ireland on Friday, and has threatened, it seems, to take Ballagh with him. The attachment I gather, is a little one-sided, so you may preserve your suite intact yet. On the other hand, Thady Boy may simply be waiting to persuade you to go, too.’
‘He would sooner help to ship me off, I am sure, and stay on here for ever, indulging himself. Has he wearied so soon? The life must all have run out of him with his songs.’
‘Or maybe he has a sense of responsibility?’ suggested the black-haired woman. ‘Ah now, but I forgot. You believe there is no such thing at all. Only a fool’s craving for power, the dream of the officious, the corruption of the mediocre. There is no natural leader alive who should not have this throat slit directly he has led.’
‘You have a bully of a memory,’ O’LiamRoe agreed peacefully. ‘I never knew a being on two legs yet that got a pennyworth of power and so much as treated his hound-dog the same. Or his women.’
She almost did not answer; but she could not quite keep her temper from showing. ‘Men have taken up that particular burden who would give their souls to be able to shed it.’
O’LiamRoe’s retort was mild and sunny and disbelieving. ‘Who? Who has there ever been? Do you know such a one?’
The wild colour had come up under her skin; couched in it, her two eyes looked like clear, green-grey water. She said, ‘You cut Luadhas’s throat for the sake of a Queen who is no more than a senseless baby, and a foreigner at that. Are your own people worth less to you?’
His head cocked, he was revolving on his knees his broad, helpless pink thumbs. ‘Now that you mention it, I had never thought of the King of England’s sheriffs as so many cheetahs.’
She raised herself on one hand and swung round to lean her back on the rock where O’LiamRoe sat. Her head tilted back, she watched him, her expression not unfriendly. ‘You feel for the man you can see; not the nation you cannot.’
‘You may have the right of it,’ said O’LiamRoe. It was not the wittiest of ripostes. Against the rock, her head was very close. He could by moving his arm have brushed the warm, heaped, blue-shining black of her hair. He tried again. ‘I find it difficult, for example, to feel for the Kingdom of France. You peel it away, as you might an artichoke—the music, the sculpture, the pictures and the palaces—and there, soggy at the bottom, are hereditary parliaments and absolutism, a dumb States-General, the primitive taxes, the gifts, the favouritism. England breathes a coarser air, but it seems healthier to me.’
Lazily, she replied. ‘Do not delude youself, Phelim O’LiamRoe—or me. Were you faced with eternal night and chaos you would poke up the fire and theorize till your blood itself boiled under the skin. Why stay if you no longer enjoy it? Go back to your heathery nook on the Slieve Bloom, where Edward’s sheriffs pass you by; and take Ballagh with you. If you have a new master, someone doubtless will tell you.’
O’LiamRoe’s gaze, for once, was unreadable. He said, ‘I didn’t say, I believe, that I was wearying. I told you once why I intended to stay.… And I asked you a question, but we were interrupted.’
‘Then ask it again,’ she said.
There was a long silence. At the side of his neck, in the baby’s skin, a pulse was beating, although outwardly he was still perfectly tranquil. ‘And do you like me or do you love me at all?’ he had asked, that night in the Hôtel Moûtier. ‘If I were fifteen years old again, I might,’ he said. ‘But now I know the answer.’
‘Do you? I think you should know,’ said Oonagh, ‘that you are not alone in your view of the artichoke.’
Looking down, he could see her high brow, her thinking eyes, the firm body under the piled, thick folds of her robe. He said innocently, ‘That might make it awkward when you take a French husband.’
One angular, boy’s wrist lay on her lap; the other hand was tucked under her head. He saw the tendons sharpen suddenly, and was not surprised when she said, ‘I have had dogs enough.’ There was a little interval; then she added, hearking back still to their previous talk, ‘I have reached a queer conclusion. There is a thing or two worse than sitting in a mud hut with salt herring and a kale bowl between your two knees.’
O’LiamRoe did not know that he himself had turned rigid. He said only, ‘I always said it. It depends on the company.’
She did not remove her eyes. Instead she gave a little twist so that instead of her back, she had one elbow on the rock, the other hand laid idly on the grass. Dead leaves, like flotsam on a web, scattered her fur. Unbelieving, he read in her eyes a kind of testy, unassumed kindness. ‘I like you, Phelim O’LiamRoe. For my own good, I ought to love you.’ She scanned his face. On it were small unaccustomed marks; of strain, of some measure of need or defence. She said with wholly unexpected anger, ‘You are the very soul of detachment, are you not? Can you do nothing to make me love you, since you are so wise?’
There was a racking silence. Then he slipped to one knee beside her, crushing her dress, and, catching her idle hand, drew her into
his arm. She came lightly, holding up her face for the kiss.
It was a strange embrace. The woman, it was clear, was the more experienced of the two; and she made no effort to hide it. O’LiamRoe’s own simple nature came to his rescue. At this ultimate moment he felt no awkwardness; nor did he strive fora sophistication beyond his means. Instead, his own basic qualities, his speculative mind, his adventurousness, his essential decency, all brought to that first kiss something perfectly well integrated, of its kind; and to Oonagh O’Dwyer, quite new.
So new that for a moment it confused her. He sensed something wrong and broke away, his whole face shaped in a queer, unaccustomed way; then found her hand on his back had hardened disturbingly. She brought her other hand up, the heavy sleeve falling back, and drew his head down to her own. During this kiss she let him know, without speaking, that what he wanted, he could have.
Humility … intelligence … insecurity: one of them spread its message through his brain, and then his nerves, and made his hands slacken, his head move, his eyes open. She did not realize it. She lay lithe in the grass, where she had slipped, and said in a gentling voice, her brogue broadened and warmed, ‘Are you afraid of bankruptcy? I’m not asking the impossible, my dear. You will go to Ireland with Stewart and wait for me. This is a beginning; not an end.’
He sat back on his heels. Among the silken down of his hair, the features were still not his own, and oddly held, as if broken against some unheeding obstacle, and clenched again into defect and misshapen pain. ‘You are very kind,’ he said; and it was impossible to tell whether or not he was being sarcastic. ‘But as it has not begun, it can be neither a beginning nor an end.’
He had moved himself out of her field of vision, whether for her relief or his own, she did not know. Lying quite still, her taut gaze on the sky, she said, ‘What is it? You had better tell me what it is.’
‘Nothing,’ he said. Her outflung arm was very white. On it, he could see the impress of his rough frieze, a pink trough of interlocking chainwork, where she had gripped him so hard. Her own dress was so fine, he bore no marks anywhere. He said conversationally, ‘It is the first time, surely, that my poor, negative principles have brought me anything so charming. I doubt I couldn’t bring myself to collect a revenue on them. I had thought them worth something less, or something more.’
Then she sat up; and he saw that she was pale, her brain behind frowning eyes following the possible burden of his. ‘I have nothing more to give that you would take.’
‘I would take honesty,’ said O’LiamRoe. And after a pause, ‘Or should I change my principles and turn firebrand first?’
He had been right. Her impulse had been kind. But it had not been selfless, and she was exceedingly proud. Her first reply to him died on her lips. Instead, she said, ‘Change them if you want to; why not? No one will ever notice the difference, and the exercise will surely do you some good.’
On the way home, she did not speak at all. Nor did O’LiamRoe make any attempt to put it right. And no one but he knew that under the thick frieze cloak, he was shivering.
By next day, he and Piedar Dooly were back in their old room at Blois.
Thady Boy, when they arrived, was out, fêting up river with the Court. Stewart’s ambitious plan to remove him had all too obviously come to nothing.
O’LiamRoe was aware that he himself had not been helpful. He could understand the exasperation, of even the dislike which he supposed had prompted Thady Boy’s ill-natured riposte of the serenade. It was the abuse of Oonagh’s good name and hospitality which he found regrettable. O’LiamRoe, from his detached side of the fence, rarely thought of anything as unforgivable.
So for the next few days he stayed in his room, seeing few people, quietly coming to terms with himself, and only smiled a little at the irony when a Gentleman of the King’s called to invite him to a royal banquet on the following day. Recognition had come at last. When the puppetry had palled and no reason but pride was left to hold him in France, the innermost door, long forced by Thady Boy, had opened to him also.
That same afternoon Stewart came back, rattling in his caked spurs and yellower in the face than usual. Finding Thady out he remained only briefly. He and Paris were leaving on the first stage of their journey to Ireland next day.
Then the Court returned, late at night and hilarious. O’LiamRoe was wakened by the arrival of Lymond with a whole drinking party, introduced thickly and meticulously, who then stayed until dawn. O’LiamRoe gave him Stewart’s message when at first light the rabble tumbled at last through the door, and Thady Boy kicked off his boots.
‘Oh God, yes of course. You took your bruises to Neuvy. I could almost hear them begging you to go home with me before the end of it. What did she offer you to leave her?’
He couldn’t have known. But the foul taste of it, the casual accuracy of the guess, made him feel suddenly physically ill. So far from being detached, with another man O’LiamRoe might have blundered into violence. As it was, he left the room abruptly, without seeing the sudden stillness on Thady Boy’s face.
The next day, Friday the 16th of January, opened quietly. Blois slept late these days, for the King, never privileged to share his own father’s council, gave his own the least possible regard; and during a season of sport or fêting abandoned it with relief to the de Guises, to the Constable, to the Marshals and the cool, overseeing glance of Diane, who never slept.
This year, the pleasure seeking hid more than the King’s ingrained resentment and his wish to please and renew the love of his friends. Beneath the surface were new tensions, no less disturbing for being petty. About this time rumour, unavoidably, had begun to play about the appearance of Lady Fleming. She, moving serenely about her daily adventures, was undisturbed; but the rift between the Constable and the Duchess de Valentinois was now perfectly patent.
It could be guessed also, without pretence of secrecy, that the Queen Dowager of Scotland was finding it harder to harness her unruly nobles. Honours, pensions, ready money in the purse, had done nothing but sharpen their hunger. Failing the bribery they were worth, their minds turned again to power and to their duty to their religion, belligerently recalled. Tom Erskine, lingering on his way back from Augsburg and cumbered with transactions to do with papal legations and bishoprics, and with arrangements for the French garrisons and armies at home, was still there, doing his best to doctor the mess, while waiting to leave in due time to complete his last treaty of peace back in England, and to return to Stirling and Margaret’s small son at their home.
The invitation to Richard Crawford, which it had been totally impossible not to send, was now a month old. Lymond had been told, with extreme circumspection, that his brother had been sent for, but it was hard to say if he either listened particularly or understood.
The entertainment for this evening had been designed by the Constable and Queen Catherine, not with a new guest in mind, but in an effort to rationalize the feverish gaiety in the castle, and to reduce the tension. It was to be a private festival held by the inner Court for itself, and the only guests apart from the two Irishmen would be less guests than pensioners: the professors and scholars and scientists and wits who came by invitation to Blois, and sitting at the King’s elbow, turned somersaults for him in the swept galleries of thought. From Paris, Toulouse, Angers, not all of them had heard of Thady Boy. The King, amused, did not enlighten them. The new toy, wound up, clicking and jumping, was to be set among the pedants unawares.
For this reason perhaps, Thady Boy was not much in evidence during the day. The O’LiamRoe saw him twice only. The first time, as the ollave was dressing, he had sat himself astride a chair and said mildly, ‘In my day, as I remember, it was customary to ask permission before leaving one’s employment—The Lord guard us, are these all the clothes you have?’ And flinching aside from the shirt and trunks and doublet the ollave was donning, Phelim had opened the clothes chest. Piled and screwed up within were the other costumes, jewelled, embroidered an
d beribboned, given Thady Boy by the King of France. They had all been handled like rags.
Lymond was ready, in a hurry, and not interested in O’LiamRoe. ‘You’ve no need to believe every tale I tell Robin Stewart. It was the only way at the time to get rid of him. He’s welcome to sail back to Ireland and stay there, if he wants to. I’ll go soon enough … in better company than that.’
He hadn’t mentioned, but Piedar Dooly had, the incident of the arsenic. Watching him now, lute in hand, hurrying off to Diane, or to d’Enghien, to St. André, to Marguerite, or any of a score of his acolytes, masters, or mistresses, O’LiamRoe was conscious of a sourness in his mouth which recalled suddenly the taste of other wretchedness recently endured. He had to force himself to remember that the creations of an original mind were seldom bought nor were they offered without a price.
The second time, coming to dress for the banquet, he heard Robin Stewart with Thady. He had come at the wrong moment. The conversation, to begin with, must have been a stumbling one. The Archer by now was at his most abrupt and nervously aggressive, his voice splitting a little as his feelings ran beyond it. O’LiamRoe heard that; and heard Thady’s voice in a tone he did not at first recognize, quiet and clear-phrased and sane. He was still, he noticed, using his Irish accent. He spoke for some time; then Stewart replied, but a good deal of the edge had gone. Then Thady said something quite brief, and there was a little silence. It was getting late. O’LiamRoe, feeling that he had done more than enough for Scotland, pushed the door open and went in.
Thady Boy was sitting on the edge of their decorated chest, rather still, looking with calm attention at Robin Stewart’s face. The Archer, evidently just risen, had come forward and had laid a hand, gingerly and enquiringly, like a nervous schoolboy, on Thady arm. Then, without seeing O’LiamRoe, he dropped to his knees.