Queens' Play (37 page)

The next day, demolishing the Hôtel Moûtier for safety, they passed through the stone-flagged basement and found the stained clothing and the ruined feather cloak. The rest of the house was destroyed and if, as rumour said, Thady Boy Ballagh died in its ashes, there was no other trace.

For a day and a half, his brother, his Queen, Lady Fleming and the Erskines believed with the rest that Lymond was dead; and Erskine, desperately sorry himself, became afraid of what, behind the white numbness, was growing in Richard’s blank face. Then Abernaci’s message came, with its bare command. Lymond was at his own home of Sevigny and was to be approached by no one—not by Richard nor by the Erskines or their friends.

February wore into March and the weeks passed, but no new message came. Richard rode past Sevigny once as the trees were beginning to bud, and saw its white towers above the mist of dark pink and chrome; but its walls were too high and its wooded gardens too wide to offer more. He had not known it existed. The next day, moving in some endless, purposeless void, he went with an irresponsible young party to an astrologer in an eccentric building called Doubtance. It was a woman. She cast his horoscope and gave him only one piece of advice, regarding him with an irritating kind of tolerance down her high-nostrilled nose. ‘Spring is pleasant in France. You should stay.’

Tom Erskine was going home at the end of the month. And it seemed very likely, despite her confidence, that Jenny Fleming would be going, too. They would stop in Paris and then would cross the Channel to England where Erskine would pause to pay his respects to the monarch before going north. By sea or litter, Jenny’s journey would be more direct.

Richard wondered whether he should join them. Even before today, he had no desire. He had no wish, he realized, to face Sybilla without news to give her; or with news of such a kind. And yet he had exhausted every approach to the mystery here that his mind could devise.

He had taken over the safeguards for the young Queen, but nothing had happened for weeks. Lymond was not, could not be dead, or Abernaci at least would have told them. But how badly he must be maimed, to enforce this isolation, this enervating silence, was a thought carried bitterly, day and night. And any reappearance had been made impossible by this new attack: the extraordinary revelation, in the most circumstantial detail, of theft and perfidy.

To Richard, at least, that condemnation, astonishing as it had been, had brought a queer kind of relief. In some respects, at least, Francis was safe, if only from himself. And it was proof incontrovertible of something he and Erskine had sometimes doubted: that Stewart’s sponsor was not overseas; nor had Stewart been working alone in the hope of selling his services unsolicited. It was proof that there was another mind here in France behind Stewart’s, and that of someone actively concerned with the plot.

With Erskine eagerly at his side, he had followed every possible clue. They went to Neuvy to see the Irishwoman, Oonagh O’Dwyer, whom Thady Boy had serenaded in the house so mysteriously burned. She was not there. She had joined the Moûtiers, her aunt informed them, in their southern home; and firmly she refused to give the direction. ‘Is it not enough to be pitied they are, and their house burned by vagabond jugglers from over their heads?’

She and Oonagh had been living at Neuvy all through the Tour des
Minimes accident and later; the Moûtiers, it seemed plain from their neighbours, were unequivocably harmless and well known. For all they knew, Richard bitterly recognized, Lymond might have struggled there by himself, knowing the house was deserted, guessing for some reason that he was about to be exposed or maligned. They were hamstrung by their ignorance, as Lymond himself must have planned. For in their ignorance lay their safety.

Meanwhile the Queen Mother, the young Queen at her side, made no plans to return to Scotland; and the French Court, with impenetrable charm, continued to make her harried stay pleasant.

It was not the lustrous pleasance it had been. No one in Blois put the whores on cows’ backs again and whipped them through the town. Lent passed at Blois and Amboise and ended, still, sour and withered, without laughter or lampoon or quick, scurrilous song. Thady was dead and better dead; and every occasion lacked him.

Everything they did wore a different cast. What had been vulgarly clever, in the light of bare exhumation looked bleakly coarse; what had been vivid looked vulgar; what had been witty looked common; what had been forthright looked outrageous. Etiquette—edged etiquette—came heavily back into place; there were ripostes which were overwitty and reactions which were over-sullen. A sense of acute spiritual discomfort hung over the flower of France, the aftermath of its brilliant flare of indulgence. If Thady Boy had come back—a Thady Boy even absolved from the treachery imputed to him—they would have had him beaten from the room by their valets.

L
IKE St. Patrick, who requested the protection of God against the spells of women, druids and smiths, The O’LiamRoe took instant remedy for his ills. Flinching from the unkind pastures of France, he retreated home but found there only a mirror for the amour-propre so fundamentally hurt. The Lord Deputy’s offer came pat. England was glad to invite him—rumours of French invasion were at their height again. It seemed, for a moment, a sardonic triumph to carry his patched self-esteem into the world of affairs on the opposite side.

To begin with, he had been delighted. Englishmen, he found, differed remarkably from the French. Here, the King was a boy. The undercurrents at Court dealt less with the naked clash of cold temperaments and fiery ambition than with opposing factions of barons who were no less ambitious, but who added to their ambition a concern, on some days more serious than others, for the land, for the people, for religion.

To his own startled amusement, he was staying in the Hackney mansion of the Earl and Countess of Lennox. Shuttling curiously between Whitehall and Holborn, Greenwich and Hampton Court at the tail of the Court, O’LiamRoe had more than once met the pallid, pouch-eyed Scottish Earl, with his light hair and his air of faintly bewildered suspicion. Then, a little later, he had met Lennox’s wife Margaret, too, and she had suggested that he should come for a spell as their guest.

At the back of O’LiamRoe’s mind lay something he had once heard about his late ollave and Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. He made no effort to pursue it; for together with France, O’LiamRoe had abandoned Thady Boy and all his affairs.

In the forefront of his mind, however, was one other vivid fact. Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, was older brother to John Stewart, Lord d’Aubigny. And thus, at second or third hand, O’LiamRoe might have news of the only person in the whole Court of France for whom he felt sympathy—the threatened Scottish child Queen Mary. He had gone, therefore, to Hackney with the Lennoxes.

It had disappointed him. The family were often away. Like himself, they were summoned regularly to Court, in spite of their religion, which he suspected was stubbornly Papish; for Margaret was a full cousin of the boy King and indeed, had she not been disinherited by her uncle King Henry, might have had a strong claim to be next heir to the throne not only of England but of Scotland, where her mother had been Queen, and where her husband’s great-grandfather had also reigned.

There were other difficulties. The busy barons at the Court, while polite, had no spare time for him; the Irish he met were all busy lisping about their pensions and their farms; and he was tired of amusing himself with brisk, politically minded Englishmen with prejudices to sell.

Even now, riding through Cheapside to vist the Strand, he was distressed, unreasonably, because among the bawling, huckstering, hurrying crowds, no heads turned as he passed. For England he had abandoned his saffron and frieze; and with it, the raffish, engaging detachment which had served him so well had somehow slipped away. It was too late now to aspire to the splendid hauteur of the wealthy chief ones whom he had diligently baited all his life. Under the soft body and the sandy pelt there lurked horrifically, transparent as a jellyfish, a grey, inferior personality, with whom he might have to live all his days. The O’LiamRoe had sloughed off Francis Crawford, but he was not happy in his new skin.

Among the rich mansions backing on the Strand, with their bowered gardens running down to the river, was the little house rented by Michel Hérisson’s younger brother, with its elegant door, its tall, paned windows and its striking rooms betraying the static elegance and oddly edgy effect of a house furnished for entertaining, not for living in.

To this house, followed by Piedar Dooly, the Prince of Barrow was riding, in a last effort to find in this famous city of London a warm, uninhibited and friendly face to give him relief. With him he carried a letter from the big Rouen sculptor.

Arriving, he was amused and in no way chilled at first by the contrast between Brice Harisson’s style of living and the openhanded carelessness of the sculptor, with his boisterous unofficial club and his illegal printing. He saw Piedar Dooly and his two horses led off
quickly and quietly to a splendid small stable; and after a succession of liveried encounters, found himself waiting in a leather-hung parlour for his host.

What little O’LiamRoe knew of this only brother of Michel’s was promising. Scottish by birth, unmarried, adventurous, Brice had been brought up, like Michel, in France, and like Michel had no philosophy other than the cultivation of his own talents and prejudices in whatever soil could best accommodate them.

Brice’s gift was an ear for languages. Able to mimic anything, he could remember dialect like music, idiom like the phrase of a tune. He had met Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, when the future Protector of England had been stationed with the English army on the north coast of France. And when Somerset returned to London, to lead England during the first years of the boy King Edward’s reign, Brice Harisson went with him, as interpreter and congenial, if junior, member of the Somerset secretarial staff.

Now Somerset’s power was in eclipse, and he had ceded control of the nation to the Earl of Warwick. So Harisson had leisure, a little money saved, a house not too far from Somerset’s palace and time to introduce the Prince of Barrow, O’LiamRoe hoped, to the more intimate circles of London life.

So, when the door opened and Brice Harisson came in, his brother’s letter of introduction in his hand, O’LiamRoe’s only concern, as he rose smiling, was whether to clasp hands or use the double embrace, as Michel habitually did. His host stood in the open doorway, small, dark, spare, dressed in thin-legged black with a high collar closely goffered to the ears—ears widely hinged, and for that reason covered on one side by a fall of thick, flat grey hair.

‘The Prince of Barrow, I understand?’ said Brice Harisson, in a voice in which disbelief struggled with boredom. ‘My brother, I fear, always rates too highly the time to spare in a busy Court such as ours. I have an appointment almost immediately. May I be of service to you first?’

Something had happened, clearly, to put him out of temper. O’LiamRoe had seen Michel, foiled in his plans, carry just this high colour, though with much less restraint. He said peaceably, ‘There is no reason to trouble you at all, at this minute. I will come back another time, surely, and we could settle down to a fine evening’s talk. There is a tavern up the street that could give a sup to us both.’

The door stood ajar, and the other man neither closed it nor made any move into the room. Impatience had added itself to the boredom; but even so O’LiamRoe was unprepared. Brice Harisson said, ‘If you will tell my steward precisely what you are selling, he will give you an answer to your lodgings. An introduction to the Duke, I am afraid
I cannot contrive. He does not care for Irish hides and finds your cheeses a good deal too coarse. Roberts!’

There was a pause. Then, with the footsteps of the approaching steward in his ears, O’LiamRoe spoke, his vowels prodigiously round. ‘Isn’t that a Scot for you, now: never a new acquaintance but he looks for a bargain from it, as the mermaid said to the herring fisherman. I was here for friendship’s sake, and with news of your brother, that is all.’

The steward had reached Harisson’s elbow. He didn’t send him away. The brown eyes owl-like under high, brief tufted brows, he said, ‘I have no money to lend, either. Forgive me. My appointment is pressing. Roberts?’

At his side, the steward snapped fingers. Sword, cloak, gloves, were brought. He was booted already, and a flat hat, discreet and feathered, lay on his smooth head. Dressed, he stood aside so that O’LiamRoe had room to leave. ‘I shall get the case from the study, Roberts, myself. I am sorry, Prince, to disappoint you. I fear my brother and I parted company some time ago now and he outwore my patience before that with his procession of supplicants. I hope your stay in London is a profitable one.’

‘Ah, God save you, I make what profit I can out of the experiences that come my way,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘That big boast of a man Michel would have knocked the head off me did I not sample the hospitality of his small, clever brother that has all the strange tongues so pat. And devil mend it, I would say you use your own tongue in the strangest way. The nearest I heard to it in nature was a retired streetwalker in Galway protecting her virtue.’

And, opening his purse, O’LiamRoe took out an écu and pressed it into Brice Harisson’s neat hand at the door. ‘Drink my health in a noggin on the way to your appointment,’ he said. ‘Our hides are stinking and our cheeses unkempt, but our loving hearts are strong and golden and shining like kingcups in the peat, and you look lonesome, little man.’ Only when he reached the stables and found his two hands hard clenched, did O’LiamRoe realize that he had been prepared for actual physical assault.

Piedar Dooly had been looking for him. As he entered the comfortable, manured warmth of the stables the Firbolg sank one wiry hand into his shrunk satin and, hoarsely whispering, tugged him aside. O’LiamRoe, intent on leaving Brice Harisson’s premises before Harisson himself entered the yard, cut him short in terse Gaelic.

Then he saw where Piedar Dooly’s free hand had pointed, and the meaning of it reached his brain. There were four animals in that stable: his own, a mule, a fine mare in Harisson’s colours, and a hack, whose mended harness and saddle, accoutred for campaigning, were
as familiar to him as his own. He had ridden behind it from Dieppe to Blois, had stared at it, sliding next to his own on shipboard, down the Seine and the Loire, had watched it at the ill-fated cheetah hunt and had accompanied it to Aubigny and back. It was Robin Stewart’s.

O’LiamRoe, who seldom disliked anyone who could supply him with amusement, had found it unusually hard, even before the day of Luadhas, to tolerate the Archer’s uneasy ways. Unsettled at present himself, he would have abandoned the ménage with some firmness had several thoughts not come into his head.

First, the sheer unpleasantness of the scene in the house had recalled that other scene over two months before in his ollave’s reeking bedchamber at Blois. He had told Oonagh O’Dwyer that authority made monsters of mankind; but he had seen what authority abandoned could do.

Robin Stewart had been sent to Ireland with George Paris to bring Cormac O’Connor to France. Instead, he was here in London with one of Somerset’s men, who was at great pains to conceal it. England and France were not now at war; but they were hardly close friends; and certainly not close enough to account for an Archer of the Guard in intimate talk with a Government official, albeit one at present slightly outmoded. Harisson, of course, was Scottish like Stewart; and he was, O’LiamRoe remembered, certainly one of Stewart’s old friends. But then, what part in all this did O’Connor play, whom Stewart had been directed to fetch?

It was this last irresistible question, in the end, that led Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, never a man to hoard dignity and always trusting to a bright tongue to make his queerer paths smooth for him, to ride noisily out of the yard, followed by Piedar Dooly and the sharp eye of the steward, and, dismounting down the street, to leave the horses with his follower while he slipped over two walls and down an alley, soothed an inquisitive dog and dodged at last into the garden behind Brice Harisson’s stylish Strand house.

There, by a process of elimination, he located the study window. It was open, and there was a porch roof just below it. In the purple gloom presaging a brisk March downpour The O’LiamRoe seized a barrel and, tearing his stockings, ripping his breeches and sticking an elbow clean through the skin-tight silk of his sleeve, hitched himself up and made ready to listen.

They were speaking in Gaelic. Stewart, nearest the study window, was not sure of his; more than once he stumbled, filling in with French or with English. Harisson’s was impeccable. O’LiamRoe could hear him lightly questioning, commenting, occasionally dissenting. His manner, in staggering contrast to his reception of the Prince himself, was quiet, intimate and understanding; and in the very aptness of its handling of all Robin Stewart’s quirks argued a
very long friendship indeed. He said now, his singing Gaelic nostalgic to O’LiamRoe’s listening ears, ‘All the same, Robin, why the boat? The Thames itself is a public place to speak with a man like Warwick. It was sure that he would refuse to hear you.’

Stewart swore. ‘Did I not try every other way? The messages never reached him. I knew he was sailing to Greenwich that day. The rest was easy.’

Harisson’s voice was still agreeable. ‘Were you plain with him?’

‘I said I had news for him that would do great good to England, and that because it was secret, I wished that he would speak to me alone.’

‘And—?’

‘He said he did not mean to discuss anything forced upon him by intrusion. I was to think myself lucky not to be put in the river and carried to Newgate; and if I had had anything to say, I would need have written him in the proper way. But he was interested.’

‘He does not sound interested.’

Stewart’s aggressive voice was smooth with complacency. ‘He was, then. I lifted the edge of my cloak and showed him the Archer’s insignia.’

For the first time, Harisson’s voice sharpened. ‘Who else saw this?’

‘Not anyone. Good God, is it foolish I am? The boat was full of servants and officials—not anyone who knew me at all. Then they waved to a ferryboat and threw me off. But the next letter I will write, by God, he will read.’ His voice, in his excitement, had risen. ‘Now is the time. I know it. A fresh message, Brice. We shall ask him to speak to us. And if he will not do that, we shall suggest place and time for a meeting with any man he may appoint. He cannot refuse. And once he knows what we offer, our fortune is made. That brat Mary married to France would mean a French menace at the Scottish Border for all time; whereas if she were dead Arran would likely rule Scotland, and Arran favours the English and could be got for a groat. Warwick might even get them persuaded to let Lennox rule—he’s got a good enough claim.