Queens' Play (41 page)

The numb nerves were alive now. The blood was boiling in his veins; his head and heart were full as the stiff core of the earth with hard-packed purpose and power. On either side, the two men still stood, but neither crowded him; carelessly, they had left him his sword. He did not even think. As Harisson spoke, the Archer drew his blade and took a step forward.

Harisson backed, his voice choking off in mid-air. Stewart took another step. Harisson screamed, a dry, unexpected sound which continued for a long time; he was jammed, now, against the window, as far away as he could get. Through the window the apprentices’ calls floated, thinly, like gulls. The sheriff said, ‘Stop him!’ in a loud voice. The clerk and the usher hesitated, and the two guards ran uncertainly forward.

They were far too late. Staring down into the sallow face, the grey hair wild, the braided epaulettes twisted—’It’s about time I practised then, isn’t it? Go to hell where you belong,’ said Robin Stewart, his eyes stiff, his breath noisy as a man under drugs. And raising both hands with the long sword between, he brought the
blade, like an axe in a shambles, upon the quailing body beneath.

That same Thursday night, Lymond returned from his fruitless journey to Islington, changed, and armed with de Chémault’s authority and his own powerful insignia of office, went straight to Warwick to express his formal concern at the plot which had come to light involving a Scot in his custody named Brice Harisson, to request that Harisson should be permitted to visit de Chémault for questioning, and to ask English help in tracing and capturing Harisson’s accomplice, the Scot Stewart.

It was the routine opening in a game imposed now on both sides: every move must be made in public, and its predestined course was quite clear. The French Ambassador had no doubt that the man Vervassal would handle it competently.

And aside from this competence, there was an understanding of the unseen balances of the situation which went deeper than de Chémault’s own. When, unguardedly, he had spoken of Stewart to his wife and she had exclaimed, ‘An assassin! Ah, not from John and Anne’s own company! How he will feel it!’—he had felt, without seeing it, the flick of Lymond’s attention. He knew that, convalescing from some injury, Crawford had been pressed into duty by the Queen Dowager in the absence of other accredited messenger—a thing not uncommon for a well-born younger son. He knew a little, even, of his past history, for Tom Erskine was an old friend. He would have liked to have known more. Jehanne, his wife, he guessed was afraid of the queer, catlike young man with the stick.

They had begun supper when Lymond returned, served privately tonight in the Ambassador’s own quarters, the men moving quietly with the mutton and quail, their livery caps neatly laid on the buffet. On the tapestry cloth Jehanne’s silver sparkled in the late April sun.

It was she who heard the step pass the door, and was driven by her housewifely instincts to rise and bring him in. He turned as she called after him, ‘M. Crawford, we have kept supper for you!’ and came in. But although he took his place courteously at their table and made conversation fluently, he crumbled his way absently through the meal, unimpressed by her cooking; clearly interested only in making an end so that he could inflict business on Raoul.

He began, in fact, before they had finished, when she had barely ended her best story of the baby’s attack on the cat. Certainly he smiled at her, and said something she must try to recall next time she wrote to Maman. But the next instant he had turned to her husband and broached the subject of his interview with the Lord Great Master of the King’s Majesty’s most Honourable Household with no apology at all.

She did not, of course, fully understand the details. She watched him instead play with a silver cup filled with their best wine, untouched, while he said, ‘Exactly the kind of story you would expect Warwick and his friends to concoct. According to him, three weeks ago Stewart came to them with an offer, but Lord Warwick was perfectly ignorant of what it might be until today. He is shocked, appalled, disgusted, and will do everything in his power to help us.’

Raoul did not seem put out at having his favourite meal interrupted; indeed his voice was less testy than she had often heard it, at the end of a long day of work. ‘And Stewart and Harisson?’

‘Harrison was arrested, of course, for reasons quite unconnected with this affair. The letters to the Queen Dowager. That is their story, and they are bound to keep to it.’ The herald paused. The despised wine, beneath his spare fingers, rinsed the rim of the cup, and Jehanne tensed in her seat. The tapestry was expensive.

Then Vervassal said, ‘I had no need to ask them to help find Robin Stewart. My talk with Harisson evidently had some effect, even if it was not quite what I intended. In his rather tardy efforts to pacify Warwick, Harisson sold the Archer to him instead of to us. In other words, Harisson confessed to the sheriff that Stewart had approached him to act as middleman in a plan to poison Mary of Scotland, and that he, Harisson, had betrayed the plot to the French Ambassador, who knew all. The sheriff told Warwick, who of course knew all about Stewart and the plot, but not that you were aware of it. From that moment the English Council, for the sake of their relations with France, were forced, of course, to sever all their connections with the scheme. In return for God knows what promises, Harisson was instructed by the sheriff to send for Stewart, who was captured this afternoon and bundled off to Ely Place for a complete confession—the poor idiot thought apparently he might still win Warwick’s support and told them again, with some pride, all his qualifications as a hired assassin—and that, according to Warwick of course, was the first direct news he had of the plot …

‘… I can imagine Stewart’s feelings,’ said Lymond, ‘when his lordship, instead of opening his arms, began to shriek for every guard in the Palace. Stewart is in the Tower. Warwick has undertaken to have his confession written out and sent to us, and will send him to you or straight to the French Court for punishment. He will take that up with you himself.’

‘It is for the King to say. I shall write him tonight. And Harisson?’ Raoul asked.

‘Harisson?’ said the man Crawford, and got quietly to his feet, an appalling solecism, with the curious quick lurch he had which covered whatever was wrong with his leg. ‘He and Stewart were brought face to face, for identification, at the sheriff’s house, and Stewart killed
him. No one, obviously, rushed nobly upon the blade. So there is no evidence against Warwick, and no evidence but Warwick’s, and O’LiamRoe’s, against Stewart, come to that. You must get Stewart’s confession out of the Council. You can hardly act against him otherwise.’

Adding rudeness to rudeness, her husband had risen too.

‘I shall take Stewart into my own custody. He will confess then.’

There was a fractional pause. Then, ‘I think not,’ said Crawford calmly. ‘My advice to you, on the contrary, is to insist that Warwick keeps Stewart and is wholly responsible for sending him to France. England is desperately anxious to avoid an incident. That is already clear. The surest way of delivering Stewart alive to France is to let Warwick do it. He dare not let him die.’

You would think something ominous had been said. The two men stood facing each other, eye to eye, without saying a word; then Raoul, saying, ‘Nothing would happen to him here,’ suddenly grasped Crawford’s arm and added loudly, ‘Go! Go, go. You wish to go. I should not have kept you.’

Startled, Jehanne got up and looked first at the herald, and then her husband. Lymond, who had not in fact moved, went on as if nothing had occurred. ‘If it did happen, you could not prevent it. You realize why we must have Stewart’s confession: it is a weapon we shall have to use. He has a superior unknown, still living in France. You must make Warwick send him to Calais, and you must extract that written confession with every shred of power you have. They may seem willing, but they won’t want to supply it. From Calais he will have a French guard to take him back to the Loire. I shall concern myself with him there.’

From his face, Jehanne de Chémault guessed, with uncharitable pleasure, that the prospect was anything but convenient. Raoul had thrown open the door. ‘I understand you. We shall speak again in the morning. The urgency in all this, you must remember, is relative.’

Lymond, his weight on his stick, stood facing the door.
‘Je vous remercie,’
was all he said, but she could see Raoul smiling with the undue warmth of relief, and then the herald, recalling his duty at last, turned and made her some sort of apology and withdrew making, as she saw through the half-closed door, straight for his room.

And all very well for that gentleman to burst in halfway through supper, leave Raoul with a deskful of work and then go off to bed; but the sooner he left Durham House, thought Jehanne de Chémault and wrathfully said so, the better she would be pleased.

Lymond did leave Durham House the following day; but only to visit the Earl and Countess of Lennox, from whose rooftree he had made up his mind to remove Phelim O’LiamRoe.

A
S a child might toy with a squirrel, Margaret Lennox had played with O’LiamRoe in the three weeks which followed his first critical visit to Brice Harisson’s house, the heroic venture in the bookseller’s, and the visit to de Chémault which had ended his share of the affair.

She played with him idly, softly, skilfully; and he knew it. Lazy to the bone, he was also perspicacious. A few weeks ago, he would have taken all the amusement he could get out of the situation, and at the first twinge of discomfort escaped. This time he did his level best, cursing wildly under his breath, to hit the ball back.

He had not gone to de Chémault again. Lennox, whose fair, sagging charm O’LiamRoe could not find funny, came sweeping into the great reception room one afternoon, flung his hat on a chair, and said, ‘Well, they’ve got him. They’ve got both of them. Now he can damned well take his foot off my neck.…’

Then Lady Lennox had followed him into his study and they had discussed the rest privately. But that evening as Phelim himself was nicely launched on a favourite tale about the two little dogs and the eggshell, the Countess of Lennox broke in, her robes as sheerly pure in the firelight as they fell from the loom, the pearls milky in her greenish-fair hair. ‘I have news for you tonight worth more than two dogs and an eggshell. You should go to Cheapside, Prince, now and then; we can match Dublin, nearly, for excitement.’

‘How so?’ O’LiamRoe was busily interested.

‘The Archer who took you to Ireland was arrested today at Cheapside, and has confessed to planning the death of Scotland’s Queen Mary.’

‘Do you tell me?’ O’LiamRoe’s blue eyes were round. ‘And myself sitting easy on that deck, within a foot of the rail, and he might have had me over in a winking. A would-be assassin!’

‘An assassin in fact,’ said the Countess. Across the hearth, her firm, well-made features were bathed in innocent light. ‘As he was taken, he ran a sword through his betrayer—a man Harisson who had been his friend.’

‘Ah, the devil,’ said the Prince. ‘That’s the French for you. There was Harisson smoothing the way for them. The least they could do, you would think, is protect him.’

In the ensuing silence, Margaret Lennox’s fine eyes fixed on his, within them the faintest spark of amusement. ‘Now why ever should you think he confessed to the French? It was the English who took him. He’s in the Tower tonight.’

He heard the story through, and wondered vaguely what had gone wrong. It did not seem greatly to matter. Robin Stewart had confessed, and justice could be done. The name of the herald Vervassal had cropped up briefly. It meant nothing to him, but thinking it over later he wondered if this was the man whom the Queen Dowager, on receiving his message, had decided to send off to London. He spent some time that night thinking about Margaret Lennox.

She had been interested, of course, in his visit to France. He had become used to that after Paget and the rest, politely questioning, had tried to find out what he had been offered, and what he knew. The January rumour had taken a long time to die: the rumour that a vast French fleet was preparing to invade Ireland and throw out the English neck and crop. He could have told them that since she had repossessed Boulogne, France was sitting back in comfort watching Croft and all the rest of the English Council’s minions in Ireland crying wolf. He didn’t say so. O’LiamRoe’s feelings, to himself, were not at all clear.

Other people had done extremely well out of England. Long ago, Ireland had been ruled by English-born deputies, but all this had given way sixty years before to home rule by the great, noble families, and the great, noble families had feathered their nests like eider ducks in a snowstorm. They had ruled, Ormond, Desmond, Kildare, as if they were kings, giving state offices to their families and using state funds for themselves.

Old King Henry hadn’t stood for it. The Viceroys came back, or the Lords Deputy as they were called, and after a cracking rebellion during which an O’Neill actually got himself crowned King at Tara, the whole drove of nobles had been killed, or had been deserted or been bribed over to England. The ten-year-old Gerald of Kildare, whose family’s claim to rule had wrecked the Kildares for good, had fled to Italy, and the uprising had almost expired.

Then the earldoms flew like henfeed. Forty chiefs and lords submitted and got their English titles, renounced the Pope and promised to help the Lord Deputy’s raids; got houses and land near Dublin
for their horses and servants when they trooped into Parliament, and sent their sons to be educated in England, or in the Pale.

And now, as the whole upheaval began to settle, crumbling, only one name stood out among the unpardoned. Brian O’Connor, lord of Offaly, brother-in-law of Silken Thomas, done to death after the notorious Pardon of Maynooth, and the strongest supporter of young Gerald, had had all his lands confiscated and had been flung into the Tower, still defiant. But his son Cormac was free, landless, unpardoned, and swearing revenge.

O’LiamRoe thought of that; and he thought, too, of the oath sworn by the ex-rebel Conn O’Neill, once crowned King at Tara, as he knelt before the King of England to be elevated to the title of Earl of Tyrone.
‘That I may utterly forsake the name of O’Neill. That I and my heirs shall use English habits. That I shall be obedient to the King’s law; and shall not maintain or succour any of the King’s enemies, traitors or rebels.…’

And he thought of the dog Luadhas and did not mention to Margaret Douglas when she probed, sewing with her women one sunlit afternoon after that, that had the King of France offered him ten thousand men and the ring of Gyges, he would still have shaken his head, related the tale of the two dogs and the eggshell, and trotted obstinately back home.

He told her instead, when she asked, about the grand ollave he had had, that was called Thady Boy Ballagh; and the time he filled the quintain with hot water at St. Germain, and wrecked the river pageant at Rouen with a herd of elephants, and upset the tumblers and began a riot in a cellar and climbed the steeple of St. Lomer in a race after dark.

He was aware of his glib tongue checking here and there, for the story did not come lightly to him. But her questions went on for ever, and her women giggled. At the end she said, ‘And your splendid Thady Boy, what happened to him? You told me he was still in France when you left.’

The ready pink moved up into O’LiamRoe’s clean-shaven face. He absently pawed the short, silky hair that would not disarrange, patted his padded silk chest and said, ‘No.…’twas a sad tale. In fact, the poor soul is dead.’

For a moment her eyes widened; then the lashes fell. Her strong fingers, idle for the moment, drifted among the silks in her alabaster box. ‘You didn’t tell me this. Of what?’

‘I only learned of the thing recently.’ Again the ready flow had stopped. O’LiamRoe said angrily, ‘He was a crazy fellow, with a devil at him, and going the foolish way to his grave.’

There was an odd look on Lady Lennox’s face: a look of astonishment mixed with a kind of satisfaction, as if he had confirmed
something she had already suspected. In the midst of O’LiamRoe’s uneasiness, a piece of information dropped suddenly into place. Once, Lymond and Margaret Lennox had been lovers, and she had betrayed him nearly to his death, to be tricked and mishandled in return when he redeemed himself. George Douglas was this woman’s uncle. And George Douglas knew that Thady Boy and Lymond were one. Lady Lennox had made him show her Lymond, deliberately, through his, O’LiamRoe’s eyes.

The same, blue, space-filled eyes were perfectly able to hide this discovery. He did not interrupt the little silence that fell. The ladies whispered, the silver dust from the silks moved and danced in the sun, and the Countess’s monkey, slipping its tether, flew unnoticed along the long silken wall from shining table to table top and, reaching the end, hung poised from a painting and leaped, its pink fingers outspread, for the great stucco architrave above the white double doors. It was sitting there, its eyes bright, its gold chain tinkling, when the doors opened on the announcement that the herald Vervassal was waiting outside.

She had got rid of her women. Only O’LiamRoe remained by Margaret Lennox’s side as the doors reopened and in the shadows a man came to stand, fair, lightly made and dimly sparkling, like crystal half-seen in the dark, a young page carrying a baton at his back. Then he moved out into the fine room and the monkey, shrilling, dropped on to the cloth of gold tabard, thick and dazzling as the sun on the sea. ‘Hallo! A family welcome,’ said Lymond. ‘How kind, Lady Lennox.’

Contemplating all this cool symmetry, O’LiamRoe was pleasurably startled. Heralds, in his experience, rarely addressed ladies of royal birth with quite so much edge. He looked at the Countess. Her unusually bleached good looks which he had been admiring a moment before had given way to a sudden queer heightening of her splendour. She drew a long, unsteady breath. The air, which had been alive as an eel bath with brilliant unchosen words, became abruptly quite dead. Sensing it, on a queer Celtic wavelength of his own, O’LiamRoe felt his skin prick. Turning, he look at Vervassal again.

The shrillness of temperament you might have suspected from that opening sentence was not in fact there; rather there was, nearly concealed, a sort of residual power, clear as blown glass, piercing and concentrated as a needle of ice. O’LiamRoe became conscious that the man was looking at him, and turned away. The herald’s gaze turned to Lady Lennox, who, O’LiamRoe could not know, saw none of these things: saw an untouched boy’s face of eight years before
and another, more recent, with the new hammer-shapes of leadership plainly on it. And now here was a face she had never quite seen, circumstances she did not know, an intellect she recognized, an illness he could not easily hide, pressed and frozen together into a detachment as dark and icy as O’LiamRoe’s, for example, was shallow and warm.

For all these reasons, for the surge of a blind force within her that she had throttled all these years before and abandoned for dead, Margaret Lennox looked back at Lymond and was silent. O’LiamRoe, glancing back and forth inquisitively, met the curious, direct gaze again, was taken and vaguely disturbed by what he saw, and smiled.

The blue eyes glinted. The herald, drawing the monkey gently on to his hand, said, ‘
La guerre a ses douceurs, l’hymen a ses alarmes
. You are forgetting your duties, Margaret, in all this excitement. Won’t you introduce me?’

It was the quality of the voice, a timbre it had held even when most abysmally drunk, that held O’LiamRoe paralyzed where he stood. His heart gave a single loud beat that drove it straight into his stomach, and he felt his whole comfortable interior recoil, leaving his exposed skin naked and cold.

The words, miraculously, brought Margaret back her balance. Using her strong, steady voice like a weapon, ‘Mr. Francis Crawford,’ she said, ‘The O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, and lord of the Slieve Bloom in Ireland.’

‘I am honoured indeed,’ said this unknown resurrected Thady Boy Ballagh with exquisite courtesy, his gaze dropped to his hands. ‘But, my God, it’s a damned silly name for a monkey.’

And then, as he dizzily came to realize, except as a whetstone O’LiamRoe was forgotten.

Sitting straight, for once, in his chair opposite the Countess, Phelim saw the fair man take a seat, the monkey bounding from his fingers like a ball, and observed for the first time the passive right hand. Flurried speculation over that was broken by Margaret’s sardonic voice. ‘Pray don’t allow the shock of it all to confuse you she said. ‘Popular resurrections are a tedious pastime of Francis’s. Had I known he would do this, I need not have played out our particular farce.’

‘My dear, the shock is mine.
De par cinq cens mille millions de charretées de diables.’
said Lymond; and catching the monkey on his knee by the hairs of its chin, gazed from it to O’LiamRoe with bland enquiry. ‘—
Le cancre vous est venu aux moustaches
. Your whiskers, Phelim! Did your revulsion impel you to a general lustration?’

The Countess’s voice was calm. She lifted her sewing and spread it flat on her knee. ‘Don’t work so hard, Francis. The Red Lion. He needed them off for his disguise.’

The only method of dealing with that was to look as if one had known the fact was public property all along. While doing this, O’LiamRoe, his senses raw as a burned man’s on the side where Francis Crawford was seated, realized that in some way Lady Lennox had scored. In the second’s pause before Lymond answered, the Prince of Barrow said apologetically, ‘I was hard-set to look like an Englishman; a fine race but not as much hair with it as would furnish a Meath man with eyelashes.’

‘God,’ said Lymond. ‘Would they want them? Any Meath man I knew had his eyes pickled like radishes; you could wipe your feet on them and never a blink. In any case.
Tu ne fais pas miracles, mais merveilles
.’