Queens' Play (4 page)

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 their 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—’

‘—Damn you!’ said O’LiamRoe with surprise. ‘There’s a fine bothar road to the Slieve Bloom alone that two cows would fit on, one lengthwise and the other athwart.’

‘—But the Prince of Barrow is as consequential and scholarly a man as you would be hard put to it to see in a city. And I am not saying so,’ added Thady painstakingly, ‘for the pay he gives me, for you would quarter yourself looking for it did you drop it from between your finger and thumb on a white sheet at midday itself.’

There was an explosion, hardly covered, from the young men, but Lord d’Aubigny grimly persevered. ‘You and your principal know a little, I take it, of the present Court of France? You will be presented shortly to King Henri, and to the Queen who is, of course, Italian born. There are five young children.…’ He described, as plainly as he could, the public faces of the Crown and its suite, without a hint that the King’s wife and his mistress were at loggerheads; that the King’s friend the Constable supported the Queen; and that everyone distrusted the de Guises, who held the King’s love and most of his higher offices apportioned between them, and at altar, campaign or council table were first with their advice.

‘It is,’ said Lord d’Aubigny, ‘a gathering of people who cannot fail to impress you. A blossoming culture. A taste for beauty and
considerable wealth. And consequently a certain state; a formality; a feeling for polite usage of some sort—’

‘We are not,’ said a bored voice from behind him, ‘permitted to duel’.

‘—And the wearing of hair on every part of the face,’ said its neighbour suavely, ‘is not now acceptable.’

Without looking round, his lordship went on. ‘Fashions change, of course. But the King himself decides style and colour for his gentlemen, and it is usual for those at Court to conform. Please do not hesitate, if in need of a tailor, to seek my advice.’

As an appeal to the aesthetic leanings of O’LiamRoe, it was a dead failure. ‘Ah, faith, is he one of those?’ said the Chieftain with pity. ‘The late King Henry VIII of England thought the same: that every drop of us should dress, talk and pray like the English, and shave off the face hair as well. It was a grand thing for my father that the hair grew on him like wire; and did he shave off the moustaches at night, there they were, glorious as ever, by morning.’

A brief silence fell, honouring this speech. O’LiamRoe, unaffected by it, glanced round. ‘Are you not for making some remark, Thady?’ And to the priest: ‘The tongue on him is green-moulded for want of exercise. There’s nothing he’d like better than a word on the hydrography.’

The ollave’s black face turned, stamped with affront.

‘Hydrography, is it? It’s hydrography we were wanting last night, God help us, and the smoke curling like an old, dried cow out of your nightshirt. I’m clean out of my nerves entirely, with your burnings and your sinkings; and “talk here” and “talk there” on top of it.’